#OSR ttrpg

[delverschoicettrpg]

Have yet to get to Mothership on the long list of sci-fi horror RPGs I want to run, but I have this clawing suspicion that this'll be a helpful resource and a half.

Mothership Playkit

I've got another Google Sheets Playkit for folks, this time for Mothership!

Mothership is an OSR space-horror game by Tuesday Knight Games, and is inspired by movies like Alien. It has oodles and oodles of interesting modules for you to run for you crew, the most recent of which were submitted to the TripTech Game Jam back in May!

I tried to replicate the way the character sheet guides you through character creation, although I had to upload a second tab just to illustrate how the different skills are connected to each-other. I also included my typical Safety Tools Sheet, which has a link to the game and my bog-standard section of Lines, Veils & Lures!

You can check out the playbook here...

...and you can take a look at my entire playkit library at the link below!

Clicky.

[2dmax]

enna the bard for my friend wren

[radiantmorningstar]

Holmes Basic Rebirth 1: The Wandering Graveyard of Kargash-Mir

Dr. J. Eric Holmes with a few of his D&D Figures, 1979. [DM Note: someone convinced me to go back to basics, since I was experiencing one of my (sadly, all too frequent) solo gaming slumps. The suggestion felt extreme: not reverting to an OSR retroclone, but reaching all the way back to the origins of the hobby. Retroclone reinforcement has sometimes been a successful strategy for restarting my creative solo RPG engagement the past. But it hasn't seemed to work more recently. In fact, "retroclone burnout" has left me a bit distressed, compounding my sense of disconnection. Feeling desperate, I decided to take the back-to-basics advice as far as I could, starting a short campaign with the Holmes Basic D&D blue book from 1977. I'm pleased to say it worked, and I've recaptured my sense of wonder, creativity, and fun. Of course, as someone with about 40 years of RPG experience, I can go back to basics, but I can't deny all the innovations and interesting evolutions of TTRPGs since then. So I've also incorporated numerous solo tools, supplements, etc. into this session. For fellow gamers, who like to look at the technical side, I'll link what I'm using below. Thank you for reading! ]

Technical TTRPG Profile:

Dominant Rule Set: Holmes D&D Basic Set (1977) - note that Hasbro-WotC has decided to disappear this rule set in favor of other versions of the Basic Set, but this version is special, perhaps because it demonstrates more than any others how player imagination—as opposed to insidious subscription models, aggressive branding, and corporate meddling—can create great experiences. Read about Holmes Basic here: https://sites.google.com/site/zenopusarchives/. If you look around, you should be able to find a free PDF of it online. I would revert to the Moldvay-Cook D&D Basic Set Rulebook if I could not find a copy of Holmes. But I highly recommend Holmes as a way to get back in touch with the raw power of fantasy roleplaying.

Setting: Ondaris.

Solo Gaming Structure: Trey: Solo Roleplaying.

Oracles and Tables: Old School Revival Solo Role-playing Guide; Loner: Steel & Sorcery; Tales of Argosa.

Starting Equipment: "fast packs" from Dragonslayer.

The Story: three childhood friends, Iovis (fighting man), Ruvin (magic user), and Dain (thief—in this case, a military scout), return to their hometown of West Withly after three years of professional training in their respective guilds (Iovis, with the Semlohe Mercenary Guild; Ruvin with the Tower of Xolark in Misty Harbor; and Dain with the Rivercross Confederation of Guides and Scouts).

In Ondaris, one apprentices with a local practitioner of an art and then serves in a guild for three years at a time with one-year stints back home to serve one's community and pay one's initial master back.

While catching up over ales at the Inn of the Blue Dragon, they're approached by a group of town aldermen, who offer them 80 gold for rescuing the mayor, Joco Havlish, and his mistress Sareena, both of whom are being held hostage by the ruthless ogre, Drazrur Blackbite. The ogre is said to keep his lair in the northeastern foothills beyond the Beast River. Though the precise location of his cave has never been established.

Recently, Blackbite snuck up under cover of darkness and hammered down a crude wooden sign, affixed to the pole of a nidstang and written in blood, demanding a tribute of 50 sheep and five virgin girls lest he execute the hostages. Obviously, this is unacceptable; though, local heroes willing to fight an infamous ogre, who understands curse magic, are in short supply.

