Ol' Gadda's Pirate Game

 

y'know what, sure, why the fuck not?

Howdy, Farmhands.

    As of the time of writing, it is the release day for Dicegoblin's "Block, Dodge, Parry" (and thus, "Cairn") supplement, "Sail, Swab, Scurvy." The document is available on itch for half off during release weekend, and is apparently only 5 dollars full price once the promotion is over. BDP is one of many Cairn hacks that I return to for inspiration while collating my own personal preferred ruleset, and while I don't yet own it in physical, it's near the top of my To Buy list for a good reason.

    But I'm not actually here to talk about BDP or it's new supplement. Because as it turns out, I've been running my OWN odd-like pirate game for the past 6 months, using it as a testing ground for whatever nonsense I decide to try and put into the Sanic Hack. The first iteration was made of me doing copious amounts of googling to see what other people who wanted to sail the seven seas in an OSR-y fashion had done before me; cobbling together their concepts and roll tables until I had something CLOSE to the vibe I expected. Every change since then has been seasoning to the taste of my actual players. So color me surprised when, at the very end of SSS, there's a short list of credits and references Dicegoblin used while writing the thing.

    - Enthusiastic Skeleton Boys by Sam C.
    - Lilliputian: Adventure on the Open Seas by Manadawn Tabletop Games
    - This series of blogposts on Wavecrawls and Pirates by Skerples

    This is list is, I shit you not, the exact same 3 sources I used to cobble together the first few iterations of my ruleset. Not for a lack of Other, equally impressive sources, mind you. They were simply some of the most immediately obvious results to read from, and so I did.

     I found this happenstance very funny, but it also made me wonder. If two completely separate people could approach a similar project, around the same time, using the same core texts as inspiration, and come out with two different systems, then there's got to be other people who will inevitably try as well. So here's the point of today's post. I could let what I've got fester in the word document I keep it in, polishing it off and on over the next 10 years until it's PERFECT and ready for public consumption. I could dripfeed individal rulings and concepts out as some sort of retroactive design documentary, for you to piece together. Or. I could slap what I've got down here, in the hopes that it becomes useful to the next person wanting to craft their own bespoke Pirate OSR NSR POSR D&DIY Elfgame Mark of the Odd Odd-like Wavecrawl Sailing TTRPG experience. At the very least, I've linked like, 6 different games they might not have found in their search yet. To those future people I say welcome. 

    Quick disclaimer: This is only the player facing rules my table needs to reference; character creation item data, and monster statblocks use standard Cairn notation. We also play in a Shounen Furry Waterworld with Sanics and rubber people and stuff. I hope this helps you, despite this, lmao.

Brace yourself for whatever This is
- Sonic Prime, available on Netflix

Until next time,

    Farmer Gadda

Sherbet Forest Clearing

(An Adventure Site for your Fantasy Elfgame of Choice)

"Forestmen’s Hideout 6054", TLG 1988

This Adventure Site was written as a thank you for a generous monetary donation that arrived during a moment of need!  Thank you so much for your support, Anonymous Farmhand!

    Deep within the dark woods of Sherbet Forest lives the jolly gang of misfits known as The Forestmen. Beloved by the peasantry and begrudgingly tolerated by royalty, these free spirits spend their days carousing in search of food and song. But one should never forget that the Forestmen's autonomy was hard won through their talents with sword and bow. They are a genial folk, but only as long as your respect their freedom.

 Slip-Wreck Rock 

(An Island Adventure Site for your elfgame of choice.)

"Island of Dragons Bones" by Zhang Li

     A simple jut of stone and sand, upon which the fossilized bones of some great beast lay. The water surrounding it feels oily and smells revolting. A small pit-stop of a village has been built here, with little to offer but cheap grog and the barest of supplies.

This Adventure Site was written as a thank you for a generous monetary donation that arrived during a moment of need!
Thank you so much for your support, Nebulabash!

The Nether - A Depthcrawl for OSR/POSR games

 

Welcome to the Underground
(Minecraft Dungeons via Minecraft.net)

 

Howdy, Farmhands

    Yes, The Nether. Yes, like in Minecraft. No, I don't ever tire of making half-baked adaptations of media I enjoy separately from the TTRPG hobby. Here's what a Depthcrawl is. Here's what the Nether is. You're basically all caught up now.

    The purpose of introducing such a thing into an OSR game is twofold. Firstly - the option to take a quick kip to HELL is just fun. There's resources and adventures to be had without needing to invest in a whole campaign centered around the setting. Second of all - the Minecraft Nether is famous for its ability to act as a shortcut for travel. In-game, every 1 block is equal to 8, allowing you to blaze (heh) past difficult terrain, so long as you're willing to risk a fiery death in exchange for time saved. In an OSR game where an area may be straight up impassable, a dip into the Nether might get you onto the other side of that mountain range, supposing you survive it.

