The Swirling Blade Glows With Flame, Imbued With Powers Of Metallic Magic Powered By The Genasi’s Ancient

Adventure:  Rebels in the Rimebough 

No matter how cold the north wind blows, the pain of old injustice burns hotter. 

Setup: The Frontier kingdom of Volskolt sits on the edge of a vast wilderness, the last bastion of so called civilization against the vast territories where no sovereign save winter can rule. Given that the kingdom was only established and its populace converted to the dominant faith less than two centuries ago most on the continent regard the Volskoltans to be little more than backwater heathens, feigning piety in polite company while practicing barbaric rituals while at home. This attitude is reflected by the urban Volskoltan population towards their rural neighbors, and by those rural neighbors towards the migratory tribes that live in the hinterlands. 

It is this tension that sits at the heart of the kigndom’s current troubles, as the elders among their people remember that their now sedate nobles came to their land as militant holy orders seeking to crusade against their heathen neighbors, burning what villages they did not take for their own and building stout stone walls as a sign of their dominance. While the elites now consider themselves one people with the “common Volskoltan”, few who keep to the old ways have forgiven them for the bloodshed, or the merciless suppression of their ancestral rites in favor of the continental faith. 

And so we come to the crossroads of fate, nearly two hundred years of injustice and resentment reaching a boiling point during the coldest winter in generations. Rebels gather their power, giants stir in the mountains, and the destiny of a kingdom may hinge on a single life. 

Adventure Hooks: 

After rescuing a waylaid caravan of holyfolk out in the hinterlands, the party arrives in a village just in time to interupt a group of villagers being burned alive in their home by a priest and his mob. Though there is no secular law against worshiping other gods in the kingdom, the church takes folk worshiping both the new and ancesteral ways as the greatest affront. Now the party must decide between preserving their in with the church and doing the right thing and saving the townsfolk from a mob that could just as easily turn on them.  

The party is called together by noble allies who have become aware of a grim secret. The young heir to the throne of Volskolt has been kidnapped while hunting near the Rimebough forest. Some ready themselves for ransom, while others cultists are behind the dead, others are worried that political dissidents are behind these actions and expect him to be used against the royal family some time soon. All that matters now is that the boy be returned home unharmed, a deed that will require the party to brave the harshest wilderness, but will see them royally rewarded. 

While everything else is happening, a normally sedate clan of giants have decided to start marauding down into civilized lands.  Is this mere chance? A plot by a faction of the Rimebough rebels? or do these giants answer the call of something even more ancient? 

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My latest Terrible* DnD Campaign idea:

Scaling Hard "Nuzlocke" Mode.

We're gonna take the entire XP mechanic and through it out the fucking window.

Everyone starts at level one, but they make a backup character at the next level. They play that first character at level one until shit gets too hard and they die. No rezzes. Next available opportunity, bring in the backup level two character. Player makes a new backup, at level three.

So on, so forth.

The only way to level up is to die. The core goals/challenges are:

be the lowest level character to make it to the end of the campaign

get to explore a whole lot more classes and characters than you would normally

conversely, deal with the gritty reality of how dangerous this life of adventure is as so many of your party keeps falling

meta-wise, built in scaling system for less skilled players: die a lot? wind up stronger and stronger more quickly to balance it out

something something Ship Of Theseus adventurers guild?

So this is a cheat-sheet I’ve made for personal use to just have an overview over all the basic D&D rules. The first page covers most of the text rules. The color divides the sections more or less from one another.

The second page covers most of the important tables and stats, that you’ll probably need through the game. Hope you like it and find some use for this! Cheers.

Nadier’s Nightblade by Randy Vargas

Just the image of cowboys sitting around a fire telling stories gave me bard ideas for the on going cowboy series

The Far Roofs

Kickstarter

Coming soon: The Far Roofs

a game of talking rats, god-monsters, and you

So today I want to talk a bit about what this game wants to be. In particular, I'm going to go over its key technical and artistic goals.

The Far Roofs focuses on immersive hidden world fantasy adventure. It's intended to offer the experience of a grounded, emotionally real base world attached to an idealized, fantastic "hidden world" setting.

One might say, the streets and buildings and houses of the game's world are basically our own. Above us, though, is a stranger, more idealized, and more fantastic place. It's hard to get to. It's dangerous. It's less grounded. It's full of wonder.

Those are the Far Roofs.

This divide exists to make the game feel as real as possible, if you want to go that way. That's part of what hidden world fantasy is about, after all---the idea that magic is here. That it's not in some distant alien land or mythic future or past.

It's here, if you want to reach for it.

(Now, the game is flexible enough that you can play "protagonist" types instead of realer people, and many traditional gaming groups will probably prefer that, but that'll mean getting less of that immersive effect.)

The mood the game is interested in is that feeling you get when you take a huge risk---move to a new place; try a new thing. The feeling you get in those times in your life when everything is alienated and wondrous and terrifying but there's also so much more *hope* than there was in the still times before.

It's a mood of being swept up and called forward.

This is, among other things, meant to be a game for people who've been beaten down or exhausted by the ... everything ... to feel that sensation of moving forward again.

To remember what it's like, why it's worth it, how to reach for it again.

