8 January 2026 Foundry and Old School Essentials (and Foundry)

     After a long period of hectoring gentle suggestion by my brother, I finally purchased the Foundry VTT system, as well as the Forge...implementation, I guess. Then, naturally, I had to buy the DCC ruleset, a huge campaign, and a module. All in all it set me back about $200, but that very same day I received my first "We're Sorry We Made You Deaf" check from the Department of Defense for $180. The universe provides. 

    Foundry, so far, seems like it has a lot of options, but I am going to have to fuck around with it a great deal to learn how to use it. It's a little disappointing to have to leave Roll20 behind after six years, but it doesn't have great implementations of the games we are playing and Dennis swears that it's better, so we shall see. From what little I've messed with, DCC is certainly way better on Foundry/Forge. 

    I am hoping to restart my Barrowgate campaign, on hold since late October due to issues taking place at home. I was just going to move on to something else, but Dennis, Ed, and Dan said they wanted to continue that particular game, which was flattering to hear, so we will! I'm going to use this as an opportunity to learn Foundry/Forge, and to try out something new: Old School Essentials. I have this game on my shelf, and my understanding is that's it's a cleaned up version of the old B/X rules with a good helping of AD&D DNA inserted into it. The irony of going from AD&D in the 90s to all these different systems--3e, 5e, DCC, Dragonbane, BRP, Castles&Crusades--then landing right back where I started is not lost on me. It is a very simply game compared to modern rule sets, so I am curious if we will find the action economy too plain (that's a complaint that I had about AD&D way back when) when compared to more dynamic systems. I am forever looking for the Goldilocks system: not too hot, not too cold. C&C came very close, as did Dragonbane. I love DCC, too, but it's hard to take it seriously, which is fine: it's a frigging ball to play. All we do is laugh!

    So we shall see how all of this goes. It's nice to have a hobby, to have the resources to pursue the hobby, and others to enjoy the hobby with. 

(4 day later): I have dipped my toes into Foundry. There are a lot of little setting points that have big impacts (i.e. setting about vision on the token prototype, the token on the board, and the scene). Lots of little dohickies and gewgaws to learn. While I appreciate that Foundry has way more games available, I am not finding it easier, or better, than Roll20. I just need to do more reps. 

22 December 2025 Random TTRPG Musings

 22 December 2025

    Yesterday was the first official day of winter. It is cold and dark. I have nothing to add about that.

    I had been working on a Castles&Crusades adventure, but I never felt that good about it (even as it was coming along fine). I find the system to be a tiny bit vanilla, to be honest, and the market is teeny-tiny if we ever wanted to actually sell things. Then, I started working on something for BRP, a system I really like, but found it a tad too crunchy for my taste re: writing. Playing, sure, but writing? Then, I took what I was writing for BRP, switched it over to DCC, and let my imagination loose. The system is incredibly easy to work with (you can see the comparison of a BRP stat block vs. a DCC stat block below, both for the same creature, a ghoul), and it brings out the absolute crazy in me. As a life-long fan of Sword&Sorcery, Appendix N books, and Weird Tales, DCC scratches a deep itch in my brain for just my plain fucking gonozo imagination. Space-horror! Sci Fi-fantasy! Mix is all up in a pot and see what comes out! So fun!

31 December 2025 Populating Hexes

    Been doing a little bit of world building/hex population over the last week or so. I've been working on a DCC scenario called "Old Gnaw: the Ravages of the Corpse God," and I needed a point of reference, so I threw together a map using the '9 Villages' method I learned from Keep on Crawling. Basically, you throw nine dice on a piece of paper, circle where they land, and use those points as villages/settlements on your map. That's what I did, and the results suggested a long river to me (since most of the dice were kind of on in row along the top half of the paper). Thus, Korg's Valley was born. Once I had the river placed, I filled in other features--mountains, woods, a swamp, some hills. The names are as bog-standard, barebones as you can imagine, and that's okay. As Carl Sagan wrote, "Before you bake an apple pie, you must first create the universe." I am not going all J.R.R. Tolkien here: this is good enough for me right now. I started writing a small bit of background, too. Nothing crazy, but the geography suggested a story to me, so I am fleshing that out a big, too. I like having a map to look at, even if it looks like it was done by a 6 year old.  

Next, we have a bit of (very rough) hex generation using Shadowdark. I did a bunch of rolling and populating, and ended up with a river that leads to an ocean with a jungle and a bit of desert, too. Two areas of caves--one safe, with a tribe of barbarians, the other unsafe with a hermit. A town on the river is risky, and is run by a malevolent sorcerer named Skalvin. Mind begins to churn. Story begins to emerge.

