House Rules For Swords & Wizardry FMAG

1. You will earn experience points for overcoming challenges, and for gold acquired.  Note that you don’t necessarily have to kill the monster to overcome the situation.  

   
2. We are playing in an open world, which means that you can pretty much do anything.  Think outside the box and have fun!  Obviously there could be consequences.  

3. At 0 hit points you are unconscious, at negative your level you must make a saving throw or die.  On a success you are returned to 0 hit points.

4. Each character starts out with 2 luck points, these work the same way as inspiration and can be used to re-roll any dice.  

5. After a fight, a player can bandage their wounds for 1d6 hit points. 

6. Consumables are important!  Don’t run out of food, torches, arrows!

7. Each character will get one hireling.  You will be responsible for this character, and in the case of things going sideways you will be asked to “check the morale” of the hireling.  They may flee, or stand tall.  The hireling can be used as a backup character in the event of death.  The hireling character will be expecting payment. 

8. Every encounter (monster or otherwise) will have a reaction check, this means that not everything will attempt to kill you right away. 

9. Surprise will be determined on a case by case basic, by rolling 1d6, on a roll of 1 you will be surprised (same goes for monsters).  Prior to rolling Initiative the players will state what their intentions are.  Initiative is handled by rolling 1d6 for each side (players and DM).  No bonuses are added to the roll, and the players will take turns rolling initiative for the group.  In the case of a tie combat is resolved simultaneously.

10. Critical hits will be double damage.  ex you roll a 5 for damage, which means you do 10 points of damage.  
11. Critical fails result in the loss of a weapon, in the case of an ability check some awful will likely happen.  
12. Ability checks are D20 + Stat Bonus.  Target number will be determined by the GM. 
13. Your attack bonus is added to your d20 roll, and your strength or dexterity modifier.  Only fighters add their modifier to damage.  Ex d20+Attack Bonus+Dex Mod = To hit.

14. Encumbrance:  You can carry 20 items, not including gold.          
15. Levelling:  Upon levelling up you can re-roll any stat, if the number is higher than the current stat you can keep it.  You regain all lost luck, and gain 1 extra.  

Wednesday RPG update thingamabob blog postie

I apologize if I've been a bit quiet lately.  I keep thinking "I should do a blog, or do another podcast".  But by the time I sit down to do it, everything pops out of my head.  I suppose that happens.  In all honesty I think that it comes down to the season.  It's finally getting nice out in the land of Winter!  So there's other things to do.

I'm hoping to get the old school group together soon, to run session 2 of the Isle of Dread.  There will be a play report after that.  I'm also slowly working on a blog detailing the machinations of the Isle NPCs.

Example: 
meet Ramses, old sailor npc that the PCs met while in Specularm. He was quite happy to accompany them, as it had been a very long time since he had went on adventure. He's really a jack of all trades, he knows a few spells, is quick with a sword and can pick a lock. He has a score to settle with the pirates near the isle and the merchant clans in kamareikos.
Image via :Old-Pirate by Grafik.deviantart.com

HEXCRAWL

The other thing I'm working on is a small hexcrawl.  I had posted on mewe asking for help filling out a hexmap that I built using:

https://campaignwiki.org/text-mapper/smale

Thus far there is twenty two entries, out of one hundred.  I figure fifty entries is probably sufficient.  Currently I'm code naming it Weird Wayfaring.  Whenever it's done I'll post a link to a google drive document.

10 MONSTER SETTING

Another fun thing, there's a new entry in the 10 Monster setting:  https://savemycampaign.wordpress.com/2019/05/13/10-monster-setting/

I'm enjoying how this idea has picked up some steam.  For the complete list you can go here, and for the information about the idea here.

WRITING RAMBLE

Other than that, I've had a few random writing ideas that I've been working on, but I'm at the point of scraping some of them (as they are exciting me less than they were).  At some point I'd like to write down my small campaign world that I used for our old school group.  It may end up being a small hex crawl.  It was very traditional fantasy (almost high?).  You can read the play reports here.  "Shanes silly fantasy campaign".  This was the thought that ran thru my head last night when I couldn't sleep.  I always find when I'm having difficulty writing something to stop the big project, and work on a smaller project.  The problem becomes that I never finish the big project.  (honestly the list is endless! Remember when I was writing a mega dungeon LMFAO!).

BLUEHOLME 

There was a discussion on the Blueholme Mewe group regarding the following:

I know B/X is the bad boy on the block and S&W seems to be the OSR mainstay having long dethroned OSRIC.... I believe many of these recent Kickstarters are missing out by not using BlueHolme as the basis for their OSR product.

