It's Been a While Since a Plug...

The logo and covers for my products on DriveThruRPG are reminiscent of Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man. Sometimes, we are not as flexible, adaptable or available as we feel we should be. We can't possibly have all of the resources we need, when we need them.

It will be ok. We just do our best.

Today's plug is for DriveThruRPG's charity bundles. 100% of your purchase goes to the following organizations:

Disaster Relief and Recovery - Australia Red Cross
Bushfire Emergency - World Wildlife Fund of Australia

Fantasy Core & Settings $19.95
Starships & Posthumanity $29.95
Modern & Urban Horror $19.95
Fantasy Supplements $29.95
Capes, Grit, and Gunsmoke $19.95

EDIT January 22nd, 2020: The folks at DrivethruRPG have added 3 more at $9.99 price point for an even better value. Here is a link to the whole category. I'd also like to thank Jeremy over at Thought Eater Blog, host of The Frothcast podcast and all of the others who reshared this post. What a great community we have.

I haven't counted how many products or how much money you'd save, but just the Fantasy Core & Setting bundle took a heck of a lot of time to download. All five of them could take hours, depending on your internet speed. And playing them could last years.

If you still have extra money and time, you could also "buy" one of my products. They are priced at pay what you want. Don't be afraid to download them for free to get an idea if they will fit with your campaign.

Swashbuckler Character Class

Zero to Hero: Uncommon Commoners

Character Sheet for Use with Unearthed Arcana

The Compass Rose Inn Minisetting

Kobold's Folly

Clicking the links above will take you to DriveThruRPG for purchasing.

Strictly (Duke) Springer - Day 020

Let’s talk about the big picture. There is a starmap below.

Moving down one yellow line costs 1 hypercharge and is done relatively risk free. I have to roll for an encounter when I arrive, but that is all. 

If I want to hop two worlds without stopping at the intervening planet, I can burn 3 hypercharges and immediately move from one planet to another. I risk damage to ship by skipping steps and I will also have to roll for entry contacts in a possibly damaged ship.

Additionally, to safely jump, I need to move to orbit (1 hour) then several distances out from orbit. Each step burns an hour. I can, if I am lucky, jump two systems in a day, at a cost of 2 hypercharges. That is my intent.

Why am I skipping a planet? Each system has a tech level and wealth code. The next system over, Palatek, is no better than where I am so I want to go to Imperia. Imperia has a wealth code of 100, the best in the game. This means sold items are worth more. Buying items is also more expensive, so if I can sell the Skimmers at a premium, I can return to Regari or Palatek to buy hypercharges at a much reduced price. They have a base price of 500, so I need to score big. 

My first jump is to Palatek. This takes 5 hours just to get to the jump point and go. Half a day is gone. On entry, I get a 1 which is e93. That event describes a deserted area, nothing happens. I can immediately jump again, so I do so. On entry, I roll a three. This happens to be the same event above, so I can move to a landing area on the planet.

Unfortunately, I roll a six while entering a city space. This gives me a System result, which is a result specific to the System I am in. This one is very bad... depending on how evil I am. The ship is swarmed by beggars. We can fight or pay them to leave. 2D6x5 secs. will cause them to walk away. I mentioned that I could be evil. They have rocks and I have a starship guns. Guess how that is going to go?

Realistically, there are zero consequences to gunning them down. I can't pick them over for cash, because they event says they have none. However, I could spend all day long rolling up number of combatants then rolling massively effective weapon fire on dozens of unarmed people.

It isn’t worth my time as a player and sort of follows the ethic of a smuggler not a criminal. We pay them off with 45 secs.

Our assets are:

1 Antelope starship, which I owe 119,300 secs. in principle.
1 Stasis pod 2 CU,

15 Fuel Units,

24 Repair units,

10 Life Support Units

1 U-bot,

2 PS-bots,

6 Skimmers,

1 Damaged Skimmer,

7 U-suit,

and the ship is fueled with 4 hypercharges, having used 2 today. 

I have 275 secs. in my pocket. I might have made a bad financial call on paying off the beggars, but it saved a bunch of time in addition to not being nutjob insane. 

Matt Jackson's CollaboDungeon... Number 1?

Over on MeWe, Matt Jackson kicked off a Dungeon Collaboration. He posted a map over on his blog, MSJx.org and invited us to pick a room to describe. You can follow the conversation over on mewe with the hashtag #collabodungeon and the results on Matt's blog.

