Bogblins

Update! You can find the v04 playtest here . Happy adventuring! Update 2! You can find the v05 playtest here.   This blog began because I wanted to chronicle the building of Jangli , my Indian fantasy Cairn/ItO hack. In typical fashion, I completely derailed that plan and started writing random other things. However, I have now completed a major milestone in my original goal - the playtest is ready! I'm going to spend the rest of this post talking about what I wrote, why, and my thoughts throughout that whole process. In the meanwhile, you can find the PDF here . If you have thoughts, let me know in the comments! Or check out the post in #wip-feedback if you're in the NSR Cauldron.   Oh, and also treat this as my update for the ADVENTure jam. It's all I worked on this week, TTRPG-wise.   Slay cover page, I wonder who made it   Introduction "Jangli is a tabletop RPG inspired by Marathi and Konkani culture, folklore, and history. In it, players take the role of bhadotri

Welcome to the ADVENTure Calendar ! The rules are simple: make something RPG related every day for 24 days (December 1st to 24th) and post what you make at the end of it all on the itch jam page. Since I can't imagine myself committing time to RPG content creation daily, I thought I'd alter the rules for myself a little. Instead I'm: Doing something TTRPG related everyday Writing up a review of what I did every Sunday (or Monday) On December 24th, I'll post everything that I made on itch, but not everything that I ended up doing. Only the content I created. Day 1 (12/1) - Temple of the Moon Priests Amazing art from Temple of the Moon Priests   I started December off strong with Temple of the Moon Priests , a one-page, system agnostic dungeon adventure. I ran the dungeon in by-the-book Into the Odd with a couple of friends. I had a lot of thoughts on how it went, and they'll slowly make their way into blog posts of their own sometime. To keep things quick I'll

I created a little d6 based random generator for Game of Thrones houses while working on my WIP Indian fantasy RPG Jangli . Since I haven't posted in a while, I thought I'd share it here: Random Game of Thrones (inspired) Houses Roll twice for color palette (d6): Red Green Blue Black White Gold   Roll once for environment (d6): Deserts Grasslands Hills Jungles (use forests here for medieval European settings) Mountains Oceans   Roll once for motif (d6): Bear Blackbuck Cobra Elephant Peacock Tiger Note that these motifs were picked out for a South Asian setting. For a more medieval European setting, try: (bear, dragon, fish, hawk, lion, wolf)  Roll once for outlook (d6): Decisive Grim Hopeful Loyal Proud Vengeful Rolling Something Up: Rolls: 1, 3, 4, 2, 2 Color Palette: Red/Blue Environment: Jungles Motif: Blackbuck Outlook: Grim   Interpreting the results: Grim and Jungle go very well together, making me think of this group as a kind of conniving, jungle-dwelling faction that

The ideal skeleton army is in 4k Ultra HD   This one's short! I haven't blogged in a bit, and since tomorrow's Halloween, I thought I'd take a look over at our favorite skele-bois. If I still feel in the Halloween mood in a week, I'll probably do hags next. Also, as a little (actually kinda big) announcement, I made a thing! It's called Into the Odd+ , it's free on itch.io, and it's a really tight 3-page Odd-hack to get the vibe of 5E with an Into the Odd inspired ruleset. It's also what I'm playing right now. Anyways,   Skeleton Basics The goal is to make skeletons really fun to clobber with as few tweaks to the base stats as possible. Let's start with what we know from fantasy media: skeletons are generally weak to smash-y weapons (clubs, hammers, etc.) but not to slashy and stabby ones you can make them out of anything that has bones often lingering in crypts, graveyards, and the armies of evil necromancers the limbs and heads keep bounci