(A typical Ondarissian Nithing Pole used for cursing and sometimes making a very serious point to one's neighbors.)

Seeing this as a fitting way to begin their year of professional practice back home and establish a reputation, Iovis, Ruvin, and Dain obtain permission from their families and former masters and accept the offer.

They provision themselves and set out to find the ogre. The Beast River is half a day to the northeast on foot. They go quickly over the flat grasslands and have no encounters or problems on the way except for sighting a brightly dressed gnome sailing past on a raft. The odd creature waves at them and shouts that they should turn back "before the spirits rise." They have no clue what he's talking about, but it doesn't sound good.

The day is almost finished when they reach the beginning of the foothills, known locally as Zaphod's Reach, due to tower of the ancient mage, Zaphod Zaphodinteries, which supposedly stood there in the times before the Scarring of Ondaris. Now there is nothing but a perpetual chill mist hanging a few feet over the ground and dark foothills extending to the limits of sight. Not wanting to face anything in the night and tired from their journey, the three friends make camp on the northern bank of the Beast.

In the morning, they realize (strangely, since it was not there the night before) that they have been camping in a graveyard. It's one of the wandering graveyards of Kargash-Mir. Ruvin, in his lore studies in the Tower of Xolark, learned about the wandering graveyards. He explains them to Iovis and Dain over breakfast.

They are an inexplicable fact of life throughout the land. Sometimes, a graveyard will "wake up" and animate itself the same way "naturally occurring" undead in Ondaris will sometimes rise from their graves.

When an entire graveyard wakes and starts to move, it is considered a "Kargash-Mir," essentially a "beast of graves" in the old language of the Beastmen. As a Kargash-Mir travels, it will absorb any other graveyard it comes into contact with and grow proportionately larger. Sometimes they move on a "circuit," appearing in a the same places over time. This one apparently stretches for miles.

Such wandering graveyards are said to contain all manner of dark fae, undead, and sometimes even deep crypts, dungeons, and fragments of towns (even cities) lost to the knowledge of men. Twisted demonic creatures, like ogres, blood orcs, ur-goblins, soot trolls, gnolls, and dragons are also said to live in them. For time runs differently in a Kargash-Mir and old things, long passed away, are ever present there.

Ruvin begins to explain the metaphysical theories involved in an entire graveyard animating and silently shifting through the landscape, but Iovis and Dain are worried. If the ogre, Drazrur Blackbite, has his lair in a Kargash-Mir, it means this one probably moves in a set pattern. It means they're going to have to explore the place in the not-so-certain prospect of finding his lair. And it means the ogre is naturally protected by whatever other nasty creatures may be calling the place home. Still, they have little choice. So they forge into the graveyard, feeling trepidatious but determined.

They move through the seemingly endless, dank, and misty Kargash-Mir for what feels like the better part of a day, encountering nothing but headstones, mausolea, and crypts. Dead trees hang their brittle branches against the darkened sky and crisp leaves crunch on the twisting pathways.

Eventually, they do encounter a giant death's head moth—a predator that may have been hunting them for some time. Its wingspan is at least six feet wide and it rises up suddenly from behind a cluster of headstones, wailing the Acherontian death dirge that can burst the heart of a grown man.

These highly intelligent flesh-eating hunters are found throughout the dark places of Ondaris, but especially in graveyards, where they feel most at home, secreting their vile nests in empty crypts, where they drag their victims to be fed upon for weeks.

Iovis is affected by the moth's mournful cry and loses all self control, running off between the crypts. Ruvin is also affected, paralyzed to the spot, unable to speak or move. Only Dain resists the affects of the death dirge. He raises his light crossbow, fires, and hits the creature in its furry abdomen.

The dirge immediately stops and the creature flaps around to face Dain. It has an unnaturally human face with red eyes. Its fangs drip yellow bile and venom. You have killed me, it sputters, but you'll not escape this boneyard intact! Then it drops to the earth, its body immediately beginning to steam and melt into the pure black sludge of elemental evil of which it is composed.

Dain shakes Ruvin out of his terror-stricken paralysis and shouts that they need to find Iovis, who has disappeared into the mist . . .

