The Bonehoard

My players requested an animal trainer profession. One thing led to another, and I wound up making a table for dog breeds available in the marketplace. I'm planning on using James Young's mechanics for animal training ( link ) with a couple tweaks, since they seem super cool and please my programmer heart. Fair warning, I haven't playtested this yet so my approach could be way off base, but I wanted to post before I wandered off and forgot. Also, I am no expert on dogs, so my apologies if any of the below info is off. Dog base instincts: Obey 1 Chase 2 Protect/bark 2 Survive 3 Play 2 Personality : +1 random instinct Dog breed : roll 3d6 for more typical adventurer pups, or d20 for any. Whatever entry you roll, the adjacent two are also available for purchase here. x is the quality rating. Gets +x to the instinct listed for that breed (including non-standard instincts). For reference, in my system 5-6 is the starting grit and move for humans. Max trained move is 9...

Here's a d20 town crier table to help the city feel more like a living entity. I'll roll on it near the beginning of a session to get an event (separate from the encounter tables I use periodically throughout the session). The list was started using this as a seed: [ link ]. Source: British Museum Event coming up (market day, holiday, festival, feast) Crown introducing new tax (luxury, staple, property, toll, market) Notorious criminal escapes / bounty offered (thief, murderer, assassin, arsonist, demon worshiper, sorcerer, monster) Someone did something to win renown (won prize fight, bred otherworldly roses, solved ancient riddle, saved child from burning building, etc) Superstition / tradition supposedly necessary for day (no crossing water, dress in red, fasting, etc) Public execution (thief, petty noble, murderer, arsonist, heretic, usurper, looters) Troubles in neighboring boroughs (riots, fires, famine, plague, sorcerous, monsters, warring groups) Weird...

Are you interested in chickens? Are your players interested in chickens? If not, this post holds nothing for you. If, like me, you have players that inexplicably gravitate towards farming in your sandbox games, you may find this post useful. Last session the party began setting up a rooftop chicken coop as part of their gang territory, to turn a profit and keep the gang fed. They plan on periodically expanding the flock, so I threw together some breeds to make the buying more interesting. Except I went overboard on this minor aspect of the game, as usual. :P I used half index cards and sketched the 20 breeds for reasons. Chickens have two stats, LAYING and MEAT. LAYING indicates how many copper a day you earn off their eggs. MEAT indicates how many silver a week they make (cash in on Sundays). It's all a bit abstracted in an odd way, but since sessions average 1-2 in-game days, I had to step up the timeline to make it worth it. I'm only making two breeds available for pu...

I love the feeling of bustling markets filled with strange goods, but players buying from equipment lists without the need for DM adjudication is so utilitarian as to have wholly supplanted any market-related roleplaying in my game. Telecanter made some cool shopping rules which I'll try out, but just for special commissions, since speed is a huge concern for me. Interactions that don't require DM adjudication are lamentably few and far between as it is. As a sort of compromise I've started utilizing "market specials" - the first time in a session the PCs say they're going through the marketplace (a central location in their borough as you might imagine), I tell 'em what freshly unloaded good is causing a buzz. Last session there was a foreigner with five "miniature bears" he was selling as exotic pets. One PC immediately bought one of the adorable critters and proudly walked it around town (leading to an invitation to meet an ennui-burdened nob...

Mechanics are with Gutters, Guilds, and Grimoires in mind, but again should be easy enough to convert to your system of choice. Apologies for the poor image quality, the phone camera just didn't cut it on these. Gray Vengeance Projects colorless flame in a beam 80' long, dex save at disadvantage to avoid. Does dX+1 damage. If you roll max damage, the wand is partially depleted and goes down the die chain on future uses. (d8 -> d6 -> d4 -> depleted) Most wands start on d6. Minor wands of Gray Vengeance start on d4, Greater wands on d8. If 5+ damage is dealt with the wand, a mind point is temporarily drained from the victim. Burns inflicted with the wand are crumbly and colorless. Constructed from tempered dim glass with a core of witch ash taken from the death-pyre of Waruda the Traitor by sympathetic agents. Waruda was denounced by several rival Strigastadt nobles who claimed she was scheming to take the life of the Queen. She was stripped of her titles an...

The names for these were taken from the spell name generator I posted a while back - the goal of which was to get spells that sounded suitably metal. :)  Stats are written for my house-rules game (Gutters, Guilds, and Grimoires), but should be easily convertible for whatever old-school system you use. Crown of Fingers - Sorcerer Rank 2, Source: ???. Make a crown of exactly eleven human fingers before chanting the spell. The wearer of the crown can dominate corporeal undead (non-mindless undead get a save). Each time the wearer establishes control over a new undead creature an index finger shrivels and scorches. When no more index fingers are left, the crown ceases to function. Control over undead lasts for 1d8 turns (DM rolls in secret). In addition, the wearer of the crown is able to interact with non-corporeal undead. This means you can hit them, but they can hit you more easily too and gain advantage when attacking you. Summon the Volcanic Tar - Sorcerer Rank 1...

So I got a bit burnt out and put the Strigastadt campaign on hiatus. It had a good run of 10 months this time around before I got worn out. I reckon when we return I'll pick up with the Forgotten Shore hexcrawl, several years after the last events. At the moment my friend Alex is picking up the slack and running a super rad game where we play WWII GIs who've voyaged into the hollow earth to blow up secret Nazi bases. We're doing a hexcrawl and repeatedly getting fucked up by dinosaurs and shit, it's hella fun. With the stress of running a game every week gone, and the inspiration of playing in other folk's games I'm already feeling a lot more excited about writing up game stuff. It's been good. North Texas RPG Con was especially motivating, I played in a lot of really awesome games and had a ton of fun. I also ran Index Card D&D on a Friday night and it went great, folks really seemed to enjoy it. I might write up a brief post on that later. Anyway, h...

I return! Here's my ruleset for Index Card D&D - a collaborative GM-less super simplified dungeon crawl game. Basically, everyone spends like 15 minutes creating a class, monster, treasure, room, and trap, and then we play a simplified D&D with the results. It's silly fun and always unbalanced, and you accumulate more cards the more you play. We've super been enjoying it, so I figured I'd share the current iteration of the rules. It's especially fun with a beer in hand! [ link to pdf ] If you play this, I'd love to hear about it! Feedback welcome, especially if the directions are unclear. I'm thiiiinking of running this Friday or Saturday night at North Texas RPG Con, since there's a dearth of games in those slots (and it was fun trying it last year), so hit me up if that's something you'd be interested in. :)