The 52 Pages 3.0

Prodded on by a satisfied player's long delayed post after a minicon one-shot game last year, I have finally gotten around to finishing my revised 52 Pages, a graphically enhanced rules outline for a heartbreaker based mostly on the Basic and 3rd editions of the world's most cautiously-referenced roleplaying game.

The most obvious update is in the fonts, at the same time calling back to the roots with a Futura-clone in the text and letting go of Berlin, the Papyrus that nobody talks about, in favor of the classier Alegreya. The main "lore" change is a clearer definition between characters' hit points - now called "hero points" with a lower-case hp, and serve to shield characters from physical damage and injury effects - and monster hit points (HP), which represent physical damage more abstractly.

The main change to play is a reordering of the combat sequence so that melee no longer goes first, and "run up to your face and hit you" is now intuitively supported. This has been a long time coming, seeing that  whenever I have run the game in one-shots, melee-first was the hardest thing to remember and implement. The solution was easy - a second move after attacks that counts as an attack and may be made by the engaged (skip attack to disengage, but you must survive melee).

Here's the link, also available in the bar to the right. I realize that the game is much more viable when you add rules dealing with levels 4 to 6 and I have those mostly written, with a load of additional spells and classes/races. By the end of April you should see another post with the 52 Pages Next!

 

 

One Page Dungeon Contest 2020: Stela Obliterata

In these pandemic times, I have summoned seven redoubtable players from my previous one-shot games and campaigns to join in a weekly online game, following the path of least resistance to Roll20 and the well-supported, and still world's most popular, 5th edition D&D. For this year's One Page contest I thought I'd work-up an area based on the campaign.

Here I must ask my current players to look no further!

The campaign is set in a region of Mittellus, far away from where eight years ago the Game of Iron campaign began. It is a desert-ringed land, culturally combining ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, the ruling empire a torpid and death-obsessed metropolis amid concentric canals that divert its life-giving river. There is more promise in the vassal kingdoms. The campaign began at the edge of one of these, Wahattu, which had recently seen its neighbor Dulsharna fall to incursions of gnolls.

My principal goal was to make this campaign last longer in game time than previous ones, which had compressed three or more years of real-time play into less than a game-year. To this end, characters would spend months between levels training up. I also wanted to give the players more of a stake in the land by having them sponsor and economically improve the last bordering village, Alakran.

After about 12 sessions they have had some outdoor and social adventures, and run through two adapted scenarios I placed in the map (Jason Morningstar's Khas Fara from Fight on! #2, their introduction to Alarkan; and following a newly dry streambed to relieve a family of flying camels from drought, they found it had been diverted to feed the fell doings of the Sinister Shroom, whose Pod Caverns lay below).

I might have more to say about this low-level economic game, and about 5th edition in general. later on. But right now, here's the entry ... wherein the players have only ventured to, and been soundly thrashed in, the bronze cedar tomb.