I got really inspired maybe a year or two ago when watching the Castlevania Netflix series. I started putting together a setting module for it but it lingered in a half started state – as do most of my projects.
But I picked it up again at the start of the month – I wanted something to run for Halloween.
As it’s the last thing I was working on – and I didn’t want to spend too long on it – I’ve built it for Rove.
It started as one card like Tomb of the Gilded Dead but I had too many ideas and wanted to give them some space. So its 3 (soon to be six i think). Perhaps one day I’ll return and flesh it out fully – I have many more ideas than I could fit.
Anyway – it’s kind of three things.
Monster Hunters
The first is just some evocative classes and monsters to fight with them. I wanted a monster hunting vibe – so the core abilities of the classes make them better at killing than normal Rove Characters.
This is the core idea of Rove – modular rules you can just add to to create the vibe you’re after.
The monsters are supposed to be nasty – but made much easier if you can research and gather the right gear to take them on (Silver, Wooden stakes, etc)
80% of the monsters aren’t finished – i’ll add them to the itch page in the next few days hopefully.
Setting Generator
Velorain is the setting. Everyone knows what it is – generic dark fantasy eastern europe kind of place. Dracula country. I wanted a generator so that it can fit on a business card but also so that it could create unique relationships each time.
I think I succeeded. The main relationships are
The Castle & its villain
The Villains & their Horde
The Temples/Villages & their Oppressing Castles
The Villages & Nearby Dungeons
As with all my work (and especially Rove) a lot of the connections and setting info is pretty implicit and relies on an experienced Referee and a general knowledge of tropes. I should probably write a post about my thoughts on that sometime.
Anyway – here’s an example of what it can do:
Take your dice and roll them – I arranged mine to be a spread out nicely:
The Village rolls were a little duplicated – so i retcon-ed a couple of them to get some more variety.
Then you link them up. The rules say all neighbouring dice are linked – but as always – take that with some creative liberty. Then the closest dungeons to the castles determine what kind of a force the villain there is mustering – and Voila! My Velorain:
Lastly, this one felt necessary for a Vania-esque setting. This time I was inspired by the derelict ship generator from Mothership’s Dead Planet. Figured i’d try and fit a similar table into a business card. Obviously I made some concessions but I think it worked out.
Heres what I rolled to give you a flavour of what it can do:
Ill hopefully give this a proper go in the session I run with it later this month.
So that’s Midnight Hunt. Pretty speedy production on this one so I don’t think it’s my finest work – but you have all the images – feel free to run it! I dare you!
If you do, let me know how it goes. If you like it – consider throwing me a buck or two on itch.io – thats also how you can get a more convenient PDF of all the pages.
I’ll try and put together the cards for the remaining monsters soon. I’ll stick it all up on the itch once it’s done.
This next card was difficult to design. It’s been the most difficult one so far to condense into two sides of a business card, yet perhaps has resulted in the one with the most “at the table” utility.
Enemies, or opponents, encounters – Monsters – are one of the core pillars of OD&D and the majority of all TTRPGs since. They make up a good portion of the content in a typical session.
Most TTRPGS provide you with a good list of them to pull from, or rely on adventures and supplements to provide them. I think Rove ultimately will do this too, but I wanted to provide a Referee with the mechanical stuffing necessary to run them in as best I could.
My goal with this card when I set out was to create a list of example monsters, some of your generic fantasy creatures, to illustrate what to aim for. Here are my 3 tiers of basic beasty I came up with initially:
Skeleton
4 HP, Rusty Sword (d4)Dusty bones held together by ancient curses, covered in the tattered remains of what it was buried in. Hobbles menacingly toward any living creature, envious of what it lacks.
Paralysing Glare: Focus Save or reduce Grace to 0 for d6 Turns.
Orc
15 Might, 12 HP, 1 Armour, Serrated Blade (d8, Bleed)A hulking brute of greenish grey skin, fitted with battle scarred scalemail. They only respect strength, using intimidation and violence until put in their place by a more powerful foe. Is ultimately a coward.
Bleed: After causing Damage, victim takes 1 Might Damage per Turn until the wound can be treated
Dragon
20 Might, 15 Grace, 15 Focus, 24 HP, 1 Armour, Teeth & Claws (d10), Fire Breath (d8, Blast)An enormous winged lizard, bright red scales and gnarled spikes cover its serpentine body. Covets its vast hoard of gold and jewels hidden in its lair. Intelligent, vain, manipulative and above all rapacious.
Swallow Whole: Grace Save or be consumed in a single bite. Take d6 Damage from stomach acid each Turn. If not rescued within 4 Turns, suffocate.
