Treasures, Serpents, & Ruins Rules Reference books are available!

 After way too long of a wait, I've finally got around to adding my Rules Reference books for Treasures, Serpents, & Ruins on DriveThruRPG. There's one for Ruby and one for Jade. 

These are meant to be table reference books, with just the rules, procedures, charts, etc. that the GM might need while running the game. If you don't need all the instruction of how to run the game or how to build your adventures and world, but need refreshers on the mechanical bits, this is the book for you! 

Ruby Rules Reference (standard Euro-style setting)

Jade Rules Reference (Asian inspired setting)

They're both Pay-What-You-Want titles, so you can go grab them for free and check them out. As always, if you like it and find it helpful, why not return and throw a few dollars my way? I reinvest the money I'm making from TS&R back into the gaming community. I'm not trying to make a million on this. But a few dollars here and there is nice. 

Oh, and in hopeful news, my younger son Steven is interested in maybe trying to DM his own game. He did some crazy free-form DMing when he was 5 or so. Now he's 10, and is thinking about maybe trying to learn how to DM the "right" way. I'm gonna order him a POD copy of Moldvay Basic to read through. This could be fun!

Treasures, Serpents, & Ruins Game Master Guidebook is Now Available!

 I have just completed uploading the GMG to my Hidden Treasure Books store on DriveThruRPG. 

Here's a link!

It's got advice and rules for running a game the way I do it (mostly), including what I feel a new GM should know about running a game, or advice for people trying out old school style gaming for the first time. 

Most of you veterans who read this blog probably won't find much use out of most of it, but I do have some home-brewed modifications to the BECMI domain and war machine rules, and a different system for creating artifacts. Also my own version of the planes of existence. 

So there are some nuggets that might be useful even to the old, jaded gamer who's seen and done it all. Or at least I hope so. 

It's fully compatible with both my Ruby (standard Euro-D&D) and Jade (Asian D&D) sets. Oh, and I've made a few updates based on the past year of gaming with these rules to both the Jade and Ruby Players Rules books and the Bestiary & Treasury books. 

If you've already downloaded them, you might want to get the updated versions. There aren't many changes, but some mistakes have been fixed and a few things have been modified.

Projects Old and New

I've managed to finish up the semester, so I should have some free time over the next two months to get some gaming projects advanced, along with preparing my next academic research project for work. If any of y'all are thinking that teachers get to laze around all summer vacation, you're wrong. We've got stuff to get done before classes start up again in the fall. 

I've gotten some feedback on my TS&R Game Master Guidebook, but other things have been keeping me from getting to the final edit of that. I will be getting it, and the Rules Reference books for both Ruby and Jade, up on DriveThruRPG soon. 

The GMG is designed for game masters new to running games, or at least new to old school style exploration-focused gaming, including advice on running the game and creating adventures/campaigns, and optional or alternate rules. The RR books are a condensation of just the charts and rules that an experienced GM needs to run the game at the table. Other than having a few areas specific to the classes/races/spells of Ruby (traditional D&D) and Jade (Asian fantasy D&D), the RR books are nearly identical.

I also had a bit of an epiphany this evening, and started working on a framework for a 2nd edition of Flying Swordsmen, but using the Open d6 system rather than a Classic D&D system. I think it will work out better this way. The way actions in-game determine Character Points earned, and the way Character Points are used to develop Skills, will help give it that feeling of training up your martial arts. Having earning CP tied to upholding the Code of the Xia (act with courage, benevolence, loyalty, righteousness, and individuality) should help drive the emergence of wuxia style stories through game play. One problem with Flying Swordsmen 1E is that the mechanics allow for cool action scenes, but don't support the sorts of drama that set wuxia media apart from simple martial arts media. 

I think the basic mechanics are sorted out. I have my list of six Abilities, and what they govern. I need to decide on the actual lists of Skills under each Ability. I have several Powers that PCs (and NPCs!) can learn, and each will have a basic use, and Techniques that can be added as more dice are gained. Similar to the Force Skills in Star Wars d6, templates will have to put Ability Dice into Powers, but after that Powers will be improved with CP just as with Skills. New Techniques can be added with each full die gained in a Power. 

I think the Techniques will be sort of like feat trees, with prerequisites of either a certain number of dice in the Power, or certain lower level Techniques learned first. This will cover things like light step, Qi, divination, or straight up magic. I should probably get a hold of d6 Fantasy before I get too far into designing Techniques to see how they balance wizards compared to how SW balances Jedi. 

Once I've got the Skills and Techniques sorted (or at least a good first iteration of them), I'll create some templates of common wuxia archetypes and see how they look. 

I have no idea how much of this I might get done over this summer break, but I will keep you all posted! 

Rewards of Social Encounters: A TS&R GMG Excerpt

 I finally finished my chapter of the TS&R Game Master Guidebook dealing with social exploration (whether in towns/cities, or in dungeons). This is the final bit, on giving rewards for this sort of play. I used to think (maybe I still do?) that the in-game rewards were adequate for this, but since XP drives the type of play that players engage in, it helps to have some guidelines for awarding XP for talking through the monster encounters. 

I say 'maybe' above because I do award full monster XP for creatures encountered that the players engage with but pacify, scare off, or talk their way out of an encounter with where no combat dice get rolled. In the past, I only gave XP for creatures defeated in combat. I'm still not giving the goal-oriented awards to my group, but I may give it a try. Anyway, here's the excerpt. If anyone has feedback or suggestions for improvement, I'm all ears! 

