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 "Horde War Advanced  is a fast paced Medieval Fantasy D12 RPG! Horde Wars Advanced covers all levels of play and over 200 Beasts, Monsters and NPCs to battle. Character creation rules, a starting adventure, sample town, and treasure generation tables are included. There are also chapters on sailing, domain play, and the setting."Horde Wars Advanced is a whole cloth D12Needleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243274667834930867noreply@blogger.com0

 For your infiltration needs:

The face in Sinless is a useful character. Assets can only be utilized with the correct etiquette, and the face is the person who can activate asset abilities, which are unique effects, unobtainable in any other way.

https://sinlessrpg.com

Hack & Slash 

Follow, Twitch, Support, Donate to end Cancer (5 Star Rating) sinlessrpg.com

Scott Martin can be blamed for this post for pointing out the similarities between Oz and Edgar Rice Burroughs fandom....

Mars is dying and has been for millennia. The only truly fertile land left is the squarish Land of Oz, surrounded on all side by deadly desert.

Oz has four countries, each home to a different race of men. The east is the home of the Blue Men, short in stature and friendly. It was once under the tyrannical rule of an ancient crone, but she was felled by a little girl from Earth. In the South is the Country of the Red Men, ruled by a benevolent queen. In the west are the Yellow Men, who are renowned for their technological skill. They are ruled by a metal man. The northern country is the land of the Purple Men. They've been ruled by a succession of queens, each with a mastery of the powers of the mind.

In the center of Oz is the Emerald City-State, and it's lofty spires and magnificent domes are made entirely of crystal. Their true color is in a part of the spectrum neither human nor Martian eyes can perceive, but the city's people wear optics which convert the color to green. It was formerly ruled by a man of Earth, a charlatan and huckster, but the rightful queen has been restored, after having spent her youth in exile, disguised as a boy.

Young Dorothy Gale was transported to Mars by a strange storm that tossed her, along with her dog and her home across the astral void. She killed a witch, exposed a charlatan, and helped restore the rightful ruler of Oz. She didn't do it alone. She was aided by a Lion Man, exiled for his supposed cowardice, an artificial man without the ancient brain that formerly guided him, and a Yellow Man whose mind was had been placed in a metal body. The companions took the Golden Road that followed the ancient canals that terminated in the great Emerald City, then undertook a quest to depose the witch that ruled the Yellow Men and who forced them to use their knowledge to build her an army of conquest.

This was only the first on many trips Dorothy Gale made to Mars. That young farm girl became a dying world's greatest hero.
The original version of this post appeared in 2018.

Here's the part where I reveal connections. I've known James Spahn for about 15 years. I personally mailed him his first print copy of Swords & Wizardry Complete. I was his Confirmation Sponsor. I consider James a true friend, and I regard him as one of the most skilled creators in the RPG industry. Yadda yadda ;)

Brave the Shadow is James' first - and indeed not his last - venture into the world of ShadowDark. So, what does your $9.99 get you?

This new supplement for Arcane Library's SHADOWDARK Roleplaying Game introduces 18 new Ancestries and 25 new classes to expand your options as a Player and offer an army of new NPC options as a Game Master.

From classic ancestries like Duckfolk and Gnomes, to more esoteric takes like ancient serpent-blooded Thulsan and or fey-marked Changeling, you'll always have some fresh blood to spill when the dungeon goes dark.

New classes include classics like the Assassin and the Archer, to the strange fungi-twisted Mycomancer, the greedy Blackguard, the mad Gallusborn, and the insane Stingbat Wrangler! And who let that Unattended Kid in here?!

It makes me want to run a ShadowDark game :)

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While not NEW new (as the West Marches Campaign Playstyle Guidebook was released in PDF in mid-May of this year, and in that time has gone Platinum for sales, the Print on Demand just went live, and both print and PDF are discounted this week.

The West Marches Campaign Playstyle Guidebook is 4.99 in PDF, 12.99 in print, and 15.99 for print plus PDF.

PS - I ordered the print plus PDF and will try to get a review up in the next few weeks.

This handbook is your guide to running and playing in a West Marches-style campaign. 

Inside, you’ll find clear, practical advice on preparing sessions, running the game, and embracing character-driven storytelling.

The West Marches method of play is perfect for modern lifestyle gaming with busy schedules and full calendars. 

Designed to be system-agnostic, this book works with any RPG and helps GMs and players alike focus on exploration, discovery, and meaningful consequence.

Whether you’re just starting out or ready to level up your game, this handbook will walk you through the process step by step.

Note: The POD is now LIVE (4th of July) and will be on SALE this first weekend. Enjoy! 

