Fantasy Heartbreak Workshop

On Reddit recently, user wittmitin described a plane of existence : It is the realm of the Shapeshifters and is made of an ever-shifting forest of mist and reflection. It is very easy to get lost inside. And requested details which would make the place an interesting experience. This seemed like a fun opportunity to brainstorm, and below is what I came up with.

Previously I suggested ideas for how to run a 5th Ed. D&D game with lower availability of spellcasting.  Weirdly however, even though the idea of trying to run low spellcasting games of 5th Edition holds some interest for me, I've sometimes been at a loss what sort of game I'd find that combination a useful fit for, or (if I was a player) attractive to play in. This post is a follow-up, brainstorming various settings which might make use of such a lower magic system.   In these settings humans (and maybe other creatures) might have access to a few spells, but spellcasting classes as such are not available. Spells are mostly cast either through artifacts or rituals except maybe a few cantrips. Hyborian Age The obvious default seems like it would be something Conan-esque. After all, that is part of the inspiration behind D&D. A world build on the crumbling ruins of older things, but now largely a land of decadent city-states and harsh lands in between. Legendary/...

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...

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...

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Starship Yesterday I finally got around to running a session of John Stater's Tales of the Space Princess for my wife, daughter (10) and son (8). Although my son lost interest about a third of the way through (sitting still was not going well), in other regards it was probably among the best games I'd ever run. My wife laughed probably the hardest I've heard in a quite awhile. Player characters had been generated months in advance.  They included: Chedna   a Human Psychic (Wife) Star Llama a Llamoid Alien Scoundrel (Daughter) Fire the Freeze or Freeze the Fire  a sentient,  chair-sized,  burning block of ice, also a Star Warrior (Son) The scenario itself was created as an afterthought to a pirate base raid adventure I'd written notes for earlier.  But after detailing how the pirate scenario would run, I realized it might be best to have an earlier scenario to establish some key setting details and ...

Inspired by Paul Schaefer's recent comments regarding am mashup of Ravenloft, Warhammer and Call of Cthulhu's Dreamlands. Setup:  The PCs are modern era human dreamers, relatively new to the Dreamlands, but acquainted with Dreamlands lore to some extent through outside sources.  It seems the Dreamlands of Earth have mutated since classical times (i.e. 1920s era Call of Cthulhu lore).  As it approaches time for the stars being right in the waking world, the Earth's Dreamlands have separated into loosely connected nightmare realms.  Each realm is given shape by the will of great old ones worshiped as Chaos Gods, or by powerful but decadent or delusional dreaming human sorcerers.  Life in these realms is nasty, brutish, short and typically a bit Dickensian. As their mortal bodies lie in comatose slumber in the waking world, Hypnos has taken an wry and inscrutable interest in the PCs, shaping the bodies of some into elf or dwarf or other less savory fare. For ...

The Lords of the Shash are monarchs and vassals of a bygone age, at once fae and undead.  They come from a hundred different cultures and the legends about them both abound and conflict.  They symbolize hubris, bravery against impossible odds, fatalism, war against fate, conflict with the natural order, failing of the natural order, the folly of excess, the vanity of worldly glory, the corrupting influence of faery, and a dozen other themes.  Some tellings have them once being human or of other ancient race, other stories claim the Shash merely ape the human form as do other fae. Sometimes they appear of noble bearing, but there is always some element of corruption or death about them.  This could be a wound that will not stop bleeding, a face pocked by active plague symptoms, maggots falling from clothing, arms and head bound as with burial cloth, colorless gray skin and raiment, listlessness and fatigue when encountering sites related to death and burial, partial...

The Autocrat is one of the six Powers That Be whose existence widely believed (including, among others the Queen of Ravens and the Machine at the Heart of the World ).  He is known to the well educated magicians of the realms as the individual who created the Secret Regulations of Desire. In ancient times there were magical formulas which could translate any specific whim of a magician into reality at any level.  These formulas are variously known as Entelechies of the Will , Arbitrary Thought Instantiations , or more commonly "Wish spells".  In the heyday of the Wish spell's use, it was employed so freely that it changed reality on both vast and subtle scales.  As a result any attempts to determine the true nature of eras prior to it's use, based on the evidence available, is exceedingly unreliable. At one point the re-writing of reality is thought to have gotten particularly intense as various mages competed to make their vision of the universe dominant. ...

