Der PigDog's PigBlog

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...

The magic rules in D&D are deficient from a literary perspective, and played out from a wargaming perspective. (To be clear, I think Vance is great, but D&D's "Vancian" magic is not particularly Vancian.) So I'm looking for replacements for my fantasy heartbreaker. Most likely I'll try to assemble lots of different rules for magic. We'll choose whatever combination of rules fits the setting for an individual game. I'll make no attempt to harmonize or balance them; we'll simply see how they interact. A set of magic rules that come highly recommended I skimmed Ars Magica once. The magic rules seem really cool, though I have little interest in the game itself. So let's try reconstructing it for the heartbreaker. Here are some salient facts about magic in Ars Magica: Spells have levels/magnitudes. There are guidelines in the book on making new spells at a given magnitude, or finding the magnitude of a given spell. Must review these. The magnitu...

According to Spotify I listened to 15000 minutes of music across 534 artists. Not a bad ratio! I have completed my migration to streaming services. My external hard drive full of high bit-rate songs collects dust in a drawer. Nowadays listening to music mostly means listening on my car speakers when I drive to work, or listening on the speakers at work. I do get some dedicated listening time at home, but not as much as I used to. I'm definitely not an audiophile anymore. I remain a stubborn album-oriented listener. Singles do nothing for me; playlists are only good if they bring in some thematic or sonic unity. I made a playlist for my Monsterhearts game that succeeds on all counts, if you like angsty music. Best new (to me) music: a tie between Billie Eilish and Wussy. I had only heard of Billie Eilish through the song "bad guy", and I thought, ok, she's a half-decent rapper, that's it. But when I put on her album WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO? (sic) ...

In this post, I give a unified procedure for resolving tasks in games. This procedure has a low handling time, but it is extensible and flexible enough to model tasks at many different scales of abstraction. It has been extensively play-tested, by myself and others, used without much difficulty in over 200 sessions. Basic procedure Use the following procedure to model a simple, isolated task, with a binary outcome. Define the task. Assign the task a base difficulty as a score TN/D . " D " is the die size you're going to use (for instance, 6, 10, 20), and " TN " is the target number; you want to roll TN or lower on the die. Also assign the task a period, the time required to complete it. Adjust for situational factors. Count up situational advantages and disadvantages. Cancel one advantage for one disadvantage until only one type remains or neither applies. Assign bonus dice for remaining advantages and penalty dice for remaining disadvantages, 1 die each. Ro...

I'm 10 or more session reports behind and it's time to stop pretending to write the old ones and start actually writing the new ones. Here we go! Second session in Simon's Under the City . Just Jay and me. He is returning with his character Hanbul Al-Alawi, a Sufi mystic and newcomer to the city. We determined that he's living in the crusader state of Odessa, and filled out a lot of detail about the city, its current religious and political tensions, and his place in it. We started with some  downtime maneuvers , three of them since it had been three weeks since the last Under the City session. Normally that would be so much window dressing, but he spent a week collecting rumors in downtime, and he rolled the rumor "Several prominent citizens stand accused of grisly murders." I don't give bum rumors, the whole point of the rumor table is to see if you hear anything scenario-relevant, so we know it's going to come up sooner or later. We figured out who ...

1. First, optionally, we're going to adjust your HP and IP in line with my notes on damage scaling . You now have IP (injury points) equal to your Constitution or Body score divided by 3. I don't bother tracking IP for monsters. If you want to keep your old HP, that's fine. In some cases (AD&D fighters) it'll be a lot more than in my system; in others (magicians in everything other than LBB OD&D), somewhat less. 2. If you are adjusting your HP, ask if your class has low, medium or high HP progression, and then use the following chart to roll for your new HP. HP progression by level; the pattern continues in the obvious way until level 10, at which point it's just +1 per level. I'm not sure why I ordered the columns like that. If you're converting a monster, just give them 1d6 HP per HD in the original. 3. Simply give the character Attack Dice (AD) equal to their attack bonus in the original. (If you really want to get fancy, you can use martial arts ...

I'm rewriting the combat procedures from D&D-like games for my fantasy heartbreaker Coup Étrange. Why? I lay out some motivations here. I got a lot of my inspiration from discussions with Eero Tuovinen and the fine folks at the Finnish RPG Theory discord server. I'm playtesting these rules with the fine folks at the Old School Table-Time discord server . Thanks to everybody involved! The overall structure of combat is different in the overhaul. In normal D&D, you roll initiative to see who goes first, then one side goes, and then the other. Rinse and repeat. (Maybe if you're fancy you get alternating phases -- this would be my preference -- or you get to interrupt your opponent's slow actions with your fast actions, as occasionally happens in AD&D 1e.) In my overhaul, melee ebbs and flows, as in a real fight. When you advance into melee, you commit yourself to being tied up in it for a variable amount of time, possibly unable to retreat. The alternating stru...

I don't like looking things up in play. I also don't like asinine detail or unprincipled differences. The AD&D monster manual statblock is basically my worst nightmare. You're telling me a wolverine is a 3 HD monster with claw/claw/bite? A wolverine can defeat three trained level 1 human combatants in armor? (They also have an extra +4 to hit, for a total of +7. Plate armor is meaningless to these beasts.) I don't want to have to look up how much damage a creature does, and I don't want the answer to be some ridiculous bullshit. I want clear guidelines for monster damage, guidelines which I can apply consistently and on the fly , without consulting any books. Principles In my heartbreaker, I distinguish between HP (hero points) and IP (injury points). HP is protagonism, plot armor. Only people and monsters with levels have HP. (Nameless humans don't get HP.) You can lose HP all you want and still stay effective, as long as you've got at least 1 left. IP ...

I have run one (1) session of rules-as-written Coup 'Étrange (meaning a session with a custom scenario written to include the PCs) and it was just ok . (Would have been a lot better if I had clearly explained that PvP was on the table from the beginning, and we hadn't had a player drop out last minute -- the missing character was a key part of the scenario.) Nevertheless I feel qualified to write up my guidelines on creating a scenario. (Actually this is a draft. I'm going to put it into practice and revise if necessary.) First, decide if you're playing a dungeon game, a wilderness game, a town game, or a mix of two or three. If you have a published module in mind, that's fine too. For the sake of example, let's say you're doing a dungeon game. Make or read through the dungeon. Make a list of principal agents in the scenario, not counting the PCs. A principal agent is somebody with a motivation related to the scenario who is active within it. If you can, add...