I think doing this helped define in my mind what an Enemy is in Rove. So I produced an actual template:
Ultimately this let me break down how I design monsters into 5 key aspects; Stats, Survivability, Damage, Motive and Abilities.
The first three are fairly basic, but require some fine-tune balancing to make them fun and easy to use in the system. These are effectively what dictate the challenge of the enemy.
Bigger number mean badder foe, mix to your liking.
This is kind of my philosophy for all RPG combat. These numbers are largely arbitrary but understanding what each does to a combat encounter is key to providing appropriate challenges to a party of players.
Stats are effectively resistances to Player abilities/machinations/etc. The exact flavour of Stat can give a sense of weaknesses/strength and provide some opportunity for Players to plan and optimise their strategy to exploit/avoid them. I am always wary about making these numbers high however. They only add opportunities to say no to your Players or deny them opportunities to shine. They should be used judiciously to give a sense of fairness or verisimilitude.
HP/Armour only serve to either elongate or hasten combat. The bigger the numbers, the more rounds of combat there will be. With the variance in player HP/Armour and Damage output, it can never be an exact science, but its the dial you play with. The distinction between HP and Armour is largely of taste, but large HP can give Players a sense of size whereas Armour more of a sense of “unstoppability”. Sort of. It’s definitely subtle and in reality just gives a Referee something to anchor mid-battle descriptions off of.
Damage also serves as a timer to combat, but more importantly, it serves as punishment for poor planning and decisions. This is how a Referee maims and kills the Characters. Bear that in mind when making these numbers high.
Then we get to the interesting aspects. The things that truly distinguish enemies in the fiction of the game.
Motive I truly think is the core of any good enemy design. A good motive and random stats trumps intricate balanced stats and no motivation every time. The motive provides the Referee with everything they need to run the enemy. Knowing what drives it, lets you extrapolate to any action they might take, often without too much imagination or real thinking. The closest TTRPGs have to NPC AI.
Finally Abilities. This is what makes enemy design and running fun. Cool things for them to do not only helps distinguish one encounter from another, but provides endless opportunities for thematic reinforcement and tactical challenge.
So what does this mean for the Rove card?
Well I tried fervently to turn all this into a series of nested tables. I broke down every type of ability I could think of into its core components. I think I actually did a fairly good job. However, tables are terribly inefficient with space, and in Rove, space is my main limitation. So I scrapped the confusing nested tables with my frankly inscrutable notation system for a much more straightforward list of ability types to add challenge to an Enemy. The tables did survive in the form of my tiered challenge table to help guide the Referee when picking numbers.
Vulnerabilities naturally evolved from thinking about the opposite of abilities. If you can increase an Enemies potential challenge, you can also decrease it.
The result
The first side was a more straightforward rules reference, pulled pretty much entirely from Trash Planet.
The second I am much more proud of.
Here I crammed as many examples of what I mean in as possible, so in theory you could pick from these lists to construct a perfectly feasible beasty from these alone.
I by no means think these lists are exhaustive, but they are pretty comprehensive. I have already had a lot of success keeping this card on me when I run any RPG now. It serves as great inspiration when I need a quick random encounter.
If there is any card I am particularly keen to hear feedback on, it’s this. So if you do use it, be sure to let me know!
That’s it for this time. Catch you for the next one.
Of the indie “OSR” TTRPGs i have come across in my time in this scene, I feel like one of the main areas of innovation has been in equipment and encumbrance.
The Black Hack has a number of items equal to your Strength score, Into the Odd has Bulky items, Knave has slots, etc. Tracking individual pounds and ounces, while “immersive” in theory, is a huge pain to actually do. What these games figured out is that to have fun, tracking inventory needs to be simple and intuitive, otherwise players will basically ignore it.
But “Simple and Intuitive” can also be a bit boring, another way to lose player attention and cause them to ignore/forget the rules. Whenever i think about making encumbrance fun, I always think to Logan Knight’s fantastic “arts & crafts” solution.
Logan’s work here was a big inspiration for Rove in general. I want lots of things to play with. I want to take advantage of the physicality of playing with business card sized things at the table.
With that comes the first rule for this new card:
Carrying Capacity. Players write all their Gear on their Character Card. If it fits they can carry it (at the Referee’s discretion), unless it’s Bulky.
Simple and straightforward. This utilises the physical limitation of the Character Card itself. I have kept the Bulky rule from ItO, its elegant and enables the Referee to give the players some engaging decisions when given too many big things to carry.
Then, we take a bit of a tangent.
