#sworddream

What better way to close out the blog's first month but with a huge repository of fun OSR games? I'm not personally a huge fan, but I understand this is a genre people really enjoy, so as a compromise, I'll do every OSR submitted in a masterpost. I understand this is probably a pretty controversial move, but I simply think the genre's too similar to each other, I might be wrong but that's just the vibe I get! I'm sure there's some very fun and creative OSRs out there, they're just not made for me. I'll keep myself from sharing my thoughts on the genre for now, but rest assure these are cool games recommended by people who actually enjoy the genre!

And now they’ve risked alienating three generations of tabletop gamers while simultaneously losing their most popular content creators.

If you play a non-wotc ttrpg, get busy talking to your dnd-only friends about it.

and oh my! Everything went as I thought it would! To prep, I used the spark tables to give myself:

Explorer, gardens, ancient dagger, houseless population, and heavily trafficked, which I interpreted as a plot involving an out of touch explorer coming to retrieve the one that got away (the dagger) as well as the one he lost (his partner/wife).

The party where hired on as his lackies in exchange for knocking off a clean 1k each off their debts. I decided garden street was a popular thoroughfare, but no one knew who maintained the gardens themselves which back up immediately to the street, and are never entered out of superstition. Right on the other side though is a gorgeous garden paradise, where a large houseless population has set up their faction.

They already dislike the explorer cause of the last time he was here. In the end, it’s revealed that his wife has been consumed by the garden and turned into a plant-person, and nothing remains of her personality or mind. She’s just some eyes and some teeth in a human-shaped plant.

Final showdown involving unleashing a PC’s bottled spectre and absolutely RUINING a greenhouse, the explorer pricks himself on the rose-shaped-dagger and is also consumed. The party is left with poeticism, curtains close, the end.

Dear reader, it fucking ruled.

I’m incredibly glad I trusted the book. There was a moment early on where a random encounter was rolled, and I ended up improvising some grannies chasing out 3 frat bro aristocrats from their temple. The party immediately found the grannies 8 times more interesting than getting to garden street, and ate the plot hook line and sinker.

Now I had no clue what any of this WAS like, it was all improv’d, and so I decided then and there to go for something the hook suggests, that there’s always someone else after the goal. One of my PC’s was a useless graduate and so I had one of the aristocrats recognize him from class. Tensions and world holding ensue, and we haven’t even gone inside the temple yet!

I ended up having the grannies keep an herb and veggie garden in the back, that happened to connect up to the mythical garden dungeon thingy behind garden street, so the detour ended up being simply an alternative dungeon entrance, which was a fun reveal later on.

All and all, if I hadn’t attempted to be so flexible in the first place, if I hadn’t indulged in my random encounters and the teachings of the book my session would have really struggled to get moving! Instead I got a super smooth runway straight into some great dungeon crawling action.

Next time I’m gonna prep more though, more city streets and transport methods, maybe even start mapping the underground? I’m terrified of the setting getting TOO gonzo for my very fantasy-focused goals for this campaign, but as always it’s a series of oneshots, which is much easier to tune for genre in the long run.

Afterword

My friends don't deserve death at the hands of cruel incompetent capitalism and yet another stroke of cosmic misfortune in their lives.

Send $1, $5, $10, as much as you can, send it their way and bask in the knowledge that you have made an irrefutable positive effort towards adding justice and kindness to the world.

Put your money where your mouth is.

Check out my latest Thing; Blessings and Bones. It’s a short alternative magic system made for the DREAMJAM on itch. 

Generate a pantheon of Small Gods that you entreat for blessings to help outweigh the tolls of casting spells.

For obvious reasons, most OSR games follow some version of the original D&D rules about actions: you get a movement, and an action.

I really like the PF2e three action system, but the elegant multiple attack penalty doesn't play well in a system with no roll-to-hit like *Into the Odd* and its offspring.

An idea, sparked by reading the Dual Weapons rule in Cairn, is to continue that line of thinking: the gang-up rule applies to all attacks -- ones you make yourself, as well as attacks made by others.

So perhaps by default all creatures get two actions per turn. You can do pretty much anything with those actions. The classic: One action to move, one action to hit. Or you can run, and then run again. You can attack twice, but you only keep the highest damage -- you're trading your action for advantage.

Once you're moved, you're moved. That's your action.

Maybe casting all spells takes a full two actions. That opens up space for some sort of magic item that reduces this, or an effect that gives you another action.