Fantasy Heartbreak Workshop

Nate Treme's In the Light of a Ghost Star  tabletop RPG is about humans of the far future, whose ancestors fled to Mars during the Sun's red giant phase.  Now that the Sun has entered its white dwarf phase, they return to Earth to scavenge ancient items of interest among the weird things inhabiting the now dark planet. Since I've been thinking of running this game at some point, I was reading over it the other day and realized two things which seemed to be lacking, so created a supplement of optional rules to cover them: Social Stat The game grants three character abilities which are couched as professions but treated as attributes or similar stats: Fighter - For combat and most other physical feats. Explorer - Mainly for sneaking and perception. Scientist - Most other forms of analysis, knowledge and technical expertise. These seem a fairly elegant combination for each character to have, but the definition was extremely brief in the original documents, and didn't co...

Been listening to a bunch of Librevox podcasts of Murray Leinster 's (William Fitzgerald's) work. The tone varies quite a bit among his works, but the stories often seem to follow the trope of speculating male protagonist inventively resolving problems to the delight and frustration of love interest and/or fellows. The Forgotten Planet is no exception. It takes place on a planet incompletely terraformed due to administrative error, where the highest form of life is amphibian, and giant fungi and arthropods dominate much of the wetter lowlands beneath a constantly overcast sky. Events of the story take place 40 generations after a ship crash lands on the world, a time at which the survivors' descents have been reduced to a pre-stone age existence with almost no social structure by the brutal nature of survival among terrifying giant insects and spiders. The plot involves the protagonist and his loosely knit band managing to improve their lot in life during a surprisingly...

The Astral Navigator's Handbook is my completed entry for the HexDrive Zine Jam . The HexDrive Zine is something being put together by Micah Anderson & Anxiety Wizard. As they  described it : [HexDrive is] about the greatness of spelljammer, and how none of us have read spelljammer ... do not read spelljammer! (if you have, forget everything!) I'd never gotten involved with these kinds of game jams in the past, but this concept meshed perfectly with some ideas I'd been thinking about for years now, so it seemed like the prefect excuse to get things down in print.  Possibly this is the fastest I've ever written a game supplement from scratch, managing to crank the thing out in two about weeks start to finish. The Astral Navigator's Handbook is a largely systemless CC-BY licensed supplement intended for use with your preferred fantasy role-playing game.  But unlike Spelljammer, it could be shoehorned into a game of slightly more sci-fi style space opera...

My daughter (11) and I, both fairly inexperienced with wargames, decided to try and run a session using One Page Rules Age of Fantasy: Skirmish .  As if to reenact the game's cover art, we opted to run humans (her) vs. ratfolk (me). The two sides contested among the ruins, each seeking to lay claim to pieces of the lost Dwarven gubbins-technology. I spent the week 3D printing a vast number of tokens (only a few of which ever got used) and a few pieces of terrain pieces (all of which saw play). Unfortunately, despite my hours of printing, the table was still a little sparse on terrain. So we added a bunch of clay pieces from kids early art projects and a couple other random items crowding our bookshelves. Member of a ratfolk patrol manages to remain upright as comrades stumble around apparently falling-down drunk. Presumably the commander should've provided better basing for the troops. We ran just the basic game, still learning the rules, but had a blas...

Originally written in response to: Can a PC be a Lich in D&D 5E? An actual lich would be pretty powerful for a typical player character to be at lower levels. So, probably successfully becoming a lich would make one an NPC in most games.  Instead I suggest a compromise for those wanting to play a walking skeleton: The Hedge Lich Sometimes wizards try to become a lich when they just aren't well studied enough to pull off the appropriate ritual. Other times a mage creates a ritual attempting to resurrect someone, a gift which only divine power can truly provide. Often the result is simply failure, but occasionally the caster creates a lesser form of free willed undead sometimes referred to as a "Hedge Lich". The flesh of a hedge lich gradually rots away leaving only an animated skeleton. A hedge lich has the same ability scores they had in life as well as any classes, skills or proficiencies. However, they lose any racial abilities except those which are inna...

Someone on Quora asked: How would you make a goodly aligned necromancer in Dungeons and Dragons? This garnered responses from a lot of folks . Options that came to my mind included: The Good Doctor - A humanist medical researcher who feels that it is not ideal to trust gods and magical patrons for healing and support, since they may have motives not aligned with those of individual mortals. Only a reasoned approach to magic can be trusted. Unfortunately academic understanding of magical healing and revivification is still in its infancy, but research continues! A Gray Gift - A necromantic prodigy. You didn't ask for this talent, but you can just perfectly envision how the entropic and animating forces intertwine within flesh. Sometimes you wonder how something so easy is so difficult for most folks to understand. Others view your abilities as ghoulish and unpleasant. But the gods can't have given you this understanding in vain, surely there must 11be some way you ...

