sneak peek: Chthonic Codex. Btw, the hiatus is gone

First, click on the image and get the Chthonic Codex sneak peek. It’s going to come out later on this year for both Adventure Fantasy Game and Swords & Wizardry. You types that play Labyrinth Lord, Lamentations of the Flame Princess, Blueholmes and Neoclassic Geek Revival will be able to pick it up and use it very easily too.

Second, the hiatus has ended. There’s been some soul-searching, and some finding as well. So, thanks everybody for your support. Your words helped.

And now a small update on production.

• Adventure Fantasy Game: I decided to go through another round of revision for R7. We are 40 pages from the end. The printer turnaround for this is going to be short once I stop freaking out about all the details. On the plus side, it’s going to be much better than the first printing. And if you bought the first printing already, by now you should have received the new PDF, and remember that you’ll get free upgrades a discount of 4.50£ on every future AFG core book purchase. If you want the new files, write me at tsojcanth+RPG (at) gmail.com
• Pergamino Barocco: the printer broke again. I should have the first proof Thursday. I have no words to say how sorry I am. This project seems to have gone wrong in every possible way. 
• Chthonic Codex: It’s taking time. But it’s coming together. I’m quite satisfied with the writing at the moment.

Adventure Fantasy Game Spellcasting: how I (re)learnt to love undeads, but not that way, and considerations

Spellcasting in Adventure Fantasy Game differs quite a bit from your run-of-the-mill OSR game, and from other systems too. The closest is Roger’s, and that’s because we had a long chat about them back in the day. How is it different from traditional D&D spellcasting?

First, there’s no split between divine and arcane magic. I’m not sure of the reasons that led Gygax to split spell lists, but i suspect none of them are good. Moreover, the concept of clerics getting more spells with levels instead of by increasing the standing in front of their gods is a bit fishy. It seems as if there were no gods but instead the spells came from the cleric inner powers… exactly like magic-users. This change did not break the game.

Second, it’s mana based, but each spell can be cast only once a day. This allows each spell to costs one mana point, simplifying the system a lot, while making actually harder to play casters. Difficulty is moved from “what should I memorize today?” and “is this the right moment to cast Sleep?” to a broader “I have no idea if I should cast now and what”, simply because every spell is a unique life-saving snowflake. It’s possible to cast a given spell a second time using items called fetishes: grab a fetish, spend one mana, a specific spell goes off. A fetish can be used once a day. There are also Mana Vessels which store a mana point; full vessels can power spells up to a given level and need to be recharged by a caster. Also, very importantly, each caster has access to all his spells all the time, so even very narrow-use spells see play instead of laying forgotten and unmemorized in musty tomes. This means that even bad spells are used a lot: Giving the Gift of Life, a level 0 spell that heals 1d6 hits at the cost the same amount of temporal hits to the caster, is seen by casters’s players as a warm, fuzzy, nostalgic kick in the groin.

Third, everybody can cast level 0 spells, provided they can somehow get one measly mana.Rolling a high Spirit is an option, grabbing a full mana vessel is another. The concept is that your level-zero auntie did really cast spells and sung those zombies back to the grave and could read any language. Your non-caster PC might not know spells yet, but fetishes are moderately common and teaching rules are kindly provided. Now, finding an equally kind teacher is a completely different topic.

Fourth, every single caster seems to be a little necromancer that could. Possibly because players love pets in RPGs. Possibly because necromancer want to be fiddling with corpses. Possibly because the equivalents of “charm undead”, “animate but not control a skeleton” and “animate a skeleton” can be respectively cast by a caster of level 0, 1 and 2. The first two can be of course combined (but the control spell costs 1 mana a day to upkeep), while the last one costs 50 coins in components. This does not stop low level casters from keeping a few skeletons around “just in case”. This, of course, might bother the peasants and burgers. Which is one of the reasons why casters live out in the sticks. It’s also a useful way of recycling discarded armour. This early undead proliferation is interesting because it directly impacts on the setting: low level mages will exhume corpses from graveyards and will have a small group of fanatical undead goons protecting them, if they can find the money. Some of you will cringe at the thought of game balance suffering from this: don’t. The Original Tilean Murderhoboes are masters at breaking everything, but this did not break the game. Instead, ponder the implication of low-level necromancy on your campaign world.

