Primeval Wasteland Areas for OSR Games

 New weekend, new table from Lands of Legends!

Winter has become really cold here, and I hate the cold, so I chose to go with some frozen (or otherwise horrid) wastelands!

Here's a d10 table with ten primeval-themed wasteland areas for your OSR sandbox campaign with simple stat references for your classic game of choice, wether it is Old-School Essentials, Labyrinth Lord, Sword & Wizardry, or any other clone of OE, B/X, or BECMI Dungeons and Dragons.

Use them to spice up your sandbox!

These are straight from the Areas section of Lands of Legends Primeval. Check it out for hundreds more!

So here's the table:

Wastelands - Primeval Areas

1. Death by Water. Dragged by the currents underneath, huge icebergs move through this ice pack, cracking and splitting it. The cracks can suck explorers into the icy waters (Save vs Death or d6 cold damage per round).
2. Smoke on the Water. This desolate plain is crossed by slow streams and pools of lava that spring from underground. The snow that constantly falls instantly becomes puddles of snow and ash and a mist of hot, toxic vapors. Traveling here is extremely difficult, as new lava pools and springs often appear without notice, and the only creatures explorers may meet are wild elemental creatures of fire, earth, and ice. 
3. Razor Rocks. This barren land is made only of sharp black rocks of all sizes, from tiny to colossal: movement is very difficult and it is impossible to lie down or sit comfortably. Advancing is like climbing (STR check every day), even if explorers cannot fall but just slow down. Sleep is always uncomfortable and does not allow to rest fully unless specific equipment is employed. There are no animals, plants or water around.
4. Freeze Wood. The trees of this land magically absorb the power of the cold. There are enough trees and fallen branches to light a fire, but its bluish flame emits cold instead of heat, freezes food instead of cooking it and causes cold damage in case of contact.
5. Purple Blur. This region is barely illuminated by an eternal twilight: a purple aurora shines in the sky, the trees lean in all directions and all devices and magnetic compasses do not work. Because of the bizarre anomalies of this place, normal vision and darkvision are blurred and greatly reduced, and all spells of divination, enchantment and illusion, as well as those related to light or electricity, don’t work and the others have a 50% chance of failure.
6. The Wurm. Buried in the depths of the world, between the sea and the earth, the Great Wurm lies under this iced land. It is the worm of the world, a primordial creature of frost, destruction and power who once caused an ice age. Its magnitude is unimaginable and only the gods can confront it. Little of what mortals can do can awaken it, but if someone casts a spell of level 5 or higher or uses powerful artifacts in this region, it might writhe in its sleep (50% chance), causing sudden ice storms and earthquakes that can create crevices and avalanches.
7. Heart of Ice. This land hosts a primordial crystal whose roots sink into the center of the world: it is a fulcrum of the magnetic, telluric and magic energies. The frozen wind that blows through the land carries its influence: explorers must Save vs Paralysis or their muscles and tendons will stiffen and ache (-2 to most action, movement halved). Those under this effect must Save again every day vs Spell or fall prey to bleak despair (further -1 to most actions and rolls, cumulative for each failed roll). After failing this save for a number of times equal to the character’s level , each new day requires a new Save vs Paralysis to avoid becoming a block of ice from within (and die). The iced figures of other explorers are the only warning of this danger! The only way to get rid of the first two effects is to leave the region. 
8. Bocochos. Huge, flightless birds roam this tundra. They are also known as Brontorniteri, or Fastclaws. They love beef jerky and tubers and can be easily tamed and employed as fast mounts, but their health will suffer from leaving their cold home region, and they’ll require special care to keep them fit and lively.
9. Ifirnia, the One Year City. Every year, at the end of summer, the nomadic people of this ice-kingdom choose the new place for their city and build it with ice-blocks. In the time of a moon the new town is finished, with a frozen circular wall to protect it and an ice tower standing over the other buildings (stores, temples, theaters and arenas). The ice princess dwells in the tower and the city comes to life with courtiers, shamans, skalds and traders until the next summer.
10. Wendigo Wastes. This desolate region is haunted by the Spirit of Cold and Loneliness. Every time the sun is covered by the clouds, there is a 10% chance of hearing the fearsome cry of the Wendigo: those who hear it must Save vs Spell or run screaming in terror in a random direction, dropping every burden they might be carrying, and they must keep running until they pass the Save (check again after 10 minutes). The cry of the Wendigo is always heralded by a cold, violent gust of north wind. The nomadic tribes that inhabit this land are immune to the howl, and worship the Wendigo as their god.

If you enjoy this type of content, check my upcoming Kickstarter: Axian Library!

About a Groats-Worth of Grotesques

 A Groats-Worth of Grotesques is a big bestiary for OSR games.

