I have been playing Red Dead Redemption 2 the last few weeks, which spurred me on (see what I did there!) to give Boot Hill a look again, especially as RDR2, like other Rockstar Games titles, is us…| Stuffed Crocodile
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 […]| Stuffed Crocodile
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 […]| Stuffed Crocodile
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. Wel…| Stuffed Crocodile
“I have signed in blood, as I know you respect the old traditions,” says my character. When the villain reaches for the pen, I kneecap him with my derringer. A simple statement, indicating a sudden, violent act. Unexpected as it was part of a previously peaceful negotiation. How do you deal with that as a […]| Sea of Stars RPG Design Journal
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 ̶…| Stuffed Crocodile
It’s fairly common knowledge by now that Something Rotten in Kislev was not in the original plan for the Enemy Within campaign. Ken Rolston became available and GW management thought that his name on a WFRP product would help boost U.S. sales. I don’t know how much of a brief he received – I think […]| Graeme Davis
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, …| Stuffed Crocodile
Published in 1987, Warhammer City started life as a background section in Carl Sargent’s manuscript for Power Behind the Throne. Unlike the town section in Shadows over Bögenhafen, though, it grew and grew. The city-state of Middenheim was a far larger proposition than a simple market town, after all, and we had also seen city […]| Graeme Davis
A lot has been written over the years about the Easter eggs and in-jokes that were scattered throughout Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay’s first edition. Between 1997 and 2001, I wrote three articl…| Graeme Davis
Last week I found Wanderer Bill’s Grenzland 5 in my mailbox. Topic “Science Fantasy”. The zine costs 5 Euros for a hardcopy, but can be downloaded for free. As the topic goes into the realm of science fiction there’s plenty of that in this issue. Most of the articles are in German, some are English […]| Stuffed Crocodile
Calibre, if you are not aware, is an open source ebook management system. It’s one of the best and most easily available ways to manage a collection of electronic books. It stores books in a …| Stuffed Crocodile
Random Tables d66 Reasons Why the Castle is Totally Deserted (Blog of Forlorn Encystment) Elemental Heretics (Elfmaids & Octopi) d100 Poltergeists (Elfmaids & Octopi) Let’s Build a Thieves Guild (OSRVault) 100 Urban Quest Hooks (OSRVault) Ideas Babies in Dungeons (Prismatic Wasteland) Random Magic User Generator (Remixes and Revelations) Sandbox Settlements: Downtime (Among Cats and Books) […]| Stuffed Crocodile
Subtitle: Being in the Main a Game of the Life and Times of a Gentleman Adventurer and his Several Companions I was woefully ignorant about En Garde! (mind the exclamation mark) until recently, whe…| Stuffed Crocodile
Capturing this now for a few reasons: This is the most organized I’ve ever been as a GM or DM — in fact, it’s the first time I’ve had a regular set of tools that I’ve …| Echo Station 5-7
This table was inspired by a quote from Robin D. Laws’ saying When in doubt, blindfold yourself, take any two GURPS sourcebooks off the shelf at random, and combine the results. Ok, this is a bit pointless but also… not. I mean, who has a d140 anyway? Or in fact even so many GURPS books? […]| Stuffed Crocodile
Last Thursday we wrapped up the Grenzland Diplomacy play-by-post game we were playing for the last few days. At least for the season.So the Grenzland campaign (tl.: Borderland) is an ODnD campaign run by Wanderer Bill for the last few years. There already was a lot of history that has been happening in this campaign, […]| Stuffed Crocodile
fortune is one of those classic unix programs that are available on basically all unixoid systems. The only thing it does is “display a pseudorandom message from a database of quotations”, or as the man-page of fortune for debian says: “fortune – print a random, hopefully interesting, adage”. To be fair, the fortune part of […]| Stuffed Crocodile
Ages ago (2011?) I found a Star Wars OSR retroclone called Star Wars – Galactic Adventures on the venerable wizardawn.com page, now lost to the wages of net history. (…that was before there was an actual Star Wars product, a kids’ book, using the same title…) For some reason it never really caught on in […]| Stuffed Crocodile
I currently am running a Labyrinth Lord Open Table every Tuesday at 8.15pm CET for 2 hours on the Grenzland Discord Server. Sign-ups are via the Norn bot in channel #glimmermark. A wiki page for the game exists. The Glimmermark is a is a border march of the Kingdom of Brillon, once a core province […]| Stuffed Crocodile