Fifth, it’s not just the system, it’s a whole different spell ecology. All the 80+ spells are new, the first purely offensive spell is cast at level 2, and there are a grand total of 8 damaging spells in the whole manual. There’s no Sleep spell. Hell Gate, the closest thing to Fireball, opens a gate to hell spouting raging flames, possibly gating in uncontrollable demons. Casters in AFG are not there to dish tons of damage but to do what mere mortals cannot: bend reality with words.

Comments and discussions here

Kinda new Class! And news! Sages and the Way of Knowledge! And Chtonic Codex soundbites!

Chthonic Codex is going to be many things: a lot of full page illustrations, monsters and weird magical stuff. Let’s say something less known: it’s going to be a proper campaign setting too.

It’s going to be delivered in ways usually not trodden by settings books: written in character by a dude in the setting. The book is going to be statted for AFG (get yourself a copy here) but compatible with other OSR games (I suggest Swords & Wizardry Whitebox or Lamentations of the Flame Princess, but they’re pretty much swappable unless you’re in New Feierland).

And the PCs will typically be Casters attending classes at a College. Taking inspiration from my experience at Glasgow University Postgrad school, with the liberal addition of magic, reckless experimenting, bad politics and environments even more hostile than Western Scotland, Chthonic Codex will be the Murderhobo’s Vademecum to School of Magic

Don’t think of wand-wielding Warner Bros brats.

Think:

FLAILSNAILS VISITS MAGIC ACADEMY, TORCHES LABS, CRASHES PARTIES

Anyway, sometimes you want a knowledgeable PC that is not really a caster. Ivan Sorensen from the Daily OSR Fix (it’s good! visit it!) came up with the Loremaster, a new Labyrinth Lord compatible class. After asking his permission I swiped the class and punched it in the face until it complied to my bidding.

Because sometimes you just want to play a smartass nerd that thinks that Casters are posers and hipsters and “pretend erudites”. They need magic because they don’t trust their knowledge.

Anyway, here’s the Chthonic Codex version of Ivan’s class. In case you wonder, a Tier is a group of three levels: Tier 1 is level 1 to 3, Tier 2 is level 4 to 6, up to Tier 4.

Sages: the Way of Knowledge

Characters who embark on the Way of Knowledge are known as Sages. The Way of Knowledge focuses on reading and copying gigantic piles of books. Also by listening to knowledgeable people taking a whole lot of notes. Sages may be scribes, historians, librarians, bards or even scientists. Sages roll 1d6 to determine Hits for each level gained in the Way of Knowledge and can use medium armours.

Extreme Literacy

Sages can write at the same speed as they can speak, and can read four times as fast. When copying spells Sages don’t need to learn the spell beforehand and treat the level of the spell as reduced by 1 per Tier in the Way of Knowledge, and they never fail.

Utter Love for the Written Form

Sages may decipher foreign or ancient languages. Roll a 5MORE with a modifier of -1, plus a +1 per Tier in the Way of Knowledge. Test the first time the language is encountered, and if successful, the character may add it to his character sheet. It’s possible to re-attempt failed languages once a new Tier in the Way of Knowledge is gained and the character is exposed to that language again.

I Read it in a Book

When examining a magical item, Sages may identify it. Roll as per Utter Love for the Written Form: if successful, the caster will know some vague detail about the item and might gain additional insights from further examination. After 1 hour more of study attempt another roll: if successful, the item is fully identified and its powers revealed.

I didn’t just study Calligraphy

Sages may learn spells and even cast them from fetishes. Each level in the Way of Knowledge counts as a level in the Way of Magic for casting purposes only. The Way of Knowledge does not grant spells or mana.