Rewards of Social Exploration: Traditionally, the rewards of social exploration are in-character rewards such as new information about the setting, alliances with NPCs or monsters, or avoiding hazards (such as combat). Experience points were not considered necessary, as the rewards listed above are intangible but significant, at least in long term campaign play. However, the GM can easily award XP for social encounters in which the PCs achieve their goals if they wish to encourage more of this sort of play.

For encounters with monsters or NPCs that could easily have become combat encounters, the GM may award the monsters’ XP value for successfully talking, bargaining, or deceiving their way out of the encounter. In order to avoid abuse, it is suggested that the reward only be applied once per adventure for each group of opponents “defeated” in this way. Continuing to deceive, intimidate, or negotiate with the same monsters or NPCs over and over again in short order does not provide much experience.

For encounters where the PCs gained useful information, made new friends, fulfilled duties, got a feel for a new city, or similar types of social exploration, the GM may wish to provide individual bonuses of 100xp multiplied by the level of each PC for that game play. This bonus XP should be rewarded for the entire session’s play, not for each individual encounter. If the PCs somehow made a profit or managed to gain some treasure from their social exploration, they should earn 1 XP per 1gp of value, as with loot from dungeons.

TS&R Ruby Bestiary & Treasury now available!

 It took me longer than I thought to finally proof and edit the TS&R Ruby Bestiary & Treasury, but I got it done last night. This morning (just now), I uploaded the file to DriveThru, so you can go grab it! 

The book has most of the Classic D&D monsters you know and love, plus some creatures from other editions converted to Classic style stats, and some originals as well. Those of you who remember my old Monster of the Week feature from many years ago may recognize some of the creatures (the Sauron didn't make the final cut, but some others did), but there are some completely new ones, as well. Not only that, I've got some different takes on some of the classic creatures as well. Oh, and a few name swaps to avoid WotC lawyers and Pinkertons bothering me. 

Oh, and there are also the treasure tables, magic item lists (some new things here, too!), and the reference tables, wandering monster tables, etc. 

As with the other TS&R titles, it's pay-what-you-want so go grab it. Feel free to take it for free, but if you like it and appreciate my work, I'll always be thankful to those who decide to pay me for it. 

Treasures, Serpents & Ruins Ruby Bestiary & Treasury

Treasures, Serpents, & Ruins Ruby Players Rules now available!

I've just uploaded my regular D&D house rules to DriveThruRPG, at my Hidden Treasure Books storefront. 

Treasures, Serpents, & Ruins Jade Players Rules 

It's fully compatible with the TS&R Jade Asian-inspired rules (the Fighter and Thief class are identical in both, just with different suggested examples of each type listed). 

In it, you'll find rules for running a game somewhere between BX/BECMI style and AD&D style games, with mostly the simplicity of the box sets, but with separate race & class, and a few other complexities from AD&D (and a few more modern conventions I like such as ascending AC). 

Ruby has rules for the following races: Humans, Dwarves, Elves, Gnomes, Halflings, Half-Orcs. As with AD&D, demi-humans have class restrictions and level limits, although a bit more generous than old Gary originally suggested.

And the following classes: Bard, Cleric, Druid, Fighter, Illusionist, Magic-User, Paladin, Ranger, Thief. Advancement goes to level 15.

Plus spells up to level 6, full equipment lists, and some handy rules for players to engage in exploration and combat, and some notes for higher level play. 

As with TS&R Jade, this is Pay-What-You-Want so feel free to download it for free, or tip me a few bucks if you enjoy it and can afford it!

The movie, huh? And TS&R Updates

So it's been 10 days since my last post. I figure I should put something up here on the old blog. But I don't have a lot to say about gaming at the moment. 

My last Star Wars session (on the 12th) went really well. They managed to avoid some of the complications and finish everything I'd prepped in just that one session. They did some pre-planning before the session started, and that allowed me to get some of the fiddly logistics out of the way (ship upgrades, droid purchases, trading the Inquisitor's shuttle for a Z-95 Headhunter to run escort for their YT-1300 freighter, etc.) before the session started. Then they managed to leverage their various skills to slip through an Imperial blockade, pick up a group of Mandalorians including an armorer who could forge the beskar steel they found in the previous game, and then run a con with the blockade just long enough to plot a course into hyperspace and jump out seconds before getting intercepted by TIE Fighters and engaged with by Star Destroyer long range guns. They got the Mandos to the 4th Moon of Bogden (where once upon a time Jango Fett was hired to be a clone donor), and after a run-in with a pair of pickpockets running a damsel in distress con, got their weapons/armor upgraded in thanks. Mandalore has been destroyed in the Night of 1000 Tears though, so that will have some ramifications going forward in the game. 

I've been watching The Mandalorian season 3, and liking it so far. It's a bit different feel than the previous two seasons, but so far I'm interested in what they'll do with the story now. Also, season 2 of the Bad Batch, which is not quite as interesting as season 1 was. Maybe it will pick up in the final few episodes? 

I had originally planned to wait and binge watch season 3 of Star Trek Picard. Season 2 was so-so, so I hadn't been too eager for it, despite knowing that most of the TNG cast would be appearing. But then I heard some good buzz from friends, so started in on it. It's definitely better than S1 or S2 so far, but the whole "dark and gritty" tone of modern Trek, and the emphasis on trying to tell cool stories rather than interesting (pseudo) scientific stories, just doesn't work as well for me. Maybe I should start in on Strange New Worlds. I haven't watched any of that yet, but I hear it's more like classic Trek. 

