An Abominable Fancy

Knacks ( knakkespelle, kitchen magic, pocket charms, cradle airs, etc. ) are t he pettiest of petty magic—very minor utility charms, often passed down in families. Mole, Mole, come out your hole Or else I'll beat you black as coal! Mole, Mole, put out your head Or else I kill you till you are dead! —To drive vermin from fruit still on the tree, recite this poem while burning moss from the tree's trunk and limbs. One, two, three, four, five, See, I caught a hare alive. Six, seven, eight, nine, ten, Then I let her go again. — To address complaints of the liver, catch a hare, pluck a small amount of fur from its belly, and then release it. Knacks have no game mechanics. They do not have a definitive effect on the world. They increase the odds of succeeding at mundane tasks by an undetermined amount. Knacks are valuable to their possessors; a farmer who can recite a rhyme that increases the likelihood of picking fertilized chicken eggs has a distin

Here's the deal: there is more fun and a better game if the GM doesn’t over-prep their campaign backstory, and lets the world grow out of discovery and interaction with the players. But if you leave things too open, every campaign ends up in the same Tolkein -cum- Gygax fantasy world and people starts saying things like “dwarf cleric” and “elven assassin” and you could not be more bored. Here’s a tool which will, I hope, help tread the line between special snowflake and rote boilerplate. The Campaign Precís. (Link to an Excel file) The idea is that this contains all the information you prepare ahead of time. You can put as much juice and color into your answers as you want. Your answers can imply larger narratives. But you can’t go past the précis. It’s focused on things your players will need to know in order to imagine their characters. These are the weapons they’re familiar with, the authority they need to contend with, and the monsters they’ve heard stories ab

My party is traveling north, from their home village of Herebury to the town of Stoat, to pick up a suit of armor and a few new PCs. I wanted the journey in between to have some color, but didn't want to drag it out with random encounters and side missions. I assigned each player a village, and asked them to describe it briefly, along with a local NPC. I asked a second player to then elaborate on either the village or the NPC. A third player then rolled a check against Charisma to see how the party faired. Here are the villages that resulted: Town: Oxley Once known as Oxcross, Oxley is known for its livestock who graze the fields east of town. It's proximity to the Thousand Acre Wood makes it home to a good number of hunters and trappers, who protect the town and its herds from wild animals. Oxley has been grooming their cattle for generations to yield the best tasting beef in the region. They also have a formidable leather working tradition. Most of the local hunter

Two additional maps for my Beyond the Wall campaign, now that they are moving past their home village: The Olfdene Valley The Wide World

Here's what Herebury looks like now that the players have generated a ton of NPCs, locations, history, and intrigue for the place. It's going to be a challenge to make the scenario as much fun as chargen has been. Woodcroft House Town Square Eighter’s House Ravengard’s Library Herebury Market The Mill The Red Herring Herebury’s Hearth Hedge Hovel Tatter Helga’s House The Forge of Hake Glenross Temple of the Old Gods Wicht Hill The Forgotten Well Guardian’s Grove Shriek’s Den Smokey’s Cabin The Lumber Camp Also, Beyond the Wall is proving to be just as great a bridge between the OSR and story games as one might hope . When I've suggested story-ish systems to this community before, they have looked upon me with the soft, pitying eye usually reserved for children who don't quite have their bowels under control, yet. Now, people are saying, "Tell me more about

Working on the town map for my Beyond the Wall campaign. This is a mostly-blank slate on which the players can drop in locations, which they will come up with as part of chargen. A special feature of Herebury: instead of a town wall, it has a ditch. Not even a moat. Clearly, these guys learned nothing in the Goblin Wars.

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