Majyc

Last night my online group finished their second Land of Eem adventure: Wally’s Waffles and Rats!, from the Land of Eem: Adventures in the Mucklands anthology As it says on the tin, the Adventure Tone of this one is Derring-Do rather than hijinks, and I’d say it delivered. The party resorted to fighting a lot more in this one, though great excitement was had when the Dungeoneer character managed…

Scouter, provided by Uncle Al’s Discount Orphans as an Underling to the PC Brigitta the Bugbear, a Dungeoneer, in our new Land of Eem Campaign. This is the first art I’ve drawn that’s more than a doodle in the margins of notes in… a decade? More? Posting it before I have time to make myself crazy trying to fix it…

The Land of Eem’s corporate dystopia is a bit odd to me, in that it’s kind of capitalism without consumption. There are frequent mentions of corporate overlords, and many if not most of the NPCs in the adventures I’ve looked at so far have a bit in their description about their attitudes towards corporations and the corporate overlords… but there are relatively few corporations named and they’re…

The Land of Eem The elevator pitch is Muppets meet Lord of the Rings, with a dash of Mad Max dystopia thrown in. You had me at Muppets. I mean, it’s not actually a licensed Muppets game, but its tone and visuals are heavily Jim Henson inspired, and the visuals are a big part of it since it’s a setting that was created for a series of graphic novels (Rickety Stitch and the Gelatinous Goo) and…

I’m reconsidering part of the rule I proposed for special effects like impale in RuneQuest. The problem with any die showing a 0 is an impale as long as it’s a success is that it skews the chances of impaling at low skills quite a bit. With 20% skill, half your successful hits are impaling. Not what I’d really like to see. Instead, I’m thinking of making it 0 or 5 showing on the 1’s die. This…

As part two of “The Macy Conventions”, I want to look at Spell Resistance. Spell resistance is another thing that’s needlessly complicated in RuneQuest 2e, or at least expressed in a needlessly complicated way. The rule is that to cast a spell on a resisting target, you need to roll 50%, plus 5% for every point your POW is higher than theirs, -5% for every point lower. They even gave you a hand…

As is my wont, I’ve been noodling on some older games that have come up in conversation recently, and in particular RuneQuest 2e. I ran a RuneQuest campaign, back in the day, and I”m pretty sure we started with 1st edition, and later switched to 2e (or maybe I just did a different campaign of 2e… wouldn’t be the first time my memory of those long ago events was a little blurry. There were a lot…

A System-Neutral Trading Mini-game So here’s a reworking/system neutralization of the trading system from my Zap! game. Note, has not been play-tested at all in its current form. To use it you have to fill in some details from your particular system and setting, like what 1 point of cost/profit actually amounts to, how big a cargo is a small or large cargo. But by design it’s easily scaled so…

The other day I said offhandedly in the Wandering DM’s discord that I’m halfway inclined to categorize Grayhawk, the first supplement to original Dungeons & Dragons, as a series of mistakes that we’re still paying for. The more I think about it, the more I want to make that case. Mistake 1: Thieves The Thief was the first step on the slippery slope of a class for everything, and everything…

Break! Apparently it’s been in the works for 10 years now. Funny, it feels like only seven. I’ve lost touch with Reynaldo since the great G+ diaspora, so I wasn’t really sure if this was still going to be a thing. I’m pretty pleased that it is, though I have no idea if I’m going to find anybody to play it with. I’m not sure anyone in my home group is that into the anime and JRPG influences that…

So, now that we have our Universal Mechanic for all older D&D editions, where does that leave us regarding Thieves? I’ve written before on how I felt the RAW versions of their skills are nearly useless, and my house-rule solution to that, but at the time I was trying to stick to the bonus chart and a d20 resolution. But it we were to go rogue, ahem ahem, we could completely supplant that with our…

I wrestle With Myself

You know the bit in The Night of the Hunter where Robert Mitchum’s sinister itinerant preacher tells the “the story of right hand, left hand” using his hands tattooed with LOVE and HATE to illustrate man’s eternal struggle between the impulse of good and evil, love or hate winning the wrestling match between the two hands? If you don’t you should probably go watch The Night of the Hunter instead…

Smoothing Attack Bonus Progression

One of the things that I really like about Original Edition Delta (Dan Collins’ restatement/mild reworking of Original White-box D&D) is how he adjusted the attack bonus charts for men attacking monsters to make a smoother progression as characters level up. The original chart divided Fighting Men into groups of three levels, e.g. 1-3, 4-6, 7-9, and then had the number you had to roll to hit each…

Rationalizing D&D SpellS and SPELL BOOKs

Random thought that occurred to me about spell memorization and spell-books in D&D. As we all know, the traditional way of doing it requires that Wizards “memorize” their spells each day and they require access to their spell book to do it. The whole thing, while probably motivated by game-play aspects of limiting wizards and making them make strategic choices, is clearly influenced by the way…

The Most D&D Book Ever?

I’ve been rereading the Hobbit, for the first time in maybe thirty years, and I can’t help but be struck by it being possibly the most D&D thing I’ve ever read… including some books that were directly set in D&D worlds. It’s not just the moments where something in the early D&D rules was clearly taken from bits in the book, like “Oh, werebears can summon normal bears because Beorn the…

Eclectic ART IN RPGS

I think when it comes to RPG books, it’s good to have an eclectic mix of art styles in the illustrations. The early D&D books were aces at this, ranging from the actual cartoons of Tom Wham, to the grounded illustrations of Dave Trampier, to the trippy works of Errol Otus. I think this kind of diversity is important because you never know what will strike a chord and provide inspiration for a…