I used this creature as a possible encounter in a Mörk Borg home game. I wanted something charged with the energy of a folk tale that had the potential of becoming something of a mystery to be resolved, and if resolved, that could award characters an item with fun magical properties, without being overpowered or being just a +1 sword or something that just had a mechanical advantage expressed in dry words of text.

I wanted magic as the one you felt when listening to old tales, so I use one of those tales that I myself was told as a child.

This creature, as I wrote it to be used in my game, is a retelling of a myth from Chiloé (a beautiful island at the south of Chile). Originally, the creature is called Camahueto, and here is a translated passage from a text that talks about it.

“It is an animal that emerges from the bottom of the ravines, from swampy lands, where a machi (chaman/healer/priestess of the Mapuches → indigenous peoples of Chile and Argentina) has sowed the scrap of the horn of another Camahueto. After a couple of decades, this animal - gifted with enormous strength - leaves the ravine to go to the sea, causing great destruction in its path.

On the beach awaits its owner, who will subdue it with a fragile sargassum (seaweed) rope, the only rope capable of resisting its enormous energy.

Once restrained, the horn - philosopher's stone of popular medicine - is extracted. With this horn, of magical properties, the body is rubbed, or its scrapings are ingested.

The animal or the person to whom it is administered to give him/her energy and strength can become aggressive or go mad if the dose has been excessive. In this case, we speak of "encamahuetados".

To take out a horn of camahueto from a province, with all its latent powers, it is necessary to transport it in toasted flour.”

As you can read, this is better than my retelling, but to be honest, I knew the tale of the Camahueto by ear, and I forgot its details, but I prefer it like that, to write what I remember of it with the blanks filled with my imagination. Because that’s one of the things I believe gives potency to folk tales: there are skeletons of stories, bags of themes, filled by the knowledge and experience of those that hear them and retell them.

Although this one and other tales of Chiloé are mostly oral legends and myths, the text of the Camahueto comes from an amazing compilation of these tales, “El libro de la mitologia: historias, leyendas y creencias mágicas obtenidas de la tradición oral” by Renato Cárdenas Alvarez, a beautiful source of creatures, myths, and magic that could be used in any low fantasy game.

So I want to recommend to all of you, if you can read spanish, to read this book → https://www.memoriachilena.cl/602/w3-article-8161.html

(by the way memoria chilena is an amazing resource if you can read spanish and are interested in the history and culture of Chile)

But if you don't read spanish, and if these tales are something of your taste, I can bring some of these tales to you, because I would love to let them live a little more on my mind and yours, and because I really think that the tales and myths from Chile, and especially Chiloé, are inspiring and can bring a different kind of wonder to our tables.

So, do you want me to bring more of these wonders to you? Do you want to know of other creatures that roamed these lands? Perhaps it could be one of my monthly posts. Let me know in the comments!

Black and Purple Corals

Every snake has been overtaken by both corals, in different regions of their bodies. Where the corals meet, the skin is fragile and crumbles to the touch.

The poison glands of diseased snakes are crystallized, taking the form of black or purple gems, according to the coral that has invaded the section of the body where the glands are located.

Rumors, tales, and testimonies

The flying winged snakes are a demanded resource, and from reports of the fishermen hunting them on the high seas, where snakes gather to hunt, they seem to be migrating to one of the large isles of the south.
This isle is flanked by two coral colonies, which are regarded as sacred, so it is forbidden to hunt or kill anything alive in its surroundings. The flying winged snakes seem to have found a haven in these corals, but as fishermen know, snakes hunt in the deep, and they must have come into close contact with the corals.
From the isle’s old laws, the fishermen have gathered that the growth of the black or purple coral on the skin of a person is a sign of bad behavior and wicked sorcery, which may mean that these corals can live on human skin as they do on snake hide.

Alchemical uses:

On contact with each other, the corals sizzle and burn, producing a black, bright flame.
If they are ground separately, and then a handful of each is mixed, they produce an explosion of black fire the size of a small room.

When the crystallized poison glands are cracked open, a thick juice of the same color is released.
If a small vial of thick black and purple gland juice is mixed, they create a strong fluorescent acid, which can pierce a finger-thick layer of gold.

If any of the crystallized poison glands are ingested by an animal, a coral of the same color begins to grow on the animal's skin, transforming it completely into a coral within three days.

If one gets contaminated in the process, it isn't clear what the best extraction procedure is. Possibly, soaking the skin in a wood ash bath for a day, and applying slaked lime at the moment of removal, may help minimize the harm during extraction.

Black and Purple Corals stats

Into the Odd / Weird North / Cairn

STR 13, DEX 10, WILL 8, 5 HP, Armour 4

Drive: To protect itself and the egg nest hidden on corals.

Swimmer: In water, they move twice as fast.

Swarm: They move together. If you see one, there are at least 2d10 close by.

Actions (one per turn):

• Bite: 1d6

• Grapple: DEX Save. On a failed save, you are grappled, you can’t move, and you are impaired. On your turn, you can roll a STR Save to free yourself.

• Suffocate (needs to grapple first): STR save. If you fail, you can’t breathe. If you free from the grapple, you can breathe.

Critical Damage:

• Contamination: Part of your body is overtaken by one coral. Your dexterity decreases (DEX -1). Every consecutive time that you get contaminated, roll 1d6. On a 1-3, black and purple coral have contaminated your body, and where they meet your skin burns from acid. It leaves a permanent scar. On a 4-5, they meet at your hand, and you lose a finger. On a 6, they meet at your face, and you lose an eye.

Mork Borg

HP 5, Morale 7, Armor 3

• Bite: 1d6

• Drive: To protect itself and the egg nest hidden on corals.

• Swimmer: In water, they move twice as fast

• Swarm: They move together. If you see one, there are at least 2d10 close by.

Instead of attack:

• Grapple: AGI Save. On a failed save, you are grappled: you can’t move, and you are impaired. On your turn, you can roll a STR Save to free yourself.

• Suffocate (needs to grapple first): STR save. If you fail, you can’t breathe. If you free from the grapple, you can breathe.

• Contamination (needs to grapple first): Part of your body is overtaken by the coral. AGI -1. Every consecutive time that you get contaminated, roll 1d6. On a 1-3, black and purple coral have contaminated your body, and where they meet your skin burns from acid. It leaves a permanent scar. On a 4-5, they meet at your hand, and you lose a finger. On a 6, they meet at your face, and you lose an eye.

