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Eow Links 27 |
| 2021-07-03 |
Eow Links 27
"Eow" for End Of Week. Links I gathered during the week. This is iteration 27.
For more weekly links, head to The Seed of Worlds Shiny TTRPG link collection or Alex's Blogosphere posts.
Most of the links below are found via the RPG Planet that Alex Schroeder built and maintains. If you have a RPG blog, please consider joining the conversation.
It's a Saturday EOW post, medium size. No favourite post this week.
Fun with ability scores, modifiers, and data analysis; or, when is a player character unplayable?
The 3rd edition of Dungeons & Dragons has a caveat that after you roll your ability scores (4d6k3, arrange to taste, the same default method as 1st Edition AD&D), you can discard the scores and re-roll if the sum of all the ability score modifiers is 0 or less, or if you didn't roll at least one score of 14 (a +2 bonus) or greater.
I rolled a hundred characters, how many of them should I expect to discard?
Ghost Town (homebrew D&D spell)
A long time abandoned dusty village springs into existence around you, displacing time and space around it. Your pursuers can’t enter the village. The town disappears after the spell’s duration ends.
First cloistered, thereafter engaged for years studying and copying text from one tome to another, it came to even Leomund’s astonishment that he should fall into a life of adventure, in what one might consider middle-age.
I am putting those two together. Let's hope the abandoned village has an intact roof for our party.
Powered by the Apocalypse, Part 7: Q&A Round 4
I’m constantly brainstorming lists of playbooks. It’s one of the first things I do when I start working on a game, and I keep doing it until long after the game’s finished. I find it enjoyable, so sometimes I’ll even take a break from harder design work just to brainstorm more playbooks for fun.
"What do you play to find out?"
Review: Thousand Thousand Islands #7 + Drawings #2
I also greatly appreciated the betel-nut chewing piece as it gives the kind of great setting detail that makes a thing feel different and still real. Should my players arrive to a location and their host pulls out a box and starts preparing betel nut for them all it both drops into that social space where serving coffee or tea fits - a thing to facilitate negotiation, diplomacy, perhaps to buy time while something else happens - but it is also something that more firmly affixes the setting. This is memorable and has the depth of detail of a true thing. I really like this window into the culture of A Thousand Thousand Islands.
Yes, a thousand thousand times.
Review: Bunnies and Burrows 3rd Edition (2019)
If you have never checked out this game then I say do yourself a favor and remedy that. This is a great piece of the RPG past and should not go ignored.
It has survived all these years, it will probably outlast beanies and espressos.
We understand at this point that a hollow earth can't exist because the interior of the earth is viscous. In order to support a cavity inside the center of the planet a solid non viscous material is required. If the mass of the earth didn't behave as a fluid, then Hydrostatic Equilibrium would be irrelevant because these principles only apply to fluids.
Let's kill the hypothesis in the egg.
All RPG campaigns need glue to hold them together, and a popular glue is having PCs have a shared goal or a shared enemy. One that I think could be fun is a shared debt - all the PCs owe somebody big time - which is effectively both of the above.
Debt, the loot sponge.
Perhaps I'm too literal, but when I see that this particular forest contains dragons and owlbears and displacer beasts and wargs and and and... I always ask myself, "what are they EATING?"
Owlbear ticks are pretty savage.
What impresses me the most about this book, like the others for Mythras with which I am familiar, is how successful it is in translating a difficult setting into something suitable for a game, that is, in rendering the world playable.
That made me order Mythic Britain and lust for Mythic Constantinople.
How to alter D&D, the be67 revision
If you know this blog, you know I have a set of house rules I'm constantly tinkering with. It's all spread over the last 10 years of posting. The last iteration is something I call be67 and it pushes the whole concept into grindhouse/splatter territory. It's basically a D&D RC/HackMaster 4E hybrid with a special twist or two.
House rules.
1DZine : Lancement d’un fanzine par la commu C’estPasDuJDR
Le capitaine Martin Bay est un homme d'âge mûr, aux cheveux grisonnants, dont le visage est traversé par un étrange cache-œil. Il parcourt l'espace avec son équipage à bord d'un impressionnant vaisseau spatial, le Pajidéhère, dans le but d'accomplir une mission cruciale : compter toutes les étoiles de l'univers.
A free french zine at its first edition. It looks promising.
Particularités et JDR : une discussion avec Erell !
Je pense que, du fait de ma particularité, j’ai tendance à être très dans ma tête (même petite, enfant), et à partir du principe que la façon dont je fonctionnais était la même pour tout le monde. Ça me paraissait normal car c’était la mienne et chez moi, autour de moi, majoritairement, les personnes étaient dans des profils neuro-atypiques et hyperactifs, des gens qui ne tenaient pas en place.
A interview in french with a very interesting game designer.
The french editor Lapin Marteau is reediting Castle Falkenstein. The cartographer is Olivier Sanfilippo and the map looks gorgeous. The crowdfunding starts on the 6th.
I wonder if it will include a new version of Comme il faut.
A translation from Spanish to French of No roleo sin mapas.
For this comment by El Poderoso Crom:
Como historiador diré: los mapas DEBEN ser inexactos. Así de claro. Pueden ser orientativos, funcionales y si, cojones, divertidos. Pero no deben albergar entre sus pliegues la "verdad" geopolítica de lo representado, sino ser en realidad un ejercicio más de ficción.
