Wednesday, November 10, 2021

Greatest Hits


I want to dump into this entry some nice things that I have found on the interwebs along the years. I intend to edit it periodically, as I stumble with shit, old and new. Everything you see here is something I want to have in handy, or has inspired me greatly. 

Lets get organized:

/////Hard theory:

Breaking Out of Scientific Magic Systems (John H. Kim)

Philotomy's Musings (Philotomy)

Reckless Dweomer: Non-competitive classes, and why balance is a false guide

Soft D&D by False machine

Blorb Principles: I want to highlight the 3 Tiers Of Truth and the Wallpaper Salience 

The Power of Bluntness: on binary Y/N rules, and an axis of complexity/ubiquity

/////Combat: 

Auto-Hits and Explaining D6 Damage (BX Blackrazor), both of them have sent me on uncountable hours of tormentous thought

Homebrew Homunculus posts on removing on damage rolls and rolled hit points.

Alex Schroeder series on map-less battle: Combat using 2 rows per side, no battlemap, theater of the mind, the blocking attacks rule and the 2 handed sword whirlwind.

Bastionland on combat that rolls ONLY initiative

Traverse Fantasy's calculations of Variable Damage versus Damage Reduction armor, very useful for any of those wanting to hack Into The Odd or similar games.

Combat progression as hit dice in OD&D

Hard ranged combat: -10 at medium range and -20 at far range, on Delta's D&D Hotspot

Hit Dice for monster parts, but monsters have an amount of combined HD at which they are defeated

/////Domain & Downtime:

 The quieter moments. "The intent is to hint at a wider and older world"

Dealing with the council 

Great list of options for your haven turn, with a fun table for crafting.

/////Magic:

Middle earth magic

The great mage nerf: 1 spell recovery per day

How to Find Familiars in OD&D, a random table to roll them and a spell to release them

/////Skills:

Methods & Madness: Target 18 for a correspondence from X in 6 Skills to a target 18 table

Correspondence between advantage and flat modifiers, a chart

Daimon games compilation 1 and compilation 2 of skill-related articles

90&30kingdoms on eliminating ability checks

Dice pool skill checks (xd6 under ability score)

The secret list of skills hidden in B/X

/////Classes:

Coins and Scrolls: OSR: Class: Knights

/////Tables/generators/aids:

A Character Background and Swag Generator for the Weird Dark Ages (gamepieces)

Random encounters for a night at the Inn, that also works for crowds. There is also another for city travel and another for rural areas (Chaudron Chromatique)

Bastionland on a way to create Planets or Hexes quickly or even Boroughs

/////Travel:

Pathcrawls

Preparing a Hexcrawl by Vile Cult of Shapes

Roll to move, by Alone in the Labyrinth 

Dividing terrain types into three: Impassable, hard and easy, with or without path. 

Landmark, hidden and secret

Dayagons, Hexcrawl Procedure and Solipsistic Hexes are about 1 hex = 1 day of travel

/////XP and advancement:

Dreamingdragonslayer on Diegetic Advancement Triggers and Diegetic genre emulation

Delta's apology of OD&D's XP for monster kill

/////Settings/scenarios:

The Pernicious Albion entries (Gloomtrain/Hexculture)

Elven Firefighters campaign (Evlyn Moreau)

NWO aliens (Foreign Planets)

Grues and Grue coins

Hopefishers (tabletop curiosity cabinet) It is intended to be a background class but its a whole village with customs, background and magic items.

Playing cute (hexculture/gloomtrain), interesting ideas about PCs improving their homebase while adventuring.

Usurped Kingdom Setup for any sandbox. Also there are versions of Thief Power Struggle, War or City Conspiracy which in the end are very similar lol. See also this procedure to make NPCS give missions (Evlyn Moreau)

The city of a thousand bath houses (lots of Ranma vibes here) also by Evlyn Moreau

/////About horses:

How to swim horses and cattle across a river

PDF on horsebreeds

Some ideas on dog and horse quirks

/////The adventure:

Descriptive tracks by type of monster

Using the quieter moments to make the world feel large and old.

/////Rulesets/big houserulings:

2d6 fantasy game (Necropraxis)

JRPG basic (Necropraxis)

Swiss Style Referee (Alex Schröeder) "Every settlement has two or three interesting, named people. These are the people of authority the characters are likely to talk to. Every settlement should have a building or two where you can find said named people, and an inn, or an explanation for the missing inn. Don’t bother with a map for the settlement"

Simple Tabletop Skirmish 2d6 rules (What a Horrible Night to Have a Curse)

Searchers of the Unknown collection (Nicolas Dessaux & various authors)

Searchers of the Unknown Omnibus (DM Wilson's take on the above)

Tiny Goons (Evlyn Moreau)

Emp Dyn RPG | The Lizard Man Diaries. I'm particularly interested on its view making all attributes and skills "example attributes" and "example skills". What if all skills, stats, equipment, etc on an rpg book were just examples? and you could add more of them as soon as you needed them? In which direction would attribute lists evolve?

Goblins y Grutas (Esteban Juan Garcia de la Cruz) a really old school spanish game. Great musings about how rules light games worked better on the design notes, greatly ahead of their time.

Thieves can too, Motherfucker! (Johnstone Metzger)

World of dungeons (John Harper) and its resources tome. Also this megapost on Roll to Doubt's houserules.

Dark Ages and Freeboting Venus part 1 and part 2 (Vincent Baker). Both are unfinished playtest versions but have interestingly unique visions on some things, IMO succeeding to create two oddly specific worlds and moods, at least on the reader.

How to be an adventurer (WWCD)


This list is meant to be a personal collection, but feel free to anchor down in the comments any OSR/RPG links you want to keep 

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