What is the roadblock? What can we do?

My personal thoughts on this are:

1.  Michael is an awesome cat and if you are looking for a license for Blueholme, look no further:  https://dreamscapedesign.net/compatibility-licences/

2.  There is always a "Flavour of the month" when it comes to the retro clone scene, there's not much to be done about it honestly.  Authors can take a more system neutral stance if they like (include ascending and descending AC for example).   I think part of the reason that S&W is so popular to write for is that you can pretty much use any module with it, without too much farting around.  (I'm currently running Isle of Dread with S&W Whitebox).

3.  I've done my best to try and bring attention to Blueholme, with the Baron series and Dusty Door.    I am unsure if my efforts have been met with resistance, or have fallen on deaf ears.  The possibility exists that some of the stuff I've written/worked on might be a little bit outside of the box.  That said I'll continue to write for Blueholme as I really enjoy it.  Specifically I really like writing for the Prentice Rules, because I find writing for 1st to 3rd level is very much in my wheel house.

Drama (or lack therof)

Last night, I fell down a rabbit hole of awful.  I went to a popular OSR blog site, read a post, then followed the rest of the conversation on fb and twitter (well one side of it).  It's human nature sometimes to read thru the drama.  In the end (after about a half hour of fucking around) I realized that I'm very happy that I'm seeing less drama nowadays from the circles that I spend time in. 

Partially the reason that I'm seeing less drama is that I've curated my mewe list better than my G+ list, and the fact that the OSR really did split completely when G+ died.  The only real issue I'm having nowadays is that I follow people on Twitter, FB, Mewe, Instagram and now discord! ACHK! I once again need to sit down and decide what the reason for my participation in social sites.  An example of this is I really need to trim down people on IG (because I see the same post on fb).  In all honesty I should delete IG.

Yup that got really rambly....

I hope you have a good day!

Deadly vegetation for the Isle of Dread!

I was thinking this morning that the Island needs some deadly vegetation, while browsing my blog roll this came up:  http://www.trollishdelver.com/2019/04/venom-vegetation-for-s-and-t.html

Which is perfect! 

I was originally thinking that I might go ahead and write up some monsters, but it appears it's already been done! WOOO!

An excellent place to find some monsters is the Swords & Wizardry SRD
http://www.d20swsrd.com/

Here are a few select monsters to add to the campaign from the S&W SRD

The Flytrap Shambler
The Assassin Vine
Cobra Flower

Here's my take on a few monsters:

Giant Venus Fly Trap: 
HD 4; AC 7 [12]; Atk 1 Mouth/bite (swallows) Damage: 1d6, Save 13; Move 0; AL N; XP 120; Special: Swallow whole*

*A Giant Venus Fly trap will try and bite its prey, on a successful attack it will do 1d6 damage, players are allowed a save, on a fail they are swallowed 2d6 damage.  If they are not rescued from the plant in 1d6 rounds they will perish. 








Creepers
HD 1; AC 9 [10]; Atk 1 vines Damage: 1d6, Save 17; Move 0; AL N; XP 15; Special: constriction*

Creepers will flail out with their vines causing 1d6 damage.  On a failed save a PC will be constricted by the vine, slowly squeezing them of their breath, they will receive 1d6 damage while constricted. 


The other thing I realized that I'm going to need are tropical birds, and apes, which will all probably be low HD type monsters.  My sorta standard is 1hd, AC 10, dmg 1d3 kinda thing.  Mostly just nuisances to the players. 

Oh and Insects! 
Hornet, Giant

Horsefly, Giant
Helix Moth
Mantis, Giant Praying
Mosquito, Giant

Isle Of Dread House Rules, and Great intro video

I found this great video introduction to the Isle Of Dread (and a pile of other awesome content on Mystara) 



I'm almost done my checklist, here's the last few things.
1.  Re-read the module and make some notes 
2.  Finish up the hirelings. 
3.  Obviously print a bunch of stuff. 
4.  Download the GM screen for Whitebox and pop it into google drive. 
5.  Re-create the tables in Isle Of Dread and stat all the monsters out for Whitbox (this will just make things easier). 
6.  Buy beer and invite people over. 
7.  Probably kill their characters. 

Here are my house rules for our upcoming Swords & Wizardry Whitebox game set within the Isle Of Dread. 

