Armor as Damage Reduction?

An obvious refinement in handling armor in RPGs is making armor reduce damage instead of the original D&D reducing the chance of taking damage. Intuitively that’s what armor does, right? It doesn’t make you better at dodging, it just reduces how much you get hurt when you get smacked. A lot of pretty good […]

Shields Shall Be Splendid!

The following presents a house rule for handling shields that makes sense to me for a more Sword and Sorcery than high medieval setting. In most D&D-likes, shields are an afterthought. The bonus for carrying a shield is +1 or maybe +2 on a d20, which seems a little strange considering the prominent place shields have in […]

Viriconium

Currently you can get all four Viriconium books ( The Pastel City, A Storm of Wings, In Viriconium, and Viriconium Nights) in a single volume for $1.99 on Kindle. That’s a really good deal. I remember being really impressed with them when I was a teenager, so it’s probably time to re-read them. Viriconium amazon link.

Overland Encounters

I just realized I never posted this here, but here are my generic rules for overland travel and encounters for D&D-like games. The overloaded encounter die is pretty similar to the one Gus L uses in HMS Appolyon. Checking for Events Each day there are at least two checks for events: one during the day and […]

Overland Travel

Another post that I never posted here, with a general way of handling overland travel based on the underlying Outdoor Survival/AD&D terrain and movement rates, simplified for easy use with pretty much any D&D-like. These templates show the cost to enter1 a hex on the overland travel map, with a key to how many hexes a […]

SF Campaign Quiz

I stumbled across this when going through my old emails, and I thought it might interest some of you. This was a survey I sent out for a group I was going to run a SF campaign for once a month online; they had agreed they wanted to play some kind of SF campaign, but they […]

Thorgal!

Why did nobody tell me how great Thorgal is? (Ok, Trey Causey tried back in 2013, but I wasn’t reading his blog back then, and made the mistake of not crawling through all the archives when I added it to my list of must-reads. Mea culpa.) Despite the name, Thorgal is not about Marvel’s new […]

Homebrewery – a tool for easy 5e formatting

Just ran across this tool for easily making pdfs and web pages in the style of the D&D 5e Player’s Handbook. Very useful if you’re writing D&D 5e home-brew material, or really any home-brew stuff that you want neatly formatted and don’t mind the D&D house style For instance, here’s a link to one of […]

Tracking Individual Initiative

Despite what I said a while back about group initiative (was it really almost a year ago?), in our DCC game we’ve been using individual initiative, both ’cause that’s how DCC is written and ’cause it has some little flavorful fillips to it that make it more interesting. In DCC only Warriors increase Init bonus as […]