My players, in the last sessions, kept making the worst decisions possible basically cancelling all the good ones they made before. I’m kinda playing an open table so a dwarf named Glirk came along today. Thelonius and Cavell also developed their backstory: Cavell helped Thelonius’ mother to abort his twin, ultimately saving his life (gross!).
Read full articleI’m running multiple groups and recently I started a small adventure with some players with little to no experience (one of them never played a ttrpg before!) and so far it went pretty good. I’m running Tomb Of The Dragon’s Heart with my own homebrew system that is made specifically for new players. As usual, if you’re one of the players, don’t read the spoiler sections!
Read full articleOne of the key tenets of the OSR playstyle is to never railroad the players. They’re not there to “play” your fantasy book and make some rolls. They’re not to play a Choose Your Own Adventure either. Their actions should have consequences instead of having a Quantum Ogre in every room. I would like to expand this concept a bit further and provide a simple yet elegant solution to avoid this kind of problems.
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A short session but an intense one! Cavill and Gaspard faced the dangers of the barrowmaze once again, this time with little luck. Cavill fell into a pit trap with Fossil Skeletons right at the beginning of the session (Area 49), luckily their dwarf henchman Cordoon grappled one of the skeletons with a rope from above allowing the elf to escape. They retreated and after a brief rest in Helix decided to go for the lower area of the starting zone. The dungeon restocked during that time and they fought a Barrow Guardian right at the entrance, afterwards they managed to reach their destination. There they investigated some crypts, battled some enemies and found some loot (a runic tablet they didn’t use yet!). They were a bit disappointed that this wasn’t the zone described in the map of Area 68, but as a positive note they managed to solve the mistery of the Solis statue in 78A.
Read full articleA month or so ago I started a Barrowmaze campaign with some of my players. I never actually got to make a report on the sessions but I feel like that this is a good time to do a small recap of everything that happened so far. It will take in account around 10 sessions or so so it’s gonna be pretty dense.
The characters are Gaspàrd, an harlequin thief and Morcar, a cleric of St. Ygg (actually he’s dead now but I’m getting ahead of myself). The intro was simple: the harlequin needed some fun and interesting tales to tell the king and the cleric had to learn the history of the maze. They arrived into Helix and started exploring the place. I decided to cut down most of the ambience and lore of the town keeping just some of the named characters. There’s supposed to be some sort of espionage going on from the baddies and such, but it felt convoluted so I just ignored that part, my players will probably never care. After doing the basic shopping they hired a guide at the local tavern and marched to the Barrowmaze. For the first sessions I skipped the other barrows completely as to not overwhelm them (also I felt like a hexcrawl on such a small scale wouldn’t really work that well). I still made a map since the one in the book gives too much away!
Read full articleHello, and welcome. Thanks for taking the time to read this, I hope you’ll find enjoyement in it.
The Nameless Tale is an experiment, a weird test that might be fun or might be not. It’s a writing excercise where most of the actions and the outcome of the story are decided by the whims of the dice. There is no predetermined path, no giant plot and no immortal characters. It’s kind of a solo roleplay game where I transform into text everything that happens and try to make it fun for you to read. All the rolls will be public and, since they can’t be live for obvious reasons, you’ll have to trust me about them.
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The air was tense. It was cold. Opening the eyes hurt a lot but Nicholas did it anyways. He was shivering as he didn’t have any clothes on. The first thing he saw when his eyes adapted to the darkness was a small cell, made of dark stones, forming a mosaic on the walls, one that he followed with his sight until he managed to glimpse an opening of sorts a couple of feet from him. His breath was coming out and instantly condensing and his whole body was aching. He tried getting up and fell, then he fell again. Third time’s the charm they say.
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I know, many of my posts lately have been about dungeons (and many more will follow) but I’m currently designing one for my players so you’ll have to bear with me. This post wants to be a small guide on how to easily draw a dungeon in photoshop even without a drawing tablet
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