Aaron The Pedantic

How It Started My Old School Essentials game has truly grown in ways I never expected. What began as a modest attempt at trying Moldvay D&D within the organizational structure of a West Marches game has now become a couple dozen players, five referees, and well many more RPG enthusiasts discussing the games throughout the day. Originally, I had every intent of taking a considerable length of time to build a deep world for them to play with. Instead, I opted for scheduled dungeon delves in a shared world, such that the players get an opportunity to get their feet wet in some instant dungeon madness, laser-focusing their time into the thing that the game is all about. I decided that I'd make a regional map, write a couple dungeons, and get the ball rolling. Where It Has Gone I don't want to dwell here too long, but to be brief, I started putting in fairly vague world details for the players to work with. It was enough to help them understand, from a basic perspect...

Whew, I'm tired. I stayed up all night.  Literally.  But it was an incredibly productive night.  Anyway, you don't care about that.  I finished the rough draft of the rough draft of my new Christmas adventure, Murder 'Neath the Mistletoe.  It's a B/X style adventure inspired by LotFP's No Rest For The Wicked, my love for old Santa stories, and my fucked up desire to turn something wholesome into something twisted.  The players arrive in a tiny village with a dark secret.  Every four years, the villagers sacrifice one of their own to a coven of hags in exchange for peace and prosperity, but this year, the sacrifice survived.  Imbued with the power of the cruel hags, this Santa knock-off is coming to town to lop off some heads. This particular adventure is much more dungeon light than my usual sorts. It basically works in three phases. Phase I: Investigating the town. Phase II: Hunkering down to survive the blizzard or venturing out to seek survivor...

THIS IS A WORK IN PROGRESS. FEEDBACK AND PLAYTESTING IS GREATLY APPRECIATED! This is by no means anything terribly original, but I feel that there is room for a tiny additional segment of character creation that could add something interesting. I'm revising the Dungeon Crawl Classics occupation chart to fit my purposes for Old School Essentials (I will be referencing sections from the Old School Essentials Rules Tome) . If you're familiar with DCC, one of the neat ways it interfaces with its 3e roots is that it has a very simplified skill system.  This format CAN be translated directly into Old School Essentials (B/X) in several ways, but you run the risk of introducing an entire new d20 based skill system.  Instead, my aim is to introduce slight benefits that work directly with the pre-existing format.  When gaps are presented that can be filled in, I'll try to fill those in. I've removed some of the occupations and added several that I felt were missing. ...

Today, we have a creature from Germanic folklore. The Bergmönch, a lumbering giant more than twice the size of a man, toils endlessly in the mines of the world. Its eyes, the size of human heads, burn like flames in the darkness. Its long white hair and pale skin set the tone for the undoubtedly cold reception that visitors are likely to receive. It dons plain black robes and carries an enormous oil lamp in one hand with a 5' tall hammer in another. It can often be found doing pointless tasks, such as shifting collected ore from one pile to another. Its presence is either a boon or a blessing. For those who act in ways that annoy the Bergmönch, death awaits. For those who honor their profession and show respect to the Bergmönch, he will show aid. BEHAVIORS: -He speaks and understands Giant, Lawful, Neutral, Dwarvish, and the most common tongue in the region. -He is incredibly hot blooded. He will kill those who frustrate him without remorse.  -He is partial to thos...

A lot of the discourse I see on alignment seems to veer one of two ways: 1. Alignment is outdated and restricting, putting a stranglehold on players that dictates how their characters should act in particular situations. 2. Alignment doesn't really add anything to the game. I'll try to tackle these in some sort of organized chaos. Is alignment outdated? By edition standards, yes. Fifth Edition has undeniably removed any semblance of significance that alignment may have on the game. At this point, alignment is strictly a barometer for general disposition that gives DMs a shorthand on "how should the character think about things?" Spells and features that target "evil" or "good" actually target specific creature types instead. Clerics and Paladins can lose their powers for ticking off their deities or breaking their oaths, but these things are generally very tangentially connected to alignment. Among old school gamers, alignment lives on ...