OSE / Dolmenwood

Level 1, AC 6[13], Hit Dice 1d8 (4 HP), Saves D12 W13 P14 B15 S15 / D12 R13 H14 B15 S15, Neutral
Attacks: Bite (1d6)
Speed: 30, Morale: 7, XP: 15
Damage Types: Bite (piercing).

Special Abilities:

• Swimmer: In water, they move twice as fast

• Swarm: They move together. If you see one, there are at least 2d10 close by.

• Grapple: DEX Save. On a failed save, you are grappled; you can’t move, and you are impaired. On your turn, you can roll a STR Save to free yourself.

• Suffocate (needs to grapple first): STR save. If you fail, you can’t breathe. If you free from the grapple, you can breathe.

• Contamination (needs to grapple first): Part of your body is overtaken by the coral. DEX -1. Every consecutive time that you get contaminated, roll 1d6. On a 1-3, black and purple coral have contaminated your body, and where they meet your skin burns from acid, taking 1d6 acid damage. It leaves a permanent scar. On a 4-5, they meet at your hand; you take 2d6 acid damage, and you lose a finger. On a 6, they meet at your face, you take 3d6 acid damage, and you lose an eye.

D&D 5e

AC 15 - 10 HP (5+1d10) - Save DC 12 - Speed 30 ft.
To hit: Melee +5; Damage: Melee +3
STR 16 (+3) - DEX 15 (+3) - CON 10 (0) - INT 6 (-2) - WIS 6 (-2) - CHA 8 (-1)
Damage Types: Biete (piercing).

Swarm: They move together. If you see one, there are at least 2d10 close by.

Swimmer: In water, they move twice as fast

ACTIONS

Bite: Melee Weapon Attack: +5 to hit, Reach 5 ft, Hit: 10 (1d6 + 3) piercing damage.

Grapple: DEX Save. On a failed save, you are grappled. On your turn, you can roll a STR Save to free yourself.

Suffocate (needs to grapple first): STR save. If you fail, you can’t breathe. If you free from the grapple, you can breathe.

Contamination (needs to grapple first): Part of your body is overtaken by the coral that has contaminated the flying snake, and your dexterity decreases (DEX -1). Every consecutive time that you get contaminated, roll 1d6. On a 1-3, where black and purple coral meet, your skin burns from acid, taking 2d10 acid damage, and it leaves a permanent scar. On a 4-5, they meet at your hand; you take 3d10 acid damage, and you lose a finger. On a 6, they meet at your face, you take 4d10 acid damage, and you lose an eye.

Anatomy and Features

The creature is larger than a large brown bear; its fur is thick, shiny, and purple. It sparks in the light, giving the impression of a dark purple starry sky.
It dwells in a wide cave, which from a distance appears to be covered with pincushion moss of the same purple color as its fur.  

Their eyes are incandescent in nature, and they look like two spheres of hot, glowing gold.
Their claws are long and thick as a child’s arm; they look as polished silver, although whether they are of this material is hard to tell from a distance.  

Rumors, tales and testimonies

There is not much that can be found out about the creature, because approaching it seems impossible and only an inspection from afar is feasible.
The Mylgadilac has caught the attention of the townsfolk for the strange events that surround the creature and its cave.
If one gets closer than one hundred feet from it, a slumber seizes the body, and if one does not retreat to a safer place, then a deep sleep overtakes the body. In this state the dreams one has are a strange thing, for they seem alien, and from time to time one has the recollection of being part of the dreams of other creatures sleeping around the Mylgadilac.
A group of travelers who fell prey to this enchantment claim to have shared their dreams, and an old woman, sleeping near the cave, claims to have experienced the dreams of her horse.
In my research, I could only get close to the cave once, when the Mylgadilac was out foraging for food, and even in the absence of the creature, I have to maintain myself awake using special tonics and potions. On this excursion, I was able to pick up some of the purple cushion moss, which by itself has a similar effect, but milder, than that caused by the proximity to the creature.

Alchemical uses

The purple cushion moss, if kept alive, can help with insomnia when placed near the bed.

When used in creatures without insomnia can make them sleep more deeply and be harder to awaken.

The purple cushion moss has specks embedded in it, resembling grains of white sand.
Working with these specks is extremely difficult because, on touch, they have a strong somniferous effect, more intense than that produced by the moss.
If they are pressed between the naked skin of a waking and a sleeping creature, they allow the waking to catch a glimpse of the dreams of the sleeping. If this is done for more than a few minutes, it can lead to the waking creature becoming lost in the dreams of the sleeper. In this state, any wound acquired in the dream becomes real.

Mylgadilac stats

Into the Odd / Weird North / Cairn

STR 16, DEX 5, WILL 12, 20 HP, Armour 1.

Slow-moving: Heavy and slow, the Mylgadilac always acts last in the round.

Actions (one per turn):

• Silver Claws: 2d6.

• Blinding Shining Eyes: The eyes of the Mylgadilac flash with a shining golden light. Everyone looking at this light must pass a WILL save or their attacks become Impaired (their weapon dice become a d4).

• Somniferous Aura: Creatures that remain within 100 feet of the Mylgadilac for more than 10 minutes fall into a deep sleep unless they succeed on a WILL save. Repeat the save every 10 minutes. The Mylgadilac can infiltrate and shape the dreams of those sleeping nearby.

Critical Damage:

• Instant sleep: The victim drops unconscious and wakes up 1d4 hours later with heavy lethargy, cutting their DEX in half.

Mork Borg

HP 20, Morale 9, Armor 1

• Silver Claws: 2d6 damage.

• Slow-moving: Heavy and slow, the Mylgadilac always acts last.

Instead of attack:

• Blinding Shining Eyes: The eyes of the Mylgadilac flash with a shining golden light. Everyone looking at this light must pass a DR12 Presence test or become blinded for 1d4 rounds (when blinded, attacks are at DR14).

• Somniferous Aura: Remaining within 100 feet for more than 10 minutes forces a DR12 Presence test. Failure makes the victim fall into a deep slumber (repeat test every 10 minutes). The Mylgadilac can infiltrate and shape the dreams of those sleeping nearby.

OSE / Dolmenwood

Level 3, AC 5[14], Hit Dice 5 (22 HP), Saves D12 W13 P14 B15 S16 / D12 R13 H14 B15 S16, Neutral
Attacks: Silver claws (2d6)
Speed: 30, Morale: 9, XP: 100
Damage Types: Silver claws (slashing).

