tag: table

Opening illustration to "The Cloud Kingdom", drawn by Charles Robinson I’m currently running a Ultraviolet Grasslands campaign, and like every other campaign I run, I’m really focussed on making the weather a big part of it. Just travelling should be a challenge — not the greatest challenge in the game — but not a literal walk in the park. I want the party hunting for dry firewood, or stuck at a swollen river, or so cold they can’t face breaking camp. Not every single day, obviously, but an “encounter” for me doesn’t have to be “kill a thing that’s appeared with suspicious regularity”. ...

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? Dinner is served ...

Jim Parkin likes making and playing very streamlined games. Really, very very streamlined games. He’s into the idea of free kriegsspiel (FK) feeding back into RPGs (the FK revolution, FKR) and summarises it well. This goes past OSR’s “rulings not rules”, and could be encapsulated as “why have the rules? Just talk through the action and agree what should happen”. This requires trust at the gaming table (no /r/rpghorrorstories), and (I personally think) a bit of confidence for the Referee....