Welcome to the first monster deep dive! Today we're going to talk about asuras (Hindu demons), orcs, and how I'm choosing to represent typical fantasy monsters in my mythic Indian setting.   Part 1 - Hiravadesh To start, a brief setting primer.     Shivanasamudra Falls, Karnataka, India/Bharat   Hiravadesh is a verdant and hilly region of a larger subcontinent, bordered on the west by the ocean, to the north by a great arid desert, and to the east and south by thick, jungle-filled lowlands. Over the centuries petty dynasties rose and fell, marking the land with temples, forts, and ruins. Small farming and fishing villages dot the countryside, living off the land and the mercy of the gods. Despite Hiravadesh's long history of inhabitance, the land is older still, and remains wild and chaotic, ever-working to break the villages and kingdoms down into the jungles from whence they came. Hiravadesh is pretty directly inspired by the Deccan region of India, specifically Western

Apologies for the meme, it popped into my head and I had no way to ignore it. Anyways, this post is about combat-heavy games and the OSR, and how those two things are not necessarily as opposed as they're generally assumed to be. Essentially, I see a place for really cool combat-heavy OSR or OSR-adjacent games, and I think that shadowy little corner would be cool to explore.   Defining the OSR (for the purposes of this post) To start, let's take a look at the core tenets of the OSR. They aren't static, they aren't the same for every GM, and they're not written in just one place, which all in itself may be a central tenet - that the OSR is horizontally and loosely organized, more so a shared concept than a set of rules to be bought and sold.   I prefer this list when it comes to defining the OSR. For reference, I'll re-type it here: 1. This is a game about interacting with this world as if it were a place that exists. 2. Killing things is not the goal. 3. There

A while ago I tried my hand at GMing Mausritter with the Chapel of Peace adventure from the Adventure Collection. Since that was one of my first OSR adventures (and definitely one of my favorites), I thought I'd write up a play report on how it went and what my thoughts were, coming from a previously D&D 5e background. Beanless fools, you know who you are! Stay out! Prep Prep for the Chapel of Peace was ridiculously easy. I read through the premise on the first page, printed out everything I needed, and I was all good! Unlike in D&D, where I might prep a bunch of encounters and nudge the heroes towards a fight every hour or so, I had a handy list of 6 random encounters on the second page, which was more than enough for a fighting game like D&D, far more than enough for Mausritter. I ended up only using one of those random encounters, specifically the 2d6 wandering converts, and even in that encounter no fights broke out. Compared to D&D (I'm going to do this a

Hey y'all! First real post of the year and it's time for some actual content. I've made a lot of progress on the game so far, given that I started only a week ago. The Introduction is written (albeit badly), and the Character Creation , General Rules , and Combat chapters are polished enough for a first draft. All that's left now are Magic , Wilderness Exploration , and Creatures . So far, the game runs a lot like Brighter Worlds without the Callings, and maybe with a teensy bit of additional combat strategy. Adding a sort of zone-of-control feature felt like a good choice, which will help get encounters to be a bit more strategic overall (we'll get to that when we do the Creatures chapter). I'm currently working on the Magic section, where I've got spell-based magic (known as j ādu ), potion magic (known as... potion magic, sadly), and boons. J ādu is easy to design, it's very similar to Cairn or Brighter World's base magic systems. Potion magic

Hey everyone! This is the very first post to Bogblins (bog + goblins). It mostly exists to catalogue my rambling thoughts while designing my own RPG, but is also gonna be a sort of campaign diary for my home game, with some additional random thoughts on RPGs, fantasy, representation, and a mix of the three. To start off, a little about me: Hi! I'm a writer, RPG player (and I guess an RPG designer now), and book reading enthusiast. I'm also a professional dancer! I'll also give y'all a little info on my game. Jangli is my (hopefully) rules-light RPG inspired both by Western Indian folklore and typical Western European fantasy. It's meant to follow the New School Revolution style of play ( see here ) and is mainly inspired by Into the Odd, the GLOG, and Mausritter. In terms of video games, it's like a cross between the latest two Legend of Zelda games and Raji. Is it finished? Not at all. Does it exist? Barely. But the concept is there, I'm gonna be making it,