Special Abilities:

• Blinding Shining Eyes: The eyes of the Mylgadilac flashes with a shining golden light. Everyone that looks at this light must save vs paralysis or be blinded for 1d4 rounds (suffering a -4 penalty to all attack rolls)

• Somniferous Aura: Any creature remaining within 100 feet of the Mylgadilac for more than 10 minutes must save vs spells or fall into an unconscious slumber. This save must be repeated every 10 minutes. The Mylgadilac can infiltrate and shape the dreams of those sleeping nearby.

D&D 5e

AC 14 - 42 HP (15+5d10) - Save DC 12 - Speed 30 ft.
To hit: Melee +5; Damage: Melee +3
STR 16 (+3) - DEX 5 (-3) - CON 16 (+3) - INT 6 (-2) - WIS 12 (+1) - CHA 8 (-1)
Immunity to magically induced sleep.
Damage Types: Silver claws (slashing).

Slow-moving: The Mylgadilac always acts last in the initiative order.

Somniferous Aura: Every 1 minute, a creature within 100 feet of the Mylgadilac must succeed on a DC 12 Wisdom saving throw or fall asleep for 1 hour. Even if succeeded, the save must be repeated every 1 minute. The Mylgadilac can infiltrate and shape the dreams of those sleeping nearby.

ACTIONS

Silver Claws: Melee Weapon Attack: +5 to hit, Reach 5 ft, Hit: 10 (2d6 + 3) slashing/magical damage.

Blinding Shining Eyes: The eyes of the Mylgadilac flashes with a shining golden light. Everyone looking at this light must make a DC 12 Constitution saving throw. If the save is failed, they become Blinded for 1d4 rounds.

A reddish-brown horned goat has been seen traveling eagerly towards the coast, coming from the deep ravine of a mountain range…

The goat, difficult to spot from a distance, has reddish-brown fur, which somehow always seems wet, as if just out of a muddy pond. Its face is gray as if made of stone, and its three horns are white with pink veins, like marble.

It moves fast and its bound is high and long; no mountain or wall seems capable of challenging its climbing abilities

Its hooves are a vibrant reddish color and leave behind scorched footprints, as if they were made of red-hot iron.

Its tail seems to be almost ethereal, appearing as a single tail by day, but at night as if it split into three long, saw-like tails. Air around it moves the way air does over a flame.

Rumors, tales, and testimonies

The goat was first sighted in a deep mountain ravine. A local villager recalls guiding a strange foreigner to the site of an abandoned marble mine. Soon after leaving him there, a sudden, violent fire engulfed the canyon. The villager returned to aid the traveler, but found no trace of him. Instead, out of the roaring flames leapt the three-horned beast, fleeing the mountains westward.

Since that day, various travelers have caught sight of the beast. Local lore now holds that witnessing the goat from afar brings good fortune, but stepping into its scorched footprints invites disaster upon one's journey.

The goat’s path always leads westward; if it maintains its course, it will eventually reach the distant sea.

Alchemical uses:

A similar creature is mentioned in an ancient text. One such as a unicorn, born from the reaction of powerful elements. Created by a magus, destined to walk toward the sea.

The creature in the text is designed to absorb the power of the earth and to gradually forge it within itself, until it reaches the sea, where this power is tempered by the waters, focusing it into the creature's long central horn while its physical form dissolves into seafoam.

The horn is said to crumble in a few hours if not properly treated, with a three-day bath in salts and yeast being the proper treatment.

When ready, the horn is said to glow in the dark, and if rubbed against the skin, it cures fatigue and restores vigor. It is also said that whoever carries the horn shows a peculiar eagerness to touch sea waters and may sleepwalk toward the nearest shore (WILL/WIS save).

Three-Horned Ravine Goat

Into the Odd / Weird North / Cairn
STR 15 – DEX 17 – WILL 10 – 15 HP – Armour 3

• Horn (d6) or Hot Hooves (d8) or Tail (d8)

• Critical damage: Perpetually dark brown scar that hurts when in contact with water.

• Evasive: It bounds and jumps constantly. Ranged attacks against the goat are Impaired (d4 instead of weapons die).

• Frenzy: If cornered or targeted for capture, it enters a panic and lashes out wildly, attacking twice.

• Walks toward the closest shore: If its path is obstructed, it attacks once with its horn. If left alone, it ignores all intruders.

Mork Borg
HP 15, Morale 9, Horn: 1d6, No Armor.
Attacks: Horn d6, Hot Hooves 2d4, or Tail 2d6

• Evasive: Jumps and bounds. Attacks against are DR13

• Two Attacks: When cornered, hunted, or contained.

Behavior:

• If obstructed: It tries to impale anyone blocking its path with its horn.

• If hunted/trapped: It lashes out in frenzy. Kicks, tail-swipes, and gorings.

• If left alone: It ignores anyone and anything.

OSE/Dolmenwood
Level 3 AC 3/16 Hit Dice 3d8 (15 HP) Saves D12 W13 P14 B15 S16 / D12 R13 H14 B15 S16
Attacks: horn (1d6), hot hooves (2d4), tail (2d6)
Speed: 150’, Morale: 9, XP: 50
Damage Types: Horn (piercing), Hooves (bludgeoning/fire), Tail (slashing).

• Evasive: It bounds and jumps constantly. Ranged weapons suffer a -2 penalty to hit.

• Frenzy: If cornered or targeted for capture lashes out violently. Now makes two attacks per round instead of one.

• Walks toward the closest shore: If its path is obstructed, it attacks once with its horn. If left alone, it ignores all intruders.

D&D 5e
AC 15 – 21 HP (10+2d10) – Save DC 13 – Speed 60’
To hit: Melee +4 – Damage: Melee +2
STR 12 (+1) — DEX 16 (+3) — CON 12 (+1) — INT 6 (-2) — WIS 12 (+1) — CHA 8 (-1)
Resistance to fire.
Damage Types: Horn (piercing), Hooves (bludgeoning/fire), Tail (slashing).

• Evasive: It bounds and jumps constantly. Ranged weapon attacks are made with disadvantage.

• Frenzy: If cornered or targeted for capture enters a panic and lashes out violently. Now makes two attacks per round instead of one.

• Walks toward the closest shore: If its path is obstructed, it attacks once with its horn. If left alone, it ignores all intruders.

I want to do something a bit different for the next couple of months. Looking back at when I started Knitted Bones, I realized that a lot of you joined me relatively recently. Because of that, many of my earliest ideas are buried deep in the archives where few have traveled.