Death by Culture

Culture doesn’t hurt, but could make you a more formidable opponent. When encountering an unknown monster, roll as per Utter Love for the Written Form: if successful the sage can determine one ability, immunity or vulnerability of the monster.

Lore Best Forgotten

Sages are completely immune to negative effects of written magical items, such as manuals, glyphs, cursed scrolls or loss of sanity, dismissing them as cultural garbage with extreme snobbery and prejudice.

New Releases: Kefitzah Haderech – Incunabulum of the Uncanny Gates and Portals – Adventure Fantasy Game R7

As previously mentioned quite a few times, Me and Albert wrote a book on portals and dimensional gates. It’s mostly system agnostic, so if you play Everway it will be useful too.

Now Kefitzah Hadereach - Incunabulum of the Uncanny Gates and Portals is ready.

It covers portal topics like why are portals cool?, what should I do with them? and how do I build them? and a small “Appendix N” about inspiring portal-enabled media.

It also comes with a muleload of tables to generate portals and everything related, including PORTATRON, the one-stop-system of portal generation.

KHIotUGaP (not an official acronym) also contains The Infamous d666 Quick Portal Destination Table, which does what it says on the tin. Because we wanted to have a d1000 table and have the longest OSR table as some kind of joke, but then we realized that 216 portal destinations ought to be enough for everybody.

32 A5 pages in black and white. Available on the Lost Pages webshop in both PDF+Source and Print+PDF+Source. The print version will be shipped next week.

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE.

While you are at the shop, the new version of Adventure Fantasy Game just came out of the LaTeX compiler. This is the seventh revision of the handbook, it fixes a whole lot of problems with the first printing. 108 pages A5 in black and white, plus a colour map. Available on the Lost Pages webshop in both PDF+Source and Print+PDF+Source. The print version will be shipped next week too.

Welcome to the Uplands!

My two last campaigns (the Original Tilean Murderhobos one, is still running), are very much about the Uplands.

The uplands can be easily described as a mix of Switzerland and Scotland, cooked in an abundant bath of the Original Fantasy Fuckin’ Sauce and blatant disregard for history and pretty much anything else.

So, taking the Witch Valley road north from Bogfort, after a couple of days, you’ll get to Witch Pass.

Over the Witch pass, these are the landscapes. Valleys…

Uplands…

Mountains…

Glaciers…

 

And then the Harga. The Harga is a subglacial volcano close to the Upland Court, the Heart of the Fatherland. Actually, the Harga has been sleepy and dormant for the past 20000 years. So the picture below is only a hypothetical case in case one of the players manage to make it erupt. I long for the day.

The locals mostly survive on mining, some agriculture and cattle and cheese exports.

The local build mostly with stone and timber, depending on what’s cheap in the area.

More details later…

Do you want hemorragy with that? Critical Hits for OSR games (including AFG, of course)

Going to 0 hits and dying is not fun. What’s fun is losing an arm or an eye instead and play a crippled PC that will live fantastic adventures while become more and more crippled.

So, your hits don’t go below 0 and PCs function fine with 0 hits. But anytime hits go below zero, tally the amount and use it as a modifier on the Internal Organs Are Supposed To Be Internal Table. Damage taken is cumulative for the table, but of you play a game where damage is more than, say, B/X, halve the modifier. AFG effects are in parenthesis.

Staggered is a status characters can suffer from criticals. A staggered character rolls an extra d6 on the IOaStbI Table, can’t act and defend at -3 (-1 FC).

