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 "Lincoln had run as fast as he could even with his cybernetically modified legs going full out. The thing whatever it was gaining on him as he rounded the ancient wall. He only thought about the dripping icor, the fangs, and those glowing all too human eyes!' And it was the last thing he ever thought about! The claws assaulted his flesh as a pair of scissors slices through fabric.His brain Needleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243274667834930867noreply@blogger.com0

What is that you say? A new Kickstarter from Phil Reed? Impossible! Heh. Phil is back with his Combat Banes and Boons, Unforgettable Crits in Fantasy RPGs Kickstarter.

Combat Banes and Combat Boons are critical failure and critical success results designed to make your skirmishes a tad more . . . interesting. Presented as a print-on-demand book or as print-on-demand cards, created by Lex Morgan and Philip Reed, these critical results may cause the heroes trouble (Banes) or might give the adventurers an unexpected benefit (Boons).  

NOTE: The project was originally conceived as two 50-card decks. We created the collected book edition for those gamemasters who prefer to use books over cards. Or, if you wish, you could hand the card decks to the players and use the book as a reference.

These rules were created for use with most editions and variants of the classic ampersand fantasy roleplaying game. (You know, the one that includes both the dungeons as well as the many dragons.) Gamemasters will need to apply their best judgment to resolving each entry, and clever GMs can no doubt use these ideas in almost any fantasy game of their choosing.

The Tavern is supported by readers like you. The easiest way to support The Tavern is to shop via our affiliate links. The Tavern DOES NOT do "Paid For" Articles and discloses personal connections to products and creators written about when applicable.

DTRPG, Amazon, and Humble Bundle are affiliate programs that support The Tavern.  You can catch the daily Tavern Chat cast on Anchor, YouTube,  or wherever you listen to your podcast collection. - Tenkar    

By Simon Carryer Simon Carryer Games Labyrinth Lord Level 3

The Great Dwarf Road! A fabled trade route beneath otherwise impassable mountains. For years it brought wealth and prestige to both sides of the range. But now it is shuttered and abandoned. Home to black forgotten things, crawling subterranean creatures and freakish outcasts. Only dire haste or desperate ambition could prompt someone to attempt the road.

This eleven page adventure details seven areas in Moria, with around eight locations per are, for about forty locations overall. It’s one of the better “lets travel through Moria to get to the other side of the mountain” adventures, although it lacks that feeling of scale that text and media Morias have. 

I generally don’t review one-page dungeons; there isn’t really enough going on. But, a collection of one pagers that make up a larger context? That’s Stonehell, and I’m all in for that. For some reason you need to travel The Great Dwarven Road to get to the other side of the mountain. Maybe there’s a blizzard up top with giants, or Saurmon is watching with his crows. Whatever. In you go! It’s got a familiar mix of encounter objects in it, from an entrance door that is stuck closed, to a broken bridge over a chasm. No balrog, but you do get a dragon! The water is the water is now a flock of harpies, ready to lure you off the cliffside, and so on, so, it’s not a Moria rip-off but rather a kind of Inspired By A Trip Under a Mountain. 

The maps are a highlight of the adventure, at least in terms of Moria-like. You get a series of of them, one for each of the seven main areas, presented in an isometric kind of view. He does a great job with terrain, from aquaduct/canal like things to same level  stairs, towers, debris, and elevation features. More than most, this helps bring that complex Moria-like environment to life. The individual area groupings are on the small side, maybe seven or eight rooms per, so you can’t have that looping complex map that exploration adventures provide. Your going from point A, one side of the mountain, to point B, the other side. And that maps supports that style of play well.

It’s a one page dungeon format, so, you get one map per page. Surrounding the map are the individual adventure keys, with a couple of page sin the back to help support things, like magic item descriptions and wanderers and travel times between the major areas, etc. 

The implications here should be obvious. The magic items are all decently described, after all the product take a page to list them all and gives them each a paragraph. Mantaster is “A crude cleaver on a long haft, adorned with grisly fetishes and trophies of past victims. For the enemies of Man, this weapon is a famous relic. It twitches and throbs when a human is within 60’ …” Neat little thing and an ok description. Or a curled horn of beaten bronze, covered in a blue-green patina. Like all of the best descriptions, they seem to be imagined. While there are mechanics, they don’t overshadow the item … and therefore the players lust for it. 

