A blog about roleplaying games and theory focused on Mythras, Dungeons and Dragons, and OSR games.| retiredadventurer.blogspot.com
A blog about roleplaying games and theory focused on Mythras, Dungeons and Dragons, and OSR games.| retiredadventurer.blogspot.com
I've been getting a lot of requests to translate Six Cultures of Play into various languages and for those translations to be posted on various RPG sites, enough that I have been laggardly in responding to all of them. So here's the blanket approval: You can translate Six Cultures of Play into whatever language you'd like and post it wherever you'd like, at no cost to you whatsoever. | The Retired Adventurer
One of the PCs in my Imperium Maledictum campaign is an Ursuline priest working for the Empty Synod, and another is a lay Ursuline. I figured I might as well lay out some of the details of the faith.| The Retired Adventurer
The Empty Synod looks around at the Imperium, at the galaxy, at its brutality and cruelty and waste and stupidity, and says "None of this is necessary. Everything could different. We can make it so." It embodies the forces of hope in a universe otherwise bereft of it.| The Retired Adventurer
Just publicly expressing my condolences to her family and friends on the recent passing of Jennell Jacquays, who wrote one of my favourite RPG campaign settings of all time: Griffin Mountain, in addition to a massive body of other work that very much laid out best practices in adventure, and specifically dungeon, design decades and decades ago. She had an incredibly ability to work through the intricacies of material in a way that made it tremendously concrete and practical without being over...| The Retired Adventurer
The Bhadra System: Overview| The Retired Adventurer
A couple of comments asked about the Statisticians of Certainty that I mentioned in the previous post, and why they wanted to travel to the future. Since they won't feature directly in the current campaign, it's easy for me to answer.| The Retired Adventurer
I'm launching an Imperium Maledictum campaign to try it out before I review it. Overall, doing the background work for the campaign so far, it's been pretty easy, and basically feels like a cleaned up and simplified Dark Heresy. I'm setting the new campaign in the Tellian Sector, but now updated to the 42nd millennium. This is a background document for the campaign.| The Retired Adventurer
I got Imperium Maledictum, the new Warhammer 40K RPG the other day. It looks good overall, I'll be writing a longer and more detailed review shortly. As part of my campaign prep for an upcoming test of the system, I decided to relaunch the Tellian Sector. To make it bigger, and represent the changes as 40K moves into the 42nd millennium and the "Indomitus Era", I decided I would make an automatic sector generator. | The Retired Adventurer
It's been a while since I've updated this blog, so here's a brief apology and explanation of what I've been up to instead:| The Retired Adventurer
Someone on the OSR Discord server asked me to write this up in a blog post, so I thought I would talk a little bit about terrain for hex maps.| The Retired Adventurer
The island of Ursino (not-Corsica) on Verra has a bunch of gnolls. The gnolls are cursed mercenaries who were brought in as exiles from the Temmeno Empire (the not-Ethiopian Empire) over a generation ago by the Banco di Asmodeo to exert the banks control over the island and beat back swarms of the undead. A few missed payments, broken promises, and angry contractual negotiations later, and they're now organised into roving bands threatening the inhabitants of Ursino and are looking for a way ...| The Retired Adventurer
There is now a system reference document (SRD) available for Openquest 3rd edition. The SRD is free to download from this link, and will eventually be hosted as a HTML document on the d101 Games website here.| The Retired Adventurer
Here's a simple and fast system for placing locations of interest in a single hex on a grid. I am assuming a four hour watch as the basic unit of travel movement. Hexes can be divided into six equilateral triangles, for anyone who didn't know that.| The Retired Adventurer
Blogs on Tape recorded my Six Cultures of Play article for anyone who finds reading giant walls of text difficult.| The Retired Adventurer
I picked up my first roleplaying game book in 1991, when I was eight years old. It was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness, which as an eight year-old, I thought was some sort of complicated Ninja Turtle comic / choose your own adventure (CYOA) novel crossover. My family was on what I think was March break in South Carolina, and I convinced my father to buy it for me (the main indulgence my parents gave me as a child was books). I was very surprised, upon reading it in detail, ...| The Retired Adventurer
I am planning to respond to the comments on the "Six Cultures" essay, but it's been a busy few months. I work for an organization that deals with international crises and you may have heard of a few going on lately. I have also recently been vaccinated and am trying to (safely) re-establish social connections with others and enjoy the great outdoors. I've also been doing (some) wedding planning since I am getting married next year. All of this has meant analysing why Reddit was mad or whateve...| The Retired Adventurer
In this post I am going to present the taxonomy of the six main play cultures as well as a few notes about their historical origins. I am doing this to help people from different play cultures both understand their own values better as well as to encourage stronger and more productive cross-cultural discussion.| The Retired Adventurer
I picked up Downcrawl and Skycrawl, both by Aaron A. Reed. My overall evaluation of both is quite positive, tho' I expected not to like them when I first ran across their descriptions. A key source that gave me enough information to decide to buy them was this extract of the core Downcrawl mechanics that Reed makes freely available. I suggest you go read it to make up your own mind.| The Retired Adventurer
I've been keeping myself busy in quarantine during 2021 by reading academic papers.| The Retired Adventurer
I was talking with Jojiro of Dungeon Antology yesterday about designing dungeons for 5e, and while doing that I used the terms "digestive cookies" and "Barbie clothes" and then had to explain them. I thought I might as well share them for others to use.| The Retired Adventurer
Five years ago, I wrote the original Trapplications post. After years of updating it based on use, it's time to present the more streamlined version I've adopted. This version is better for stocking and restocking dungeons, while also remaining usable in play as a "wandering trap" table.| The Retired Adventurer
My offline 3.5 campaign shifted online in April and then came to an end in late August with a TPK and will be rebooting as a 5e game sometime in 2021. I've been invited to the same group's alternate 5e campaign, and will be joining sometime in January 2021. | The Retired Adventurer
I haven't yet, but I'm going to experiment at some point with using 2d4 for hit locations in Mythras. It has seven results on a bell-curve, to match up with the seven hit locations of a character. I think you could use this to emphasise armouring certain parts of the body that are likely to be the target of strikes, without requiring a full suit of armour. | The Retired Adventurer
The Openquest 3rd Edition Kickstarter is in its last 40 hours. The PDF + POD coupon level is super cheap, at around 12.85 USD at current exchange rates. If you haven't tried Openquest before, I would suggest picking it up while you get the chance (I am not being paid or otherwise compensated for this post; I don't have an "affiliate link" or something to click on; I think I mainly bring grief rather than pleasure to the creator's life; I am doing this because I like the game and want to encou...| The Retired Adventurer
Sorry, for some reason my ability to comment on my own posts has been missing this past month and a half, possibly due to Blogger's new interface. I'm still sorting out the details.| The Retired Adventurer
A blog about roleplaying games and theory focused on Mythras, Dungeons and Dragons, and OSR games.| retiredadventurer.blogspot.com
A blog about roleplaying games and theory focused on Mythras, Dungeons and Dragons, and OSR games.| retiredadventurer.blogspot.com
A blog about roleplaying games and theory focused on Mythras, Dungeons and Dragons, and OSR games.| retiredadventurer.blogspot.com
A blog about roleplaying games and theory focused on Mythras, Dungeons and Dragons, and OSR games.| retiredadventurer.blogspot.com