I've received a print copy for review from the author George Edward Patterson. The DrivethruRPG print-on-demand version is a nice big A4 softcover book, counting 251 pages. It was released in May 2021.

From the DrivethruRPG blurb:

Being a SYSTEM-AGNOSTIC Role Playing supplemental treatise ON MONSTERS; which is to say a BESTIARY for your Tabletop Games of Fantasy. Styled in the manner of the Baroque Period; a Curiosity Cabinet of Creatures for enlivening the table!

The over 100 entries were gathered out of sundy authors, philosophers, physicians, and poets; sacred and profane. The illustrations are collages of diverse prints and emblems. From the lowly ant to the earth shattering Behemoth, the mundane dog to the alien Ch M G, this collection is a rollicking gambol through history and myth.

The blurb itself shows the (awesome, to me) baroque, anachronistic language style of the book, which aims at making it an in-world bestiary collecting information and rumors as they would be reported by sages and chroniclers of your fantasy world.

While the blurb describes it as system-agnostic, each creature entry includes simple game statistics (AC, HD, damage, and special features) which make them easily portable to most OSR games.

Things I liked:

• Art. Lots of it. Each creature entry is accompanied by at least one public domain image (engraving) which has been, in most cases, artfully photoshopped to better match the author's idea. Public domain engravings have a long tradition of cheap (and fascinating) art for RPGs, so this might sound as nothing new. But what's here is stunning: the quantity and variety of images is insane, and the quality of the alterations is stylish and serves the author's ideas very well.
• The baroque textual style. The book is presented as a XVI century bestiary: The book title and general introduction, and the first description of each entry feature a marked and remarkable baroque style, which obviously matches the art. The creature descriptions are particularly fascinating as they weave bizarre observations by a writing persona that is implied to be from the implicit game world.
• The general theme of the grotesque. The creatures presented can be divided in thee groups: ordinary creatures, "classic" fantasy creatures, and unusual creatures. The first groups features creatures such as ants, camels, bears and so on, and imaginary creatures. The trick in the book is that all of them have at least one unusual feature which makes them interesting and subtly weird. The same applies to "classic" fantasy creatures (these include Dragons, Hell Hounds, Leucrotas, Mantichoras, Giants, Griffins and others): all have a twist, a unique take, and often a series of variants which are often all you need to make your classic fantasy game feel fresh without turning its monster fauna into an all new, completely unfamiliar, world. The last group is made of creatures that are new. A few examples: Bishop Fish, Vegetable Lamb, Filth Licker, Haunted Umbrella, and the Wonderful Two-Headed Girl. These are brilliant and and are the incarnation of the grotesque theme. Surreal, otherworldly, somewhere between nightmare and fairy tale, and yet somehow with a very real feel to them.

In short: I'm impressed with this book, which deserves more attention than it's had so far.

I can see this book as an excellent resource for a series of OSR games: Old-School Essentials, Lamentations of the Flame Princess, Sword & Wizardry, and any other post-clone like Knave or Maze Rats. Especially if you want to inject your "classic" fantasy campaign with bits of unusual, surreal, fantastic, horrific, surprising creatures, and even more so if you want to completely put aside classic creatures for new ones.

A final note on price. At the time of writing this, the A4, 251 pages softcover is priced a mere $13.99, which is a lot of bang for your buck, when compared with many other products with a much lower page count, and the PDF is $4.99.

Primeval Mountains & Hills for OSR Games

 New weekend, new table from Lands of Legends!

Mighty bad weather today here, with nature reminding us whose world this is, so I offer a d10 table with ten primeval-themed mountain & hill areas for your OSR sandbox campaign with simple stat references for your classic game of choice, wether is Old-School Essentials, Labyrinth Lord, Sword & Wizardry, or any other clone of OE, B/X, or BECMI Dungeons and Dragons.

Use them to spice up your sandbox!

These are straight from the Areas section of Lands of Legends Primeval. Check it out for hundreds more!

So here's the table:

Mountains and Hills - Primeval Areas

1. The First Peak. Dragons this place the Last Flight. This peak is nearly impossible to reach without flying, because of its extremely steep cliffs. Even if flying, explorers will have to face the seven Greater Storm Elementals (Air Elementals with lightning bolts), bound to guard the way to the peak. At the top lies the cemetery of the First Dragons, who came here to die when their time had come. Their bones have turned to gold, but are guarded by a Wight Dragon: one of the oldest, wisest and most dangerous creatures of the world (ancient undead Black Dragon with Wight abilities, plus almost all the knowledge one can have, and a very bad temper). If the Black Dragon is slain, the golden skeletal dragons will rise to fight!

