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.
As you may or may not have gathered, I had a bit of a health scare.
They say a change is as good as a rest, but given that this was a hypertensive attack, rather than a mental health break, I’m not sure that holds true.
Anyway, I’m on a couple of weeks of bed rest and waiting on more tests at the hospital, which means I’m behind on my crowdfunding project, Wightchester, despite having made contingency plans for such an eventuality.
I had previously put out a call for assistance, but wasn’t exactly compis mentis due to meds and distress, and I thought it best to be specific about what I need help with in a place that people can see, rather than contacting people back individually.
My good friend T-Shirted Historian whom I do RPG discussion streams with has stepped up to help me with some rules appendices and some location descriptions.
Mail me grim@post-mort.com if you can help me out. I will compensate if I can, but it’s not going to be a lot of money as it hasn’t been budgeted for. Free product is another possibility.
House 7 (Open)
The door to this house lays on its back, inside the ground floor room. The wood is somewhat splintered, and the frame is split. The door was broken clean of its hinges, leaving a gaping maw in the front.
Parlour/Kitchen
The room is in total disarray. Looking down at the floor you see hundreds of footprints, layered one atop the other. Every piece of furniture in the room has been shattered to splinters and pushed against the outer walls, which are covered in filthy handprints. Even the stove, the only recognisible piece of furniture left, is dented – as though buffeted by some great force.
Encounters:
Bedroom
Like the floor below the bedroom is smashed to flinders and absolutely covered in footprints with thousands of black and brown handprints all over the walls. There is one difference though, a bloody patch in the middle of the room, scattered with broken fragments of bone and teeth, odd patches of hair and skin. A bloodied hatchet lays next to it, its haft broken.
I still, for life of me, don’t understand why Zak Smith has taken a dislike to me, it seems to be purely for political purposes, but these questionnaire things and ‘article a day’ things help keep me motivated and productive. So what the criminey-heck.
‘OSR’ stands for ‘Old School Renaissance’, it’s a back-to-basics approach to roleplaying with a focus on homebrew and just-above-homebrew implementations of rules which, mostly, stem from ‘Red Box D&D’ and other early editions.
The capability to create all these ‘forks’ from the old D&D rules in part stems from the peculiarity that you can’t copyright rules, and in part from the Open Game Licence that came along with 3rd edition.
‘OSR’ is less a specific set of rules, though, and more an attitude. ‘Old school’ in that regard is more of a punk rock, heavy metal, unreconstructed, undeconstructed, in your face ‘pulp’ attitude to the way you game, rather than what dice you roll.
D&D has no nostalgia factor for me. I didn’t start with D&D, I started with MERP, Dragon Warriors, Fighting Fantasy and other games that were far more popular in my little corner of England. I’m also neither entirely a narrative, nor a crunchy system fan. I like different things for different reasons, the right tool for the right job. Still, the OSR shouldn’t really appeal to me, and I don’t really play much in the way of old school games (Dragon Warriors stream notwithstanding). Still, this ‘Here’s three dice, now make a game’ attitude is appealing, as is the ‘fuck you if you don’t like it’ approach found in things like Carcosa and Lamentations of the Flame Princess.
1. One article or blog entry that exemplifies the best of the Old School Renaissance for me:
This old article from back when The Escapist had some balls provided me with a basic grounding in what was going on, back in the day. Still with a shufti via the ol’ Wayback Machine.
2. My favorite piece of OSR wisdom/advice/snark:
“I find myself with insufficient time and desire to write about games but I also have the sense that the ‘OSR’ scene this blog is devoted to has become a rather disgusting place where crass commercialization is strangling a formerly creative amateur community, and where destructive ‘alt-right’ views are becoming increasingly prevalent, even among some of the more significant publishers in the community.”
This from this blog.
I mean, it’s just so absurd a thing to say, but why this is my favourite thing is that it got virtually no currency within that community. It was rebuffed for its absurdity and ridiculousness without getting the same kind of traction it has in other RPG communities.
That’s one of the biggest and best selling points such a community can have to me.
3. Best OSR module/supplement:
I’m not a ‘supplements’ sort of guy, which is why I hardly ever purchase them and why I try to write into any adventures that I create some kind of added value (GM advice, random tables, that sort of thing). So this is a tough one, however I’d go with Vornheim. Predictable, I know, but it did demonstrate there were other ways to lay out, write, organise and use supplements that has – modestly – informed some changes I’ve been making.
4. My favorite house rule (by someone else):
Using tokens to reward player attention and roleplay moments, and to penalise player distractions, inattention and mood-breaking.
5. How I found out about the OSR:
I have no idea. It seemed to just sort of… arrive by osmosis.
