kyonshi

I have been tinkering with my own rules for a while now. And while it still isn’t finished (will it ever be?) I am getting to the point where I could see it being used in a game. Now mind you, I didn’t really come up with this on my own, I just took ideas from other places and added my own spin to it. The very core of the game used to be the Labyrinth Lord SRD, but I drew in parts from other…

I do like random results in my game, especially effects of reaction and morale rolls. I feel the game is much more interesting if I as the referee do not exactly know what is going to happen with any given NPC. The issue is of course that while I try to come up with reasonable reactions, sometimes my NPCs are too reasonable. So this table is supposed to deal with that. What happens when NPCs…

Disintegrating asteroids (source: NASA) Claire Vallas, Shipping Company AdminCitizen, CorporateRequired Skills: NoneRequired Equipment: Transportation Westom-Karr’as Shipping is a single-system transport company specializing in non-jump mining transports. One of their large mineral transports from the asteroid belt in the outer system has stopped responding to calls. The ship (the Westom VI) is…

Small houserule I came up with while redoing the my xp awards for my campaign: Attending a church service/religious ceremony of a friendly faith and tithing appropriately to their stature (at least 50gp) gives 50 xp. It also has a chance of bestowing a blessing. The character tithing needs to roll Save vs. Spell to gain the effects of a Bless spell until the next combat or rest period (whatever…

Elves are well known to be able to see in the dark… because they glow. Infravision and darkvision to me never made that much sense for Elves. Why would they be able to see in complete darkness. Every picture of an elf in the woods has them lit by some unearthly glo…. ooooooh. Yeah, so elves faintly glow from the inside in an unearthly light. Not much, not really that noticeable during the day.…

Random Tables d100 – Hireling Hobbies or PC Pastimes (d4 Caltrops) D20x5 Great Grails (Archons March On) d100 Woefully Encysted Creatures (Blog of Forlorn Encystment) Farmer Drama 2 Ethyria Farm Life + (Elfmaids & Octopi) Resources 10 Reasons Why the Guild has a Partial Map (Rise Up Comus) Who feeds all these monsters? Monster Keepers & Menageries (Elfmaids & Octopi) DOWNTIME DEMANDS OF…

Grenzland no. 6 appeared in my mailbox last week, and now can also be downloaded from archive.org. A harcopy can be purchased for 5 Euros from Wanderer Bill (as long as copies last that is). It features a mix of mostly English and partially German articles concerning OSR topics, including an expanded article on Campaign Events. Information and Reconaissance in Domain Games by lkh is a meditation…

Random Tables d100 – Vignettes for Faerie & Other Unseen Lands (d4 Caltrops) d100 – Pecuniary Problems, Awful Arrears, & Delinquent Debts (d4 Caltrops) D6x6 Grimy Grimlocks (Archons March On) Relationship Complications (Traverse Fantasy) 1d100 Things in the Wizard’s Tower (Dice in the North) Resources More Shrine Fluff (Elfmaids & Octopi) The Forgotten Hermitage (Dyson’s Dodehecadron) A…

It might have been visible in my post from yesterday, but I don’t actually like Oriental Adventures. The original ’85 AD&D book that is. The book purports to give rules for an “oriental” setting that wildly and inappropriately mixes together East Asian cultures and doesn’t even have the decency to genericize the concepts used like it did in the main books. Being Oriental, it seems to say, is all…

Remember those heady days just after Magic: The Gathering came out, when all of a sudden any TTRPG related publisher decided to push out their own trading card game? Well, so does Atlas Games it seems, who have been sitting on unopened “On the Edge” boxes for the last 30 years and are still selling them, for pennies on the dollar by this point. I’m not sure why I thought it was a good idea to…

I have been thinking of making this table for a while, and right now am working on it for the Grenzland zine. The inspiration for this is of course the Campaign Event table in Oriental Adventures, which I have to say is one of the few parts of that book that can stand on it’s own. Nevertheless, while it is in general the most useful part of the book, it also is too long, too wordy, and slightly…

Y…eah. I mean, I have been doing these things for old DSA scenarios already, so now I get to do them for old Shadowrun ones as well. And Dreamchipper definitely is one of the oldest ones on the block, technically the second of independent scenarios after DNA/DOA (and the fourth after the venerated Food Fight in the rulebook and Silver Angel which was a pack in with the GM screen). And it’s not…

Last week we had the 26th session of my Glimmermark Labyrinth Lord game, which makes for a game about every 2 weeks on average since I started in July 2024. Unfortunately sometimes it’s just not possible to find enough people to play, even if I offered the game as an open table game. We decided early on that we play with at least 2 players around, although we had a few times when we decided to…

Ok, this is only connected with role-playing games in the most tenuous way possible, but there was a Polish chain of gas stations called D&D which even had a logo that reminded me of old Basic D&D logos. I think they were mostly around Lodz, and even when they were around it never was all that big a chain. They often were in awkward places that you’d not expect a gas station to be in in the…

A recent episode of Retronauts reminded me about the Chicken Stinger (or Chicken Leg, or even Cockatrice although that name sounds wrong), the monster used in both Golden Axe and Altered Beast. Well, mostly Golden Axe I would say, as the first time I came across it was in the Master System port of that game. And Altered Beast never was that fun. If you’ve ever played the Golden Axe games you…