2. The Chained Titan. Legends say that a titan is chained to the side of a mountain of this impressive range, punished by the gods for giving mortals the secret of fire and metal. Actually, the titan is a giant sculpture carved on the side of the mountain. In the caves of his eyes, the last immortal blacksmiths of the people who carved the sculpture have their ever-burning forge, creating weapons in black iron, adamant and other special metals.

3. Rock Giants. The huge boulders that lie scattered on the flanks of this mountain are actually giants made of rock, at their larval stage. While the group travels across this area and passes near the boulders, there is 1 in 6 chance that their proximity makes a rock “hatch” and let a giant arise, attacking immediately.

4. The Machine in the World. Throughout these mountains travelers hear a ticking noise coming from underground. Under the mountains there are ancient mechanisms and stone wheels and mills powered by lava falls. The machine moves continents, causes earthquakes and pushes tectonic plates according to the will of mysterious engineers. Gates to the machine are hidden and protected and inside there are stone golem guards. Tampering with the gears might cause enormous, violent changes in the world.

5. Veins of Gold. A vein of wild alchemical gold runs in the heart of the mountain, occasionally emerging here and there. Those who do not realize the danger and touch or step on these outcrops must pass a Save vs Petrification or their blood will be turned into solid gold. At worst, their friends will have about 10lbs of gold as a consolation (if they manage to retrieve it).

6. The Heavy Mountain. This mountain’s heart of molten metal increases the gravity of the surrounding environment. Anyone and anything in this area becomes gradually heavier, weighting up to twice.

7. The First Dwarves. The roots of this mountain are inhabited by the first dwarves, stocky and uncouth beings, deformed and primitive. They are not evil, but misshapen, idiotic and violent. They have no language, but worship a grotesque boulder-god. Their skin is leathery and their bones are as hard as stone.

8. Grey Bearhounds. A race of strong hounds lives in these mountains, used to hunting wolves and bears. These animals behave like common wild dogs, but are quite larger (the size of a dire wolf). Heroes might tame them as pets, animal companions or even mounts.

9. The Crystal Peak. This mountain is a colossal meteorite made of crystal, partially covered by debris and rocks. At night it emanates a sick purple luminescence and during the day a disturbing buzzing can be heard from the surrounding mountains. The peak and the valleys around it are inhabited by all sorts of chimeric beasts, lured here by the crystal or possibly generated from it. Fragments of the crystal might be used to propel or channel chaotic energies in magic rituals, but for each day spent around the peak there is a cumulative 1% chance of developing some chimeric mutation.

10. Shadowridge. The wild predators of this mountain range live a double life: during the night (whether they fall asleep or not), their bodies become ethereal and they hunt with the special abilities of shadow creatures while maintaining their shape, HD and attacks.

If you enjoy this type of content, check my other random tables posts, and my OSR stuff on DrivethruRPG: the Land of Legends series and my pwyw e-zines for Old-School Essentials: Wondrous Weavings Warped and Weird and Mysteriously Missing & Merrily Met!

My next pwyw Old-School Essentials e-zine will be released next month! To find out what it'll be about, and grab it as soon as it's out, follow me on Facebook, Twitter or Telegram!

Fairy Seas & Islands for OSR Games

Going for a short weekend trip to beautiful Genoa, so here's a d10 table with ten fairy seas & islands encounters for your OSR game of choice, wether is Old-School Essentials, Labyrinth Lord, Sword & Wizardry, or any other clone of OE, B/X, or BECMI Dungeons and Dragons.

These are straight from the Encounters section of Lands of Legends Fairy. Check it out for hundreds more!

