Wednesday, March 10, 2021

Old Gold - Simple Chase Minigame, Adaptable to Other Stuff, Too

Was looking for a mini-game or way to compress down some rules because a player in Tuesday’s game found a sentient intelligent but CHAOTIC sword.  He needed have a battle of wills with it in order to prove to it that he is boss.  

Anyway, while digging for stuff to use in that, I found this.  It’s meant to simulate chases in D&D-like games, whether in a dungeon or city or wilderness or whatever.  It can handle multiple groups of pursued and pursuers, has a lot of hectic action, and resolves with a playable outcome.



Linking here to the guy’s post that links to one version of the thing, which he posted his adapted rules for - if you like his adaptations better than the original, someone in the comments made a version of the board using those adapted rules.  

Hope this adds to your own game toolkit.  🙂  

Link to source with 2 complete sets of rules on how to use it: http://tenfootpolemic.blogspot.com/2017/05/flee-snakes-ladders-chase-mechanics.html

FWIW, “Polemic” rules variation seems like it would work best when you have two or more groups involved in a chase.  David Black’s rules worked better as an adaptation for a one-on-one contest of wills.

Either way, worked great for this and will definitely use it again for its intended purpose as well as future adaptations.  This blog is also on my massive list for mining more material.

P.S. it worked awesome for the sword’s psychic struggle with its new owner.  Lots of drama and back and forth before a winner was resolved.  I used the Black rules version, with speed being a substitute for willpower.  

I treated it like a black hack style usage die, where each roll of a 1 would drop you one die size to a minimum of d4.  Spots on the board that gave you a negative would also drop the die, positive ones would bump it up to a max of d8.  

I gave the player 12 rounds to win or else would lose.  He had the option to “rest” in between rounds and both he and the opponent would bump up a die size, but lose two turns.

Wednesday, March 3, 2021

Cloister of the Frog God write-up/review.

Posting this for Gabor Lux/Melan.  I couldn’t leave it as a comment on his blog as it’s too long, lol.

SPOILER WARNING - I give away some secrets of the adventure here.  

It’s available in English as part of the recent releases of Rappan Athuk.  I ran it by itself.  There’s literally one tunnel that leads into that mega dungeon, and I just erased it off the map and ignored it.

Highly recommended.  Tons of adventure packed into a few pages.  It took almost 9 months of weekly 2 hour sessions to finish it off.

NOTE - the rest of this is written directly to Melan, since it was meant to be a blog comment originally...

Setup was that frog cultists jacked with our home base (poisoned the local spring with a toad idol).  Also attacked a nearby village and we had to rescue some kidnapped girls who were dipped into black slime and turned into frog people.  

The local Archdruid asked us to go check on a nearby semi-ruined abbey/vineyard some of his brothers were supposed to be refurbishing and repairing.  They had cut off contact recently.

What has happened is the frog cultists have come in and killed the druids to get access to their ancient holy areas underground and to try and trick some adventurers into releasing the frog plague.  The wards on the locks of Zodmar’s tomb prevent the froggies from touching them.

During the frog cult invasion, the head Druid on site secured the horn of flies (found by them below ground) and cross of Yorah and accidentally let loose the invisible stalkers as a last ditch effort to fight off the invaders.  The frog cult turned the dead druids into zombie slaves to further excavate and find treasure.

Meanwhile the frog cult just took over the above ground restoration project and pretend to be normal monks.  That’s what it’s like when the players find them.  They can tell it’s off because of the frog decor and missing druids.  A nighttime recon mission lets them bag a Druid zombie and via “speak with dead” they find out about the whole situation and the hidden star.  

We call for backup (archdruid and followers come) and make a plan.  The party mounts a raid and end up killing most zombies and humanoid cultists above ground and capture Grosso alive.  Of course, Grosso has basically allowed this to happen.  

Through hints and false resistance, Grosso helps the party go deeper and deeper.

Finally, they do unleash the frog apocalypse, but manage to seal it in with stolen corpses, animated, then polymorphed to ogres, who then take out the pillars of the antechamber and collapse the ceiling down.  The archdruid is then called upon to use stone to mud and the reverse to make the sealing in more permanent.

However, without the archdruid’s supervision, Grosso mounts his escape.  He kills several druids, and manages to pour his Elixer of All Seeing Doom down the gullet of one of his still living victims and flees.

