Bent bookshelf

I have a dislike of entirely made up Fantasy place names. I like naming conventions for places that relate to features in a geographic area: Old Harbour, Newbridge, Waterford. Part of the reason they feel real to me is that thus is how a lot of place names actually came into being, part is because I'm Irish and I'm surrounded by names like this.  Another thing that happens that I'm fond of emulating for Fantasyland is how names like this can originate in one language and be carried into a new language by a later group. Dublin is supposed to be based on "Dubh-linn" which is literally "Black-pool." Still the same convention, but one step removed. I don't have fantasy languages for my setting, and I try not to use real world languages directly. STEALING! Now we rob things from others. Namely the language Wiki from Dwarf Fortress. This has an extensive list of words for the various languages in the game. They have pretty consistent and satisfying phonem...

This post is full of a lot of unsubstantiated 'reckon'ing.  I don't own Coriolis yet.  In case speculating on rules I might like to fiddle with will annoy anyone, best read no further. I've been falling in love with Coriolis from a distance...   It's been from a distance for two reasons.  Firstly I've just started a new campaign for both of the groups that I run games for.  Both of these games are in Medieval Fantasyland, and they're both using my rules mashup of Knave 2e and Frostgrave.  This is what both groups have asked for and at the moment at least everyone seems to be having a good time.  Secondly I'm skint from Christmas spending and need to horde some money to buy Coriolis and MYZ to realise my evil plans.   Since my Frostknave games started I immediately began looking for a Science Fiction system I could languish in for a while.  I tend to do some solo RPing to build out worlds that I later use at the table.  This mea...

 I've had a niggling obsession with card draw mechanics for randomisation for a while now.  I've put together a very esoteric dungeon/wilderness population system based on drawing cards from a deck.  Each suit is a different experience; Humanoid, Flora/Fauna, Hazard, Wonder/Sensory.  I've had fun with it.  Where I always struggled was deciding when to stop creating and make the dungeon make sense.  I would have endless fun making rooms and having them loosely tied together.  Thematically they would fit just fine, because of how I had compiled the tables, weighting towards the dominant faction or dominant fauna.  But they would still be a loose system of ideas.  I experimented with different ways to put them together.  My favourite way when playing solo was to use the system based heavily on Emmy Allen's procedural works, Gardens of Ynn and Stygian Library.  Each room is assigned a number as they are created.  Then I would start...

Whiff, whiff, whiff I've run 4 sessions of Knave 2e with two different groups.  In the first couple of sessions I kept running into a problem that I had previously left behind; my dislike for AC based systems with low level characters.  They can be a whiff-fest.  Anyone who played Morrowind back in the day will also have experienced this, left click to attack and see the *miss* floating up instead of damage on your enemy.  Prior to Knave I've mostly been running Cairn, Electric Bastionland and various Oddlikes.  These have led me to the belief that rolling to hit is vestigial and irritating. In my first Knave session a player who ported his character from another system as a level 3 fighter/paladin just kept missing.  So did his opponent.  This is nothing new.  But what bothered me was that NOTHING WAS HAPPENING.   Felstad to the Rescue It just so happens that I'm also exploring Frostgrave a lot recently.  I know, I'm late to this p...