Dead Letters Podcast Launch

I've been a part of Dead Letters, a NYC-based TTRPG collective, for the last few years. We've got a massive weird-apocalyptic urban hexcrawl module coming out in the near future (more on that soon), but also we've just launched our official podcast!

Join Sam, Walid, and I as we take a close, critical, and somewhat academic approach to reading through TTRPG books, modules, blogposts, and ephemera. We already have three episodes out, with many more sitting already recorded in our queue. 

Episode 1: His Majesty the Worm

Episode 2: Settlers of a Dead God

Episode 3: Triangle Agency

Introducing Odd Goblin

 I've been using a pocket system, Odd Goblin, for the last year and change and it's been remarkably fun and easy to run dungeon crawl adventures with. I think it's time for me to put it out here on the internet.

You can find it on itch, here.

What's with the name?

Odd Goblin's full name is "Odd Goblin, Free In The Forsaken Dark", a mash-up of all the sources it drew inspiration from. These are. . .

(Into the) Odd: Quick and decisive combat rules. Largely compatible with adventures/etc written for Into the Odd/Cairn/etc.

Goblin (Laws of Gaming): 36 GLOG-compatible classes, each built around a skillset that emphasizes giving the player tools to play with over numeric mechanical improvements.

Free (Kriegsspiel): A core resolution system that hews close to the fiction--you roll d10 and the number you get answers the question "How well does this go on a scale from 1-10?". As a system this is obviously not fully FKR, but the philosophy was inspirational during development.

(Forged) In The Dark: The initial version of this was a ItO/FitD mashup, with early drafts of this having a much more FitD skill system. It's evolved a lot since then, but the inspiration is still visible.

Forsaken (Megadungeon): Sam[LINK] ran a megadungeon campaign where each magic user class had tight and thematic set of 6 spells, more about utility than direct combat ability. It worked great so I stole it. Also the inspiration for the print-and-play format.

Why should you try it?

I run an open table largely visited by people new to roleplaying, where I need to be able to make a character and teach how to play in ~5 minutes, but also where the system gives enough to grab onto for a new roleplayer to find inspiration. Odd Goblin threads that needle better than any other system I've found--the basic mechanics are dead simple in a way that orients play towards "Imagine you're in the situation--what would you do?", and the character classes are meaty and full of fun tools to play with.

The core resolution mechanic is built to be simple but adaptable to the fiction--it always generates a number between 1-10, answering the question "How does this go on a scale from 1-10?". It's flexible and narrative-first, but also easily moddable on the fly. Setting a pass/fail target number is quick and easy, but for more nuanced situations you can just roll and improv the consequences based on the result in a more granular way, or even apply more esoteric dice tricks to when desired. I've found that this is already the way most people play games with binary skill systems, so Odd Goblin just leans into the way people intuitively want to play.

I'm leaning into my lack of art budget, so the game is designed specifically to be printed out and made available as a set of loose paper on the table. Pages are modular and cover 1-2 topics each, and character classes can easily be handed to the players playing them.

Odd Goblin characters tend to be powerful in utility but fragile. Pure combat spells and abilities are relatively uncommon and HP totals are low, but most classes have a few tricks up their sleeves that can fundamentally change how they navigate a dungeon. The system is best paired with non-linear adventures, where 'breaking the dungeon' is a feature and not a bug.

I've been running it for a megadungeon campaign at my school, and tend to release a big update between semesters. It's been incredibly fun and flexible, so for anyone else who loves dungeon crawl games primarily oriented around problem solving using weird tools, I encourage you to take a look! Let me know what you think in the comments

Introduction

I'm Misha, a (usually) NYC-based game designer and educator. Most of my professional background is in digital game design and programming, but this is my tabletop RPG blog. I always have a few RPG ideas rattling around in my notes, but until now I've been pretty bad about sharing them with the larger RPG community.

There's a ton of great stuff going on in the various RPG spaces out there, and I love playing pretty much all styles of games, but my favorites (and, by extension, what I tend to design) are fiction-first games focused around creative problem solving. I'm a big fan of RPGs that are incredibly rules-light on the player-facing side, but also have a ton of non-binding mechanical structures that the GM can use to keep things interesting while acting as a fairly impartial referee.

I'm super interested in the unwritten rules people use to run RPGs--all of those habits and processes a good GM juggles behind the scenes to keep a game fun. One of the big weaknesses of this hobby is in how hard it is to learn to run games without basically just mentoring under an experienced GM (or just following a ton of RPG blogs), and a good portion of this blog is probably going to be me trying to figure out ways to make the barrier to play lower for novice players.

My big published digital game is Sumer, a local multiplayer digital boardgame where you play as one of four Sumerian nobles trying to sacrifice the most stuff to the goddess Inanna. It was our attempt to take all the cool design innovations of the Eurogame board game scene and bring them to the digital game realm. Check it out on Steam and the Nintendo Switch, it's really good stuff.

I'm currently working on a team tactics roguelike game tentatively called Megadungeon. At the time I'm posting this, the combat mechanics are pretty locked down, but the larger game structure and visual presentation are still in flux. It's a melding of 4e D&D's tactical combat systems with the dungeon crawl structure of B/X. You can find it on itch.io