House Rules

• You will earn experience points for overcoming challenges, and for gold acquired.  Note that you don’t necessarily have to kill the monster to overcome the situation.  
• We are playing in an open world, which means that you can pretty much do anything.  Think outside the box and have fun! Obviously there could be consequences.
• At 0 hit points you are unconscious, at negative your level you must make a saving throw or die.  On a success you are returned to 0 hit points.
• Each character starts out with 2 luck points, these work the same way as inspiration and can be used to re-roll any dice.  
• After a fight, a player can bandage their wounds for 1d6 hit points.
• Consumables are important!  Don’t run out of food, torches, arrows!
• Each character will get one hireling (of the same class).  You will be responsible for this character, and in the case of things going sideways you will be asked to “check the morale” of the hireling.  They may flee. The hireling can be used as a backup character in the event of death.
• Every encounter (monster or otherwise) will have a reaction check, this means that not everything will attempt to kill you right away.
• Prior to rolling Initiative the players will state what their intentions are.  Initiative is handled by rolling 1d6 for each side (players and DM). No bonuses are added to the roll, and the players will take turns rolling initiative for the group.  In the case of a tie combat is resolved simultaneously.
• Ability checks are based on your ability check stat.  Ex a 5th level thief must roll over 10 on a d20. Ability modifiers can be added to the roll.
• Your attack bonus is added to your d20 roll, and your strength or dexterity modifier.  Only fighters add their modifier to damage. Ex d20+Attack Bonus+Dex Mod = To hit. 

    

A Review of Quake Alley Mayhem! for Gathox Vertical Slum

I was kindly given a copy of "Quake Alley Mayhem!" to review.  Here's the publisher blurb:

Enter a seedy underworld of alien hyper-capitalists and wondrous ancient artifacts with Quake Alley Mayhem! 

This murderous, misshapen module foists a host of traps, puzzles, and environmental hazards upon unsuspecting players in a race against time. Structured for both tournament and campaign play, Quake Alley Mayhem! includes pregenerated characters, supplements to track the party's progress and impending doom, and hooks to fit the adventure into a larger campaign.

Designed for 3 to 6 players of levels 1 - 3.  You can purchase the adventure here. 

This adventure was written & illustrated by David Lewis Johnson, Edited by Mike Evans (DIY RPG) and the layout was  done by Matt Hildebrand.  The adventure is intended for Gathox Vertical Slum, however it could be easily inserted into a home brew alien world with no problems (Following the review is the publisher blurb for Gathox Veritcal Slum).

GAWD I LOVE THE ART

The adventure is setup for campaign & tournament play, which includes a handy chart for tournament scoring.  The hook is straight forward, it focuses on a team of fresh gang members and their attempt to retrieve a artifact for their boss. The thing I really dig about this module, is there are no rooms in it that are empty.  Every room has a chance for roleplay, a fight, and or a deadly trap.  In other words this isn't a vanilla dungeon with safe words! This is partially because of the tournament aspect of the adventure. 

In my humble opinion the writing is solid and evocative.  The rooms with traps are different than your average type trap, the puzzles are fun.  The adventure is setup with a timer and the GM needs  to keep track of what is going on at all times, as some environmental hazards play a big part in what happens thru out.  This is a awesome mechanic.  There is even one specific room that is dedicated to slowing down the PCs and having them enjoy a little bit of side gaming.  Of course, the hazards don't stop right!  Excellent idea. 

Here's the cool thing about this module, it's totally DIY RPG.  All of the races, aliens, places, weapons and artifacts are all made up.  It's not your typical fantasy adventure, with fantasy creatures.  It's not your typical alien world either.  However you could easily run this adventure as a "gangs of Chicago" kinda thing no problem.  (Well with a little bit of tinkering).  Heck you could easily run this in a mutant future campaign.  

DAMN I DIG THE LAYOUT (LOOKS AWESOME ON MY 8" TABLET), SINGLE COLUMN CENTERED. 

The adventure takes place in a old mill/safe house.  There are three levels, and 18 action packed rooms!  Once again, easy to pop into whatever universe you are playing in. 

The nice thing about this adventure is that it comes with pregenerated characters on very cool hand drawn character sheets (note there is a blank copy in the back of the book).  The PC races give you a bit of insight into the world of Gathox.  Included are:   

Street tough, Martial master, Soldier, Cosmic doctor, spiritualist, faith healer, mutant.

The module also includes a handy death and dismemberment table, its a d10 table, and I'm printing a copy of of it for my GM screen (when I get to a place with printer, ie work).

Honestly this is a pretty cool adventure, and if you like your gaming a little gonzo alien awesome, I think this is absolutely perfect for you.  At the end of the book are a few campaign hooks, and a wonderful rumour table.  Both of which easily setup more adventures.  While the source book Gathox Veritcal Slum is not needed to run this adventure, I'd strongly recommend it, if anything just to have a bit more background information (also to support DIY RPG, cuz they put out some awesome shit). Of course reading the sourcebook will get you even further into the mood.  