So, to give myself a bit of room while I keep tinkering with all my projects (I have many ideas flying in my head and as always, a lot of rethinking on the direction of some of these semi baked ideas and semi finished projects), I’m going to start unearthing some OSR creatures I created for my home game and this Substack (yes!, this substack was about that at first, the notes of an alchemist and the creatures she encountered in her travels). My plan is to bring these creatures back to the surface for all the new subscribers in the upcoming posts—though whenever I have new updates on my other ongoing projects, I won’t hesitate to post them too. To make these monsters useful for more people, I’ll also be adding an OSE/Dolmenwood and Mörk Borg stat block to each one of them.

To kick this off, let’s travel back to the lab of my alchemist alter ego, Octaria Pulnassea. This is the Ciafilo—complete with its original anatomical breakdowns, local rumors, and the strange materials you can harvest from its body.

A live example of a very elusive specimen, a large one-eyed bird, known by the locals of the village where it was captured as…

The Ciafilo is a large black and white bird, about the size of a medium-sized dog, with one yellow eye and an astounding crown of feathers that react to sound.

All its feathers have an almost metallic coloration, which gives them a certain reflective quality. They are incredibly durable and flexible, and even fire does not damage them.

Its beak is of a copper-like material, and has six small holes from which a golden steam seems to emanate.

Rumors, tales and testimonies

The people of the far western village, where the Ciafilo was captured, say that the bird is responsible for the strange behavior displayed by the inhabitants of their region in winter.
According to them, the bird, fleeing from the cold, is attracted by the warmth of the town, and in its presence, a golden mist begins to overtake the streets. In this strange atmosphere of golden fog, people become extremely emotional, and passionate crimes, love affairs, and quarrels become more common than ever.
The power of this bird has become so well known in the surrounding area that in the coldest weeks of winter, when its presence is most expected, people from other towns travel to this western village, creating a sort of winter festival, attended by artists and enthusiasts in search of the bird's influence. But despite all the people who visit the village, only a few claim to have witnessed it.

Alchemical uses:

A feather of the Ciafilo, if burned in a forge to the melting temperature of copper, can be spread into a hand-sized, human fingernail-thick layer, which, when cooled, is as strong as iron, with only a third of its weight.

The crown feathers are thinner and wider than the rest, with finer and longer barbs and barbules; if its quill is inserted into one’s ear, hearing is enhanced. If they are left in the ear for more than a few minutes, they begin to spread roots that become embedded inside the ear. Their removal can be dangerous and cause deafness.

When petted, the Ciafilo begins to exhale a golden steam-like substance.
Breathing this substance exalts one’s emotions.
If it is collected on a cold copper vessel, in a couple of hours it transforms into a bright yellow liquid, of sweet smell and taste.
If drunk cold, a vial of this liquid exalts the emotions, but if drunk hot, it soothes them.

Ciafilo

Into the Odd / Weird North / Cairn
STR 12 – DEX 15 – WILL 18 – 12 HP – Armour 2

• Critical damage: Extreme swing of emotions for one week, 1d8 each day:
  1-Euphoria, 2-Melancholy, 3-Depression, 4-Anger, 5-Numbness, 6-Arousal, 7-Remorse, 8-Euphoria

• Beak: d4

• Claws: d6

• Fast Flight: Can use an action to double its speed, instantly closing distances or escaping into the canopy.

• Golden Dust (Special): Once per encounter, it shakes its wings, filling a 30-foot area with shimmering powder. Everyone caught inside must pass a WILL save or roll a d2:

  • Appeased: Completely pacified. You cannot attack for 1d4 rounds unless harmed.

  • Exalted: Overcome with reckless rage. Defense is DR14, but your melee attacks deal +2 damage for 1d4 rounds.

Mork Borg
HP 12, Morale 9, Gleaming Feathers (Armor -d2)

• Frenetic Pace: Due to its unnatural agility, the Ciafilo acts 2 times per turn (on top of its movement). Attacks against it, and defense rolls to dodge its strikes, are DR14 Agility.

• Beak or Claws: It can choose to slash with its claws (d4 damage) or tear with its beak (d6 damage).

• Fast Flight: Can use an action to double its speed, instantly closing distances or escaping into the canopy.

• Reflecting Light: Its feathers bend light. Attacks from range are made at DR14 Presence. When hidden, detecting it requires a DR14 Presence test.

• Golden Dust (Special): Once per encounter, it shakes its wings, filling a 30-foot area with shimmering powder. Everyone caught inside must pass a DR14 Presence test or roll a d2:

  • Appeased: Completely pacified. You cannot attack for 1d4 rounds unless harmed.

  • Exalted: Overcome with reckless rage. Defense is DR14, but your melee attacks deal +2 damage for 1d4 rounds.

OSE/Dolmenwood
Level 3 AC 7/12 Hit Dice 3d8 (13 HP) Saves D11 W12 P13 B14 S15 / D11 R12 H13 B14 S15
Attacks 1 × beak (1d6) or 2 × claws (1d4) or Golden dust (see below)
Speed 60’ Morale 9 XP 125
Damage Types: Beak (piercing), Claws (slashing).

• Immunity: Immune to magical charm and mind-affecting effects.

• Resistances: Takes half damage from fire.

• Golden Dust: Once per encounter, the creature can shake its wings to release a cloud of golden dust filling a 30-foot area. All caught within the cloud must succeed on a save vs Spells or have their emotions magically altered. The GM rolls 1d2 or chooses the effect:

  • Appease: Targets become completely calm and peaceful, refusing to attack for 1d4 rounds unless harmed.

  • Exalt: Targets are overcome with frantic agitation, suffering a -2 penalty to armor class and saving throws due to reckless behavior for 1d4 rounds.

D&D 5e
AC 14 – 20 HP (10+2d10) – Save DC 16 – Speed 60’
To hit:  Melee +4 - Damage: Melee +1
STR 12 (+1) – DEX 15 (+2) – CON 12 (+1) – INT 8 (-1) – WIS 12 (+1) – CHA 10 (+0)
Immunity to being charmed.
Resistance to poison, fire, and radiant.
Damage Types: Beak (piercing), Claws (slashing).

• Golden Dust (1/Day). The creature shakes its wings, releasing a cloud of shimmering powder in a 30-foot radius centered on itself. Each creature caught within the cloud must succeed on a Wisdom saving throw (DC 16) or have its emotions magically altered. The DM chooses or rolls a d2 to determine the effect:

  • Appease. The target is magically calmed. It becomes indifferent toward creatures it was hostile toward and cannot attack or take harmful actions for 1d4 rounds. This effect ends early if the target takes damage or witnesses its allies being harmed.