    This post is acting as a sort of proof of concept for now; some things like specific Adventure Sites will need their own pages with internal details, and I'm not about to sit here and write out an entire Minecraft Bestiary. What is going to follow is a series of posts where I take a Nether Biome, either from Vanilla or Modded (and won't that be a fun email to some poor coder, wondering what on earth I'm talking about when I ask permission to use their IP), and produce some simple tables with their unique content. Feel free to use as many or as few of these as you like for your own personal experience. I, for one, will be overloading myself until I burn out from the effort. Heh. Burn.

    Until Next Time,

        Farmer Gadda

There SHOULD only be One - Exclusive Class-as-Hirelings Options for OSR Games

 

Considering a third of this image is "blue haired anime guy with sword",
it might not be the most appropriate to the topic but oh well.
-Fire Emblem Heroes Official Art

    Not So Recently, I read SandroAD's blogpost, "Hirelings as Specialists." It's less of a gameable system, and more of a proof of concept for turning existing fantasy game skill sets into hireable NPCs, and thus allowing Players to access those abilities without needing to be of that class themselves. Slightly More Recently, I went down a bit of a Rabbit hole, beginning with Joshy Mcroo's blogpost, "A Campaign Where There Is One Of Anything." As the title suggests, it posits a fantasy world in which concepts, classes, monsters and the like are singular and rare. It's part of a longer discussion among multiple blogs, some helpfully listed at the end of Mcroo's post, about the nature of Monsters, the banality of 'generic' fantasy concepts, and ways to mitigate those issues. With both of these blogposts rattling about in the empty space where my brain should be, they were bound to eventually collide, which is where I find myself today.

   In a game where There Is One of Anything, especially if Player Options are also uniquely limited, there comes a question of how literal that One is. Having The Bard doesn't mean there are no other sassily homoerotic lute players roaming the lands and getting gigs at taverns. Having The Witch doesn't mean the concept of a full Coven is an alien one. The impetus on creating a world Where There Is One of Anything is a matter of focus. Yes, there are "Paladins", knights that swear oaths to a higher power and follow a code of conduct. But for the purposes of your adventure? Your characters? Your party? There is only one that truly matters. Only one whose purpose and goals are truly divine in nature, and who's decisions will alter the path of history (or at least, do so where your players can see them).

    Expanding on SandroAD's concept of placing class features into a hireable npc to feature multiple classes is fairly simple. The Specialist Point system they posit would need tweaking and balancing, but the base concept is sound. Each Hireling has a set of abilities with a point cost, which the players can trigger once a Dungeon Turn by paying it. There are a handful of passive abilities that make just having the Hireling come along a good choice, even if you never use their Point abilities in that specific dungeon. I could open any edition of DnD, blur my eyes, and come up with a bunch of these in one go.

    For a DM who runs multiple campaigns, especially those with overlapping players, this system might already sound like an utter wash. Do you just make 12 NPCs, one for each core class, and reuse those over and over? Isn't that??? Boring? And to that I say no, not really. For starters, while Sandro details a specific Thief in his blogpost, none of the mechanical abilities are tied to that character's species, personality, or toolkit. I think this should be left alone on purpose. By keeping the mechanics the same (i.e. all thieves across games have the same abilities), but changing the context in which those abilities came to be, you create a familiarity with the Rules and their use, while creating a new social challenge for your players to overcome in order to attain them. Rannie the Human Thief may actively want to work for the Party in one game, while Yoseph, the Dwarf Thief might actively dislike a member of the party in another game. If the players already know what they will gain by convincing Yoseph to put aside their differences, they may choose to invest more time in that character in the hopes they can add his abilities to their toolkit.

Gotcha'! - Capture Monster Friends for Old School Gaming

 

Life's just better with friends at your side.
Doubly so if they're Magical Pets.

    Recently, I read Dwiz's blogpost, The Genres OSR Can't Do. I must admit, I sort of expected a listicle of weird media that have nothing in common with european medieval fantasy, with the unspoken reasons they wouldn't work within the expected framework of OSR left for the reader to assume. Gaze upon me, for I am Boo-Boo the Fool. A better blogger than I, Dwiz instead specifies what each genre offers that might intrigue a ttrpg player in the first place, detailing what he feels sets them apart from other genres in an appreciative tone. Sure, the OSR as is probably can't support it without crossing it's eyes a little and unfocusing, but that's no reason to build a wall and forever cordon them off from your tables. Even with the examples Dwiz puts forth, there have already been instances in the ttrpg scene where individuals attempt to make OSR Hacks to emulate those genres.  

 

    To me and my twisted little gremlin mind, this almost sounds like a challenge. Also, God is dead and Life is short, so why not give it a shot. 

