Tag: knave (Page 1 of 2)

Enter The Nerdom Plays OSR-style Dungeons & Dragons – The Complete Adventure

All episodes of Enter The Nerdom‘s foray into the old-school goodness of Dungeons & Dragons are out now! Follow along as hosts Stan Moroncini, Chad Cook, and Watson Bradshaw join special guest Dan Mason, and delve into the depths of the Puzzle Dungeon: The Seers Sanctum by Directsun Games! We used a hack of Ben Milton’s incredible Knave to keep the rules simple and straightforward, maximizing our play time and keeping the players on their toes with every death-defying encounter and mystery they faced.

Here’s the complete episode listing:

You can catch all their podcast episodes here. Be sure to tune in, because they cover many amazing “nerdoms”: Ghostbusters fans, the  incredible Star Wars-based charity organization known as The 501st Legion, professional wrestling, anime, and so much more!

I’ve also released some of the assets we used for the game:

I’ll put up a few more bits of information and perhaps some more adventure-specific assets I used in the following days!

Treasures Just Beyond – A Knave 1st Edition Hack with Gygaxian Flourishes

When the hosts of Enter The Nerdom approached me to run them through a game of “Old School style” Dungeons & Dragons, I knew I needed a lightweight ruleset to get us through what was likely to be a pretty fast one-shot scenario. It turned into two sessions, but we all agreed that the setup and “learning” time needed to be at a minimum to keep the podcast playthrough very fast and energetic. I turned to Ben Milton’s Knave to get what I needed!

I’d already worked on some hacks for Knave‘s 1st edition, so I just compiled those into a doc, stripped out some of Knave‘s more “lowlife, dirty bastards” stylings and replaced those with classic Gygaxian and Arnesonian flourishes: non-human PC ancestries, quick-playing dungeon and wilderness crawling rules, and a simple modification to make spellcasters a bit more of a thing via spellbook rules layered on top of the “anyone can use a scroll” magic rules. I topped it off with some Feat-like abilities to replace class abilities, and give the players their own little niche protection.

Here’s the final document I used, as a PDF formatted to be printed “Booklet” style in Adobe Acrobat, and stapled together. I used cardstock for the first page, to give it a sort of “cover” quality, and referenced it during play. Especially when the PCs started dropping to 0 hit points, or scoring critical hits and fumbles. (There were a lot more fumbles than hits, as I recall!)

Keep an eye on Enter The Nerdom to listen to our actual play of Directsun Games’ Puzzle Dungeon: The Seer’s Sanctum using these rules!

Enter The Nerdom Plays D&D: Treasures Just Beyond Character Sheets

The continuing adventures of the Enter The Nerdom crew should be posted to your favorite podcast listening service soon! In celebration, here are some character sheets I created for these sessions.

These character sheets are perfect for Knave and most of its hacks, and can probably do in a pinch for any ability score-based D&D retroclone or remix. The particular hack we are using is my current playtest draft of a Knave hack I call Treasures Just Beyond. It adds very basic dungeon and wilderness procedures, provides a slightly more robust social mechanic based on reaction rolls and attitude, and modifies the magic system to mix in elements of the original edition of Dungeons & Dragons and GLOG (perhaps better explained and shown in the Cairn SRD “GLOG Magic Hack“). Don’t worry, I’ll be posting that entire playtest document very soon!

Without further ado, here are the character sheets for Treasures Just Beyond (Enter The Nerdom Variant):

Player Character sheet

NPC Hireling sheet

Editable version of both via Google Slides. You’ll need to click File > Make a Copy and save it to your Drive somewhere, then you can edit it.

Enjoy!

Enter The Nerdom Actual Play: Adventuring in the The Seers Sanctum with Knave and Dungeons & Dragons

It’s here! Enter The Nerdom and special guest Dan Mason have ventured into The Seers Sanctum!

The adventuring party is Madmartigan the Greatest Swordmaster in all of the Realms, Pockets the Dragonborn, Krondor the Wild Elf, and Mable the Elf Wizard. And nothing will prepare you for this puzzle-heavy romp with loads of old-school spirit, using Ben Milton’s brilliant Knave alongside B/X-era Dungeons & Dragons spells, magic items, and monsters. (Get Knave 1st edition here, and support Knave 2nd edition in its final hours here!)

This is just part 1 of the quest! Listen to the full episode here or wherever you listen to podcasts. Check out some behind-the-scenes photos over on their Instagram (@enterthenerdom) and stay tuned here for character sheets, rules references, and more.

Huge thank you to the hosts of Enter The Nerdom and Dan for this wonderful gaming opportunity. Looking forward to part 2 in just over a week!

Enter The Nerdom Plays Dungeons & Dragons…by Way of Ben Milton’s Knave

I recently joined the Enter The Nerdom podcast to discuss Dungeons & Dragons, the movie Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, and all things tabletop roleplaying games (listen to the episode here or at your favorite podcast service).

This week, I’m back on, running them through an “old-school” style dungeon crawl using two fantastic resources:

  • Ben Milton’s Knave
  • Directsun Games’ Puzzle Dungeon: The Seers Sanctum

Hosts Chad Cook, Stan Moroncini, and Watson Bradshaw are joined by Dan Mason, with yours truly as the Dungeon Master! Here’s a little teaser about the session.

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