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...

Wyrms & Warrens is the primary fantasy heartbreaker I've been working on for awhile now, based largely on the Swords & Wizardry SRD with significant modifications. I've broken it into a Player's Handbook (PHB) and a Warren Keeper's Guide (WKG).  Altough the WKG is still in its infancy, the PHB is more ore less complete and available for download at the links below. This project is a labor of love, available for free to all for use, modification and critique. Player's Handbook v0.451 ( pdf ) ( odt ) - 8/14/16 Player's Handbook v0.41 ( pdf ) ( odt ) Player's Handbook v0.4 ( pdf ) ( odt ) Player's Handbook v0.3 ( pdf ) ( odt ) Player's Handbook v0.2 ( pdf ) ( odt ) Player's Handbook v0.1 ( pdf ) ( odt ) 8/14/16 - Edit:  Table of Contents fixes, typos, formatting, etc. 8/13/16 - Edit:  Major changes to magic systems. Addition of illustrations, etc. 8/10/15 - Edit:  Updated Hurl power to include information about small anim...

Interested in a simplified psychic rules for early edition D&D? Based on the Swords & Wizardry rules, and drawing inspiration from Microlite20 magic system, it may not be the Complete Psionics Handbook , but its the: Partial Psionics Pamphlet This has actually been created for awhile, but never got around to posting it up before. For completists, an older and simply more poorly edited version can be found here .

I've always liked psionics in my D&D, both as an innate set of traits, and as a trained or ascetic practice.  But one of Telecanter's blog posts, which helped highlight these differences got me thinking about how odd it is that a character whose claim to fame is self reliance, would be marauding through a dungeon looking for wealth and power. I posed this question in the comments, and in  Telecanter's response , he mentioned a similarity between kung fu narratives and westerns.  This led to a roundabout epiphany on my part. In my mind westerns will now always be associated with this weird little niche of geekdom: The Dark Tower - With it's knightly gunslighters. Knights of Cydonia - Which crosses the kung fu and western genres. 21 Guns - Which crosses the Dark Tower with Knights of Cydonia. The Dark Tower in particular suggests a foil to the gunslinger:  the failed gunslinger. Gunslingers who fail their Test are forced to turn in their g...