Blood, Death, Satan & Metal

First of all, this content isn't mine. It's from the Secret Santicore 2017 document, written by Trent B. of newfeierland.blogspot.com. The compilation, which came out this year as a beautiful pdf, is full of great content, including a piece by me (Reef Elves for DCC and LotFP), and a piece written for me by Lungfungus of Melancholies and Mirth, featuring bizarre and abstract alternate planes of reality. Check it out!

I had to share this table of weapons for giants. But of course, it applies to the Lucky Idiot, who can use anything as a weapon (it was inspired by a player who wanted to use a Buster/Guts sword) as long as it's not mechanically different from the standard weapon types. Exceptions can be made with Lucky Idiot rolls, and these give a lot of flavor and possibilities for that. So here's a table of ridiculous nonsense for a Lucky Idiot to use, I guess. It doesn't have to make sense.


d20 Giant Weapon 1 A mud-caked ox-plough 2 A sharpened windmill 3 A sturdy chimney …

Some Refs and players enjoy including downtime activities, such as spell research, carousing, domain management, and other stuff. Crafting and selling is one such type of downtime activity, and so why not make up a skill for players looking to earn silver, make items for enchantment, repair gear or whatever else?

The Craft skill is a specialty skill. Characters do not possess a 1 in 6 chance by default: it is the class ability of  Dwarfs, for whom it replaces the Architecture skill and progresses at the same rate. Others may only gain the skill by allotting Specialist skill points or training in the skill. 
Characters with the Craft skill are trained in making one type of good, such as different types of food, clothing, or art, armor, guns, or weapons. The Craft skill may be taken multiple times in different professions, which must be increased separately from one another.

In order to craft, appropriate Specialist's tools and facilities are required. The amount of time it takes to…

I have yet to meet a player who has not, at one point or another, taken part in Murderhobo behavior. As a kid who taught himself D&D at the age of 8 reading the 2nd edition Player's Handbook, I built a lot of dungeons with 10' x 10' featureless square rooms housing treasure chests guarded by orcs, and as a player never payed for an inn, a hot meal, or any type of service that a normal person would use. All my income went to implements of murder. But given that verisimilitude can be fun (to a point) and that OSR characters will often find a lot of treasure and have nothing to spend it on other than carousing or buying magic items from the inexplicably present economy built around dungeon crawling, let's give them a reason to care about the things that make us living, breathing people and not cardboard cutouts of munchkins murdering our way through a series of backdrops. If you'd like to apply some simple modifiers to NPC reaction rolls to incentivize this, here …

As a huge fan of LotFP and its d6 skill system, I wanted to take a look at one of the other most popular and celebrated skill systems. Third Edition Dungeons & Dragons d20 system was a turning point in game design, in my opinion- it changed most things to d20 rolls, had tight tactical rules, ascending AC, and a bunch of other stuff. Probably most importantly, the Open Game License, without which we wouldn't have the OSR. But the skills. Let's look at the skills. I'll be breaking this down into several categories, comparing the LotFP system to the 3e/Pathfinder system, and awarding points. Spoiler, LotFP wins, big fucking surprise. But this isn't a contest, it's an analysis (with a stupid point thing). 
Number and Function of Skills The LotFP skill system has a lean 10 skills, with Refs encouraged to create their own as needed. The 3e system has a plethora of skills (I list 38 here. Pathfinder has 28 according to paizo.com, but that's still a lot). Here are th…

This free RPG day I grabbed my stuff and headed out to Black & Read Books in Arvada, Colorado. I took LotFP and Mutant Crawl Classics, and ended up running MCC after playing a Starfinder one-shot. I'd never played it before, and thought it would be fun. Afterwards, I grabbed the adventure, and I'll be giving it away, postage included, to somebody.

The adventure is basically the sci-fi version of those We Be Goblins adventures they've been putting out. The goblin FRPG day adventure is for level 6 gobbos now, which I assume means it's the 6th year running. Who the hell plays a level 6 one-shot game?

Anyway, this is apparently the launch of a new yearly tradition, with these considerably less cute Stitch knockoffs instead of the little green gobbos. Get em, Disney. Make them bleed.

Skitter Shot is for 4 first level characters, and pre-gens are provided in the back of the book, with full-color character illustrations. Pretty nice. It would have been better if they were…