GUTTER RUNT
THE LAND OF JOBE
- System: Old School Essentials Advanced Fantasy
- Game Type: Indefinite Campaign (no set number of sessions).
- Sessions: 8, so far.
Skip to most recent session report.
After my weekly home group finshed up our Cities Without Number game, which was relatively crunchy and high-concept, a few of the players expressed a desire to go back to something a little more classic and simple. So, we took a break for a week or two while I strung together the continent of Jobe: my go at creating a vanilla-ish fantasy setting for OSR play.
The playstyle of the campaign is pretty standard OSR stuff: the world is generated before play begins and the excitement of the game comes from exploring and screwing with that world rather than following any preplanned plot. I do have a loose 'metaquest' planned that'll kick in once the players have escaped the early game dregs and surived long enough to get to 3rd/4th level but it's more of a 'there's something that someone needs in these three places around the gameworld, go figure out how to get them' sort of thing rather than a beat-for-beat story,
In addition to the OSE ruleset, we've also thrown on these houserules:
- Experience and Levelling: Player characters can gain advancement in two ways: 1) defeating enemies, and 2) by turning gold into experience via carousing. We use Luke Gearing's (excellent) d100 table for this.
- Merciful Heroes: Whenever a humanoid enemy is defeated in combat, it's assumed that they are knocked out rather than killed unless the player doing the violence explicitly says otherwise. I'm 50/50 on this one so far. Originally we put it in because we thought it was weird that most 'heroes' in the game end up with kill counts that rival Genghis Khan but as far as I can tell this rule hasn't really changed play in any meaningful way. Maybe some level of mindless violence is inevitable with this style of play.
- Cavegirl's Horrible Wounds: When a PC hits 0HP, instead of instantly dying they take a horrible wound, as detailed in Cavegirl's Very Good Post on the subject. This lowers lethality a litte bit (which works for my players, who are more experienced with the trad-side of RPGs), builds visual history onto PCs, and creates organic, diegetic goals: 'Oh no! Our 5th level caster has lost her tongue and now she can't do spells! Time to go and find a way to fix it."
My only gripe with this system is that there's less variety than the big list of wounds might initially suggest since almost all of the damage characters take comes from 'Ripping' damage. I'm gonna have a go at revising my own version at some point. This one synergizes really well with the next (and final) houserule:
- Retirement and New Characters: When a PC retires, that player's next character begins with 50% of their xp. If they die instead, the next character only starts with 25% of it. This, combined with the horrible wounds, creates some fun dilemmas when a favourite character has really gone through the ringer and starts to show the wear of their adventuring. If I had 10 cents for every time a character has died and a player has cried out 'Gah! I knew I should've retired them!', I'd have like, I dunno, 2 dollars.
SESSIONS:
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PCs Present:
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- Thoren Orenbastard | Dwarf Cleric
- Borun Orensen | Dwarf Fighter
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