Remember those heady days just after Magic: The Gathering came out, when all of a sudden any TTRPG related publisher decided to push out their own trading card game? Well, so does Atlas Games it seems, who have been sitting on unopened “On the Edge” boxes for the last 30 years and are still selling […]| 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
Ok, this is only connected with role-playing games in the most tenuous way possible, but there was a Polish chain of gas stations called D&D which even had a logo that reminded me of old Basic D&D logos. I think they were mostly around Lodz, and even when they were around it never was all […]| 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
A blog (mostly) about tabletop roleplaying games| Stuffed Crocodile
10 posts published by Geoffrey during December 2024| Stuffed Crocodile
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
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
Random Tables d72 Squires (Bastionland) D6 Social Media Services of the Near-Future (Archons March On) D6x6 Sanguine Sirens (Archons March On) d100 – Wilderness Woes & Hinterland Hazards (d4 Ca…| Stuffed Crocodile
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
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
Not sure how many people are interested in it considering this is an English-language blog and this is a (largely) German-language campaign newsletter… but anyway, here is issue 2 of Glimmermärkische Zeytungen. I decided to create an In-Game chronicle here, as written by the scribe on Castle Aberwacht. Which largely concerns the doings of the […]| 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
In 2003 The Lord Weird Slough Feg (they later shortened the name to just Slough Feg) released a concept album based on Traveller of all things. This was way after the star of Traveller as an RPG property had gone down and before it rose again. From what I remember the early 2000s were not […]| 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
I was just thinking how people completely miss out on one of the most interesting aspects of this comic series. Marvel Star Wars ran for 108 issues, concluding in 1986. But at the beginning the first few issues adapted Episode IV A New Hope, or as it was then known “Star Wars” into comic form. […]| 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
Free Stuff Pendragon Quick-Start with “The Adventure of the Sword Tournament” (chaosium.com) “The Quest of the Red Blade” by Greg Stafford (itch.io) “The Adventure of the Great Hunt” by Greg Stafford (itch.io) D&D 2024 Free Rules (dndbeyond.com) Random Tables 1d60 Ways to Seal a Pact (Dice in the North) d100 – Retainer Refusals & Hireling […]| Stuffed Crocodile
They say quantity is a quality all on its own, and that certainly fits the artistic output of Johnny Bruck. Johnny Bruck was a German artist mostly working in pulp magazines, most famously Perry Rh…| Stuffed Crocodile
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
[Labyrinth Lord] Tomb of the Serpent Kings Session 1 (also MapTool) A while ago I started playing with some people on an online server. That was about the time when I decided that I should maybe be…| 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