[frog-and-rat]

Welcome

This is to be a starting point for me to blog about ttrpgs. It will hopefully be my game notes, or tables if i can think of them… or maybe art drawn by me. No one really knows.

The name “the Frog and the Toad” came from the tavern name tables in ShadowDark by Kelsey Dionne of the Arcane Library. The current header images shows the 1 and the 20 rolled in my emergency dice kit to get that result.

ShadowDark is currently my system of choice, though I just got a pretty good end of fiscal year bonus from work and I’ve backed/bought a few more games. Unnatural Selection is a supplement by the Dungeon Damsels. Knave 2e, by Questing Beast, Dolmenwood, by Exalted Funeral, I backed something by the Merry Mushmen, but i don’t remember what it was, then i bought A Folklore Bestiary by them. I should have tons to talk about.

I’m currently, slowly, playing a game with my kids using the mini-campaign setting The Gloaming found in Kelsey Dionne’s Cursed Scroll no. 1. It is written with one adventure fully written, but otherwise several places and NPC’s with a few sentences about them, the rest I get to come up with, or yoink something from other adventures to insert into the campaign. I hope to post these adventures here. Feel free to join me, or if you never even stumble upon this blog, that’s okay to. Who knows, maybe I’ll get good at this kind of thing and start a real blog, like a Xanga!

Who knows what is to come here? Probably not much, but I’ll try.

[d4-hp-magic-user]

Stocking a Hexcrawl in OSE:

I've tried a few times in the past to stock a hexcrawl for OSE or a similar game—but I've never managed to stick with it long enough to have something playable. I think part of my problem was trying to do it raw (not as in rules-as-written, as in no lube). No tools. All from scratch. Without a current campaign to give me a reason to stock it.

So I'm trying again! Having a current campaign gave me motivation so maybe I'll finish it this time!

I started it not as a hexcrawl, but as a back-of-the-napkin point crawl between settlements and (pre-written) adventure sites. Not a lot, 3 settlements and 4 or so adventures. I came up with some factions (which I am still hammering the details out for) and some NPCs (with the assistance of the 5e DMG and some random name generators).

Then I read Stocking Hexes with the B/X Dungeon-Stocking Procedure, which is pretty much exactly how it sounds. Monster hexes are lairs, traps can be natural hazards or man-made, etc. I then used the OSE wilderness encounter tables to decide what the monster is. Already just from using it to stock ~10-15 hexes I have realized just how much have *any* sort of procedure helps break up the analysis-paralysis of an empty hexmap.

So far some notable locations i have generated are:

- a bandit lair next to a "trap" in-between two of my "major" settlements I had pre-made, quite obviously the trapped hex is where the bandits ambush passers-by

- a treant lair adjacent to two "special" hexes: I'm imagining the two special hexes as sort of a mythical "deep wood". You know in LOTR how the old treants become a moving forest? Some sort of cross between that and Murkwood. Perhaps an extra chance of getting lost, and spending the night means an encounter with "angry trees" (stationary treants)

And neither of these locations require much in the way of extensive keying! Just a few bullet points. Most monster lairs can be simplified to "a few connected cave rooms" or similar. For intelligent creature lairs I plan to use Quick humanoid lair generator for wilderness stocking for inspiration. If the lair needs to be cave or dungeon-like I will probably use a random map generator, if its more settlement-like I think I'll keep it vague and only detail important buildings and locations.

I also recently read The Grand d666, which made me consider making some sort of spark-table of a similar variety. Or maybe I'll just steal borrow one from somewhere else...

Anyhow, once I make some more progress on the hexmap I might post some of it to give a bit of an example of how I'm going about it.

[franciscolemos]

Cosmonaut in the dark.

[alicelufenia]

So I checked out Whalefall

I saw this recommended and thought "oh another dungeon crawler based on 1970s D&D. Wait inspired by Darkest Dungeon, Below (okay these make sense), also Disco Elysium and Dark Souls?? Alright I'll check it out, don't expect anything from it-

Alright you have my attention

So yeah, in going one step further from the meatgrinder tradition of classic dungeon delving, you literally play a ghost that body hops when you die. Also a very unusual use of a hex map for a game, as the dungeons you explore are basically two dimensional, and each floor is one dimensional; you go from hex to hex in a line, similar to Darkest Dungeon. Keeps it easy to track at least, and also hints that it's not the layout of a floor, but the composition of each room and hex (which are all randomly rolled when you uncover them) that matters.