Seas & Islands- Fairy Encounters

1. The Three Swordfish. Three swordfish approach the heroes’ vessel. Their bills are real steel weapons sprouting out of their muzzles: a rapier, a sabre and a broadsword, and they are fully capable fighters. They were bloodthirsty pirates, cursed by the sea fairies to protect a thousand ships from pirates attacks. When their task is fulfilled, they’ll return to their original shape and be free from the curse. They’ll escort the heroes’ ship, and will try to trick them towards some pirate ship, as they’ve already saved 999 vessels and can’t wait to be human again.
2. Geppetto! A terrible monster wanders these seas, a dogfish big enough to contain shipwrecked people and fish escaped from digestion. Meeting this monster probably means losing one’s ship and ending up shipwrecked and swallowed. Inside the monster a little group of people can survive and make long journeys. As described in the legends, in order to exit from the jaws of the monster, it has to regurgitate.
3. The Island under the Sea. This island looks like a towering obsidian pillar, visible from afar. Dozens of ships and boats dock between the rocks surrounding it. On its surface is the access to a system of caves going down below the water, where an entire population lives. There are hundreds of people and it is a thriving port. The caves are dry and waterproof, well ventilated and equipped with spring water, thermal water, animals and edible plants, and even underground sources of biological light.
4. Flying Rocks. These flying rocks were thrown by an angry titan against the wily sorcerer Brassalandro who had robbed him of the magical bag of zephyrs. The sorcerer summoned a djinn that stopped the rocks, leaving them suspended midair. Today the rocks wander slowly with the wind, and host several nests of harpies.
5. The Reef Village. Lost in the sea there is a crescent-shaped "island" made of pure coral. The reef has grown so much that some men have cut coral "bricks" and used them to build a village of several dozens of cabins. People living in this place go fishing, use seaweed for crafting and trade with sailors, selling pearls, shells and corals in exchange for wood, rope, leather and metal tools.
6. Pufferfish. The Gods of the Depths use the Pufferfish to lead people of the surface to their realm. These big fish can swallow a “passenger” whole, kept safe and dry inside a transparent bubble-stomach, which allows them to breathe and see the outside (air is provided by the gill system). Inside the fish, heroes can reach the luxurious mansions of the Tritons and the Sea Gods. But why are they trying to summon the heroes?
7. Old Crabman. This old fisherman lives in a hut by the shore. He admires crabs and considers them superior to human beings in every respect. He’s ready to deliver long speeches about how the different types of crabs move, hunt, rest, mate, fight. He knows because he has been taught the crab language by the mermaids, and is willing to teach it to anyone who proves to love crabs as much as he does, by managing to fish ten different types of crabs in one week and keeping them alive.
8. Primate Pirates! This corsair ship’s crew is made of nimble monkeys and mighty apes! Their captain is a human, a cruel old buccaneer who commands his horde thanks to a magical amulet that casts a never-ending “Charm Primates” spell and makes its bearer understood by all primates.
9. Singing Undines. Some water elementals follow the ship and constantly hum a simple tune. If someone on the ship sings back to them, or plays a musical instrument, they push the ship, making it travel faster. As soon as the music on the ship ceases, they lose interest and disappear.
10. Triton Hero. A triton knight in seashell armor, armed with a coral spear and riding a giant seahorse, is pursuing a sea dragon who has kidnapped the mermaid princess of this sea. He might need help and if victorious might share his triumph at the Sea King’s court.

Grim Swamp Encounters for OSR Games

Halloween is almost here, and here's a d10 table with ten swamp encounters for your OSR game of choice, wether is Old-School Essentials, Labyrinth Lord, Sword & Wizardry, or any other clone of OE, B/X, or BECMI Dungeons and Dragons.

These are straight from the Encounters section of Lands of Legends Grim, which is part of the Halloween Sale on DrivethruRPG. Check it out for hundreds more!

Swamps & Marshes - Grim Encounters

1. Maidens in the Water. Ghosts of drowned women lurk in these pools. When travelers come close to their pools, one or more of these Wights grab the heroes' ankles and drag them to the bottom. If a hero gets caught by their claws, he must get rid of them fighting underwater before drowning.

2. A Thorn in the Side. Thick bushes of curved thorns grow verdant in this desolate place. If a thorn scratches one of the heroes (Save vs Death) the tip breaks off and enters the wound. In a few hours the tip will try to crawl up to a safe place in the body (armpit, groin, abdomen, chest) and there it will begin to grow, until exploding in a tangle of thorns and tendrils and transforming the victim into another bush. Upon entering the body the tip deals 1 HP to the victim and acquires it as its own, then it "steals” the victim 1 HP every hour until he dies. Extracting the tip (or the growing bush) requires an expert healer or surgeon, and causes 1 damage to the victim for each HP of the plant.

3. Scarecrows. In this part of the bog there are many poles stuck deep into the soil, on which creepy black crows are perched, staring around to people walking in “their” place. Digging around the poles or plucking them out, one may find that they are attached at the bottom to a carved pumpkin, like underground, upside down scarecrows. If these objects are destroyed or damaged, 1d6 horrible undead crows come out from the ground for each damaged pole. As soon as a good number of these diabolical creatures has gathered, they will attack the party.

4. The silent death. A grey gas exhales from some pools of the marsh, remaining very low on the ground. The shortest explorers (dwarves, halflings) may feel a sour taste in their mouth and an irritation at nose and throat. If the party stops to camp, ignoring these effects, those who sit or lie down will fall asleep almost instantly and asphyxiate in five minutes, without even waking up. Only a successful Save vs Death, or noticing the immediate sleep of those who breathe the gas, can prevent this silent death.

