February Plans: A Return to the Indie, OSR and ALT-RPG Scene!

 While doing a lot of reorganizing in my home office and study I realized I had a metric ton of small brochure and zine shaped RPGs and sourcebooks, predominantly for Mork Borg and Mothership, but Shadowdark came in at a close third, followed in no special order by Cairn, OSE, Swords & Wizardry and sundry other weird abominations, including one of my latest favorites, Outcast Silver Raiders. 

In short: the indie RPG zine-scene is thriving, and it is often blending in interesting and weird ways with the OSR scene thanks in no small part to Old School Essentials and Shadowdark, which is admittedly less OSR and more "5E, after you take a weed-wacker to it." 

So, for February I am going to focus on a medley of the choicest gems to have arrived from this otherworldy dimension of chapbooks, fanznes and weird art experiments that exist like mynocks on the fringe of the giant ship that is the conventional expensive hardcover RPG scene. Should be a blast!

In no particular order I plan to dive in a bit on:

Outcast Silver Raiders (the coolest blend of grimdark, weird and OSR yet)

Cairn Boxed Set 2E

Liminal Horror's latest offerings and where its Kickstarter is at

What's up with Mothership stuff lately

Mork Borg....is there no end to the flood?

The Tenth GM Inspiration: Techniques used in Modern Indie Modules

The Tenth GM Inspiration: Techniques used in Modern Indie Modules

Last blog talked about how I use round outlining (as I call it) to work out scenarios and even whole campaign ideas. This time around I wanted to talk specifically how that technique is in regular, constant use in the indie RPG scene right now, and its a very effective way at creating and running ready to go scenarios. The most effective examples of this technique are found in Mothership modules, specifically the trifold brochures which are an extension of the one-page module designs that started becoming popular a decade or two back (from the One Page Module contests, AAW games adventure-a-day and more). The Mothership modules (and there are also Mork Borg, Cairn and other modules of similar nature) are generally built around packing an entire session (or more) on two pages, which can then be folded as a trifold module. This forces the author of the module to maximize their use of space. 

One way to do this effectively merges the module description boxes, the map and the adventure path all into a single mixed graphic....the Haunting of Ypsilon-14 is the first such module for Mothership, and an excellent example of how to execute this (I do a deep dive on it here). Each area of the haunted space station has a quick series of bullet points on the salient elements of the area to be explored, and line/arrow links showing you where in the space station you can then go to from that location. Some extra page two text covers NPCs, the monsters and encounter timers and events. I managed to get three or four sessions out of this module, it's that good.

These modules my design work best for GMs (Wardens in Mothership) who are accustomed to improvisation, because the space limits mean you will inevitably have descriptions or events that cannot be covered; the design is meant to force emergent gameplay, and a GM running a module in this design would be best aided with a notebook on hand to take notes as you expand upon the module as you go, to keep your plot and detail additions consistent.

Doing this for a homebrew is actually a great exercise in thinking about what the core conceits of the scenario should be. You also don't need to limit yourself to a one or two page format, though that can be fun as an exercise in creativity and design. That said, look to systems like Shadowdark, Cairn, Mork Borg and Old School Essentials for examples of how this concept is expanded upon into multi-page modules that are still, at their core, using the "what matters most in this area" conceit of tight design with outline-focused dungeon design. 

It is Settled (for now): Mothership and Tales of the Valiant

 So I have at last wrapped the D&D 5.5 campaign (we have loose plot threads, so who knows, maybe it will be revisited eventually) and Wednesday night formally begins with a Mothership ongoing campaign. I am plotting for around 5-10 sessions, but maybe we'll get more out of it; who knows! Mothership is a very fun game, but it is easier to do one shots and short campaigns with it than it is to do protracted campaigns....similar to Call of Cthulhu, the group can only sustain so much horror before it transitions from spooky fun to "wow how aren't we dead yet."*

I have had an infrequent Friday group as well, which my son was occasionally running Pathfinder for (and I ran Shadowdark for them before that). The group expanded to six players with last week's return to form, and I began running Tales of the Valiant at long last! It was a good session 0.5, with some char gen followed by a bit of gaming. I am introducing the variant concepts to them as we go (such as lineages and heritages, luck, doom, dread and so forth) bit by bit, in a completely new world setting I devised jut for TotV. I had initially planned to use preprinted modules but after reading through everything I had I decided most of them sucked for purposes of my GM style and what I wanted out of the game, and so I devised my own low level intro campaign module instead. I meticulously followed the encounter design rules outlined in the Gamemaster's Guide and have so far found them more satisfying than 5e/5.5E's traditionally more vibe-based guidelines.

Anyway, this mix seems to work for now! I have plans soon to try out Cairn 2E, Fabula Ultima, Outgunned, The Electric State** and possibly a return to Savage World's Pathfinder edition. We shall see.....but the important thing is, lots of options that require no further engagement with D&D 5.5.  

*Or, alternatively, "We have all lost multiple PCs, does anyone have a living PC who remembers why we landed on this haunted space station in the first place?"

**RPG and the original book only, we will not speak of the Netflix movie.