Traverse Fantasy

The vocabularies of certain Indo-European languages encode a memory of a social taboo against speaking the name of the bear. Germanic languages famously (although not quite accurately) are thought to refer to the bear as “the brown one”. Slavic languages seem to use a term derived from the phrase “honey-eater”. Baltic languages call them “hairy ones”. D&D retroclones operate on a similar principle. They avoided speaking the name of the devil (that is, whichever particular D&D edition is being emulated) for license reasons, but signal euphemistically to the reader which edition is being lifted. Old School Essentials in one printing refers to itself as being “styled after the beloved games of the 1970s and 1980s” but it’s very specifically a retroclone of the 1981 D&D Basic/Expert rules. My own Fantastic Medieval Campaigns is “a new version of the ruleset for fantasy wargaming campaigns, first published in 1974”—but “the” ruleset in question is the original 1974 D&D...

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....

There was a Reddit user named Kubular who happened upon a novel way to determine damage in D&D combat when their friend had assumed that it was just the difference of their D20 roll minus the target’s armor class. Something similar happened to me a bit ago, before I switched to decision-based initiative from individual initiative ( as Dwiz referred to them ). My friends kept mixing up their initiative with their attack roll, not consciously, but just as an honest mistake when you have to keep doing shit with that D20. That was actually a partial motive for me in switching to my current approach because it felt more intuitive and maybe even ‘fairer’—but the misconception stuck with me. There are many ways to combine all those pesky combat rolls, and one of my favorites I had tried before was Nova’s approach of using damage dice , but isn’t it funny to stumble upon something new by accident? Like chocolate chip cookies (which I know weren’t really accidental but you get the point,...

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...

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...

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...

( Previous Post ) I’m going to invoke the death of the author here before anyone else does (never mind). It’s easy to talk and argue about intent when discussing texts, especially when the question is whether a text contains contradictory perspectives or priorities. At least we don’t know what either author thought on the topic, so we can’t take that as a faulty basis. Anyway, when I refer to authorial priority, I want to determine if the passages attributed to either author have different notions of play or its telos —or perhaps, if we didn’t know which passage could be attributed to which author, if such differences in the text would still be manifest in predictable ways. Any reference to intent per se here is a heuristic for the text’s own significance (in the Lacanian sense, of a meaning generated rather than given). Hypothesis I: Differing Priorities Now that I’ve cast this protection spell against bullshit lit-crit pedantry, I can submit my hypothesis that OD&D alternat...

I did the oopsie of assuming that a controversial, or at least non-consensus, position was actually a non-controversial consensus. From “ Inaugurating the Icon0clasm Ball ”: Not only was OD&D interpreted (i.e., read or played) in various contradictory ways by contemporary readers, but its two authors encode contradictory visions of this game within its source text. Did you catch that? In other words, “Gary and Dave had different priorities collaborating on Dungeons & Dragons , and this is apparent from the text as received.” I promised myself I wouldn’t do any more exegesis of this fucking thing, but that’s a big-ass claim. Is it true? Back when I was working on FMC , I was interested in the development of the OD&D text which consisted of a back-and-forth between its two authors. I’m indebted to Dan Boggs’ Hidden in Shadows blog which I read and internalized years ago, and the timeline below is from his original 2012 post on Beyond This Point Be Dragons : In 1972, ...

The true picture of the past whizzes by. Only as a picture, which flashes its final farewell in the moment of its recognizability, is the past to be held fast. “The truth will not run away from us” – this remark by Gottfried Keller denotes the exact place where historical materialism breaks through historicism’s picture of history. For it is an irretrievable picture of the past, which threatens to disappear with every present, which does not recognize itself as meant in it. Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History It's August, so submissions for The Icon0clasm Ball for  Fantastic Medieval Campaigns  have opened! I'm genuinely excited to see what y'all come up with, because the discursive universe of  OD&D  needs something new (and, dare I say, it deserves a better reception than as the germ of brand-name  Dungeons & Dragons  or of old-school revisionism). I've made steady progress on my major project for this, and I'm hopefully (hopefully!)...

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.