5. Just a Sip! Something the heroes have eaten or drunk contained the spores of some killer snail. The snails settle inside the stomach of one randomly chosen character, grow up in one day and start eating the victim from the inside, killing him in atrocious pain in 1d4+3 days. Each day of pain imposes a cumulative -1 to all rolls. After understanding the cause of the unbearable stomach ache and blood spitting, the best way to kill this parasite is to find a deadly poison and drink an abundant sip of it. After swallowing the poison, the victim must normally make the Save against it, hoping that it takes effect only against the small monsters.

6. Bog Bodies. The bodies of those who drowned in this swamp have been preserved in a unique way, due to its particular environmental conditions. They have retained their skin and internal organs but their bones have completely dissolved. These unusual zombies can be met as peaceful corpses or wandering the swamp with a staggering, slow gait. They reduce bludgeoning weapon damage but take normal damage from cutting weapons.

7. The Hag’s Hut. The heroes spot a hut built on top of a wooden platform. Charms made of bones, feathers and twigs hang from the roof. It is the home of an old hag, retired here after a life of mischief. If found at home (50% chance), she might be welcoming and curious about news from outside the swamp. If her house is explored while she’s outside gathering herbs or food, she’ll get angry and try to trick the characters with the story of how she was forced to leave her village when she was young because she was “wrongfully” accused of being a witch, and then she will serve a poisoned dinner. Her familiar is a fist-sized spider hidden under her clothes.

8. Crab Spiders Pool. The heroes spot a pool whose banks are filled with soft, twitching, iridescent, fist-sized spheres. They are crab spider eggs, ready to burst and feed on the animal carcasses left nearby. Their d4 mothers are around, looking for food, and will be back in d4 hours.

9. Festering Logs. The heroes spot a pool of mud choked with soft, rotting trunks, their mold-covered roots turned upward and emerging from the sludge. The rotting wood seems to tremble and pulsate: under the bark, the soft, rotting pulp is full of larvae of giant mosquitoes or giant robber flies, in various stages of development. Characters might take some and sell them to alchemists, or try to grow a very unusual pet.

10. Sludge Demon. A pool of mud raises a muddy hand to grasp a character’s ankle: it’s a sludge demon, coalesced from the dirt of the pool (1d6 HD). This fat, slow, revolting abomination cannot really hold anything with its semi-liquid state, but can, and will, try to asphyxiate its preys by forcing its muddy arms and appendages through their mouths, tendrils and ears (attacks up to 4 targets, 1d6 damage, plus losing next action if it hits). It cannot really be killed as long as it has muddy soil under its feet, where it regenerates very quickly (one HD worth of HP per round). If destroyed, it will leave a long, green, jagged tongue on the ground.

10 QUESTIONS TO, ENNIES SPECIAL: Mauro Longo & Two Little Mice

This is a special interview! Today we chat with Mauro Longo, the mind behind Brancalonia the Spaghetti Fantasy RPG, and the Two Little Mice team, who gave us Broken Compass. Why am I interviewing them together? Because they have a lot in common, such as being Italian and having won a bunch of Ennie Awards two weeks ago!

Brancalonia got the Gold Award for the Best Electronic Book category, and three more Silver Awards for Best Setting, Best Writing and Product of the Year, while Broken Compass received a Silver Ennie for Best Production Values. 

Mauro Longo is an old time friend of mine: we played RPGs together for years, and we wrote together the Savage Worlds settings Ultima Forsan and Tropicana, and the Old-School zine series Lands of Legends. He’s also worked on internationally acclaimed RPG projects such as Lex Arcana and Inferno, and is also a novelist and a Choose Your Own Adventure gamebooks author.

Two Little Mice actually is three -regular sized- people: Rico Sirignano, Simone Formicola and Daniela Giubellini. Before Broken Compass, they created the fairy-themed Household RPG, which won the Italian RPG of the Year 2019 award, the Parsifal graphic novel, and the Anime e Sangue urban fantasy series (available on Amazon Prime Video). And today’s news is the TLM team has just been acquired by the board game colossus CMON!

1 Hello Mauro, Rico, Simone and Daniela! So, how does it feel to be nominated for the Ennie Awards? And then to actually win? Did you see it coming? What was your reaction? Italian RPGs had received a few nominations in the past, but this year Italy totalled five Ennies, which is a record. Do you see a trend in that? What are your plans to keep winning?

Mauro: Well, as you can imagine, it was OUTSTANDING and we don’t have plans for that :D . Of course, we submitted our game to the judges, “with our hat in our hands” like we say, hoping for 1-2 nominations. We didn’t see the four nominations coming, nor the four awards we got. We actually spent the night (3 a.m in Italy) watching the streaming together with the TLM team and our shared joy was a real thing. In one moment, we all passed from our national RPG scene to the world top level… What a night! 

