Fantasy Heartbreak Workshop

This is inspired by, if not probably the most direct response to, Catty Big's inquiry regarding a 5th edition review.  It's also heavily rambling, so hold on to your hats. My tastes in D&D and it's ilk are pretty eclectic.  As with music I rarely like all of one thing, but tend to find certain things I really like in most products.  Below are general impressions of several editions and related products.  Keep in mind these are all subjective feelings and not deep analyses.  Your mileage may vary. Caveat:  Sometimes I like to build for lots of damage or one thing or another. But usually I'm not too fussy about balance, as long as I feel my character's abilities haves something interesting to contribute both inside and outside of combat. Swords & Wizardry (0th edition retroclone) Advantages:  Small and pretty straightforward.  Pared down and easy to tinker with. Disadvantages:  Some bits still feel a bit cobbled together an...

Today for your reading pleasure, a brilliant and delicious excerpt dredged from the corners of the internet: ---- >> Anonymous 06/02/12(Sat)06:24 No. 19334013 Anonymous No. 19334013 06/02/12(Sat)06:24 No. 19334013 Once, we had an elf who fucked one human, once, and developed this psychotic obsession with bringing him back to life after he died. She sort of faded into the background after a while, we forgot about her, but two campaigns later her research started popping up, and this escalated until it turned out that she was basically getting ready to harvest all life on Earth to try and bring her pet goldfish back to life. By the end of it were were up to our balls in hideous soul-stealing goblin mutants that ate souls and vomited them back up as pearl catalysts for some ancient resurrection ritual. Five fucking campaigns of fighting this insane elf, motivated by love and heartbreak to destroy the world and overthrow the will of the gods to bring her husba...

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 ...

Having run and played in a weekly 4th Edition game for about nine months at this point, I feel like I've got a basic sense of the system at this point, at least over the first few levels.  And while play isn't abysmally awful, I have had issues with a few aspects, mainly revolving around the omnipresence and tedium of combat. However, other folks in the local group seem to enjoy the system well enough.  And 4E does have some interesting settings and material I would appreciate the opportunity to mine (Gamma World & Dark Sun in particular). So, with that in mind I've come up with a few, five, patches I'm hoping to try out in the foreseeable future, once the current adventure path wraps up.  These are each intended to deal with specific issues, hopefully revamping them with an "old school" sensibility, but without gutting the system entirely. 1)  Combats take forever.  Characters will almost certainly win against all but the most extreme opponents, bu...

At the request of one of my players, a new PC race for Wyrms & Warrens: Centaur Ability Score Modifiers: CON +1, WIS -1 Experience Cost: 2 times the standard XP to advance each level. The typical centaur appears human through the waist and upper body, springing from the shoulders and lower body of a horse, though zebra, goat and cervid morphology is not unheard of. A centaur can move as fast as a horse and carry as much weight, though when undertaking actions with the human portion of their bodies they gain no special strength advantage. They also gain one of the following abilities: Paragon – Like Chiron, these centaurs are among the best of their kind, superior even to most humans in their grasp of the arts and sciences. Centaur Paragons lack the WIS -1 penalty and instead gain an INT +1 or WIS +1 bonus. Charger – Having seen many scuffle, centaurs of this sort have become superior in combat, able to wield a melee attack per round with their front hooves...

Reading through the first couple chapters of the Monte Cook's Cypher System, and it is pretty neat.  The only thing that seems a bit odd to me is the requirement to multiply a Difficulty rating (1-10) to a Target Number rating (Difficulty x3) which is actually rolled against.  This seems especially odd in the case of expending effort, where you spend several points to lower the difficulty, which in turn lowers the Target Number, which you then roll against. Also while reading, the three pool system brought to mind Michael Wolf's wonderful WYRM System .  This in turn led to wondering: Why not just roll a d6 for Cypher and cut out the x3 Difficulty conversion? Looking into this, there's little trouble so far in switching from d20 to a d6 system. Maybe as I read Cypher further there'll be a later section where the need to multiply by x3 will be better justified.  But in the meantime, the conversion seems pretty straightforward: Basic roll Th...

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...