A Little Me and Pips

I'm a D&D guy since back when my dad tried to teach me the game from the Moldvay B/X box (and now that I think of it I cannot imagine why he ever bought it actually...weird).  Although back in the day I played Gamma World, Star Frontier, Car War, and even some James Bond, Star Trek (meets Aliens), and Twilight 2000, really I was a D&D player at heart.  I was infatuated with anything to do with Camelot, magic swords, and dragons.

Today, real life almost always keeps me from playing.  I spend a lot time reading blogs and buying up products to keep myself involved.  I love the plethora of games out there and I'm fascinated by all the various ways people play.  One of the things I want to with this outlet is to document (review?) stuff, mainly D&D but also rules and mechanics.

I'm also a Kickstarter junkie, but that's for another day...

One of the things I was thoroughly impressed with from the Lamentations of the Flame Pricess Weird Fantasy Role-Playing Game (LotFP: WFRPG, or just WFRPG) is the skills d6 mechanic.  By itself, its a great little simplification to Thieve abilities with the addition that everyone gets a shot at it.  However, I was also enamored by the graphical representation of the skill by using dice.  Shade in the pips to represent your skill level.  Brilliant.

Now jump over to Sham's Grog & Blog and the Art of Delving.  Here is a nice mechanic for adjudicating tasks that allows for improvement (using pips).  I like this because (extrapolating) you don't all of a sudden get better at picking locks when all you've done lately is kill monster and take their loot.  Here your lock-picking only gets better when you actually pick locks.  Nice.

Tsojcanth from Lost Pages has taken this a step further and created a whole new game around the idea: Adventure Fantasy Game.  I waffled a few days but finally bought it.  I hope to do a more thorough review soon because I really like the concept applied to skills for OSR games.

Ooze Pits

Just finished reading through The Ooze Pits of Jonas Gralk and oh my gosh this Purple Sorcerer is amazing!

This adventure has it all, pig-stealing mist-men, bizarre cults, castle raids, freakishly huge trees, ooze out the wazoo, and tons and tons of PC death in pure DCC RPG style.  The best part though is that there are so many plot hooks and side adventure ideas a lazy GM could spawn off all kinds of setting-defining threads.

Remember, the Funnel is your Friend