What are the guards talking about ?

 Hello all,

A quick random table today as a warm-up. Roll d6 once for each column.

Feel free to tweak, develop, adapt to your game and setting, if you wish so. I mean, if you're reading an OSR blog, it's probably obvious to you, but restating the importance of a care-free DIY attitude cannot hurt, right ?

On to the silly table. (I'll perhaps do some proper table layout once I'm not on mobile, sorry) 

You're infiltrating a castle / dungeon / guarded place of interest. You managed to sneak successfully near a room where two of the guards (not necessarily human guards) are conversing idly, and you're eavesdropping.

What are they talking about ? 

Guard A tells guard B about how...

Column 1

1 ...one of their in-laws... 

2 ...their own child... 

3 ...their boss / officer... 

4 ...the local authority (count/ess, duke/duchess, marquis/e, head of the city council...) 

5 ...their favourite sibling... 

6 ...they themselves...

Column 2

1 ...have recently become addicted to...

2 ...have definitely given up on...

3 ...are intensely repulsed by...

4 ...have been proselytized by a bunch of weirdos the other day about...

5 ...are, right now, really contemplating...

6 ...have made quite a bit of money with...

Column 3 (this one's a d12, folks, sorry)

1 ...social justice for all

2 ...social interaction in general

3 ...the idea of flirting with coworkers

4 ...dragon sightseeing

5 ...gladiator bets

6 ...the virtues of the good ol' plain cabbage soup

7 ...sunday meetings of the cult of the Dark Blood Death

8 ...the pirate life

9 ...this whole "hygiene" thing

10 ...castle personnel unions

11 ...raspberry farming

12 ...unicorn horn powder

Column 4 — And it's... 

1 ..."funny that it's finally happening to them too !" 

2 ..."intensely distressing right now, pal. Got another beer ?" 

3 ..."very unusual for them, you know ?" 

4 ..."absolutely disgusting !" 

5 ..."giving me hope / relief for once" 

6 ..."making me jealous. Really jealous"

 

Let's end with an example I just rolled ! It is very important to playtest your silly tables. :)

Guard Alan tells guard Beryl about how their captain Claudia has been proselytized by a bunch of weirdos the other day, about the virtues of the good ol' plain cabbage soup. It's absolutely disgusting ! On the street, in broad daylight ! Why can't these guys let people enjoy their spices in peace, huh ? Why must that new bland-food movement try and ruin everyone's meals ? I tell ya, these travelers from that island up north are up to no good. If you ask me, the Duchess oughta keep'em outside of our borders and away from our kitchens ! Etc.

(You will also note that I have no idea how to write accurate spoken English accents)

Current projects

Several convergent signs tell me to publish something this year.

1. My spouse and I crafted handmade notebooks as Christmas gifts for the family this year. (Well, I just customized covers of preexisting notebooks, because my skills are far from "crafting and sewing the whole cover and book" yet.) We had tons of fun cutting, gluing, and designing our little artistic zine-like objects ! I want to do this for RPG fun !

2. Nova from Playful Void put out her Zungeon Manifesto : demystifying dungeon creation with approachable procedures, a strong zine spirit, and the value of not hesitating to put something you've made out there, for the public to see.

3. W.F. Smith from Prismatic Wasteland put out a Year of the Beta manifesto of sorts, too ! Publish something unfinished but playable : see if you polish it, let others pick it apart, get it playtested, or just get it out of your system, but in any case : publish something.

So. These elements, resonating between themselves, collide with my strong preexisting desire to publish something, and with my drafts growing bigger every week. And with the fact that, yes, I actually felt confident enough to publish a translation on my itch page ! Knowing that I can do stuff is a powerful feeling.

The question is : publish stuff, yes, cool, very cool. But... which stuff ?

This is the post where I attempt to lay out my current projects.

First, a word about my deplorable workflows.

Nowadays, I try to limit myself to 5 active projects and 10 on the back burner. This is what I can manage without much problem, while permitting frequent rotations — which I need.

You have not seen my stuff yet because I never finish it, for a myriad of reasons I wrote an entire post's worth about, before deleting it and choosing to stay on topic.