There is a trend: an internal Italian trend. Starting with Ultima Forsan, then with Lex Arcana, Broken Compass, Valraven, Inferno, Lands of Legends, Not the End and similar Italian games, Italian game designers are transcending the national border and bringing our games to the rest of the world. We didn’t have the strength to arrive on the English speaking marketplace before, we have it now. And the whole thing will escalate quickly.

TLM: Being nominated for the Ennie Awards was thrilling, and winning a silver medal was way beyond our wildest expectations. This is one of the greatest awards for games, and we only stepped into the gaming sector three years ago.

In the last years Italian role-playing games are proving well received even beyond our borders, thanks to some very successful KickStarter campaigns. We hope that the recognition awarded to Broken Compass and Brancalonia will contribute to bring even more attention to our niche and help the Italian gaming industry to grow.

2 Ok, just in case someone reading this doesn’t know your games, could you please pitch them for us here in, like, 10 lines?

Mauro: Brancalonia is a “spaghetti fantasy” setting for the 5th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons. It’s set in an unheroic, picaresque and roguish version of Medieval Italy, a world that quotes, collects, and mixes references from contemporary Italian fiction and over a hundred works of Italian fantasy tradition, pop culture, and collective imagery – like Collodi’s Pinocchio, Orlando Furioso, Calvino’s fiction, fairy tales, Dante’s Divine Comedy, and the “Spaghetti Western” films. In Brancalonia, all the player characters are knaves, members of a Free Company of mercenaries, rogues and rascals, engaged in questionable jobs across the various domains of what is left of an ancient kingdom now in ruins.

TLM: Broken Compass is a pulp adventure game inspired by the classics of the genre like Uncharted, Indiana Jones, and Tomb Raider. When playing Broken Compass you step into the role of an Adventurer, someone who braves the dangers of the world in search of a Treasure and will have to face a terrible and dangerous Rival to get it. The best things about Broken Compass are that it’s very easy to pick up, simple to learn and play, even online, and the great attention to details that gained it the Silver ENnie for Best Production Values.

3 Tell us about your specific jobs. What are your roles and your areas of expertise? How does your creative and productive process work? Your creative productions include RPGs and also novels, CYOA books, comics and live action shows. Is there an overlap, influence, contamination that seeps into how you conceive, play and create RPGs?

Mauro: I’m now the creative director of all the RPG and gamebook lines in Acheron Games. I lead a composite staff of writers, artists, developers and other contributors. I usually try to work on POP CULTURE as a whole subject, from which to extract tropes, ideas, features and quotes. This is the way I approach RPGs, even in their mood, their atmosphere. Ruleset comes later.

TLM: Two Little Mice is made up of Riccardo “Rico” Sirignano, Simone Formicola, and Daniela Giubellini. Rico and Simone are both writers and they focus on the development and writing of the games, while Daniela is the artist behind the beautiful illustrations in our books.

Before diving into the RPG scene, we produced a tv series released on Amazon Prime Video and several plays for theatre. These days we are also working on a graphic novel that should be delivered to our backers shortly. We take inspiration from many sources; Broken Compass, for example, was clearly the product of our shared passion for both movies and travel.

4 Both Brancalonia and Broken Compass were launched on Kickstarter, with very successful campaigns. The perfect example of how crowdfunding was supposed to work: small publishers gathering funds for large projects.

Through the years, though, it has become more and more important even for the “big players” in the RPG industry.

Do you consider that unfair? Or is the presence of big publishers beneficial to the small ones? Do you see that changing anytime soon? How would YOU like things to change?

What’s your overall experience with Kickstarter campaigns?

Mauro: Kickstarter is a tool publishers can use for their projects, and in this way it’s neutral. For us in Acheron, an international crowdfunding portal is the way we can directly reach an audience worldwide: players living in the USA, UK, Australia and so on. The point is not the money, the fundraising, but the visibility our games can have, and the direct connection between creators and players. 

It can’t be unfair, if everything is used in transparency. I like this system, I adapted very well, and I will use it again, when needed.

TLM: Many of our projects over the years have been founded with the help of Kickstarter and we are very grateful to have such a platform. When big players also use this platform, they help introduce it to a greater public, which then has a chance to discover the smaller companies there. In our opinion, and as proved by our experience, this coexistence doesn’t work against indie companies. It’s not unfair for larger companies to use this platform, so long as they do it responsibly. But this goes for everyone, big or small.

In future, we’d love for both creators and backers to come closer to the philosophy behind crowdfunding campaigns, both explaining clearly and accepting the risks they involve, and striving for a better communication on all sides.

5 Italian style. Is there any such thing in RPGs? How “Italian” are your Brancalonia and Broken Compass? Rules, setting, concept, approach, anything you think may apply. Has it been a key element for success?