And on the movie side of things, Shazam 2 is out, but we haven't seen it yet. I really liked the first Shazam. It's the best DCEU film. But we were busy this past weekend with a lot of stuff, so it's still on the to-watch list. And the D&D movie seems to be out in the US, at least in some markets. I've seen people posting about it on Facebook. But it's not out in Korea yet. We'll definitely go see it. It looks fun, and from what I've been reading on social media, it's a decent adventure comedy film, although not so "D&D" other than a lot of fan service thrown in. 

Back to gaming, other than Star Wars, I'm still working on my TS&R Ruby books. The players book could be released as is, but I think I should read over it one more time. I always find a few small mistakes. Also, I don't have any equipment illustrations like the Jade book has, but then the Jade book's ones are my poorly hand-drawn efforts, so maybe it's just as well without it.

I'm almost done formatting the Ruby Bestiary & Treasury as well. It's got even more monsters than the Jade book (over 400, compared to 350+ in Jade), but more of them are familiar to D&D players. Still, I've managed, while formatting for space and illustrations, to find space to plug in a few more monsters, so there are some new things in there. Both of these books will also be pay-what-you-want titles when I get them ready. B&T just needs a reworking of the random encounter tables, as the ones I had before included a lot of monsters that are only in Jade, and I might want to put a few of the late entries in there as well. Once the random encounter tables are done, the book is ready. 

Editing/revising/formatting the Ruby books also helped me find a few mistakes in the Jade books, so I'll likely be updating those soon as well. I'll let everyone know here on the blog, and via DriveThru when the updated versions have been uploaded.

TS&R Jade Bestiary & Treasury now available!

Hey hey, I've gone through the Bestiary & Treasury book I'm using for my current campaign, and fixed a lot of small errors, and added some additional explanations where I thought they might help others. Added more art, as well (all public domain). And now it's available on DriveThruRPG.

As with the TS&R Players Rules, this is available pay-what-you-want, so you can download it for free if you like, or throw me a few dollars if you can spare them and think it's worth it. 

The book has around 370 monsters, plus full treasure tables and magic item lists, and some handy reference material like sample dungeon, wilderness, and planar random encounter tables.

Treasures, Serpents, & Ruins: Jade Players Handbook

I went ahead and put my TS&R Jade Players Handbook up as a pay-what-you-want title on DriveThru. 

It's got rules for character creation, with six races and nine classes. It has spells from level 1 to 6 (classes top out at 15). It has equipment. It has adventuring, exploration, combat, and spell/magic item research rules. It has a character sheet. 

Feel free to download it, and if you like it, think about maybe pitching a few bucks my way as a thank you!

I'll be putting the Jade Bestiary & Treasury up soon, and the Ruby Players Handbook and Bestiary & Treasury (standard Euro/D&D fantasy stuff, with my house rules) as well. Soon, of course, is a relative term. They might not be soon after all, but I'll try to get them up soon.  

Why pay-what-you-want? Because no one needs another fantasy heartbreaker, but I'd like to put this out anyway. And I don't need the money, but a bit of extra income never hurts. 

Thousands of copies of Flying Swordsmen have been downloaded for free, but I've only sold 250 copies of Chanbara. I'd rather that this gets out and people use it, or at least get some ideas from it that they might want to borrow or modify for their own games.

This is my gift to the RPG community.

Feeling Confident

Tomorrow, I'm starting up my new TS&R Jade campaign. It's a mixed Asian-inspired fantasy realm. Not faux China like in Flying Swordsmen, not faux Japan like in Chanbara. Just a big old fantasy goulash of Asian history, legends and pop culture tropes. Just like most D&D campaigns mix up all the European (and sometimes Near/Middle-Eastern) historical and legendary tropes. 

Two of the players missed the session 0 two weeks ago. I've been working with them online to roll up their PCs. One of them, Lisa, got the rules document from our Discord channel and was looking over it while we text chatted. We had this exchange: 

Seeing Lisa's reaction, I'm feeling more confident about releasing this rule set (and the TS&R Ruby, which is standard Euro-centric D&D classes that no one really needs if you have any old rules or modern retroclones, but anyway...). 

The TS&R Jade Bestiary and Treasury book is more or less done. Some of the art is placeholder stuff. I cobbled some pictures together with my meager GIMP skills, and they look fairly crappy. Others were low res public domain images, that looked OK on the screen, but when I printed them out looked bad. 

I'd also pared down the monster descriptions in order to fit in art, but now there are plenty of gaps where things just didn't fit the way I expected, so I could go back and expand on some of them to have less white space on the pages. 

Oh, and I've got some space in the magic item description sections for some images, and need to find some good PD sources for items (or again try my GIMP skills to modify them). 

So the Player book is good. I'm happy with it, and at least one person has given me a glowing review. The monster/treasure book is nearly done. I just need to add a few "magic item" images, remove or replace the monster images that make it look amateurish and expand a few monster descriptions that were overly truncated. 

Then I need to totally rewrite the Game Master guidebook. I've got a lot of ideas for how to do it, many based off of recent posts at The Tao of D&D, and some ideas from other blogs or YouTubers (check out an old school YT channel called Bandit's Keep if you haven't yet). 