    To that end, I decided to take something I'm fairly familiar with, and take a swing at jamming it into an OSR/POSR/NSR-ish experience: Magical Monster Buddies and How To Catch Them. I'm a big Digimon fan, and you can't be one of those without also being intimately aware of how Pokemon works, so I'd say I'm pretty well-rounded. Goblin Punch took a swing at putting the Pokemon experience into a Wizard-ish Class, which certainly is a way to do it; but I'm imagining something a smidge more modular, something to be placed over your system's existing mechanics and procedures without replacing them directly.

 

RELIC/ARCANA/MAGIC ITEM: "GOTCHA PAWN"

very best dot gif

 

    A hollow sphere made of a marble-like material that separates into equal halves. Magically stores or summons a single Bonded Creature at will. While inside the Pawn, Bonded Creatures are placed in a pseudo-stasis, aware of external events, but stabilized in time until summoned. Should a Bonded Creature fall to or below Zero HP at any time, they will be instantly stored within the Gotcha Pawn, stabilized until medical help can be offered.

 

    To bond a creature to a Pawn, the creature must be a Sentient Non-Humanoid capable of consenting to the ritual. Once completed, both the Creature and it's Bonded PC can activate the storage or summoning function of the Pawn at will. The bond will be broken should the Pawn ever be destroyed, freeing both members from its responsibilities, unless a new Pawn is used to reinstate it.

BONDED CREATURES 

Monsters rule, actually

    Stat as Hireling. If your system of choice includes armor and weapons, roll their values into the base creature's abilities. Choose 1 thematic beginner level spell, the creature can cast it innately. While not requiring payment, like most Hireling rules suggest, Bonded Creatures instead require an equivalent amount of daily rations to keep happy.

 

    Creatures should not be capable of using weapons and tools, though they should gain the positive effects of armor they wear. If using a game with a Slot-based Inventory system, halve the expected number of slots for a PC. 

 

Orders & Quick Orders

    On your Turn in Combat, you may use your Main Action to give a simple Order to your Bonded, which they will attempt to complete to the best of their ability. (i.e. "Run Away!" is easier to follow than "Dodge under his legs and escape out the North door")

You may instead use your Movement or Free Action (talking) to give a Quick Order, however it won't be as commanding. The DM will roll the Bonded's response on their Obedience Die.

 

Obedience Die 

    If a Bonded Creature is given an Order that is too complex or hurried, the DM will roll a die and compare it to the table below. The value of this die begins at a d6, but may be increased to a higher die size via a Downtime Action.

 

Result	Effect
1	REBEL/INVERT
2	IGNORE/BE DISTRACTED
3	RETREAT/FLEE
4	REPEAT PREV. ORDER
5+	OBEY ORDER

 

  DMs should feel free to temporarily lower your Obedience Die Sizes in relation to behavior at the table. Using your pikachard as a meat shield too often will naturally make it less likely to listen to you.

 

 DOWNTIME ACTION: CREATURE TRAINING 

I refuse to raise an uneducated 'mon

    For Downtime spent primarily on Training your Bonded, roll a WIS save against the Creature. On a success, the Obedience Die is temporarily increased 1 Size until the next Downtime. After 3 successful Downtime Actions, the increase becomes permanent.

    Creatures may also gain the benefits of Downtime Actions available at the table, such as Stat Improvement, Learning Spells, and Carousing. (please don't lead your pikachard to drink) 

EVOLUTION: 

IMMA' MOTHER FUCKING TEEEEEEE-REX!!!

     At a Milestone, Bonded Creatures gain a new form unattainable in the wild.

•     Roll 1d20 against each Stat, increasing them by 1 on a success.
•     Learn to innately cast 1 thematic Spell of the PC's choosing.
•     Decrease the Obedience Die by 1 Size.
•     If the Evolution occurs mid-combat, heal the Bonded Creature by the difference between their previous and new Max HP values.

    What constitutes a Milestone depends on the system at your table, but in the abscence of a leveling mechanic or story-based progression, consider the first time a Bonded Creature's Obedience Die is permanently increased to a d10, d12, and d20 as milestones.

Extra Notes

    The availability of Magic Items in your system/setting greatly determines how accessible any of this is. Are Gotcha Pawns purchasable? Expensive? Lost Relics of which only a few remain? Perhaps the Bonded Creatures in your setting are limited to Elemental Spirits, prebonded to a Pawn and waiting for a Hero to find them?

    I personally would limit the available Gotcha Pawns, filled or empty, to 3 to a PC. Being able to only issue a single Order per Round balances out the convenience of a magical pet in combat, but trying to keep track of more than 2 positions on a grid will slow down the game considerably.

    As Evolution potentially increases a Bonded Creature's stat, Evolution is triggered by a Milestone tied to the Obedience Die, and increasing the Obedience Die requires a Downtime Action Save against a Bonded Creature's stat, there SHOULD be a slight, but noticable increase of time/difficulty in achieving further evolutions. I personally wouldn't go any granular than this, but as with anything you find in an OSR blogpost, feel free to season to taste.