#TTRPG Wightchester Full Scale Map

The PDF version has a lower-resolution map, so for those who want it here’s the overall city map.

#TTRPG – Second Free Adventure for Mork Borg, OSR and Grimdark 5e

What do you know, I finished this early.

An introductory adventure for use with Wightchester, and it’s free.

With that, my obligations to my backers are discharged.

See you in the new year 🙂

Get it HERE.

#TTPRG – Free Adventure for Mork Borg, OSR and Grimdark 5e

An introduction to the themes and style of Wightchester, and it’s free.

A second free adventure will be coming in the new year.

LINKY-POOH

#TTRPG – Wightchester: Prison City of the Damned RELEASED!

Wightchester is a ‘city crawl’ adventure book for 5e D&D, Grimdark 5e, Mork Borg and OSR roleplaying games. Set in an alternative 17th century England where the dead have risen from the grave and one city, completely overrun, has been turned into a hellish prison for the dregs of the Kingdom’s society. Dark, bleak, challenging horror fantasy in a setting of almost unrivalled detail.

500 pages of an Early Modern walled city, packed with intrigue, mystery, horror and death.

DIGITAL DOWNLOAD

HARDCOPY

#RPG #TTRPG #WeirdHookMonth – Parasites

The Hook

Gulped down by a bakunawa, your ship ends up in its stomach only to find a community already waiting to cannibalise your ship and take your supplies. Nobody who has tried to escape has ever managed and you have other, natural, parasites to compete with. Ones that see you as prey.

Suggested Systems

BRP, Lamentations of the Flame Princess, Victoriana.

 

#AprilTTRPGmaker Feature a TTRPG designer

I admire, and am envious of, the success of James Raggi. His Lamentations of the Flame Princess is ‘just’ a D&D retro-clone, but he has made it phenomenally successful, purely on the basis of presentation, creativity, thematics, mood, marketing and investing in the art.

The fixation on a single game is also something I find amazing. I always flit from one idea and one game to another. To devote so much time and effort to a single game, and support for it, is an ‘outside context problem’.

Raggi also has the same ‘fuck you’ attitude to people who have issues with what he does, seemingly giving even less of a shit than I do that anyone’s offended or upset. He’s also unafraid to work with people who feel the same. The criticism at least seems to affect him less as well.

All of this, at least to me, is admirable. Even if I’ve never been a particular D&D fan.

#RPG Foul Humours for the OSR RELEASED! – Schlocktoberfest

BUY IT HERE

The OSR has become something of a home for the grotesque, the strange, the disgusting and the horrible. Whether that be the deadly oddities and horrors of Lamentations of the Flame Princess or the pecularities of Carcosa – not the mention the many other fringe products – there seems to be a home for the vile, unsettling and surreal.

Some of the things that cause the most visceral disgust and reaction in people are bodily fluids – spit, blood, urine and more. Slimes and oozes have always been a big part of fantasy gaming and combining these with the wilder, darker sides of magic and the compulsion to shock and disgust players who come under attack by these things can combine to create some potentially powerful monsters and dark spells.

Enjoy these ‘Foul Humours’, created from human excresence.

Rough as Toast
‘Rough as Toast’ is my imprint for ‘cheap and nasty’ products. Things that are a bit more experimental, silly or ‘hit and miss’ where a lot of money can’t be spent or risked on a bit of an ‘out there’ idea. If you see that marker, you know you’re getting something a little ‘whacky’ or uncertain, but you will probably get some fun out of it.

Schlocktoberfest
The Pulps were churned out at a massive rate of knots. Strange and silly ideas thrown at the wall to see what stuck. Occasionally some of those ideas turned out to have legs – legs that are still carrying them nearly a hundred years later. My intent with Schlocktoberfest (prevously just a sale some years back) is to just throw a bunch of monsters, ideas and other bits and pieces at the ‘wall’ and see what sticks. Maybe something will.