Seriously cool adventure.   

Gathox Veritcal Slum

Welcome to Gathox Vertical Slum, a far out, gonzo science fantasy campaign setting for Swords & Wizardry White Box Edition and other classic tabletop role playing games.

Aliens, mutants, spellslingers, and hardened criminals struggle for dominance in a lawless city built upon the back of a wandering, world-hopping godling. Inside this tome you’ll find:
* A fully mapped and fleshed out Vertical Slum, stuffed to the gills with greedy factions, hook-laden NPCs, and seedy locations.
* A new gangland system for running domain-level games at level 1.
* 43 fully illustrated strange and inimical monsters to spring on unsuspecting players.
* New classes, skills, ability checks, hirelings, and gear for players to work their will across the mean streets of the Great Spire.
* A vertical dungeon introductory adventure to test the skills and resourcefulness of new and seasoned players alike.
* Over a hundred lavish interior illustrations by D.L. Johnson.
* Five pieces of interconnected chapter fiction contributed by Josh Wagner.

Beneath The Fallen Tower (SWCL) Review

Premise: Fifty years ago, a magician known as Melchior the Despoiler, rumored to be consorting with dark forces near the town of Southfork was investigated by a troop of militia and a priest... all of who returned from his tower as undead attempting to slay their own families. They were defeated, and after a petition for aid, the Duke lent the village his trebuchet and his men leveled the mage's tower. Shortly before this assault was mounted, Melchior’s apprentice Xander escaped with a few books, a wand and a magical blade.

Now that Xander has died. His apprentice, Aurelia, together with her henchmen, have returned to find the master's library. Unknown to them, goblins have been living in the ruins for 30 years...

You can grab it here for $2.00 (GM's Day Sale, regular $2.99) 

Beneath the fallen tower is written for Swords & Wizardry Continual Light, but is easily converted to any OSR type system.  The adventure is written fairly open ended, as a GM you could place it in your own home brew world without too much extra work.  The town where everything starts is called Southfork, and that could be just off the map, an explored section.  As well the adventure has a medieval feel, so keep that in mind when planning.  The premise of this adventure is pretty solid, you can easily create a bunch of rumours in the town of Southfork circulating about the wizard, and the line of apprentices.  The hero's are tasked with finding the son of a merchant.  The hope of course is that they stumble upon a bunch more bad guys, the tower, etc.  This adventure could easily be a few session thing.  Especially if the GM took some time to add in a few more things to do (according to the map).  Depending on which way the heroes end up going.  

The background for the adventure (the towns & world) is well thought out.  I would however have placed the section regarding the wizards tower earlier in the text, as it states "this is where the adventure takes place".  But all good.  The tavern is interesting, where the adventure starts.  There is a list of rumours and a table for how many true or false rumours you may receive.  This of course is a fairly typical but smart way of starting an adventure.  One thing I noticed is that the tavern is "fairly rat free" as far as the basement goes.  There's adventure right there! The actual town could have a bit more description as far as other stores.  Where do we buy weapons and armour? who can we sell our loot to? Once again easily figured out by a GM. 

Onward.  The hand drawn map detailing the surrounding area is cool, my only issue is that the text is a bit hard to read, although that is easily over come.  I would try and blow it up and bit, and throw a hex layer underneath for the sake of argument.  

I should note that this entire module is filled with great art, all of which are drawn by Denis Mcarthy (also the writer).  It's nice to see a product that is completely DIY, the writing, drawing, etc.  This is something I'd love to take a stab at, but my drawing is not really on point. 

Once the players find the son (and or lack thereof, I'm not ruining anything here) they will also notice that the ruins of the tower are fairly close to the sons position.  

The map of the ruins is pretty cool, hand drawn.  The actual dungeon is fairly straight forward, lots of monsters and some treasure.  A smart party will enter and re-enter the dungeon as many times as it takes to kill off monsters, and find any treasure.  And a smart GM will reload some of the monsters upon their return!  The dungeon has a few traps, and could be deadly for a party of 1st level adventurers.  As in most cases, if I was to run this I'd tweak the amount of monsters depending on the party.  Not that big of a deal. 

