Der PigDog's PigBlog

If you only play with life and death at stake, you'll flatten your game and lose a lot of interesting scenarios. Defeat and death in the dungeon How often are these goblins going to fight to the last man? How often are they going to stay in a pitched battle when they're already losing? How often are your retainers going to do the same? In the second world war, the deadliest military conflict in history,  21 to 25 million soldiers died, out of 70 to 130 million mobilized. Yet nearly every fight in the dungeon is a fight to the last man. Ridiculous! In my game, if an organized enemy comes into contact with the players, they immediately send a runner to a strongpoint to get reinforcements. And they retreat long before they're wiped out; 20% casualties is a good time to turn around, if you can get away. (This requires a precise interpretation of morale. Morale can't just be "roll this to see if the enemy runs away'; the enemy must be played smart enough to retreat ...

Famously, your ability/competence doesn't decrease as you lose HP. Lots of games have tried to model injuries and death at low/zero HP; here's my shot at it. We'll add a new stat to people and monsters, Injury Points, or IP, scaled to their size. System assumptions HP doesn't represent physical durability or martial fitness directly; it represents protagonism in a genre that privileges those things. Thus as we increase in HP (via leveling) we normally improve our attack bonus, but we also improve our ability to ignore various harms and annoyances. If I've got high HP, it'll take me ages to starve to death, not because I have secret caloric reserves, but because, holy mackerel, when was the last time you read a good pulp fantasy novel where the hero starved to death? Similarly, I'll last for ages in combat, taking many more hits than a normal man, and it's not because I'm more physically durable, but because I am a hero, and heroes don't die in pi...

In Threesome, you and one other person have a threesome. Come up with a little bio for your starting character, including a name. Don't discuss this with the other player. Write down "List of characters" and put the name of the two starting characters on it. At least one of these two characters is going to have a threesome soon. Decide which player is going to choose where the first scene is set. They're player 1. Turn 1. Play a short conversation between the two starting characters. Do they know each other, or are they just meeting? Pay close attention to the setting of the conversation and each character's role in the social fabric, including other people they know, and any relationships they are in. Update the "List of characters" as you go. On turn 2, player 1 picks a character from the list. Player 2 picks another character, and chooses a setting for the turn. Play out a conversation between the two. At the end of the turn, roll 1d4. On a 1, you...

This post gives new magic rules inspired by Ars Magica. It's written for my own fantasy heartbreaker, but it should be compatible with most or all OSR games. Try using this in place of your Magic-User's normal magic rules, or add these as variant casting and spell-learning rules for a different casting class. These rules offer supreme flexibility and extensibility for a sort of magic grounded in magical traditions. I provide links to the traditions at the bottom of the post. These rules also model spell research, including the creation of brand new spells, better than any I have seen in any OSR game. What a spell is A spell is a combination of a noun and verb, spoken out loud, plus some gestures and effort. Your specific magical tradition is going to give you the specific list of nouns and verbs that can combine to form a spell. The same noun-verb combination can be used to cast a bunch of different spells; the noun and the verb just give the basic family of effects. For instan...

Skimmed through the Ars Magica book Hedge Magic this morning. Pretty much every hedge tradition listed there is more interesting than the default Hermetic magic. It's a better use of my time to adapt these cooler magic rules than the main ones. These are simpler, too! An image of a Gruagrach from the Ars Magica book on hedge magic. Might as well pretend this is "fair use" You won't be able to use this without the material in the Ars Magica conversion basics . Gruagrachan (how do I decline this noun? gotta look it up at some point) magic is inspired by the Picts and druids and all that. Roll 4d18 (lol) for your starting spells (see below for spell descriptions) and take "some practice" at every skill necessary to cast the spells. If you've got two spells using the same noun, bump up the skill level by 1. If all your spells use the same verb, bump up the skill level by 1. Blessing of Urban Wisdom for the Rustic Blessing of the Swordsman's Expertise St...

Untitled Vampire Game with Martin. Martin played a refugee and orphan from a civil war between rival ethnic groups in a small east African country. I played a charismatic older boy assembling a gang of child soldiers among the refugee. Despite the oppressive subject matter, play was in a sense relaxed; we didn't drive towards any climax or conflicts, we simply narrated events as they struck us. In the end, the boy survived the gang, but his overall odds look grim, and I doubt he'll live much longer. I have complicated feelings about the ending of the game. It worked, as in, it felt right, that the boy should escape the gang by jumping off a bridge, and in the process breaking his leg. But I don't want things to be up whim like this in general; the chance of wimping out and pulling punches is too high. I want a resolution method with teeth. My current thought is that the Vampire should add a die whenever they take steps to feed on the Victim, and the Victim sh...