d6 No-Hands Character Concepts

It's that time again--secret jackalope! Magos of the Mind#1349 wants "Beyond Humanoid: or guidance for playing something without hands I guess. Can be something like the "Really Good Dog"* glog class or something more original/alien."

We take it for granted that we have two average human hands. You can eat a sandwich, fold your clothes, and stare at your smartphone for much more time than is necessary with typical hands. Take those away, and you get all sorts of curious different conceptions of everyday ambulation and motor control. 

So what do you do without hands? Are you like Zacian, from Generation VIII Pokemon, who is a superpowered dog that holds a straight-up legendary sword in its mouth? That is, admittedly, quite rad.

VILLAINS FLY ZEPPELINS - Pulp Adventure in the Style of Indiana Jones & The Rocketeer

Mood Music (Look, I can't help myself. I love mood music.)

In October of 2020, the Free Kriegsspiel Revolution (FKR) Discord released the first edition of its APA-style zine, The Neverending Drachenschwanz, with the theme being "Zeppelins & War." The iconic and ominous zeppelin conjures images of dieselpunk esoteria, disaster, and 100% nefarious villains piloting them to enact schemes of global manipulation. 

Timothy Dalton as Neville Sinclair, from The Rocketeer

As such, I took it upon myself to leverage Norbert Matausch's excellent Landshut and go full-camp into the tropes of moustache-twirling, scheme-hatching, globe-trotting villains flying around in sinister zeppelins while you, the players, race to thwart their plans and unravel their public prestige. 

You might be a journalist, armed with little more than a bowie knife and a tome of ancient lore. You're great at brawling, but you're bad at driving. Regardless, it's up to you and your friends to stop the plot of Kitanova Vadimovna, the dread cultist from the USSR whose signature explosions bristle from her heavily-armed sky fortress. Can you work with your contact, Barnaby St. John the fixer, to recover the ebon monkey of Ibn Fatullah before Vadimovna and her goons get to it first? Will you be able to evade the meddling of Illuminati mercenaries pursuing their own ends, but intervening in yours?

The above is a full plot generated across sixteen short d6 tables. A few rolls is all you need to whip up the seed for a complete adventure, a party of "good guys," the villain, their zeppelin, the artifact, and more. The game is run primarily by description, impact, and common sense consequences, with opposed 2d6 to adjudicate situations with unclear outcomes.

Michael Byrne as Ernst Vogel, from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

Grab your whips, your flashbulb cameras, and your side-car motorcycles. Indulge your spirit of daring and dauntless adventure and rise to the occasion. Pit yourself against the evil caprice of cabals, conspiracies, and grandstanding public enemies while VILLAINS FLY ZEPPELINS!

 Grab the simple two-page spread PDF here.

d66 Cairn Background Loadouts Adapted from Old School Essentials

As I mentioned before, I forever admire the B/X & OSE feel regarding traditional Dungeons & Dragons adventuring, but I'm partial to Into the Odd's take on classless characters. The consequent reliance on items, background, flavor, and cunning to formulate your "class" identity in-game (and several factors therein allowing for constant malleability and foreground growth) is the sweet spot for me in terms of who a character is and what they do. This comes full circle with Yochai Gal's adaptation of the Into the Odd family for "traditional" adventuring in dark wood and dungeon alike, Cairn.

Stepan Alekseev

So, without further adieu, I present to you my interpretation of nearly all extant Old School Essentials classes (including Classic Fantasy, Advanced Fantasy, and selections from Carcass Crawler and Dolmenwood) in Cairn loadout style.

(Also available in free PDF at DriveThruRPG and itch.io)

RPGs with Kids, 5: Push the Button

My boy and I had an awesome follow-up session to our maiden voyage of Galaxy Far Away. 

Last time, the crew of the Brave Eagle (Ithak, Jenssi, Dash, and 10-N) knocked over a supply depot held by Imperial troops in order to jack some contraband tibanna gas for use as Rebel hyperdrive fuel. There were some rigged explosions, burgeoning Force powers, and a funny conversation with a stormtrooper in an elevator. Ultimately, Dash got shot (but recovered!), and the Brave Eagle returned to the moon of Corellia where Commander Suto gave everyone a word of congratulations for the mission. Most importantly, my young son, Ted, had a wonderful time playing Star Wars.