The Player Experience in 5E vs OSR, a Brief Comparison (Skip to next session if you want the bullet points) In Fifth Edition Dungeons & Dragons, player characters are heroes. From the very beginning, 5e PCs are well beyond the capabilities of the average populace.  They have above average ability scores, they get a full hit die + CON HP, Spellcasters start with several spells to choose from with multiple castings per day and cantrips they can use at-will. Martial classes start with benefits that put them significantly ahead of 1HD creatures, such as Fighting Styles, Second Wind, Martial Arts, etc. This also says nothing of the many skill proficiencies and expertise. This gap only increases as the game goes on. By contrast, games in the OSR tend to be far less charitable to starting characters. For a basis of comparison, we'll focus on Old School Essentials, as it's a direct retro-clone of one of the most foundational editions in the OSR, Moldvay B/X D&D from 1981.  Wha...

 THE QUESTION HATH BEEN RAISED!  The answer shall be found.  Hopefully. As anyone familiar with my blogging, my tweets, or my videos will know: I am mostly an amalgamation of a ton of incomplete thoughts.  Occasionally, those thoughts find something that makes sense, then they spit it out for others to see it and revise as needed.  Here's what I've got for magic items right now. 1. Risk vs. Reward This should be no surprise, especially to fans of old school gaming.  One of the things that really lights our fire for gaming is the desire to have to make difficult choices, and to see the ramifications of those choices.  This is the essence of role-playing (as opposed to telling a story/acting).  Here's your situation, what do you do?  Magic items have the capacity to introduce risk vs. reward in two ways.  Earning the magic item can be an exercise in risk vs. reward, and using the magic item can be an exercise in risk vs. reward. Perhaps th...

Cha'alt: Fuchsia Malaise is out!  I've got my greasy hands on the PDF and I'm going to take some time to try to give everyone an idea of what exactly this monster has.  And a monster, it is.  At 165 pages of main content and an additional 65 pages of appendices, Fuchsia Malaise gives you a hell of a lot for $15 (give or take).  Just how much quality is there in this massive quantity?  We'll see.  A few disclaimers: 1. I consider myself to be a good acquaintance of the author.  I backed the project and offered some feedback on the book during the editing process. 2. I was not given anything for doing this.  I paid for my PDF and for the hardcover. 3. The very nature of this review is going to be highly preferential.  Things that I say are something I dislike may be something that you appreciate and vice versa. 4. I'm currently running a Cha'alt game but have not (as of yet) been able to incorporate that much of Cha'alt: Fuchsia Malaise in my g...

  Why, Aaron, what an overly clickbait title you have, right? Reaction rolls.  If you've come across this blog, the likelihood that you know not only what reaction rolls are but also exactly how to use them is staggeringly high.  For the sake of everyone else, this is the idea. If you're unsure how a creature is going to react to the player characters, you roll two six-sided dice.  The higher the result of the roll, the more favorable they are to helping the player characters.  It uses a bell curve, so typically 7-9 is your fairly neutral average.  This is the chart from back in the early days. It may not be a surprise to anyone, but I don't use this chart exactly as it's written.  While I see the purpose of multiple rolls, I favor a single one, and I use it more than just for monsters. 2-5 Extreme hostility 6-7 Somewhat hostile 8-9 Neutral 10-11 Favorable 12 Helpful One may ask, "but Aaron!  This is completely random!  Why can't we consider ...

I've had a campaign going on for a few months now.  The simplest way to explain it is to just say "I'm using these books." Let's break this down. The World The world is, in its simplest form, Cha'alt.  Straight out of the book, though I've added races from Hubris for some extra flavor.  I'll extol the virtues of ALL of these products at the end of my diatribe, but let's just focus on what Cha'alt has to offer.  Cha'alt is a gonzo desert setting that is post-apocalyptic.  Imagine if you took Mad Max, but the entire reason the world ended was actually because the Elder Gods at the edge of the galaxy were pissed off that humans were enjoying themselves with YouTube instead of going to Cthulhu Sunday School.  A war between civilization and the Elder Gods commenced, leaving the entire world a smoldering waste in the wake.  However, remnants of the high technology world still survive.  Environments with these pleasantries are as sacred as they ar...