Spider Queen

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...

Sometimes you have an interesting exchange on Reddit that sets your mind working. I had such an exchange recently regarding the concept of being time-rich, and how classic editions of D&D, right back to OD&D itself, assume you have a lot of time on your hands - something that, in the modern world, is increasingly not the case. 🕷 A lot of things in the old systems only make sense when viewed from a certain point of view. Here, the point of view is that of a young wargamer in the mid-70s. You're fairly affluent, and your job doesn't impinge too much on your leisure time - apart from fantasy and sci-fi paperbacks, and the occasional late-night movie marathon, there aren't a lot of demands on your attention. This is the perfect environment within which to become obsessed with the brand new game of Dungeons & Dragons that someone just came up with. The old editions assume a similar environment for their players. OD&D in particular assumes that you'll have a ...

I think we think about adventures and hooks wrong. It struck me recently, when writing about illusionism , that we use hooks all the time in games where they really aren't warranted - we use hooks to disguise the buy in for a game in the narratively-focused style, trying to make it appear as a sandbox. Let me explain. A lot of narrative-focused campaigns (I even want to say "most") start with a quest hook: Someone comes up to you in a bar and gives you a quest, or bandits attack the town, or you get a message saying that the king is dying, would you mind awfully blah blah blah. By "narrative-focused", I mean campaigns where the GM has prepped a plot they want the PCs to follow - not a bad structure in and of itself, as I'll discuss. But these campaign openers annoy the hell out of me, because they're empty scenes: They look like they have some meaningful choice in them, namely the choice to take the quest or not, but there isn't actually a decision h...

I've been having ideas left and right for stuff that I want to write about, and spilling out words onto the page, but in the tangle of offshoots and cul de sacs that follow, the bolder ideas have been getting lost in the murk. If you want to hear me ramble on at length about something very few people will really care about, you can read my doctoral thesis when it's done. So I've cut about 75% of this post (no really), to focus on what I want to talk about. What I want to talk about is war stories. You see, ttrpgs are all about stories - no duh. But there are two types of stories (at least in trad gaming) as I see it. I call these "narratives" and "war stories". A narrative is what you get when a GM sits down ahead of time and thinks up what action the coming session is going to contain. It consists of set-pieces, and connections between them. There are a few reasons people do their game prep in terms of narratives. One is ease: You generally have to do l...

I've hit on an idea for how to run XP in a way that will work for my upcoming sandbox game using The Black Hack. The system itself should be pretty much transferrable to any classic D&D derivative that uses race-as-class (I've hacked the "kindred classes" from B/X into my game), or with some tweaks for ones that don't. The one complaint people consistently lodge against The Black Hack is that it doesn't contain much scope for levelling up. This confuses me slightly - as far as I can tell, it offers about as much scope as the early editions of D&D on which it's modelled. That is, fighter-types get better at hitting things, magic users (in the broad sense) get access to more powerful spells, thieves' skill at thief-y tasks increases, as does their backstab damage, and of course everyone gets more hp. Anyway, as I understand it, advancement in these games is largely supposed to be driven by acquisition, especially of magic items - your +2 to hit e...