Anne's been running us through some pretty great sessions using Arnold K.'s GLOG rules and Skerples Many Rats on Sticks variant.  And I'm really digging both the lightness of the system and the magic rules. But as much fun as it is, I can never leave well enough alone. For one thing, no matter how much I love the old school DIY  just cobble it together and make it work nature of games like this, I'll always miss the newer roll-high type systems.  So this, and a bunch of other little fussy preferences, are what gave rise to SKROP : the Standard Kobald Rules of Play . SKROP v1  - PDF | DOCX 12/9/2021 - Edited to note: A newer version of this document edited, significantly expanded and altered, should be out in the next few months.  The name is being changed to simply "KROP" (Kobold Rules of Play).

Shanna Germain's  link to the short movie STRAND, recently got my interest in Numenera fired up again. Which led to a discussion of the game with Anne & Josh . In the course of conversation it came up that, while interest was expressed in the world and setting, certain things about the Cypher system hadn't set right with some of us.  In the subsequent days, this led me review my own laundry list of issues with what, at first glance, seems like an elegant system, but on closer inspection seems a bit kludgy. This in turn started the brainstorm as to how to fix things. Or at least patch them up while still making them compatible with published materials I enjoy: Fewer Dice and Calculations - Dice rolling seems needlessly complicated (adjust difficulty with multiple factors, multiply result, then roll against?  I tried to fix this once in the old CY6HER post awhile back and took a page from that.  The d20 is removed and uses just a d6 for all rolls i...

Armor of Agathys is a D&D 5th Edition spell. One of the few that is not open game licensed (OGL) under the system reference document (SRD).  This image is a rendering of what passes through my mind every time I read the spell name.  Agnathans include lampreys and hagfish. Also now my profile pic.

This was originally in response to the question: What are some villainous factions for a D&D campaign? Below you'll find just a bunch of well meaning folks who believe they're on the right side of history. The Trans-Planar Liberation Front (a.k.a. “The Egg Breakers”) Slogan: Crack the shell and let all fly free! The Trans-Planar Liberation Front has one goal: Break down the barriers which separate the prime material plane from all the others and set all those who live here free to wander among the planes as they will. They view the mortal realms as a prison, or at best a creche where overprotective parents have kept their children cooped up too long. This isn’t how souls of sapient creatures were meant to live! Surely everyone longs for the wild lands beyond this existence. If this was a personal goal of the members, things might be fine. But the TPLF view all mortals inhabiting the material plane as prisoners, even if they don’t realize it yet. So members s...

In response to the post: Can you selectively dust of disappearance just an individual? Could you ingest it or slip it into a drink for the invisibility effect? DCs given assume D&D 5th Edition DC. - --- - If the rules don't specifically allow it, I'm guessing that by default it probably isn't intended to work if used in ways other than described. Otherwise it would probably be an ointment or potion. But if players get creative why not allow something to work with side effects and caveats? When snorting or ingesting Dust of Disappearance, roll 1d12 or choose: You snort a line of dust of disappearance. Works. Perfect! But now, each round, make a Constitution save, DC 15. On a failed roll you sneeze, coating the opponent in dust and making them invisible. Lasts the usual dust duration. You're blind! A friend reads the small print: Not meant to be taken internally. May cause retinal transparency lasting up to 16 minutes. You itch like crazy. Allergic re...

Someone on Quora had asked  How would you stat a wendigo in D&D 5e? And I kept thinking there were already stats for a Wendigo, or something like it. But digging through, the Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition official sources, I couldn't readily find them. So, with minimal research and a little brainstorming, came up the ideas below. Wikipedia  says of wendigos: The wendigo is described as a monster with some characteristics of a human or as a spirit who has possessed a human being and made them become monstrous. Its influence is said to invoke acts of murder, insatiable greed, cannibalism and the cultural taboos against such behaviors. ... Basil H. Johnston, an Ojibwe teacher and scholar from Ontario, gives a description of a wendigo: The Wendigo was gaunt to the point of emaciation, its desiccated skin pulled tightly over its bones. With its bones pushing out against its skin, its complexion the ash-gray of death, and its eyes pushed back deep into their sockets,...