The party splits - the fighter and the archdruid drag the infected man down and seal him also into one of the tombs by collapsing the tunnel and sealing it off.  The rest fan out to find Grosso.  

The wizard flies over the courtyard, catching Grosso in a Plant Growth spell.

Or rather, he catches a zombie decoy dressed in Grosso’s robes, and Grosso silences the wizard, then accesses the tunnels below from the shaft in the ruins  - down below, the party failed to eradicate all the undead in the area below the inner cloister.  

Grosso quickly comes to lead a gang of skeletons, ghouls, and wights.  He tries to make a play to retrieve the Horn of Flies.  I had previously set up that the flies one can summon by attacking the horn can be fed to the demon frogs, which makes them docile and controllable by someone wielding Yorah’s cross.

I liked the idea of those artifacts being there for a reason.

Anyway, thinking to defend the horn when Grosso first escaped, the players were tricked into chasing the decoy.  However, they had the sense to Wizard Lock it in, and Grosso has to abandon it.  

Through superior knowledge of how all the underground tunnels connect, Grosso manages to escape back through the outer cloister to the surface undetected, where he robs the party’s loot wagon of the Staff of the Batrachian (which they killed the Tsathar priest for) and flees on horseback while the party was left thinking he would exit the cliff side caves where a boat had been stashed.

Stuff I modded/changed besides what’s noted above.

Minor stuff - I made the entombed vampire into Koshag, and his sword was entombed separately to keep him and his powerful artifact separated forever.  The party retrieved the sword, but didn’t touch it.  The fighter wants to seek a way to control it without becoming chaotic.

I also made the named tombs throughout the complex belong to a family of brothers who were ancient warlords, evil and corrupted.  The ruins of their fortress are the foundations of the inner cloister and the source of the dungeons below it.  

A party of good adventurers at some point in lost history were the ones who defeated and sealed them all up, including Zodmar and his infection.  They placed the basilisk there (I made it an undead basilisk) as a guardian against the frogs or Koshag the vampire escaping.

The party want to further investigate this family’s history.  So I changed Koshag Xontollan to Xyntillan, lol.  They may also choose to pursue the Abbot who is fleeing into the swamp after another magical horn, and another offspring of Tsathoggua (modding material from Echoes #4 for that).

Some memorable scenes.  

Using an army of animated dead to excavate the collapsed tunnels in the cave area.  It was neat to see new players acting in a very old-school way, using henchmen and monster allies to engage the fictional world.

Our fighter fell into the pit trap at the harpy pool.  That was a nice, tense escape scene as well.  They pulled him up while the harpies were swooping around to attack him.

The players went for Yorah’s cross knowing that the cultists had lots of undead minions.  The climbed the wall of the cloister and got at it that way while avoiding the stalkers.

They defeated the basilisk by using the thief as bait and flanked it when it made a move for him.

They defeated the vampire by using Polymorph Other and turning it into a trout which they immediately staked.  Funnily enough, this only works with certain rulesets.  Some rules limit Polymorph to LIVING creatures, but not S&W.  AD&D 1E says you can polymorph a vampire but it will just shapeshift itself the next round.  Unless it is staked immediately in the same round.

So they kept the vampire hostage for a while, but in the end, just destroyed it in its fish form by cutting off its head.  If they hadn’t, it would have returned to its grave, where it’s currently sealed in with the 666 demon frogs.  That might have made for an interesting future villain.  A vampire engorged on demon frog blood... alas, no good.

I can’t believe we had so much adventure from what is just 12 pages excluding the maps.  

One player complained it “took too long” but he missed a few sessions, and also they played it in such a way that drew it out.  They were very meticulous and strategic at trying to clear the place.  I think they wanted to use it as a base, but that’s not going to work with the whole “evil god stuck under it” vibe.  Our wizard wants to take it over and experiment there.

Player comments.

They felt it had its own personality, and felt like a real place, occupied and changed by different groups.  They liked the dimensionality of it with the ups/downs/ins/outs everywhere.  They felt like the loot was well placed and fit with the history and plot of the place.  It was also built in a way that felt like the challenges escalated the deeper they went, but were also environmental challenges because they never wanted to just rush in and attack.  Lots of planning to use the environment in play.

That’s all I can think of now, but it was an epic session.  I know they hated to let Grosso go, but he rolled lucky.  I basically had him roll randomly for his path to escape and he happened to hit one of the few avenues they weren’t sufficiently guarding and he got by them.