Finally, I used the good old Dungeon Master's Guide from 1979 to generate some hexes. I came up with a desert that lead to a plain, then a marshy area with a pond, the ruins of a city (!), followed by another marshy area with a pond. The tale begins to emerge from the concepts that are completely randomized. 

The point here is to show that randomization can lead to good, creative ideas. This is a way people could play (and did, back in the old days): procedural D&D. The world, and the story, emerge from the dice. I could see doing this at a table just to see how it goes, and to see what happens. It would be an incredibly slow game (I could actually play this by myself if I wanted to), but it would be...interesting. 

 

7 December 2025 Science Fiction

 7 December 2025: Science Fiction

    I love science fiction. Love it. I didn't read too much of it as a kid. I read Dune in high school (I think I read it twice) but I can't remember any others. Ray Bradbury, which is really more fantasy than sci-fi. H.G. Wells, maybe Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein. Other than that, not much. For whatever reason, in 1991 when I was a senior in college, I decided I wanted to get into some science fiction, but I wasn't sure where to start. I was a big Dan Simmons fan at the time--horror being my main jam in those days--so I picked up his (then) new novel Hyperion and had my mind thoroughly, utterly, completely blown. Hyperion remains one of my favorite books of all time, not just because I found the story and the concepts incredible, but because of the experience I had while reading it: sublime. Transcendent. Consciousness expanding. It was remarkable.

    After that, sci-fi was on the menu. I read some of the classics--Foundation, Ringworld, Rendezvous with Rama, maybe a few others and enjoyed them all, but I was still more into fantasy and horror. I met the science fiction author Samuel Delaney, whose writing I find unreadable, but who was a kind man, and generous with his advice about what to read as a newbie to the genre. I discovered William Gibson and Neuromancer, and sort of fell in love with Molly Millions. 

    It wasn't until 1996, when I was living on Diego Garcia while in the Navy that I truly hit my sci-fi stride. We had a small but mighty library on the island, and for some strange reason, there was an incredible selection of science fiction books available. I'll never know how the books got there, and kept being replenished, but the choices were remarkable, and I read them voraciously. I'm talking a novel a day voraciously. I did the deepest of deep-dives and read science fiction until my eyes bled. I discovered John Wyndam and read his major works (The Midwich Cuckoos, Day of the Triffids, The Chrysalids, The Kraken Wakes), for example. There was a series called Science Fiction Masterworks, and I read a bunch of those. David Brin, Greg Bear, Ben Bova, Brian Aldiss, Jerry Pournelle, Philip K. Dick. David Weber introduced me to military science fiction, which lead me to Heinlein's Starship Troopers and Hadelman's The Forever War. I read Ursala LeGuin's gentle science fiction (The Dispossessed, The Left Hand of Darkness), C.S. Lewis's theologically infused Space Trilogy, and Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game. John Scalzi! Jack Campbell! Becky Chambers! Octavia Butler! The many, many, many anthologies put together by Gardner Dozois. I read science fiction like a starving man entering into an all-you-can-eat buffet. It was, and is, awesome. 

    But what I've never done is run a science fiction TTRPG. We dabbled a little in Gamma World back in high school, and played a good amount of FASA Star Trek (and more recently, the Modiphius version). I had Star Frontiers, and maybe even Traveller, but I never played either. So all of this is a long way of saying, I am thinking pretty hard about running a science fiction game. I'm a little burnt out on fantasy, and I'm never running Call of Cthulhu again (love the game. Sick of playing it). Me brudder and I recently considered Troll Lord Games' Amazing Adventures, but found it a bit too pulpy for our tastes, I just bought the entire M-Space collection from from Frostbyte Games, which is for BRP, so we'll see how that goes. Once I finish my rough-draft of The Runes, I'm heading out into the vasty deeps of space.

5 December 2025 Amazing Adventures vs. Basic Role Playing

 5 December 2025 AA vs. BRP

    Last night my brother and I had a conversation with our good friend Dan, who we have been role playing with since way back at the beginning, in 1984 when we were all in high school. We were making a video so that we can learn how to make Youtube content for our (eventual, hopefully) gaming company Wicked Place Game. It was a lot of fun to traipse down memory lane and remember the great adventures of yesteryear, and the halcyon days of spending a Saturday afternoon flipping through old Dragon Magazines, or reading the AD&D Players Handbook for the umpteenth time.  Wonderful memories.

