Spirit of 1974

Beneath the crumbled ruins of the Jeweler's Sanctum, an adventure in Volume 1 of the OSE Adventure Anthology, there exists a Queen of Rats. Skilks, as she has called herself, has accidentally slipped a magic ring onto her finger. The ring is a trap - it grants the wearer basic sentience, the ability to speak common, and little else. It overwrites the user's previous operating code, so to speak - a rat will have its brainpower enhanced with these skills but a human(oid) will be reduced to them (to model this more concretely, the ring reduces intelligence to 3).  Skilks is a gracious queen to the 5 giant rats that follow her (none with magic rings of their own), and eager to trade with visiting diplomats from other nations (i.e., wandering adventurers). She is pretentious and ambitious but utterly naive and basically harmless.  The same could not be said for Norrin the Illusionist, a player character with a lust for the magic ring. The party went through an extensive trade sessi...

Influences. That's today's topic. I've set the basic metaphysical foundations and assumptions of the world, tied them to an existing tradition and body of work I can draw on, and highlighted an area about those assumptions that needs more fleshing out. I'm following up on this development by explicitly naming the influences and inspirations I want to incorporate.  As we are dealing with a world predicated on Dharmic philosophy, I'm sure it won't be any surprise that the most dominant influences I'll want to turn to and lean on are the great Indian epics - the Ramayana and Mahabharata. There is a huge amount of material in those works that can shape and support my own creative direction, much like Norse mythology shaped and directed Tolkien or the worlds of sword and sorcery fiction influenced Gygax. In particular, I think the Mahabharata's epic war at the conclusion of an age, one in which God's intervention was not to prevent a dark age but to impa...

  So tonight my 5e D&D players get high on psychedelics in game, and head toward the river to find a crocodiamond (this is a diamond-scaled crocodile born when one of my players misheard me say “crocodile” and I said “No, crocodiamond is way cooler, let’s run with that”). Their NPC Dwarf fighter friend comes with them to babysit. I decide that they meet machine elves. Machine elves, if you don’t know, are a name given to a kind of being some LSD users have reported experiencing during trips. In my game, Machine Elves are kind of like modrons who read too much Henry Ford and now seek to break into the material world and launch an industrial revolution of such scope and speed that it would give Queen Victoria whiplash. On the spot, I decided the plot my players foiled last session – a Druid sought to ferment dissent in the City of Blackwall so he could use the resulting chaos to replace the Vizier – was about preventing the Machine Elves from breaking through. When the players bl...

 My goal is to, sometime in Q1 2025, have written (and ideally publish) a campaign setting introduction and 3 accompanying adventures. In my mind this looks a lot like the Hungarian D20 Society's Fomalhaut zines, especially the Drifting Lands campaign setting guide. The presentation of these zines is fantastic; they feel so authentically like a 1970s D&D publication while still incorporating the higher budget capacities of the 21st century.  Worldbuilding has been my passion-art for nearly my entire life. I spent my time in high school buried in the Language Construction Kit and putting together long lists of monarchs and dynasties. But unlike a lot of the world's best world builders, I don't have a single setting I've been working on for a long time. I've jumped from setting to setting, largely because I deeply tie my settings to different parts of my life, and my life hasn't been very stable or consistent for a long time. There's also a thematic diffic...

As we enter the sixth and final month of my open table game of Arden Vul, I think its time to put some of the many lessons I've gained to paper. The experience has been illuminating, to say the least, but as my first foray into this style of gaming there is so much I would do differently if I could start again (which I will, in due time, just not with Arden Vul). The game I ran was designed to follow the implicit philosophy of the first edition Dungeon Master's Guide, made infamous in OSR circles by the "BrOSR" movement. While I'm not enamored of them or their work, they do raise an important point: the original game implicitly assumes something akin to an open table megadungeon campaign with 1 day passing in game for every day that passes out of game. In the background of the megadungeon campaign is a simulated world in which characters are expected to live full and meaningful lives, with rules and guidelines being provided in AD&D for everything from harlotr...

 There’s a lot of pitfalls with medieval fantasy books and movies that people are quick to critique – the peasants were not all actually that dirty, the clothes were not all actually that bland, the castles were not all actually that drab, the nobles were not all actually that corrupt. Hollywood and Random House together thrive on the myth of the Dark Ages, presenting periods like the Carolingian Renaissance – a high-water mark of European culture - as a time of general misery and squalor that snuffed out the creative spark of the individual under a blanket of religious manipulation and state terrorism. Yet it takes only a trivial interrogation of this image to discover how incorrect it is. There are, however, other misunderstood aspects of the medieval world lying behind the dirt hovels and cackling bishops that are more rarely called out. Chief among these, especially in RPGs, is the difference in the medieval mindset. The reason we buy so fully into the “Dark Age” mythology is...