We were very excited that our plan worked for stopping the apocalypse we accidentally triggered.

They fought the first round of 10 frogs to come out, and killed 6.  But then 10 more hopped out and they had to flee.  They were mad because they dropped the Globe of Devious Entrapment into the tomb, but as written, you have to touch it for more than a round for it to suck you in.  It got some of the frogs, but not fast enough or the number needed to make a difference.  It was lost when they triggered the cave-in.

Thank you for the great module.  I wanted to run it after you talking about it on your old blog and I bought Rappan Athuk just for the Cloister.  Totally worth it.  Hope it gets an English release like the Hungarian version.  I actually found your map from that edition and used it instead.  We liked it better than the Rappan Athuk one.  Yours made it a lot easier to follow the twisting connections.

Kudos, sir.  

This is my Tuesday game.  My Monday guys got sent through your House of Rogat Demazian as a heist session.  And Thursday’s group just got teleported to another planet via LotFP’s Tower of the Stargazer, so I’m going to put them in Systema Tartarobasis.  Can’t wait!  

P.S. Thanks to my players Erik, Sam, Nik, Nathan, Tomo (and Ian, Will, and Ben who played some but not all).

Monday, March 1, 2021

Dangerous Brian - Dead Blog Review 2006-2010

 This blog stopped updating in 2015, but I’ve only read it thru 2010 so far.  Mostly about wargaming and minis, which I’m not that much into.  


Finally got to some “old gold” - shit I can swipe - when he was laying out some stuff he was converting from Harn for use with OSRIC for a game he was running.

Two posts in a row of cool, short write ups of hex-crawl sites.  Two of my 3 weekly games are doing hex crawls and I feel like these descriptions would get players wanting to check these spots out.

Stuff like this:   

15: THE GHOST TOWER OF ELKALL-ANUZ The Ghost Tower of Ekall-Anuz is said to move regularly from one world to the next. Certainly, it often stands in the ruined city of the same name, but travellers insist that on other visits, sometimes as little as a week later, the Tower has vanished from the ruins, only to appear again at some later date. Seemingly without pattern.  

Good, right?  So I went to printfriendly and pdf’d them, then combined them in GoodReader because that’s how I wanted them, lol.

Part 1: http://dangerousbrian.blogspot.com/2010/10/sand-box-adventure-sites-part-one.html

Part 2: http://dangerousbrian.blogspot.com/2010/10/sandbox-locations-part-ii.html

And as a little bonus, he’s got a page on the site with a bunch of cool random tables I will check out more before I’m done with this blog.  

Get that here: http://dangerousbrian.blogspot.com/p/gaming-links-random-tables-and-other.html

Cheers to you, Brian.  Hope you are well and still dangerous.

Sunday, February 28, 2021

Delta’s D&D Hotspot - Old Blog Review circa 2007.

 So Delta’s blog is one of the oldest OSR ones, specifically focusing on OD&D that you can still find.  Started in 2007 and is still going today.

I looked back on the posts from 2007, and most of it is talking about OD&D as a viable game and comparing it to then contemporary 3.5 edition.  The tail end of 2007 has him talking about the announced 4th edition.  

We all know how that went.  Maybe it’s a good game in and of itself, but it’s not D&D.

I digress.  There are a bunch of posts looking at various aspects of OD&D and Delta modifies and house rules them to make them even simpler, borrowing an idea here and there from modern gaming.

There is no specific post that I would consider “old gold” but he has since compiled all his house rules onto a single page on his blog.  If you’re wanting to try OD&D give them a look.

The stuff for encumbrance and combat are good mods, but I’m not looking to go back in time for my ruleset, and while his rules are better than the originals in play, they’re still more granular than I like.

(Currently running Black Hack 2e, for comparison).

If you want to see what the earliest days of “OSR” blogging was like, and see some intelligent looks at old rules and improvements to them, check it out.  Delta is a good writer and good at rules analysis.  Probably comes from being a teacher and stuff.