The individual encounters here are decent. The creatures are engaged in activities sometimes, like bickering, Or they have something going on … like being infested by parasites. Ick! Each map is generally themed. The dragon map. The cultist map. The goblin map, and so on. There are others in those areas also, but you do get a good zones vibe going on. And the interactivity from the encounters is pretty decent as well. A pool full of tiny parasites … that you can barely see. That’s a little different than the usuall Stab It/Talk to it cycle. The harpies are on a cliffside, and the bandit leader is paranoid of traitors. This is a good example of including just a little bit more in the description, a few words, to help the DM bring the encounter to life and give it variety. And he does it pretty well.

The writing style is supported by evocative descriptions …; where evocative is defined as … a little bit more to the environment. “The red light of cooking fires, the sound of murmuring voices, and the smell of woodsmoke spill from the arched entrance. Ropes and pulleys hang overhead.” That’s not so bad. The main gates are rain-wrm and of pitted iron, towering. And, eve the monsters, from the “man-legged centipede” to an ogre that “…  is elderly and gaunt, his face a mess of scars, one of his eyes a horrible wet hole.” We’re doing well here!

What’s missing here, though, is the scale of Moria. Hmm, no, not the scale, but the VIBE that comes from the scale. The art/maps and text descriptions don’t really convey the tower buttress or collosol emptiness of the halls. The maps HINT at it, bt there’s not much more than a hint. You never get the sense, at all, of the massive undertaking fallen. That void of nothingness and hints of the majesty of days of old just doesn’t come through at all. Perhaps, we can reframe this somewhat by calling this “just another mountain tunnel” instead of the appeals ro Moria. IN this case things are a little better, from a vibe (although Moria still hangs heavy in the back of your mind) but now we’re on the Just Another Tunnel Complex thing, and, while this is an ok zoned dungeon, it  still doesn’t really FEEL like a place.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $3. The preview is seven pages and more than enough to get a sense of the adventure. Good job.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/449106/The-Great-Dwarf-Road?1892600

3 hexes northwest, 6 hexes north of Alakran.

 

Irrigation works radiate from a small, spring-watered lake -- an oasis, in fact -- and water the fields of four homesteads spread across a few square mines. Collectively, the lake and settlements are known as Gablu Sha-Madbani.

Each homestead is a complex of adobe buildings that holds an extended family of multiple cousin lines numbering 20-40 people, and 25-50% that number in hired and indentured workers. Essentially, this is a village distributed across terrain.

Each of the homesteads has a specialization of labor and is named after a local creature that was hunted to extinction generations ago - the smithing clan Gurha has the bulette, the sewing and woodworking clan Ashapti has the axe beak, the religious and lorekeeping clan Wallahha has the lion, and the defense and earthworks clan Garash has the manticore. Each clan hall has stuffed and mounted trophies of the respective beast.

Wallahha clan is the largest and a young Wallahha couple, Betish (she) and Rimush (he), wish to split off and form a fifth homestead. To earn legitimacy, they believe, they will have to hunt to death the population of another animal, the closest being the mountain cats in #231. The only question is whether the couple will be villains (in the eyes of sandwalkers and tender hearted adventurers) or questgivers (for ailurophobic or simply greedy wanderers).

   This is not the article's artwork but its a favorite classic Amazing stories cover featuring one of myfavorite Burroughs storiesGrab It OverHEREWith the Warriors of the Red Planet retroclone due any day now I need a fast way to reintroduce Barsoom to a few jaded old school friends. Some of these folks had never read the Edgar Rice Burroughs classics of Barsoom!  I didn't want to get into a Needleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243274667834930867noreply@blogger.com0

 'I will take you all too the stars & beyond!'  Dr. Hans Reinhardt at his TED talk on 2110. Dr. Hans Reinhardt;" The word "impossible" is only found in the dictionary of fools" On September 1st the USS Cygnus mission was launched from Earth to Talu Centri 8 colony to link up & the go deep into interstellar exploration. This of course was a part of the Cygnus foundation's 300 billion dollar Needleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243274667834930867noreply@blogger.com0

I'm a huge fan of Sine Nomine Publishing. Kevin Crawford's work, Starting with Stars Without Numbers, and the rest of his releases over the years, have been nothing short of inspiring and extremely useful, especially to the sandbox and improv-style GMs.

Kevin is also extremely generous, issuing Free versions of his various "Without Number" rulesets that are complete and extremely playable. These aren't quickstarts or light versions of the rules, they are complete without some of the extras supplied in the pay version.

So, what is Kevin's latest release, Cities Without Number: Free Version?

Cities Without Number is a cyberpunk role-playing game built for sandbox adventures in a dystopia of polished chrome and bitter misery. It's both a full-fledged Sine Nomine toolkit for building a cyberpunk world of your own and an Old School Renaissance-inspired game system for playing out the reckless adventures of the desperate men and women who live in it. Whether polished metal or flesh and blood, your operators will risk their lives and more to seize those precious things a merciless world would keep from them.