6. My favorite OSR online resource/toy:
This medieval town/city generator.
7. Best place to talk to other OSR gamers:
8. Other places I might be found hanging out talking games:
9. My awesome, pithy OSR take nobody appreciates enough:
Vomit it out, then clean it up.
10. My favorite non-OSR RPG:
I hate these kinds of questions. Who can ever pick just one? Enjoying Iron Kingdoms, FATE, Eclipse Phase and the games I’m working on at the moment.
11. Why I like OSR stuff:
The punk aesthetic, the IDGAF community, the ‘try anything’ freedom that the narrative game community aspires to, but gets too hung up on politics and wokeness.
12. Two other cool OSR things you should know about that I haven’t named yet:
My Machinations of the Space Princess RPG.
My house-rule that you can try any combat move you like, but at a basic penalty of -5 (gives fighters something they REALLY excel at, swashbuckling).
13. If I could read but one other RPG blog but my own it would be:
14. A game thing I made that I like quite a lot is:
15. I’m currently running/playing:
The Iron Kingdoms RPG (the non-d20 one). Our heroes are a band of morally questionable mercenaries, working for a secret society of wives/widows of the powerful 
men of the city as their enforcers and investigators. It’s all ascending towards some sort of confrontation with the current, established powers that be.
16. I don’t care whether you use ascending or descending AC because:
So long as everyone at the table agrees, why the cock should it matter?
17. The OSRest picture I could post on short notice:
Is at the top of the page.
This is the last entry in this monthly challenge, so I’m not paywalling it. We’ve mapped out the basics of the world and have some idea of the rules. Eventually, I’ll get around to turning them into an actual book! As regards this question though… I think short of roughly mapping the world and – perhaps – ‘hex crawling’ a section of the world as a starting area, I’d like to leave things rather vague. Talk of distant nations and lands without anyone being truly, entirely, sure of what is out there. A less defined world leaves far more room for Games Masters to add their own material and leaves room free for supplements and definition as good ideas occur.
Some things will be defined of course, and those have already been covered, while the ‘bottom page text’ – as with Machinations of the Space Princess, will contain plenty of rumours and story seeds.
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I tend to have a few particular archetypes that I play most often. In the world that I have spelled out thus far I would play a rogue/thief type character who has come up from the slums in one of the fortress cities via sometimes grim and often criminal means. He would be a capable fighter, compensating for the relative lack of combat capability compared to a fighter by taking compensatory skills and specialising in particular weapons. He would mask a terror of falling back into poverty with bravado and a surface-level amoral and materialistic fixation. Beneath that he would be a good man forced to live in bad circumstances, but with sympathies for The Comity’s assault on the status quo.
He would not be above slitting a motherfucker’s throat in their sleep, but would also get drunk afterwards from the guilt.
He might look something like this…
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Nature in this world is extremely dangerous. Even without the mutations and strangeness incurred by the wars of the Philosopher Kings this is a world with megafauna, magical animals, plants and the same natural disasters, plagues, fires and issues that would occur in a low or no magic setting. Mother nature is, very much, a bitch. Nature is something to be tamed, exterminated and beaten into submission for most peoples in this world. It’s a hostile relationship with nature existing as a sort of amoral (rather than immoral), destructive force…
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Whatever my equivalent of halflings ends up being, these will be the most misunderstood race. There will be prejudice against them at all levels of society and in all ways. This will range from simple distrust and dislike to the degree of treating them as pests, in much the same way we would treat rats. While they’ll be known as thieves and pests to most other races, they will have a unique and interesting culture that explains and covers much of their behaviour, as it is seen by outsiders…
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For the most part particular seas and oceans are not fantastical per se, but rather locations within them are. Given some of my inspiration is going to be taken from pre-christian European mythology, wells, ponds and lakes are more likely to be individually magical and to be the dwelling places of fantastical creatures. Locations in seas or things that live within them may be fantastical, but as to magical bodies of water themselves? Not so much…
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In terms of things like The Underdark, no. I don’t think such things make particular sense in the world I have thus far described. Having a whole, separate underground world makes it become somewhat mundane and the unique and strange nature of such a place becomes diluted over time through familiarity. So rather than a single, connected, unified underground realm I think each underground location will be unique…
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I’m torn in two directions on this. On the one hand the absolute, black-and-white morality found in – for example – the D&D alignment system is something I find incredibly dull. On the other hand there is a demand from some quarters to a return to that simplicity and to examples of pure good and unremitting evil. I am not a fan of the idea that, say, orcs are all born evil, with no hope whatsoever of ever being anything else. This leads to things like Paladins slaughtering goblin babies in their cribs…
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