The Bonehoard

While playtesting the ruleset I'm working on I ran into some hiccups with overland movement rates. Frequent changes between terrain types caused my simplistic "3 hexes for plains, 2 for forests, etc" rules to not flow as nicely as I'd wish. The multipliers I was using could also combine a bit too extremely, and flat bonuses felt wrong at lower rates where mountains would proportionally benefit far more than plains, for example. Here's the system I came up with as a result - it has worked nicely in my tests thus far. It requires a bit of math though. Nothing hard, but fair warning in case math is especially difficult for you. This is for 3-mile hexes. Cost is how much it costs to enter the hex, from a per-watch budget of 60. Hexes per watch given for ease of reference. A watch is four hours, and they can travel without penalty for two watches a day. 3 watches = Tired, 4 = Exhausted, 5+ = make Grit/Con checks at increasing penalty. For each degree of ease, move one ...

Back from the dead! I'm fixin' to finally run a wilderness hexcrawl that I'm very excited about, and am refining some procedures prior to play. I figured I'd document some of the prep here, in case it's useful to others! After looking at some great examples of modified encounter checks but not quite finding what I wanted, I decided to incorporate some of the general ideas and formulate my own mechanic. The Hazard System and the Underclock were large inspirations to this. Goals : Allow for surprises, both good and bad. Sometimes create suspense. Have no "null" results. Have higher results be better, to allow modifiers to the roll depending on conditions. Roll 2d6: [Spoor (SP) starts at 0] 2: Bigger Encounter (surprise). Reset SP to 0 3: Regular Encounter. Reset SP to 0 4: SP > 0? Encounter. Else, SP+1 5: SP > 1? Encounter. Else, SP+1 6: SP > 2? Encounter. Else, SP+1 7:  SP > 0? SP+1. Else, Challenge 8: Flavor, SP-1 9:  Minor Resource (if ...

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...

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...

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. :)

Speaking of characters getting disfigured, I figured I'd share my Death & Dismemberment chart. I found most charts insufficiently generalized for my purposes, so created my own. So far it's worked well, dishing out non-lethal wounds at times but never feeling safe to roll on. Mechanics explanation - similar to WFRP, once characters are reduced below zero grit they roll on the below chart, adding one for each negative number they've reached. I.E. at -2, if they rolled a six, they'd get to 8 on the below chart. I've got a custom hit location die I use for the fights, so we know what's being hit for armor and wound purposes, which has arms, legs, torso, and head on it in varying proportions. DEATH & DISMEMBERMENT 2 - Adrenaline rush    - Advantage on next roll of choice   3 - Jagged wound     - Scar (-(1d4-2) Cha if on face)   4 - Sub-part damaged (finger, eye, etc)       - save or permanent inhibition  ...

One of the traditions I love best at our table is the graveyard - a place where notable PCs wind up when they die. Instead of fading into obscurity, we have a reminder of their awesomeness sitting next to the play table. They're fun to make and take a lot of the sting out of character deaths. Here's our graveyard, now full after almost a year and a half of play over several settings - it starts with Strigastadt, moves to the Forgotten Shore, goes to the Lost Pyramid, and finally returns to Strigastadt. With Chuck Chuckleston's death to a brutal combination of fungal hounds, grease dogs, and giant wasps recently, it looks like we need another expansion... Open in new tab if you want it legible

As previously stated , sorcerers grow artificial bodies in order to duplicate spells. Typically, very short-lived homunculi are used, lasting just long enough to get the job done. Some sorcerers create longer-lived homunculi via this process however, commonly referred to as vatlings. Here's a system for their creation accompanied by some bad scans of crappy watercolor splotch drawings I made. The demon-flesh samples used to grow vatlings are contained in specially-constructed zinc cylinders that stabilize the tissues for long-term storage. They're expensive to create and feed, so mostly sorcerers make do with a handful of strains, but if a new mutation is particularly useful it can be tempting to add to your repertoire. When finding a new tissue sample (from another sorcerer), roll random characteristics for the fleshy shells that strain creates (or just make something up):

