Time for a new game.

I want to run Luka’s Ultra Violet Grasslands again, but I just don’t quite understand his SEACAT engine, so I’m going to use Black Hack for that¹. We’re going to make a travelogue in the Vastlands!

Joshua and Emmett are now cattle ranchers, both seeking a quiet change in career for various reasons. They’re driving buggalo from Emerald City to the Porcelain Citadel

We had a Session Zero and talked about the kind of game the three of us wanted to take part in, and we all wanted something pretty chill.

1. Violence should be largely avoidable (minimal surprise ambushes!)
2. Not too grim (some of Luka’s flavour-text is being elided)
3. Enjoy the ride, we’re thinking of the Westerns we like and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintence

This was a game I played in rather than ran for once! It’s a published adventure in both The One Ring (and Adventures in Middle Earth) 1e, now updated to 2e. So unlike normal, I’ll skip the story.

In AiME it’s To Dungeons Deep in Erebor Adventures - for TOR 2e it’s been lowered in difficulty of enemies considerably, but otherwise is identical.

Thoughts

The good stuff:

• It’s great being in LotR again - I don’t know why I like playing games in Tolkein’s world. I guess it’s the fact that you can stitch in eurofantasy around the cracks and it’s pretty easy to cover things up. Or just quotes from the film!
• Stances add a bit of interest to combat, and encourage some Saxon shield walls. Characters can be in Ranged combat (or fleeing) or various levels of aggression in melee, effectively giving you 5e-style Reckless Attacks
• A bit less cruft than 5e (AiME), less hammering the square 5e peg into a round hole

The bad stuff:

TROIKA! It’s just fun to write down. The caps and the exclaimation mark are part of the name, even. It’s a silly game of nonsense lands and people and animals. I think of it as a less-complicated version of Hypertellurians - you don’t have a crazy selection of powers, or stat damage across three stats. Instead, scatter a couple of points across Skill, Stamina, and Luck, and then pick or roll a background. Backgrounds are things like Befouler of Ponds or Questing Knight rather than “urchin”. They give you some belongings and some skills; like spells or the ability to fight, scry, or dive. Like a very light class.

So, I had a single session to fill, and I thought this would be a perfect pick. I’ll just run a lightweight pointcrawl across a city for a bit, what can go wrong?

That’s what.

The blog has been pretty empty in 2022, as I’ve changed timezone and country, and not played many RPGs. But I’m getting slowly back into the swing of it again, and as I’m doing that I realised it’s the same time of year I’ve been writing what I want to play next. After two years of lockdown-triggered online experiments, the real world beckons.

So, compared to last year, I have finally run a session of TROIKA!, which does indeed turn out to be very silly. The others though, have not had any takers. The RPG players I’m meeting in person are much more keen on 5e, and that’ll be what I start playing again very soon. I’d very much like to play:

Here’s DELVE, which describes itself as a solo map drawing game. Clearly I have a theme of map drawing games, but the others have been co-op games and this one is not! It’s almost a turn-based city-builder.

(Whoops, forgot to publish this!)

Finally got round to playing Ex Novo! Like The Quiet Year, you’re telling the story of a settlement. This time though, that settlement can be large or small, and take place over many many years.

We ran it for a small town on the edge of a slightly-more-magical Roman empire.

Survive. Solve. Save. Pick one.

Back in August, I had a game of Mothership for the first time in ages. Mothership (MoSh) is a sci-fi horror game that leans strongly on the style of the Alien films. Humans have spread among the stars, but it’s grimy, dirty, and technology is fallible. Space is big and scary, but you have to put up with it, to earn some money from The Man. The character classes are Scientist, Android, Teamster, and Marine; and don’t need any explanation if you’ve seen the films.

I honestly thought I’d written about it on here, but I bought a lot of MoSh stuff in ZineQuest 1 when Pound of Flesh came out, and wasn’t writing up my experiences then. After a frenzy of games (and getting back into RPGs in general), Mothership took a back-seat for me. I think I travelled through Gartner’s hype cycle on it - I played a few different games of it in rapid succession. There’s a lot I like about it, but after a while it does feel unfinished, and some of the rules stack a bit messily for me. For example, each class typically modifies the behaviour of rolls for players around them. So if you’re playing this with a 5e mind to a balanced team¹

Very soon the promised final version is launching on Kickstarter and hopefully that will answer all the questions.

I ran The Haunting of Ypsilon 14. This blog will contain extensive spoilers! Also CWs for body horror and animal death.

I’ve seen people try to make healing more and more rules-light in their OSR games. No rolling of hit die. No “1HP per night”. No “well you need to have had at least an hour for your Short Rest”¹. Just heal, or die already.

Into The Odd has “five minutes and a glass of water” for healing temporary effects. And Wombat (among others) has proposed “eat/drink/rest makes you heal”. And I wondered how to make eating more interesting, without making it more complicated. How can we add some roleplay, rather than some roll-play?

So, about a year ago, I looked at what games I wanted to run next. I was pleased I wrote it at the time as it reminded me what I wanted to play, and I’m even more pleased now to go back and look at it again.

I have played from the list:

1. UVG. Admittedly, I didn’t play as much as I wanted, but I got a flavour of it, and of the SEACAT engine. I still want to run this, but it can only be as a campaign; I just don’t see the interest in a one-shot. To me that’s a SEACAT one-shot, not a UVG one. In fact, I’m very interested in using Into the Grasslands to use ItO instead of SEACAT.
2. Hypertellurians! A few times. I really like the setting but, like a lot of OSR, I find it very difficult to balance. I keep an eye on settings for it, but even the official Mottokrosh ones seem to have terribly difficult enemies to fight. Mind you, I always end up making games too easy…
3. Beak, Feather, and Bone. It’s a bit like The Quiet Year, but with more birds.

Finally got around to playing this! The description from the website is better than I could write.

Beak, Feather, & Bone is a collaborative worldbuilding tool as well as a competitive map-labeling RPG. Starting with an unlabeled city map, players are assigned community roles before taking turns claiming and describing locations. Players draw from a standard 52-card deck to determine a building’s purpose and then describe its beak (reputation), feather (appearance), and bone (interior). As buildings are claimed, a narrative for the town and its inhabitants emerges, including major NPCs and shifting power-dynamics.

It’s designed to be played in person, but I’m still playing online¹. Unlike The Quiet Year, it does not encourage playing in silence, and the map is already drawn. There’s also no events occurring, any timeline would grow from natural RP.