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.

Runes and Rune Words

Diablo II is a masterpiece. 

I'm not much for "gearporn," and in fact, I mostly hate that wretched term. That said, if one game got the idea of nigh-limitless equipment options right, it was Diablo II. The vanilla game was stacked with all sorts of axes, boots, wands, gems, helms, belts, and potions... but when the expansion, Lord of Destruction, was released along with some battle.net patches, the scope of the game's equipment list became truly staggering. I won't go into undue detail here, but one item type introduced in the expansion content is the focus of this post: runes.

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.