Anouncement: 2nd Age is coming to FKRCON 26th-28th of may

This saturday (27th of may) I'll be running a 3 hour game of HUD-less/black box adventure gaming from 19:00 to 22:00 CET for 2-6 players. The adventure will be set in the 2nd Age (free on itch.io), a project I worked on with the brilliant Adventures Buffo. You can read some more about 2nd Age and my GMing style in these blogposts. 

If you are interested in joining my game or any of the other games that are organised for this digital con, join the FKR collective discord via the link in the poster.

About the game I'll be running:

The setting:

• The time period is faux early industrial Europe. I strive for bleak whimsy; definitely not a nice place but not grimdark.
• Characters are pawns of the Empire during its Second Age. They have been send overseas to one of the failed colonies of the First Age with the orders to reclaim this lost glory.
• Each character is a member of one of the organisations which keep the Empire running. Membership provides access to means, knowledge and status, as long as you are loyal and are contributing to strengthening the position of your organisation. 

The adventure:

• The Empire desires the reopening of a First Age research facility. Your organisations are ordered to send members to get a sense of the facility's current state and to salvage anything of use or value. Goods as well as individual reports are to be given to one of the desk clerks at the Governor's Office.
• Some of the organisations have a vested interest in the research facility. Players from those organisations will get goals which will initially be secret from the rest of the party and which might be in tension with orders from other organisations or even those of the Empire.
• No one knows exactly what is in the research facility. Which means most things won't be missed.

Character generation:

1. Pick or roll one of the 12 organisations from the 2nd Age supplement linked above.
2. Jot down the sign up bonus. the stipulation, and the abilities you get being of first rank in the organisation. Any ability that mentions a weapon or tool, grants you that weapon or tool.
   
3. Think of a name and some pronouns.
4. Reflect on the choices made which got you in this mess (including those you had no say in!)

Safety:

The adventure features themes of colonialism and imperialism, and at least hints of body horror. 

Before play, I will give players the option to publicly or privately let me know if there are any lines (don't even want this stuff mentioned) or veils (mention is ok, but no vivid descriptions please) that they would like the table/me to keep in mind. 

If at any time something during the game makes you uncomfortable, you are always free to (temporarily) leave the table, let everyone know publicly you don't like what is happening, and/or message me directly if it is something I am doing. 

The table is lgbt+ friendly. If you have a problem with that, my tables and the discord server on which I will run this game are not for you.

Mausritter 'the Estate' prep: d20 things Magpies do

I am running the Estate boxset for Mausritter for some of my friends from swordfighting. They are currently making their way through the Fruit of the Orchard. Due to the situation they ended up in at the end of last session I am in need of a random table of Magpie behaviour. It is made with the specific adventure in mind, but might be useable for other situations as well?

Minor spoilers for Fruit of the Orchard.

Another Skill System: Experience and Training

This was written for HAG, a Hud-less adventure game I am tinkering with. Hud-less gaming assumes that players don't interact directly with any mechanics, that stuff is all taken care of behind the screen by the GM. Other than hud-less I als want HAG to be a true FKR game, meaning that rather than giving you a rule on how to do something, I explain why I do something a certain way and provide options to the GM they can use.

In my game, skills are a leverage that players can use to argue why they should be able to succeed at something. The GM is supposed to take the skill into consideration when determining the risk of a situation. This is inspired by a system from Chris McDowall which I first remember seeing in his Primordial posts, but he describes it very clearly in this blogpost about Mythic Bastionland.

Anyway, here's the system.

Elves: what they do and where they come from

In theory, elves are immortal. This is why they are so incredibly old, though often not as old as you think. 

Elves can recover from the most severe wounds, if they can live until the next moon. This is why elf medicine is so sought after. That no such medicine exists has broken many desparate travellers who came to the elves looking for aid. 

And somehow, they always already knew you were coming. Elves seem to know everything that happens. Information spreads among them like wildfire, they seem to understand each other without ever needing to speak.

Their armies are undeafeted, as there always seem to be more of them, each as highly trained as royal guards and with experience unequaled by even the most seasoned human veterans. That these elfs all seem remarkably similar in their physical appearance always seems to go unnoticed in the disorder of battle.

And yet the world is littered in their ruins, their great empires collapse. Somehow calamity always strikes. Somehow these miraculous beings never seem to last. And when their world crumbles they 'return home', often traveling great distances to do so.

All of this is due to a few important differences between elf and human bodies.

Common Misconceptions About Dwarfs

There are no female dwarfs, they simply grow out of the ground

It is true that dwarfs aren't born in the organic sense of the word, but to say they grow from the ground is like saying human children just pop up between their mother's legs: a gross oversimplification and demeaning of the hard work of child labour. 

#Dungeon23: Februari/Level 2

Go here if you want to look at the room keys, the encounter table and the map:

LINK

#Dungeon23 week 4: Filling in the blanks: Bird Food and Prototypes

 This is week 4 of my #Dungeon23 entrees:

CLICK HERE

Basically rounding out what I've established in the prior weeks and getting ready for level 2. 

#Dungeon23 week 3: Little Helper Hideout

This is week 3 of my #Dungeon23 entrees:

CLICK HERE

This part of the dungeon is basically all a part of a lair, making it rather more interconnected than the previous posts. 

Downtime Acvtivity: Worshipping a God

I've written before on the divine. Twice actually. I guess having to teach religion as part of my job does that to me. Or maybe I just really like weird gods? Anyway, here's a procedure for worshipping a god to gain their favour as a downtime activity.

Worship

In order to worship a god a player character needs access to a shrine located dedicated to that god within their domain. Established shrines are probably the easiest option, though if player characters want to build a shrine to a diety that would be an option as well (though that would require them to dedictate time on it during downtime). 

#Dungeon23 Week 2: Giant Frogs and Little Helpers

Rooms (Week 1): 

Sun 8th: NE Stands I: Boneyard

Bones of human and non-human animals scarreted about (picked clean). When spending a turn looking 1-in-6 chance to find "roll loot"