Unless you have been living in a monastic cell for the last decade you cannot have failed to be aware of the OSR movement. You can be forgiven for not knowing what the R in OSR stands for but that is par for the course.… Read the rest
This week I am reading…
Sagas of Midgard!
Sagas of Midgard is another d100 system. They [Drinking Horn Games] refer to it as a Roll Over system. The core mechanic is nice and simple. The GM sets the target number taking into account any difficulty factors and the players roll the dice and add any bonuses they can muster.… Read the rest
More Lazy GMing: Destination Spaces in My Against the Darkmaster Campaign
So now I have nudged the trajectory of my PCs wholly into an overland journey to the enemy-occupied Dwarven mountain city of Angrothrond, wherein the PCs expect to find armies of Orcs and Trolls, caverns of partially mined angril (a homebrewed substance similar to mithril) and perhaps a massive, inert stone golem and a slumbering Iron Dragon of Morgoth from the First Age of Middle-earth.… Read the rest
Race as Class in Rolemaster Games
The other day I was looking up something in Middle-Earth Role Playing (MERP), and I came across a passage I don’t recall reading before—ever before, even when I aspired to run MERP just last year!
… Read the restElves have certain advantages over the “mortal” races … , and in terms of a fantasy role playing game this is reflected by a restriction on how they assign their stats.
Using the ‘wrong’ skill
I was writing an adventure the other night and one of the challenges requires some combination of navigation, survival, region law, tracking or at the very least general perception.
The characters have an option of paddling up a jungle river with its inherent risks of crocodiles, water snakes and possibly hippopotami.… Read the rest
Looking again at difficulty factors
I have been thinking about difficulty factors this week. My default position is that I am a huge fan of using difficulty factors on skills.
I normally start with a defined difficulty factor so I know a cliff edge is Sheer Folly at the top and in the middle section it is Absurd and finally Very Hard as it levels off slightly.… Read the rest
Fantasy Inspiration
In the scene above can you see a face in the rockface? It probably isn’t there at all but it when I first saw the imagine it sort of jumped out at me.
The point is of this is threefold…
The first was the forum post by Jengada on rendering campaign worlds.… Read the rest
Lazy Peasants
I am bringing together two threads here. The first is Gabe’s Lazy DMing and the second is a conversation I had with Marc about how he has house ruled the Patronage/Renown rules from One Ring in to RMu.
When Marc first mentioned Patronage he described it as a single figure, 0-6, that is used to represent the characters current standing with a particular NPC.… Read the rest
Generating Fantasy Adventures for Competent Players
No plan survives contact with the players.
—Davena Oaks
After my latest session I opened up Michael Shea’s The Lazy DM to compare his advice to my emergent method of adventure generation—one that suits my current campaign, anyway. It’s from this book that I pulled the quote above, and, for the sentiment contained therein, at first Shea’s advice seemed like it would be of some use to me.… Read the rest
King of the Swingers
I spent the past two weeks writing a set of adventures. Bizarrely I have used a format I have adapted from Shadow or the Demon Lord to create an adventure for Zweihander as a writing tool to create a Rolemaster adventure.… Read the rest