Liminal Ark

It's the hottest day of the year... While melting slowly into my chair today on what seems to be the start of a harsh heat wave here in the Pacific Northwest I was thinking about stories which involve the hottest day of the year trope. Everyone in these stories are exhausted, agitated, and slick with sweat making what ever ordeal they are already going through that much worse. The heat wave is a more sinister version of the more in your face disaster like a hurricane or tornado but eats away at you slowly instead of an explosion of escalating misery. So what's that got to do with RPGs? THE HEAT WAVE Beyond its aesthetic a heat wave can be used as a motivator, a hazard, or even a character all its own in your story. In addition to mechanical ways mentioned here keep in mind that the heat wave is just as powerful as just another layer on top of the current setting. Take care to describe the liminal haze of the crossroads. The odor of rancid sweat or herds of grazing animals. The ...

Best Left Buried has quickly become one of my favorite dungeon crawlers for its quick conflict resolution and survival horror ethos which straddles the line between story games and the OSR (At least for this casual.) My favorite part are the Adaptations which are monster abilities that can also be taken and made into magic items or mutations for the PC's to use as well. This created a dynamic in my games where as the players grew more powerful they became more and more like the monsters they were trying to slay. Love it.  Recently, I've been creating a mega-dungeon inspired by molds, vampires, and Resident Evil which while far from finished has given me more cause to experiment with these Adaptations. Though creating your own Adaptations is a painless process often I end up enjoying a simple reskin or reinterpretation of existing ones just as much. As a demonstration here is a big moldy monstrosity I made for the kitchen section of my dungeon.   THE COOK Theme: Taste. It ...

Not Your Daddies’ Ironsworn Hack "Stalker"  by DigitalEpicness  is marked under CC PDM 1.0. To view the terms, visit https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0 / Have you ever wanted to explore a zombie apocalypse scenario but with influences of STALKER and DayZ in the free and awesome Ironsworn RPG? Well to make this experiment a reality I’ve been cooking away at a setting hack to do just that. Like a lot of you my in-person roleplaying has had to be cut down quite a bit since quarantine began which has steered me back into the direction of solo roleplaying. In addition, back into the realms of post-apocalyptic gaming chiefly the buggy love-it-or-hate-it walking simulator DayZ by Bohemia Interactive. The tension and paranoia felt by interacting with strangers while setting your own survival goals reminded me so much of Ironsworn I felt the need to see whether these two ideas can be fused together thus Ironsworn Wasteland was born. But why? Ironsworn is by far...

Group Background This is more of a prototype than a complete idea but I thought I could take a crack at creating a group background feature that you could add onto a group of characters with a feature they could all use as well. The idea came from Pathfinder 2E's group backgrounds, Dark Secrets from Avernus, and Shadow of the Demon Lord's Group Frameworks. Developing the ideas further for a specific adventure is probably the way to go but sometimes it can be helpful to have these kind of generic frameworks ready to riff of in the moment. It's especially useful as a device to mesh character concepts together around the adventure's main goal which normal backgrounds don't do so well. Anyhoosers here is the Shared Nemesis Group background. "Wanted Poster at Holburn Station (London, UK)"   by  takomabibelot  is marked with  CC0 1.0 Shared Nemesis You have been drawn together by the trespass of a powerful foe that has become your Nemesis. Rather than sit by and...

Exotic Arsenal After years of playing Destiny there are few exotic weapons whose story and mechanics capture my nostalgia than Thorn and The Last Word. The ill fated battle between Light and Dark waged by two combatants of legacies' lost to time is a story suited to most fantasy worlds whether they wield firearms or greatswords.  For my own ends and as a sort of proof of concept I will present a version of the two iconic weapons as DnD style artifacts. Rather than get bogged down in custom Firearm rules I will assume you have your own favorite homebrew or even the basic DMG rules available to you so I can focus instead on nailing down the theme of what the weapons represent to me. This is more than likely not final but a thought experiment for funsies. Without further ado Thorn and The Last Word... The Last Word (Weapon (Hand Cannon), Legendary) "Yours, until the last flame dies and all words have been spoken." —Shin Malphur to you, as you journey forth into the unknown A...

Monstrous Mondays An experiment Recently, I ran a dungeon for my players underneath a small town where a crocodilian mummy lord named Mazebek held court. The creature was inspired by egyptian myths and the wonderful Bloat adventure written for Mork Borg by Greg Saunders  (Which you should check out it's pretty cool ). Like the vagabond Silas in that adventure Mazebek had a certain appetite for mortal flesh and possessed a menagerie of automatons who prepared his meals for him. In an effort to make this cannibalistic feasting more exciting I decided it could be more interesting for Mazebek's servants to innovate on the idea of creating pleasing meals for their lord. So, after reading an article on Auto-Brewery Syndrome, my course was set and the Noble Rotter was unborn.  La Mort Vivant: The Noble Rotter The Noble Rotter is a zombie who has been used much like a wine cask or oak barrel with legs. A walking, eating, storage unit for fermented things like beer, wine, or veggies, ...