Overall this is a pretty cool adventure, straight forward.  As far as constructive criticism is concerned a layout job would make this adventure have a bit more eye candy.  (Which by the way I'd be totally up for!).  I read another review of this, in which the reviewer tore the whole thing apart, not linking to it though.  The text and descriptions of the dungeon could be expanded a bit, a few more sentences of description.  As well creating a gap between the player information and the GM information.  Obviously though an GM worth his or her salt can get this adventure going without an problem. 

This adventure is worth checking out, especially if you are looking for something to run for SWCL.  It could easily become a sandbox with a few other little adventures going on here and there.  As an example my Lizardmen of Illzathatch could be placed within the overland map no problem.  

Denis also does stock art, which you can check out here: http://drivethrurpg.com/browse.php?keywords=Denis+mccarthy&x=0&y=0&author=&artist=&pfrom=&pto=

And you can check out Denis's blog here: https://gwythaintny.wordpress.com/

Denis has playtested this adventure, and you can read about it here: https://gwythaintny.wordpress.com/2018/02/01/session-recap-of-beneath-the-fallen-tower-playtest-at-manhattan-minicon-3/  (which btw is friggin smart! We should all playtest our adventures!) 

I'd like to thank +Denis McCarthy for sending me a copy of this adventure!  If I ever get a old school group going again, this is something that I could incorporate.  And that's the thing about the OSR, you can grab little bits and pieces and just have a wonderful time. 

The Midderlands - A First Look

I've been thinking a lot about parallel universes lately.  As an example I recently had a conversation with +MonkeyBlood Design (Glynn Seal) about the Midderlands product that he has been working on.  Email parallel universes are even weirder, as part of the discussion was originally about the Midderlands, but then I turned it on him and said "hey man here are your interview questions".  It's very much the whole chicken and the egg thing.  So instead of posting about the Midderlands first, I posted the interview instead.  All of this might be the other way around in a different version of the universe.  Interesting note though, The Midderlands is based on a part of England where Glynn lives.

The Midderlands itself is a twisted, medieval-fantasy version of a region fifty-miles across centred on where I live in England.  It’s an S&W Complete-based, OSR, mini-campaign setting with bestiary of monsters/NPCs and race-classes, and a hex-map, and whilst it’s not a hex-crawl, it could be used as such as some hexes are described.

So I'm currently digitally pawing thru a copy of Midderlands (a current draft).  First thing that strikes me is an "OSR Mini Setting", second thing I notice is that its a 155 pages.

Things to note:  Weird shit happens in the Midderlands, The Gods are disinterested in the place (although they are aware of it).  There is a lot of wonderful tongue in cheek humour (which I absolutely adore).

Here's the run down of the coolness of this "mini" setting.  First off it's not mini whatsoever.  Just reading thru it I keep getting inspired, ever single page there is a nugget of something that makes me go "Yes! this would be cool!".  There's a whole section on the variety of fish in the Midderlands, there are places of interest, monsters, classes, random tables, detailed hex map locations and a included adventure.  Everything you want in a setting.  And not written in the typical boring setting style.

I'm going to say there's a good 40+ monsters in this book.

Glynn has a cool collection of tidbits, maps, images that are going to be used in the Midderlands, you can follow it here:  https://plus.google.com/collection/wJJXME 

As far as the humour is concerned, it's honestly the kind of stuff that I always giggle at.  I personally think that a lot of adventures and modules take themselves a little too seriously, and this is a welcome change.

Hex 1122 provoked some much needed Monty Python type discussions.  At the table I could see this one being super entertaining.  And honestly this is just a taste.  There is a lot of great stuff in the hexes.

As the draft stands now it is easily run-able as a setting, I am curious to see what the end result is going to be however.

The nice thing about it so far (I'm currently reading it) is that its one of those settings that you can go in and tinker under the hood.  I've often talked about my hate for the cannon of the Forgotten Realms, and how it feels like I'm destroying something, because so much has been written about it.

The Midderlands gives you more than enough ammo to get cooking.  And I can only guess that by the time it is done, there will be a helluva a lot more awesome.

The layout is fantastic, the art and maps are what you have come to expect from Monkey Blood Design.

Spying over the fence there is a conversation on Gee Plus about what Glynn would like to see in the final product, and if that happens (even if its a special edition) it's going to break new ground.

I can't wait for this one.  As I stated earlier, it's inspiring.  There is something on every page, whether its a graphic, a interesting line, or a cool table.

At this point obviously this is still in its draft form, but WOW I can't wait to run this.  I'm thinking what might be a fun mashup is to take the Midderlands (look at the map) and to the east put in "Pyramid Of The Lost King" from Genius Loci Games. 

All images contained in this post are copyright Monkey Blood Design (2017), all rights reserved.