For the next session, Suto tasks the crew with finding a refinery to process the tibanna gas into actionable fuel for Rebel ships. A tip-off leads to Onderon across the Inner Rim from Corellia where another operative, Janna Kor, leads a recon group. Janna is a seasoned Rebel who has a heavily-modded A-Wing at her disposal, and is currently assigned with R2-D2 (Ted's request!). She often zips around the planet spying on Imperial operations and looking for weaknesses. Ithak (Ted's main character) hits it off with Janna quickly, and the two put their heads together to make a daring plan--use the tibanna gas as an explosive, blow up the biggest Imperial refinery on Onderon, and steal all of their fuel. All I had to do was let slip to Ted that tibanna gas is very volatile and can blow up, and the rest of the plan was all his.

My favorite take on Onderon was from Knights of the Old Republic II.

RPGs with Kids, 4: Frag Grenades and Force Powers

A little while ago I wrote Galaxy Far Away to play Star Wars with my young son, and we finally sat down to do just that this weekend. 

With a few questions and d6 rolls, Ted created Ithak the Ithorian, a Force-sensitive X-Wing pilot and loyal Rebel who is very shy but loves his family. He's great at sneaking around. At some point in the past he went to Tatooine and was ambushed by Tusken Raiders and is afraid to return to the planet. He also met R2-D2 once and they became good friends. His goal is to find Yoda and get real training in the Force.

Ithak the Ithorian, our protagonist

Galaxy Far Away: Star Wars - This Is The (Ultralight) Way

I love Star Wars. I always have. I always will. Arguments about which bit of the canon (or non-canon!) is best is moot. Every segment of the whole has its flaws--lackluster moments, inconsistencies, cringe-inducers, and poor realization etc--but the saga is greater than the sum of its parts. I digress. This isn't an agenda post, it's my attempt to slim down Star Wars roleplaying into a bite-sized game while maintaining grit, tropes, and high stakes.

Ever since I read around about FKR stuff I thought about the "worlds, not rules" adage, and what worlds I'd like to translate to an ultralight model. My son made that decision for me after he asked me to run a Star Wars game for him. I have WEG Star Wars d6 handy, but thats an awful lot of dice and still a bit too crunchy for a five-year-old to play. I've opted to take concepts from Landshut, Adventure Hour, Revenant's Hack, and Primeval d6 and fire them all into the thermal exhaust vent of the Death Star to see what happens.

Jaromir Hrivnac, ff

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.

Three Alt-Mesozoic Fantasy Dinosaur Archetypes

For this year’s bonus Secret Jackalope, I present Lexi with dinosaurs from a different, fantastical Mesozoic era.

AD&D Allosaurus, looking a bit bent.

Dinosaurs, as we know of them on earth, were once the apex examples of both predator and prey alike. The various eras of natural prehistory featured a menagerie of amazing creatures, but only the Mesozoic Era provided us with dinos, and we got zounds of them. Traditional dinosaurs have shown up in RPGs since their inception, with a number of supplements, adventures, locales, bestiaries, and whole campaign settings devoted to them or highlighting them prominently.

Six Mighty Boosh Backgrounds for Troika!

Open your mind. Let us begin our quest to find the new sound. Come with us now, on a journey though time and space...

Back in my first-ever post I mentioned my firm belief that The Mighty Boosh takes place in the Troika! setting. Consequently I present you with six backgrounds touching on both common and unique Boosh flavors. Were I more ambitious than I actually am, I'd promise you thirty more backgrounds to make a proper d66 table. I might.

Talents: Divine and Weird

After looking at fighter/rogue and ranger/wizard talents for use in Knave and similar rules-light whatever-games, we come to cleric-analogues and... everything else. The "weird" list has made appearances across the blogopshere and seems to be the witchy/eldritch/esoteric bucket for various and sundry curious abilities. I've very much enjoyed what I've seen elsewhere, and tweaked and added my own thoughts to finalize what I'd like to leverage in terms of flavor and mechanics.

