Rules

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:

[Might] Might, [Grace] Grace, [Focus] Focus, [HP] HP, [Armour] Armour, Weapon/Ability ([Damage])[Motivation] 

• Ability: [Ability]

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.

Olobosk.

Rove Gear.

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.

Another rule coalesced from the incredible advice from Electric Bastionland.

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.

Olobosk Out. 

Officially introducing Rove – my take on the micro RPG.

I have been wanting to create something like this ever since I stumbled upon Damnation of the Judgement Kings by Vandel Arden and his subsequent Microblades.

Those drove me to create Milliamp for Electric Bastionland after finally getting Silent Titans to the table and seeing how fun and easy it was to run an Into the Odd game.

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:

1. Short, concise rules, in your pocket.
2. 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.

That’s it for now.

Olobosk