Against The Wicked City: Old-School Space vs. New-School Time
I have got to stop reading Pathfinder adventures. The clue's in the name, I guess: the job of the adventures (and the adventurers) is to f...| udan-adan.blogspot.com
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. - Samuel Beckett Learning to run an RPG, like most things, is mostly...| udan-adan.blogspot.com
When I finished my Team Tsathogga campaign back in 2019, one of the things that I noted afterwards was the extent to which fighters had struggled to keep up with magic users as the game progressed into the higher levels. At the time, I wrote:| Against The Wicked City
I recently read a book called Mummies, Cannibals, and Vampires, by Richard Sugg. Despite its title, it's not about monsters. Instead, it's a history of what Sugg calls 'corpse medicine' - the early modern practise of using bits of dead people in attempts to cure the living. Sugg can be a bit credulous in places, but he does a good job of establishing that human blood, fat, and bone saw fairly widespread use in both European folk remedies and 'academic' medicine during the period, giving rise...| Against The Wicked City
One of the players in my City of Spires campaign recently commissioned a collection of character art for the party from Autumal Bloomer, of Tabletop Character Art. I thought they were absolutely adorable, and so - with the permission of both the original artist and the commissioner - I'm reposting them here. If you'd like images of your own D&D characters in a similar style then do give Autumnal's Etsy shop a look!| Against The Wicked City
Severed Fane asked for a 'small campaign bible' for my current campaign, City of Spires, which shares a setting with my previous Team Tsathogga campaign. This campaign world started as a kitchen-sink-y science fantasy setting, suitable for running short, casual games over beer with players new to D&D. To my utter astonishment, I'm still running games set in the same world six years later, and it has now accumulated a staggering level of background lore. | Against The Wicked City
Second in a series of three 1d10 encounter tables, one for each of the three biomes that my PCs have been most active in recently. This post covers the uplands. Feel free to roll on them next time you need to stock a random hex!| Against The Wicked City
Fourth and possibly last in this series, depending on whether I can muster the energy to do posts on any of Kabuki, Dawn, Aphrodite IX, or Fallen Angel. This one's just on gender, as Witchblade had little interest in race beyond the usual 1990s surfeit of honour-obsessed Yakuza assassins. Previous posts on Shi, Warrior Nun, and Ghost here, here, and here.| Against The Wicked City
A year ago I posted tables of 72 encounters from the City of Spires, as a convenient means of recycling material from my ongoing campaign into something that other people might find gameable. As the game is still going on (and now approaching the two-and-a-half year mark, or five and a half if it's considered as an extension of the previous Team Tsathogga campaign set in the same world), I thought it was probably time for an update.| Against The Wicked City
Malcolm Svensson asked for more of these, so blame him for this. Previous posts on Shi and Warrior Nun Areala here and here.| Against The Wicked City
First up, a brief announcement: the kickstarter for Knock! issue three has now gone live, packed with material from the old-school blogosphere's finest. It will also have a couple of my articles in it, so if you've ever wanted to own a physical copy of my d100 problem-solving items table but couldn't be bothered to print it out yourself then this is your chance.| Against The Wicked City
[Advance warning: this post will probably be of interest to no-one but myself and a handful of pop culture historians.]| Against The Wicked City
In yesterday's game, one PC was rescued from captivity by the party, but not before undergoing some pretty severe torture. This presented me with a bit of a quandary: having him simply bounce back from such an ordeal after a couple of Cure Light Wounds spells felt wrong, but at the same time I didn't want the consequences to feel like a punishment. (The problem with most 'lasting injury' rules is that they make you weaker as a consequence for failure, which makes you more likely to fail again...| Against The Wicked City
More monsters that my players have run into during my current City of Spires campaign. These ones lean further into science fantasy, as one of the key conceits of the campaign is that it's a fantasy setting built on top of the ruins of an SF setting. The deeper you dig the more likely you are to start running into all the malfunctioning cyborgs and radiation zombies left over from previous ages of the world. | Against The Wicked City