So for the dozen or so people actually waiting for this, Treasures, Serpents, & Ruins is coming. Soon. Hopefully by the end of the year!

Acronyms & Ampersands

So, a little update. I'm just about done with my two versions of the Players' Rules books: Ruby and Jade. 

Ruby is standard Euro-Tolkien D&D races and classes. Jade is my version of Oriental Adventures. 

For the overall game title, I'm going to stick with Treasures, Serpents, and Ruins. The ordering just flows better than reversed, at least to me. 

BUT!

When I abbreviate it into an acronym from now on, it will be TS&R. 

Hopefully that's enough of a change to set my little house rules docs apart from the racist wannabes and their grifting. 

And who knows, maybe a better name will come to me before I release this thing to the wilds. 

Anyway, the game so far includes: 

TS&R Ruby Players Rules: PC races including humans, dwarves, elves, halflings, gnomes, and half-orcs (half-elves just use the human or elf rules, whichever side they favor). For classes, I have Bard, Cleric, Druid, Fighter, Illusionist, Magic-User, Paladin, Ranger, Thief. No subclasses. No multiclassing (I will have optional rules for that in the GM Guidebook). Levels 1-15, with demi-humans capped at 8, 10 or 12 (as in BX and BECMI, but class assortments similar if not identical to 1E AD&D). Spells levels 1-6 (1-4 for bards, paladins and rangers). Equipment lists and some rules for play including some higher level end-game stuff. Still need to add some art to this one but the text is done.

TS&R Jade Players Rules: PC races including humans, koropokuru (dwarves), shenmin (spirit folk), vanara (monkey-men) and yeongno (oni-folk). Classes are Cleric, Fighter, Kensei, Sohei, Thief, Wu Jen, Xia (monk/martial artist), Yakuza. Everything else pretty much the same as in Ruby. Completely done, including art.

TS&R Jade Bestiary and Treasury: Lots of monsters for Asian fantasy games, plus treasure tables and magic item lists, and wandering monster tables. Text is done, just need to add art.

TS&R Rules and Procedures: The small book with how to run a game, including rules for managing exploration and combat, creating adventures and campaigns (still working on writing this section), and to include rules for high level "end game" play (to be written). 

The things still to be created include: 

TS&R Ruby Bestiary and Treasury: I actually just need to edit out the stuff that's too Asian from my current working document that I use for my West Marches campaign. I've already done that for Jade, since I was planning to release the East Marches adventure and wanted something without the Greek/Norse/British/etc. monsters in it to work from. Although a few creatures were just re-skinned (like turning minotaurs into yakmen, or having chimeras with tiger heads instead of lions'). I'll do the same for Ruby fairly easily. 

TS&R GM Guidebook: This is where I plan to stick the (half-baked?) advice for GMs. Rules and Procedures is how to run a game. GM Guidebook will try to explain why things are the way they are, and suggest ways to change things up. Reading back over Flying Swordsmen and Chanbara lately, I think I've got some solid advice that I can include, but every time I get too wordy in my R&P, I end up deleting it as I want that to be just stuff that is needed at the table. So R&P will be the handy rules reference, GMG will be my attempt to out-Gygax old Gary. 

And especially once R&P and GMG are done, it should be pretty easy to make Players Rules and Bestiary and Treasury books for other genres of play. 

Oh, and despite being told it's a bad idea because people will just shit all over it, I've decided that these will all be released Pay What You Want. I make good enough money from work. Chanbara has been a nice little bonus each month, but I'm not gonna get rich from this game. It's just D&D in a different package, after all. Might as well just let people have them and they can throw me a few bucks if they appreciate what I've done.

Adjustments and Circles

My Treasures, Serpents, & Ruins East Marches rules (seriously need to rename that if I want to release it to the public*) have just undergone a small revision. 

I originally had 8 classes: Cleric, Fighter, Kensei, Magic-User, Sohei, Thief, Xia, Yakuza. 

Then I dropped it to 5: Cleric, Fighter, Magic-user, Thief, Xia.

Now it's back to 8 again (with some adjustments to the three that were dropped and re-added). 

The archetypes just seem better as their own classes instead of weird multi-class combos. 

Oh, and I've scrapped the multi-class system and did not add in the dual classing system I blogged about a few days ago. For now, I think I'll add those as options in a DM's book that I need to get around to heavily editing and completing. 

I did a mock-up of layout, including public domain art. Printed it out, and it looks pretty good. Still needs a cover. As of now, it's just got a title page on the front, and the character sheet reverse as the last page. 

Options: 

a) Convert the title page to a proper cover. Don't worry about a back cover. Keep it simple as an ebook. 

b) Add in cover (front/back) and back cover (front/back). Turn the 40 page document into a 44 pager, with the two blank pages on the reverse of the cover pages. Can be easily printed as double-sided. 

c) Leave it as is for the ebook version, but create a proper print version with a cover. Cheap looking, but easy.

Of course, I still need to figure out bookmarking. No matter how many times I tried, and how many tutorials I watched, Scribus will not save bookmarks in Chanbara's PDF. So now I'm not bothering with Scribus, and am simply doing the layout and PDF export from LibreOffice. Gotta watch a few LO tutorials for bookmarking PDFs. 

