Free from Sine Nomine

I've mentioned Sine Nomine in a post about Stars Without Number. What I haven't mentioned is just how impressed I am with Mr Crawford's work, both in quantity and quality. Well, he has struck again.

Now he is producing his own free e-zine. This inaugural issue is 15 pages. It has a very nice wrap-around cover. Articles include a new class for Scarlet Heroes, two one-roll generators, one for backwater spaceports and one for abandoned structures. There is also a rather lengthy article detailing the development timetable of Sine Nomine kickstarter projects. All in all this looks to be a very useful addition to the Sine Nomine line.

One small suggestion, though. The layout of Sine Nomine products is very functional. Nothing fancy, no background textures or sidebar art pieces. This is very much appreciated for its printer friendliness. However, title spaces, section headers, chapter titles, and the like typically have the name header followed by a sort of subtitle. The subtitle is white in a black background:

That's not very printer friendly. It doesn't matter if I send it out to be printed, but if you do it at home, all that black ink adds up. And believe me, you'll be wanting to print all of Sine Nomine's stuff. It's that good.

Chainmail (Yes, again)

It's all in the approach. Most people considering a Chainmail/D&D experience approach it from the perspective of adding Chainmail combat to D&D. What about taking the approach of adding certain D&D elements to Chainmail. There is a philosophy amongst the OSR that it is easier to house rule things in, rather than yank them out.

That being the case, the first thing that needs to be done is to clarify and clean up the Chainmail elements we will be using, namely combat, magic, how magic items function, and monster stats/descriptions. Secondly, the elements from D&D that will be needed have to be identified and retooled to conform to Chainmail. That's a bit of a two-sided sword. Most of D&D is written with the assumption that the reader owns and is familiar with Chainmail. So, some of the work is done. Unfortunately, the veil between Chainmail and D&D is rather nebulous and the voice of the rules slips back and forth without warning.

I've contemplated this on here before, but it never really gained critical mass because I just couldn't get my mind around how to integrate Chainmail's wargame combat into D&D's roleplay arena. Then I found these guidelines at Howling Tower (thanks, Steve). This was a major hurdle for me, and now that it is out of the way, maybe I can move forward. As always, I'll keep you posted.

Old School Encounters

I'm still working on unique wilderness encounter tables. I'm currently working with Judges Guild Wilderlands of High Fantasy, Map One. I "cut" it into 4 pieces and blew each up to an 8.5 x 11 sheet. I've been coloring them with colored pencils. I'm almost done, and when I am, I'll post them all. I love the old school look of the maps combined with the DIY vibe that colored pencils bring.

Anyway, I was snooping around for something to help make creating the unique encounter tables easier. If you remember, my plan was to "throw all the dice" to generate not only the occurrence of an encounter, but the specifics as well. I'm not sure that will hold up in development, but it is still a design goal.

My research led me to Old School Encounter Reference. I haven't spent very much time with it, but it is already evident that, even if it doesn't ultimately help with my one-roll encounters, it will prove exceedingly useful. It is written with AD&D/OSRIC in mind, so it takes some result-tweaking to work for OD&D, but that's no big deal. Honestly, it does for encounters what the Ready Ref Sheets do for the game in general. There is a lot of encounter related random goodness in here. One of my early favorites from my brief skimming was the tables to randomly generate spellbooks, by Magic-User level. Awesome.

Oh, did I mention it is a free 160-page pdf? Well, it is. So, what are you waiting for?

Mythika Gazetteer

 

I've been busy today with Mazes & Minotaurs. I've collected the various Mythika Gazetteer articles from all 10 issues of Minotaur Quarterly. It is a single, fairly large, pdf in the blog's 4shared folder. It includes a copy of the above map, pertinent related articles (but not themed adventures), and a cover I put together. If you have any comments or thoughts, please pass them on. I really enjoy doing stuff like this, so I hope you find it useful.