Off the back of my post on encounter dice in the living dungeon, I wanted to expand the list of things the dungeon takes away from the party. After all, the dungeon has a 1:3 chance of taking something away every dungeon turn, and a 1:6 chance of taking away double. It’s worth thinking about what we are prepared to lose.
This table can be used when a 2-3 is rolled on the Encounter Die, but also any time you want something unfortunate to happen to the party.
Tell me moreI’m a fan of the ‘overloaded encounter die’ introduced by Necropraxis, fine-tuned into the beautiful, integrated Hazard System, and extended in other directions by Jones Smith, Meandering Banter, Ten Foot Polemic, and many others.
Every OSR rule is a homebrew of someone else’s homebrew, so here’s the encounter die tweaked to my own sensibilities. The D&D dungeon is not just another location, but a living thing, a liminal space slunk down between the rational aboveground world of fealty, farmland, and feudalism, and the inhuman, alien chaos of the worlds below and beyond. To descend into the dungeon is to brave darkness, madness, and fear; it is to bring order, reason, and fixity to the everchanging body of the dungeon-beast through map, ten-foot pole, torch and shining blade. Once mapped and described, each room numbered, each square studied for treasure and traps, the dungeon becomes just another waypoint in the violent march of civilisation through the hidden spaces of the world. It loses its mystery and its magic. So why shouldn’t it put up a fight?
Tell me moreWhen I was recently organising a mega-dungeon adventure for BECMI D&D, I was trying to come up with a simple way to think of the contentious subject of treasure.
My issue with treasure is mostly that in XP-for-coin systems like BECMI, B/X and their clones, it’s hard to reconcile a ‘simulationist’ perspective (as espoused by Gary Gygax and the wonderful Treasure by Courtney Campbell, which a lot of the generated items below are derived from) with a balanced perspective which makes players feel like they’re moving forward at an even keel in their adventures - the perspective closer to the XP-for-monsters setup of later D&D.
Tell me moreThe sages have many tales to tell of the Vorhvex, that vast and ancient magical forest marking Riverie’s south border. Once, it is said, people and the creatures of the woods lived in harmony amongst those dark and brooding trees. Roads ran the length of the forest, and a monastery to the forest god Yaqun sat somewhere deep in its groves. But those times are long past. Nobody who enters the forest now ever comes out. The sages whisper that the priests angered the forest in some way. Perhaps they stole something precious from its heart. Perhaps they interfered in some way in the endless war between the creatures of the forest and those evil denizens of the swamp. All they remember nowadays is the strange verse…
Tell me moreAn untested concept for adding a little bit of character specialisation during advancement for class-less games like Knave. When the players are levelling up, ask them:
“What one lesson has your character learned from this adventure?”
The answers might be along the lines of “turns out dragons can hear real good”, or “I must not run into the room without checking the ceiling first”, or “do not make the Dwarf Princess angry”. It’s good if the lessons come from a remembrance of a life-or-death situation, something dramatic and storied.
Tell me moreThis weekend I’m running a one-shot adventure for a group of friends, and in pursuit of a D&D-esque system which would get out of the way, but also give that feeling of weird glorious number-crunching corner-peeking treasure-hoisting spider-escaping potion-slurping joy I remember from my first games with D&D 3rd Edition in high school, I discovered Ben Milton’s perfect confection Knave. Milton seems to be a big name in the OSR community, to which I am only a newcomer. All I can say is that Knave, and Milton’s other game Maze Rats, just really hit that system sweet spot for me. I think it might be because Milton plays his games with high schoolers. They still feel electric, y’know?
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