Riffing off / reinterpreting the idea thread Scrap Princess and Arnold K. have going here and here about spells being an actual lifeform. I am a literal-minded fellow so I took it towards spells originating as flesh-and-blood creatures. So, spells originally come from demons. Many demons have the ability to project their consciousness outwards from their bodies, manifesting as fireballs or choking mists or whatever. Unmoving, vacant gazed, their bodies wait until the consciousness returns (usually quite quickly). Some people a very long time ago figured out how to trap those roving consciousnesses, first as a defense, then utilizing them as weapons. All spells are therefore unique entities, although there is some commonality in function between them. I don't know what level spell this guy is but it's bad news [ src ] Each page in a spellbook is a spell-mind trap, with the mental key belonging to the sorcerer. You can get a spell from someone, but the process is akin t...

As mentioned in the last post, PCs in my game enjoy both participating in and betting on the Fighting Pits of Zig. Zig's cult is filled with muscle priests who worship that divinity of strength, praising physical prowess over all else. Priests especially steeped in the lore of Zig are known to wrestle bears, emulating the myths surrounding their divine patron. Anyhow holy fight club. Brawling rules are a modified form of those found on Detect Magic here : Roll d20, add attack bonus. Whomever gets higher is winning. Ties = no advantage either way. Crit fail = make a fool of yourself. Crit success = accidentally escalate an extra category. Fights go from bruised -> bleeding -> screaming -> broken -> maimed/dead If you win the round, describe how you make your opponent bruised/bleed/scream/etc and you get +3 on your next roll. If you lose, choose whether to tap out or escalate to the next category. Example - The mighty Blax Jax (ftr 2) is facing off against Jadi Am...

Played another game in Strigastadt on Friday that went pretty well, but a couple issues were highlighted: 1) My rules for First Aid are a bit broken 2) Treasure was... insufficient for the terrible risks involved As a quick recap, I have First Aid working as a standard LotFP d6 skill (based off Logan Knight's Surgery rule), where failure means inflicting a point of damage and success healing equal to the number rolled, and you can only heal folks at or below 1 hp. Thought it was pretty handy, but one of the players only sunk a single point into the skill... which, with the healer's bag, meant a 50/50 chance of helping or harming. I like the idea of being able to do damage on a failure, but as the rules stand it's not super helpful where you need it most: when characters are a point or two away from bleeding out. You shouldn't have to dump all your points into a skill before it becomes usable! So, as a minor change: only failure rolls of 6 harm the patient... Th...

So I love the idea of an adventurer shattering their spear in the heat of combat and having to draw their trusty short-sword to keep the nasties at bay. Or someone snapping off an axe-head in the skull of an enemy. I like Logan Knight's notches rule a lot, but think it's a bit too fiddly for me - I really don't want to slow down combat, since quick combat is one of the great features of OSR games like LotFP. So without further ado, my simple version: On a critical hit or critical miss, roll 1d6. +1 if you're using a spear, -1 for great weapons. Your weapon breaks on: Terrible 2-6 Shoddy 3-6 Poor 4-6 Well-made 5-6 Excellent 6 Masterwork double sixes on 2d6 Most stuff is well-made. Other qualities are available if sought, they are worth: Terrible 0.3x base Shoddy 0.5x Poor 0.7x Well-made 1x Excellent 5...

On the suggestion of one of my players (a much more experienced DM than I), I wrote up some pre-made equipment packs that folks can choose during character creation. When you've just died, or are new to roleplaying, picking a pre-made pack is approximately 100000% faster than assembling one yourself. In a setting where death is not uncommon, they smooth some bumps in coming back into the game. The idea originated from this post on Zenopus Archives, and I'm quite taken with it! The packs are based on a 110 SP total, an average amount on the LotFP 3d6 SP to start roll. There's no discount to the pack and swapsies are allowed, which means they'll be chosen a little less frequently, but whatever.  The packs are definitely not perfectly chosen, but here they are in case some other folks find LotFP equipment packs handy: