Traverse Fantasy

I mentioned earlier I was using Gus L. and I’s dungeon from Fantastic Medieval Campaigns so I could be lazy and not have to prep much for my home campaign’s alien arc —isn’t that the point of a prewritten module, come to think of it? It turned out okay, but I didn’t write a session report because I felt dissatisfied. Everyone had fun, we had good moments, but from my perspective there was friction between the experience we were having and the thing we kind of passively accepted that we were playing. The skeleton of the dungeon is already not the ‘right vibe’ for the campaign but, where at first I was able to make it work because of characters’ own motivations, I struggled because the new characters lacked a reason to be there at all except that the ‘crew’ as an abstract unit had been heading there. The advice sometimes is like, players should invent their own characters’ motivations for being at a place or doing a thing, but I don’t subscribe to a framework of play centered on the se...

Feats are a big hit, turns out! I’m bringing back level 0 ancestry feats because I can tell my friends just wanted more to play with. “I don’t like complexity” mfs when they get to build their little guy. Some of these I had basically written years ago! Changling: Once per day, change the appearance of your face. Dwarf: You are immune to alcohol and poison, and can detect both. Elf: You are fully aware while you sleep; nothing surprises you. Hellchild: You have advantage at intimidating and seducing others. Hoblin: You can hide in bush or shadow, and behind bigger folk. Orc: Once daily at 0 hearts, restore 1 and attack with advantage. Nymph:  Spend 1 inspiration to call forth local nymphs of your type. Scalespawn: Spend 1 action to breathe fire for 1 dmg. Treat as arcana. Terran: Never suffer disadvantage from linguistic differences. Watcher: When you rest and heal, you also see visions of elsewhere. I’m also reworking “experience feats” (the ones you get at ...

The story continues—sort of! More-or-less new characters across the board, but we’re moving on with the thing because I had already prepped this shit and didn’t want to do another fucking thing. Unfortunate as it was to recount events up until then to provide some semblance of context, it also felt like a good exercise that solidified my approach to this campaign: fuck time records. Redo sessions. Retcon whoever was there up until the one about to start. Individual characters may follow their own arcs, but the basic unit of the campaign is the crew and whoever’s in the crew can change as needed. I think that’ll keep me from going insane more than imposing bullshit like “You have to go home at the end of an adventure” or “You need to schedule for everyone last time to come back” or “Someone needs to substitue for so-and-so to play their character.” Anyway. Characters! My stuff is put away so I don’t have their names on me, but a rose smells sweet even if you don’t know what it’s called....

Basically: I was inspired by Dwiz’s post about how ‘ the maze game ’ of charting sites was central to early D&D in contrast to later approaches which abstract or give knowledge of the map for players and their characters (contrast with Josh McCroo ’s approach which has the party receive a blank map—itself a fun method!), as well as an entry in Gumbo’s AD&D series about how maps in that game specifically facilitate fast travel while escaping a site or returning to deeper levels (i.e., it’s not just for the sake of note-taking). I doodled some rules I wanted to play with in my homebrew pirate game this weekend (AHEM Cinco! ) and Elmcat was very encouraging about what I had come up with. So here we are! Maybe Wuffus will consider this a late entry in the blogwagon. There are two resource items in my game which players can freely stock at havens before or during their adventure: rations (for recovering on the road) and ammo. Now I’m introducing a third called stationery . Ima...

Sorry to keep Cinco! -posting, but Alex from  To Distant Lands wrote a really fun addition to magic which I wanted to share and also slightly refactor: Metamagic When you work with another mage(s) to combine your powers into a new spell using the same motif, each of you pay one inspiration. All additional inspiration spent afterward is multiplied by the number of casters for the purpose of defining the effects of the spell. This is really cool and, I can imagine, produces the cool sort of scene where you get a crowd of mages casting a spell together. My first thought reading it was, oh geez, one of us needs to come up with ways to spend more inspiration (or at least scale up the rules that currently exist)! But that made me think: oh, maybe the approach is backward, and rather than multiplying effects we can treat it as a discount on combined effects. This is my revision: Multiple mages in one zone with complementary motifs may cast a spell cooperatively. Each ‘helper’ spen...

Alex from To Distant Lands had been considering Cinco! to play his Gran Carcosium setting (which I had played in a little bit ago !), and he asked me where I was at with feats since he wanted to play with that sort of approach. He wrote a couple of his own, which made me realize why I had been struggling with it on my end. My prior approach was to use feats to gatekeep specialized rules for characters, which was a fine thought, but I was too granular in splitting up and encapsulating those rules in feats. They didn’t have the pizzazz of, how Alex had put it, being excited to do something new and unique. So I consolidated those—from seven granular feats to just one feat for arcana rules and another for weapon rules—and had fun with all the rest. I hope these are more fun! I still haven’t played with feats because when I asked some of my friends how they felt about them, they preferred having a minimal character sheet and letting me handle the rules stuff—which is real and why I’m h...

I really like Eldritch Fields ’ table for encounter activities , but I wanted to simplify it so that I don’t need an entirely different set of indices for sentient vs non-sentient creatures. Instead, roll D20 below; for non-sentient creatures, subtract 10 if the roll exceeds 10. D20 What’s Up? 1–2 Dead 3–4 Resting 5–6 Foraging 7–8 Examining 9–10 Sparring 11–12 Traveling 13–14 Camping 15–16 Working 17–18 Meeting 19–20 Partying I guess you could also divide by 2 but that’s kind of annoying to me, and I basically like to treat the D20 as a D10 by looking at the least significant digit. Or as Tamás from  Eldritch Fields  commented (hi!), use D10 instead! I just use nothing but D20 and D6 at my table :)

I wanted to have a pseudo-lifepath thing in the appendices for Cinco! to help players conceptualize characters if they’re at a loss with where to get started. Below is what came of that! You’ll recognize a lot of material from my original draft, FIVEY , but I tried to condense everything into providing just enough information to contextualize a character origin without pigeon-holing individual characters. Thanks to Alex from To Distant Lands for providing really helpful feedback on that front! Without further ado… If you’re playing a character, pick or roll on the table below for your character’s origin; keep in mind, though, that the Game Mother might disallow certain origins just to make the setting more cohesive. If you’re the Game Mother, considering building your setting around the characters your players create; otherwise be upfront with expectations and don’t surprise your players with them! A setting handout helps everyone. Changeling (1–2): A fairy snatched a baby to pay...

Sorry, I just need to exorcise a thought real quick to convince myself why it’s a bad idea. The impulse is I realized that Cinco! doesn’t have swords +1 and I was like, oh, how sad—even though by all means it’s a good thing that it’s not a fucking number-go-up game. It’s intentionally all very discrete and non-granular, reducing as much as I possibly can to pure structure (not necessarily in terms of procedure but, in general, of dynamics). But let me just give this a try. Come onnnn. It's like my 2023 post but easier. Split Bonuses Your aspect bonuses can only go up to +4 now (start by allocating 2 points), but now you can add a bonus from an item you use, also from +1 to +4. Bonus Item Quality Rarity (D20) — — 1–10 +1 Junk 11–4 +2 Common 15–17 +3 Rare 18–19 +4 Legendary 20 Your starting items are common (+2). You can get rare and legendary items on adventures. The above rarity roll might come in handy (results 1 to 10 are nothing). Dura...

Swear to Gxd I was working on this before the previous post. I just waited to post until it seemed less topically timely because it was a genuine effort and something I had wanted to write as a reflection on where I’ve been and gone over the years. Happy New Year and, if you celebrate, Happy Logos Incarnation Anniversary! Or solstice or whatever. Fuck. This is also nice to post on the blog because I can actually include links to things here. Cinco! is mostly inspired not necessarily by Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition (2014) as much as by the McElroy Brothers’ podcast The Adventure Zone and my experience playing D&D as modeled on that media. This book is a tribute to that subculture which despite being centered on D&D also elevated it through play to something more than a tactical skirmish game. It’s inspired by tumblrinas, gamer girls, and theater kids who strove to redeem creative sparks from boring prisons. Ben Milton’s Knave (2018) inspired me to seek simpler r...