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I own the first four issues of Carcass Crawler in print (and PDF), and I've thoroughly enjoyed them. Although written for OSE, the vast majority of the content is usable with the OSR system of your choice.

Carcass Crawler: Issue Five is 7.50 in PDF at DTRPG.

The fifth issue of Carcass Crawler — the official Old-School Essentials zine! Each issue is packed with new material for your games, including new character classes and races, new spells and magic items, new monsters, optional and expanded rules, referee advice, previews of in-development products, short adventures, and more!

In This Issue

• New classes and races: Two new character classes and races. The changeling and the ratling.
• Expanded poisons: Additional descriptive details around the 9 standard poison types, plus 11 new poison types.
• Weapon materials: Rules for weapons of enhanced or weaker materials (e.g. silver, bone, bronze).
• Magic swords: Tables and minor magical quirks to add flavour to the bog-standard sword +1.
• Cantrips: Minor magicks practiced by apprentice arcane spell casters.
• Level 0 characters: Rules for rolling up level 0 "normal human" characters, either for NPC retainers or for use in funnel adventures. Complete with tables of backgrounds and names.
• Lake and river monsters: 8 new monsters that lurk in freshwater rivers and lakes.
• Up Chaos River: A short adventure where PCs must travel up a chaos-infested river to save the local village. Suitable for use as a funnel adventure for a group of level 0 characters.

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There are several Free League titles on sale at DTRPG right now.

DragonBane* is marked down 40% - to 14.99 in PDF.

Mork Morg is marked down 40% in PDF - to 11.99

ALIEN RPG Core Rulebook is marked down 40% - to 14.99

Forbidden Lands is marked down 40% - to 14.99 in PDF

The Lord of the Rings RPG (5E) - marked down to 14.99 in PDF

Symbaroum* - marked down 40% to 14.99 in PDF (or spend a penny more and get 18 other RPGs like Power Rangers, RuneQuest, Dr Who, and more)

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In the last few months I really got excited about D&D 4th Edition again. I actually wrote a post about this a couple of weeks ago. After not having run anything for quite some time, I was really excited about donning the DM’s mantle once more. In just a few weeks I expanded my 4E library from just the three original core books to quite the collection of used books and new PoD ones. I even invested heavily into ArcKnight’s flat plastic miniatures which I can wholeheartedly recommend. I spent almost every waking minute thinking about the game I’d love to run.

My wife and a friend immediately showed interest when I talked about 4E, but unfortunately I couldn’t really find any additional players on a short notice. I don’t like playing with strangers, so we decided to give it a go with just two players. The problem is: 4E doesn’t play well with small groups. The whole encounter design is meant for a balanced party of about four to five players. At first I tried scaling down existing 4E adventures but this proved more tedious than I anticipated and most of the adventure modules I had access to weren’t really to my liking.

One D&D adventure I always wanted to run was Against the Cult of the Reptile God, which was originally written for AD&D 1st Edition. So I took the module as a basis and created encounters suited for a two player party. This was certainly doable although I noticed that 4E is somewhat lacking when it comes to low-level monsters. But with some reskinning this was not too big a deal. I placed the town of Orlane into the southern part of the Nentir Vale to the west of the barony of Harkenwold and wrote a new introduction to get my players on their way to Orlane. While travelling in the vicinity they stumbled upon a family attacked by hungry wolves. A short combat ensued in which the player characters and the slightly too powerful family of peasants defeated the wolves in a couple of combat rounds. The combat was fun and I really liked making use of these nifty flat miniatures, but I noticed that properly balancing things is harder than I anticipated.

The family thanked the player characters for their help and told them about strange happenings in Orlane. Of course my players immediately took the bait and went to Orlane. After arriving in the village they immediately started exploring and talking to the villagers. This part of the game went pretty smoothly and was a lot of fun to everyone involved. They carefully avoided getting into trouble but were almost ambushed during the night. After about four hours playing we called it a day and talked about what they thought about the game and the module. We all agreed that the adventure had been a blast so far. We had a lot of great roleplaying opportunities and my players enjoyed the exploration and investigation angle of the module. But we also agreed that the module didn’t really allow D&D 4th Edition to shine. I also had to admit that preparing the game had been much more work than planned. After some discussion we agreed that we wanted to keep playing the module but switch to a more suitable system.

Was this D&D 4th Edition’s fault? Of course not. I still think it’s a very cool game and if I ever get the chance again to run a game for a larger group I might pick it up again. Using a 1E adventure was probably a bad idea as well. We are currently trying to decide what we should switch to. AD&D 1st Edition might be the most logical choice but perhaps one of the more recent retro clones or something like Castles & Crusades might work better for us.