Internal Organs Are Supposed To Be Internal Table (1d6+damage)

1. you can’t roll a 1. Stupid WYSIWYG editor. ignore this entry.
2. Cut or bruise. Will leave a scar or permanent bump.
3. For some reason you let your weapon fall off your grasp. That sucks.
4. Badly unbalanced. Staggered for 1 round.
5. Your weapon arm is broken/badly cut. Next time dodge instead of using it as a cover for your head. -3 to hit (-1 FC) for a month.
6. Face blow. You see the stars even from within a dungeon. Staggered for 1d6 rounds. If you have a full face visor, instead SAVE or staggered 1d6 rounds. In any case, SAVE or lose an eye.
7. There is a gap in your ribcage. Blood is coming out. YOU BE A DEAD MURDERHOBO. (it’s here to allow insta-death on 6 damage)
8. Crotch. Yow. Staggered for 2d6 rounds. SAVE or lose your bits.
9. Hit square on the head. If you have a helmet, SAVE or staggered 1d6 rounds. Else, SAVE OR DIE. If you save get a nice scar on your face and lose: 1d6: 1: an eye 2:an ear 3:nose 4:part of skull 5:jaw 6:tongue.
10. There goes your (1d6: 1, 2: leg, 3,4:arm 5:head 6: torso), smashed or cut off. If this doesn’t kill you, you are going to collapse in 1d6 rounds. After, SAVE OR DIE anyway.
11. An internal organ becomes external. That’s does not bode well. SAVE OR DIE. If you save, staggered for 3d6 rounds and you lose half of your Constitution and your max hits are halved. By the way, if from now on you drink or carouse, SAVE OR DIE.
12. Blood. Blood spraying everywhere. Everywhere it should not be, at least. And it’s yours. SAVE OR DIE each of the next 1d6 rounds, then collapse for 1d6 hours.
13. Hemorrhage like a pro, internal if blunt damage. SAVE OR DIE each round for the next 2d6 rounds.
14. or more. YOU DEAD DAWG. In a horrible way. Like, your belly is open, your bowels fall out, someone trips over them and sprays blood and gore everywhere. Or you explode.

Comments here.

PS: This blog didn’t get much TLC in the past month because, well, I haven’t been running games. No game, no blog.

PPS: I’ll test them tonight.

PPPS: testing went fine

Adventure Fantasy Game: SOLD OUT! and another AFG-R7 illustration

Adventure Fantasy Game is sold out. Gone. I thought it would take me a couple of years to sell the first print run, but it took six months. I might have one or two copies in a pristine state kicking about, but I’m not sure.

If you are interested in a copy email me and I’ll let you know If I can find one. Obviously the PDF is still available, and it’s possible to preorder the new release from the website.

The good news is that AFG-R7 (AFG seventh revision) needs only a little bit of layout TLC before shipping. R7 will be laid out on a handier A5 instead of A4, with new illustrations made by Chris Stanley, the illustrator of the upcoming Chthonic Codex. Like the one below, gracing the new MOSTROTRON pages.

The page count is now at 108 pages instead of 64, due to the smaller page size and the much improved layout.  Except for corrections content is going to be essentially the same, with a few additions like the Way of the Arts, improved Starting Equipment tables and potentially more. Potentially because I don’t want AFG to become a Big Game: I’d rather keep it sleek and relegate additional content to this blog and other books.

As per use, comments on Google Plus.

On age and time pressure in domain games. Or: the OSR Lurgie Table

Getting old kind of sucks and life’s most annoying way to let you know you’re getting old is to make your body fall apart. Age in D&D traditionally means falling stats. Stats falling with time gives players a sense of urgency, especially during domain play. It’s fine to spend a few years breeding horses, raising kids, researching spells and skill at arms and blogging, except when you’re not happy about time passing.

Every winter after the 1d6+30th each PC follows the following steps:

1. Roll on the Lurgie table. The stat in the second column drops by one permanently because of the condition in the third column.
2. Roll a d6:
   1. On a 4 or more, get back to step 1. I know, it sucks, but the alternative to age is an early death.
   2. On a 3 or less, you’re happy with not getting even worse.
3. Roll two dice:
   1. If the result is equal or over your Physique or Constitution or 12, you get the serious lurgie: roll again on the Lurgie table to find which one. That stat takes 1d6 damage, but you recover 1 point per month. A medic can roll on medicine to halve the damage (round up).
   2. if the result is under your Physique or Constitution, you’ll probably see the next spring unless you starve or the orcs/them foreigners get you.