I’ve been making changes to my homebrew heartbreaker Cinco! based on my most recent play-sessions. These aren’t published yet because I have some new empty space I’d like to fill with handy tools for myself. The document is now A4 so that it can be resized to A5 for print. The main character sheet is now digest/A5 sized, and cards for items and exhaustion will be moved from your sheet to your hand. Replaced supply with rations. Rations are only spent when resting for a whole night, specifically to treat any place in the wilderness like a haven. Health potions however can be consumed at any point, including during an encounter; this makes them very valuable as treasure! Removed distinction between equipped and packed cards. You can now use any of your 7-ish items during combat, except that: large items cost 1 extra action to use; and you can’t use duplicates of the same armor type. Levels are now from 1 to 10. When you play with feats, you start with one at level 1 and gain...

My partner got me and herself really into  Dandadan , which she described at one point as  Mob Psycho  for people who go to the club. It's so so so fucking good. Momo and her friends are my queens. Okarun is such a precious squishy boywife . The stories of the monsters they encounter and how others get wrapped into their life pull you by your heartstrings to the edge of your couch. Anyway, I was reminded that the most popular RPG in Japan is Call of Cthulhu , and it struck me how Dandadan is a perfect potential reimagining of that premise: just replace grimy 1940’s investigators with bitchy modern teenagers. Since I tend to center my home game on mysteries anyway, this led me to think about how I would lean further into it and support Dandadan -style supernatural hijinks in the same way that D&D supports sailor guardians and Fortnite supports Sabrina Carpenter. I think there's two main considerations: possessed characters and psychic characters. Both of these can b...

This is partly my attempt to modularize more complex rules from Cinco! (I can’t decide how to type that) as opt-in rules for characters, as well as coming up with additional ones because they’d make more sense as special abilities than as general (if complex) rules. The following subsystems would be impacted and restricted only to characters with the appropriate feats: Critical attack moves Travel options Arcane enhancements Healing at havens This isn’t my first time doing this, but I was never fully happy with my initial two attempts (wow, one year apart, in 2023 and 2024 ). I feel happier with these because they feel more potentially abstract and reskinnable based on who your character is. My plan is to have 20 "experience feats" that you gain from your levels, and 20 "origin feats" which I've written before and I would actually be really happy to play with. So, these are the 20 experience feats! As a treat, here's the optional "unified...

Hi all! I've been sneakily uploading changes to my home game  Cinco!  over the past month. Here's a changelog: Armor items act as a virtual +1 heart and give resistance against certain damage types until hit (represented by flipping over the card). Damaged armor resets during downtime. Supply is now a discrete item which fully restores a character's hearts and inspiration during travel or exploration; in the latter case, it requires 1 turn to consume. Expanded guidelines for opponents, including a framework for damage resistances and vulnerabilities. Expanded rules for travel into a " pick-your-poison " minigame (this has been a hit!). Renamed "readied" to "packed" items on the character sheet since it confused even myself. Renamed (unnamed?) "bashing" to "bludgeoning" damage so it didn't rhyme with "slashing". Created worksheets for havens, ships, and optional cardless characters. Hope you enjoy! :) Below are ...

