Monday, 28 July 2025

Low Tidings - A Fort Defense One Shot


Low Tidings is a defensive one shot for Old School Essentials. Chiefly inspired by Fritz Lieber's legendary, picaresque Fafhrd and Gray Mouser series of stories, tales whose weird, fantastic, sword-swinging and roguish charm in turn inspired Dungeons and Dragons and feature in AD&D's famous Appendix N. Low Tidings is a something of mini-module, condensed to 4 sides of A5 but very playable.

On a bleak and savage coast a pair of sorcerous sisters vie for the patronage of a pelagic god-wizard. Now, promised magical favours, gems and more by a talking gull, your party finds itself fighting through the night, besieged in a crumbling sea-fort, defending an eldritch ritual against a crazed witch-queen's army of blood-thirsty pirates and worse!

In this adventure you will find:
  • A hand drawn fortress map, ready for your players to repair, barricade and rig with tricks and traps.
  • A 12 hour timeline detailing the events of the siege - assaults, infiltration, ruses, magical attacks and the things and places revealed by the receding tide.
  • An IRL scavenger hunt mini-game!
While written with the world of Nehwon in mind, Low Tidings be easily adapted to any fantasy campaign setting. It can be quite challenging and is not recommended for new DMs. Low Tidings was written with OSE stats in mind and was submitted to the Appx. N JamIllustrations by William Stout, Map by me. (Special thanks to the DCC module 'Acting Up in Lankhmar' by Michael Curtis, my favourite one shot, for inspiring me to write Low Tidings). While not perfect, this was a long and tricky write so I hope you enjoy it.


Friday, 4 July 2025

Six Savage Lairs

Lo, warriors! In ill caverns, places-weird and ruins-haunted, squat and gibber; lair-lurks, foul fiends, sea-things and stooped troglodytes, all atop spilling heaps of forgotten treasures. So leap, spring cunning and battle-crazed - broadsword humming - indue your thick-thewed frames in blood, gold - glory and legend!

Here are six, free, lair-style dungeons, inspired by the 3lbb and written for an OD&D lair design contest. They are lurid, savage and pulpy. The layout was predetermined quite stringently. Most notably, each lair must fit on a single side of A5. This proved a fun, albeit tricky, constraint. My first attempt; Caveman Lair, 15%, though terse, spilled over this single side limit, - though Diogenes of Dio's Dungeon did ascribe it "vance-quality" (while discussing its disqualification). See:

😏

Remember these are Lairs, different but closely related to 'true' dungeons. While largely occupied by a single 'monster' type, do not assume these are not places of tension and of simmering conflict that your players cannot explore and exploit. Some of the lairs are linked narratively but can be played in any order, making them a good fit for sandbox campaigns or linked one-shots. Each lair should be a good fit for a single session of play. 

Also four of the lairs belong to cavemen 💪

Herein you shall find:

  • The Lair of the Cavemen (Oopulg's Tribe), suffering in a sea-cave under the yoke of savage merman conquerors.
  • The Lair of the Mermen, a hub of imperial conquest, led by an imperious queen blinded to the traitors in her midst by the loss of her daughter. 
  • The Lair of the Brigands who took her, and the foul fate they are suffering at the hand of their disinterested and capricious dark-lord.
  • The Lair of the Cavewomen (Lankimbirizin's Tribe), hunted by chaotic humanoids and led by a dying magic-user who seeks to a new chief to lead his tribe to safety. 
  • The Lair of the Cavemen (Big Borguluu's Raiders), a vicious band of raiders encamped in a ruined minster that holds its own secrets. 
  • The Lair of the Cavemen (Bruug and Eewallaaa's Tribes), two tribes joined by the pairing of the chief and chieftainess suffer clashing cultures and the moral predations of two human missionaries.

Most art by Frank Frazetta with maps by Dyson Logos and Watabou's dungeon generator.


 

Sunday, 22 June 2025

Death in the Dark - Meaningful Torchlight and Light-based Initiative



Some find that torches and light management generally to be easily forgotten during play. Something easily glossed over. This omission comes, often unknowingly, to the detriment of both the atmosphere and play of dungeon-delving adventure. So, what to do? 

This house-rule bakes light into initiative, taking light source management directly into and during combat. Presenting new dilemmas and meaningful choices as your party manages light to tip or rebalance combat in their favour - will they attempt to light that new torch or try to push on despite the disadvantage?