#RPG – Machinations of the Space Princess Companion – Skills

Image from Battle Angel Alita

The Machinations of the Space Princess skill system is deceptively simple and much of it compensates for the -5 penalty rule, encouraging character builds with signature moves and capabilities beyond ‘I hit it with my axe’. Other Skills provide pools, bonuses or extra capabilities unavailable elsewhere.

The existing Skills are fairly comprehensive, but there is room for some additions and new ideas, as well as a new category of skill, a specialised skill that can represent the particular capabilities of specialist training or cultural capabilities.

Example Psi Skill

Bio Control

You have honed your body to sustain itself on psionic energy more than anything else. For each level in this skill you use 20% less food, air and water each day. At level 5 you no longer need to eat, drink or breathe if you do not wish to. At level 6 you not only need no sustenance, but can sustain another person without food, air or water for a day with a touch and the expenditure of a psi point. You can also pass for dead by slowing your metabolism, a Skill Roll will make you appear deceased to examination, or even a scanner.

Example Combat Skill

Body Weapon

You have honed your body as a weapon, increasing your capacity for unarmed violence to extreme levels. This is usually the result of some very harsh training and effort by doing things like punching bags of hot sand and so on. Each level in the skill increases your unarmed damage amount.

1. 1D3
2. 1D4
3. 1D5
4. 1D6
5. 1D8
6. 1D8 & +1 Close Attack when unarmed.

Example Scholastic Skill

Better Living Through Chemistry

You have good knowledge of chemical cocktails, drugs, psychedelics and other chemicals and their effects on your own body and that of others. By careful, constant tailoring you’re able to put together (relatively) harmless cocktails of chemicals that can enhance people’s abilities. Maintaining the precise balance takes a lot of work and devotion, so you can only apply these bonuses up to your Skill Level and this must be decided at the start of each game session – continuing until there’s a reasonable in-game amount of time passed for you to tweak (pun intended) the dosages.

Skill Points can be spent in the following ways…

• 1/+1 Initiative.
• 1/+1 Social Reaction (pheromones and chill)
• 1/+1 to a Saving Throw
• 1/+4 Hit Points.
• 2/+1 to a Statistic
• 3/+1 to an Attack or Defence score.

Example General Skill

Schmoozer

You’re good with people. You know what to say, how to carry yourself and how to make a good impression and look your best. You add your level in Schmoozer to your Social Reaction score.

New – Specialist Skills

Specialist Skills are skills that originate within very particular cultures, training regimens and secret orders. As such there’s usually a price to training in these skills and they’re not normally available at character creation. If you’re designing your own campaign you need to decide how powerful you want these to be, where they originate and what the cost of entry to learning these skills is.

Compensating for this is the fact that specialist skills are generally twice as powerful as regular skills, making them much sought after. The first level in such a skill is gained when it is trained – in game – and doesn’t cost a Skill Point, after that it must be increased with Skill Points as normal.

Example Specialist Skill – Ki-Tian

Ki-Tian is a form of ‘gun fu’, the application of zen-like principles to firearms combat as an integrated martial art. Ki-Tian claims to have been developed during the mythical time of the human diaspora when the human species was butting up against galactic society and the need for defence with cheap and handy weapons was particularly pressing. The kata involved somehow tap into the background psi-field. At levels 1-5 Ki-Tian provides +1 per level to Ranged Attack and Ranged Defence so long as the practitioner is using a pistol. At level 6 the Ki-Tian kata channel latent psychic energy to power the pistols, meaning they no longer require ammunition.

 

#RPG – FLiCKPIG Released!

Buy it HERE

FLiCKPIG is an old school dungeon crawl, with pigs. There’s a randomly generated dungeon, some pregenerated characters and it should be played using OSR rules (preferable Lamentations of the Flame Princess).

It can be played as a boardgame if you’re lazy, as a full on RPG scenario of sorts if you’re feeling a bit more creative.

It’s rough as toast.

While I have your attention, please back the DarkZel Scholarship fund!

 

#RPG – Soon… Pigs.

With a nod to lost-lamented magazine, CLiNT and a middle finger to evangelical vegans.