Land of NOD - Session 3

Session 3 (Jan 15, 2013)

(Back to Session 1)

I made the mistake of not writing the session report shortly after the game... I hope I included everything important. Let's see...

40k and D&D - A General Overview

Warhammer - I am mostly talking about 40k here - fascinates me; the setting has some crazy great ideas and the artwork is superb and very inspiring. It has two major flaws that oft hold me back from playing it, though: (1) the official system is baroquely complex for my style, and (2) the setting, if logically followed through, excludes D&D-style adventuring altogether. With this post (and probably with a couple more) I intend to get over the problems (admittedly, both can easily be solved) and create the means of adventuring in a setting (reminiscent) of Warhammer 40k.

Twelve Peculiar NPCs

The following characters may make interesting henchmen or retainers (or allies or enemies or whatnot), in addition to showing how silly my games can sometimes be. Statistics are not provided so that each Referee can decide how powerful these characters are.

Twisted Demi-Humans - Dwarves

Dwarves; we all know them well: short, stout, bearded folk of the underground, excellent warriors and miners, oft with values strongly associated with those of the romanticised vikings. Although this is a picture we can all relate to and it bears the advantage of ease introducing the concept to newcomers, it gets old and boring with time.

There have been many excellent variants geared toward making them more interesting (e.g. ASE, Red Tide, Devil's in the Details, etc.); hopefully, the compilation of ideas below may be useful for some people and live up to the standards set forth by the aforementioned examples.

Land of NOD - Session 2

Session 2 (Jan 11, 2013)

(Back to Session 1)

Continuing our campaign started not much before the - apparently delayed - End of the World, the party pursued their goal and, after quickly acquiring a ship and hiring several sailors, set off towards the little island of Psara, where Porto's pirates were supposed to lair. The player of Udes could not come due to sports injury (which we, students of philology and similarly portentous fields, who participate not in such mundane and strenuous activities, shall never fear*); however, an other new player joined the game. We play together in Narmor's Dragon Age campaign (unfortunately, the reports are in Hungarian); he is new to OD&D, however.

*Such is the humour of ours, arts students.

What makes a setting work for D&D?

A while back on Dreams in the Lich House, there was a couple of posts (here and here) regarding what makes a D&D setting good in terms of playability. Although there was some disagreement over which elements count as core and essential to the game, no one has offered a better treatment yet (regardless of what exactly "better" is supposed to mean in this context).

Assuming there exist a number of criteria which absolutely have to be satisfied, we can find the core elements of a D&D setting by analysing how adventures are generally set up, what elements they include (locations, items, etc.), and how they relate to the player characters' actions.

Land of NOD - Session 1

Session 1 (Dec 18, 2012)

Note: This session report is an edited version of the one posted at http://land-of-nod.forumatic.com.

We finally kicked off our long-awaited Land of Nod campaign. After a short introduction to the setting and the rules (OD&D with a few tweaks), four characters and their followers were set loose in Ophir, looking for trouble. I must admit, I improvised all of what happened on the fly (I wanted to prevent creating stuff in vain, plus I have started my best campaigns with a completely improvised session earlier, so it seemed reasonable it may also be accomplished with a pretty rules-light game, too).

HCC1 - Valley of the Hawks

Note: This is a reposting of a review from Dragonsfoot with minor editing.

The Valley of the Hawks is only but the first instalment of the Hex Crawl Chronicles, a series describing different sub-settings (based on certain North American areas, according to the author). It is published by Frog God Games and written by John M. Stater (of whose NOD magazine both Melan and Bryce Lynch wrote a review). It uses the Swords & Wizardry Complete rules, but can be used with any old school D&D-esque system (for those who are interested: a Pathfinder version is also available).

Brief Introduction

Greetings everyone and welcome to this yet another OSR blog!

After giving much thought to the idea, I took the advice of a fellow Hungarian gamer (Narmor, I'm looking at you) and decided to kick off my very own blog. The following types of posts are likely to be seen here, in no particular order:

• house rules and how they worked out at the table
• reviews (only once in a while), ideally with game experience
• session reports (summaries in bullet-point format)
• campaign/setting ideas (most of them never reaches actual play, thus they are likely to be sketchy)

Creating and maintaining this blog is actually one of my new year's resolutions (gaming-relevant ones are to be discussed here); I suppose three posts per month seems to be a good lower limit, so expect at least that many.