stevemangames

Mind you I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, but after looking over the satement on WotC's new OGL plan. My reading of it comes into three bullet points. 1. This does not look like smokescreen for something more sinister. By stating publicly that they are not longer going to try to deauthorize the OGL 1.0a in such a public way, they are making it harder to try to deauthorize it in the future. 2. The SRD 5.1 being released under Creative Commons is a nothing-burger legally. The SRD is just common ideas to fantasy gaming and game rules, both things that re not copyrightable. However, by releasing it into the CC, they're ensuring that people will still use their derivative works. This is a bit sinister, as it completely undercuts Paizo/Kobold Press/Green Ronin's ORC license. 3. This is a double-edged sword for the industry at large. While it brought people's attention away from D&D for a time and got more attention on other games, it also ensures that D...

Where have I been? Mostly focusing on work and managing pain. However, a discord server specifically about small indie videogame development had a 48 hour game jam. I don't make videogame beyind poking around in RPG Maker for fun, nothing completed. But the rules of the jam did not ban tabletop games. The theme was Nostalgia so... I made a mostly complete OSR-adjacent trpg based on my nostalgia for Exodus: Ultima III (NES) and the DOS versions of U4 and U5. It's lacking dungeon creation guidelines, examples for traps, and setting information beyond telling you to go play U3, U4, and U5. I would also like to test it a bit more than just mathhammer and asking a friend of his opinions. It was the only tabletop game so the admins, while impressed, aren't putting it in the rankings instead just summarily creating a "tabletop games" subcategory and giving best in category to me. Anyway, here it is. https://www.mediafire.com/file/om5y7gbaahzi1vs/Ultima_TRPG.pdf/file Whi...

Second half of 2022 a heck I wanted to use this blog more but didn't. Have been working on my Dungeonpunk game. Overhauled my dice mechanic in a bout of inspiration and an inability to leave well enough alone. Picked up Battletech thanks to moving closer to one of my oldest friends who is huge into it. Finally refined the definition of the genre term I've been using for my Dungeonpunk setting. I have very little interaction with WotC's Eberron setting beyond meming about the lolipope but I think it als counts as anachro-fantasy as do most of the later Final Fantasies. Anachro-fantasy Anachro-fantasy is a neoglism that describes high fantasy settings where everyday magic is so integrated into everyone's lives, the people basically live like the modern day. It is a setting type where the referee or author selects a technology level for most things between the medieval and Renaissance era, then sprinkles in items from post-WWII. It marries the aesthetics of medieval fantas...

This thread gets posted time and time again on /tg/ about what terms do you use for various magic-users and the like so I thought I'd sit down and right out the variety of jargons for mages in my own pulp-fantasy worldbuilding project (the one run with 10D6/dungeonpunk, not BX D&D). And if you're one of those loons who shits on worldbuilding all the time as a distraction, suck eggs. You're wrong and your games are bad. Magic-User Anyone who uses magic as their trade. If you use magic, you are a magic-user. Mage A term magic-users use to refer to themselves in a casual sense, often prefixed or suffixed with a description of what they do. Life mages are magical physicians, Fire mages throw fireballs, Death mages futz with the powers of life and death, magewrights make minor magical trinkets. The only exception is Potion-makers, they don't identify as mages normally. Specialties Abjurer, Pyromancer, Necromancer, Artificers, etc. Within the academic circles of sorcery, ...

 The radio silence lately is because I'm not running a game, prepping a game, or (sadly) in a game as a player right now. I've had a few false starts trying to join games, mostly OSR or (natch) 5E, but all of them have either fizzled after a session or two or just never got out of the DM going "we'll be playing soon!" anyway, I have been doing a thing tho https://dungeonpunk.fandom.com/wiki/DungeonPunk_Wiki My homebrew system has its own wiki now For someone who loves classic D&D, the system I made is not classic D&D. It's a strange middle ground and I love it. Please take a look.

The hardest part of writing for me is looking at a blank page, so I tend to lean heavily on random generators for a kickstart. While there were a few magic item related ones out there none of them really followed the rules I wanted so I made it myself. It should be pretty self-explanatory, It does not create the item's story for you, you still gotta do that yourself. But for me just generating the statline is enough to develop enough of a story/description for it to work. Link: https://www.mediafire.com/file/mp7t9l15gtk2ibs/Magic_Item_Tables.pdf/file Here are some examples I made with it (system neutral terminology so they can be used in any game, just think on how the terms apply to your game of choice): ISHISHAKU The blood sorcerer Hakanaimaru was a greed man, with a strong lust for gemstone and coin. Hakanaimaru toiled for years in his laboratory trying to convert coal to diamonds but to no avail. Then one day he struck upon an idea. To summon an earth spirit to search out mount...