Make Sure of Your Wilderness Travel Rules

 Do not make my mistake. Make sure your wilderness travel rules are set in stone before drawing the map.

Guilt Free Bags of HP

 Complexity is good. Thinking deeply is good. That said, always have some faction that is just purely evil as sometimes players want a guilt free reason to have combat. Undead are great for this purpose.

50 Years

D&D is 50 years old this year and the hobby of roleplaying is not much older than that. It is astonishing to think how long it took for roleplaying to be invented considering the only technology needed is access to something to write on and something to write with.

It is an exciting time to be alive!

Selling a Megadungeon Crawl to Players: The First Delve

What makes a megadungeon great, the part that makes you excited as a referee to run it, you need to show the players this experience, all of it, during their first delve.

A megadungeon is a hard sell to players and you need to sell it right from the get-go. Yes, megadungeons get better the more you delve them, but if you do not convince the players that it is worth coming back for a second delve, they will never experience the deeper play.

This means players need a taste of:

Faction play, not just meeting a faction, but learning how to join them and how to manipulate them.

Mapping the dungeon leading to dungeon knowledge that they can use to have an advantage over the dungeon's inhabitants.

Choices and mechanisms in the megadungeon that impact the entire floor.

Small amounts of the lore of the megadungeon and hint at a hidden and strange history.

Rooms with radically different scenery. Assure them that just because it is a megastructure that this doesn't mean it will all be the same.

The weird. The idea that really, anything could be down here.

If this seems like a lot, it is because it is. I don't know how to incorporate all of this into one session, but I think we should be attempting it.

Do Not Cancel!

It's game night and a bunch of players just canceled. All you have left are 1 or 2 other players. Do you cancel the game? NO!

Some of my best games have been with one or two players. Instead of your players having to wait their turn to announce their character's actions, they have all of your focus. My players love that and often consider those games their all-time favorites.

But what if the last game left off with a major boss battle and if only a couple characters show up they will be utterly destroyed? Yeah, don't put them in that situation! Have the game be a flashback, a flashforward, a flashsideways, a dream, or a hallucination in the blink of an eye. It doesn't matter. Hand-wave it and move on to the fun part, running the game.

Okay, but what do you run? I keep a few one-shot low-level modules on hand just for this occasion. A mid to high level character should be able to handle a low level module without trouble.

Also, some modules are built with the idea of having only one or only a couple players. I have had big success with The House of the Red Doors and The Moon King Wants to Party. Keep a PDF on your phone or the module in your referee's bag and the next time a bunch of players cancel keep the game going!

A Map of the Shattered World

 

An old map I made using the outstanding Hex Kit map-making program.

A Mutant of Ixx Homebrew

Having played Mutants of Ixx for a year (see this post) I am in love with the game, but at the same time see what I would like to tweak and so for my home campaign I eventually did just that!

I added a few new items, including one that reduces the OP factor of having great armor. Added 4 new classes to choose from (beast mutant, plant mutant, vat-born human, and robot). A slew of cyborg augmentations. All on a single page.

You can purchase it at DriveThru RPG currently for $1 here.

As a special treat, I have included a blog exclusive of the chart I use when PCs try to use relics that are beyond their understanding.

If somehow you have not played Mutants of Ixx by Skullfungus stop what you are doing and pick it up now at DriveThru RPG

No More Forever Gamemasters

As a gamemaster, do whatever you can to also play in a campaign. It gives you insights that you can never see as a gamemaster. You don't understand how easy it is to miss the seemingly obvious unless you understand the player's experience.

I love gamemastering, I would honestly only ever gamemaster and be happy with that, but I do all I can to be a player because my greatest insights on how to be a good gamemaster have all come from being a player in someone else's game.

What I Learned Playing a “One-Shot RPG” for a Year (The Mutants of Ixx)

 For a year, my home campaign has played an almost-weekly game, using u/skullfungus amazing two-page RPG The Mutants of Ixx, which is a hack of Into the Odd by Chris McDowall. Mutants of Ixx I believe is mostly thought of as a one-shot style game because of its low page count (2 pages) and minimalist style, but I’ve found that it has enough meat on the bones to easily fuel long-term campaigns.

Here is what I have learned

The post-apocalyptic world is harsh.

Food, water and ammunition are hard to get and even harder to hold onto. Having food and water tied to healing makes them a valuable resource. My players always know exactly how much food and water they have and are on the lookout for more. When my players think of looting the body, they are pulling out their skinning knives and thinking of that sweet, sweet, meat the body holds.

I have encouraged this hunger by making most bodies riddled with toxins and parasites and the streams are polluted or consisting of salt water.

Ammunition is also currency; this makes every combat a question of how much money do I want to shoot at the enemy. You can see the players making the calculations and this makes for some interesting choices.

Being outnumbered is scary.

While player character death does happen, I have found it to be not as frequent as I first expected. That said, the scariest fights for the players have always been the ones where they are outnumbered.

The included map is more than enough.

When I started playing Mutants of Ixx I scrambled for other maps made by Skullfungus to use when the players tire of the starting area. All that scrambling proved useless. The included map is so evocative and full of inspiration that my players have yet to explore the entire map and a huge amount of content can be found (or easily created) in just two or three hexes.

