Spineless Grimoire

  There is a little project I've been working on for a few weeks now, a zine/system (that I might call dragon dust) focusing on the dragon belt, a set of floating islands forming a giant staircase to the moon. The setting is inspired partly by the wild west, and partly by Morrowind (I won't explain how in this post). The aesthetic is also influenced by late 90, early 00 anime and mangas, more specifically Cowboy Bebop, Trigun and Et Cetera.  The dragon belt is a lawless place filled with charismatic wayfarers, sketchy bandits, forgotten tombs, mysterious mines and ghost towns. I had the opportunity to run a few games with it, using my troll's bridge poker system  (keep in mind that this version is already quite outdated, but will give you an idea of the rules used). These sessions helped me refine the system, get a good feel of the place, and the last game was especially fun. Here is how it went : Roy the wandering seer,  Allan wizard extraordinaire, Salay the lying ...

Recently decided to scroll through some OSR discord prompts and found one that caught my attention "Hub growth rules and random tables for downtime and between adventures. E.g. carousing, rumor procedures, upgrading the smithy/apothecary/library grants better armor/potions/scrolls, etc" First thing it made me think about was, of course, darkest dungeon, and its hamlet, slowly expanding between adventures. That's great, locations are character and they deserve to evolve (there will be a post about the mythic underworld someday, I promise). To simulate that, I tried to come up with event tables that will affect the hub, its inhabitants and resources. This exercise was interesting, the following tables need testing and a few more tweaks, but hopefully, they provide an interesting starting point. The hub must have a few services defined, their price should be above the one listed by approximately 15%, for each service, note the increment in price, as it will fluctuate. Each d...

Lately I've been rummaging through my gamebooks, I have a lot of fondness for Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson's fighting fantasy books (despite the linearity of some of the titles) and city of thieves was actually the first time I experienced the thrill of adventuring in a fantasy city with a character of my own (yes, even before my first game of dnd). Today though, we are talking about crypt of the vampire, a gamebook by Dave Morris and not part of the FF line. The book is relatively simple, some of the typical FF mechanic are missing (no luck, fixed chance to hit monsters) but the feel is still close, and the adventure has the benefit of offering multiple (and viable) paths. While mapping the crypts, I noticed that despite the linearity of the adventure, the dungeon in itself could maybe be lifted out of the book : Encounters : 1-2 : 1d6  skeletons ,   3-5 : 1d3 enthralled fighters  (level1), 6 :  Tenebron  (Vampire, will only fight for 1 round before retrea...

Cards are cool and fun, and they offer a lot of texture to randomization, a card has a symbol, a value, if you use tarot deck you even have the major arcanas that can add a layer of interpretation. So why not try to use them to generate a dungeon on the fly. Here is a small method I designed a while ago, it is not perfect and may require more playtesting, but it was fun to toy around the idea. For this generator, I will be using a standard 52 card deck but treat the kings, queen and jacks as trump cards using the following list (you could also use a tarot): Jack of ♣ - The trickster : Something/someone is not as it seems Jack of ♥ - The chalice : Something fallen from grace, not used at his full potential Jack of ♦ - The beacon : Something noticeable, a figure of hope Jack of ♠ - The traveler : A new lead, potential, possibility for a new beginning Queen of ♣ - Thread of fate : Something already known or encountered Queen of ♥ - Temptation : Something that evokes dread or desire Queen ...