Prey Species

I really enjoyed this solo rpg. I think it works so well because it is so specific and so confined, both narratively and mechanically. You are conducting research on a tiny cave, digging through layers of soil to discover what lays beneath. You draw on a worksheet as you move through the layers, and at certain depths there are flowcharts to go through that give you a prompt. An artefact is found; a fire pit was dug, a creature died, an excavation was made, an amulet buried. Then you move on to the next layer.  The first thing that caught me were the discoveries made while navigating the flowcharts. First, they are determined by depth. As you build up layers of soil you roll a d6 for the depth of a specific layer. The depth then determines which flowchart you get. Deeper ones are mostly animals, then as indigenous people move in you get some experiences from them. Finally, white colonizers arrive near the top. The flowcharts read like poetry, and at crossroads you roll a d6 to deter...

  Journal logs found beneath Ancient Mecha City. From a computer terminal in bunker ruins on the planet Sumar - 3rd planet from the star Orion - dated 2577 in the Age of Darkness DUST-DOGS/TERMINAL_19/CARGO ROTT/2577_10_29 50 years ago we came down from the The Graveyard to try to make a home for ourselves on Sumar. A corp took The Crypt and with all that firepower we just couldn't keep up anymore. We settled the ruins beneath Old Mecha, made nice with the other scavs, tried to hide from the bigger fish. And then Orion burnt out.  Lucky for us, we found an overlooked bunker with a couple frames, and over time we managed to kit them out with what we could cobble together from the ruins. Radio activity has picked up, and we intercepted some talk about the “Eternal Flame”. Looking it up in the bunker’s records, turns out someone knew Orion’s fate, and tried to forge a relic that could reignite his flame. It's most definitely someone's mad ravings, but it gave us a taste ...

bonus stinky evil cat I’ve been thinking a bit about why I have enjoyed running Cairn and why I haven’t been enjoying D&D 5e or Lancer recently, and I think I have stumbled upon an answer: Emergent vs Progressive gameplay. There’s lots of writing about this, mostly around videogames, so I’m going to talk about these terms as I understand them, but I’ll also try to include some other writings that I’ve looked at. Emergence is when simple rules interact with complex systems. Think Chess or The Sims. Simple rules, like, “a pawn can move one space forward” or “Sims need to eat” come into contact with a complex system, like a human brain crafting a grand strategy, or a simulation of an entire world.  Progression in games is a newer phenomenon (according to Juul) where there is a series of challenges, and there are strict rules which the player must follow in order to solve them and eventually reach the end. For the most Progressive game, think Mario. Run right, jump, maybe throw a f...

 A Procedural Alternative to the Random Reaction Roll Intro You’re probably doing something like this already if you're rolling classic 2d6 reaction rolls. I’ve always struggled with converting the usual 2d6 table into something playable, often having to fill in the table myself on a per-encounter basis, especially when it seems like often players want to talk their way past encounters. The reaction table doesn't give me enough to go on for the majority of encounters, and so, it's not very helpful. Here are some things I’ve been doing to remedy the reaction rolls, and I’d like to get them down as a proper procedure that I can fall back on when I’m feeling a little lost during an encounter.  I've whittled it down to 3 key stats, that should be pretty easy to insert/substitute into any OSR game.  A Demand (list of examples at the end) Disposition, a stat ranging from 0-5 Patience, a health-bar of sorts, ranging from 0-5 Escalation, 3 distinct steps: sheathed, weapons draw...