But it is changing, hence this post.

 

The active projects

 

Standard OSR heartbreaker #12568214

An ever-changing ensemble of rules and systems designed to accommodate the cool OSR mechanical bits I come across, while staying lightweight and accessible. The current incarnation is a simple, generic base, with individual games / campaign settings / modules riffing on this base and adding settings, character options, rules, variants, etc. I am quite proud of the underlying concepts and the flexibility of it.

What I hope to do with it :

- lay out its theoretical foundations in more blog posts, like I started this summer ;

- develop and publish a zungeon by testing my simple dungeon stocking method (mentioned in the post I linked to) ;

- clean it up, publish it on Itch, perhaps as an SRD, and develop my own game ideas derived from it ;

- actually using it to play, focusing more on gameable content than system tinkering for a while.

 

Cosmo Spleen

Ultra-light d6 engine geared primarily for 1 player, solo or with a GM. Short game. Genre : planetary romance / sword and planet (I'm accidentally discovering that the genre is called "planet opera" in French, and the name has its charm).

The pitch : picaresque space losers find themselves in perilous situations on strange worlds, and can only rely on their wit and luck to get out of them, with precarious resources and constant complications.

What I hope to do with it :

- publish it in its most basic, simple form instead of constantly adding unnecessary small bits to it ;

- finish the solo playtest I have started with an interesting character ;

- develop Magic Spleen, a fantasy version where Ars Magica style wizards constantly get into trouble, both in and out of their wizard tower / academy / coven / HQ ; it looks very fun, is d12-based and of course has new rules and random tables.

 

DUNADRA

 My own version of an OSR+trad d20-but-it's-simple-I-promise fantasy game. Inspired by D&D 5e, and somewhat 2e too, this game aims to provide an exciting fantasy setting for heroic and epic adventures, with an anti-canon design, many adventure seeds, interesting character options that stay simple and accessible, and a modular philosophy. The problem, really, is that I have to attach a system to my collection of random tables and worldbuilding advice... But I prefer doing it this way, because I want my own D&D-like without the cruft (of both fluffy and crunchy varieties) of those systems.

What I hope to do with it :

- putting together a simple, but complete enough, system ;

- develop as many tables, tools, seeds... that I want, but publishing a beta with the basics ;

- see if people think that the name "Dunadra" is too on the nose or not !

These are the biggest things I'm working on right now.

 

The back burner

Various Lasers & Feelings hacks

What it says on the tin. Slowly hacking away at a Final Fantasy one and a Giscardpunk one (yes, that's a genre – basically French 60s-to-80s retrofuturism), but I have other ideas. It's quite fun and easy, but I still can't finish them ! I have trouble deciding some options for the FF one, and the Giscardpunk one got hit by a wave of feature creep. Yeah. I'm paralyzed by feature creep in a Lasers & Feelings hack.

What I hope to do with them :

- finish them without spending too much time on them ;

- publish them.

Oh, and the FF one is called LIMIT & BREAK. You have read it here first !

 

RP6 : Voyageur

A hack of Grant Howitt's one-page RP6 game, which I translated last month (see link near the beginning of the post). It's for a comical & cynical space opera setting, with no canon but lots of things, that I have been visiting from time to time for a few years now. I feel like RP6 would fit it perfectly !

What I hope to do with it :

- actually get around writing it ;

- publish a beta before developing all the stuff (there could be a lot) ;

- playing it with people, because I think it's got lots of potential.

SCAV system

One of my darlings. A simple system for playing in a setting I imagined around ten years ago now : France, 2100, after the apocalypse caused by climate change and subsequent societal crumbling. I just love this setting and the stories you can tell in it. The system is simple. Just gotta work on it. I have a lot of material and inspiration already, and it's one of the few homemade settings I actually GMed for friends.

What I hope to do with it :

- publish some form of beta when it's in a presentable state ;

- develop some adventures and various starting set-ups for it.