    We had a lively discussion about gaming systems, picking apart the things that we like and dislike about many of them, and generally nerding out about TTRPGs. As Dennis and I think about creating content for our nascent gaming company, there has been some disagreement between us about what exactly we should be working on. Little brother is firmly in the Castles&Crusades camp, and with good reason: the game system is well-designed, we've played it and like it, the company is great, and they give us a 50% discount when we buy things! All solid reasons. I have been a bit hesitant, though, because in my observation, the footprint of the game is much smaller than other systems we like, so it's a very small pool to swim in should we go in that direction. Other games (not including 5e, which none of us are interested in) like Dragonbane, Shadowdark, and (we think...) BRP have larger audiences, more eyeballs, more dollars, etc. It is notoriously hard to find information about games sales, so much of what we are talking about is supposition based on anecdotes (like how many game-related materials are available on Drivethru RPG, or how frequently games are discussed on websites like ENWorld, or how many members there are on a Discord channel). It's hard to know where the energy is outside of 5e and big guns like Daggerheart and Draw Steel. 

    No game is perfect. For example, I prefer unleveled games (BRP) but I don't love skill systems (therefore AA). Both systems are supported on Foundry, but neither on Roll20. BRP is probably much bigger than AA re: a community of players, but both are tiny compared to something like Shadowdark, which itself is fractional when compared to D&D. Both of these systems are old (C&C is 20 years, BRP is 50!) so game mechanics have modernized and changed a great deal since then. I have tremendous affection for BRP, but I do love the Troll Lords. It's hard to know what to do, but at this point, all of this is a passion project: we are doing what we like in hopes of one day (maybe...) monetizing it somehow.

    I have become bogged down in writing my C&C module. It's been a bit of a slog lately. It might be that I'm a little burnt out on fantasy in general, which is mainly what my group plays. I don't want to run Call of Cthulhu again; I love that game but I am done with it (I've written about this elsewhere). So...what, then? A horror game that's not CoC? Some kind of multiversal sci-fi game? I'm not sure. I might need to switch it up a bit. 

14 November 2025 The Shudder Mountains

 14 November 2025 The Shudder Mountains

    We have been playing DCC for about six months now, and it is gonzo-fun for sure. Our big group is five players and one GM (Mr. Cheese), and all we do is laugh our assess off. The rolls are so swingy, the magic so weird, and the monsters so bizarre that it all makes for a fantastic beer and pretzels sort of gaming experience. I have run this system twice: once in a sort of catch as catch can, episodic game where I was just learning the rules (we played some home brew and the module "The Well of the Worm," which was fun. The second time was a longer campaign set in Hyboria, using the DCC: Lankhmar rules; it, too, went well, ending in an epic TPK. 

    So I like the system a lot, and I hope to run it again. Hyboria is still wide open, but I was thinking about something a little bit different as well. In my head I have a Call of Cthulhu game that begins in the real-world and moves into the Dreamlands, something I did do a few years ago using the CoC 7e ruleset. It was one of my favorite campaigns that I've ever run, and everyone seemed to enjoy it. With that said, the reality is, I have played Call of Cthulhu too much. I have found the end of that game. Don't get me wrong: it's a wonderful, wonderful game; it is the game I have run the most, I think; even more than Dungeons&Dragons. But after 44 years, I think I am Cthulhud-out. It's hard to keep the game fresh after all this time, and it is impossible for my players (and me) to avoid metagaming. 

    But I was thinking...what if I used the DCC rules instead of the CoC 7e rules, to create a campaign like what follows: the game begins during the Great Depression, and is set in the Appalachian regions of Kentucky or West Virginia. The players are all normal things: doctors, cops, whatever, who for reasons are going to investigate strange doings in the hills and hollers. There is a ton of super spooky lore in that part of the world, so a few horror-themed adventures would be totally fine (and mechanically easy) to run. The big threat is a snake-handling Christian cult that is being influenced by an actual entity from another world, in the Shudder Mountains of...somewhere. The multiverse. Players would be drawn into the Shudder Mountains and take on their fantasy personas-- much like the Eternal Champion, or like Lovecraft's Dreamlands. On that side of the multiverse, they are a dwarf, or an elf, or a fighter, whatever. They would explore the Shudder Mountains, and adventure there with the Big Bad (a snake god like Yig or Damballah). Weird, horror-infused fantasy. At times, they would pop back and forth between worlds. 

    Shudder Mountains is based on the works of Manly Wade Wellman and his Silver John stories, which I love. The author of the source book, Michael Curtis, loves those stories, and wrote a really unique campaign setting which I think is great. I also have been digging Old Gods of Appalachia, a horror podcast set in that same part of the world. This may be be a thing I try and do sometime. I think it would be a blast. 

