An Abominable Fancy

In my Kley-inspired setting , I'm calling the thief and thief-adjacent classes The Sneak because it seems to address the tactics of the class. Fighters fight, Sneaks sneak. Sneaks can be thieves, con-men, spies, assassins, detectives, merchants, reporters, diplomats—anyone who chooses guile as their way of getting things done. All illustrations in this post by Honoré Daumier An ongoing event in the OSR Olympics is reworking the thief skills. They're an inelegant fit with the rest of the rest of the game, what with their exclusive claim on tasks that had previously been open to anyone who could describe their character doing something sneaky, and their weirdly low levels of competency. And yet they loom so large in the broader conception of what the game is supposed to be that it seems churlish to just excise them. So here's my take, with the Sneak Skills. These skills are based on the assumption that everyone can hide, and look for traps, and climb, and whatnot b

In trying to imagine a fantasy RPG based on Heinrich Kley's drawings , the first thing I wanted to captures was the riotous sense that anything could be alive and acting out its own dramas and comedies. Gasoline Stallion Animated Objects Everything wants to live, even stone and wood and metal and glass. The world is awash in animating spirits seeking forms to inhabit. The more attention, be it care or anxiety, people focus on an object, the more likely it is that an animating spirit can bond with it and bring it to life. Complex machinery, such as autos, firearms, and furnaces, are almost universally animated. Beyond all the normal attributes and functions one would expect of an object of the given type, animated objects posses Mobility, Alignment, and Motivation. Mobility An object’s form usually determines how mobile it is. If a normal version of the object is capable of movement, so is the animated version. If an object, such as a clawfoot tub, has parts th

A few weeks ago,  +John Stater posted a notion of making a simplified version of his admirable Blood & Treasure as a foundation to build retroclones based on the work of specific illustrators. That's an idea scientifically calibrated to pique my imagination, and I started wondering "What would D&D look like if it was based on the work of Heinrich Kley ?" I've been playing with it a bit, and it's synched up with a number of other ideas I've been noodling. Here's a rough outline of how I'm framing things: Alignments Civilized Wild Social Status Laborer Bourgeoisie/Burgher Gentry Background Wilderness Rural Urban Maritime Military Trade High Society Academia Clergy Class Soldier Sneak Spell-caster (Inventor, Spiritualist, Illusionist) Doktor Race Centaur Elefant Froschling Human Krokodiller Satyr Right now, I'm building it all on a f