Lestrades_Game

  Vaults of Vaarn – Leo Hunt ~2022   The following table tells you most of what you need to know about Vaults of Vaarn, an indie TTRPG released in limited edition hard back in 2022-23. The underlying chassis of the game is Ben Milton's  Knave rule set, a riff on D&D basic and modern gutted down to 7 pages of tables and a core system. My general view with short page count games is you get what you include pages for. You can strip down the rules but situations that occur regularly in game will need to be bridged by the GM and players. In short I think the modern trend of ultra-light games is with a few exceptions ill judged. Vaults of Vaarn is an exception for two reasons.   First it is loaded with great tables. Tables that bring its dying earth Vancian, Wolfe-ian setting to life more than any pages of background or lore could (why do people like lore so much?). Long-time RPG fans might say this looks like Gamma World, or even Metamorphosis Alpha, and the...

I periodically turn my rpg session notes into something more publishable. Below are links to a short adventure I wrote and a campaign locale. First up, a Lovecraftian romp through a statue on the edge of a volcanic island; https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B39t62uIctG3aWJad3BmVlk5a2c/view?usp=sharing Its a bit linear, but its supposed to be a short adventure. I've tried to channel as much Lovecraftian weirdness as I can into it. Second up, a city in the dark of the Underborea; https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B39t62uIctG3SEFHbk5JZi1UelU&authuser=0 This is more of a campaign setting. The wider Underborea has sections of mega dungeon and hex crawl. This is meant to act as a plot trigger and base camp for the players. Both are written for the rpg Astonish Swords and Sorcerers of Hyperborea, by Northwind Games, which has become my fantasy ruleset and setting of choice.

My world building with Gimp continues. I've had a couple of cracks at putting together a city map and now having something that will probably get into my campaign. It is still a work in progress but it at least looks interesting. The concept is to have a city built on the back of a giant crab. This has some novelty to it, evokes the weird fantasy vibe im shooting for and allows for lots of interesting rationals in the world detail. For instance the city has a massive rain collection system to generate the needed water. To put this together I got a photo of some spiny species of crab, used the magic wand to select everything non crab in the image and remove it. I then dragged the contrast way up and darkened the crab to get a silhouette of the crab. I then used the path tool to design in the roads and then the buildings. I added in some of the spines in grey as these will be hollowed out to form some of the bigger buildings in the city. The background is a bi...

Making good maps is an easy way for someone with little to know art talent like me to make ones adventures look good, and perhaps even publishable (Will send some to fanzines at some point).  I've been steadily learning the ropes with GIMP. This is a bath house I'm constructing for my current Astonishing Swords and Sorcerers of Hyperborea game. I need to create a good pattern fill for the pools, and probably design some more objects to give the map a more populated feel but the structure is there. I very loosely model it on some historical floor plans;

With the rise of the Old School Renaissance (OSR) has come the rise of Fanzines and Magazines. I've had a read of Fight On!, Gygax Magazine, Footprints, & Magazine, Nod Magazine, Knockspell, Crawl!, AFS, and Metal Gods of Ur-Hadad. In this post I’m going to give a quick run down and critique of each of these. Fight On!; I start with Fight On! because its my favourite and I think probably the best. Edited by IG with the help of Calithena and others, this fanzine gives you between typically 80 and 130 pages devoted to Old School roleplaying mostly focused on D&D Basic and OSR games that use a similar rule set.  About 70% of the content is material such as dungeons, cities, monsters or adventure hooks you can drop straight into your game.  Of particular note is the material from Gabor Lux who writes these vivid heavily appendix N adventures. There are on running features such as community mega dungeon that is added to with each issue. The other 30% or so is opinion...