If at any point any of your stats is 2 or less, you’re bedridden. At 0 you’re DEAD. If your hits get to 0, you’re bedridden, under 0 you’re DEAD.

This is the Lurgie table for AFG.

1d6	stat affected	condition
1	physique	consumption/stroke
2	craft	drink/senility
3	spirit	evil eye/nerves
4	take 1 negative additional hit	palsy/tremors
5MORE	NO LOSS	you’re fine!

And this is the Lurgie table for D&D and other OSR games. In these games the stat loss is secure instead of having a 50% chance because it has twice as many stats compared to AFG. There’s no direct hit point loss but a drop in Constitution will lower your HP.

1d6	stat affected	condition
1	Strength	stroke
2	Intelligence	senility
3	Wisdom	nerves
4	Dexterity	palsy
5	Constitution	consumption
6	Charisma	evil eye

As per use, comment on Google Plus.

Domain Game 101: Horsebreeding Rules

Passing the holidays in Milan means, to me, playing a lot. In the past week I ran 5 sessions of 5-6 hours each and PCs gained land and title. There’s a lack of small scale OSR rules for domains so I started using Chris’s Feudal Anarchy rules. One of my players realized that horses are expensive and decided to start horsebreeding.

I made some rules to support it because I think it’s an interesting downtime activity, it’s appropriate for a knight bachelor and destriers are awesome, mean, have 4HD and fight with hooves and a big chip on their shoulder. By the way, I have zero experiences with horses. I have vague memories of riding a mule for about 10 meters when I was 5 though, so a casual wikipedia browsing gave me enough information to build some rules. I can only claim that these rules please us, but not any kind of realism or clue.

Most importantly horses in general allow characters in heavy armour to outrun opponents. Wearing heavy armour or not ought to be an important choice in fantasy RPGs and the whole “can’t outrun opponents in heavy armour” is a big, big problem. In AFG this usually means death for either fighters left behind as the rest of the group falls back or for the fighters’ unarmoured comrades that don’t flee when they can. Horses give you mobility.

The following rules use super-easy 5MORE mechanics. Furthermore all hit dice below are d6s: if you prefer using d8 increase all end-of-development thresholds accordingly. Note that “level 2 horse” means that the horse saves and fights as an animal or monster of level two.

Horsebreeding Rules

Mares are usually receptive in spring and summer (two seasons). If there is a stallion (adult male) available mares (adult females) can try to conceive, roll once per season a Conceiving roll, succeeding on a 5MORE.

Then, for each of the three following seasons, try a 5MORE Pregnancy roll with a +1: on a failure pregnancy results in a stillbirth. If all rolls so far have been successful 11 months after conception the mare will give birth to the cutest little foal ever.

The foal will start at 1HD. Roll the hits at birth: of course it won’t have all these hit points as soon as it gets out of the womb, but we’re going to use hits to track horse development until their fourth year, when development ends.

From the second year rules change depending on the two parents’ level. The types are Rouncey (lvl 2), Courser (lvl 3) and Destrier (lvl 4).

Rounceys: add 1 hit during the second year, then 1d6-1 hits during the third year. At the end if the third year if the horse has at least 11 hits it become a Courser, otherwise a Rouncey.

Coursers: add 1d6 during the second year and 1d6 during the third year. At the end if the third year if the horse has at least 15 hits it will become Destrier, if it has 6 or less a Rouncey, otherwise a Courser.

Destriers: add 1d6+1 during the second year and 2d6-1 during the third year. At the end if the third year if the horse has 11 hits or less it will become a Courser, otherwise a Destrier.

If horses of different types mate, treat the offspring as inferior type but add 1 hit at the end of development.  If a Destrier mates with a Rouncey, roll development as a Courser.

An horsebreeder can follow up to 10 horses and can aid horse development three times each season: in case the character is not pleased with one of the above rolls for their horses a Horsebreeding 5MORE test can be rolled. If successful the horse can re-roll and keep the best result except for Pregnancy rolls.

Mares Special Attributes

In addition to any other horse quirks that your system supports, roll 1d6 for each of the following attributes. On a 1 the mare has that attributes, but don’t tell that to the player until it’s evident.

