Imbricated Interests of a Ludic Ghoul

I bodged the map together on the morning of the game before work. Sepia toning = instant credibility Last night at the Iglootree Shop in London I ran the first of our MYSTERY RPG sessions, in which we take something weird off of the shelf and let members of the public play something unknown - and are hopefully as surprised as we are. For this session I selected the game HAMMERS: Bell Book and Candle Edition by Sivad's Sanctum aka Jon Davis (no not that one ), described as "A Playtest of Horrific Old School System Tools". The System Hammers is one of the strange little games that have cropped up in or adjacent to the Thinking Adventures Discord server. The server generally has a focus on old-school gaming in new directions - many of the rules tinkering there uses OD&D as a basis and Hammers is another of these 'sort-of OD&D' type games, though it wears the influence very loosely while it pulls piecemeal from many (many!) other contemporary indie ...

WARNING - this post contains hex-and-counter wargame terminology! Partially inspired by the first part of this video , I decided to bite the bullet and codify hexcrawling movement value in my 1e AD&D campaign in terms of hex-and-counter board wargames.  Wargames (I would prefer the term be reclaimed away from miniature games, but that's just me) are something I really enjoy and the counting of movement in hexes in terms of a unit's value is second nature to me, so this just makes sense. It does away with the B/X nightmare of terrain types causing 1/3 or 2/3 movement penalties and when you apply that across a multi-hex journey, and simply allows the party to move discretely from hex to hex, paying for terrain costs as they enter. Though derived from AD&D materials, I see no reason this couldn't be used for any game with the 12/9/6 style movement. So, here is the chart. I haven't yet tested this but I will do in my upcoming session this week. Read on if you care h...

I've just released a new PWYW Tunnels and Trolls adventure that I wrote for use in convention play, Ferverax and the Wildnerness of Gleam . It features a hand-painted map for the party to move around on at speed as they try to locate the invisible castle of the titualar evil wizard Ferverax.   He has an X at the end of his name, he must be bad news I did my usual 'over-prepare in a panic by 5000%' method and spent hours on this acrylic painting for the map. It's very much inspired by the Mike Winterbauer school of CRPG map design, and in fact the adventure does feature magical fountains that boost your level a la Might & Magic which Mike produced some absolutely glorious maps for. Map by me, Andrew Walter. The original is big! Tunnels & Trolls is a game I've really found myself enamoured with in the last few months (I have had the 5th edition rules for several years but it never really clicked for me until quite recently). Of all the 'old games' it...