Swidden Pages

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...

Finally I've made the last two classes of the quintessential RPG quartet, the wizard and the cleric. If you aren't in the loop, I'm making some very light classes for Into The Odd since its character generation kind of lacks that sort of innate character ability that many classes in other RPG systems provide. You can check out the fighter and the thief here . I'll be honest, making these two was hard for me, as I have this principle that magic should be rewarded, not simply given. So, to fit with this principle I made it so that both of these classes have costs for their magic. Wizards have a power word which stirs within their lungs and can rupture them if used improperly or without care. Clerics can worship really  weird domains to gain powers from, but they better keep to their oaths or at least have a sacrifice towards their domain ready unless they want to be stripped of their magic. The Wizard & The Cleric ( Jakub Rebelka ) Now, for the notes and cre...

Something that Into The Odd does, probably purposefully, is not giving characters a lot of innate ability. It really comes down to gear and how creative your players are willing to get with the hand they're dealt. This is fine, the only problem is that you need to give characters lots of minor arcanum to give them that fun innate ability that many classes in RPGs have, and that can be troublesome if you are playing a low-magic setting (like the one I'm running for my players) where magic is a rarity only found in the darkest corners of the world. To counter this, I'm making a pretty light system of classes that only give a character one or two active abilities. These abilities are designed to be pretty minimal while still offering a nice amount of style for your character so your two fighters or thieves aren't the exact same. Characters choose their class at level 1 and can advance their set of abilities at levels 3 and 5. The Fighter & The Thief ( Jakub Reb...

Hi. I'm Donna, a student, writer, and a very sketchy artist. I've spent a long time lurking and figured that it'd be nice to contribute to the SWORD DREAM/OSR scene. For most of the games I run I use  Into The Odd  by Chris McDowall  and I use  GLOG  by Arnold K  for sillier one-shots, so expect game-able content for those two systems along with little blurbs of worldbuilding at the start of posts. Of course, there's not much worldbuilding to do in a first post, but I do have game-able content. Specifically I have the sheet that I hand players when they create characters for my Into The Odd  games, modified for vanilla Into The Odd  since the game my players know is heavily hacked. Out Of The Womb & Into The Odd ( Jason Nyugen ) When creating new characters for a new campaign, I hand each of the players this sheet and give them 10 to 15 minutes to brainstorm character bonds and who knows what about who. I listen at the sidelines, encour...