Tag / fantasy

by guyeatsfood

Random Adventures : Tome of Adventure Design, 1st edition

I’m going to start my ‘reviews’ of random generators here, with the Tome of Adventure Design. After using this, I discovered a recently-released 2nd edition, but I’d already done the leg work with this one, so I guess a disclaimer is that I’ve done this using the 1st edition. On a quick glance at the 2nd edition they’ve tidied it up and added loads of extra bits to make it easier, so I’ll give that a go soon too; but this used the 1st edition.

As mentioned in the previous post, I’m interested in broad-brush strokes randomness; I don’t need individual detail (I’ll be using a tried and tested structure for that) but I do want some ideas to get me going. We’ve got a game of Shadow of the Weird Wizard, Rob Schwalb’s new-ish high fantasy game, booked in in a few weeks – so I thought I’d see what this threw up.

While you’re reading this, I should tell you about my Patreon. Patrons get access to content 7 days before they hit this site, the chance to request articles or content, and the chance to play in one-shot games, for a very reasonable backer level of £2 per month. If you like what you read, want to support the blog, and have the funds for it, please consider supporting here. Telling people about the blog, and sharing links/retweeting is much appreciated also – thanks!

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by guyeatsfood

Enter the Animus: Lessons from Assassin’s Creed

I’ve just finished a run through of the videogame Assassin’s Creed: Mirage, having a great time running, jumping, and stabbing through 9th century Baghdad as I uncovered a sinister conspiracy of “Templars” and, mostly, stabbed them all. It’s a great series of games that I’ve loved since it started – and it’s got loads of juicy stuff in it for TTRPG GMs to steal.

So, here’s a few things we can borrow from the Assassin’s Creed games. For this, I’m sticking to the more action-oriented ones, which Mirage harks back to – think Black Flag, Syndicate, and Unity – rather than Shadows, Origins, Odyssey, or Valhalla – which are much closer to actual RPGs.

While you’re reading this, I should tell you about my Patreon. Patrons get access to content 7 days before they hit this site, the chance to request articles or content, and the chance to play in one-shot games, for a very reasonable backer level of £2/$3 per month. If you like what you read, want to support the blog, and have the funds for it, please consider supporting here. Telling people about the blog, and sharing links/retweeting is much appreciated also – thanks!

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by guyeatsfood

Setting, Hillfolk, no-SR, and Adventures

I’ve been deep in game prep this week, ready for a double dose of Seven Hills and then Kraken over the Easter break. And so while I’m trying to get my head down and prep, I find myself getting pleasantly distracted by game stuff. Here’s what I’m thinking about at the moment.

While you’re reading this, I should tell you about my Patreon. Patrons get access to content 7 days before they hit this site, the chance to request articles or content, and the chance to play in one-shot games, for a very reasonable backer level of £2 per month. If you like what you read, want to support the blog, and have the funds for it, please consider supporting here. Telling people about the blog, and sharing links/retweeting is much appreciated also – thanks!

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by guyeatsfood

Five Room Dungeon Hacks, Part Two – Twisters

I’ve blogged before about the 5-Room Dungeon here, and why its structure needs a bit of help sometimes to make it really shine in one-shots. I’ve been thinking about it more lately – inspired by this post which talks about 5RDs being scene sequences instead of locations. That post was talking about location-based design… but I’m interested in scene-based design as well. So what can we do to hack 5RDs a bit more flexible and epic? We started by introducing Multiples – but now, we’re going to talk Twisters.

Not like this…

While you’re reading this, I should tell you about my Patreon. Patrons get access to content 7 days before they hit this site, the chance to request articles or content, and the chance to play in one-shot games, for a very reasonable backer level of £2 per month. If you like what you read, want to support the blog, and have the funds for it, please consider supporting here. Telling people about the blog, and sharing links/retweeting is much appreciated also – thanks!

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by guyeatsfood

Dungeoneering Done Differently

I’m prepping some location-based adventures for Unconventional GMs at the moment, including a game of the excellent His Majesty The Worm, and one of the many interesting bits of game design it has in it is a different approach to exploring dungeons.

It made me think of other interesting ways games structure exploring locations, and how we can rig together similar systems for other games. 

While you’re reading this, I should tell you about my Patreon. Patrons get access to content 7 days before they hit this site, the chance to request articles or content, and the chance to play in one-shot games, for a very reasonable backer level of £2 per month. If you like what you read, want to support the blog, and have the funds for it, please consider supporting here. Telling people about the blog, and sharing links/retweeting is much appreciated also – thanks!

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by guyeatsfood

Beware of the Cat! – Review: No Small Crimes in Lankhmar, for Dungeon Crawl Classics

A slightly different review post today, being a review of a short adventure published by Goodman Games for their Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar setting. As with all my reviews, this is play-informed; I ran the adventure last week at Kraken, with a total of six players. Curious patrons can find my pregens attached to this post – I wasn’t able to source a Lankhmar PC generator in the many excellent DCC websites, so you’re welcome to these!

In short, No Small Crimes is excellent, and offers many things that we can steal and adapt for a location-based one-shot.

While you’re reading this, I should tell you about my Patreon. Patrons get access to content 7 days before they hit this site, the chance to request articles or content, and the chance to play in one-shot games, for a very reasonable backer level of £2 per month. If you like what you read, want to support the blog, and have the funds for it, please consider supporting here. Telling people about the blog, and sharing links/retweeting is much appreciated also – thanks!

Patrons have also got the eight pregens and one-sheet of rules that I used to run this adventure below – if you’d like to try running it yourself, be sure to check it out!

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by guyeatsfood

Four Things About Daggerheart

Update: You can watch us play through the Quickstart, using v1.3 rules (so some slight tweaks to the content from what’s discussed below, and more in line with the final product) here.

I’ve had a chance recently to run the Daggerheart RPG quickstart a couple of times – the playtest rules are available at the link above, and contain far more than just the quickstart – and I thought I’d pick out a few things from it. For a first impression, to be clear, I think it’s really good – it does some things in a genuinely interesting way, and it’s a really good quickstart in terms of introducing both setting and system in a concentric way.

When this first landed, there were plenty of internet commentators giving their opinion of it – but as I’ve repeatedly said, we should judge games after playing them, not before – and for me Daggerheart is something I’ll definitely be picking up, and probably running a lot of. So, here’s four things I like about Daggerheart – specifically, the quickstart.

While you’re reading this, I should tell you about my Patreon. Patrons get access to content 7 days before they hit this site, the chance to request articles or content, and the chance to play in one-shot games, for a very reasonable backer level of £2 per month. If you like what you read, want to support the blog, and have the funds for it, please consider supporting here. Telling people about the blog, and sharing links/retweeting is much appreciated also – thanks!

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by guyeatsfood

The Clockwork Citadel – a one-shot for Fabula Ultima

I’ve been grooving on Fabula Ultima, a JRPG-style system with simple, flexible rules, since it released. As well as a nifty set of rules, it also has hands down the best quickstart I’ve ever seen, which takes players and GM through the rules, setting, and play culture of the game hand in hand and step by step.

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by guyeatsfood

Guiding the Ironlands – how to run Ironsworn as a One-Shot

Ironsworn, Shawn Tomkin’s RPG of dark fantasy with solo, guided, and GMless modes, is one of the most exciting releases to the hobby in recent years. With its sci fi sequel, Starforged, now established it’s beginning to get some decent play on the convention circuit – and it plays really well with a GM (in ‘guided’ mode) as well. So here are some tips if you want to get it to the table.

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