Planet Gnome

I like fantasy when there are only humans and I like fantasy when everyone looks like and extra from the Mos Eisley cantina , but the middle ground where there are other species but they're basically just grumpy humans with bumpy foreheads or pointy ears just doesn't do it for me.  I've been thinking about how I'd do my ideal version of a fantasy RPG, and have come up with some ideas for alternate fantasy races (I'm thinking about calling them lineages instead).  I still need to come up with in-world names for the different lineages, so for now I'm referring to them by what inspired them. Dragonfly People First we have the Dragonfly People (they're sort of dragonfly/firefly/beetle/termite people, really).  They are covered in a segmented carapace, usually in metallic shades of blue, green, and yellow; and have long narrow wings which can be safely folded into their backs. The Dragonfly People build their castles on floating moats of earth which are the shatt...

Once long long ago there was a king with a failing heart.  The court sorcerer believed he could give the King a new heart, but a strong healthy donor must be found and the Blacksmith's Son was chosen.  Unbeknownst by the court, the boy's lover was the Witch's Daughter and a curse of sorts was laid on his heart.  He was taken in the night and the sorcerer cut out his heart and placed it into the King.  The King felt as though he has the strength and vitality of a young man, death no longer felt as if it was looming over his shoulder, though the incision never quite healed.  The King's own son got tired of waiting for the thrown and had his father assassinated.  The body of the King lay dead until the next full moon when he awoke as the Blacksmith's Son. Until the heart is destroyed, the King and the boy are fated to be reborn whenever the other dies; each with the twisted death mask of the other on their chest.  Every time the Blacksmith's Son reawakens...

I'm about half way through "City of Bones" by Martha Wells .  (Note, there are a couple other books called "City of Bones" I am talking about the Martha Wells one.)  In this world the future is divined by burning the bones of specific people from the setting.  In addition to being a more evocative and sinister flavor of augury, it adds the danger of being jumped and killed not just for your pocket change but for your bones.  Let's blatantly steal for this for our silly elf games.  Augurs, oracles, and prognosticators are able to read the ripples of fate by burning the bones of elves, wizards, and the magically profane.  The bones are burned in copper braziers and the ashes interpreted against lines inscribed in the dish. This practice has fueled a cottage industry of bone collectors.  Cut-throats and grave robbers provide a steady supply of bones of dubious origin.  The discerning fortune teller saves the rare genuine elf bone for their own privat...

  Download the PDF or Google Doc The Idea When I first learned about the game Microscope , like a lot of people, my first thought was how cool it would be to use it to build a campaign setting then run an RPG in it.  I read through it and watched several videos on it, and it was just too much of a game in its own right.  I liked the idea of building the world as a group but didn't need as much structure for the process itself.  At the beginning of COVID I discovered Whitehack and was inspired about how setting-versatile it was.  The only real assumptions it made were that magic was a thing and that swords were still viable weapons.  This could mean Lord of the Rings but it could also mean Star Wars or Dune.  This brought back the idea of creating a setting as a group then running a campaign in it, and I decided on just making a series of group discussion questions. Now, I have yet to actually make a campaign this way, my RPG opportunities have greatl...

Spellburn and Battlescars is one of my favorite game that I have yet to play.  It's built on top of Into the Odd but adds back player classes and traditional fantasy trappings, filling the same niche for me as Cairn .  Even though I can take or leave trad-fantasy, I find it super useful when running for new players who know Dungeons and Dragons through pop-culture.  The Game Master's Handbook for Spellburn and Battlescars is very good, too.  It's full of tips and procedures I wish I had been given when I first started running games. All of that is to preface that I wrote a new class or "Archetype" for the game.  When I read it back in June I was super inspired and started thinking about a Discworld/Earthsea inspired witch class.  I had a bunch of ideas and wrote a bunch of notes, and like most of my other RPG projects kind of lost steam.  Well a few days ago someone online asked me about it, and that gave me the motivation to type up my notes and pu...

 This one is pretty self-explanatory.  I was poking through some abandoned RPG projects, and found this technobabble table I had written while procrastinating working on some space backgrounds for Troika. Download PDF      

It's been a few years since I have run 5e, but when I did managing combat initiative order was one of the more cumbersome aspects.  I've seen a number of solutions online and this is what I came up with. First of all, I passed off initiative management to my players.  While I was drawing up the combat map and getting minis out, my players would roll their initiative and the rogue would write them down and read the names back in order to the druid who would clip them to the initiative tree.  The tree sat on the corner of the table where everyone could see it and know who was up next.  All I had to do was roll initiative for the enemies and let my players handle the rest. Something else I did was group up the enemies into 2-3 groups who would all act together.  This streamlined things immensely, especially when there were large groups of small enemies. The tree itself was just a dowel and a couple pieces of scrap wood.  The names were hot glued onto clothes p...

I've been watching a lot of videos on solo skirmish games this past week and have been cobbling together terrain out of cardboard and interesting looking bits of trash.  I was watching a Chris McDowall stream demoing Mythic Bastionland and procrastinating painting my terrain when I had an idea for a skirmish game of my own.  The Idea Character Creation Allocate d4, d6, and d8 each to a stat: Melee, Ranged, Guard, and Aid. One stat will be left blank. (Use the die name, not the rolled result of said die). Roll d4, d6, and d8 together, the summed result is the character's starting Wound value. Everyone takes one free dagger. Select an additional weapon and one armor. Weapons Dagger - Melee d6, Ranged d4 Short Sword - Melee d6, Guard d4 Long Sword (Two-Hand) - Melee d8, Guard d6 Axe (Two-Hand) - Melee d10, Guard d4 Bow - Ranged d10 Armor Shield - Guard d6, Aid d4 Light Armor - Guard d6 Heavy Armor - Guard d10, -1" Movement Combat Each combatant gets one movemen...

This idea started as a take on elves for a Cairn one-shot I ran about a year ago. It has been peculating ever since and evolved from elves to grounded vampires. In a previous age a handful of connected billionaire families fled the Earth's climate crisis to live on an orbiting space station. There they spent unknown generations festering and self mythologizing and remixing the same limited gene pool. Finally the Earth's environment had recovered enough to be more appealing than station life and the twisted descendants returned home. Inbreeding, crude gene editing, and diminished gravity had produced something tall, pale, and anemic. Vampires are lanky with knobby joints, roughly eight feet tall. They have a limited warrior class who have been chemically and mechanically enhanced but most are frail and lack stamina. Their skin is pale to the point of translucence, only a step more opaque than a spring roll . Their veins can be read beneath their skin like a roadmap, a fe...