Spider Queen

[To the tune of Paula Cole  "Where have all the cowboys gone?" ] I was a little surprised at the end of my last Swords and Wizardry campaign to find that, among the surviving characters, there were no fighters. I don't think this was because of the survivability of fighters (or fighting-men and -women, or what have you), since the other classes had the same rate of attrition or greater. Rather, I think it speaks to a player preference. However, speaking diplomatically, I think it's a preference that runs slightly against the grain of old-school play. Put slightly more bluntly, I think it's a little misguided, and I would like to try and correct it. 🕷 Frankly, there's a sort of perception that the fighter is the boring class of the available options. This is kind of understandable. Mechanically speaking, swinging a sword in old school D&D is kind of flat; you roll a d20, and if you're a fighter you get a slightly better chance than everyone else to hit...

Let's talk about Traveller. Part of the reason I've not been updating the blog is that I've refocused my energies on a new campaign. I've always wanted to run a Traveller game - something about the setup of the rulebooks just inspires me, especially with regards to the little black books of Classic Traveller. Traveller seems, in some respects to be exactly set up for the on-and-off, open table sandboxes I've come to love (and in some ways not, but that's probably another post). But I've clearly drunk too much of the OSR DIY Kool-Aid - the idea of setting my campaign within an already established setting with lots of details doesn't spark my imagination like the idea of coming up with something of my own, tailored to my tastes (and stealing liberally from my favourite sci fi authors). Building a sci fi setting for adventuring in, though, is a different job of work from building a fantasy milieu. And that's what I want to discuss today. Specifically, I...

Continuing with a mini series of posts, I guess (first one here ) rethinking classic baddies in a way that makes them more interesting than might be assumed. Title is a reference to this essay . [Edit: I actually wrote this post before seeing this related video , but a friend since recommended it to me, and I pass that recommendation on here.] 🕷 Orcs, now... everybody knows about orcs. They're the bogies used to scare children, they're the ones as get blamed or cursed when a sheep goes missing. They're the evil race, as everyone knows, eh? Well, you think you know about orcs. But let me tell you, child, what you think you know isn't half the truth. The evil race... hah! Orcs aren't a race, and they aren't a kindred either - don't you get smart with me, kid! It's understandable folks would make the mistake - reasonable folks don't have a word for what they are. But pull up a seat and I'll tell you. The secret is, orcs aren't born evil, and th...

Bit of a change of pace from usual programming, but fun nonetheless. I recently completed a project that's been brewing for a while: Scratchbuilding a science fiction desert settlement out of junk. Making your own Mos Eisley facsimile seems to be one of those bucket list items for sci fi wargamers - a project everyone wants to get round to eventually. And 'eventually' is the key word here: I've had some of these cardboard boxes and yoghurt pots sitting around in my materials box for years! Reading up on Chris McDowall's The Doomed  and trawling Magpie and Old Lead  gave me the inspiration to finally sit down and start gluing and painting. Witness some of the results below. Some quick notes on methods I used: I built all of this in 15mm scale. I actually started collecting sci-fi in 15mm specifically so I could more easily build terrain like this. And it is a lot  easier - I don't even know how much time and effort it would have taken to try to churn out the same...

Intro An era has just ended. For two full years - since roughly September 2022 - I have been running a regular open table sandbox campaign in Swords and Wizardry. We aimed at meeting weekly, and probably averaged a game about every 2-and-a-bit weeks across the two years, taking into account small periods away and substantial periods of regular attendance. This was, without qualification, the best campaign I have ever personally been involved with. Testimonials from players confirm this. The core group was made up of a mix of 5e veterans and completely new players, all of whom had an amazing time right up until the end of the last session - 7.5 hours of continuous play - and the final folding up of the GM's screen. All things must come to an end (credit: Nicolas Delort ) The campaign represents a honing of my own techniques for running games, and the culmination of a process of refinement, of setting up a campaign to reflect what I personally want out of a game, and what I view as ...

I recently changed my mind on the big tentpole dungeon. A dominant (if not necessarily the dominant) playstyle in the OSR is the wide-open sandbox. Players usually start as nobodies exploring a frontier beyond which is an unknown, depopulated wasteland, usually brimming with adventure sites and treasure. Taking a cue from Keep on the Borderlands, a lot of these homebrew campaigns seem to feature a dungeon that stands out from the rest. It's usually bigger than other adventure sites, and accordingly features hallmarks of megadungeon play, such as faction interaction (although it doesn't strictly have to be a megadungeon). The idea is that, while the party might discover other adventure sites, this is the one they keep coming back to and chipping away at little by little, as a mainstay of the campaign. This is the tentpole dungeon. I've been aware of the concept of the tentpole dungeon for a while, but I never really got on board. It felt more organic to me to have lots of a...