Fault and Responsibility

That daily radish grind... Nothing is your fault, everything is your responsibility. Imagine your younger brother is playing a game of chess and asks you to take over. Would you feel bad about losing? The setup wasn't exactly "your choice". Would you feel awesome about winning? Those first moves may have very well set you …

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Into the Odds and Ends

Shipwright A few procedural bits and bots I've found enhances gameplay of Into the Odd (and other Mark of the Odd games): Rolling a Character Before rolling a new character, find which method you'll use (d6): Starter Package Table Starter Package Table Alternative Start Package Mutant from the Underground Simple Folk Unhuman This you a …

Out the Odd – Fleeing the Dungeon

This is how to cut an expedition short and remove tedious dungeon backtracking from your Mark of the Odd game: When the group flees danger to end their expedition and return to safety, each character rolls their three saves in order: STR save (vs harm and danger): if failed, you lose 1d12 STR. If killed, …

Stone-Cold Abstract Combat

Before zooming into full turn-by-turn combat between the player characters' party and their opponents, maybe you want to keep it abstract. Try this. Get a bag and some white stones and some red stones. Start by putting one white and one red in the bag.Add one white per uninjured member of the party.Add one red …

The Villainous Campaign

While playing the Disney Villainous board game, I was struck by how dynamic and chock full of interesting characters, places, and artifacts the animated Disney world is. Maybe it's playing too much Kingdom Hearts, maybe it's my love of Electric Bastionland that, by "word of god", snuck Disney princesses into its Oddendum (see the Fullstister …

The Two Rules

MORK BORG. It's a grim fantasy RPG I like for it's dark tone and striking, very striking design. It obviously had an influence on Skorne, including the Revelation reference of breaking the seven seals to bring out the end of a doomed world. Side note: I can do without the filth of MORK BORG. It's …

monostat

you are a 1 things that are trivial are a 0, you can do them easily things you can do with effort are a 1, you can do them things just outside your skill are a 2, you cannot do them unless you get the upper hand from adequate help, training, or tools things way …

3×3 Dungeons

As a follow-up to this post about the optimum number of rooms in a dungeon. The most manageable and memory-friendly number of rooms is 7 +/- 2. So 5 to 9, the reverse of your 9 to 5 office job. From Skorne (find it PWYW here): “Dungeons” refers to any adventure site filled with danger …

Odd Notation: Monsters

If you’re reading this, it’s likely you’ve run or played in a games in the Mark of the Odd family, be it Into the Odd or Runecairn or Weird North. I myself have run Cairn, Electric Bastionland, Maze Rats, and Mausritter and of course I’ve also run my own Skorne and Adventure Hour!, which trace …

Skorne 1.3: The Rules

After reading this interview from Sean McCoy, I've elected to make my systems on itch.io, including both Skorne and Adventure Hour! free/pay what you want. They're Creative Commons, so have at it. This then is an announcement for continued development and playtesting for Skorne as changes are made. It started with an idea: what if …