Cephalon Dusp's Archives

     A while back, I ran a small pirate campaign. The campaign ended up not going very far, but I have some incomplete notes on ships and sea-faring that have been kicking around in my head ever since. So, lets share them with the world! Ship Stats     The most fun part of this, of course, is looking at all the cool ships you can get. In order to simplify things, I made several classes of ships with fairly generic stats. Additionally, borrowing from Ultraviolet Grasslands and the Black City (UVG), I created the concept of the "chest" unit of weight. This is approximately one chest of treasure, one person, enough supplies (including water) for a person for a week, and the minimum amount of crew member needs on a ship. Its mostly weight, but has a space component too. A cannon, with balls and powder, takes up 20 chests, which by my math was about 1 ton. Generally, a single crew member is assumed to take 10 chests of capacity, through their weight, equipment,...

 I have been enjoying the Dungeon23 challenge so far, as it feels entirely manageable. Even if I miss a day, it doesn't take much extra effort to catch back up which has been great for my motivation. We shall see if my motivation and inspiration will continue to hold strong, but this is definitely a good start. I have created an overall dungeon structure mapping how levels and sub-levels interact, but I am leaving actually drawing out the rooms until later and am purely focusing on their descriptions. To help with this, I ended up cobbling together my own version of a dungeon stocking table, using a d12: Monster Monster Monster & Treasure Monster & Treasure Treasure Special Trap Trap & Treasure Empty Empty Empty Empty So, without any further ado, the rooms so far!  Area 1A: Mud-Filled Ruins 1/1: M     One entrance to the dungeon. A former den, relatively dry. Small roots hang from the low ceiling. Part of the rear wall has collapsed inward, revealing...

    For those who are not a reader of All Dead Generations , not too long ago there was a post about creating an "alternate, alternate" combat system for D&D by thinking about what might have evolved from a different set of wargames (specifically, Strategos ). I found it an interesting read and absolutely love theoretical alternate histories about how D&D could have developed.     So, to keep this idea developing, I am taking it into the next stage: refinement for actual use with OD&D by someone unfamiliar with the original source material.      As a warning, the refined system I am presenting here is just my interpretation of it and it certainly doesn't include everything you could possibly need (it doesn't even include everything from the original post!). Still, I think this is a productive exercise and useful to improve the system and hopefully create something that I can use in my own home game! The Concept      This new ...

     In the past weeks that I haven't been writing here on the blog, I have been creating and running a Pirate Campaign for my normal table. We have been having great fun with it, but as I have worked on cobbling together the systems to run it, I have hit quite a few brick walls. A Standard for Every Ship      Among the most annoying problems I have encountered, is the handling of ships. Every system I have encountered has its own ways of handling ships and they rarely agree, even if they are ostensibly easily convertible between them.      Now, historically, in the pirate age one of the most popular boats was called a Sloop, usually being a single-masted sailing ship that was quick and maneuverable in the water. If a Sloop has 2 masts, it becomes a cutter though that doesn't change much about the ship other than making it slightly bigger.      After robbing some nobles' pleasure flotilla, my players earned a massive haul and w...

    One problem that I believe many people notice in RPGS and work to fix, even subconsciously, is having too many choices during character creation. It sounds crazy, but it is a real problem. Anyone who has attempted to make a character in Cyberpunk, Pathfinder, or even 5th Edition D&D knows that the number of choices to be made can make it difficult to quickly make a character, even for experienced players!     5E specifically has 13 classes, a huge number of races, and even more backgrounds, nevermind the character options that unlock as characters level up like spells, subclasses, and feats! There is an enormous number of options to consider, and it can be completely overwhelming for new players.     From my experiences, OSR games generally try to shy away from this, but not nearly as much as we might like to think. Sure, everyone knows about the three main classes of Fighting-Man, Magic-User, and Cleric or Thief, but it is important to remember tha...

     I will be the first to admit that I oftentimes enjoy theorizing and philosophizing without actually testing my theories. It is common in the OSR space, that people theorize quite a lot and play maybe a bit less. While armchair thoughts can certainly be productive, they can also be blind to the problems that will crop up in the real world. So, lets take a look at combat based on my experience with testing the combat system I have proposed in my last post on the topic .      Today, I am going to focus on rolling initiative. One thing that I have seen people often talking about is making combat more chaotic and frenetic, sort of the Combat as War instead of Combat as Sport paradigm. One method people propose to do such a thing is changing initiative, such as by regularly rerolling it. I personally really like the idea, since it actually makes initiative bonuses more meaningful than when it is only rolled once. If initiative gets rerolled every round, sure...

    I'm back again! To help make up for the content I didn't make the last couple of weeks, I have decided to make this week a double post week! Hope you all enjoy.      It shouldn't come as much of a surprise to anyone who has played any version of Dungeons and Dragons (or most of its spawn) that many RPGs have a large focus on combat. It makes sense, considering the game's roots of dungeon crawling and exploring the wilderness while fighting off the monsters that call it home. So lets spend some time working through design decisions to sketch out the broad strokes of a new(?) combat system. Some Quick Background     There are many, many ways to simulate combat in an RPG. Most fantasy RPGs all come up with their own way of handling it too, so there are a lot of things to pull from. For brevity, I will only pick out a few particularly notable examples.     First, in 5th Edition D&D, combat works by having every character and monster take ...

    Unfortunately, OSR has a bit of a problem in its dungeoneering rules. As Delta points out in this blog post , the source material for OD&D (Chainmail) used 1 minute turns in 1:1 combat, but a mistake was made moving things over to the new game giving us the 10 minute turn. The two most notable issues this causes is that spells last significantly longer than they were balanced for and that adventurers explore dungeons incredibly slowly (120 ft per 10 minutes is about 0.14 mph).     The naive solution to this is to simply revert back to using 1 minute turns as should have been done originally. While this does solve both of the main problems of the 10 minute turn, it also has the unfortunate side effect of entirely breaking the dungeoneering rules which heavily rely on a 10 minute turn. After all, it would be a little strange to be checking for encounters every 3 minutes and resting for 1 minute out of every 6. Never mind the horrors that result if you were atte...

    One of the most common tools people will come across in tabletop RPGs are hex maps. They divide a map into a number of hexagonal sections to ease measuring distances, plotting trips, and filling in new areas. Obviously, this comes with limitations that a plain map does not have and can sometimes pull people out of the fiction that they play in, but hex maps have their uses, even if only for the DM.     The problem with hex maps is that it is normally important to have several maps at different scales, such as one for nearby areas, one for the kingdom, and maybe a world map. Obviously all of these levels need to agree with each-other, but what scales to put them at is a pertinent question.     Unfortunately, it is one that does not have any single satisfactory answer. Still, I will be working to discover what I believe are the best sets of mapping scales for use in the general OSR space.  For those not interested in reading the article and my reason...