 

Zelda RPG (that's not the final name, please don't sue me Nintendo, I have no money)

A game I've been developing for a year or two now, coming back to it from time to time. The Legend of Zelda is one of my favorite video game series ever, and I really want to pay homage to it – none of the other existing TTRPG propositions I've seen in that space really appeal to me, for some reason or another. This project is dear to me, and my proposition is very faithful to what I love in the series.

What I hope to do with it :

- finish it with many cool tools for dungeon and puzzle creation, which is a quintessential point in Zelda ;

- use it to fuel the writing of another WIP of mine, a re-imagining of a Zelda fanfiction comics I did when I was 15 (it was atrocious and wonderful) ;

- hope it finds an audience somewhere.

 

Other things

There are other projects I keep in mind, or in notes. Some of which are almost complete (the basic skeleton anyway), some of which are short notes. I could list them all, but this post is long enough as it is. There's an Into the Odd-inspired game tentatively called Giscardpocalypse (adventurers wandering in the brutalist ruins of a former Giscardpunk world), a dantesque "cosmic war" game depicting demons and angels battling at the interstellar level, an ItO / Electric Bastionland hack with Jules Verne & other French vibes called Paradis Électrique, various ideas for generators and tables, and well... many others.

Looking at it, that's more work than I can do in 2025 ! I probably won't start publishing prolifically after so many years of not doing it, but I am confident that some of the stuff can see the light of day this year.

Also looking at it, a certain number of my projects heavily feature French culture, names or folklore. I am not sure why. Perhaps because there are not that many works in that space (even by French authors), or perhaps precisely because I feel the need to engage with my culture and its representations, in a time where it constantly reveals its many dark sides.

Anyway ! Publish stuff this year, do what you can, how you can, and see how it goes. I'll certainly try !

Bluesky presence

Hey, it seems I'm present on Bluesky now.

I never used Twitter at all : it always looked intimidating and exhausting and, frankly, kinda uninteresting from afar.

Bluesky is, too. But I am in a place where it is actually interesting to use for me, now that I care about connecting with fellow TTRPG creators, and now that I have more strength for other causes — and these require some degree of socialization.

And, of course, it doesn't reach the levels of awfulness of the other place, even if not everything is perfect (harmful bullying will never leave the internet, will it ?).

So ! You can find me there : @joyeuxscribe.bsky.social

There's English-speaking TTRPG stuff there, but also in French, and also talks of French politics, Covid / long Covid and my own disability, etc. Making and managing several accounts for different topics and circles of socialization was too exhausting, sorry !

GUYS I DID SOME STUFF

 

I actually finished something for once !

Grant Howitt’s November 2024 one-page game is RP6, a game centered on the quintessential RPG activity : talking with your GM, and by talking I mean trying to negotiate, ask, demand and extract info out of your GM.

So I whipped up a translation in French and posted it on itch.io !

This makes it my first game on itch and my first published translation. I am fucking proud of myself.

Now I have ideas for several hacks, it’s really tempting.

Dungeons all the way down – preview

I have a big post brewing about dungeons. It will probably be in two or more parts, and needs illustrations.

Here is a TL;DR preview so I can get the bulk of it out of my system. Ideas that wander in your system for too long, well, a) are exhausting and b) probably deserve to get out there.

On to the point.

Dungeons are :

1- enclosed units, space delimiting gameplay (you're in the dungeon or not, if you cross its borders, you get out of it or your GM needs to expand it) 

2- given visual representation (typically : a map, whatever form it takes)

3- filled to the brim with three things : a) dangers, b) weird stuff, c) opportunities (for treasure, adventure, story, advancement, etc.)

4- given procedures to travel in them and interacting with them.

Based on this definition, it appears that :

1- dungeons are dungeons (no joke ?!) 

2- megadungeons are dungeons (no joke ?!)

3- overworld spaces and maps are dungeons 

4- cities are dungeons (the "safe havens" just being particularly sleepy dungeons).

