Moondog Gospel

  The Castle Itself What Kalmar Castle looks like today.   The Castle before it's 19th century restoration. Side view. A large copy of the Carta Marina was displayed. Medieval Artefacts     Reminiscent of The Seventh Seal (1957) Hounskull helmets, from what I can tell. 100cm~tall suit of armor   Art pieces   "Rebel's Death" The Castle Church, The Feast Hall They still do mass in this church regularly. "' Glory to God', used signify that the work was produced for the sake of praising God."     Diagrams The King's Private Chamber At the end I point out where the king's secret door to his private toilet is.

It's summertime and my friends at uni were bored and wanted to play some TTRPG, so I stepped up to DM Og today. It was probably some of the most fun I've ever had, for about 90 minutes (It being good only for slapstick comedy oneshots seems to be the common consensus). In Og, you play as caveman. Og rightly recognizes that playing as a caveman is an inherently silly thing to make a game about, so it doesn't take itself seriously. The main mechanics are: You know about 5 words, from a list of 18. You must only use these words to communicate. You may also grunt, gesture, point, and draw stick figures, if you're feeling fancy. The simple d6 system includes critical failures: "On a roll of 1, the GM thinks of the most disastrous, humiliating result
(short of outright killing you) of your sudden lapse into utter stupidity, and then describes it to you." Og Character Sheet What happened, basically (Italics is DM speak). My players took less than 10 minutes to all

Roughly 1 in 4 PCs die in the campaigns I run. I'm a kind DM however, so to save the players the emotional trauma of losing their beloved PC, I just have everyone who rolls a 1 on a d4 rip up their sheet and make a new one.   Of course I don't actually do that, but the 1 in 4 death rate is actually accurate, and not just for adventurers- The same mortality rate applied to crack dealers in 90s Chicago. This might lead you to think that this line of work would be unpopular, and the few in this profession would be compensated highly. Surprisingly, that was not the case. Selling crack was actually so popular that there were more dealers than there were street corners for them to stand on. 25,000 people were betting their lives on this career, despite most of them earning just 3.30$/hour. If you're running DCC, the odds of dying are more like 3 in 4.   You might be wondering then, why was crack dealing so popular? "Well, for the same reason that a pretty Wisconsin farm girl

I like encumbrance systems. Deciding whether to bring this or that equipment, or debating whether or not to drop your sword so you can carry an extra bit of treasure on your way out of the dungeon is a very interesting decision and makes the game all the richer for it. Without an encumbrance system, there's no penalty for carrying loads of useless items, so these decisions never have to be made, and there's no reward for a clever player. It is also realistic- you just can't carry everything, realistically. A penalty for excessive physical burdens is good. Why don't we have one for mental burdens? Just as there's a limit to how much you can carry on your back, realistically, there should be a limit to how much you can keep in your head. It's very rare you see an RPG give characters any penalty for knowing lots of lore, for speaking many tongues, or for knowing a whole library worth of spells in their head.  Typically, this penalty for being physically encumbered

Do you think encumbrance is too easy, too simple, and too logical? If this is the case, I have a new system that completely ruins all that: Scrabble Encumbrance. You have a square grid where each side is 8 + STR mod long. You must write down all of your possessions on it, in a way that follows the rules of scrabble. Here's an example of bowman's and a spear-fighter's inventories:

I'm a big fan of humanocentrism and race-as-class in my games, but I'm not a big fan of the three demihuman races you'll usually see in old school games. The Elves, Dwarves, and Halflings, are classic companions, but I feel like 50 years of players playing them has exhausted their use. There's only so much you can do with a scottish accent and a mug of ale. I'm going to go over the various races' defining criteria, and then give an example of another race that is similar in theme, so that you don't have to go making new classes , and can instead just reskin what you've already got. Dwarves are stout, resistant to poison and magic, and used to underground terrain. I think a good replacement for them is rock-people. Those naming their Rock-Person character Dwayne are booted from the game. Instead of having keen ears and eyes that are used to the dark, the rock-people can feel even the tiniest of movements of the stone around them. Instead of listening a