#RPG – Grimdark – Characters

Art by Maxime Defoulny

So these rules are really me brainstorming how I would need to change the rules of D&D to better fit the ‘grimdark’ setting I am intending to crowdfund in the near future.

D&D is great for all sorts of games, but as a ‘general’ rules set doesn’t particularly excel at being anything other then D&D. Lamentations of the Flame Princess and other, hardcore ‘old school’ games hark back to the extreme peril of playing low-level characters in Gygaxian misery-dungeons, and often have a grind-house/grind-core heavy metal aesthetic, veering more towards horror than fantasy.

That’s great and all, but I want to do something with 5e, to appeal to people on a basis of more than nostalgia and to provide a familiar, but different, experience for people who are new to role-playing and have entered through the popularity of 5^th Edition.

There’s something of a fetish for super-difficult games in computing, from Darkest Dungeon, Salt and Bloodborne to the Infamous, Dark Souls. Tabletop games are different, you can’t learn or hone the skill of the game or learn the attack patterns of the monsters, character builds can be optimised, but that tends to diminish the role-play. Difficulty, then, has to come from the sense to play tactically, carefully, swing the advantage in your favour and to deal with difficult and horrifying roleplaying and decision making.

We need to take that, lustrous, heroic edge off 5^th Edition’s default rules-set to amp up the difficulty and make people play more carefully, but without turning it into a total meatgrinder.

Let’s talk about characters then…

Species

In the setting I am envisioning you would only be able to play humans. So far as the types go otherwise, there isn’t really anything much else that needs to be done. As a default the human traits – especially the variant ones – go a long way to helping compensate for bad rolls at character creation, mixing self-determination and the ‘hardcore’ nature of the ‘straight roll’ character generation – which I would foresee being the standard rules…

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#RPG – Postmortem Studios July Update

It is entirely too goddamn hot.

Way too hot.

It’s hotter than a round-bottomed girl in short-short that someone’s set fire to.

New meds and (finally) some financial assistance with my mental issues have made things a lot easier and less stressful here. You can’t honestly measure the positive effect a little better financial security can have. I’m back to being somewhat productive every day and that’s a start.

Of course, the aim is to use this boost to get to a point where I don’t need the help any longer, which means continuing to work hard and investing that little extra bit of financial security in the future.

Gor products will continue to come out – The Cave of Gold came out last month and Brad continues to churn out the stock art, I’m also in talks with Toby for more Tobyart and am still uploading donated and commissioned art for the Zelart Scholarship. Towards that ‘investment’ end though, I’m still going to be looking to commission new art specifically for stock art. If you want to be considered hit me up.

I’m also looking to partner with cosplayers, still, something I’ve wanted to try and do since… two-thousand-and-frigging-six. This whole idea is a somewhat crazy experiment, but if you’re a photogenic cosplayer/LARPer with an original character in the fantasy, horror, science fiction or post-apocalyptic genres let me know. This would be a smallish upfront payment and a 50/50 profit split plus promotion of social media, sites, photosets etc. Again, hit me up at the same link above if you have any interest.

Right now I’m working on the next Gor adventure, 05 Black Daggers, and the first book in the survival trilogy of games, The Green.

This month is Grimdark D&D month on the blog, teasers and portions of these articles will be available for free at postmortemstudios.wordpress.com and steemit.com/@grimjim while those who sub on Patreon for as little as a buck a month or at Minds.com for a token a month will get full access to these articles, which will be early brainstorming for a future crowdfunded project.

Patrons and Minds donors (Mentalists?) also get discounts on apparel from our Teespring store and from PDFs. So mosey on over there and give me your cash!

Also please, please, please sub to my Youtube channel and also Inappropriate Characters, the talk show I do with The RPGPundit and Venger Satanis.

Right, time to try and cool off and get some work done!

Zang!