As usual Jeff put up another post that stirred a disused corner of my imagination: Cave man days, through the lens of a D&D fork. This is something I used to give a lot of thought to back in the day.  GURPS Ice Age seemed like such a neat idea, but I didn't love the system and couldn't figure out what to do for adventures (Fighting wolves and tribes all the time?  Hunting a lot?).  Acquisition of non-subsistence stuff isn't typically a big part of the caveman way of life. One possibility would be tribesmen stumbling across Lovecraftian horrors, but I had doubts about losing player interest while trying to build a backdrop of normalcy before contrasting it with the first unnatural discovery. Another thought was contrasting current neolithic era with finds of lost pre-existing civilizations of human or inhuman origin.  It's an idea I like, and I think it could work well used appropriately. The Lithic setting wouldn't really work as a part of the same...

All things are possible. All things are known. Nothing is remembered. In the Biblioteca Mundi setting there are spells available, or at least working theories, on how to do anything . However that was during the height of the Great Library three millenia ago.  Since that time all the books have been checked out and none returned.  Or more accurately:  The library has been sacked hundreds of times and it's pieces are scattered among guilds, wealthy collectors, misanthropic magicians, and the tombs of dead kings and sorcerers. If you want to cast a spell you can hope the information is easily available locally (unlikely) , or spend fifty years researching it yourself (Yay! A life well spent.) , or go raid the dungeon where rumor has it that a treatise on similar effects was once stored.

The Dungeon Masters Guide for the 1st Edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons contained, among many other things, the now famous " Appendix N ".  This particular section of appendix contained material which had inspired and shaped Gygax imagination and AD&D. In a similar spirit writers since occasionally included an Appendix N or equivalent recommendations in their games.  And I figure I'd like to take a crack at this as well.  So the following is an "Appendix N" tailored to the feel of the Owl Light setting. Books and short stories Arthur C. Clarke - The Lion of Comarre Glen Cook - The Black Company series Lord Dunsany - The King of Elfland's Daughter , also short stories, in particular:  Idle Days on the Yann , How Nuth Would Have Practiced His Arts Upon the Gnoles . Barbara Hambly - The Sundog series M. John Harrison - The Pastel City (and other Viriconium stories) William Hope Hodgeson - The Night Land Robert E. Howard - The Cona...

Magic beans are an incursive fae plant.  Grown in the fae realms magic beans produce relatively normal looking plants given the terrain.  However, when planted in the mortal world they sprout into something completely different. Fae beings can not plant magic beans themselves in the mortal world, and most see no need to, but mortals can.  A mortal planting magic beans in the mortal world grows a magic bean stalk.  A magic bean stalk is a gigantic tangle of vines rising up to the sky where they pierce back into the realms of Faery. The seed pods grown by a magical beanstalk, are the size of small canoes, with seeds the size of chickens which are quite edible.  Unfortunately only a few are produced per vine, so they do not provide a very sufficient food source for more than a few individuals.  Also the seeds of a magical beanstalk are sterile and will not grow if planted. Magical beanstalks survive in the mortal realm for only a season before succumbing...

Since this is a place to collect and annotate the various projects I have in the works, and maybe give them some focus, now seems like a good time to actually outline what the cellars currently include. But first a little background as to where this stuff will be coming from: Old School D&D - I'd always liked the aesthetic of old school D&D related games,  for most of my life generally chalking it up to nostalgia and a love for low-brow fantasy art. Gamma World 4th Edition - (no, not Gamma World D&D 4th Ed., which is actually Gamma World's 7th Edition) is my favorite iteration of the post-apocalyptic genre, though several of the others have their moments (e.g. 7th Edition's two-background system). 3E - I liked a lot of things about how 3E and it's relatives cleaned up and standardized things.  Also my little freeloading communist* heart finds the open game movement a thing of joy. 4E - D&D 4th Edition may have a few interesting elements he...