In its pages, you'll find...

• An old-school inspired game system that's fully compatible with the sci-fi Stars Without Number game and its fantasy sister-game Worlds Without Number
• Cyberware and sophisticated high-tech gear suitable for chroming the most discriminating cyborg and equipping the most refined of street operators
• Playability-focused hacking rules designed to give hacking-focused PCs useful and important things to do without forcing an entire separate mini-game on the GM
• Gear rules for drones and vehicles, to better equip PCs who want to bring a little extra iron on their next mission
• System-neutral Sine Nomine worldbuilding tools for helping a GM create their own custom cyberpunk world or elaborate the details of existing worlds and settings
• Gang, corp, and city district creation tools for fleshing out your world with people and places that fit
• Fifty Mission Tags for adventure creation, plus guidelines and step-by-step procedures for handling facility infiltrations, managing local heat, selling loot, and other activities beloved of corp-hating street scum everywhere
• The default campaign setting of the City, a premade backdrop to help you get into the game as quickly as possible

And that's just in this free version of the game. In the deluxe edition of Cities Without Number, you'll also be getting...

• Cyberware quirks and features for particular megacorp product lines
• Variant gengineered human types for PCs who don't fit the baseline mold
• Optional rules for the psychological strain of Cyber Alienation
• Optional rules for cheap street cyber, for those campaign settings where every goon with a knife has some wire beneath his skin
• Spellcasting, spirit summoning, and magical items for GMs who want to add a dash of magic into their cyberpunk world

For more than a decade, the Without Number games have given GMs and players the tools they need to forge their own sandbox worlds. Cities Without Number adds to that, so get it now and build a dystopia that's all your own.

 

The Tavern is supported by readers like you. The easiest way to support The Tavern is to shop via our affiliate links. The Tavern DOES NOT do "Paid For" Articles and discloses personal connections to products and creators written about when applicable.

DTRPG, Amazon, and Humble Bundle are affiliate programs that support The Tavern.  You can catch the daily Tavern Chat cast on Anchor, YouTube,  or wherever you listen to your podcast collection. - Tenkar    

Over the years Worlds Without Number continues to come up on the pile of books that needs to be exploited. Now with the release of Cities Without Number it's time to put some of our campaigns ideas into focus from of the past. Campaigns I've run in the past especially with Tegel Manor. Martin Ralya from a 2014  Rpg Geek entry  captures what makes Tegel Manor so damn good in his comments; "This isNeedleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243274667834930867noreply@blogger.com0

 "War is hell. The super-jungle is hell. Put those two together and you just know there's zero chance of finishing your tour alive..."  - Corporal Mike Simms, 3rd Marine DivisionSo I'm just getting back home now from lunch with friends & we're discussing the "The September Group" aka Сентябрьская группа who became a major force within our Hostile rpg campaign. The group is made up of veteran Needleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243274667834930867noreply@blogger.com0

So, I've been a little bit grumpy about how everything played out with the Kickstarter that I still think borrowed a little too heavily from Cupcake Scouts (and how it raised over $100K with 'my idea'... if I'm being honest). I've kind of avoided Cupcake Scouts stuff for the last few weeks, which has been fine, because I've gotten a good deal of Army Ants '81 stuff done, and I'm very happy with how that's turned out, and I probably wouldn't have started that at all if not for the Cupcake Scouts snafu.

ANYWAY.

Mary is out of images for the Instagram she maintains for Cupcake Scouts, and asked for a drawing of the girls in a cemetary fighting zombies that are coming out of the ground. She really likes Halloween. So, I did this drawing, and as I was working, I realized that the composition of this piece is really strong. I didn't intentionally design it this way, but it sort of happened. But then I realized that 'good design just sort of happens' is what you get when you've been trying to get better at something for a few decades. I like how the whole image uses triangles - there is a line that goes directly from the hand in the lower-left along the arrow, up across Harper's arm, and then across Bri's arm. There is a straight line down from there along Bri's left side and her leg; there is a line back to the hand across the ground. Everything goes to a focus point on Bri's face - everything in the frame directs you back to that. I'm just really happy with how this turned out - when I do a full supplement for Cupcake Scouts, odds are really good that this is the cover.