Oh, and the TSR-E Monster book is sort of ready. The text is ready, anyway. I've got a big host of monsters, plus treasure tables and lists & descriptions of magic items. The only problem is, most of the pages are crammed with monster stat blocks and descriptions, without any art at all. If I want to add art, I'll have to sort through my public domain folders for good images (or pay some artists to create new art) and reformat it from the ground up to include the artwork. It'll take some time, but the text is sound so it probably won't be too onerous. 

The only big thing left is that pesky Game Master book. Since I know the Classic D&D system, I don't really need it at the table as a reference most of the time. But other people could definitely use it, especially if I want to include suggestions for things like multi/dual class PCs or suggestions on creating a game with the right feel. 

What I do have keeps drifting between the sort of thing you'd write for a complete newbie (introductions, careful explanations of the systems and why they are the way they are), and bare bones rules with little explanation (reference for experienced DMs). I really only need the bare bones one to run the game. But other people might want/need the more expansive version. Maybe I should make both, a rules reference and a game master guide with lots of (questionable?) advice and suggestions and explanation. 

Anyway, the players book is something that I could release soon. And with a bit of editing, the monsters & treasures book could follow soon after.  

*Current thoughts on renaming: copy Pokemon games and use something like TSR Ruby (standard Euro/Tolkien D&Disms version) and Jade (kung fu/samurai/wuxia version). Potential future releases could be TSR Marble (Greek/Roman myth inspired), TSR Bone (prehistoric), TSR Steel (Arthurian/Carolingian romance), TSR Uranium (rockets & rayguns retro sci fi), etc.

What to Include

 It's been a while since I've posted. Partly because I'm working on my next academic paper. Partly because there just hasn't been much gaming related stuff to write about. West Marches continues (with another casualty last session, and nearly a few more -- 5th level is still not invulnerable!). Star Wars is still on the back burner. I'm still futzing around with East Marches when I have some spare time. 

And that's where I get my topic today. For East Marches, I have a hex map with 120 keyed locations. The map is 22 by 34 hexes, so there are a total of 748 hexes. That means only 16% of the map will have something detailed in it. I hadn't planned it that way. When I was creating the map, I just started plopping down icons for caves, settlements, ruins, strongholds, holy sites, and special locations fairly randomly. That ended up being about one keyed location for every six hexes. And that leaves plenty of empty space for DMs who would want to add their own locations to the mix. 

Anyway, I've given a title to all 120 locations, and have some ideas and notes for a quarter of them so far, but the notes are still pretty general. And I'm thinking now is the time to map and stock these locations. Most will probably be of the "one page" or "5-room dungeon" type write-ups, with a few bigger locations here and there.

So, that brings me to the title of this blog post. What to include in each keyed location?

Obviously, some will be fairly traditional dungeons. They'll need a map, encounter area entries, monster stats, treasures, traps, hazards. 

Others are places that could be dungeons, or could be resources, like settlements. They need NPCs, lists of resources that PCs can access there, and of course stats for the residents and treasures, in case the PCs go murder-hobo on them. 

Finally, some are just odd locations. They may or may not need maps. They may or may not contain monsters, traps, or treasures. They're the grab bag of encounter areas. 

A few things I need to remember to include in each keyed area's description are: 

• environmental features to make the area distinct
• motivations for monsters and NPCs
• interesting cartography for dungeons
• contingency plans for the inhabitants
• connections to other locations on the map
  

The last one is, I think, the most important. For a wilderness crawl, there should be plenty of clues leading from one interesting area to another. This is something I've often failed at in my current West Marches game. My players have been really good about pushing the borders, wanting to fill in the white spaces on the map. To up my game, though, I should prepare more links and clues between locations. It will give the area more of a lived in feeling, and will provide hooks for future adventures.

Yes, this post is mainly just me getting this written down so I can refer back to it later. But it's also a benchmark I can use to judge if the adventure is good enough or not, once I get it written.

New (old) Projects

 I'm sitting here at my desk at work, taking a break from research, and fiddling around with game stuff. Thinking about what I could do to add some new content to my Hidden Treasure Books store.

I'm still making slow progress on my East Marches megamodule. I have ideas for most of the 120 keyed locations on the map, and the ones I have left to decide on are in the farthest region, which will be for Name Level PCs. I plan to recycle a few small locations from earlier games I'd run of Flying Swordsmen and Chanbara, plus some new ones. The first region (for 1st to 3rd level PCs) has 14 encounter areas keyed on the map. Once I get those areas done and flesh out the home base a bit more, I'll release it as the first installment. That should give me more motivation to keep working on the other four regions (for levels 3-5; 5-7; 7-9; 9+ respectively) and get each installment out sooner rather than later. Once all the installments are done, I'll also be putting it together in a comprehensive package. 

So while I'm doing that, I'm also fiddling around with my TSR and TSR-East homebrew rules. Jeff is rolling up another PC, and was asking if he could have a multiclass with one class from the regular TSR and the other from TSR-East. I hadn't really given that much thought. In fact, TSR-E doesn't even have multiclassing rules yet. So that's something else to work on. And if I'm going to better integrate the rules, I should finally figure out how I want to do the "thiefy" skills. Thieves, Assassins and Acrobats get % based skills, while the Ninja and Yakuza have x in 6 or x in 10 skills. 

I've also still got the idea in my head that instead of selecting class and race, there should only be classes, and each class has sub-classes/kits/archetypes to choose from, and demi-human versions are subclasses. For example, if you're a Fighter, you can be a normal (human) Fighter, or you could choose to be a Ranger or Dwarf Fighter, for example. Then TSR-E would just be adding new sub-class options like Ronin and Tengu Warrior to the base classes. That's a lot of work for very little real gain, though, so I'll probably just keep it as it is now with lots of classes, and races separate. 

