Ostensible Cat

Some of you may remember many years ago, an initiative in the OSR Blogosphere to encourage folks to create a shared world sandbox adventure setting known as the Sea of O'Sr. Here's one of the main blog posts about it from the Lands of Ara blog:  http://carterscartopia.blogspot.com/p/sea-of-osr-adventure-path.html For years, I've had this tucked away in my head and have really, really wanted to get back to this idea of creating a shared world sandbox for folks to adventure and create in. Being a huge Michael Moorcock fan and Elric Sailor on the Seas of Fate being my absolute favourite in the saga, the whole idea of a pandimensional etheral sea with many strange locations has absolutely fascinated me. I still think the idea behind the Sea of O'Sr is a great vehicle for it. Not sold on the name but I don't hate it either. Still a working title. Anyway, I'd like to do more than just small islands like in the original concept. I'd like to encourage anyone who

Greetings again all! One of the things I love is to create new monsters. It is an absolute delight for me to just sit around and come up with some new craziness that I can throw into my game at a moment's notice and go. Often, I'll make up monsters on the fly with my home group since I tend to improvise my adventures as I go along. Anyway, in the spirit of that, I was doing a bit of playing around today with Gimp manipulating some pictures for inspiration and came up with a new intelligent pack beastie that I'll definitely use in my campaign. I bring you the worgrilla! Enjoy and happy gaming!   Worgrilla Hit Dice: 6+3 Armour Class: 6([13]) Attacks: 2 fists (2d8), Bite (1d6) Saving Throw: 11 Special: None Move: 9 Alignment: Chaos Challenge Level/XP: 6/400 Description: Worgrillas are intelligent pack hunters that inhabit the dense emerald jungles of the Kundalear mountains of Shangrilah. These beasts are fearsome territorial predators and will

So far, things are going ok. It is a bit daunting to take the guts of an RPG system, tinker with it and roll your own, but I am still optimistic that I can make a playable classless D&D variant that is playable and still compatible with old school RPG materials. So what do I have so far? Basicall the builds for low level Fighters and Magic Users are starting to really come together. That includes variant builds of fighters. The challenges will be to see how well they scale as they level. The plan right now is to have a basic level progression that all characters follow and as they go, they use XP to buy class abilities to mix and match and make the type of character they want to play. So theoretically, there could be those that want to progress and not purchase any class abilities but they would also have very basic combat and magic capabilities. I say basic in that magic theorectically is available to anyone, but all magic has a price and only those schooled in the arts can mitiga

Ok, so I've had some time, energy, clarity of thought, alignment of the stars and planets, or whatever that has allowed me to make some progress on my classless OSR system. I've pretty much been consulting a bunch of OSR games such as Swords and Wizardry (Whitebox/Core/Complete), Astonishing Swordsmen and Sorcerers of Hyperborea (naturally :) ), Knave, the Black Hack, and even some 3.5 books and Palladium fantasy, and Arduin Grimoires amongst others for inspiration. So far, what I've decided is to lean heavily on Swords and Wizardry Core for the base system, particularly around attributes and bonuses. I love the Black Hack's take on saving throws. I mean, I really have always wanted to make the difference in say a 14 wisdom and a 15 wisdom quantitatively meaningful. Therefore saves are attribute checks, where the character rolls their attribute score or lower on a d20 with modifications for the type of challenge they may face. As for character creation, I'm still