d66 Classless Kobolds Linktree (of sorts)

Hello! 

As of Summer this year, I have changed jobs to work as a middle- and high-school Humanities teacher for a classical Christian school. As such, I am constantly buried beneath looming stacks of Great Books written by all of the best old dead guys. Translate that to blogging, and I have increasingly less time to update here than I would like. I mentioned that a while back during a season of overall transition, but here I am, still trying to keep RPG projects on the back burner without them burning or going sideways. 

Stepan Alekseev; possibly casting a charm over my blog to revivify its consistent content updates...

What dawned on me earlier is that I have had a lot of projects and podcast appearances and such which have been lost in the shuffle over the last few years, so I want to take a brief moment to collate my blog highlights in one place. I will endeavor to update this over time as new items are added.

RPGs with Kids, 6: Prepare for RAMMING SPEED

The game: Any Planet Is Earth

The players: Ted, my kid son (playing Miles, two-term expedtionary). Brian, my older brother (playing Chet Lancaster, three-term expeditionary, two-term mercantile). Nate, my kid nephew (playing Blaze, five-term military). 

The situation: Dornami Station, at the edge of a long trade lane, is evacuating due to a sudden solar shift in the system's star, dooming everyone on board with an imminent supernova.

The complication: The player's are dead-broke and want to hijack the expensive med supplies in the storage complex but are being forced to leave by the private security firm running the station.

The scheme: Leverage guile, lateral thinking, and a bit of gumption to score and leave without a bust (or a blast, ahem).

Ben Nicholas - Artstation

Ponderings on Any Planet Is Earth v2

At the time of writing this, I've sold just over 400 copies of Any Planet Is Earth (with about 4,800 downloads). That's small beans, to be sure, in the world of publishing, even in the indie/niche corner of the RPG hobby, but I only ever wanted to release it because it's what I want to run. That said, I am warmed by it's name popping up from time to time on reviews or threads or discussions, and getting messages from strangers and close peers alike who like it a lot and have riffed about with it on their own time. That's neat.

I've had a "second edition" in mind for a while now since it's original release back in June of 2020. My original timeline was a release earlier this year before the arrival of Spring 2021, but then I had another kid and bought a house. There goes 6+ months of so-called free time. C'est la vie.

Jeff Woodman

My Interview with Alone In The Labyrinth

Short but sweet, Sofinho invited me to his podcast for a chat about my history with board and roleplaying games; Free Kriegsspiel and whatever the heck it means; the beats behind Any Planet Is Earth, Weird North, and Galaxy Far Away; and playing RPGs with little kids. All of this led to a larger conversation about imagination, it's training, and how to lean into it with new and old players alike.

The JIMTERVIEW

I make this post mostly to add the clarifier that DJ Kool's "Let Me Clear My Throat" is my headcanon theme song for Svarku the Efreet from Hot Springs Island, presumably surrounded by breakdancing combustarinos. That's all.

Free Kriegsspiel: Worlds, Not Rules, Etc.

What's Free Kriegsspiel? That's a silly name. 

Okay, free kriegsspiel (FK) is shorthand for "ancient school" RPG theory. That is, how were role-playing games played before role-playing games were published and "official"? What did they look like before D&D etc showed up in the early 1970s? In a very modest nutshell, tabletop wargames in the 1800s ("kriegsspiel," in German) slowly evolved to a point where military strategists realized that a neutral referee (the "umpire") could help arbitrate fog of war and interpretation of rules, making the game/simulation far more flexible and realistic. These umpires translated hard rules into "free" rulings, hence "free kriegsspiel."

(hopefully) Simple and (possibly) Universal Player Advice

As a short, sweet follow-up to yesterday's post on pared-down and generic referee advice, here are seven short maxims for players in any adventure game. Regardless of genre, these ought to prove helpful for framing the expectations of your game and either softening the crunch of tenured veterans or quickly bringing new players up to speed.

Stepan Alekseev, "50"

Agency: Attributes and related saves do not define your character. They are tools. Don’t ask what your character would do, ask what you would do. Be creative with your intuition, items, and connections. 

Teamwork: Seek consensus from the other players before barreling forward. Stay on the same page about goals and limits, respecting each other and accomplishing more as a group than individuals. 

Exploration: Asking questions and listening to detail is more useful than any numbers, items, or skills you have. Take the referee’s description without suspicion, but don’t shy away from seeking more information. There is no single correct way forward. 