It’s the first time I actually feel the amount of times I played in a year worth mentioning. I had a rather successful 2024 in terms of ttrpg gaming. If my reckoning is correct (and I think I might miss a few) I played 56 sessions of roleplaying games this year. And this doesn’t take […]| Stuffed Crocodile
The last few weeks I have been posting pretty often, daily even, which is interesting. I sometimes do get these posting spells for a bit with this blog, and that’s quite nice. Anyway, today I had business in Warsaw and wasn’t able to write anything before I was on the train back, so this post […]| Stuffed Crocodile
There are no Glimmermark games for the next two weeks. Which means there also are no expeditions into the wilderness or the local dungeons as we are running on a 1:1 campaign time scale, with every week in real life being about a week in the game.But why is that? I mean, why is that […]| Stuffed Crocodile
During my excursions into reaction rolls for Traveller lately I realized that the Traveller book has a template for how to create rumor tables (or just come up with rumors on the fly). Unlike other games (uhm… DnD) which never get into this deeper than having a rumor table in some of their scenarios. This […]| Stuffed Crocodile
You have seen his works before if you ever looked at anything regarding space colonization. Rick Guidice was an American illustrator who did some stellar work illustrating some of the things scientists at NASA were working on. Some of his most striking stuff was regarding various ideas for space colonies. And if you look up […]| Stuffed Crocodile
As we all know Shields Shall be Splintered! Shields For our Glimmermark game we agreed that shields are a necessity for the aspiring adventurer, as they allow you to soak one damage roll by sacrificing the shield. Critical Fails and Critical Hits The whole idea of a crit on a natural 1 or 20 was […]| Stuffed Crocodile
Ho humm… these link collections are getting a bit long sometimes, especially if I don’t actually post them for a while. Free Stuff Goblinoid Games offers a draft of the Labyrinth Lord 2nd edition on their website Pocket Basic Rules for OSR (drivethrurpg) Random Tables Where Did I Get These Spells From? (Elfmaids & Octopi) […]| Stuffed Crocodile
Adventurer was a rather short running UK RPG magazine. In the last issue, Adventurer 11, June/July 1987, there was an interesting interview with Terry Pratchett, where he recounted his experiences with D&D (he used to play and early Discworld has at least some influences from that) and why he stopped. My favorite part is this […]| Stuffed Crocodile
So Cauldron gave me the opportunity to actually play a lot of ODnD for once, and with that came the notion of using a single damage die to roll the damage on targets. For context: this is how it worked in the original rules of DnD, and it is not something that I really considered […]| Stuffed Crocodile
Goblin (Character Class)Req.: DEX 9 and CON 9Prime Reqs: STR and DEXHD: 1d8 (as monster HD)Max Level: 6Fighting: As equivalent monster HDSaves: As Fighter Goblin Level Progression Experience Level Hit Dice (1d8) 0 1 1-1 1.000 2 1 2.000 3 2 8.000 4 3 32.000 5 3+1 65.000 6 3+2 A goblin usually is slightly […]| Stuffed Crocodile
It wasn’t all doom and gloom and Satanic panicking in the 80s about rolepaying games. Dynamite Magazine actually had a few features about this new sort of game, and they all have a rather positive spin on the whole enterprise. The famous one is of course the one with the cool homebuilt Dungeon Grognardia and […]| Stuffed Crocodile
I am preparing for a Traveller game, and so here are a few conceits that bear repeating for understanding the setting and the rules properly. In a lot of cases those are truisms or commonplaces, but I think it helps to keep them in mind. Space is vast “Space is big. You just won’t believe […]| Stuffed Crocodile
Learning Magic in the GlimmermarkWhen I started to plan for the Glimmermark one of my main ideas was to make it even more Vancian, instead of getting rid of the Vancianess like many people would prefer to. Magic needs to be rare, mystical, and hard to get. Magic effects need to be dangerous and closely […]| Stuffed Crocodile
Reaction Rolls and Morale for MGT 2e I am prepping for a Pirates of Drinax campaign right now, and as the current version of that is for Mongoose Traveller we are going to use that edition. There is something to be said about the way the newer edition (now even with a refreshed look for […]| Stuffed Crocodile
