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The Spires of Altdorf
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So far this book is really failing to impress. Admittedly I bought it as a guide to Altdorf rather than as a scenario but impressively it is so far managing to work as neither.
While I've had a lot of success using Blogger I've decided to move away from integrating everything on Google products. In the era of GPlus everything worked together nicely but now there's always a feeling that you're one product manager away from everything being cancelled while at the same time your content is being ingested and reprocessed to create new things like generative AI that you never really were asked about. I've decided to start writing on a new blog that is part of the Fediverse and which I think has a nicer interface for writing and reading. The first post there is a writeup of the storygame Scene Thieves which is about a travelling troupe of actors who bring drama and do crime.
Sanctum is a supplement or perhaps alternative campaign setting that focuses on settlements (or Havens in the cant) in the City Beneath. The idea is that the Haven and it's community form the fulcrum of the campaign play with the longer term fate of the Haven being the key dramatic resolution. The setup echoes Belly of the Beast quite a lot, in particular in how the gameplay loop works for Havens, this felt identical to Belly of the Beast's "Delves" to me. There's also a presence of Blades in the Dark in terms of investing in a community for both storytelling and mechanical benefits. The Beats system all borrows positively from the work of people like Vincent Baker . In sure this slim volume assembles a variety of good mechanics to create a campaign frame centred around a community in a bizarre environment with a twist. It builds on the existing Heart rules for Haunts, Domains and Stress to make the integration pretty seamless and logical. Hav...
Most OSR community is based around Dungeons and Dragons, however like a lot of Europeans my first encounter with roleplaying or fantasy gaming was not through D&D itself by through reflections of those who had read a copy or heard of the idea and created their own. Like a lot of early British roleplayers my nostalgia is really for Fighting Fantasy, a formative experience that was notable different in tone from American fantasy while being composed of much the same tropes. Troika! is an attempt to create a retro-clone that brings together Warhammer and Fighting Fantasy into a simple rules system that bakes weird fantasy into core of character creation in the same way that the Ratcatcher career did in the 1980s. The basic mechanics are pretty simple. Mainly 2d6 are used and the basic characteristics are Skill , Stamina and Luck . If you are attempting something against the environment you try to roll under your Skill on two dice, if contested you roll and add, aiming for t...
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