It's meant---and I do understand that I am finite and flawed and this can only go so far---as a tonic and refreshment to the soul.

--

Rules

The Far Roofs uses a 5d6-based dice pool system for day-to-day task resolution. It's relatively traditional and optimized for fast, fun dice reading. There's a loose consensus I've seen in RPG design circles that dice are for when outcomes are uncertain and both options are interesting, and I don't disagree ... but there's also this thing where rolling dice to decide is intrinsically interesting and fun, where it's fuel for a certain part of the brain.

This game tries to get as much out of that side of dice as it can.

You'll also collect letter tiles and cards over the course of the game. This is for bigger-picture stuff:

To answer big questions and to complete big projects, you'll either assemble representative words out of those tiles, or, play a poker hand built out of those cards. Word and their nuances express ideas and shape how outcomes play out; poker hands, conversely, just give a qualitative measure of how much work you do or how well things will go.

In keeping with this, the campaign is represented principally in the form of questions or issues your words and hands can address. Player/GM-created campaigns would be the same.

--

Physical and Electronic Product

I wanted to put the print version within the range of as many people who might need that tonic as possible. That means that for this particular game, I wanted to cover the full territory that I'd normally cover in a two or three volume set (core rules, setting, and campaign) in a single 200-250-page volume.

In practice this means there's a guide and examples for constructing the setting, rather than a deep dive into a fully-detailed world; that there's a bit less in the way of whimsical digression and flourish than in the writing I'm known for; that there's minimal "flavor" text on abilities; and that the campaign presentation is pretty fast-paced.

Conversely, it means that the game should be easy to absorb and to share with other possible players, and, that the game and campaign in this one relatively small volume should provide enough content for five or six years of play.

The book will be 8.5"x11" with grayscale art, available in a limited hardcover print run and a print-on-demand softcover form.

--

On the Rats

You'll see a lot of talk from me and others about the talking rats in this game. They're one of the jewels of the experience, and I think they're probably a significant draw just for being talking rats that are core to the game.

... but I'm going to hold off for now, because, to be clear, this is not a game of playing talking rats. It's just a game where talking rats and probably one of the top three most important setting elements.

I couldn't get that feeling I wanted of ... the base world being grounded realism; of the hidden world pulling you up and out and into a world full of magic ... with your playing rats, with your playing something so distant from the typical player.

So this is not a game of playing them.

They're just ... I like rats, and so I made the rats in this game with love. They're great ... whatever the equivalent is to "psychopomps" is for a magical world instead of for death ... and a way of talking about how in the face of the world, we're all pretty small.

--

I'm really excited about this game; the playtest was lovely.

I hope you'll enjoy it as well!

some dnd backstory ideas that give your character a reason to leave home that isn’t “everyone in my family died.” (just to say: i have nothing against those backstories (i use them a lot), but its fun to mix it up!)

family/friends/personal

someone close to you is sick. you need to adventure to find a cure

someone stole something important from you and you need to find it

you’ve received a message from a long lost relative and are trying to find them

someone that you love has been kidnapped (maybe you have to earn money to pay a ransom or complete some deed…)

adventuring runs in the family! everyone is expected to complete one quest in their lives

your family/culture sends people out to complete certain tasks when they reach a certain age as a rite of passage

another player’s character saved you in the past so you feel indebted to them and travel with them, protecting/aiding them

there’s a magical drought in your hometown and you have to fix it

your hometown doesn’t have a lot of jobs so you have to travel and send money back home

some childhood friends and you made a “scavenger hunt” where you try and complete a checklist of certain tasks (ie. defeat a barbarian in hand to hand combat, steal x amount of gold, slay a dragon, etc) in an allotted amount of time

quests/jobs

a god/patron has sent you on a quest to do something for them

you’ve been hired by someone to complete a task (and you get sucked into the big adventure along the way)

you’re on a quest for knowledge. maybe it’s to learn the best ways of fighting, maybe it’s something more academic related

your priest received a vision from your god and they sent you on a quest

you’re writing a book about the world and different cultures and you need first hand experience

you’ve found every map you’ve come across is shitty, so you decide to become a cartographer and make your own

you’re a detective who helps solve crimes and need to travel to solve a particular case

you’re a collector of a certain object and travel across the land to find it

you’re apart of an adventuring academy and have to complete a quest to graduate

you’re an artisan and you travel with your wares, trying to sell them. alternatively, you’re trying to spread word of your business and gain new business partners

you worked at a tavern your whole life where an old bard would sing songs of their adventuring party and that inspired you to go and do some adventuring of your own

feel free to add some of your own!

kind of obsessed with thesaurus dot com claiming that lover is a synonym for knight

Here is a free pdf of the players handbook

Here is a free pdf of xanathars guide to everything

Here is a free pdf to monsters manual

Here is a free pdf to tashas cauldron of everything

Here is a free pdf to dungeon master’s guide

Here is a free pdf to volo’s guide to monsters

Here is a free pdf of mordenkainen’s tomb of foes

For all your dnd purposes

I wish more people used Magic the Gathering's Color Pie instead of D&D's alignment all of the time.

Like, saying a character embodies the selfishness and impulsivenes of Red Black offers more depth than Chaotic Evil