Talking: Treat NPCs as if they were real people, and rely on your curiosity to safely gain information and solve problems. You'll find that most people are interesting, and will want to talk things through before getting violent. 

Planning: Think of ways to avoid your obstacles through reconnaissance, subtlety, and fact-finding. Do some research and ask around about your objectives. 

Ambition: Set goals and use your meager means to take steps forward. Expect nothing. Earn your reputation. Keep things moving forward and play to see what happens. Pull the lever.

Violence: Fighting is a choice, and rarely a wise one; consider whether violence is the best way to achieve your goals. Try to stack the odds in your favor, and retreat when things seem unfavorable.

Any Planet Is Earth is LIVE

Welp, after several months of writing, refinement, and relentless editing for concision, my little sci-fi game, Any Planet Is Earth, is live and available for sale at DTRPG and itch.io! To say I am pleased with it is an understatement. I am pumped! I want to give a big thank you to those who provided excellent feedback, playtesting, and inspiration to the project, and a special shout-out to Jeff Woodman who put together the evocative and brilliantly simple cover art (the little ship is my fave).

2d6 Sci-Fi d66 Tables

As I continue chugging along with Any Planet Is Earth I find myself thinking about what referee tables would actually help me when running the game. I have plenty made up at this point, and I have more to go, but I thought I'd plop out a few of the most generic for the sake of broader usability. Since d6 is the best die, and 2d6 is the best number of dice, and d66 is the best table, and Maze Rats has the best d66 presentation, I opted to go with that formatting.

An Example Crew

To follow up on yesterday's post about character generation in Any Planet Is Earth, I rolled against some tables tonight to generate a sample crew of five people for play following their respective careers. I rolled 100% randomly here, not picking services for any characters, whether initial or follow-up.

Pardon my coffee table (janky).

Any Planet Is Earth: Character Generation

After establishing intitial concept for Any Planet Is Earth, I've put together the service tables for terms served by players during character generation. You'll either roll for or select your starting service, roll 2d6 against the corresponding table, then either accrue skills or bonuses or roll against subtables for events, mishaps, and boons. In this manner I am scraping my favorite bits from the expanded Mongoose Traveller 2 career tables and stripping them of their context, allowing for players to come up with the context for their results or with help from the referee. This provides some easy worldbuilding while also setting up your character quickly with a lot of variablility.

Any Planet Is Earth: Core Rules Draft

"Any planet is 'Earth' to those who live on it." 

Isaac Asimov, Pebble in the Sky

I thought I wanted to set out to make a fantasy adventure game of my own design. I was wrong. I already held Into the Odd and (the tragically lesser known) MoldHammer up as near-perfect designs (the former with a bit more crunch than the latter [which sounds amusingly impossible]). After digging into the Electric Bastionland rules (not to mention already enjoying Mausritter, Maze Rats, and other venerable off-Odd derivative hacks), I realized that there is no fantasy design space I really care to fill. I will 100% always play or run or hack any title from that family of games.

So with few other strong contenders for genre, I turn to science fiction, which I've really always admired reading and exploring far more than fantasy literature and games of all stripes. Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Jack Vance, Orson Scott Card, and William Gibson took up (and still take up) a great deal of my reading budget, among other similar contemporaries. 

The Sci-Fi Encounter Die

I really enjoy hard-going-on-harder science fiction. Star Wars and general science fantasy/space opera are wonderful, but I prefer the Robert Heinlein/Issac Asimov variety the best. I've been reading it for far longer than I ever read Tolkien, Vance, or LeGuin. I find myself in the thick of the OSR fantasy side of things if for no other reason than the ubiquity of dirty goblins in the world. This is not a bad thing. In fact, it is readily enjoyable. That said, after reading through The Traveller Book several times after grabbing it in POD format, I realize that really and truly I am a sci-fan before I'm a fantasy fan. It's not really a "this or that" situation, of course, but all that is to say that I have spent a lot of time trying to come up with a "perfect" fantasy rule set for my use, only to find that in all honesty, Mausritter beat me to it. Seriously, every riff on modern "old school" fantasy I had brewing in my brain has been done already and better by Isaac Williams. Go download his game and enjoy--it's Into the Odd taken to the Platonic Ideal of OSR adventure.

The illustrious A. Shipwright.