Once you have trained your players (and possibly even yourself) to regularly consider the darkness, and their provisions against it, you can start to use light/dark more and more in all different facets of play. Here’s how it works:

Use side initiative: roll once per round of combat (before the round begins), the highest roll determines which side (monsters or party) acts first.
  • Monsters roll 1d6.
  • The party rolls a d4 with no light, a d6 with one light and a maximum of d8 with two or more light sources (but the more spare light sources the better).
  • (Alternatively, the party rolls 1d4, +1 per active light source, to a maximum of +2)
  • The party wins ties but a light source is destroyed in the process.

The Role: 
Like the Caller, Mapper, or Chronicler roles, your group might appoint a Lightkeeper (Pointman, Underscout, Warden, etc). This player:
  • Tracks the party’s active light sources.
  • Rolls for initiative.
  • Optionally, manages marching order and/or makes all the encounter rolls (though this can be its own separate player role).
The Lightkeeper player could use a simple tracker like this, with a number of counters/tokens/beads equal to whatever torches/lanterns/runes/lightbulbs/flashlights/glow-rods that the party possesses, placing them in the light bonus boxes or spare light 'pool' respectively. 

 LIGHT?:     
 ▢     ▢
(d6) (d8)
   POOL
[‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾]
[                     ]
[________]

Or

 LIGHT?:     
 ▢     ▢
(+1) (+2)
   POOL
[‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾]
[                     ]
[________]

On Light Destruction, Tips and Optional Rules:
  • A light source is automatically destroyed on matched initiative rolls - the party cannot elect to lose initiative, so it's best to carry more than 2 light sources. 
  • As the DM, don't neglect to describe how each light source is destroyed. How a light source is destroyed is deeply tied to the context of the combat - a giant bat might bite the candle out of your hand, a lamp might get flung into a nearby pool of slime, a candle might be dropped and trampled in the jostle of combat, a gnollish arrow might pierce your lantern or the darkness itself might swallow up the light of a torch leaving nothing but a burning ember. This description is important.
  • Destroyed light sources cannot be reused, torches cannot be relit, lanterns cannot be repaired or refuelled.
  • This form of light source destruction is in addition to light source depletion via rolls on the Overloaded Encounter Die.
  • During daylight or well lit sections of the dungeon use normal d6 vs d6 side initiative.
  • Your party will often run at the maximum initiative bonus but don't worry, they will burn through light sources quickly enough.
  • Lanterns. Lanterns are better than torches in that they can be covered when the light wants to be hidden (unlike torches which must be extinguished and therefore, destroyed) and again, unlike torches, are not destroyed/depleted by overloaded encounter rolls that cause light depletion, they just run out of oil. Lanterns are only destroyed on joint initiative rolls. But feel free to house rule this as you see fit. 
  • Use a good, workable encumbrance system. If using a slot-based encumbrance system, one torch should take up one slot. 
  • Light Destruction on initiative roll draws is the most elegant thing about this - you can continue to use d6 vs d6 side initiative with just this tweak. 
  • Dwarves have infravision, not dark vision so they still they still benefit from light sources in combat.
  • Populate dungeons with monsters that target characters carrying light sources and creatures/traps that target light sources directly. 
Optional: Deader in the Dark
You can increase the severity of the darkness by altering the light to die size threshold. For more severe play; players without any light automatically lose initiative, roll 1d4 for initiative with one light source, 1d6 with two light sources and a maximum of 1d8 with a three or more light sources. Light source destruction on tied initiative rolls continues as normal. However, automatically losing initiative can become a predictable IGOUGO. It looses the 'appeal' of players managing to win initiative, despite their disadvantage, only for the monsters to predictably snatch back the initiative and effectively have 'another go' - performing their actions back-to-back.

Optional: Dungeon Scarring
If you want dungeon DARKNESS to be a fantastic and corrosive phenomenon, to feel like a living force that hates you - consider Dungeon Scarring. For every 10 minutes the party spend without a source of light (or whenever encounters are rolled for) the characters suffer from dungeon scarring - each affected player must pinch off a piece of their character sheet, no more than a few millimetres, that or poke a hole with a sharp pencil. To be even harsher, you can enforce dungeon scarring for each initiative roll the party makes without a light source. Your players will never forget their torches again. 


Postscript:
This is something of an adaptation of a method employed by James Young, which in turn I believe was inspired by Veins of the Earth's initiative system. Also, check out this cool meta house rule for initiative by Benign Brown Beast and this mega list of different initiative systems by Knight at the Opera.