I am also working on my DM side rules for TSR-East, and realized that I should give them an edit to make them generic to TSR. Anything traditionally European or Asian can be in separate TSR-East and TSR-West players books and monster/treasure books, if I ever publish this thing. [I was getting some pressure from players to run a kickstarter or something to get this out.

Oh, and I looked through my old Caverns & Cowboys game from a few years back. The play testing on it seemed to work well enough, although we didn't really put the magic system through its paces. I think I might try to find some time to go through it once more (there were a few things players pointed out I could add) and get it up as a cheap PDF/POD game. 

So I'm looking at plenty of gaming-related stuff to work on this year. We'll see how much time I end up with to do these things. C&C is probably easiest, I just need to make a few tweaks, then format it and add in art (which I've got some PD images saved, and Jeremy Hart has done some mock-ups of potential pieces I could commission from him). But at the moment it's the project I'm least enthused about. 

Ghost Castle Hasegawa, the first adventure I made to play test Chanbara, also is in need of a small edit, then formatting, and art insertion. I should get that done, soon, too. Should, I say, but will I? I've been sitting on it for several years now.

Chanbara Price

I just reduced the price of the Chanbara PDF to $5.00. If you never picked it up because you thought $10 was too much, now's your chance!

The print version is $15, as well.

Get 'em while they're still sorta luke warm!*

*Chanbara has never really been "hot" but I'm happy with it! Hope you all enjoy it, too!

Checking My Achievements

I was looking over my posts from last year. I was surprised that I'd put out seven whole posts in February last year, since I spent almost all of February in the US with my family. But in that last week, I managed to crank out those seven posts.

One of them had this list of goals for 2019:

Now, here are my potential RPG related projects for this year:

1. Converting my West Marches 5E game to Labyrinth Lord. Some players won't like it, but I'm ready to get back to basics. Fewer classes, fewer spells (but often more powerful in effect), and a lower power level; but hopefully more action/interaction.
2. Starting an online Chanbara campaign. Probably with the usual Hangouts/Roll20 gang (Busan Gaming Group plus any of Dean's 5E gamers I can lure into it). If any blog readers are willing to make time on Saturday evenings East Asia/Australia time (Saturday morning North America, midday Europe/Africa), let me know.
3. Finishing up my next set of paper minis (just need to format the book then get it online). It has the Isle of Dread module monsters plus the creatures in BX that aren't in BECMI's Basic and Expert books. 
4. Moving on to the Mentzer Companion Set for the next set of paper minis? Or making a set for OA/Flying Swordsman/Chanbara? Or AD&D monsters? Or AD&D/later edition character types? 
5. Releasing the dungeons/locations of the Chanbara game, plus some for more standard D&D type play, as cheap modules for sale through Hidden Treasure Books.

Overall, I did pretty well with this.

1. I did, sort of. I converted to my house rules Treasures, Serpents, and Ruins, which is BECMI with the serial numbers filed off and some more content inspired by AD&D and 5E. And I couldn't be happier with the game now. Why did I wait so long to convert?

2. I did start the Online Chanbara campaign. Snow Pine Island. I made a map. I made several dungeons. The players made characters. They explored one dungeon. And honestly, I lost interest. I realized later that I'd tried to set up too many factions on this tiny island full of monsters. The players picked the factions they thought would suit their characters, and they were all over the place. Trying to figure out all these conflicting motivations, and goals for each PC that were at cross purposes to every other PC, was just too much work.

Next time, I'll mandate ONE faction that all PCs must have allegiance to, and then let them choose a second one of their choice for some conflict. That way, I can use the shared liege to give them adventure hooks, but let them decide whether to support that goal or try to subvert things for their secondary liege's goals. Make the players do the work on that.

3 and 4. I not only finished the BX Extras/Isle of Dread minis, I also put out a Chanbara minis book. More paper minis this year? Probably not. They're fun to make, but time consuming, and don't really sell that well. What I should do is finally get around to reformatting the Basic Monsters pdfs to match the Expert books, with multiples of monsters usually found in groups to save people the effort of having to print multiple pages to get more than one figure.

5. This is the only one I didn't get done. But I did start in on East Marches, which will likely have recycled content from my earlier Flying Swordsmen and Chanbara campaigns. Hell, even from my old AD&D OA game from 1997, and my 3E OA game from 2006-7. Because as I posted before, there's a lot of stuff that needs to go into this thing. Might as well save myself a bit of effort and self-plagiarize, when things fit.

2019 Year in Review/2020 Looking Forward

After five years of very little blogging, 2019 was a productive year for me. Or maybe that it wasn't so productive allowed me to blog more?

Actually, the secret is that my wife and sons spent most of the year in the USA. They're still there now. I'm flying to the US for a vacation in a little over 2 weeks. I'll be there for a month. So don't expect any posts here in the tail end of January and most of February.

Living by myself has given me more time to blog, but also just more time to think about game stuff. And more time to read others' blogs, which often spurs a topic in my mind.

