Rabeleis is my Dungeon Master

Over on the Unseen Servant, I'm running a new game:

GARGANTUA.

We're using Chris McDowall's Into the Odd for Patrice 'Kabuki Kaiser' Crespy's Castle Gargantua.

It's early, yet, but so far it's been a lot of fun. The procedural generation of Castle Gargantua keeps everything low-prep, and Into the Odd is extremely good for play-by-post.

For flavor-enhancement, I'm keeping a copy of The Life of Gargantua and Pantagruel close at hand. This is a collection of late Renaissance novels by François Rabelais. It's bawdy, violent, scatological, profane, and unrelentingly dismissive of every pretension that society has to offer, then or now. Right in line with the mindset of your average dungeon party.

So far, the party has conversed with a door that recited "Antidotal Jokes," viciously dispatched the first living thing they encountered, and poked their heads through a couple doors.

If you're curious about how any of these elements play out, feel free to pop over and check out our campaign forum. If you think you'd like to join, get in touch and I'll let you know when a good time to hop in rolls around.

Comments

Knave 2e Alternate Attributes

Sometimes, I'm exactly in the mood for the classic simplicity of defining characters entirely by D&D's six attributes, as Knave does. But sometimes, I want the players have have just a little smidge more to fiddle with.

Lasers & Feelings, RetroRocket

Necro-Cavaliers of the Astral Galaxy reminded me of just how much fun John Harper's Lasers and Feelings is. So I made a hack. Like so many others have. There's no new titular dichotomy for my hack, even though lasers aren't so much a part of the 30's era, Buck Rogers-style, planetary romances I wanted to emulate. Something like "Rockets & Romance" would have been entirely genre appropriate, but there's no improving on the geek poetry of declaring "I rolled LaserFeelings!" Anyway, I hope you like it. Let me know if you play it! LASERS & FEELINGS, RETROROCKET (pdf) Here's some of my previous noodlings along the same retro-futuristic lines: Ray Guns Food Pills Strange Powers An Exaltation of Rockets

Knaves, fancypants

I've prepared a new layout document of Ben Milton's Knaves . Knaves is a great, light rules set that has an extremely elegant core mechanic while retaining total compatibility with OSR material. It's pretty much the rpg of my dreams. This document contains the complete rules, plus a bunch of useful hacks from the community, plus a few of my invention, plus some useful resources from Ben Milton's previous effort, Maze Rats . EDIT: I've updated the layout to fix errata and make a few tweaks. Further, I've made 3 variations: KNAVES TABLET LAYOUT The Tablet Layout is meant for scrolling on screens, and contains hyperlinks. KNAVES SPREAD LAYOUT The Spread Layout is set up to print on Letter-sized paper. KNAVES A4 LAYOUT The A4 Layout is set up to print on A4 paper, and is probably the most elegant of the three versions. This is presented with generous permission from Ben Milton, and should in no way be an excuse for not purchasing a copy of Knav...

An Abominable Fancy

Search This Blog