If you plan to run D&D 4th Edition in 2025, please don’t make the same mistakes as I did. It’s still a great game and can be a lot of fun but be prepared to put in a lot of work as a DM if you have less players than the game was designed for and/or if you want to use adventures not designed for it. What probably also didn’t help that while preparing for the 4th Edition game, Daggerheart had been released, which I am extremely hyped for (yes, I have the attention span of a squirrel of caffeine sometimes).

Have you tried getting back into 4E recently? What are your thoughts on this controversial edition of D&D? Please share your thoughts and experiences below!

While clicking around on the Daggerheart website today I noticed a section called “The Void”. To my surprise it is their official playtesting hub where they post new Daggerheart stuff for us to try out and give feedback on. There are two new classes in playtest at the moment: the Warlock (which looks a lot like the D&D warlock) and the Fighter (which has a Martial Artist subclass).

If you like Daggerheart and want to learn more about what they are working on right now, check out “The Void”.

Even though I think I never watched a full Critical Role session, I’d consider myself a fan. I totally adore their animated series and I own several books related to CR including a book about the group, several comics and two books about the setting of Exandria. When they announced their own fantasy RPG – Daggerheart – I was immediately excited. I didn’t actively participate in the playtest but I followed the game’s development and I liked a lot about it. Eventually I preordered the deluxe boxed set.

Unfortunately I am among the unlucky few who didn’t get their boxed sets on release day. For some reason some of them got delayed. Darrington Press didn’t get into detail about what caused the delay but they apologized and offered anyone affected by the delay access to Daggerheart on Demiplane and an Art & Token pack on Roll20 for free. The PDF was included in the preorder so I was able to check it out as soon as I got home on Tuesday. Please note that this will not be a proper review since I haven’t even read everything but rather my very first impressions on the PDF version of the game.

My first impression is extremely positive. The 415-paged PDF (including the core rules, various sheets, maps, and all Domain cards) is absolutely beautiful. Darrington Press has production values on par with much more prominent RPG publishers like Wizards of the Coast or Paizo. The included art is stunning and everything is well layed-out. But what about the content?

Daggerheart contains all the rules for players and GMs to play and run the game. There’s an extensive bestiary, equipment for all tiers of play, random loot tables, nine classes with two subclasses each, and 18 (yes, eighteen. That’s not a typo!) ancestries with rules on how to mix ancestries. There are 9 communities to pick from. I haven’t counted the Domain cards, but there’s plenty of those. Domain cards contain the various Abilities or Spells a character can pick up. The format reminds me somewhat of D&D 4th Editions powers which isn’t really a bad thing in my book.

The core mechanic is quite interesting. You roll with two d12 against a set difficulty. One of the dice is the Hope die, the other is the Fear die. When your Hope die has the highest result (this is called Roll with Hope) you get a Hope point which is a kind of meta currency which players can use in various ways including fuelling some of their abilities. If the Fear die is higher (which is called Roll with Fear) the GM gets a Fear point which he can use to trigger certain GM moves (like in PtbA games) or activate enemy abilities. If both results are the same the roll is considered a critical success and is also counted as a Roll with Hope. Rolls with Hope may lead to positive side-effect even if they fail while Rolls with Fear usually mean some kind of negative consequences for the player characters. I like that.

Daggerheart doesn’t come with a particular setting to play in, but with multiple campaign frames which can be used by players and the GM to collaboratively build a campaign. The included campaign frames are The Witherwild, Five Banners Burning, Beast Feast, The Age of Umbra (which will be an 8-part series by CR in the near future), Motherboard, and Colossus of the Drylands. Each campaign frame give enough information to get started and some even come with additional mechanics. Even if you don’t want to play in any of these it should be easy enough for any GM (even inexperienced ones) to create a campaign frame of their own. Daggerheart looks to be pretty flexible and can be easily adapted.

What I particularly like is that they included a lot of tips for new players or people new to the system. There are character guide sheets for each Class which give players assistance when creating their first characters. From what I’ve seen so far there’s a lot of GM advice on how to run Daggerheart with a focus on new GMs. It’s obvious – at least to me – that they want Daggerheart a great if not perfect entry for people new to the tabletop RPG hobby.

What I am most excited about is the freeform combat in Daggerheart. There’s no initiative, no action count or turns like in classic TTRPGs. Combat plays out much like noncombat scenes. This might be also the hardest thing for me to adapt to if I run or play Daggerheart. Turn-based combat has been a core concept of most TTRPGs for the last 50 years or so. At the moment I am not 100% sure how Daggerheart’s combat plays out at the table, but I’m sure they’ll give a proper explanation or example somewhere in the book. Remember: I haven’t finished reading the PDF, this is not a proper review.