The cart is inspired by the Caravan sheet from Luka Rejec’s UVG. A shared resource for all the players to manage. Making them printable paper items gives the Referee even more opportunities for mischievous fun! I love the idea of a player losing their backpack and getting to tear it up at the table, or keeping hold of a lost cart and presenting it back to the party dramatically when they recover it.
This is the kind of unique direction I think Rove can take that other RPGs can’t. Put a pin here, we will return to this idea in later cards I am sure.
The rest of the Gear card is fairly straightforward. Rove uses a simple gold standard:
Gold Standard. Commerce is conducted with gold coins (g). Guide prices for common items & services are overleaf.
I toyed with using Gold to silver to copper or similar like I have seen in many other ItO style games but I always find coin counting like that busy work generally, and only adds to confusion. One number to keep track of money is simple. A bunch of coins is a fun challenge to present the players but this system does;t stop that necessarily, just puts in on the Referee to do the economics.
I have a little advice on how to utilise treasure:
Treasure. Should be hard for Characters to move. If its not Bulky, or outright impossible for 1 person to move, it should present some other logistical challenge.
The rest of this side of the card has some common tags I like to add to gear, as well as the main place where the Bulky rule will be:
Bulky. Awkward to carry and/or requires two hands to use. A Character can only carry 2 Bulky items at once. Any more and their HP is reduced to 0.
Reload. Takes a Turn after firing to ready.
Area. Damage all targets in an area. Damage is rolled separately for each. If it’s unclear how many targets are affected, roll the weapon’s Damage dice to determine the number.
Breach. Weapons that ignore Armour.
Bleed. After causing Damage, victim takes 1 Damage per Turn until they Rest.
Vorpal. Cause immediate Death at 0 HP.
Then the entire rest of the card is example gear, like that found in ItO books.
The biggest challenge on this card was the balancing of prices. I think I have done an okay job but I would treat these prices as guidelines rather than hard rules. I have certainly erred more on the side of making things too expensive rather than cheap. I really dislike that in most games, my money only really matters when gaining XP or buying absurdly expensive things like magic items. I want to provide some degree of choice and characters “saving up” for better gear.
I also categorised things in a way that is somewhat consistent between armour and weapons. I have seen this in a couple of other ItO Hacks. 3 Categories, Simple, Martial and Heavy. I think this helps when coming up with gear for NPCs or new Characters to know the numbers/tags of the items they have, you just have to add flavour.
I think this list is fairly comprehensive to 99% of mundane items your likely to encounter in Rove. I want to leave it open to creating unique and more interesting gear in future modules.
On that note, I do have some exciting ideas in the works…
Just a tease, but I’m excited to see where I can take this project!
That’s all for this month. Checkout my Patreon for access to the Print files for Gear and the other cards.
So those are probably my biggest inspirations for this project. Milliamp proved to me that what I wanted to do was feasible, and actually really convenient.
So these first two cards are laser focused on the main two design goals for Rove:
Short, concise rules, in your pocket.
Goodies for your players.
For the referee, just an overview and a quick reference guide to the most common rules you will need. Honestly, this first card is probably more of a formality than anything else. We need a basis from which all the other cards come from and that lays the foundations for how this game works. It does that job but in reality once you know these rules you won’t be needing it often.
But that’s fine, there are plenty more ideas I have in the pipeline that justify having the card with you at the table. At the end of the day, you still don’t need to carry a kilo of book with you to the table for the odd rules dispute.
Here is the pièce de résistance of Rove – the player card or character sheet. Why has every RPG I have played never given me a rules summary on the reverse of my Character sheet? It’s so simple and is a massive quality of life improvement.
What this card does is legitimately let you just sit down with a group of people and just begin playing. Hand these out to players, and just ask them to make a character. At the end of the night, stick it in your wallet and you’re sorted. It’s a little thing, but this is ideal for one-shots or convention games I have found. It just cuts down so much on the bulk I feel weighed down with when running anything else.
Why so smol tho?
It’s a psychological thing, and it might be personal, but having a physically small object defining the box with which you are playing in, just gives me so much more space and mental freedom to do what I love – running the game! It’s why I find running games from one-page dungeons and their ilk so freeing. I don’t have any page flipping to do, or have my nose in a book while I’m playing with my friends. I can look my players in the eyes and improvise anything that isn’t immediately available to me or not memorised.
That to me is the peak of this hobby – and I think Rove goes a good way to getting you there, I hope.
You can download the print files for Core and Player cards on Itch.io or over on Patreon for free.
More coming soon! I have already added the print files for Travel on Patreon. Print versions are in the works and I have many more ideas in the pipeline.