Twin-conceiver: this mare has a 50% chance of conceiving twins.

Late estrus: the mare is receptive also in autumn.

Fertile: +1 to Conceiving roll, +1 to Pregnancy rolls.

All comments here on Google Plus.

Western League: here’s your manor in the Uplands

My Milan group finally managed, two sessions ago, to get land and title, by the way of sheer guts and being possessed by a malignant weapon. I don’t really do session recaps but I’m willing to give it a try.

As it often happens in RPGs, it all started by doing dirty work for the High Chief Karl of the Upland Court. A tribe of headhunters riding terrorbugs (flying purple scarabs armed with claws dripping with psychoactive poison) was killing his villains and prized cows and he wanted the tribe wiped off the face of the earth. The whole setup (and more) is described by the adventure/sandbox/minisetting at the end of the Adventure Fantasy Game handbook. So, spoiler alert.

*  *  YO, I WROTE SPOILER ALERT * *

One day a small part of the group (Schroedinger the Fighter, Kalibek the Engineer and Winston Moretti the Warlock) decided to put an end to the headhunter problem: Chief Karl sent them eastward, beyond the Harga volcano, telling them to look around the area for heads on poles.  After exploring the area they found a hill riddled with tunnels. but while deciding how to act they were attacked by a cannibal hunting party going back to their den. The immediately blew into a horn to raise the alarm, and the small skirmish soon escalated to a slaughter as more headhunters and terrorbugs (often acting as flying mount for headhunters) joined the combat.

Winston, during the fight, killed a bug rider and managed to take control and ride the giant insect, but as he struggled to take control of the bug the tide of battle was pushing against the players, so they decided to fall back. While running away Schroedinger got bit by another bug, failed the save and, due to the psychoactive bug poison, terror paralyzed him. An airborne Winston arrived, dispatched the bug, lifted Schroedinger and flew away. Meanwhile Kalibek was safely running like the wind in the thick woods. Then Winston noticed the fighter was wielding Nautilus and the penny dropped.

Yeah, this is the illustration for Nautilus. It will show up in the second print run of AFG.

Nautilus, the malevolent cephalopod spear, is known to throw itself at enemies it wants dead by draining mana from his wielder, only to reappear in his grasp a moment later. So Winston touched Nautilus felt his magical energy drained by the weapon, which propelled itself against a chasing enemy, killing him, only to reappear in his grasp a second later. Turning back and letting the frenzied spear feed on his mana to throw itself again and again against the few remaining savages, the tide of battle turned once again, this time with the PCs winning!

In the following melee Winston got bitten by another terrorbugbug and succumbed to its terrifying paralyzing poison. Everything seemed lost, but Nautilus possessed him! Winston became frenzied, killed the remaining enemies and then blew the cannibals signaling horn again, hoping to summon more victims. Ten more came out with bows and spears, followed by a dozen kids with daggers and stones, wanting blood. Incapable or unwilling to outrun the savages the party stood their ground and killed all of them.

Winston then, and it’s uncertain whether the possession was still ongoing, piled the corpses, put the party’s Idol of Cthulhu on the pile and then all the party together supplicated and prostrated themselves in front of the God’s effigy. Their prayers were heard, as their wounds started to close and their pain to ease off.

Then they left for their camp and came back the next day, blew the horn again and were challenged by the chiefs and their kids, all riding terrorbugs, 12 riding as many in total. The savages had nowhere else to go and the first snows were approaching, so they tried a desperate last assault to save their ancestral home. At the end all the headhunters were slain, the bugs driven away and their ancestral home plundered.

So, yeah, that’s how you get a manor* from a lord: by killing hallucinogenic bugs and scores of men, women and kids. Because if someone has enough guts and disregard for decency to do that, you’ll end up being a very good knight that does not question orders.

All comments here.

[*]: actually a tower in the middle of a valley linking the Uplands with the Western League. With a big hole in the wall. And a hungry giant living inside.