Hi all! Hosting The Icon0clastic Ball on Itch. This is a jam for Fantastic Medieval Campaigns , a free version of the original role-playing game, published under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Although it functions on one hand as a “retroclone”, what distinguishes it from other versions is its unwillingness to compromise the confusing and fractal nature of the text, as well as its willingness to criticize that text and its authors. This culminates in a project to situate the original role-playing game within its socio-historical context, to illuminate the perspectives of its original authors and also reveal the extent to which the text is distorted by our own perspectives. It is neither traditional nor old-school nor war-game, and yet here we all are merely grasping the legs of this elephant. As for this ball, the category is ICON0CLASM . Most readers and players of the original role-playing game, even in the form of FMC , attempt to envision and emulate the game as it was originally played. Res...

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! 

From my personal play packet! Possibly the laziest setting ever, but it’s honest. All the gorgeous art shown here is by the delightful Norn Noszka ! World of Faia Faia is the setting of my home campaign, a sort of cosmic crossroads between worlds. Portal-hopping dwarves meet star-sailing terrans on a planet otherwise populated by a species known as faians—some elves, others orcs. Though Faia is a usual fantasy world, it is written to explore realist themes about society and history. Cathedral of Light Elves are faians who were baptized under the Cathedral of Light, a religious institution established by the Snow-White Queen. The elves were initially unified by this swordseer to defend their continent against the dwarves of the Midgard Company. However, they eventually opted to split the Dark Lands of Faia between themselves and the Company. This coincided with the Crusade Against Darkness, a declaration of all uncivilized faians as demons (orcs) from myth-times. They worship Qesem,...

Free adventure or whatever? This is my prep for the first two proper sessions of Turtle Island ( S1 , S2 ). There's only one statistic of note: that Bokor is a "champion". In my house rules, this means he is a figure who by himself is of medium difficulty in combat (a mini-boss, so to speak). That might make him equivalent to an ogre or troll? Idk. Locations These are the bare bones of the adventure site; it wasn’t until after the first session that I expanded upon the site’s story based on what seemed interesting. Entrance → Crop Fields, Big House Crop Fields → Entrance, Slave Quarters, Driver’s Home, Engines 3 farms: sugar, cotton, cacao. Actively being worked by 150 enslaved zombies, who go to “sleep” at night. No overseer to be found. Slave Quarters → Crop Fields, Provisions Gardens, Big House Not been lived in for quite some time. Some mementos of the once-living: Amulet of birth control (treasure). Bible overwritten with cultic depictions. ...

Zombies and vodou and marital drama oh my! Crew Roster Participants this session are in bold! Nicole: Elf arrested for bodysnatching, now a knife-hoarding edgelord; 4 experience. Nolan: Orc stand-user raised by elves, arrested on accusations of spying; 4 experience. Makandal: Orc maroon and voudonist ratted out while carrying out a raid; 6 (+4) experience. Queen-sama: Elf prostitute, arrested after being caught by a client’s wife; 8 (+4) experience. Xen: Amnesiac dwarf magician following strange dreams to the land of Flo’Rida; 6 (+4) experience. Downtime I let Xen spend 1 treasure so everyone present could do the research action (add 1 rumor to the map, or ask the game mother to ‘clarify’ 1 rumor already on the map). In the future, I think I’ll have individuals spend their own treasure; I just wanted everyone to participate this time. Queen-sama asked for clarification on the sea serpents rumor. I said that there have been multiple sightings of the sort of flying sea cre...

Hashtag OSRisOverParty, Hashtag RIPBozo, etc etc. The initial… “edition” of Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition tried to present itself as a reactionary return to some ideal past paradigm of D&D —be it Third Edition to win back territory lost prior to Paizo’s Pathfinder , or an even older Gygaxian edition to get in the pants of the sort-of nascent OSR. Practically, this resulted in a final product that was like a simple Third Edition with dogwhistle-like nods to OSR conventions (since the play-style’s influence in the end was tenuous at best and mostly abandoned after the public test phase). It’s maybe more succinctly described as a people-pleasing game, with the caveat that people-pleasers don’t please anyone. So, how did it become popular? And how does the new 2024 not-edition reflect major differences between then and now, in terms of how D&D is perceived and played? This is my ramble. Sent from iPhone. Fifth Edition: Born in 2014 Of course, nobody plays D&D as ...