Talents: Survivalist and Arcane

In my last post riffing off of Knave and the idea of expanding the class-less structure to something akin to a talent tree or loose categories of "adventuring" perks, I looked at martial and specialist talents, roughly mapping to "fighter" and "rogue" archetypes. Today, I'm looking at survivalist and arcane talents, which are sorta-kinda like "rangers" and "wizards" except that my intent, overall, is to lean towards flavor and utility without rehashing tropes.

The Lounge Temple of Asavraki

One of the reasons I started this blog was for ease of use regarding the OSR Discord's Secret Santicorn exchange. I, myself, received a fantastic d66 table of utility spells from Isaak at Fallen Empires, and look forward to implementing it in my games! I received a request from Shoe Skogen -- "temple dungeon, etc etc for a tropical archipelago, with fun adventures, monsters, maybe a factional dispute?" I wracked my brain on this one for a bit, but inspiration came to me in a torrent and I began to realize a small reinvigorated temple in the depths of the jungle wilds with an unusual twist.

What if an old goddess fell out of favor with broad worship, but was rediscovered by a cadre of opportunistic goblins? What if that goddess, Asavraki, was the minor deity of fragrance and leisure? What if that means she is basically the goddess of midnight toking? What if the goblins are not exactly aligned on goals, with some being sincere followers, and others being money-grubbing dogs about the whole affair? What if there are kobolds? And paladins? And old priests locked in stasis?

Well, all of that, and more, awaits you in...

I went back and polished it up and released it for a buck on DTRPG and itch.io. If you ask kindly, I'll give you the drive link for freebies, otherwise you can nab it in the links above.

Inventory, Exploration, and Resting

Before digging into more talents, let's recap and expand upon some basic mechanics of the little ruleset I'm putting together by clarifying two central ideas: inventory and the encounter die.

At present, all PCs start with fourteen inventory slots. Additional slots are awarded if their strength, constitution, or intelligence scores exceed 15. This can happen three times as a result. If all three of these scores are above 18 (which takes a while to accrue in any campaign), they're awarded with another bonus trio of slots. That is to say that any PC will only ever have between fourteen and twenty slots. No less, no more (well, unless some wonky magic item or godling's blessing shows up, of course). In this framework, most things take up one slot (like a mace, spellbook, or small golden idol), while a handful of other items can be bundled together to conserve space (such as pitons, ball bearings, or coins), and many others require anywhere from two to four slots apiece (including platemail, a big shield, or an impressionist masterpiece). If PCs fail to eat/drink/rest they gain fatigue, which eats up inventory slots until resting for a while in a haven location (ie, not the wilderness). Inventory is cramped, basically. It's meant to be.

Talents: Martial and Specialist

Knave is fantastic. Everyone go buy it and enjoy. It's the post-retroclone retroclone, insofar as it's aim is to fundamentally streamline the B/X-era D&D formula into the most basic and accessible format possible. Ben Milton, the author, also notes that it thus assumes the position of ideal hack-able skellington for all manner of rules-light OSR frameworks. Knave assumes that no classes exist. Like Maze Rats before it, all adventurers are simply that, adventurers. Not everyone has to be trained up as a cleric or fighter or magic-user etc, you're just folks who have no better option than to delve for a living.

As a result, the immediate oh, let's hack this element to Knave is formatting some sort of class-analogue structure to the otherwise-class-less rules system. Among the various Discord channels this structure has come to be known as Knacks, mainly because Knack and Knave sound so canny together. Check out Laughing Leviathan's excellent Knave-Knacks and A Man With A Hammer's Knacks for Knaves for other posted variables on the formula. More are floating around, currently unpublished in various ways and means, and I highly recommend you check them out as you find them.

Scrapping To-Hit with Modded Weapon Tables

Two years ago, I read Troika!, and besides the surreal whimsy of the implied setting by way of the many (d66, no less) backgrounds stocked within the strange pages of the book, I was smitten with the mechanics of the thing. A riff on Fighting Fantasy, the game supposes a robust advanced skill system which, unlike modern game-mechanism-forward iterations of "perception" or "arcana," presents us with treats such as "etiquette," "golden barge pilot," and "mathmology."

But seriously, look at how golden this barge is. See how it shines.