Lately I've found myself struggling to stay motivated on some of the nitty-gritty bits of running an ongoing campaign. I need a system for t...| vilecultofshapes.blogspot.com
I got kirt dankmeyer's curt and dank prompt "d20 surreal science fantasy adventure seeds, the weirder the better. Optional: A micro-setting that would tie them all together" for the OSR secret santacorn this year. | VILE CULT OF SHAPES
i'm doing a thing where i'm trying to quit smoking cigarettes and in addition to using patches and nicotine lozenges i'm also writing d100 tables instead of smoking. also writing tables if i fuck up and smoke.| VILE CULT OF SHAPES
The concern about adding guns to d&d is that they tend to change the game the same way guns changed combat in real life; it's even more deadly than it was before and heavy armor is less useful. Combat skill is a little less useful as anyone can point and pull a trigger and kill.| VILE CULT OF SHAPES
taking a break from the Internet, except for writing work, blog posts, research, and music. not doing anything social. those of you who know me on the discord are aware i retreat into hermetic semi-seclusion 3-4 times a year. i probably won't be very active again outside this blog until after Halloween, potentially until after new year. we'll see how it goes. if you really want to contact me for some reason I'm sure it'll happen.| VILE CULT OF SHAPES
lol I did all this work for nothing, Luke already posted his hexfilling procedures on his blog go look at them and use them they're wonderful| VILE CULT OF SHAPES
I was inspired to write this solo wilderness exploration / survival RPG based on an outdoor adventure my three-year old took me on at our neighborhood park. I let her lead me through a pretend exploration in which we gathered nuts, built campfires, caught monsters in traps, protected our nest using magic herbs, stored away food, gave gifts to buddhas, and hid from the rain underneath trees. I'm so lucky to have such a being of pure light in my life. | VILE CULT OF SHAPES
A quest is when a faction wants to hire the party to do something. An adventure is when the party decides to pursue a goal of their own accord. Quests often spawn adventures, and adventures typically involve quests.| VILE CULT OF SHAPES
A trap is something that looks harmless/useful but actually kills you.| VILE CULT OF SHAPES
So I decided to run a quick game on the discord, thinking there should be more low stakes 'just for fun' mess around games on the server. There's a lot of hijinks you can get into in an hour! We tossed around some ideas and decided to run Knave. I had a half-finished dungeon that was burning a hole in my brain, but i couldn't locate the file, so I generated a random dungeon on Donjon and familiarized myself with it while the players rolled up theirs characters.| VILE CULT OF SHAPES
My friend Strawberry Milk on the OSR discord asked me to write an article about traps. You can blame him for this.| VILE CULT OF SHAPES
I've been sitting on this for months worrying about it being terrible because I'm both an overachieve and a self sabotager. | VILE CULT OF SHAPES
d20 rooms split between d4 floors. Alternatively you got d6 floors with d8 rooms each.| VILE CULT OF SHAPES
In a funk. Peeling all the onion layers back and discarding things that complicate my life. Taking a step back from OSR and d&d in general.| VILE CULT OF SHAPES
Draw a map. Use whatever format inspires you the most. I like the freedom of a blank sheet of printer paper and a nice mechanical pencil, or thick sketchbook paper and micron pens. Let the ideas flow as you go. If you get stuck quit and go do something else.| VILE CULT OF SHAPES
I had a pretty serious knee injury so I've been laid up. Rather than working on comic sans 23 as normal I've instead been playing Shadow of the Colossus and messing around with character.ai. The site let's you make an AI chatbot by describing it's personality.| VILE CULT OF SHAPES
Here it is, the first entry in my year long experiment to produce a sloppy half-cocked adventure module a week. I plugged away at this one a bit a day since my introductory post. I think I may have overdone it a bit. It's a fully realized two level dungeon with mostly unique monsters, encounter tables, everything. 20 entire pages of adventure fuel.| VILE CULT OF SHAPES
A lotta people are doing the Dungeon23 thing, where you write a dungeon room per day and by the end of the year you have a 12 floor megadungeon. Some people are using it as an excuse to do other stuff, like hexcrawls etc.| VILE CULT OF SHAPES
Aka vilecult abuses math| VILE CULT OF SHAPES
Over at the OSR discord we get a lot of questions about how to run a hexcrawl, often from 5e refugees. There's a lot of great how-to posts out there, but many of them overcomplicate what is, in my opinion, a very simple thing. | VILE CULT OF SHAPES
Kids are exposed to too much violence in media. I know this is a controversial subject, and I may seem a little old fashioned for putting it forward. So be it.| VILE CULT OF SHAPES
Here's some notes I have about elves, magic, and low fantasy campaigns. The part about elves is lifted almost directly from the Japanese Wizardry TTRPG. The campaign thing came from a discussion on the discord.| VILE CULT OF SHAPES
What's a tavern without a bit of gambling?| VILE CULT OF SHAPES
Languages are often underutilized in OSR, while I believe that they were used extensively in early editions of the game. This is probably due to people not understanding why they are there.| VILE CULT OF SHAPES
I'm gonna start cleaning out all my old notes and scribbled ideas by posting them unfinished to the blog. This is my style and it's best I come to terms with it | VILE CULT OF SHAPES