Bogblins

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 too s

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

Warning: this is a long one y'all   I am personally a huge fan of rules-light RPG systems, and with all the recent talk of Daggerheart , MCDM , and D&D 5.5e , my minimizing gaze has turned itself on the community's most hateable game (with some exceptions for the bigots): D&D 5e. Now, I actually really enjoy 5e in play, though that enjoyment often comes in spite of the system rather than because of it. I enjoy the focus on heroic fantasy and the emphasis on narrative arcs and character backstories. This isn't to say that I don't like the OSR or NSR - I actually love those play styles and communities, and their focus on emergent narrative - I just enjoy another style of RPGs too. So, having gotten that disclaimer out of the way, what's the goal here? In short, I'm going to boil down D&D 5e (as represented in the PHB and MM , not all the expansions) into something more rules-light and fiction oriented. I want to keep the core mechanics relatively sim

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