So because of life changes among our player group, our Saturday game ended in December, though our Sunday game is still going. We decided to wait until spring to try to form a new game group for Saturdays. Last week I posted in the 3 local D&D find player groups we are a part of recruiting for a Saturday game. I got so many responses, we ended up forming 2 different Saturday groups, each biweekly, so one group will meet 1st/3rd Saturdays, other group 2nd/4th Saturdays, and if there's a month with a 5th Saturday, that will be an off day. We'll see how this goes, I wasn't planning on running 2 different games (3 if you count the Sunday game, plus I play, not DM, in a biweekly Friday game).

-M

Picked this up while at the LCS yesterday to add to my shelf of ttrpg/D&D history books...



Probably won't get to dive in to it until next week some time.

-M

For the "lore bards" among us, some word origins...



-M

Saw this on Twitter:






x.com/Vintage_RPG/status/1799782106429558887

Skylla from the same LJN toyline that Warduke was from.







-M

DriveThruRPG had the DragonBane core set half off today, which has been on my wish list since it came out, so I finally bought that. I'm not posting this because I expect anybody else has been waiting for it to go on sale, but more to vent that DTRPG doesn't send emails to you when items from your wish list go on sale, which sounds like it should be a no-brainer feature. I have to occasionally remember to log in and check my wish list to see if anything I want is on sale. DragonBane is probably the last full system I'll get for a long time. From the hype, it sounds like it might have some ideas I can swipe.

As long as I'm posting, I'm going to ramble a bit on my own RPG system, which is looking more and more like one of those things I'll "work on" forever for myself but rarely use. In spite of that, the work is still a fun exercise of imagination. I had an epiphany recently on how to structure my magic system. I wasn't sure how to make all of my criteria fit together:

1) I wanted to incorporate the idea of sympathetic magic, i.e., "like affects like", an idea I've been partial to since I read Master Of The Five Magics as a kid.
2) I wanted magic to be impromptu. Not just capable of being impromptu, but impromptu out of necessity.
3) The basic rules should be known. The results of using magic should be unpredictable, though (although the effect will incorporate some element of your intent), to the point of being so dangerous to use that it would only be used in desperate situations. I don't need or want any of the piddling magical stuff like a +1 sword.
4) Related to the idea that the basic rules should be known, and given that my tribes are just learning to use magic, advancement of magical knowledge is an achievable, if unwise, goal for someone or some group to pursue.
5) The in-world rules of magic needed to require as little suspension of disbelief for me as possible. It's not too difficult to concoct some wild fantasy in-world mechanism for why waving your hands in a certain way while uttering a certain string of syllables is going to have some very specific effect in the world, but it's very difficult to settle on a *satisfying* mechanism, for me, anyway. I want as much as possible for magic to be the science of a world that just happens to have some different physical laws, and that if I were dropped into this world, I can picture exactly what I would do to try to create some magical effect using these simple rules.

So, while trying to work in some of the concepts from the Ars Magica system (which meets some of my criteria, but not all), I realized I already had some lore which could combine nicely with it to build something which checks all my boxes. Starting with a summary of the relevant lore (I promise to use proper nouns and in-world terms only when absolutely necessary): The world had a creator, who abandoned the world soon after creation. The creator has a rival, as much mischievous as belligerent, who tried to provoke the creator by loosing an outside, unpredictable force into this creation. However, seeing the creator's lack of interest in the world, she also immediately exits the story. I'm calling this outside force the Dragon Force, and the means by which it entered the world was the appearance of plant-like pods, which the rival raised across the globe, in turn to explode with the Dragon Force they contained within. A small percentage of the pods were semi-inert (they didn't explode, at least), and can reproduce, so the species does survive to this day.

The DF is normally invisible and intangible. However, crushing one of these pods so that its juice runs over your eyes allows you to see the DF. It is not static, nor is it homogeneous. It's like many intertwining rivers of differently-colored ether flowing across the world. The rivers can be as wide as a valley or as thin as thread. It was observed that these threads sometimes naturally get convoluted enough to knot up, and that if this knot is released, there is some effect or manifestation in the world. This effect isn't totally predictable, but always relates in some way to the color of the thread, and either the environment, or if the knot formed around an object, then the effect had some characteristic of that particular object. (These random, natural effects are also a source of encounters, but that's not relevant to describing how humans use magic.)

Washing your hands in the juice of the pod allows you to manipulate the the rivers/threads (I need a better description than river/thread). The range of manipulation is greater than your physical reach. Through experimentation, humans learned to tie and release their own knots, and what the forces each of the different colors of the DF represented (currently known: control, create, destroy, perfect, perceive, transform), and what sympathies can be leveraged from the physical objects, called charms, bound by the knots (for solid objects, the known sympathies are: "lineage", "how many pieces of the target the object contains", "shape"). Charms are kind of like (my understanding of) voodoo dolls in that you usually want them to be a smaller version of your target, and as similar as possible. The release of knots is directional, hence you have a targeting ability.

Given this justification for magic, there's a lot of variables affecting how close the result is going to be to your intentions: How much of the particular force you want to use happens to be in your environment at the time, your experience in manipulating that force, how similar the charm is to the target, how hastily you tied the knots, the distance from you to the charm (you can manipulate threads beyond your physical reach, and anything can serve as a charm), and the distance from the charm to the target. Even with all conditions being ideal, you're not guaranteed the outcome you desire. The most dangerous variable is that it's nearly impossible to not include some threading of unwanted forces into your knot, no matter how skillful you are. 

The effect of the pod juice on your eyes lasts for a shorter time than the effect on your hands, so unless you have extra pods to keep juicing up your eyes, it's best to keep your arms and hands motionless until the effect fades from your hands, or you run the risk of transforming a loved one into a newt. Your face and hands will be stained for a while, so it's going to obvious to everyone you've recently been using magic.

Monolith Games (makers of the current Conan board game are making a new Conan The Hyborian Age RPG (which will go to Kickstarter later this year) and have a free downloadable Quickstart rules and sample adventure available for download here: Conan RPG by Monolith.

-M