An Abominable Fancy

I have compiled a campaign document for 21st Century dungeon-delving using Into the Odd. In the spirit of Into the Odd, it's brief—4 pages—but contains everything a player needs to get started. UNDERGROUND (free PDF) I also redrew a map for one of  +Chris McDowall 's adventures from the Oddvent Oddpedium , SUPERCAPACITOR. Not that there was anything wrong with the original map. Just keeping my hands busy.

Oh my goodness.  +Chris McDowall 's Into the Odd is the business. Personal gaming context: I've been thinking up some campaign possibilities for a gaming group. One of the notions I've been playing with is a dungeoncrawl. The setting for the dungeoncrawl is the modern world. Players can equip themselves with anything you'd find on Amazon, or at Home Depot, or from some weirdo internet swordsmith. The PCs live in a city (I've been thinking I'd make up a forgotten borough of NYC). Of course, the city is sitting on top of a megadungeon. The gist: There are secret urban spelunking clubs. Most of the wealthy families in town can be traced back to an ancestor who was in a club. The Borough President is intent on stopping the clubs, and closing up any passages to the Underworld that are discovered. The Municipal Sewer Authority is rich and powerful and unruly. The deeper you go, the less technology works, and the more mythic things become. Be nice to the rats, b...

Every character has a backpack or equivalent carryall. It is assumed that your pack contains: 1 week of rations water skin bedroll change of underthings Something Class-specific (equipment for maintaining weapons, spell book, holy symbol, lock picks, etc.) All other contents are uncollapsed wave functions. When you need something, roll against your WIS (or maybe LUCK, if you have a Luck stat) to see if you thought to pack it. First item: roll 1d6. (Automatic success if WIS is 6+) Second item: roll 2d6. (Automatic success if WIS is 12+) Third item: roll 3d6. (Automatic success if WIS is 18) Etc. The GM may add/subtract a die to/from the roll based on how likely they think it is to be in your pack. You may only roll once for a given item in a given adventure. Once an item is produced from the backpack, write it down. That item is now definitely in your pack until the next adventure. The quantum backpack resets at the end of each adventure. Before an adven...

I've been noodling with an Ancient Greek seacrawl. And you can't have Ancient Greeks without Pankration, and you can't have Pankration without grappling rules. There isn't a standard OSR approach to grappling. Holmes and   B/X don't address it, and AD&D presents what I assume is a Gygaxian prank. So, here, I've collected and broken down into constituent parts all the grappling rules I found close to hand, with the thought of cherry-picking the best ideas. It includes two sets of houserules by Douglas Cole, who has written quite a lot about grappling . Not included here are the grappling rules he and Peter V. Dell'Orto wrote up for Tim Short's The Manor . Hurry up, postman. Nature of the Contest: How Grappling is Initiated 5e Basic: STR check vs. Target STR or DEX. This doesn't apply terribly well to OSR, since NPCs don't have attributes. AD&D: Oh, man. Oh geez. Ohohoho. Forget it. AD&D Dragon #61: Melee attack vs. AC...

Apropos nothing, here, from the great swirling surfeit of alternate classes available on the Internet, are a few I'm especially fond of. Timothy Ide Delving Deeper: The Illusionist (free pdf) No shortage of contenders out there for the spell-casting variant, the Illusionist. This one is unique, and wonderful. Rather than a magician who specializes in a particular type of spells, this Illusionist is a straight-up fraud. But an effective fraud. Instead of spells, he prepares tricks—chemicals, gadgets, sleights of hand—to mimic the appearance of magic. F'rinstance, this first level "spell": FOG (affects: 4" diam, duration: 6 turns + 1 turn/level, range: 6") The illusionist mixes two ethers that immediately produce a thick bank of fog 4" in diameter (or any equivalent dimensions) and up to 20ft deep. It is impenetrable to sight. Some of the contrivances for the fake spells are more convincing than others, but it's not important that each s...

Just had a fun evening with the kid, using  +Benjamin Baugh 's B/X supplement: At 5th Level, Everybody Rides. The idea is that, just as you get a fancy house when you enter upper-level domain-style play, you get an epic mount when you reach the point where B/X introduces wilderness exploration. And who doesn't want an epic mount? The kid had been asking if his lizardman fighter could catch a hippocampus. I pulled out Benjamin's rules, and the kid forgot entirely about any fish-tailed horses, and instead rolled: GHOSTLY, the undead coal-fired cyborg horse-fox-spider chimera! Ghostly is a walking nightmare, ridden by a lizardman with a flaming sword. My seven-year-old is metal as fuck. And so, of course, we didn't stop there: Lisa, the rabbit cleric, rides high atop a tiger-striped wooly mammoth that can sound the heavenly trumpets with his trunk. Bochen, the griffon wizard , doesn't need a mount, because he's a griffon. But he gained a companion...

Minimalist Body Mind Heart That's about as simple as you can get with abstracted quantitative measures of pretend humans. Some might say that you don't need Heart, but they're probably not much fun to play with. Classic Strength Dexterity Constitution Intelligence Wisdom Charisma These six attributes are like a beautiful nerd haiku. They not only carry tremendous nostalgic weight, but they're pretty brilliantly flexible. This is the porridge Goldilocks ate. Extended Strength Agility Precision Endurance Reason Knowledge Intuition Awareness Presence Yech. Anytime an attribute list gets too long, I start backing away. This is a more accurate depiction of the sort of competencies I test for in my games, though. Á la Carte Expendable Additions Luck Power Sanity Will Resources Depending on the campaign, one or more of these might be helpful. These can be used as roll-under attributes, but points from them may also be expended. F'rin...