The character sheet is awesome!

It immediately sets the tone and more than once players have taken the time to color their character sheets creating a vibrant piece of art.

Advantage is huge.

My players quickly learned that rolling advantage on their damage is a game changer and have become very adept at pulling of cool stunts and maneuvers to gain advantage. This has led to some exciting battles.

Most Battles last two or three turns.

Combat is quick, decisive and occasionally deadly. I love this.

The initiative system allows for a lot of teamwork.

Allowing the players to all act together on their turn is simple but powerful. PCs can easily work together to do things they couldn’t do on their own.

The level up system encourages ambition.

Having followers and commanding armies baked into and required by the levelling up system has encouraged my players to reach out and try a different playstyle than they normally do. Often the interactions between a PC and their follower have led to some of the best RP moments.

Sometimes a little bit of OP is not a bad thing.

I have watched Mind Blast decimate my big baddies and the result has been my players cheering and talking about that combat for several play sessions later. There are enough things to counter it (groups of enemies, robots who cannot be affected by mind blast, rolling poorly) that I am not worried about it becoming an “I win button” and the amount of fun they have when it works is worth it.

What I would do different next time

Armor is king.

There is really no reason for a character to not wear the maximum armor they can get a hold of. Max armor is fairly cheap and its ability to reduce all incoming damage by 3 is huge. If I did it over again, I would make the max armor very hard to get a hold of. Not something you could just buy, but instead the reward for finishing an epic campaign.

Mutations never run out.

In a year of play the only characters to have exhausted their mutations have been starting characters with only a d4 usage die for mutations. This is not a huge issue, because robbing my psycho mutant players of their precious mutation powers would be frustrating if it happened often, but as it is now, rolling the Mutation Die feels like useless record keeping since there is no real fear of it being exhausted. It is too easy to refresh the Mutation Die after a short rest. Going forward I will house rule that the Mutation Die requires resting overnight to reset.

What is there to buy?

The players do not have much to spend their money on or to save up for. This relies on the GM to create valuable items to purchase or excavate from old ruins. Which is okay, there is only so much room on two pages after all. I am partly handling this by creating cybernetic items my PCs can purchase and install at a high cost. If a GM knows they are going to be running a long-term game of Mutants of Ixx I would suggest spending a little time creating a high-end item list that will give the PCs something to drool over and save up for.

Players want more defensive abilities.

While my players absolutely love the system (even some of the crunchier holdouts that normally champion GURPS), the one thing I hear from several players is they wish there were some more defensive actions they can take on their turn since the system is auto-hit. I have handled this by adding some special mutations such as a healing ability (spend 1 STR to heal d4 HP) and defensive ones like protective thorns (d4 dam to opponents who hit you in melee).

An unwanted mutation can bum a player out.

Most of the time players are super excited after rolling their mutation after leveling up. The exception to this is that every once in a while, a player rolls a mutation that they just don’t like. It’s not even that they feel the mutation is weak, but it just doesn’t fit with their image of their character. My fix for this has been to have ancient tech in ruins that can allow a mutant to reroll one of their mutations before the machine breaks or having irradiated mushrooms that do the same thing, being sold by vendors for crazy high prices.

Some people rather go it alone.

Some of my players found controlling multiple characters to be distracting and slowed things down, but felt they wouldn't be weak in comparison if they did not take an apprentice. Next time I might limit players to one character.

I have no idea what a Panzerhound is.

Despite all this we did find after a year we were hungering for a game with more crunch, but two pages equaling a year of game time is pretty darn good!

TLDR: The Mutants of Ixx is light enough to fit on two pages, but crunchy enough for long-term play.

My players and I love this game and we are going to keep running it for the foreseeable future. Who knew so much goodness could be contained in two pages?!

It’s only 2$ which is a steal at double that price. Go show some love and pick it up at

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/274526/The-Mutants-of-Ixx?affiliate_id=568571

His Patreon is also filled with useful stuff that can often work great alongside Mutants of Ixx

https://www.patreon.com/skullfungus/posts

Some amazing Ixx paper minis are found here

https://gnarledmonster.itch.io/ixx-paper-minis

While not technically Ixx these paper minis fit the vibe

https://skullfungus.itch.io/warparmy

A second edition of Ixx now with more pages and a slightly tweaked system (note I have no experience with this version)

https://www.playrole.com/store/games/isle-of-ixx

Lastly, a handy pocketmod character sheet for the new version

https://uristmacitchio.itch.io/pocketfold-of-ixx

Swords Against Wizardry by Fritz Leiber

 I think of all the fantasy writers I have read Fritz Leiber may be the most skilled at writing longer fiction. The first story here illustrates that skill perfectly, describing in page after page the climbing of a mountain, I found I could not stop reading. It was a thrilling read and I think any lesser author would only get 3 or maybe 4 exciting sentences out of this action, but here Fritz makes a meal of it and you find you only want more.

This entry in the series is a strong one and has a bit more worldbuilding and sense of place than the others; not that the others were lacking.

The action in this book is a little less fast paced than the earlier entries, but I don't think most people will mind it at all.