So I wrote this digital character generator forever ago for Trash Planet Epsilon 5, but i couldn’t get it working exactly how I wanted. I have since fixed the major defects in a burst of interest in perchance.org again.
Its also on Itch.io for convenience. Perchance.org is really cool – I have seen a few RPG tools on it before and had a lot of fun diving into creating stuff with it.
Its by no means perfect! I might revisit it in the future as the layout isn’t great I don’t think. Its also basically useless on mobile which is a shame. I am really bad a responsive CSS so I’m going to park that one for now!
This generator is a pretty good template now for producing other similar Mark of the Odd games so I might experiment in the future. I will likely put one together for Rove soon.
I am in the process of writing my modular, micro format, Into the Odd Hack – called Rove. I have been coming up with concise and practical – at the table – rules for things I have never found satisfying solutions for.
One of those things is travel. I think my unwritten rule for travel is to simply avoid doing it if you can. If it’s not interesting, doesn’t serve a purpose or isn’t the point of your game, why do it? Players just arrive at the entrance to the dungeon, just outside the town, etc. Job done!
But if the need for some sort of survival/travel arises – can I have rules I could whip out and run with on the fly? (TL;DR Yes i can and here they are)
So let’s explain my design goals and constraints:
Map independence – I don’t want to have to rely on hexes, a properly scaled map, a fully mapped point crawl, etc. But I don’t want to exclude them either. These rules should try to accommodate all.
Quick & Practical – I don’t want a multi-step procedure I have to follow. It must be simple and quick. It should feel like combat in ItO games – you find out the results of the players choices quickly. That doesn’t necessarily mean deadly. Unlike combat you can’t avoid travel with clever positioning.
Short, concise, modular – The design goals of Rove.
Quite quickly I came up with 3 core tenants of wilderness travel that I needed to fulfil, each relatively independent of each other but could be used in some combination:
Travel – The actual movement part.
Survival – Not dying along the way.
Obstacles – Things that make it difficult getting there.
Travel
So my first constraint – the map problem. I think you can do away with issues of distance and travel times. They can be abstracted like they are in combat. Not important, but its part of your job as the Referee to try and remain consistent. When players travel, they do so between two points, that is all the rules need to cover at a fundamental level. As long as players get interrupted at semi-regular intervals with some game mechanics – you are good. So the first rule:
Distant. Exact Travel times & distances are unimportant but should be fairly consistent. (Roughly equal points on a map, a hex on a grid, 6 miles, etc)
Wherever I have run travel – the main problem I have is meshing the rules and my players desire to problem solve around them – like I want them to do with combat. They want to find a shortcut, travel at night, travel a more direct route, etc. Unless the map itself has been designed with this in mind I never find good way of tackling that mechanically. I tried to do this in the Will of Rot with the Rottwood getting in the way a bit but its not easy and I don’t think I succeeded.
So How about a sort of push your luck mechanic? A depleting resource of the potential travel you can do every day. You can go slow and steady and have a fairly hassle free time, or you can belt it and maybe hit more challenges. This way the players desire to problem solve can be funnelled into a discussion about what is worth risking.
What I settled on was a depleting dice pool that you roll each time you travel. You use the dice pool to determine if your attempt the travel was successful, your chances of which decrease as the dice pool depleates:
Travel. When Characters travel to a Distant location, roll 4d6. If the total is ≥7, they make it there unhindered. Reduce the number of dice rolled by 1 for each consecutive roll per day. Sleep restores Travel rolls to 4d6.
Delay. If the total is <7, the Characters are waylaid by an Encounter or something else, determined by the Referee.
Every day the players have 4d6 to start with. Your rolling to beat 6 and each subsequent roll your more likely to fail and get waylaid by something. I think these probabilities are just right! Your almost guaranteed to succeed your first roll of the day, then that drops off slightly to a 9 in 10 chance which is still pretty good. But then you have a sharp drop off to just over 50%, a gamble, fairly close to that sweet 70% chance that feels “fair” to our monkey brains. Great! I am happy.
So what delays the characters? Again, I want to be loose but give my advice. It’s ultimately down to the Referee who will have context to inform them, but generally it just needs to be a new or different challenge for them to overcome instead:
Encounter. Can be an Enemy, Hazard, non-hostile NPC, etc. It should in some way challenge or disrupt the Character’s progress.
With just what I have covered so far – you have a simple push your luck game for the players to engage with. Do they risk a roll on 2d6 or just setup camp already? If the area is dangerous, they could go very slowly and only move once a day. Perfect opportunity to push a time pressure on them somehow to make that choice difficult!
But we can keep going. We need another level for the risk averse and another for the bold and stupid:
Mounts. When Travelling on horseback or equivalent, begin each day by rolling 5d6 instead.
