Heavy Metal Mutant Future part 4 – A Taarakian!

To defend: This is the Pact.
But when life loses its value,
and is taken for naught -
then the Pact is to Avenge.
Taarna is the piece most people think of when Heavy Metal comes up. It might have something to do with it being the longest segment, the cornerstone of the movie, and that Taarna is on [...]

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High Speed Dungeons and Dragons

After reading Greywulf’s posts about High Speed D&D (30 levels in 30 games), I really started thinking about how to run it with earlier editions.
The basic idea is to run a game of D&D where the characters level up at the end of each single-session adventure. After 30 games, these epic heroes complete the uber-quest [...]

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The Healer – a Labyrinth Lord Character Class

As I approach the final stretch of work on Magical Theorems & Dark Pacts I’m going through our playtest documents and putting finishing touches on the alternate magic-user classes held within. One class that was particularly enjoyed by the players, much to my surprise, was the Healer. Lacking the versatility of the cleric, I expected [...]

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Heavy Metal Mutant Future – 2 – Den

Last week in the Heavy Metal Mutant Future we looked at the Harry Canyon sequence to see how it affects the setting and what we can do with it.
Before I get into the second sequence, Den, I have to point out the number of nods to Heavy Metal found in another of my favourite movies [...]

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The Desert of the Gods Part 1 – Denizens & Background

When I first launched my old-school 3.x campaign in 2001, we started with a mega-dungeon campaign to get our feet wet. We based it around an area I used occasionally but always intended to use a lot more in my B/X campaign – the Desert of the Gods.
The Desert itself is a “magical wasteland” in [...]

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d6 and 2d6 Thiefin’ for Basic Dungeons & Dragons

While I am a fan of the B/X D&D Thief, I am not as enamoured with the percentile skill system. In general I dislike percentile systems because the granularity is just too fine. I also tend to prefer die rolls with curved results. Finally, many players of thieves tend to have this idea that a [...]

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Swash Swash! Buckle Buckle! Weapon Mastery in Basic D&D

When the D&D Master Rules was released, it included a new Weapon Mastery rules system that was… well… somewhat crazy. In a game where a level the average level 11 fighter has around 50 hit points (we can even go as high as 65 for exceptional constitution), having a skill that grants that same fighter [...]

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Random Polearm Generator

Bill! Glaive! Glaive-Guisarme with Hook! The medieval man-at-arms was most commonly equipped with one of a strange assortment of polearms instead of a trusty sword or even a club (at least you can expect he’ll know what to call a club!)
AD&D1e players in particular were assaulted by a massive variety of polearms in the core [...]

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Steamguns and Blackpowder Clockworks – Magical Arms

In this second instalment of Steamguns and Blackpowder Clockworks, I present a small collection of magical firearms for fantasy games that have implemented firearms as part of the setting (and that can work in a setting that doesn’t – see the footnote).
Once again, this post is part of the RPG Blog Carnival, hosted this month [...]

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Steamguns and Blackpowder Clockworks – Rules

Whenever you play with the technology level of a fantasy game (or any roleplaying game, in my experience) one of the first things that the players go hunting for is new weapons technology. In the case of most steampunk settings, this means the great gun race has begun.
In this series of posts for the RPG [...]

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[B/X Dungeons & Dragons] Blackrazor’s Kin – The Black Swords of Kale

The most famous of the Black Swords of Kale is Blackrazor, a magic black sword that “shines like a piece of the night sky filled with stars”. It is definitely the most potent of these ancient blades, and the most well-known – sought after by many and one of the artifacts used to help found [...]

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[Espionage '88] Rebuilding the Bureaus

Espionage ‘88 is my project of working on combining my favourite parts of Top Secret and Top Secret / S.I. – basically taking the Top Secret game, and adding the advantages and disadvantages of TS/SI, as well as cleaning up and simplifying the hand to hand combat system and completely rebuilding the social contact rules [...]

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