Bogblins

So I've recently started working on a new campaign for my players, something akin to the Counter-Colonial Heistcrawl , set in a fantasy and steampunk-y island chain in totally-not-the-Arabian-Sea. Think pirates, witches, and animal-folk carving out a refuge from totally-not-the-British. Oh, and there's edible magic called "jz āduchi" (or "seraphic" in not-British), made from a sugarcane-like plant. Fun stuff.   Anyways, I needed a map, and thought this would be a fun tutorial. First, a look at what we're making: Very empty, but so is the ocean. I want them to feel small and alone.   Ok, tutorial time. Step 1: Getting GIMP GIMP is an open source image editing program in the same vein as Photoshop. We're going to be using it for the rest of the tutorial, so if you want to make your own hex-map, I'd recommend picking it up. It's totally free, and really easy to install, just click the download link, run the file, and it's all set up.   Ste...

Hi! I hope y'all have had a happy Halloween (and a happy Diwali)!   In this post I wanted to detail how I prep my pointcrawls! This isn't about prepping for the purpose of publishing, but about campaign prep and weekly session prep, the kind of stuff that you do at the table. To start, let's get some guiding principles out of the way. 1) Easy to prep -- I have a busy life! Prep should take an hour tops. 2) Consistent -- I want a regular system for session prep. When designing the campaign, I tend to start creative and untethered, but once I get down to the weekly session prep, I want the process to be very consistent and logical. 3) World-First -- Prep situations, not plots. As in, prep a world with conflict that involves the characters, but don't prep outcomes. Let them occur naturally as a result of character-world interaction. Ok, principles done! For my actual prep notes, I'll break it into two parts. The first is campaign prep - it's about how I set up the...

This is Part 2 in a four part series! See Part 1 here for context. ~ ~ ~ Personal opinion (and known hot take): there are far too many rules in RPGs. In fact, I'd say the ideal amount of rules for most traditional RPGs is something like Into the Odd or Cairn 1e . Nothing but the barest of bones, to adjudicate the fiction when the GM's common sense judgements are insufficient. The Intentions of Minimalist RPGs The goal, to me, in playing and designing minimalist RPGs is to stay immersed in the fiction as thoroughly as possible. Some people play RPGs for the strategic combat element (and I do too - just different RPGs) and others play for structured storytelling. But for the people who play RPGs for immersion and fast moving fun, I think minimalist games are ideal. The lack of structure allows for freedom in play, and the little structural formations that do exist provide for those cases where complete trust in the GM is not enough. That, then, is the purpose of rules. To provi...

For a while I've been playing around with really minimalist RPGs like Primeval 2d6 , Into the Odd , and Dungeon World , and I'm absolutely loving it. Without the weight of rules, the players are immersed in the fiction continuously, and are rarely pulled out of the game and into mechanics.   Basically, I have a lot of thoughts about minimalist RPGs, and I want to write them out, so we're going to do a four part series! It was all originally one big thing, but that got unwieldy and hard to edit, so we'll break it down like this: 1. What Makes a Good Character? - essentially outlining the bare minimum requirements for an RPG character, and how the system needs to support it. 2. Fantastic Mechanics and Where to Find Them - discussing the core mechanic and supplementary mechanics, and what role mechanics should play in the game. 3. Genre Imitation and Laser Swords - crafting an example minimalist RPG from this framework, based on Star Wars generally, but especially Star...

Hey everyone! I'm back after... 2 months? That's a long time!. I'll keep this post short, it's really just a brain dump as I work out pitches for my personal campaigns . In the next week or two I'll put something more substantial on y'all's plates, once I get back into the swing of things. Anyways, today we're going to talk about making a pitch - what, why, and how. The What and Why A pitch is a short bite of information that describes what your game's about. Here I'm using game to mean anything from an RPG system ( Mork Borg is a game) to a personal campaign or adventure (someone's playthrough of Honey in the Rafters is a game). Pitches should be short, really short in my opinion. They ought to be just enough to get the players an idea of what the campaign is about, who their characters might be, and what tropes or genre conventions might exist. Essentially, a pitch calibrates the players' expectations.   Pitches also direct the play...

The colonizer is enamoured . He is in love with the world, with its vibrant cultures and beautiful nature - but he cannot truly appreciate it. The colonizer hurts everything he loves because possession, subjugation, and hierarchy are the only ways in which he may conceive of the world. The colonizer loves the dances of the people and so he chains women in his palace. The colonizer loves the ferocity of the tiger and so he mounts its head on the wall. The colonizer loves the world and so he must mutilate it to make it his. Once mutilated, it is no longer the same world he loved before, and so the colonizer is always starving and hunting.   The colonizer is proud . He thinks himself the center of the world and the greatest thing in it, and everything around him is valued (truly valued, not simply lusted after) in accordance with how similar they are to him. The colonizer sees himself in the despotic tyrant, and so he speaks cordially with him. But his skin is too dark, his religion t...

Welcome back everyone! I have finally returned to my blog after a weirdly long hiatus, and hopefully I'll be able to blog again about every one to two weeks. Things have just been very busy lately.   In this post I'm going to return to the Combat OSR that I've played around with before and revisit it in more depth. Hopefully by the end of this post I'll have a list of core principles and some suggestions for houserules and gameplay changes. I'm also going to start it off with some musings on motivations and play cultures - feel free to skip that if you'd like.   Motivations The reason I'm revisiting the Combat OSR is due to a recent playtest of Jangli I ran. Character creation went well, the actual gameplay went fine, and when a fight came up the party jumped right in, rather than running like a good OSR party might do. Part of the reason they fought was because this group of players wasn't my usual Mausritter table and weren't super accustomed to...

This is a very short one but something that I feel isn't said enough.   Oriental Adventures (and all RPG products like it - made by Westerners to tell adventures set in the backdrop of fantasy Asia) is Western fantasy. These stories are Western fantasies of Asia and Asian peoples and cultures, and they are Western fantasies of themselves (in highlighting what they foolishly believe the West is not).   Real Asian Fantasy (TM) is written by Asian people. Define "Asian" as you will - I believe Westerners who've lived and grown in Asia to be capable of writing Real Asian Fantasy. Western Fantasies (of Asia) transport the player to a world that is superficially different (ignoring the deeper differences of culture and perspective) and revels in exoticizing those superficial differences.   See The Mahasarpa Campaign . It does not explore South Asian perspectives on duty and community, but instead continues to play in the sandbox of temple looting and treasure-driven advent...

Prismatic Wasteland has issued a challenge ! Here it is: "In January 2024, come up with a new resolution mechanic for a TTRPG and give it a name." So far, my favorite's Davy Jones Bidding , by the Illusory Sensorium (insanely cool blog title by the way). Go check it out ! Now, for my mechanic: D6 Tokens Each character starts the game with X [1] tokens and Y [2] skills. When faced with a challenge, you may spend 2 tokens to overcome it. If you have a relevant skill, spend 1 less token. If you lack the necessary gear, spend 1 more token. Nearby friends can spend up to 1 token each in your place, but will join in the suffering of any mishaps involved. Roll a number of d6 equal to the tokens you spent. If any of the dice show a 6, there is a mishap ! Something goes wrong, but you still succeed. If all dice roll 1s or 2s, there is an opportunity . Your character succeeds with added effect, new information, or gains back a token.   [1] I haven't decided how many tokens a ch...