  • Exalt. The target is overcome with frantic agitation and reckless fury. For 1d4 rounds, it suffers a -2 penalty to its Armor Class and saving throws, but its melee weapon attacks deal an extra 1d4 damage due to its reckless behavior.

Today, I want to show you the latest update for Runner of the Wasteland (also available at DriveThruRPG, Wargame Vault, and RPG trader).

As I mentioned in my last two posts (this and this), I’ve been working on a framework for those moments when you want to do something in the game, but there isn't a specific rule for it.

Since Runner of the Wasteland is a very “focused” solo TTRPG, where the gameplay mostly revolves around a tight loop: accept a delivery job, survive the harsh wastes while traveling between towns, deliver the package, and repeat. My solution for “doing something outside the rules” was actually hinted at in a small comment at the bottom of the core rules:

At first, this was fine. It relied on managing your daily Energy (E), which is the core mechanic connecting every other piece of the game.

However, I realized I wanted to be more explicit. I wanted to design a system that introduces uncertainty and more tension to your runner’s actions, representing all the external factors that are completely out of their hands.

After a lot of testing and trying out different ideas, I boiled down the “rules for actions without rules” to this:

Here I kept the game’s core resource management intact. You still perform actions by spending Energy (E), and whether you succeed depends entirely on your willingness to pay that cost. However, I’ve added a couple of new elements:

1. A dice pool procedure to introduce external factors and weave them into the narrative. This represents everything outside of your runner’s control. It dictates how much effort they must ultimately exert to complete the action, without defining success or failure—that part is still entirely up to you.

2. A “Do it anyway!” rule to let players try their luck instead of paying the E cost. This offers an escape route when you are locked out of options, especially when your runner only has a few points of E left to survive. However, “doing it anyway” is not a free pass. You must still suffer the consequences of this extra effort, leading into a minigame where you desperately try to redirect the fallout toward your less valuable assets (by rolling a die in a tight “rolling track”):

3) And finally, I also added a spark table to help you add more depth to your failures, successes, and the consequences of “Doing it anyway!”

Just like the previous expansions, this new material comes with its own folding guide to help you assemble your booklet.

What if you don’t want to add all this mess to your game?

As with all the extra rules I have made for Runner of the Wastelands, these are purely optional, even on a session-to-session basis, as sometimes I want to play the game just with the core rules, and others I need more depth to the mechanics.

So when you are using them, feel free to choose and mix them as you wish!

What’s next?

For the fifth goal (the $100 goal), if we reach it, I have the crazy idea to record a soundtrack to listen to while playing Runner of the Wastelands. This will be a major endeavor and will take longer than previous extra materials, so I’m still unsure whether to pursue this idea or not.

Also, I still want to create more focused spark tables for each type of terrain, and at some point, I would like to develop some procedures for factions (which is something I miss in my own game).

You can always leave comments on the page of the game, or here, to express what you would like to see next.

I hope this extra material pushes you to have more adventures in the wastes!

Have a great week!

As I discussed in the previous post, I really love the loop of Runner of the Wastelands, and I enjoy the idea of having E (Energy) as the main engine of the system. E was built to represent the energy you wake up with to do things every day—something that is sometimes out of your control, which is why it has a random component.

My goal was to move away from static attributes or dice rolls dictating whether you can perform a task. Instead, it places the choice in your hands: if you spend the energy (E), you succeed.

This mechanic also set a clear time constraint; it naturally defines a day through the number of things you can do before needing to go to sleep. Rolling poorly at the start of a new day, and waking up with only 4E (3+1d6) forces you to face a brutal reality—you only get to do four things today.

However, there are instances where the outcome of your intent is not entirely in your hands. This is true whether the result is binary—succeeding or failing—or when an action has a degree of success, such as the amount of food you track down when gathering or hunting under the core rules. In these situations, the different procedures and potential actions you take across the wastelands and towns are naturally tied to a dice roll.

But how do we fit this into the same overarching framework, where E dictates how many actions you can take, while still creating an all-encompassing system that handles unexpected situations outside the written rules? That is precisely what I have been developing. Today, I want to share with you the path I have taken toward this new system for Extra Material 4.

First step: What if I copy myself?

My first thought was to copy myself. I want to emphasize that in Runner of the Wastelands, not all actions are equal. For the majority of those written in the main rules, after you spend your E on them, you succeed, and the only variable is the degree of success managed with a roll. However, some actions require a roll just to decide whether you succeed or not. So, I looked at the only action written that way in the main rules and tried to copy it as a model for something more general:

So, I took this core concept and expanded it into a generalized mechanic. In doing so, I also incorporated the idea of a Skill Level to create room for character growth and progression over time:

Action/Skill level X = You try to do the action. Roll d8, in a (8-X) or higher you suceed.

This means that “Travel Stealthily” essentially becomes a Level 4 skill. By swapping the d4 it currently uses for a d8 and shifting the target number to 4 or higher, we keep the exact same probability of success.

It also means that at Level 0, you have a 12.5% chance of success; at Level 1, it’s 25%; at Level 2, it’s 37.5%; and at Level 3, you arrive at the flat 50/50 chance you would normally get from the Oracle.

At first, this felt like a solid idea, but I quickly realized it introduced a fundamental problem: it shifts the game's overall feel. If every action outside the written rules relies on this binary chance mechanic, the game starts to feel like a standard game of probability. While it might lead to faster gameplay (when replacing the Oracle), flattening every unexpected situation into a simple pass/fail roll strips away the distinctive flavor that makes Runner of the Wastelands unique. Here, E is reduced to a mere "token" you spend just to roll a die. It’s like saying, “I have this cool concept of Energy, but now it will just work as a door to the most common way of thinking about actions in RPGs.” So no, I needed to put E back where it belonged—at the center of everything.

Second step: Putting E back in the center.

To put E back at the center, I flipped the idea. I stopped asking: “Do I succeed or not?”

Instead, the system now asks: “How much E do I need to pull this off?”

Every unwritten action now has a fixed cost in Energy. This cost scales based on the raw effort required:

• 1E → If it is something you know how to do and have successfully done before.

• 2E → If it is something you know how to do, but with an added complication.

• 3E → If it is a task that is completely new or inherently difficult.