Had such a fun session of my home campaign! Got to use my new travel rules and (due to the all-you-can-roll nature of them) honestly I had to convince my friends to end each leg of the trip to actually play where they were wanting to go... But we love it when journeys aren't about the destination, right? The rulebook for  Cinco!  now has all the latest updates I've been using to play if you're curious :) I'm tired and a little buzzed so I'm gonna summarize this session with bullet points. Roster These were the characters in play: Enkidu: Amnesiac dwarf following strange dreams to the land of Flo’Rida; 9 (+3) experience. Makandal: Orc maroon and voudonist ratted out while carrying out a raid; 9 (+3) experience. Nolan: Orc stand-user raised by elves, arrested on accusations of spying; 7 (+3) experience. Queen-sama: Elf prostitute, arrested after being caught by a client’s wife; 11 (+3) experience. Queen-sama leveled up! I need to remind her player. Summary Pr...

One common complaint about feats or even class features is that they foreclose particular actions from characters in general by cloistering them within specific character options. For this reason, I tend to like what I currently have going on in my home game  CINCO , where a character's equipment in combination with their aspects determines their capabilities, which feels both more flexible and more natural. But I had a thought: maybe the foreclosure is the point? Sure, it keeps things simple one way to not have character builds, but the trade-off is that all rules apply to everyone all the time. I realized in the shower that I wouldn't necessarily like to have every possible rule in the back of my mind even if I only use a subset of them. It's nice in typical  D&D  to know that you're a whatever, and to have your special rules in your character sheets where you know what you need to worry about (and you don't need to open the book to find rules that always appl...

I like fluxcrawls , but there's little choice involved as such. Instead of rolling for a random event or the quality of an event, check D20: on 9–, pick 1; on 10–19, pick 2; on 20+, pick 3: Avoid an encounter! The Game Mother will not roll for a random encounter event. Bypass some danger! The Game Mother will not roll for a random disaster event. Complete your journey! You arrive at your destination after resolving travel events. Discover a location! You spot someplace new, and have the choice to detour there. This is just a sketch, not tested yet, but I wanted some way to reintroduce the mini-game feeling of travel without giving the appearance of choice via granularity.

Finally published the 'dry' version of  CINCO! Table-Talk Odyssey  on Itch! If you're seeing this here then you probably know what its deal is, but essentially: this is my home campaign ruleset, which are meant to isolate the character-driven dynamics of my  D&D 5E  subculture into something geared specifically towards making silly quirky characters and playing with them. The setting is... pirates, or really like... Haitian revolution... Caribbean. Yeah :D Also Norn Noszka illustrated the booklet and they did an incredible job, just gorgeous evocative art!! Please enjoy, hope you like it! Will eventually publish with my campaign prep which I feel like is the actual sauce of the thing, not the rules rules. But I don't want to do that until I feel like it's fully useful. 

I left my Switch at home so I've been borrowing my partner's to play her copy of  Shadows Over Loathing , a silly quirky goofy point-and-click RPG in the lineage of the browser-based  Kingdom of Loathing . There's six-ish regions in the game, each having a dozen-some points of interest which you navigate with your character (as a "physical" location with one or more rooms, rather than an abstract point). You can travel from any point of interest to another in the same region, and it may just trigger an event such as an encounter or a detour into another site hitherto undiscovered (the more sites you discover, the less random events are possible, the "faster" you can travel between sites). That's all there is to it! I had an epiphany while playing that such a structure could solve a "problem" I've had running my pirate campaign, that I feel obligated to locate adventure sites in the geography of their particular island, having the player...

I'm working on aggregating the posts on this blog into a big book so I can eventually delete it for my personal safety, considering the state of our world. There were some things, though, I wanted to share while I still had a soapbox here. This will be a short revisit of bite-sized dungeons , which in sloppy fashion I over-complicated. This is basically copied from Cinco! , my personal campaign book. You don't need preset patterns of rooms and connections! Just have six circles, each numbered: Entrance Monsters with treasure Monsters without treasure Treasures without monsters Random shit Random shit Roll D6 six times to draw connections from each of the rooms to another, re-rolling results equal to the current room or those which have already been rolled. If you want, you can also roll D6 for which connections have special attributes like being lengthy (requiring 1 turn to traverse), difficult (requiring some check), or hidden (requiring foreknowledge). And that's all!