A tabletop rpg with a difficulty selection. I gotta admit, that's a first for me. Also with the way some of these rolls are and needing to roll under, a d12 is going to make them an absolute bitch to pull off, fitting for the highest "difficulty."

Ah yes, the corpse list. That's a thing.

Many, many years have passed.

Probably the most metal part of this game, you literally fight the big dungeon boss while falling, to either be swallowed by the Depths forever, become the Crypt Worm, or climbing out, one floor at a time. Holy fuck

As with any classic style rpg, there are many, many tables to roll on, their unique contents being something I'll leave for the reader to discover for themselves.

Also, gang of 1d6 thieves. Something menacing to me about that.

Your spirit is basically your class. The one constant between bodies.

...William?

Oh hey found my favorite class. And very transgender too.

Also the fucking medic class levels up by killing the patient.

😨

yeah I can believe it

Anyway this shit rules

[heelycular-manslaughter]

You've forgotten how long you've been doing this. Dungeon crawling. There is no longer a world above, just a mass of lines and colors, without end. With a rusted blade in hand, you drop down holes dug long ago, exploring ancient caverns with modern design. Rats, bones, worms, worms, worms. You'll find gold eventually.

Whalefall is a dungeon crawling system inspired by the OSR movement, Disco Elysium, and Fear & Hunger. If you're a fan of any of those or stuff like Dark Souls, Dungeon Meshi, Below, Darkest Dungeon, The Lighthouse, or working at a job in real life, you might like it (no guarantees).

[level2janitor]

am i doing this meme right

[losttrailsmaps]

City Streets Map Pack

Greetings everyone, welcome to another map pack! It features 12 total maps, including city streets, bridges, cathedrals and much more.

Patrons get access to gridded/ungridded and watermark-free maps. The grid size of each map is 30x40.

Check out the map pack here.

[domjordanillustration]

trap sprung

[2dmax]

bday card i made for my GM, who was one of my first 3 GMs ever (if not the first) back in 2017. we mainly play Dungeon Crawl Classics together, and he is in fact running a campaign for us with that system now. it's a horizontal card that folds upwards.

The front of the card was laid out by tracing this image from pose emporium on deviantart, then embellished and exaggerated.

i also traced the script font, which is free for personal use. found on dafont i believe - dont remember the name.

[radiantmorningstar]

Holmes Basic Rebirth: Dark Coda

Having escaped the wandering graveyard (a "Kargash-Mir"), Ruvin, the magic user, and Dain, the thief-scout, emerge from a crypt to find themselves stranded on the "Midnight Enclave" of Ondaris—a vast grassland stretching for hundreds of miles in every direction.

They searched for their chidhood friend, Iovis, in vain. Nor were they able to locate the lair of the ogre, Drazrur Blackbite and save the mayor of West Withly from being ritually sacrificed along with his mistress to Blackbite's deity, Vaprak the Demon Prince.

Using the boons received from his ritual to Vaprak, Blackbite raised an undead skeletal warband and enslaved the entire town. He forced them to march north, across the Beast River, into the Black Forest, where the ogre's lair was hidden all along (not in the Kargash-Mir, as the heroes believed). Now men, women, and children are working under harsh conditions to construct a forest keep for Blackbite. Any who survive the forced labor will be eaten by him and his hobgoblin lieutenants.

Ruvin and Dain learn these things thirdhand from the gnomish boatmen who navigate the Beast River and function as the unofficial information resource of the realm. Returning to their childhood home, only to find it empty, with no sign of just where their friends and family have been taken, is heartbreaking.

After a few days of trying to formulate a plan, Ruvin and Dain have to face reality: there is nothing they can do. Ruvin goes back in sadness to the tower of Xolark in Misty Harbor, while Dain is required to return to the Rivercross Confederation of Guides and Scouts, where he is expected, now that his yearly leave is over.

Little do the two friends know that they will never see each other or their families again. Such is the price of failure on the harsh and brutal continent of Ondaris.

And so goes the . . .

[lord-soth-dk]

[franciscolemos]

Elder Karemantan, late to the council meeting.

[skeletonhouse]

sunset over old battlefield