• 4E → If it is a new or difficult task compounded by an extra complication.

But this model is missing the mismatch between your intent and the outcome. I rethought this dynamic: after you declare your intent, you roll to see if the E you thought you needed is enough, or if you actually need more or less.

Putting it like this ensures it is still a matter of managing your E, and it remains your decision whether you will spend the extra E or not. Crucially, it adds some uncertainty to represent the things you cannot control.

After spending your initial Energy based on your intent, roll 1d6:

• 1–2: You underestimated the effort required. You must spend 1E more to achieve your goal.

• 3–5: Your intent perfectly aligns with the outcome. You achieve exactly what you set out to do.

• 6: You overestimated the effort needed. Your result is better, faster, or yields more than intended—or you immediately regain 1E.

With these two pieces of text, you have a rule to tackle all actions outside the written rules, and you can even add “growth” to it by saying:

• Every time that you do “something new,” write down that action and make a mark beside it. After 20 marks, it becomes “something you know how to do and have done before” (meaning you will now spend 1E or 2E as your base intent).

• Every time that you do “something you know how to do and have done before,” write down that action and make a mark beside it. After 20 marks, you don’t have to roll the dice after your intent.

And just like that, we have an entire system that puts E at the center of everything. And now, it is time to test!

Third step: Say the same but simpler

And I tested it. I played various “mini-sessions” where I tried to do things that weren’t in the rules, sometimes layered with the Oracle, sometimes not. Although the system succeeded in feeling more like Runner of the Wastelands—in the sense that every action felt like part of the management of E—it still felt a bit clunky.

The actual dice rolling didn’t feel bad at all. However, looking up the definition of each action type just to determine the baseline E cost slowed the entire experience down. It created two problems: first, I constantly had to stop and check how much E a specific task required; second, it was often difficult to decide which arbitrary category the action fit into. The mechanics were getting in the way of the momentum.

What I realized is that I could convey the same idea much more simply. I had already hit the nail on the head regarding the core message of the mechanic: this is a game about energy management, and the uncertainty stems entirely from how much E you will ultimately have to spend. However, the execution just wasn’t elegant enough yet.

My final solution was to strip away the categories and streamline the fiction into a simple pool of dice:

Base Cost: To do anything unwritten, spend 1E.

The Uncertainty: For every force outside your control that you feel that is important and interesting (Adverse weather, Time constraints, Inexperience, Antagonist, etc…), add 1d6 to a pool. Use a different color of die for each specific threat, obstacle or complication.1

• Any 1–5: Complications. That specific obstacle demands +1E, or you cannot accomplish the task.

• Any 6: If you commit to doing the action, then you spend 1E less doing it, OR you excel on it (you perform the action better, faster, or deeper than intended).

Use the colors of the dice to weave the mechanics straight into your story. The color tells you exactly which obstacle made you spend more effort and which ones ended up helping you.

If you need a quantity when doing the action, roll 1d6:

• 1–2: Less than expected: Fewer / shorter / less…

• 3-5: As expected.

• 6: More than expected: More / longer / greater…

I played more “mini-sessions” with this new system, and it runs much smoother than the previous version, still maintaining the core idea of E management as the heart of the game.

Maybe how it is written can be improved, but I am very happy with how this mechanic feels, because it feels like Runner of the Wastelands while adding something new to it.

I invite you to try this framework in your next session of Runner of the Wastelands and let me know your thoughts! In the meantime, I will continue testing.

This is it for today. If you want to see more extra material for “Runner of the Wastelands”, remember that you can help by buying it, sharing it with your friends, or commenting/reviewing it on itch.io, DriveThruRPG, Wargame Vault, or RPG trader. For every 20, let’s make 1 extra new thing!

See you in two weeks!

So first of all, thanks to all of you who have joined Runner of the Wastelands in some way or another—by sharing it, playing it, reviewing it, or buying it.

For me, it has been super interesting to have a “never-ending” project at hand, where I can display some of the ideas I have about solo playing while trying to maintain cohesion with the previous material and the vibe, setting, and initial intention of the game. So, thanks again for helping me explore this creative space.

Now, I have been juggling some ideas for what to do next with the new extra material (extra material number 4), so I just want to share these still-in-progress ideas.

Actions outside of what is written

I really love the loop of Runner of the Wastelands (RW), and I built all the resource management and actions around this main loop—expressed through the actions you can take in the wastes, in town, or in combat. However, I think that at times, if you want to interact with things outside of this loop, you can only rely on the footnote advice I gave in the core rules:

While this works, it introduces two fundamental problems:

1. There is no “trying”: The core engine of RW relies on spending Energy to perform tasks, which works well for the specific actions defined in the game (both in the core rules and the extra material). This is because every action is binary: you either do it or you don’t. There is no concept of “trying”—at least not in a general sense. Only a few actions involve a random element, which, if it goes against you, can be interpreted as a failure while trying (such as when you “travel stealthily”).

   

   And this can be a problem. If you want to interact with something outside of the written actions, you could just spend 1E—but does that mean you can achieve anything with 1E?

   The way I have managed this in my own sessions of RW is that if I feel spending 1E isn’t enough to achieve something, I roll on the Oracle.

   

   And this works great and keeps the momentum going, but it gives every “difficult” task a flat 50/50 chance of success. This can be “fixed” by adding a third die to the Oracle: if a success is more or less probable, you roll two answer dice. If at least one of them shows an even or odd number, the answer is yes or no, respectively.

2. There is no “growth”: The other potential problem with the RW core rules is that there isn’t room to improve your character’s skills. Your runner is always fighting against the depletion of energy, and that’s it. I actually like this feature, but I can imagine other players wanting a way to progress by increasing their chances of success for certain actions—something you can’t achieve using just the Oracle.

So, how do we build a framework to add gamable pieces to RW—one that allows players to take actions outside of what is written in the core rules and extended material?

This is something I have been thinking about, and I have an idea for it: to take the structure of the “travel stealthily” action and extend it into a generalised mechanic.

Action/Skill level X = You try to do the action. Roll d8, in a (8-X) or higher you suceed.

This means that “Travel Stealthily” essentially becomes a Level 4 skill. By swapping the d4 it currently uses for a d8 and shifting the target number to 4 or higher, we keep the exact same probability of success.

It also means that at Level 0, you have a 12.5% chance of success; at Level 1, it’s 25%; at Level 2, it’s 37.5%; and at Level 3, you arrive at the flat 50/50 chance you would normally get from the Oracle.