Not counting the Flying Swordsmen page, my most popular posts this year were:
1. Man, Gygax could be Wordy [Two paragraphs? Not my most thrilling content. Was the title good clickbait? I didn't intend it as such.]
2. Roleplaying, Metagaming, and Differing Opinions [Now this one spawned a conversation both here and at at least two other blogs, so I'm not surprised it was popular.]
3. The Action Economy is a Bad Concept [This one was intentionally given a click-bait title, and it worked. Spawned a really good discussion, too.]
4. Traps, Are We Thinking About Them Wrong? [Another one that got some traction and discussion on other blogs, so again, not surprising that it was read often.]
5. The Secret Roll [One in which the idea was inspired by other bloggers, and initiated posts on the subject at other blogs as well as a lot of discussion here.]

Personally, I set a record of returning to the US on three different occasions last year. I'm going to repeat that, or if I can swing it, make four trips this year, to visit my wife and boys as much as possible. We video chat twice a day, so we're not completely separated, but even 21st century tech is no replacement for being there.

Gaming-wise, in 2019, I didn't produce much for all of you (other than blog posts), but Chanbara and paper minis sales continue to trickle in every month. My West Marches game (both face-to-face and online sessions) are going well. I did some play-testing of Caverns & Cowboys, which probably could be cleaned up and released relatively soon if I set my mind to it. And I've done a lot of tweaking of my Treasures, Serpents, and Ruins house rules for Classic D&D, including, as I've blogged about recently, TSR-East, which is more of a Pan-Asian fantasy game than Flying Swordsmen or Chanbara. TSR-East is about ready for play-testing. I think I'm going to just allow it in my West Marches games and see if anyone bites, and how the classes stack up.

I've also been putting in the ground work on a module for TSR-East/Chanbara/Flying Swordsmen (or Labyrinth Lord or BX/BECMI, or whatever) module East Marches. I made a map, and there are 120 keyed locations on there. A few will be simple interesting encounter locations, but most will be dungeons of various size. And the map is divided up into zones appropriate to characters from 1st through Name Level+, so thinking up all these dungeons and encounter sites will take some time and effort. I had foolishly blogged about releasing it in 2020, but I know that's not going to happen. It's gonna take me longer than that to write this thing up. It's ambitious. And this is for spare time, along with normal planning for my West Marches campaign, not to mention academic writing for work.

My plans for the new year are to keep blogging, for one. I may start in on the Mentzer Expert Set Cover to Cover. People liked the Basic CtC posts from a few years back.

I want to get as much done of East Marches as I can. I may release this thing in serial format.

And I should probably spend some time cleaning up a few issues in Caverns & Cowboys, and release it as well. The game mechanics are borrowed from a well-tested system. It's not everyone's cup of tea, but, well shoot, Pardner. Ain't ever'one gots t'like it. But if'n yer want t'take on dragons 'n' goblins 'n' such with Remingtons, Colts, 'n' sticks a' dynamite in a phoney 19th Century frontier, this-here game may well just scratch that itch.

Not sure what to make of this

Sorry to get political on a gaming blog, but I need to address this.

Earlier in the year I put out the Chanbara Characters paper minis set on my DrivethruRPG store, Hidden Treasure Books. Now frequent blog readers will know that I'm terrible at self-promotion. It's my Midwesterner background, maybe, or my introversion. If people want what I'm offering, great! I'm happy to provide it. But I don't go posting about them all over the place, all the time here, or in barely semi-relevant comments on others' blogs or forums. If they become relevant, I might bring them up.

Needless to say, I don't check for feedback or reviews as often as I should. The paper minis line has only gotten one review anyway (positive), and all of the feedback about Chanbara was here, aside from one comment on Drivethru asking about the print version when only the PDF was available.

I did check the other day, and found that a guy named David B had posted this:

David B June 10, 2019 12:33 am Asia/Tokyo

Why did you not give them Japanese skin tones or did you not want to lose the opportunity for some virtue signalling 

 

 

I posted a response there, but probably this David character will never check back to see it, since I missed his comment for five months. So David B, if you're reading this and would like to further explain yourself, please feel free to chime in in the comments. 

My response to this was to laugh, honestly. I was pretty up front about the creation process of the paper minis here on the blog. So I'm guessing this guy isn't a regular reader. I'm a pretty poor artist. I never really developed my talent in art. I don't try to create the art myself. I take public domain images and modify them using GIMP. Sometimes that's just cropping out all the background to leave the character. Sometimes, if it's a black and white original, I colorize it. Sometimes I modify them to add weapons/armor or modify the pose a bit. Mostly though, it's selecting the figure I want from the original and deleting the rest. 

Now, with my Basic Adventurers set (see how I did that! Product placement!), I did go to some effort to make sure there were equal male and female figures, and that there were a variety of skin tones depicted. Many years ago, a Filipino friend I was gaming with took a look at my minis and asked me, in all seriousness, "Why are they all white?" And my only answer was that, being white myself, and thinking of Medieval fantasy as typically European-coded, they were all white. Then I stared painting more variety on my minis.

 

It doesn't hurt me in any way to be more inclusive. And if customers appreciate having some choices for fantasy characters that look more like they do (or a chance to use a figure that very much does NOT look like they do), great! Win-win, right?

With the Chanbara set, though, I was collecting Japanese public domain art, and some vintage photographs (also public domain). I didn't need to colorize anything, as they were already in color. The vintage photos were already colorized. 

The range of skin tones found in the Chanbara Characters set are the range of skin colors depicted by actual Japanese artists of the 17th through 19th centuries. In other words, most of these figures are of Japanese subjects as painted by actual Japanese artists. The rest are photos of Japanese people (colorized by someone other than me).