Corollaries :

5- overworlds and megadungeons differ mainly in their presentation (map, outside or subterranean...) and choice of travel procedures

6- you can treat any type of dungeon as any other type, and use procedures as you need them. Your dungeon is actually a forest or an island ? Okay. Your megadungeon is actually a lost valley ? Okay. Your overworld campaign world is actually underground, or is a single city ? Okay. Your gloomy city of thieves is so dangerous that some of its neighborhoods need dungeon procedures to be traversed ? Okay. (I've got references for most of these examples already, especially in video games.)

Final points :

- some games understand this very well already. I have not played it yet, but I think that Electric Bastionland takes the "borough as a dungeon" approach quite seriously.

- you can use the same, or almost the same, universal basic procedures to fill your dungeons. Just change the content of the tables a bit. I have a d6 table that I use to fill any kind of dungeon.

- inversely, it can be interesting to tailor the travel procedures, and think about which you want to employ and why (to what effect).

- you can rename "dungeons" in my expanded meaning as "adventuring locales", "dungeon units", "gameplay units" or what have you. They still need a better name. Something with "blocks"?

- your can view your game world / campaign milieu as a landscape of fractal Legos. All your campaign is composed of dungeon blocks within blocks within blocks, arranged with all the variations you can imagine.

And that's all folks. Now to see if I can finish the detailed post(s) sometime in the summer. But you can share your thoughts already !

Reading Holmes right now

... and it's interesting. I lean even more rules-light ordinarily, and the book is still somewhat chaotic. But it's a good read, a good example on how to pack a complete game in 48 pages, and it's better organized than OD&D (which, admittedly, isn't a high bar to clear). There's a lot of good in it.

All in all, in a strange way, it's the official D&D version that I can grok the best, it seems.

Might share other impressions or house rules later.

Death at 0 HP – a simple adjustment

On matters of survival, older rules are harsh : out of HP, you're dead. It's quick and makes sense : the character can't take hits anymore. But it makes for deadly games, where lethality is a big threat. I think that is desirable (in old-school, exploration-focused, horror-adjacent games), but can be tweaked.

(More than enough digital ink has been competently spilled discussing this very topic elsewhere, I won't reiterate much here.)

Newer rules (for a wide acceptance of "new") offer many ways of mitigating the actual risk of death, sometimes effectively eliminating it from the game. So they naturally change the feelings and expectations at the table, and for the classical OSR game, we don't want that. In addition, these rules sometimes become fiddly and burdensome in play.

So here's a quick-and-dirty idea to find a middle ground that is a bit more permissive than, say, Holmes, but remains firmly in the old-school camp.

When a hit (or whatever) brings you to 0 HP (that's a floor, even if a hit should bring you to negative totals), you're out for the rest of the fight (if in combat) plus the rest of the dungeon turns till the resting turn. You are probably hurt, wounded, and someone tends to you.

Once that passes, you regain the use of your standard abilities, saves, attacks, etc. but stay at 0 HP. The HP recovery then happens at the usual rate.

But if you further lose a single point of HP when still at 0, you die.

Simple, no ? Puts some pressure on the PCs while giving them a tiny bit more air to breathe. It simply interprets "out of HP" as "you can't take further hits, but aren't dead yet" instead of "you can't take further hits, because you took them all and now you're dead".

Another advantage is that it allows TPKs to not end with everyone dead, but everyone KO. The party can subsequently be captured by the enemies, or some other story plans like that. 

So : 0 HP means KO, with a penalty, and any further hits kill the PC. That's it.

Further thoughts :

- enemies who don't want to kill the PCs can do just that.

- the GM is still free to rule that some attacks or other dangers can kill directly instead of KO, and should warn their players about this. Typical examples : dangers or attacks triggering saving throws, like dragon breath, falling into lava, drinking virulent poison, etc.

Note : remember that, in old-school D&D, there are other rules in place to manage and mitigate the risk of death. Inheritance is one, for example. Some select magics can be used to resurrect or bring back a PC, or healing them abnormally fast. (As usual, it's more interesting if they need a quest and/or come with a price.) And Holmes explicitly says that it's possible to play with 2 PCs at once, which helps a lot too. Finally, hirelings and henchmen are there as replacements.

Hope this helps ! I've put it in practice (as much as I practice these days), and I must say that it works quite well.