So, the next big question is: how do you learn these skills? Perhaps through a tracker you must fill to earn a level, where each box on the tracker is filled by spending 1E?

In combat: triggers and instinct

Another idea I want to explore is the addition of triggers and instincts to combat. This is a concept I borrowed from The Burning Wheel, which introduces “instincts” as actions your character automatically performs whenever a specific situation arises. In The Burning Wheel, this serves as a safeguard. It ensures your character maintains a certain behaviour even if you, the player, forget to declare it. It also acts as a shield against a Game Master’s gotcha moments—proving your character was actually prepared. For example, an instinct could be: “I always travel through dangerous territory with an arrow nocked.” If you are ambushed in the wilds, even if you hadn’t explicitly told the GM you were ready, you can invoke your instinct to show you were prepared and shoot that arrow right away.

When I first read this in The Burning Wheel, I thought it was ingenious and made me think about how to include something like this in my games. However, for a solo, GM-less game like Runner of the Wastelands, in which combat is played on a hex-combat-map —where you have just a few types of actions and where every extra thing you do costs you Energy, the core resource of the game— this idea morphed into something else: a way of “coding” your runner’s behavioural patterns during combat.

My plan is to introduce a list of conditional triggers and instincts (reactions). Whenever a trigger condition is met, the corresponding instinct activates. A very obvious example would be: Trigger: Lose Energy during an attack → Instinct: Move one hex away.

I think this system can expand into a cascading sequence of trigger-instinct pairs. This would allow players to build tactical “combos” that activate dynamically during an encounter. Of course, a cascading chain of automatic reactions could easily break or hack the game’s balance. To counter this, transitioning from one trigger-instinct pair to the next in a combo chain should cost 1E

This will allow your runner to react in moments of danger, triggering actions outside of their turn, or in reaction to their turn`s action. This gives them a new way to survive the wastelands, while allowing players to express their runner's peculiarities through how they react to danger.

So the next step is to write a list of triggers and instincts, and then, of course, a ton of playtesting!

Card-based combat?

A few weeks ago, we had a long weekend, and it was amazing. We travelled through the north of Chile, but in the moments of leisure —when my friends were taking a nap, reading, scrolling, or just relaxing— I found myself wishing I had brought a copy of RW. But then I thought about it, and travelling with all the miniatures and terrain pieces (obstacle) can be a bit impractical.

With this in mind, I started thinking about creating a travel-friendly version of the game. This essentially translates into designing an alternative combat system that removes the need to carry miniatures.

This idea, much like the ones before it, is still in its early stages. However, I have identified at least three core pillars of RW's combat that I must translate into this new system if I want to maintain the same vibe:

• A getaway mechanic: A system that allows you to flee from combat while still feeling like a tense competition of speed and positioning.

• Interacting with obstacles: A way to navigate or run over obstacles, allowing players to use the terrain to their tactical advantage (preserving the "feeling of terrain").

• Energy depletion as the core engine: Keeping resource management at the heart of the conflict.

I’ve been experimenting with different mechanics and components to pack these three pillars into a portable format. At the moment, I’ve had some success using a standard deck of playing cards to bring these ideas to life. So now, just like with the previous concepts, the next steps are to refine the mechanics and dive into a lot of playtesting!

What to do next?

These are just three ideas I’m working on, but I still have some others cooking up, like making more backdrop images for the different biomes, making a system for factions, and creating new actions. So, if you find any of these ideas more interesting than the others, or you have an idea of your own about something you are missing in your session when playing RW, leave a comment!

This is it for today. If you want to see more extra material for “Runner of the Wastelands”, remember that you can help by buying it, sharing it with your friends, or commenting/reviewing it on itch.io, DriveThruRPG, Wargame Vault, or RPG trader. For every 20, let’s make 1 extra new thing!

Also, I have been working on new designs for the character artquetypes of “No Peace for the Heathen”, so probably in the next weeks I will be sharing some of them.

See you in two weeks!

This week, I want to show you how things are going with No Peace for the Heathen (NPFTH), my OSR/NSR project inspired by the mythology of Chiloé (Chile).

For those of you who are new on here, and haven’t read about it yet: in NPFTH, you play as native islanders trying to survive a brutal invasion from the north. The main goal here is to find “Isla Chica”, this legendary hidden sanctuary. To get there, players have to pull off some pretty specific, harrowing tasks tied to their backgrounds just to map their way out. Characters will journey through a world where the colonizers’ worldview and the islanders’ cosmology crash into each other, twisting the whole place into some really dangerous, surreal, and magical environments.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I have accumulated a lot of material for this project. At first, it was meant to be a standalone game with its own combat, exploration, magic, downtime, and manipulation rules.

However, after some thought on how to find the best avenue for this setting to reach more people, I decided to channel my energy into transforming NPFTH into a setting book with modular additional rules. To do this, I am leaning into the framework of Cairn 2E —a well-known OSR/NSR ruleset that I have experience with, and one that provides the perfect amount of space for the setting to breathe.

In this direction, what I have been doing is translating the different character archetypes of NPFTH into Cairn 2E’s backgrounds.

So, let me show you how these archetypes are looking through the Cairn 2E lens…

NPFTH backgrounds (Cairn 2E’s style)

There are some differences in style, and I had to add an additional table for the things the character believes they must accomplish to reach this mythical land beyond the reach of conquistadors. However, I think it’s on the right track, and it has been refreshing to see the game through a new lens.

What are the next steps for NPFTH?

Well, after letting a project rest for a while, there is always the danger that new ideas will come to haunt the very foundations of what you built before. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it brings a lot of second-guessing and rethinking about whether you are on the right path.

The good thing is that, after all this second-guessing and reflection, I decided that NPFTH is on the right track. All of those new ideas—which come from new things I’ve stumbled upon throughout these months—will only add to NPFTH in its present shape. And yes, I’m talking about new rules, or playstyles encapsulated into mechanics, that will serve to complement the great scaffold that is Cairn 2E.

Two of the main TTRPGs that have made me rethink what I want to include in NPFTH are The Burning Wheel and Mythic Bastionland. The first one has been an amazing read over the past few months—I got lucky and found someone selling a secondhand copy. As for the second one, I’m actually playing it right now with some friends and loving some of its amazing mechanics.

From The Burning Wheel, its philosophy on driving the story through character Beliefs—written statements by players that guide their actions—and how GMing is all about putting these Beliefs in tension, is a framework I see as the perfect medium to propel the kind of stories I want people to tell when playing NPFTH (which is already somehow expressed through the “What do you believe you have to do to reach Isla Chica?” portion of character creation, but that I think I can formalize and empower even more).