 

And this David B person, since his location lists him as Asia/Tokyo and assuming that he really is posting from somewhere in Asia, should realize that East Asian peoples actually do have quite the range of skin tones. I have students here in Korea who are just as pasty white as my Celtic/Germanic-heritage white ass (one who's even paler!) and some who are so dark they could almost pass for African-heritage. And that's not counting the fake tan "ko-gyaru" in Japan. I'm talking about the soccer club boys or track girls who spent a lot of time out in the sun. 

So I'm stumped as to why David B, if he is actually in Asia and not just using a VPN to make it look that way, wouldn't know this.

I'm also wondering why he thinks I'm "virtue signalling" by this. Makes me think he's just another one of those incel alt-right asshats on the internet, pissed off that someone, somewhere, is doing things without the express purpose of pissing people off. Or even worse, that he's crypto-fascist and doing his own virtue-signalling to his Aryan brothers on one of the most obscure items for sale on DriveThru. Like I've literally sold 4 copies of this thing. That's all. 

 

Now that sounds pretty bad. And I don't like to make wild assumptions about people like this. So David B, if you are reading, please prove me wrong in the comments. I'd love to know what your motivation was for posting that comment. Were you actually offended in some way? Are you (needlessly) defending Asian people from some perceived slight? Are you virtue signalling to the Regressive Right? Or did you just feel ripped off because you're one of those 4 people who spent your buck-fifty on this thing and weren't satisfied with it?

1E OA has a surprising amount of character options

I am making plans to continue my paper miniatures line with characters for Oriental Adventures.

I made lists of all the race and class combinations. And man, the way the Hengeyokai work, I'm going to have to create a LOT of minis to cover every option!

There are 12 or so animals that are the base form of a hengeyokai, and they have normal human, hybrid and animal forms. I figure for marking their position on a battle mat, the hybrid or animal forms are enough.

There are four classes that Hengeyokai can choose, luckily. Only four. And a few animal types must be evil so can't be Shukenja, and a few must be chaotic, so can't be kensei. None must be lawful, so any Hengeyokai can be a Wu Jen. And Bushi have no alignment restrictions.

I usually do male and female versions of each (the animal form will just get one and you can hand wave any sexual dimorphism in the species). So that's 12 regular animals.

Hybrid forms, however, will require:

24 Bushi (12 male, 12 female)
20 Kensei (10 male, 10 female)
18 Shukenja (9 male, 9 female)
24 Wu Jen (12 male, 12 female)

That's an awful lot of hengeyokai. Especially since for many of them I will need to modify a picture of a human with an animal's head to make it work. There are some public domain pictures of Japanese anthropomorphic animals, but not enough.  Even if I only did one hybrid form of each class for each animal type, it's still 55 total pictures including the animal forms.

And for humans, I was planning to have two of each sex for each of the ten classes. One of each sex for Korobokuru for each of their five classes. And Spirit Folk - luckily I don't think there's that much difference between the three types visually, so just one of each sex for each of their four classes. If I did one for each type of Spirit Folk, that would triple that number.

So if I went whole hog (1 male and female of each class for Hengeyokai hybrids plus animal forms, 2 male and female of each class for Humans, 1 male and female of each class for Korobokuru, and 1 male and female of each class for each type of Spirit Folk), this book would have 172 miniatures in it.

That's a bit of work there. Might take a while. Even if I limit the Hengyeyokai and Spirit Folk, and only provide one male and female each of the human classes, it's still 93 miniature images I need to create.

In the mean time, I listed out the class options of Flying Swordsmen and Chanbara. That's easier to do since everyone's human. A lot of these can do double duty when I get around to the OA set, although I may mix it up a bit to give people more value for their money spent if they buy both. Especially for classes like the samurai where I have tons of pictures that work. Spell-casters and martial artists may get recycled out of necessity, however. We'll see.

I've got all the pictures selected for the Chanbara set. Some are pictures I used in the book, but not all of the book pictures make for a good miniature image. There are two male and two female images for each class/profile in Chanbara. So I should be able to get this book out soon. And I should be looking at the monster lists, too...

New Title for Sale: Expert Monsters Set 3

For those who've been purchasing my full color fold-up paper minis made with public domain art for Classic D&D, I've got my newest set available. Expert Monsters 3 covers all the creatures that were in BX but left out of the Mentzer revision. The Acolyte, Medium and Veteran round out the Bandit as NPC versions of PC classes, there is a sea dragon, whales, woolly rhinoceros...plus all the cool dinosaurs and monsters from Isle of Dread!

Allosaurus (favorite dinosaur of mine!), aranea, natives with lots of leader types including the zombie master, phanaton and rakasta, etc.! The kopru is a favorite of mine in this set. It took some kit-bashing of various public domain images, and a bit of retouching, but I think it looks suitably Lovecraftian and disturbing (for a small image anyway).

If you run BX instead of BECMI, you're missing a few monsters from my previous sets. Now you can get them. And if you want to run Isle of Dread in any rule set, this has those special IoD monsters you need.

As usual, every page uses layers, so if you want to only print certain monsters, you can switch off the ones you don't want to print and save ink.

You can purchase it here for the low, low price of $3.

When I start working on the next set, I think I'm going to go with some Flying Swordsmen/Chanbara/OA type characters. I'll probably start working on the Companion Set monsters too, since quite a few in this set are in the Companion.