Mauro: Acheron IS a producer of Italian-style concepts, IPs, games and fiction. It’s our mission: “Made in Italy, shared worldwide”. We are expressly devoted to Italian-ish settings, novels, lore, pop culture and so on. Of course we also like stories and settings with completely different flavor, BUT we use “Italian stuff” as a distinctive trait, to introduce ourselves and to be distinguished from other publishers.

In our case, it definitely has been a key element for success.

TLM: Italian style is famous all over the world in many sectors, from design, to fashion, and for many other artistic products. We like to trace our love and attention to details back to our traditions, our history, and the many beautiful things our Country has to offer, and we hope to keep sharing our love for peculiar things with others. It would be hard to say if there is such a thing as an “Italian Style RPG”, but the cultural wealth that surrounds us is a great inspiration for our imagination, and there’s no doubt it played a role in the creation of our products. In many ways, Broken Compass is NOT an Italian game, but we believe that our novel approach to a genre so dominated by the American perspective played a role in our success.

6 Inclusion and representation of minorities in RPGs are a hot topic. How do you address that? 

Mauro: We try the best we can. Our saying, for Brancalonia, is that we are “social justice knaves”, and everything in the setting is planned to be "cosmopolitical", inclusive and respectful, even if in an ironical way. Our most frequent trick is: take a stereotype and then subvert it. This way you get to use the tropes that you want to, but you can create more than that, representing a lot of differences. 

TLM: When designing Broken Compass, we came to realize that the genre that inspired us (let’s call it “archaeological adventure”) historically hasn’t been the most inclusive or respectful in the representation of other genders and cultures. Our objective was to bring the genre into the present, adapting it to a modern society and leaving its problematic traits in the past. Representation and diversity have always been a cardinal element of our creative ideals, and we often had to go against the reference material and find different ways to stay true to them.

We are proud of having created Broken Compass as a game with people of many genders and nationalities, and proud of our fans and backers who appreciated and supported our choices.

7 Let’s see how good you really are as role players. Now you are Hollywood screenwriters and must write a short email to convince Mr. Warner Bros to produce a movie or tv show based on your games. Go!

Mauro: Brancalonia is “fantasy with no money for CGI”. Think Clint Eastwood and Eli Wallach with blades instead of guns and that’s it. What could possibly go wrong? 

TLM: With the fifth Indiana Jones in the works, Jungle Cruise in theaters, and a movie based on Uncharted that’s already going through post-production, we think Hollywood knows already that the archaeological adventure genre is ready for a revival. It would be hard to come up with anything that could rival such colossal productions!

8 Licensed games. If you could buy any franchise/IP for an RPG, which would it be? Tell us about the franchise and the game you’d make.

Mauro: I’d go with some Italian crime story, but with an ironic mood in it. Inspector Coliandro would be a great game.

TLM: Without leaving Italy, it would be great to work with the great people at Bonelli. We think coming up with an investigative rpg that lets players become “Nightmare Investigators” like Dylan Dog would be a fun and interesting project.

9 I’m sure the four of you already have at least ten other ideas for new RPG products that you might be publishing in the future! Am I right? Can you share what’s on the design table? 

Mauro: Brancalonia and Inferno will go on for a while with extended lines. A new idea for the future could be “Fascists from Yuggoth”, a pulp-weird adventure game in a fascist empire that never fell, thanks to some crazy alien lovecraftian tech. In the game, you will be part of the international antifascist brigades and fighting against this evil Italian tyranny, their legionaries and their mad scientists, up and down the Mediterranean Sea.

TLM: We think we’ll stay at the House for a while and, as already announced, work on the second edition of our very first role-playing game: Household. There are more surprises ahead, but nothing we can tell you yet.

10 My regular final question: please point us to a song you think we should listen to, game related or otherwise.

Mauro: We spoke about Italian stuff, so my suggestion is a piece by Ennio Morricone from “My name is nobody” OST: “Il Mucchio Selvaggio”. It’s a not-so-known spaghetti western music I really love very much.  Again: so Italian!

TLM: Ok, we’ll give you three, one each.

Rico: The beast of pirate bay (Aurelio Voltaire) 

Simone: Aerials (SOAD)

Daniela: Weapon of Choice (Fatboy Slim)

Thank you Mauro, Rico, Simone and Daniela! Bye!!

Mauro: Ciao Giuseppe!

TLM: Thank you Giuseppe, ciao!

Ciao!

This ends the interview with Mauro and the Two Little Mice.

If the interview made you curious, go check out Brancalonia and Broken Compass!

And stay tuned for more interviews!

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About Dying in Old-School Essentials and Other Old-School Rulesets

Like my other post about encounter balance, this article takes Old-School Essentials for reference, but can be applied to most retro-clones.