 

This half-formed rpg setting idea I got the other day. It could probably work with something D&Dish but might be better suited to something else. Anyway, the world that the players' would know and explore is a sort of mythic forest, a dark fairytale sort of woodland with no apparent beginning or end. Within the woodland are areas of human habitation, where everyone probably speaks the same language, and probably some enigmatic ruins, suggesting perhaps a once united human culture or series of cultures, but nothing like that exists in the present and nothing more than fables that hold any memory of it. Memory, like everything else, gets swallowed by the forest.
The woodland can be a strange place. There are dangers there, even horrors, but there are also places of beauty and enchantment. These last are perhaps hard to find again after visiting, though.  Adventurers are wanderers in the wood, dealing with the things the forest brings them.
I envision it as something like an adult, darker Over the Garden Wall. Perhaps with a bit of Ravenloft with the forest replacing the Mists. The forest might give a similar uncanny vibe to the Zone in the film Stalker. Other inspirations: Grimm's fairytales and the film Company of Wolves. Maybe some stuff from the rpg Symbaroum though it's a bit less "Brother's Grimm meets Acid Western" than what I'm envisioning.

Four hexes northwest, six north of Alakran.

 

Unusually shaped, the high sides and hollow core of this peak resemble an antelope's hoof seen from below. The acoustics of the mountain's inner cavity are strange; voices echo, resonate, and multiply out of all recognition. An encounter in this space or to the southeast will involve hearing such eerie sounds, looking around (if you dare), and finding (d4):

1. A sick lost goat

2. A boy determined to prove his manhood by calling down the ghosts and showing no fear

3. An abandoned bagpipes that is being energetically made love to by a confused armadillo

4. A prankish minor air elemental

It is no secret that I'm not a huge fan of the FATE system. Sure, I backed the Kickstarter and received oodles of support material, but the system itself just didn't do it for me.

The thing is, I AM a fan of graphic novels, and Atomic Robo looks like a fun one. I guess I can just ignore the included Atomic Robo RPG, or simply use it as a reference source.

Remain calm and trust in Science! We've resurrected our February 2021 Atomic Robo Bundle with nine complete .PDF graphic albums of the Eisner Award-nominated Atomic Robo comic series from Tesladyne LLC, plus the 2014 Atomic Robo RPG tabletop roleplaying game from Evil Hat Productions. In 1923 Nikola Tesla unveils a robot with automatic intelligence: Atomic Robo! Granted full American citizenship in 1938 after a secret military operation, Robo founds Tesladyne, a two-fisted think tank that explores the fringes of scientific inquiry. After decades of high-octane, full-contact hypothesis testing at the edge of human knowledge, Robo and the Action Scientists of Tesladyne are the go-to defense force against the unexplained.

Created in 2007 by Brian Clevinger and Scott Wegener, Atomic Robo has been online since 2015 at atomic-robo.com. There's giant monsters, rogue agencies, underground cities, trans-dimensional vampires, one particularly annoying dinosaur, and explosions – lots of explosions. Atomic Robo reads like the Ghostbusters, Indiana Jones, Buckaroo Banzai, and Rocketeer movies crammed into a robot who wears pants. Jump in anywhere – each graphic album in this offer is a self-contained story, so you can read them in any order.

 

The Tavern is supported by readers like you. The easiest way to support The Tavern is to shop via our affiliate links. The Tavern DOES NOT do "Paid For" Articles and discloses personal connections to products and creators written about when applicable.

DTRPG, Amazon, and Humble Bundle are affiliate programs that support The Tavern.  You can catch the daily Tavern Chat cast on Anchor, YouTube,  or wherever you listen to your podcast collection. - Tenkar  

Hello friends!

We’ve just released a new video on how to use the Torchbearer 2E game master’s screen and its grind trackers.

Check it out here.

We hope to do a series of these videos. The next one up should be a demo of a Torchbearer conflict.

Army Ants isn't just a game, it's a veritable media empire. 

The Game

- The Core Rules for Army Ants '81 are now a PWYW release.

The Comic

- The original series is being re-mastered and released a page a day.

Other Cool Stuff

- Brandon posted a youtube video review of the game. on his RPG Overviews channel.

- Quinn made a fillable character card. Thanks, Quinn!

Five hexes northwest, five north of Alakran.

 

Azuppa is a streamside village of 125 people, missed off most maps. The usual (goats) and unusual (cactus ranching, prickly pear fruit and the sweet pulp which is fermented) defines their economy. Their singular custom is the Woeful Designation. 

This distinction, marked by a headband of red felt, passes on every third day to a new villager in a complex rota. On that day, the villager is relieved of their duties, and attempts to recite back to each of their fellows all of that person's woes, complaints, and grudges, sincerely and with as much aplomb as they can. When they are wrong, the client is free to abuse and correct them, in the process shouting their woes to the heavens. 