Forced March. When 1d6 would be rolled for Travel, Characters can forgo Sleep and instead roll 2d6 again.
Now we have a reason for horses, you basically can travel twice a day effectively risk free. So twice as fast (sorta?). And if you really want to, you can wander around in delirium. Maybe worth the risk if players are running for their lives from something nasty in the night.
The only other thing missing for me is navigation. What if the players are going somewhere they don’t have a map for, or can’t see where they are going? I still think this is another trapping of common tropes. Generally Characters have a map and can discern direction. Getting lost generally isn’t fun or interesting. The interesting parts still are what happens along the way, the encounters, the locations, etc. So satiate my need for “complete” rules, I think its still useful to have something for if the Referee does deem it relevant or important.
Navigation. It is generally assumed Characters have a map and can discern their heading. If not, when Travelling one Character makes a Focus Save. On a failure they stray: Roll d8 for direction: 1;N, 2;E 3;S 4;W 5;NE 6;SE 7;NW 8;SW
Darkness. Makes Navigation harder. Always require a Focus Save, with Disadvantage for Characters with no map or direction.
(Focus is WIL or the mental stat basically)
Survival
Onto survival. ItO does have its own rules for this in the form of being Deprived where you cannot Rest effectively and thus regain HP. However that does not incur compounding detriments which I think should be a feature. If your out in the wilderness there should be tension when you get down to those last few rations.
Hunger. When a Character goes a day without a meal, they lose 1 Might.
Thirst. When a Character goes a day without water, they lose half their Might. After 3 days a Character is Dead.
Might being Rove’s STR from ItO or your “real” health. This way you can push past hunger if you’re out of supplies, but you risk being an easy meal for some beasty should you come across one. Also I only separate hunger and thirst because I like the idea of Players being stuck in a desert and being far more desperate to search for water than anything else. In most other environments I would probably treat them as one.
Sleep. When a Character goes a day or more without at least a few hours of sleep, their Saves suffer Disadvantage.
I think sleep should be relatively optional. Plenty of times I have run games where players explicitly want to push on into the night and I don’t want them to be immensely dis-incentivised from doing so. I certainly want it to be the risky option though.
Lastly I wanted to simplify supplies. What I settled on is a fairly common pattern (I was inspired specifically by Into the Wyrd and Wild here). I expect players to track supplies but it should be straightforward. Very little actual accounting to do, just tallying really. I toyed with separating foraging and hunting, but if the Referee wants players to roll on an wildlife chart to discern exactly what they find that’s their prerogative. The results would effectively be the same – you get more supply. Also, like in my desert scenario, you may just not be able to find food/water easily.
Supplies. All the food, water, etc, a person needs to survive for one day in the wild. 1 Supply = 1 Day = 1 Gold (G).
Hunt/Forage. Counts as Travelling. If the total is ≥7, Characters find 1 Supply each. <7 and they have an Encounter. May not be possible in all environments.
Obstacles
Finally we have problems the players face along the way. This is absolutely driven by adventure context here for the specifics of what the players come across.
Hazards. Environmental problems for the Characters to overcome. (Cliff edge, river rapids, quicksand, landslide, etc.)
I do want a way to distinguish mountains from plains, but I don’t want a list of a million different terrain types and their disadvantages. Specifically in my games also I like having weird scenery with specific effect (See The Will of Rot again). In general there are two types of terrain: It’s easy so it doesn’t matter, or it slows you down:
Difficult Terrain. If the terrain is difficult to traverse (mountains, swamp, etc) Delay occurs on Travel rolls <9 instead.
Now difficult terrain just nudges players to slow down and have more dice to roll during Travel. But regardless its now more likely your guna come across something along the way; monsters hidden in the reeds or crumbling cliff faces.
To end off this section, just my advice on weather. Like with all obstacles, it should only be included if its going to create some problem for the players to solve. If the adventure already has enough of that, it can be forgotten I think.
Weather. Depends on environment and terrain, but should only be included if it can present some challenge to the Characters. Example:
Roll d6 each day:
~ 1-3: Mild and uneventful.
~ 4-5: Torrential rain; Difficult Terrain.
~ 6: Freezing fog; Darkness & open water freezes solid.
And that’s it! I have put it together in a business card format like all Rove rules will be:
I have tested it a bit and it seemed to work how I had hoped. Quick to use, straightforward and hopefully covers 90% of the circumstances you are likely to come across as a referee.
If you end up using these in your game, let me know. Id love to hear how they worked out. Likewise if I have missed something glaringly obvious to you I want to know!
