Sision Tower Now Available!

Some time ago, the wind began to sing of death in the Sision River Valley, and if purgatory was a song, Glovakians are now listening to it.  The source of  this soul-crushing music was tracked to 90 miles northwest of Ambir.  What was found?   A massive, oddly built stone tower that wasn't there before. 

Word quickly spread and the curious set out in droves.  Many turned back however, as every passing day the music got worse, but a brave, or foolish few, managed to make camp and eventually go inside.  If anyone’s made it out, no one really knows, but there’s no shortage of rumors as to what's really going on in the place that has come to be known as, Sision Tower.

Sision Tower is an OSR styled, vertical dungeon-crawl where the PCs explore an odd domain of Holy origins.  Here, they will test their survival skills as well as their Faith.  Here, they will meet Saints and Seraphs.  Here, in the struggle between Law and Chaos they have to decide.......Plunder?? ...Sacrifice??...or Both!!!

Sision Tower includes:

• All original black and white art.
• Over a dozen, fully illustrated, new magic items.
• Unique monsters and a sample setting.
• A vertical dungeon crawl of 35 rooms.
• A spiritual setting in the same vein as Praise the Fallen.

Sision Tower is designed to challenge character levels 3-5 and is easily used with most traditional fantasy role-playing systems.  39 printer-friendly pages, now available at DriveThruRPG!   

Sision Tower

For all who purchase...Thank You!

Rynath Monster: The Chain Wreck

According to legend the first Chain Wrecks came into existence in a dungeon deep beneath the Phaen Moors. Powerful agents of entropy, Chain Wrecks are the tortured souls of those who perished in bondage.  So terrible was their death, so vile is their thirst for retribution, that they blame all life and will stop at nothing to bring the universe one step closer to oblivion.

Though incorporeal, due to the spiritual weight of their cursed chains, Chain Wrecks display a shocking amount of "physical" strength.  They prefer hit-and-run tactics such as flying through walls across narrow hallways and small chambers.  Utilizing such tactics, one Chain Wreck alone is capable of decimating an entire village or a small town.  Those left alive will pray for death as cursed chain fragments now torment them from within, preventing their wounds from ever properly healing.

Particularly dreadful are the larger, more brazen, Howling Chain Wrecks who announce their presence with a maniacal, chain-rattling howl that can stifle the courage of even the most stalwart warriors.

Chain Wrecks can speak whatever language they knew in life, but they suffer such sadistic madness that any conversation is....unlikely.  Chain Wrecks do not hoard treasure on purpose.  Any treasure found near them will undoubtedly be found on one of their victims.

Chain Wreck D&D 5th Edition

 Chain Wreck OSR

For those of you interested in art, here's the unrefined sketch.  Looks like crap, but seeing as it was already my 3rd or 4th attempt, I stuck with it.  Just like writing, drawing is a process.  Tough it out; stick with it.

Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition Character Sheet Revised

It was only a matter of time before I decided to revise my 5th Edition character sheets.

The most notable change is the horizontal placement of ability scores as opposed to a "list."  Lists are usually easier to read, especially at a glance, but I think this format works.  Overall, it sort of has a "Dark Heresy meets D&D" vibe, which wasn't my goal but I like the outcome.  I included two versions, Gold and Black.  I also removed the italic lettering on the spell sheet and corrected some minute alignment issues.

For earlier versions of this Character Sheet see the side-bar on the right.

D&D 5th Revised 09/18
D&D 5th Revised 09/18 Fillable

D&D 5th Revised--Gold 09/18

Traveller: Evolution of a Character Sheet and.....Fantasy Traveller?

What got me interested in Traveller was the cover art for Alien Module 3: Darrians.  Art sells, that's a fact.  If I ever publish an RPG I will fork out whatever money necessary to acquire a beautiful cover.

Of course I only ever flipped through Darrians a few times when I bought it, it was the Mongoose Traveller Core Rulebook that I fell in love with.  It's a slim, solid black, well constructed book that encapsulates all you need to run any sci-fi game. And I mean any.  I love the simplicity and elegance of this system.  If it has one flaw, I'd say that flaw is a character advancement system that seems like an after-thought and also that Education and Intellect are too closely related.  Character creation is all based on random rolls and I think advancement should be as well.  Perhaps after so many XP or so many sessions, a player could roll on one of the career tables in their career path.  Just a simple house-rule waiting to happen and something that I have incorporated in a somewhat related project of mine...

Anyhow over time I collected almost every book in the Mongoose Traveller 1st Edition Line and over the past several years designed and redesigned the character sheet.  The official sheets for this game look nice and work just fine, but I'm all about space maximization and printer friendliness.   

***Traveler players are a technical bunch.  But, if character sheet evolution bores you, then skip to the bottom of the page for the final sheets and some thoughts on Fantasy Traveller.*** 

These early designs aren't too dissimilar to the official sheet.  Here I was mainly concerned with how to present the skill ranks (to the left of the skill, as opposed to the right, as on the official sheet.)  I also switched back and forth between lines and boxes for the bottom info.  Ultimately, I would settle on lines.

At this point I became interested with cramming all the skills into 1 or 2 columns.  The first sheet below doesn't even list the skills, and I quickly determined that just didn't feel like Traveller. 

And here I flirted with the notion of splitting the skills into different categories, but that gets tricky in Traveller because skills can be used in different ways.  I would use this idea later...

With my designs for Judge Dredd and Strontium Dog, the appearance for what would be my final format becomes apparent.  Here I added in hit-point boxes, though I've never known any one who tracks hit-points on their actual character sheet.  Psi has also been added as a Stat and more slots are created for the career terms.

At this point, the character sheet is formatted for Mongoose Traveller 2nd Edition and it feels complete to me.  The rules for 2nd Edition are basically a cleaned up, streamlined version of 1st.  I love the addition of boons and banes and the Prisoner career.  The layout is nice, but I have to say I prefer the 1st Edition solid black cover with black and white interior art.  Just because art is in color doesn't mean it's better, or modern for that matter.  

Of the two sheets below, the Redline version is my go to.  I feel that the red boxes allow your stats to stand out more, where as too much black can drown out pencils.  Plus, the black and red color pattern matches the Traveller theme.

Traveller 2nd Edition-Redline

Traveller 2nd Edition-Black

And then there's this...

For years people have been craving a Fantasy version of Traveller.  There is even a photo-shopped image of a box set called Wanderer floating around the web.  What a tease that is.  So, on and off for a few years now, I have been designing my own.  I used to call it Dungeoneer, which was the default name I tended to give any fantasy system that I worked on.  Now I call it Rynath. The gold sheets below are samples of my first design done a few years ago.  Magic works similar to psionics in that each school has a subset of spells that can be cast at varying difficulty.  Dabbler means you've learned just one of those spells.  I made 12 or 13 career charts, each with the standard 3 sub-career specializations.  The one thing I never did is write up all of the events and mishaps per career.

The black sheets below are a recent refinement of the project.  I streamlined character creation from the usual Traveller style and changed up the skills a bit, including how armor works.  There are no events or mishaps, just a benefit roll after every term and I envisioned 5 terms of 2 years to be the standard with a starting age of 15 + 1d6. 

Currently, this project has evolved away from simply being Fantasy Traveller to a Traveller/OSR hybrid (Old School Renaissance for those who don't know.)  Instead of having careers, I have basic OSR style classes with their own charts (and fewer of them) to roll on with a rare occasion for a multi-class.  The game mechanic is basically Traveller's 2d6 with some modifications.

I'm considering making an ongoing series of posts discussing these Fantasy Traveller and OSR projects.  Until then...