Category: RPG Resources (Page 6 of 11)

Tim Bannock writes useful articles filled with tips, tricks, advice, house rules, and compilations of links from all over the web to help you improve your roleplaying game sessions.

Defining Your Traits in Cortex Prime and Tales of Xadia

Something that trips up players and GMs new to the Cortex RPG — and a lot of games described as “narrative” or “fiction-first” — is interpreting  traits that are purposely vague. This comes up when choosing what traits to use in a dice pool, as well as describing the outcomes of those dice rolls. Players and GMs may hold different expectations of what a trait means when it’s no more than a word or short phrase plus a die rating. Strength D8 might be fairly self-explanatory to an experienced tabletop gamer, but Liberty D8 or Divided We Stand D8 are probably far less so.

Let’s look at ways to define traits by taking a look at the concept of “narrative permissions” in game design, as well as the Statements mechanic in Cortex games, and see how they can help us out!

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Knave: Using 5E Backgrounds to Determine Starting Gear

Since the launch of Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition, one of the features I’ve enjoyed the most is Backgrounds. These archetypes are a fun and simple way of differentiating characters outside of the mechanical rigor of classes and lineages, and they tie characters to the game world. They might tell us what your character’s occupation was before embarking on a life of adventure, or tell us where they are from or how they were raised.

Knave is a beautiful, elegant OSR system that is getting a 2nd Edition over on the Questing Beast Patreon. One of the things I’ve been tinkering with is adding 5E Backgrounds to Knave. Doing so provides two interesting facets that can change up how character creation works and how the game plays out:

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Try This Inventory Slot System for Dungeons & Dragons Today

It’s been a long time since I posted anything to this website, but if you follow me on social I’ve been tied up with two things (gaming related, anyway): creating a customized version of the FASERIP system by way of the OGL, used in the MCU-inspired actual play podcast Let’s Start Over, Shall We?, and gearing up for a megadungeon crawling 5th edition D&D campaign with some old friends to introduce (at least one of) their children to roleplaying games!

It’s that second one that influences today’s post. I’ll be providing a fully detailed — but not yet playtested — inventory slot management system for adventurers. It also takes into account porters/quartermasters, draft animals, and towed storage like wagons and carts. It’s based on 5th Edition for some numbers (like a draft horse’s Strength score, for example), but can be pretty easily ported to any D&D-adjacent or OSR game.

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Lost Mine of Phandelver and Dragon of Icespire Peak in the Seas of Vodari

Last time I started a project on Greyhawk adaptations of the adventures Lost Mine of Phandelver and Dragon of Icespire Peak from the D&D Starter Set and D&D Essentials Kit, respectively. I mentioned some Greyhawk factions that I’ll post (actually re-post from my old site neuronphaser.com), but that’ll have to wait a hot second. You see, the day after writing the Greyhawk article, I got my hard copy version of Tribality Publishing’s campaign setting and rules expansion The Seas of Vodari (<– affiliate linky, if you wanna help support articles like this).

If you haven’t heard of it or checked out, hit that link above (even if you don’t want to buy it) and check the preview. It’s an awesome seafaring campaign setting made up of a post apocalyptic world of island nations, at the center of which is a raging magical storm. From a setting perspective, it’s got a lot of great ideas and tools for being a lot more inclusive than classic D&D settings (i.e. LGBTQIA representation; diverse artwork; not all orcs and drow are evil), and it doesn’t go grimdark with the post apocalypse side of things. From a rules perspective, there’s a huge amount of supplementary material on firearms, cannons, boats of all shapes and sizes, and loads of new class options, monsters, and magic items. Oh, if that’s not enough of a sell, there’s a 26 page free preview, too.

So what’s that got to do with LMoP and DoIP? Well, here’s a map and a few ideas on porting those adventures to The Seas of Vodari! Read on!

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Lost Mine of Phandelver and Dragon of Icespire Peak in Greyhawk

Since chances are high that I’ll be running a combined Lost Mine of Phandelver and Dragon of Icespire Peak campaign set in Greyhawk in the not-too-distant future, I figured I’d share some of my work. Which, of course, is built on the shoulders of giants. A Fifth of Greyhawk posted about this very same thing back in 2018, so I’ve borrowed from that, created player and DM hex maps, and made a few tweaks. Check it out below.

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