An Abominable Fancy

William Bradley Satyr Playbook PDF Here's my playbook for generating satyr characters in Beyond the Wall. I started doing straight translations of my various B/X satyr classes, but decided they weren't quite the right tone for BtW, and pretty much started from scratch. Let me know what you think, and, as always, suggestions and corrections are appreciated.

An extremely abstract map of the area around Herebury. I'll be using this as part of a playtest of a campaign-level supplement for Beyond the Wall, which involves collaborative sandbox building.

Sarah Stillwell, 1904 One of the best things about  Beyond the Wall  is the character creation process, which is based on playbooks. They generate your stats, your history, and your village. They establish relationships between both PCs and NPCs. And they allow you to have your OSR cake and it eat, too. You get to be a class purist  and  model as many and varied types of characters as you like. There are only three actual classes:  Warrior, Mage,  and Rogue.  The playbooks allow you to dress these mechanically straight-forward classes up in different clothes. An archer and a barroom brawler and a knight might all be Warriors, but you can make a different playbook for each, and they will feel very different. People have been doing this with D&D Fighters for a long time, but it's very satisfying to be able to meaningfully specialize your spell-caster without having to write a brand new spell list. The Mage can be a classic wizard, cl...

John Stater is the prolific creator of Blood & Treasure, Pars Fortuna, Mystery Men!, and Tales of the Space Princess. He wrote Hex Crawl Chronicles for Frog God Games, and is docmenting his own massive hex crawl setting in the magazine, NOD. He has several new projects coming out, including Tome of Monsters (for which I provided some drawings), Grit & Vigor, and a series of Basic-style iterations of Blood & Treasure designed to emulate specific fantasy genres. His blog, The Land of NOD, is a wonderful resource for gaming ideas, thought experiments, and truly peculiar character classes. What is your history as a gamer? John Stater: I began gaming in 6th grade—so about 12 years old. A friend of mine had seen his brother play Moldvay basic with some friends, and we tried to recreate the game ourselves based on his memory of what he'd seen. We probably didn't get it quite right, but I loved it and got my mother to buy me Basic D&D (from Toys 'R...