Dunkey's Dracula Generator Made Pleasant

Dunkey Halton posted a Dracula Generator that I liked. I stole it, made it look kind of like it belonged in A Red And Pleasant Land and glued it into my copy. It fits nicely in the back, over all those blank pages. Click the thing below to get it.

Sad Dolls

Written in a hurried scrawl in the last page of the journal is an address, then nothing but blank pages. The address leads to an abandoned building adjacent to the Old Bugbear, a suspiciously cheap inn on the quiet side of town.

Skelintons Versus Demons One Oh One

by Xavier Turisini

  

The dead are fighting the demons down in hell and always have been. Both are terrible and neither can possibly win. But worry not, for they cannot touch us up here in the land of light and beauty.

Oh wait sorry what's that?

"He took the King's secret whistle from its secret hook. He blew a long, low blast down the King's back secret stairway. And a moment later he heard them coming! Up from their musty hole beneath the dungeon, up the empty midnight tunnel to the royal bedchamber tower, came the magicians on their padded, shuffling feet. Up and right into the room they came chanting."

  -Bartholomew and the Oobleck, by Dr. Seuss

Fuck. Fucking wizards. Now there are demons and skelingtons crawling out of the dark holes and graveyards all over the world. That's just great.

The Caves Beneath Otbara

What are you doing down here? It's dangerous under the city!

1. I wanted to get down to the port without paying taxes or having my luggage searched.
2. I wanted to find the Rewarding College.
3. I wanted to see if it were true that the weight of the city was going to crumble the cliffs one day and tumble everything into the sea.
4. I heard you can get into the palace through these caves.
5. I just followed one of those hooded creatures you see deliberately pacing the streets of the city, the ones with all the legal protections -Peaceful Monks. I mapped their progress and discovered their paths were drawing intricate city-wide pentagrams. Then I decided to follow them.
6. I heard there was a series of shrines down here that, if visited in the correct order and with the correct rituals, can supercharge magic items.

THE CAVES

The caves sprawl for a very long way - going beyond the borders of the city and down all the way to the water. I suppose it could be a megadungeon but maybe not.

I Ran Logan Knight's Mystics

Rules are shit - this is known. However, I must concede that they are nice for making people do things and making them feel like the things they are doing are the right things to do.

In vanilla Dungeons and Dragons people playing wizards obsess over finding weird scrolls, thieves piss off the rest of the party at every turn and fighters hang around, feel washed out and itch to kill things. All as it should be.

But then along come clerics and bore the shit out of absolutely everyone. Maybe that's intentional? Whatever. Fuck them. Clerics are boring.

Don't worry though. It's going to be OK.


Logan Knight has answers. He wrote a blog post where he suggests replacing stodgy old clerics with his own mad, itinerant mystics. I did, and you could too. Let's talk about why that'd be a good idea.

Running Deep Carbon Observatory

For anyone reading this who doesn't own and/or isn't running Deep Carbon Observatory then this probably isn't the post for you. Here's my review instead.

For everyone else, maybe this will interest you and maybe it won't. What follows is a record of some of my thoughts about the book and how it went down in my campaign.

DIY OSR Starter Sets

Inspired my recent acquisition of Paolo Greco's punk rock anthem, the Cthonic Codex*, I have been thinking about starter sets.

Here are some things that are great about starter sets:

• They come in BOXES.
• Having BOXES on your shelf in between the books makes you feel like a deviant.
• They are full of weird stuff that would seem totally unrelated if it weren't all in a BOX together.
• There are primal human urges to read things that are books but play things that are in BOXES. If you want something played, put it in a BOX.
• You could be making your own OSR Starter Set right now.
• Then you could give it to the one you love. He will say, "I never understood how you could play a game from a book. Now that you have given me your favourite game in BOX form I can love you again."

HERE ARE SOME STARTER SETS YOU COULD MAKE

These ideas for basic OSR starter sets were chosen with a few simple premises:

1. The base of a starter set should sometimes include rules, and then either a module with which to use those rules or instructions for generating scenarios for those rules.
2. The separate pieces of the starter set should have nothing to do with one another. Not be made by the same person, not intended to be used with the same system.
3. The components of the starter set should be free or very cheap.
4. These are all things that I really like and would genuinely love to play.