grimoire of grimoires

bandwagon

i don't have a lot of experience balancing spells

1. In the murky depths of a crumbling tomb
caster blinds themselves and every sighted creature within twenty feet for [dice] rounds

2. Lies a gibbering creature in full bloom
target sentient must repeat every new sentence they speak thirty times, for [sum] hours

3. Wrapped in chains and wrapped in skin
for [dice] of the target's limbs: target's skin is replaced with chains

4. Its name aloud is a sin
target forgets their own name for [sum] hours

5. GRIMOIRE! GRIMOIRE!
horrible knowledge floods the mind of target sentient. They must save or spend [sum] rounds clutching their head in a fetal position while retching. Target gains a random spell from this list

6. You fill me with such sweet dread
target's stomach fills with [sum] pounds of sugar   

Bangshot Manor

I wrote this smallish adventure if you want to take a look.

 clicky clicky

The germ of this idea started awhile ago. I wanted to write an adventure in a medeivalish setting but with cyberpunk puns, tropes, or themes. Thought it would be funny if players were to hack into the net to progress, but with sharp tools and a rope net instead of computers.

The first version of this dungeon was an ancient underwater pleasure palace or temple with a chained kraken at its heart. The civilization or organization which had captured the kraken was long gone but the creature still lived and its psychic wails filled the dungeon.

I tried to fill it with some fun stuff like decrepit machinery and radical druids but it didn't seem to be coming together. Got too caught up in fitting everything together coherently and the dungeon might have been too big for the one shot I wanted anyway.

I still like some of these ideas but a lot of them weren't included in this second version, which is lighter in tone. I'm reasonably pleased with the current version, but I haven't playtested it yet so who knows if it's actually good. 

Why fantasy

I think one of if not the main reasons the medieval era has such a big hold over western fantasy is that it’s a pre modern time . Fundamentally strange, alien, and perhaps unknowable 

Ttrpgs are for me about exploration, seeing somewhere new and interacting with it . Combat can be interesting if done well, as can improv-type social games, but encountering the bizarre where it’s at imo

The past is a foreign country, and one rich with detail. It’s easier maybe to create a convincing place that breathes out of the past than to imagine and project one from the present? I’m not sure. Fantasy does seem to be bigger than SF in the broad sense though

Maybe because the premodern past is wild but still easily legible 

But the modern era has lots of good stuff! There are plenty of weird realities in the present and and future. Guns. Propaganda. Spaceships. None of that in the mud grubbing Middle Ages 

Cybernetic etymology

In my latest oneshot which has had a goalpost of “within the year” for about half a year, I’ve been interested in combining nautical themes with cyberpunk themes

Primarily because the central conceit and perhaps the main organizing idea of the adventure is to make one or more puns along the lines of having a fantasy setting where players hack into a literal net made of ropes 

Cyberpunk is the best genre (hyperlink) but I’m not actually interested in running a sf adventure 

this primary reason recently received a secondary jolt of positive energy when I realized that cybernetics comes from the Greek word for steersman

Clearly I’m onto something 

A purpose of this blog

I want to write some things down mostly about osr. My friends are, I think, tired of my walls of text and writing here rather than a Google doc that is to say writing somewhere I might be read might improve, discipline, expose , provoke, or discourage The Writing all effects which sound good to me 

also it seems like all the osr writers I like have blogger blogs so