I can’t help myself, but Daggerheart is a game that immediately grabbed me when I started learning more about it. There’s a lot of potential there and if I hadn’t already planned to run D&D 4th Edition, I’d probably switch to it in a heartbeat. Is Daggerheart the D&D killer? I doubt it. My guess is that it will get a healthy amount of players and GMs pretty quickly as word starts to spread. I’m interested in what might happen if Critical Role switches to Daggerheart for their main campaign, but I think they’ll probably stick to D&D 5th Edition for their main campaign – at least for the time being.

I’ll definitely dive deeper into Daggerheart‘s mysteries over the coming weeks and months and if I find the time, I’ll post about it here. Stay tuned.

UPDATE: I added a short section about the core mechanic.

Legendary RPG author and designer Rob Kuntz is adding TWO very sought-after PDF products to his Three Line Studio Store, after those products recently sold out as popular print releases elsewhere on the web (DATG at TLB Games, and DD at Chaotic Henchmen Productions)...

Rob's seminal treatise Dave Arneson's True Genius, and iconic RPG adventure module Dark Druids, have now joined our range of downloadable digital (PDF) products!

 

And here's the double-whammy to all our fans and friends: if you purchase DATG and DD together as a bundle — The DATG Dark Druids Bundle — you will get 20% off your order (*valid until 5th July 2023). Now that's regal!

Good Day to You All!

There is no better way to start off a New Year than with -- not just one but TWO -- brand-new, never-before-published creative, exciting products!  Even better, when such creative, exciting products are about a CELEBRATION...

Throughout 2023, Rob Kuntz and Three Line Studio will be celebrating 50 years since the inception and playtesting of the world's first commercial RPG in 1973!

And there is no better way to celebrate than to reward YOU, Rob's loyal fanbase, with our launch of Gargax's Glorious Gewgaws and Pryce's Price, both available to purchase exclusively from our newly-launched Three Line Studio Store!  Please note that for the very first time, we are 'going' digital as those two products are published in professional high-quality full-colour PDF format, printable and viewable on all electronic devices, PC/MAC/Android.  Cartography, interior art and Gewgaws cover art by are by a promising young Italian graphic artist, Davide Gambarara, who did a stirling job!  Davide brought a crisp line work to both Gewgaws and Pryce.  We cannot praise him enough and can already hint at the fact that Davide will be involved in forthcoming TLS projects!  https://www.facebook.com/dagamarts/
More information about Davide from our TLS Facebook post.

Rob's two celebratory releases are part of Three Line Studio's Red Book™ collection, and are send-ups to Gary Gygax:

Gargax's Glorious Gewgaws is divided into two sections.  The first part references in detail some special magic items, while the second part features the films, literature and authors that historically inspired the beginning of the RPG form.  Pryce's Price is a very exciting and captivating action-packed adventure module with gothic undertones, described as "one of the most fantastic adventures written by Rob Kuntz to date!"  Gewgaws and Pryce are sure to brighten up your day... and your game!  Head off to our store -- only one click away -- and while there please also make sure to download Rob's latest FREE (26-page long) Newsletter: https://threelinestudiostore.company.site/ If you wish to purchase Gewgaws and Pryce together, why not take advantage of our SPECIAL OFFER on the Gewgaws Pryce Bundle and save 25%! Happy Celebrations!
 

Download the first issue of Cepheus Journal. There is an article about CE skills, part one of a scifi adventure on salvage and recovery, a Sword of Cepheus NPC, a description of a free trader with deckplans, a small pseudolizard species to encounter, a piece on modern war, tech level comparisons and more. We want … Continue reading Cepheus Journal Issue #001

Rosalis Cluster is Sector generated using the Cepheus Engine rules. It can now be downloaded from the downloads page. The download includes a huge PNG-image (4227 x 5305 pixels), and two text-files with the UWPs and the XML-data. In the map of the sector we can see two multi subsector empires. The Raniera Worlds and … Continue reading Rosalis Cluster

You are rolling up a new Traveller character and you aren't sure which Background Skills to choose. In this article, I will show you the best background skills for your Traveller character.

You need scout ship deck plans for your virtual tabletop game. Check out my new Pioneer-Class Scout Ship Deck Plans For Roll20 AnD VTT.

The Cepheus Journal is a free and ad-free Fanzine. We are looking for submissions. While we wait for the first issue, these mock-up covers might provide some inspiration.

Looking for sci-fi RPG adventure seeds for your next game of Cepheus Engine or Traveller? Check out The Missing Survey Vessel.

Need a new hairdo?  Need that crooked nose straightened out?  Need to go incognito for a while?  Try the new Cosmedoc Cosmetics Autodoc!

My players needed something larger than the standard air/raft, so I created this civilian g-carrier for them.