The Yak-Men Cometh

There are a few ways to travel over long distances in the Oligarchies. Many of these methods are also available outside the Oligarchies, but we don't care about that right now. Common On Foot I mean, obviously. By Beetle Alice Jaunet The most common way to get around - the humble larger-than-life bug or beetle. The average trundling Joe Schmo prefers the sturdy heft of the Elephant Beetle whilst the marauding mountain manrustlers of the Moughli hill-tribes prefer a springier Flea. Bigger bugs don't do so well with steep inclines or the cold, so sticking to the valleys is a safe bet. By Palanquin Louis Sabattier Only the cruelest and most arbitrary of masters would have their servants carry them cross-country. Which is precisely why this is the most common mode of transport for Ogre Magi, who only seem to be truly comfortable when there is a bare minimum of human suffering occurring around them.  Uncommon By Ophilione  (I did this one) What cou...

To begin with, my Yoon-Suin campaign was essentially LOTFP played straight with a few pickings from tenfootpolemic . Inevitably I've houseruled to an absurd degree. I even dropped Wisdom and Constitution because I didn't like how they did basically nothing, but that's a topic for another day. One thing which bothered me was how Skills were being used in my game or, chiefly, the fact that they weren't. Just for any non-LOTFP-savvy readers - in Lamentations of the Flame Princess you have a dozen "Skills" representing things like Climbing, Bushcraft, Sneaking and the like. Each had a score out of six. You rolled a d6 when you invoked that skill and if you rolled equal to or under your score you succeeded. My Specialist (renamed Adventurer) had put points into Architecture and kept using it to find out neat, irrelevant information about buildings. "Oh yeah it's a classic example of French Gothic". Neither of us could really fathom what its ...

My current campaign which I am GMing is set in David McGrogan's excellent Yoon-Suin . In particular, my game is set in the Oligarchies in the Mountains of the Moon. In real terms, this is a fantasy counterpart of Nepal, with several powerful city-states ruled by immensely wealthy elite with a very casual view to the lives and sufferings of their less-wealthy peons. Yetis and yaks abound. My players have so far traveled between two major cities, passing from one major river valley into another over a well-traveled trail through an otherwise-intimidating and labyrinthine mountain range. My players like calling sessions "episodes"  As I've grappled with various shades of travel rules, balancing descriptive flow with time-saving brevity and mechanical satisfaction, I've been thinking a lot about mountainous travel in RPGs. The following is an unscientific thinking-aloud about mountains and their nature. If you look at Nepal or any other mountainous count...

Following on from Scrap Princess' Google+ discussion about first level spells, I've been thinking about Identify. The problem - Identify identifies the properties of magical items. Therefore the implication is that you don't know what magic items will do unless you (A) randomly and dangerously activate them or (B) cast this particular spell that has no other function. If the GM is giving players magic items, or providing a space/setting that allows for the random acquisition of magic items, the implication is that the GM thinks it would be jolly good fun if the players had magic items. So why, then, the barrier to using them? Players either (A) waste one of the wizard's otherwise-useful slots with this otherwise-useless spell and then just carry on as if they knew the item's properties from the outset (and if the day consists of "ok we do nothing today except let the wizard identify the item so we're not going sperlunking with one less spell slot...