The standard rules of most OSR systems simply have characters die at 0 hp.

Many players and GMs feel that's too harsh, especially if you actually roll your class hit die to determine hit points at level 1, meaning you may very well start with 1 or 2 hit points.

That's as bad as it sounds, one hit and you're down... and yet it's very much in line with one failed save and you're dead, which is a constant threat (poison snakes, death spell, pietrification, and so on) even when you have enough hp to take a dozen arrows.

Adhering 100% to those rules is much less harsh if you use Retainers and/or each player plays two or three characters. After all, Old-School Essentials explicitly states it's designed for 6-8 characters, not 3-4. This is the best solution the book has to offer, and if you want to stay within the boundaries of the rules and experience the original gameplay, I suggest you try this route first. This probably is, by the way, where the DCC RPG four-characters-per-player funnel adventures originate from.

But most players prefer to play one character. I get it.

In my DMing career, I've often tweaked death and dying one way or another. Here's a few systems I've tried, plus some I've read around and liked, or not liked, presented to you in small modular bits. 

Maximum HP at level 1. That's probably the most common house rule! It has a large impact on character survivability for level 1-3, then evens out at higher levels. Simple, zero book-keeping involved, nothing to remember while playing.

"Roll the body" Save. When you reach 0 hp, you drop down and you might be dead. You make a final Save versus Death when (if) someone checks on you. You pass it, you're back on your feet with 1 hp and still have a chance to make it back from the dungeon. This type of rule can be found, for example, in Dungeon Crawl Classics. If you're left there, you're dead, eaten by monsters or just bled out. This is highly dramatic for sure! Allows for glorious TPKs where no one is there to check on fallen heroes, and works as a high tension final parachute. Because of Saves progression, higher level characters have better and better chances of avoiding Death's door at the very last minute. Starting characters, not so much. Also, some classes definitely have an advantage with this. I'm looking at you, dwarves. Anyway! This requires no book-keeping. The only thing you have to remember is "hey please check on me!" when you go down. A simpler variation is just immediately Save versus Death to, well, Cheat Death as soon as you hit 0 hp.

Negative HPs. As soon as your HPs reach zero or lower, you're "dying", or "bleeding out". You're out of combat, and might die unless helped. Negative HPs have been around since forever, often together with max hp at level 1. Lamentations of the Flame Princess has them. The big difference in implementation is what happens when you're out of HPs. In most cases, you have a maximum amount of negative HPs, which might be fixed (-10, for example, or half your Constitution score). Actual death can happen as a Save versus Death every round to avoid bleeding out until someone tends to your wounds. Nasty GMs might ask you to apply your negative HPs as a modifier to your Save roll, which scales well with higher level characters and their improved saves. Sometimes bleeding out is translated as suffering 1 hp of damage every round, until you hit -10 or another threshold, which means you're finally dead.
I completely, irrationally hate negative HPs. Anyway. You have a little extra book-keeping. Saving every round (or suffering -1 hp per round until -10) works as a clock for other players, forcing them to decide if they want to spend a round to try and save your life somehow.

Or, you know, just leave those HPs the way they are, and try something different if you're determined to increase survivability. Like...

Shields Shall Be Splintered. One of the most popular OSR house rules of all times. You sacrifice your shield and completely avoid damage from one blow. This simple rule originated here in 2008 and has been developed and built upon in many variations, also involving helms and other pieces of gear. If you use this rule, you must decide what happens to magic shields... and probably enforce a "can't carry more than one shield" rule. This rule leaves non-shield-using classes the way they are, though.

A possible variant: anything you are holding in your hands may save you from one blow and is destroyed in the process, but you must succeed in a roll (a Save versus Death, of course) to pull such a feat. Sounds silly? Think how many swords +1, wands, and holy symbols are going to get broken...

Injury/Death and Dismemberment Tables. Another OSR staple. When at 0 hp, instead of dropping down dead, you roll on a table and see what's happened. Sometimes you lose an eye or ear, some time a finger, toe, or limb. Some time you suffer no effect at all, or lose a point of Constitution or other score, and some time you're crushed to bits, adieu. Conceptually, this adds layers of intermediate results to the binary outcome of th Roll the Body/Cheat Death final Save. This post lists so many examples you may check to pick your favorite table or to create your own. Using such tables increases survivability, and may lead to character retirement! Which can be a nice outcome, for a change. Players must keep in mind that losing their sword arm was the alternative to losing their character altogether...

Also keep in mind that you can decide to have injuries and lost stat points to be permanent or temporary. Temporary effects may be recovered in a given amount of time (weeks for example), while the permanent ones may still be recovered with some magic effect: custom spells, rituals, or the obvious Wish solution.