I put together an edited version of the Lamentations of the Flame Princess Grindhouse character sheet, including a couple of changes:

– Added a “Spells & Magic” section, for recording both spells and magic effects / items / curses, etc. I made it as large as I could, because magic effects can be complex.

– I removed the Magic-User and Cleric pentagram things (they looked cool, but my players rarely used them), and replaced them with the “Languages” section.

– Added a section for recording “oversized” items.

– Merged “Properties” and “Investments”

– Changed various spellings to British English.

You can download the character sheet here. [Read more…]

I’ve put together a character sheet for the Delta Green tabletop RPG, designed for use in online Google Hangouts games. It should also print nicely for offline play (remember to turn off grid lines in the print settings, and to set the margins to narrow).

Here is a link to the sheet. You will need a Google account to use it. The link will let you make a copy of the sheet in your own Google Drive, which you are free to edit / use / print. You can tab between the front and back of the sheet at the bottom of the page. [Read more…]

Blimey. Has it been two months already? I’d meant to update this blog much more regularly than that. By now I’ve actually finished prepping the campaign and have already started running it. In fact, the first session was this Monday.

So, why didn’t I update the blog? What happened? Well, my players is what happened. I had grand, pretentious plans to run a Medieval French-styled megadungeon campaign in Lamentations of the Flame Princess, using Isle of the Unknown and Castle Gargantua. It would have been equal parts La Chanson de Roland and Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

However, my players had other ideas. We’ve been playing LotFP regularly for almost two years now, and there were lots of little things they didn’t like about the system. They grumbled at the “race-as-class” thing (personally, I think less is more, and would much prefer to just remove demihumans altogether). They really liked the idea of more class options and mechanical bonuses for their characters (which I’m really not a fan of, but hey). They wanted to move into high-level play and command armies, which is something LotFP doesn’t really support (we tried using the mass combat rules from A Red & Pleasant Land, but it fell a little flat; they wanted something crunchier).

In fact, it turns out my players don’t really like the kind of old-school horror play I get weak-kneed over. The idea of playing nameless nobodies dying ignominiously in a long-forgotten tomb doesn’t interest them; one player complained that a high lethality campaign would stop him “connecting” with his character and make him feel like he was playing “cannon fodder” (which is, btw, madness. Jools and Jops were the very definition of cannon fodder, and I loved those little fuckers). I don’t really care about connecting with a character. I much a prefer roguelike (or Dark Souls) approach to roleplaying games, with the focus being less on story and roleplaying, and more on player skill and the capricious whims of RNGesus. [Read more…]

My wife and I watched Annihilation on Netflix the other night. She was thought it was pretentious wank. I enjoyed it (I’m quite fond of pretentious wank), though I agreed it was flawed. I haven’t read the book, but I think I might hunt it out now to see how it differs from the film.

* * * SPOILERS * * *

It’s basically Tarkovsky’s Stalker meets H.P. Lovecraft’s The Colour Out of Space. In Stalker, a group of nameless protagonists (the Writer, the Professor, the Stalker) travel into an area of wilderness sealed off by the government called “the zone”. Reality is breaking down here, so they have to tread carefully. They are searching for a specific landmark in the wilderness called “the room”. Each has their own reason for seeking this place.

In Annihilation, a group of nameless protagonists (the Biologist, the Anthropologist, the Psychologist – at least, in the book they’re apparently nameless… they’re all given names in the film) travel into an area of wilderness sealed off by the government called “the shimmer”. Reality is breaking down here, so they have to tread carefully. They are searching for a specific landmark in the wilderness called “the lighthouse”. Each has their own reason for seeking this place.

Just as in Lovecraft’s The Colour Out of Space, a meteorite has fallen from space. It has released a colourful, radiation-like cosmic effect (“the shimmer”) that warps and mutates (ultimately fatally) the flora and fauna around the impact spot. The affected area is slowly growing, creeping toward civilisation. It’s unclear whether the phenomenon is sentient or not, or what it’s motivation might be (if it has such a thing). The core of the phenomenon is hidden underground (in Lovecraft, it’s at the bottom of a well; in Annihilation, it’s hidden beneath the lighthouse).

Annihilation takes these source materials (though the author of the book, Jeff VanderMeer, has denied Lovecraft was an influence in the original novel) and mixes them up into something new. It scrambles their DNA, adding a splash of 2001, maybe a dash of Arrival, a hint of Under the Skin.

Which is fitting, because that’s the central conceit of the movie; the shimmer is supposedly refracting everything within it, mixing it all together. Creating something new. [Read more…]

Ok, let’s do this thing.

I already have the high-level concept for my wilderness / megadungeon campaign. Basically: it’s a hexcrawl on a medieval plague island, meaning that cities and towns are treated like dungeons because roughly 30% of buildings are boarded-up under quarantine and the plague is transforming the infected people inside those buildings into strange and unwholesome things.

I got some great feedback on Google+ about my campaign concept from Beloch Shrike of the Papers & Pencils blog:

“If you wanted to be really weird with it, you could say the disease starts seeping its way into architecture and changing the internal layout of buildings as well. Give yourself an excuse to make all those crazy dungeon layouts that are so fun to play.”

I really love this suggestion. So, over time, I’m going to have the disease cause weird organic growths to sprout up everywhere, transforming the internal architecture of each town’s plague quarter into fleshy meat-dungeons (probably using some of the tables put together for Xor).

If the PCs don’t fight back the infestation, then the meat-dungeons will slowly spread and link up across the island. There will also be a cult worshipping the plague, encouraging the infection to grow across the hexmap. So, basically, add Abomination: The Nemesis Project to my list of influences.

Anyway, I have some strong themes I hope will tie everything in the hexcrawl together (i.e. plague, disease, and mutation). I’ve selected my wilderness (Isle of the Unknown) and my megadungeon (Castle Gargantua). I’ve also decided to populate the map with a bunch of published LotFP adventures (luckily, I have a healthy collection at hand). [Read more…]