     

11 November 2025 The Runes: Design Journal (2) (plus 5e and DCC!)

 11 November 2025

    Veterans Day, so no work for me today. As a veteran myself, I find this is a nice day to reflect on my own service from 1993-1997 (a long time ago now), as well as the service of my family. My great grandfather, Michael Joseph Reilly, earned his American citizenship when he emigrated from Ireland and joined the USN during World War I. The next generation, my grandparents, served in WWII, while the next generation--my dad and my uncles--served during Viet Nam and the first Gulf War. Then my brother, myself, my sister in law, and my cousins served. Most recently, my nephew Connor! That's five generations of veterans over the past 100 years, and that's something to be proud of.

I have been banging away at The Runes. It is a disorganized mess, but progress is happening. There are a lot of questions I have about how to organize this thing: monster stats in the back, or in text? How specific vs. general do I need to be re: how events unfold. How much detail is too much? How polished does a first draft have to be? Does any of it even make sense? Hard to know. I'd like to have a workable, edited draft of this thing by the beginning of summer, so that's my goal. Once I have a student teacher (starting in January) I'll have a lot more time to work on it. As it is, I am picking away at it here and there. You can see my amazing hand drawn maps below. They are, literally, good enough for now. 

We have been playing a DCC campaign with Mr. Cheese as our GM. It's a bonkers game, and I think that's the point: the system itself leads us toward funny, chaotic experiences. There are so many tables, and so many out of pocket results that weird shit happens all of the time. I admit that DCC brings the freak out in me; my imagination just goes haywire and I say and do bizarre things (like my breast-feeding male cleric, Otto). It is a fun experience for sure, but I do think that the built in randomness of the game engine makes it more funny than serious. We laugh our asses off, everytime we play! 

Which brings me to my next point: having messed about with various systems now--D&D 5e, Dragonbane, Star Trek, Dungeon Crawl Classics, BRP, Castles&Crusades, and Cthulhu 7e--I have come to the conclusion that the system can drive the vibe of the game as much as the GM and the players can. DCC, for example, has swingy magic (and swingly rolls in general) baked into the pie so that the unexpected happens all of the time. You are one roll away from disaster or triumph regardless of your actions and choices. My wizard, Cal, either throws biscuits or nuclear bombs when he uses magic missile. It's a crap shoot every time. In Dragonbane, the monsters were tremendously difficult because they always hit, and oftentimes more than once.  Because it is an unleveled game, combat felt dangerous. Because there were limited spells, it felt...I don't know, fey. It was fun for sure, but the engine made the game feel a certain away (or at least that's how I experienced it). I ran it with a bit of a fairy tale vibe on purpose, and the system led itself in that direction. 

Castles&Crusades has an OSR ethos: characters are generally weak, progression is slow, powers and abilities are given sparingly, and the whole thing feels like player thinking is far more important that player character features. We've been playing it for a few months now, and I've noticed that my three players are playing more thoughtfully than normal, because they have to! They've had to retreat a few times, which is unprecedented in my gaming experience. It's a good system to play with experienced people because they really need to stay focused on what's happening. The system is not going to protect them.

Which brings me to 5e. 5e is the 10,000 pound elephant in the room. It is the system that an overwhelming, vast majority of people play now. While I might be hammering these stats a bit, according to the data I've seen, between 12-15 million people in the US play Dungeons&Dragons, and 80%+ of them are under the age of 40. Old heads like my friends and I make up a vanishingly small part of the TTRPG hobby, and our memories of the earlier version of D&D, especially 1st, 2nd, and BECMI, are not widely held by the majority of those who play these games. Those crazy kids are all playing the most successful, and most popular iteration of this game: 5th edition Dungeons&Dragons.

Having run two campaigns (one didn't go well on my end, but my players had fun) and played in 2.5 (two regular, one modified Lord of the Rings variant), I found that 5e was not to my liking (I am confident I wrote about this before).  But as I thought about it, and as I had a great conversation on ENWorld with other people who love these games as much as I do, I realized my dislike for 5e is a me issue, not a game issue. I joke with my brother and say in my best stoner voice, "You can't play 5e with a 2e mindset," but it it turns out, that's true! 5e is designed to be a high-fantasy, heroic RPG. Characters are powerful, and have a lot of options, very quickly. It is a wildly different game than earlier iterations, and it does what it sets out to do well. Comparing it to older versions, or OSR variants, is unfair to the system: it doesn't want to be those things! So 5e isn't less than or worse than; it is its own thing, and it's good. It works, people love it, and I need to stop being a grouchy old man about it. Over the past six years, I have amassed so much stuff, a lot of it 5e, and I hope to--at some point--play it. Maybe it will be a Lord of the Rings campaign, or maybe I'll dip my toes back into Kobold Press and Midgard. We'll see, but my days of complaining about 5e are done. Things change.