This is one of those things I did for campaigns before: a small newsletter/zine with infos, hints, and used rules about the campaign. It isn’t strictly necessary, but I always liked the idea to have a physical reminder of the campaigns I ran, even though the campaign itself has a wiki-page on campaignwiki.org. Despite the […]| Stuffed Crocodile
Cauldron 2024: Manor on the Borderlands …of Hessia and Thuringia that is. But that means in living memory the Iron Wall ran merely a few hundred meters away from the location. And I swear I wanted to go there and make a proper picture but there was simply no time. I managed to play more […]| Stuffed Crocodile
I’ve been thinking about Dungeons & Dragons classes lately. And I think fewer classes is better for the game.| YUM/DM
Messing around with the good old Octyrannopus gave me an idea: maybe it could camouflage itself, like a cuttlefish? That seemed like a fun effect that I could readily simulate for my regular campaign players. The first step was to … Continue reading →| Echo Station 5-7
I got this because I’m a sucker for D&D merch and interesting notebooks, so it might as well have been aersolized narcotics. I didn’t have super high hopes for it — my last TTRPG tie-in notebook (not D&D-branded) started falling … Continue reading →| Echo Station 5-7
To write a backstory for a DnD character, you should avoid writing a detailed recount of their life and instead opt to describe a few key events or relationships. This can improve the colloborative storytelling component of these games and provide you with enough character flkexibility to help you enjoy the game more consistently. In […]| The Bardic Inquiry
Questions help us communicate and understand each other and we can use them to improve the engagement of our players in our roleplaying games. By asking the right type questions of our players, we …| The Bardic Inquiry
So we talked about Drinax and what the UWP implies, but what does life there actually look like on the ground? Well, quite terrible really. There’s not too many people around. The population …| Stuffed Crocodile
Art by Richard Powers So as I mentioned I am preparing to run a Pirates of Drinax campaign and as I talked about in the article one should not see the UWPs of certain worlds as holy writ. Which is …| Stuffed Crocodile
This one was again a rather short session. It literally was just the rest of session 2, but a week later. It took all of 90 minutes and then we were finished. They already had planned stuff out bef…| Stuffed Crocodile
Downcrawl is a tabletop roleplaying toolkit that lets players build and explore a weird, wondrous underworld together.| aaronareed.net
Fables of Camelot is a roleplaying game I wrote with Sami Koponen this last summer; Sami had been thinking of the problem of introducing roleplaying to new people in a convention environment, so when he came to visit me for a week we put our heads together and cooked up a game to fulfill his […]| Game Design is about Structure
The Verdant Quarter is now complete, meaning that the entire Gossamer map is likewise finished:| BEARDED DEVIL
I have an adventure out in the new issue of the Star Wars Adventurer’s Journal, called “The Haunted Helm” (download link at the bottom of this post). It started as an adventure that I wrote and ran for London back … Continue reading →| Echo Station 5-7
From what I’ve seen, the campaign books for D&D 5e just keep getting better and better. London and I have picked up three of the recent releases: Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount, Eberron: Rising from the Last War, and most recently … Continue reading →| Echo Station 5-7
London and I have been playing D&D again lately. Our table is not huge, and with maps, minis, and rulebooks, it can get a little crowded. Also, we like to be able to take D&D on the road when we go … Continue reading →| Echo Station 5-7
Today sees the completion of a quest 25 years in the making for me–and if you just want the file, it’s at the bottom of the post. But first, some backstory. In the mid-90s, West End Games published a quarterly … Continue reading →| Echo Station 5-7
Tabletop roleplaying in an infinite sky.| aaronareed.net
Map Close-Up| BEARDED DEVIL
Map Close-Up| BEARDED DEVIL
Map Close-Up| BEARDED DEVIL
Map Close-Up| BEARDED DEVIL
Map Close-up| BEARDED DEVIL
Map Close-up| BEARDED DEVIL
Map Close-Up| BEARDED DEVIL
Map Close-up| BEARDED DEVIL
Like many others, I’ll be attempting Dungeon23 this coming year. I’m hoping to update this blog far more frequently, and to begin producing more polished content soon. My megadungeon is, naturally, part of the gigantic ruin beneath Hex – a small section of the First Library, or Old City, built by the primeval Librarians in aeons now long distant. This first post will describe both the dungeon itself, a part of the Old City called the Apocalypse Archive, and some of the psychic effects a...| BEARDED DEVIL