Matt declared a free for all while Goblin’s Henchman through out an idea for 300 word description limit, which I ran with.

I picked area 7. Unlucky number 7.

The 300 word description:

Location Seven. The Twins.

There are two women, twins, in the pit. They are identical in all ways save one. One women wears a lead ring. When they become aware of the characters, they will both shout out for help. When the characters look in the pit, they will hear the following orders:

Twin with the ring: "Kill her! She's a demon!"
Twin without the ring: "Kill her! She's an idiot!"

They are both at the bottom of the pit and represent no threat to the characters in this state. They are both bloodied and bruised from the fall and each has a blacken right eye.

If the party rescues them, they will find out the following information. Twin One, the one with the ring is named Meredith. She entered the dungeon with her friends in search of treasure. She found a gold ring in area 8 and after discerning no purpose to it, put it on. She was pushed by a monster into the pit.

Twin Two, without the ring, was a doppelganger hiding in area 8. To take on Meredith's form, she ambushed her by pushing her into the pit. Unfortunately for the monster, Meredith grabbed it's wrist as she fell and both ended up at the bottom. As the doppelganger took her form, Meredith shouted "Begone!" which the ring of wishes interpreted as a command against the monster. Since the doppelganger was in mid-transformation into Meredith, the ring fixed it in that form before turning to lead. The doppelganger is now an exact copy of Meredith.

The twins have found combat against each to be profoundly lethal, as they mirror each other's moves perfectly, hence the matching black eyes. They will not fight each other. They will join the party to escape the dungeon.

I'll probably make up stats for Meredith someday, but she is presented as rule set agnostic here.

No one said anything about a follow up, but I'd love to see #1, #2, #3...

Strictly (Duke) Springer - Day 019

Emily reporting for duty. 

We get things done quickly today. I make some great rolls and get my Life Support Units and U-Suits by mid-day. Annoyingly, I also get a roll for a ship and a boat again… I can’t afford those. I buy 10 Life Support Units and 5 suits. More than what I need at a price of 60 secs. I have 690 left.

Since it’s mid-day, I am going to take on some financial tasks. I pay the crew for the week early, leaving 620. I also make an early payment on the ship so I have 320 credits left.

If I don’t change things, I will either become wanted for not paying on the ship next week or lose most or all of my crew.

Our assets are:

1 Antelope starship, which I owe 119,300 secs. in principle.
1 Stasis pod 2 CU,

15 Fuel Units,

24 Repair units,

10 Life Support Units

1 U-bot,

2 PS-bots,

6 Skimmers,

1 Damaged Skimmer,

7 U-suit,

and the ship is fully fueled with 6 hypercharges.

I have 320 secs. in my pocket.

OSRx - Take That!

I honestly don't know what OSR stands for. Is it "Revival"? Is it "Renaissance"? I noticed that "Old School Rx" or "OSRx" ends in the abbreviation used by doctors for "Prescription" or more simply, "take that".

You know what you can do for the OSRx?

Right now, you can order order a charity bundle from DriveThruRPG to support those facing the fires in Australia. I've round up all 5 themes, so click away:

Fantasy Core & Settings $19.95
Starships & Posthumanity $29.95
Modern & Urban Horror $19.95
Fantasy Supplements $29.95
Capes, Grit, and Gunsmoke $19.95

EDIT January 22nd, 2020: The folks at DrivethruRPG have added 3 more at $9.99 price point for an even better value. Here is a link to the whole category. I'd also like to thank Jeremy over at Thought Eater Blog, host of The Frothcast podcast and all of the others who reshared this post. What a great community we have.

What if you don't want to do that or don't have ready cash? Linking to or subscribing to a blog could help a lot. The collapse of G+ robbed the community of the means of communication and we scattered. Every blog that shares links is a defense against that sort of collapse. My suggestion is to add those blog rolls, but also sign yourself up for https://campaignwiki.org/osr/. This "blog" serves up dozens if not hundreds of blogs in one feed. It's great. If you already did that, why not check out some of the people who provide content?

As with blogs, podcasts are great. There are so many out there, I don't even know where to begin. You could begin by subscribing to some of the podcast I linked to in the right hand column or share your own favorites in the comments below.

There are all kinds of communities to join, too. I like MeWe best, but there are so many to choose from. Check a few out.

Lastly, and probably most importantly, play a game and do a review. Post it up some place. Without you insight, the community won't know what is good and why. Have an opinion and share it.

Rx... take that.