Been Studying for the upcoming Old School Game

I think I may be running Old School D&D with some newbie players quite soon and as the ambassador its even more incumbent on me than usual to bring on the awesome.

In perpetration I have been studying world building for hex crawls, initiative systems and more.

Its all enough to make my head hurt though I am pretty sure it will be worth it when I combine it with my improvisation skills.

Thinking of Dave Arneson

Going gaming in a bit and I'll be thinking of Dave Arneson , the co-founder of the hobby I love.

If our lives pass in the hereafter I just hope I can tell him "Thanks for everything, Dave."

The Tome of Manly Things

I usually avoid reviewing Pathfinder stuff these days as I am focused more on Old School for my D&D fix.

However being a sucker for free stuff I decided to download Little Red Goblin's Tome of Manly Things

Its a DTRPG freebie (here) that was meant as an April Fools product.

However its quite clever as it uses a variant of the gunslinger Grit mechanic to allow people to play "the Most Interesting Man in the World" or Burt Reynolds or whoever those guys in the Vegas commercial were

Being a joke product there were a few bugs, a small lack of clarity on how many man cards a person gets (how awesome is not a number and as such I recommend 1+ charisma modifier) or any discussion of what the Man Code is. Of course that kind of realistic since no in reality knows what it is either. ;)

However despite the flaws this is actually a cool class and renamed Hero or something is not only playable but fun.

Definitely an interesting and offbeat add to the game I can recommend.

Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque Compendum is Cool

If you like Ravenloft or any kind of Gothic Horror and play and old school game or if just want a grab bag of new free goodies, spells, poisons, a cool system, optional rules, monsters and more (and yes I did say free) Go grab the tales of the grotesque and dungeonesque compendium here

Its very cool.

Between this and the Lands of Ara I mentioned earlier you'll have hundreds of pages of neat stuff to enjoy for free.

So get, go get them. I'll be here when you get back.

Some small changes to the Blogroll

This sis really a filler post but I've removed a coupe of blogs that haven't updated in a few months (Dungeons and Digressions and Asshat Paladins) and am proud to add a couple of new one , the excellent Lands of Ara and Cyclopeatron.

I've also changed my profile picture to a public domain image of the Five Stones at Duddo at least till I can make one I like better

Enjoy.

Lands of Ara Compendium Free

Lands of Ara is another great blog I probably should have in my blog roll but don't.

They have a collection of their work from about 2009-2011 for free. Its got a lot of cool old school stuff and a gorgeous layout.

You can get it at the site here

Check it out. Its cool and did I mention it was free?

No Dice? So How Do You Play ?

In tonights session (Frozen Convict Post-Apoc) we had a little conundrum, no one me included remembered to bring dice or cards or any kind of decent randomizer


I suppose I could have made chits but that was more trouble than it was worth. We tried coin tosses to but the odds were too hard to compute.

What I did is use number guessing. I'd pick some numbers between 1 and 10, one for every ten percent chance of success and if you guessed my number you succeeded. This worked like a virtual D10.

All in all the players got it quickly and found it pretty workable. Its n substitute for actual dice but it was more or less (probably less) random, fair and fun which is all we could ask for,