Swidden Pages

A small friend found its way into your skull one night and made its home within your fleshy recesses. You're different  now. Perhaps its the magic that makes you different or maybe the wanderlust or possibly the cravings. Or maybe you aren't different, after all, you've seen others like you who share the same friend in their skull. What you do know is that whatever is in your skull loves you, will care for you, and all it wants in exchange is to see the world. The Sea Spider Bogdan Rezunenko ( Using Oblidisideryptch's GLOG rules for warlocks )  Goals Wants to gather experiences from the world. Dangerously curious. It tugs your attention towards the unexplained in hopes that you will seek it. It's unknown exactly why it wants to gather experiences, and what these will be used for, but it's an innocent goal when compared to to other known warlock patrons . Starting Equipment A sling made of knotted seaweed with a pouch of fossil-like rocks, a...

"Do not lose hope - what you seek will be found. Trust ghosts. Trust those that you have helped to help you in their turn. Trust dreams. Trust your heart, and trust your story ." - Neil Gaiman Gold-for-XP has never quite stuck with me, so I've decided to do advancement in a different and much more subjective matter for my new kind-of-weird-hackjob-of-West-Marches campaign with my friends. I really want them to seek out weird-ass-shit instead of just going places solely because "there might be money." So, I present: Tales-for-XP   Tim Mcburnie (Breaking off from Jakub Rebelka, shocking, I know) The rules are simple. To level up you must tell an amount of thrilling but true stories about your exploits and adventures equal to the level you're trying to reach. So, if you're at level 1 trying to reach level 2, you'd need to tell 2 stories. If you're at level 2 and trying to reach level 3, you'd need to tell 3 new stories, and so on...

Conditional creatures are really fun to make. They really stress making unique abilities rather than focusing on stats and numerics while still implementing game mechanics. Here's 6 creatures that do something nasty when dealing critical damage (knocking somebody unconscious, for those of you who don't play Into The Odd). Without further ado: Upon dealing critical damage , [Creature]... ( Jakub Rebelka )  ...Dons Itself Onto You Animated Armor Gilded armor that shambles around without a wearer. Wants a friend. STR 15, DEX 10, WIL 5, HP 6 Lashes out with a armored backhand (D6) and a rapier (D8) It, oddly enough, dons itself onto whoever is critically damaged. In 1 round, it will fly away with the wearer in tow. If anybody else hits the armor, it also hits whoever is inside. It stabilizes folk who are bleeding out, and it will take them to some forgotten closet or armory to boast to itself that it has a wearer once again until whatever is inside starves to death. T...

I have some pretty bad anxiety. This only really shows itself during major occasions and when I'm GMing. Early on in my career of "forever GM", I found that I'd panic quite a bit, whether it was because I totally didn't expect the players to make a particular decision or because they'd talk to an NPC I didn't prepare whatsoever. This panic led to some pretty disastrous sessions, and to make it worse, I had the stupid idea that by just doing sessions completely unprepared I would cure myself of this anxiety around improvisation. No matter how many times you throw yourself into the flame, you won't stop getting burns. I learned that I needed a cope, a safety net to help the process because the panic is inevitable. I've taken comfort in this page I made to help improv. In fact, despite my original purpose for it being highly situational, I find that I refer to this page the most out of all my pages when GMing. It's helped me ride with the...

Recently my players have been asking if there are any more classes aside from the quintessential four I've made for my Oddhack. So, I've been making a few more classes. My goal is to have all the classes that 5e has, except with different more free-form mechanics to allow for player customization. I present: The Barbarian & The Druid ( Jakub Rebelka )   I've also got a few notes and credits as always: -  The barbarian was heavily inspired by this barbarian from this amazing blog , check them out but don't try to pronounce the name because you may get a headache. The first draft of mine was almost a complete rip of their barbarian. I later made the conduit part a bit more minor and the rage less complex and slightly less powerful. -  The druid was heavily inspired by my own gibberish in my last post . It's basically a ripped version of the mask's ability, but made less powerful, and with less damning consequences. Of course, if you think t...

No plan survives first contact with the player, at least no plan of yours, my fellow GMs. I often find that heavy planning isn't worth it. I specifically find that improvisation is advantageous in play, for it can lead to even more interesting results than your original planning may have ever yielded. Attached to my GM screen I have four pages. The first is a giant list of random names, surnames, quirks, appearance, and secrets, all on D100 tables in some almost too tiny text. The second is a set of "templates" for magical items. The third is the player-facing rules to my hack. The fourth is simply for taking notes. I tend to run lots of my games pretty off-the-cuff since I am only an efficient writer when it's about an hour before the game starts and I'm panicking - anxiety is a horrible curse to have. Now, in interest of making interesting content, I'm going to share the magical item templates, since I'm almost sure everybody has seen their fair shar...