I have been finally learning how to use Affinity Publisher, which I've had since the release of V2, and started a short booklet of rules set for running osr/nsr-style game in Finnish. Mostly just to combine some of my favourite things from games I've run past year or two, and to have something I can give to the kids I've run games so they can start running their own with ease. After two nights of working at it, I realised that I have much more fun time doing the whole thing at once, compared to just writing text and editing it until it's ready.
Going into all at once, I can see how the text should look like, what information is extra fluff, and how much the layout and visuals help making things clear. It's easier to get the blob of abstract, half-formed thoughts into coherent collection of ideas when there's more than just words to use for the task. And, browsing and editing Public Domain art is always good times.
Anyways, the plan with the codified rules and guides is to have bunch of short booklets that I can then mix and match based on what kind of game I want to run. the basic rules are super simple and short, in the style of ItO, Cairn and Knave, with one or two narrative mechanics stolen from Whitehack and PbtA games. Another booklet could have procedures and rules for more tactical, grid-based combat, dungeon delving, and resource management.
At the moment, I have most of the main mechanics down, and a third-iteration character sheet ready. For playtesting, I'm planning to start with The Black Wyrm of Brandonsford and Waking of the Willoby Hall.
Example spread from "seikkailijan opas". Overview of the character creation on the left side, and instructions for rolling basic stats on the right.
I had this idea game idea while watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer about immortal people who meet in various moments in history. There's potential for more fleshed out version, but what follows is the first sketch for One Page RPG jam.
What's it about?
A roleplaying game about group of people who have lived since ancient times.
Each session is one glimpse to their lives, in one particular place and time when the characters came together.
The game can be played the traditional way, with one constant GM and one or more players, or with revolving seat with changing GM. When player is GMing, their character is absent for that part of their story.
Mechanics
When a character tries to do something where the outcome is uncertain, and both failure and success have dramatic and/or entertaining results, the player throws one six-sided dice (d6). A result of 5 or 6 is a success of some kind, and 1-4 is a failure. These successes and failures can be enhanced and mitigated if the character has done a Heroic Deed in the past.
Heroic Deeds
Every character has done at least one Heroic Deed. It is what they are remembered for, after a century or more gone.
These deeds are written down in the character sheet in the form they are shared amongst the people. What actually happened is not of great importance, what matters is the legend born from that event.
Tables
| d6 |
Place of origin |
| 1 |
On the banks of Euphrates, when Sargon of Akkad rules as King of the Universe. |
| 2 |
In Thebes, on the year when Queen Hatshepsut draws her last breaths. |
| 3 |
In Kashmir Valley, when Alexander faces the river Ganges. |
| 4 |
In a ship bound to Tyre, where Hiram I prospers. |
| 5 |
In Bretagne, you watch as the the Carnac stones are raised from the ground. |
| 6 |
In Saba, you flee as the first Himyarites arrive. |
Remember old internet? No, not old old, but the one we had in the late 90s and early 00s. When everyone and their cats had a cool homepage with rotating gifs, cheesy backgrounds and visitor counters? Sites hosted in Angelfire and Geocities. Might be your cookie cutter nostalgia talking, but I loved browsing those sites, full of wacky and weird and interesting stuff.
Neocities
Luckily I am not alone in this longing for more varied and colourful internet. Neocities, a modern version of Geocities, is filled with rad sites you can browse for inspiration and good ol' world wide web fun. And most importantly, they make it super easy for anyone to set up a personal website.
Sadgrl has a great Beginner's tutorial on how to set up the site in Neocities, so I won't be talking about that in this series. They also have a Layout Maker for easy generation of html & css files, with few basic options like sidebar amount, header size and so on. Check also the Learn-section in Neocities. They have their own HTML course there, and links to various resources.
From those links, you will find everything you need to get the site up and running. In the following posts, I'm going to show few things that can help with building and maintaining the site.
But why?
Setting up a personal site or a blog is made extremely easy with modern services like Wordpress and Wix. So why would someone want to go at it the hard way?
For me, all those tools feel way too bloated, full of features I'm never going to use. And they take away some of the ownership of the site. Maybe not in any legal way, but in technical and personal sense. And with automation and templates designed for modern web, it's easy to make nice and clean but bland and lifeless sites. In their About page, Neocities states their goal as:
"To enable you to harness the creativity, beauty, and power of creating your own web site. To rebuild the web we lost to automation and monotony, and make it fun again."
I don't know about you, but I think that's just what the internet desperately needs.