Here is the main link to the blog: http://deltasdnd.blogspot.com/

Here’s a link to his house rules all collected in one place (mostly what he blogged about in 2007): http://deltasdnd.blogspot.com/p/primary-house-rules.html

If you prefer, he’s also got a link to his games company page where you can get his house rules combined with the full rules of the OD&D-based game.  He’s got free rules for players and judges, and some other stuff on Lulu that you can buy.  http://www.oedgames.com/

Currently, in addition to still blogging, he appears pretty active on his YouTube channel called Wandering DMs.  I might check that out but currently, I’m more in reading mode than watching.  Catch this here: http://www.oedgames.com/

I’m going to continue reading into 2008 and beyond at some point, but for now I am going to dig around for some more stuff circa 2007.

Oh, and sidebar, the comments on Delta’s blog are funny, because he will have comments from a decade later, which he still answers.  Kind of shows that the content is evergreen, and people still find their way to the content.  Those blog comments have also been a good way to get plugged into more “lost” OSR content from back in the day, looking at blogs by his readers and blogs that his readers follow.

You’ll hopefully see me posting more about those at some point, too.

Saturday, February 27, 2021

The Stonegiant’s Cave - Dead Blog Review

One last post from this blog before I move on.  “Sean” didn’t post a whole lot, but the maps he shared (sampled and linked to in my last post) were all amazing.

His final post before going dark in 2018 was to drop some cool weird B/X monsters on us.  This was his first post after almost 2 years silent.  He notes that it was some content he had posted to Google+ and wanted to save it from oblivion when that shut down.

You can grab those here: http://thestonegiantscave.blogspot.com/2018/11/well-its-been-long-time-since-i-posted.html

Oddly enough, though he is/was a talented artist, he declined to illustrate these.  

I liked them a lot, and I found it well worth copying the URL to printfriendly.com to make a PDF for myself to add to my monster folder.  



Note: some of these appear to be adapted from similar creatures in video games, but I don’t know if they all are or just some.  Regardless, loved the true DIY OSR spirit.  

Sean, hope you are well and still enjoying drawing maps.

I think I am going to label posts like this with old game-able content to swipe for your own game as “old gold” just so I have a label to link them together.

The Stonegiant’s Cave - Dead Blog Review

Been checking out this blog today: http://thestonegiantscave.blogspot.com

Started in 2011, last post is in 2018.

Of interest, so far: A few custom classes.  Most are some D&D based space opera classes.  Spaceman, explorer, scientist, robot.  Kind of cool, but nothing special.  Probably have seen this kind of thing a ton of times by tons of folks.  

What really did stand out to me - in 2013, one of the more prolific posting years - was a ton of scanned, hand-drawn map artwork.  It’s exceptional, hitting that perfect sweet spot of better than I can do, but looking like it’s old and hobbyist level.  Not all polished and digital and slick.

Here is a page with a few overland maps in black and white: http://thestonegiantscave.blogspot.com/2013/01/pulp-fantasy-sword-and-sorcerey.html

In a later post, he shows the city map here when it’s completed.

In this one he shows some colored maps that he did years earlier: http://thestonegiantscave.blogspot.com/2013/01/a-walk-down-memory-lane.html

Again, love the style in these.  Aspirational, if I ever find myself wanting to draw maps.

Finally, one last link here to some more hand drawn dungeon maps: http://thestonegiantscave.blogspot.com/2013/01/take-walk-on-dungeon-side.html

Showing off a wide variety of types and styles of design and rendering.

Based on other stuff this blogger posted about, I hope he was eventually able to go fishing some more.  Kudos, sir.  Hope you are well if you ever see this review.

Anyone else reading this who likes old style hand drawn maps, check these out.  Dig around as he had quite a bit more than I posted.

Friday, February 26, 2021

A resurrection or a rebirth or maybe even a beginning, finally

 I don’t know if this will go anywhere.  But as of COVID, and March 2020, I started running D&D style games over GoToMeeting.  I run 3 games a week, 3 different campaigns, all different players.  Most of the stuff I run is gleaned from the OSR community.  

This blog was created back when that was kind of sort of new.

It’s not anymore.

Ten years old, at least.  A lot of blogs have come and gone.  A lot of cool stuff was jammed into Google+ and then vaporized.

I’m not ready yet to be creating original content.  But I think I will start posting here about “game-able content” that I extract from comics, shows, movies, books that I consume.

And then also do a revisit to any old OSR blogs I find that maybe don’t post anymore - maybe from those that still do - but look at their old content.

What is game-able and usable today?  A lot probably.

This is a very self-indulgent and non-content post.  But it’s like an anchor in time.  A declaration of intent.

We will see what happens tomorrow...