The Dreamlands: TYRANT - The King of All Snakes

 

Last of the Dreamland's most notable inhabitants, for now. I'm dreaming up more about what kinds of hermits could be living in there, but noting concrete yet. Not entirely thrilled with the layout, but it's good enough for now. The HP and attacks are all dependent on the heads according to rules for a Hydra, so I tried to make that trackable, but it feels cluttered and taking up too much space. I might revisit this.

The Dreamlands: The Dreamwoods General

 

This is the general information about the Dreamwoods. Perhaps Slumberwoods would be a better idea so as not to be to repetitive. In any case, these are the general things to know about it. Arborix, being a special thing, has been detailed before, and The King of Snakes is currently in the making, getting at least a page itself. The green box will hopefully at one point be substituted by illustrations of Yip-Yip Birds or forest gnomes, but yeah, this is it for now for this region. I might at one point dream up a guide for the colours of dreams and running a forest gnome village or something, but for now I'm taking my dreams to the King of Snakes. Should you want to submit some ideas, feel free to pitch in with what other kind of magic/abilities the forest gnomes could have.

The more I am dreaming up these things, the more I find that OSE might not be the best system to run this in this whimsical, dreamlike way, and that perhaps TROIKA! or RISUS might do better. But for now, for making this world, I will keep doing the OSE thing, as it makes me learn and understand the system more.

Children of Bastion: Looking for Cat

 So here's the deal.

I've been working on a game for use in class that uses the frame-work of Electric Bastionland's map-making and some of Dreaming Dragonslayer's tips for playing with children. I don't have time or energy to type it out and translate it and everything, but I hope to soon make an updated version that works better.

I want to talk about it though because recently on a forum we got talking about happy games and why there are so few of them where it seems to be "baked in", while there are a lot where horror or grim nihilism seem to be baked in to them.

This game is made to let children create a world and play it, so there's a lot of cute happy and silly energy.

In today's session (which accompanies the story where Mary and Martha are sad because their brother died) the pupil's character got a letter from their grandma that she was sad because her cat (Mimi) was lost. The pupil's character came from a neighborhood in Bastion where people like cats a lot. (determined through session zero like play somewhere before) The PC would then go and look for the cat. Using the map to navigate was fun since he had to navigate the map we drew together, choosing a path (letting his bike be converted to sail the canal and meeting a class of kindergartners who asked how that bike worked, ...). Arrived at Grandma's place we got a description of the cat (a black cat with a red ribbon) and went looking. 

He decided he had seen the cat on the way and I went with it and so we went on the way. We crossed the group of kindergartners again who were talking about a cat they had seen with a red ribbon. Perking up at this he asked what colour the cat had. The kids said 'white', and he started laughing like I told him the best joke ever. Then he asked if anyone had seen a black cat. A kid said 'Yes, I did! It had a blue ribbon!" (He laughed again. I guess I'm a genius?) and then he asked if someone had seen a black cat with a red ribbon and one kid had. He convinced the teacher and the class to show him where. He had bid them all goodbye and gave them all a hug, ending up hugging the las one, realizing it was a black cat with a red ribbon (the end of class bell had just gone) and he rushed it over to grandma being treated to cookies and having a big old party.

All in all a big success.

The Dreamlands: Arborix - King of the Forest

 

The people who have been following along my dreaming and drawing of the Dreamlands that I started to share recently are already somewhat familiar with Arborix, the Forest Dragon in Hex 15. Seeing their popularity on the NSR discord and on the Cauldron, I decided to finish them up well enough to share even here. Some things have changed from the previous version and I've attempted to make them some custom made spells. Seeing as the spells are mainly for them I'm not really worrying about it but once people play in this world they might want to get the opportunity to learn magic from Arborix and then I'll need to figure out some stuff about what level these spells would be. (Since these would be pretty fun to have as spells) I will accept guidance on this here. Anyway. The next people I've been dreaming more about (and who have changed a bit since the hex-map) are the bee-shepherds from hex 1. People wanted to learn about the Yip-Yip Birds as well, and that will come up soon to I think. Whatever comes next here will come next. For now enjoy this dragon. Feel free to ask questions, but I won't promise to give answers to them. I hope the resolution is enough to read. (It gets bigger when you click on the picture)

The Dreamlands - Designing a hex of hexes using OSE

So, life has been hectic and I haven't blogged a lot. I still commute to work though, using the train and walking some distances. As such I've started to dream up a fantasy world using mainly the wilderness encounter tables from Old School Essentials. It's both escapism and learning the GM side of the game and deepening my understanding of how these things work.

I had tried these things before, but always got way to ambitious in my scope, so the projects fell to the side, having learned from them, but not finishing them in the least. This might be another one of these, or it might be the one. I don't know. For now it's just an escapism thing that I'm willing to share with the world.

So, I made a hex of 19 hexes itself, since I think that's how it works in OSE. One big hex fits four small hexes (I think 24 miles is the big one, 6 is the small one). As such some of these hexes are actually hexes crossing the border into the next big hex (I think 1, 3, 8, 12, 17 & 19). But once again. Keeping it small, not worrying about that now.

Liking how the Black Hack (2e) did hex-map randomization, I took that as a start and set 1-3 on a d6 as grassland, 4-5 as another randomly rolled type of land (1d8 and each is a terrain type other than settled and city) and 6 as special, meaning that it would be out of the normal rules. If grassland was rolled on 4-5 with the second roll it would become special too. I think that was how I did it.

Then I rolled one encounter on the Random Wilderness Encounter Tables for each hex and started interpreting things. Asking myself questions, interpreting results, moving things around to where it seemed more reasonable. For example I rolled a small Roc for the grassland in 9, but wondered where it would nest. The only hills hex rolled is hex 6 so I ruled that the nest is there, but it's hunting grounds cover multiple hexes, up till 9, making it be a reasonable encounter in this place. Sometimes my imagination started to run on it's own and I added things here and there to fit to the inspiration goals/guides I set for myself.

Anyway. The main part is now done, so I am sharing it. Now the idea is to work on the different parts on it, detailing things slowly and dreaming things up a bit more. Who knows what will happen.