Who here remembers Shi?| Against The Wicked City
You know what makes for good drama? Unequal power relations!| Against The Wicked City
A few monsters who have turned up in my current campaign. I think my PCs have figured all these guys out well enough for me to safely list them here.| Against The Wicked City
I've been running OSR D&D more-or-less weekly for over five years, now, with a heavy focus on exploration, problem-solving, and diplomacy. Combat happens, but I learned early on that the kind of combat power-ups that most later D&D editions obsess over were almost irrelevant: when most fights are either one-sided ambushes or desperate fighting retreats, the shift from 1d8 damage to 1d8+2 damage is really not that big a deal. My players regularly forget which magical weapons their PCs are carr...| Against The Wicked City
I've always thought that Aeolus's bag of wind from The Odyssey would be a great item for a D&D campaign. It's a bag with a wind inside it: point it in the right direction and open it to blow your ship across the sea, or knock your opponents down, or blow out a fire, or whatever. The effect is powerful enough to be useful, but specific enough to force players to think about how to turn it to their advantage, and the fact that it's a one-use item means you don't need to worry about the PCs sudd...| Against The Wicked City
There's a legend about the Battle of Brunanburh, at which King Aethelstan confronted the allied kings of Scotland, Dublin, and Strathclyde in 937 AD. Before the battle, one of Aethelstan's soldiers was lying sick: he happened to be a Devonshire man, so in his sickness he prayed to his local saint, the martyr St Nectan, to heal him. That night he had a vision of St Nectan, and in the morning the sickness was gone and he was well enough to fight.| Against The Wicked City
I've written before about the dangers of simply doubling down on the same ideas ad infinitum, leading to extremely one-note characters, settings, and situations: barbarians primarily characterised by their barbaric barbarism, rogues notable for their roguish roguery, and so on. Not only does this tend to make scenarios more boring on a conceptual level, it often also leads to less satisfying actual play. If the Pyromantic Fire Coven of the Burning Flame Witch are totally all in on fire magi...| Against The Wicked City
My department has been interviewing for new academic posts this week - and as I contemplated the mountain of incoming job applications, the vast majority of them inevitably doomed to failure, I found myself thinking about D&D wizards. Becoming a D&D magic-user clearly requires a specialised education, and yet many of these highly-educated wizards end up as expendable dungeon-crawling adventurers. This suggests to me that D&D wizarding, like modern academia, is probably a profession in which s...| Against The Wicked City
This post is about a situation that arose in a recent session. One of my players suggested that I post it, and I thought it might be of interest as a case study of in-game problem-solving.| Against The Wicked City
Part 10 in an irregular series where I take bloated Pathfinder adventure paths and try to prune them into something more useful. Previous Condensation in Action posts can be found here:| Against The Wicked City
I've long since lost count of the exact number, but I'm pretty sure that my current 'City of Spires' campaign has now run for almost as many sessions as the 'Team Tsathogga' campaign that preceded it. This has prompted me to think a bit about the different shapes that the two campaigns have taken. 'Team Tsathogga' was, from beginning to end, an extremely freewheeling, even anarchic campaign, with the PCs roaming randomly around the map getting involved in whatever seemed most interesting at t...| Against The Wicked City
Who knoweth not of Paladin Girl?| Against The Wicked City
Romantic clockpunk fantasy gaming in a vaguely Central Asian setting. May feature killer robots.| udan-adan.blogspot.com
I have got to stop reading Pathfinder adventures. The clue's in the name, I guess: the job of the adventures (and the adventurers) is to f...| udan-adan.blogspot.com
Who knoweth not of Paladin Girl? M:tG card art for Knight Exemplar, by Jason Chan (2011). Exemplary in more ways than one! Paladin Girl has...| udan-adan.blogspot.com
I've been running OSR D&D more-or-less weekly for over five years, now, with a heavy focus on exploration, problem-solving, and diplomacy. C...| udan-adan.blogspot.com