It can be imagined that in this place there are no secrets and the Azuppans cause each other as little trouble as they can. If someone is free of woes, the Designated One points them to a woe-stricken individual and charges them with repairing the woe, on pain of an arbitrary forfeit to be decided by the village headwoman, a dry and lean crone called Imirr the Cutgrass Blade. Visitors on this day are not spared, and if they are reticent about their troubles or simply possessed of none, they will be assigned one villager's woe from this list of intractables:

1. Sick goat, vomiting 

2. Plague of aphids on their prize cactus bush

3. Unrequited love for an absolutely uninterested agemate

4. Restlessness, ennui in the village, a desire to go far and see great things

5. Fear of spiders, only curable by forced exposure

6. Illness of the liver, foretold to be fatal in three weeks

The forfeits are humiliating acts for the locals, entailing loss of face. Passers-through will simply be fleeced for as much property as the headwoman thinks she can get away with.

 "The world is neon and dust.There is nothing more than the flesh. There is nothing greater than the wires. There is nothing to dream that is not sold and nothing to worship that is not made. It is a mirrorshade world of human reflections, every red hunger and every black passion worshiped in cathedrals of glass and greed. The great love their sins like children and the least want only to be Needleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243274667834930867noreply@blogger.com0

I didn't realize Backerkit was its own crowdfunding platform, but now I know :)

Unnatural Selection: A Supplement for use with Shadowdark is funding directly via Backerkit and is "a supplement of classes, ancestries, adventures and more for use with the Shadowdark RPG."  Or, more precisely, "Unnatural Selection is a new digital and physical Supplement to the Shadowdark RPG. It introduces over 120 pages of new classes, ancestries, weapons, spells, untamed beasts, underworld oddities, magic items, adventures, and other enhancements while maintaining and expanding the core of the Old School Renaissance."

There's a ton of content under a single cover.

• 120+ pages in a concise, two-page spread layout
• Rules for all new elements
• 6 New Ancestries
• 4 New Classes
• 70 familiar and brand new spells
• 65+ New Monsters, Animals, and Underworld Oddities
• Backgrounds from the Underworld and Nature
• Nature Spirits & Death Pantheon
• New Support Spell Type
• New Carousing
• New Mishaps
• New Treasure and Magic Items
• Zero Level Gauntlet and Campaign Setting
• Incredible hand drawn black-and-white art

Do I need it? Probably not. Do I want it? Definitely!

The Tavern is supported by readers like you. The easiest way to support The Tavern is to shop via our affiliate links. The Tavern DOES NOT do "Paid For" Articles and discloses personal connections to products and creators written about when applicable.

DTRPG, Amazon, and Humble Bundle are affiliate programs that support The Tavern.  You can catch the daily Tavern Chat cast on Anchor, YouTube,  or wherever you listen to your podcast collection. - Tenkar      

I'm having the longest experience of déjà vu... back in the mid 1990s, I went to a comic convention with two projects in hand. I had a box of Seymour #1, a fantasy comic about a teddy bear that fused pro wrestling with Dungeons and Dragons and my emerging sense of how I wanted to tell stories that I'd been laboring over every detail of for weeks. I also had a bunch of army ants mini-comics that I'd thrown together in like three hours and printed up on my way to the convention.
People could have cared less about Seymour, but they were all about the Army Ants. Almost everyone I talked to grabbed a copy (that I was charging maybe a quarter for, which didn't even cover the costs of the printing, so I was not the greatest businessman). 
Fast forward almost 30 years later. I have a book that I spent a bit of time laboring over, trying to get every detail right about a group of scouts going on fantasy adventures - and then an army ants book that I put together remarkably quickly, and put up as a pay what you want for the heck of it.
And, again, people are responding to that. I'm not at all unhappy about it - I'm thrilled that people are responding to Army Ants, which was my first love and the thing I've created that is the most uniquely 'me'. 
Two quick things to share:
@rpgoverviews posted a review of the game, which I truly appreciate. 
There was a request for a character sheet, so here's a blank version of the card I posted for Phil a few days ago...




 

 So last week The Red Room released Wretched Darkness Second Edition  & this caused a bit of a stir among my players. Let me explain the crew of the USS Victory is made up of 'special operatives' of the Federation. Many of these include those suffering from supernatural conditions. Now the player's wanted  upgrade thier PC's to second edition Wretched Space & Wretched Darkness. There weren't deepNeedleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243274667834930867noreply@blogger.com0