Meanwhile, from Mythic Bastionland, the concepts of Myths and Omens—and how they are intertwined in the exploration procedure—offer a perfect way to simplify my own concept of the Chasm. By turning story and exploration into a single, beautifully tight system with simple mechanics, it ties everything to the land much more elegantly than what I had originally planned.

Ultimately, I think both games have an immense amount to teach, and I highly recommend anyone reading this post to get a copy of each. For me, they have opened my mind to new ideas, showing me new ways to express what I truly want to express through NPFTH.

More to Translate Into the Cairn 2E Style

Another thing I’m working on is funneling the entire setting of NPFTH through the amazing tables and tools found in the Cairn 2E Warden's Guide. Over the coming weeks, I will be building setting-specific tables so you can create your own version of Isla Grande, and I'll likely share how these tables are coming together in my upcoming posts.

This is it for today. If you want to see more about NPFTH you can read my previous posts about it (here is one! but you can find more by browsing my Substack homepage).

As always, I want to remind you that Runner of the Wastelands (my solo TTRPG) is continuously evolving, and your support helps fund new additional material! You can support the project by buying it, sharing it with friends, or leaving a comment or review on itch.io, DriveThruRPG, or Wargame Vault. For every 20, let’s make 1 extra new thing!

See you in two weeks!

After a looong time I’m finally returning to the substackverse, initially with a two-post-a-month frequency.

It has taken me this long to write a post because this year I’ve been navigating a complete redefinition of my daily life. Returning to my homeland after eight years, I’ve had to discover new places and reconnect with the circles I’d left behind. Among the challenges has been rebuilding a home—a process that takes time, both in terms of social connections and the practical aspects of setting up a house. But as of last week, I can finally say that I have a home.

I've managed to fit most of my things in here. It's not a spacious place, but it's cozy, and I've gathered all my games and miniatures on tall shelves that line the walls. Most importantly, I have a comfortable desk where I can really get into my writing, and I’m very close to most of my friends.

So, as a first hello from my new home, I wanted to share the latest updates on “Runner of the Wastelands”!, because we reached the third goal of $60! (also at DriveThruRPG)

I was popular for a week!

As a quick first update, I just want to share my surprise at what happened during a truly magical week this May, when Runner of the Wastelands became the most popular solo RPG on itch.io and the third most popular TTRPG overall.

I don't know how this happened, but a huge wave of people downloaded the game. So a massive thank you to everyone who helped spread the word!

But enough about past glories—now I want to show you what’s included in the third expansion!

Of prestige, my handler, and the people I know

When playing Runner of the Wastelands, I realized I wanted more gameable elements to interact with when visiting towns. In particular, I needed an impactful, mechanical way to tie in my character's history as a runner in each location—a gameable piece that allowed me to leave my mark on each town.

My vehicle for this was the concept of “prestige”—a record that directly affects how much you can charge for your services as a runner—and a new archetype, the handler, designed to show another way runners impact the societies of the wastelands.

Prestige

Since I wanted to maintain the simplicity of the rules, I tried to make prestige a way to show your character's advancement and interactions with the world, without the need for complex, person-to-person or faction-to-faction notekeeping.

The easiest solution I found was to create a prestige score for each town (there is a maximum of 10 towns in Runner of the Wastelands), which depends directly on how effective you are as a runner and determines how much you can charge in each town for your next job.

This simple score includes the possibility that failing a job will damage your prestige so badly that nobody in that town will hire you anymore. However, since your prestige depends on jobs both from and to that town, you can always rebuild your reputation by delivering packages to them coming from another town.

Handler

Handlers were an idea that came second in this exploration of the relation between runners and the townsfolk. In my mind, handlers originally started as a guild of runners. However, the mechanics I began to build to manage that guild—and its influence on your runners and their jobs—became too cumbersome. I tried to create a network of interconnected assets, which was interesting but not simple enough. After a couple of tries, I reduced the scope of the idea and disconnected the people of this guild, who previously worked as connections to get better jobs. They became handlers: unaffiliated agents who use their connections in each town to find you jobs.

In essence, they do the work for you, so you expend less energy searching for more jobs (for just 1E, you can get 1 to 9 jobs). But then the question was: okay, you can get more jobs for the same 1E you spent before for a single job, so… what is the catch?

To answer this took some trial and testing. At first, I thought that they would take a cut of the money for themselves for each job. It was a logical approach, but the problem is that you get paid upon delivery, so how does that make sense narratively? You deliver the package, and somehow part of the money magically teleports to the handler? Also, if that were the case, I would have to keep a record of which handler gave me which job, making everything much more messy.

After some thought and playtesting, I arrived at a solution: debt. For every job you get from a handler, you incur a debt with them. If you don’t pay that debt, you can’t ask them for more jobs.

This not only makes things simpler, but also provides an extra narrative outcome that sprouts directly from this mechanical aspect of the game. It allows you to explore how this debt affects your character and forces you to think about how to manage your other jobs in order to fulfill that debt that you have with your favorite handler.

In addition to this, I added a random factor to how many jobs you get from a handler depending on their level, and things ended up looking like this:

To keep track and not panic

To manage all this I made a simple table, or ledger, where you can track everything you need to determine your Prestige (PRE) and Prestige fee (PF) in each town, plus, space to record your handler and the debt you have with them.

Extended connect table

Since handlers and prestige add more dimension to the game when you are in a town, I felt it was a necessity to expand the table of people you can meet in each town to allow for more variety and avoid repetition. I also decoupled the “kin” of these characters from all their other “aspects”. This is something I dislike about the connection table in the core rules, but hadn't changed previously due to space constraints.

What if you don’t want to add all this mess to your game?

As with all the extra rules I have made for Runner of the Wastelands, these are purely optional, even on a session-to-session basis, as sometimes I want to play the game just with the core rules, and others I need more depth to the mechanics.

So when you are using them feel free to choose and mix them as you wish!

This is it for today. If you want to see more extra material for “Runner of the Wastelands”, remember that you can help by buying it, sharing it with your friends, or commenting/reviewing it on itch.io, DriveThruRPG, or Wargame Vault. For every 20, let’s make 1 extra new thing!

Also, I have been slowly working on “No Peace for the Heathen”, but I have some updates I will share with you in the next post.

See you in two weeks!

Finally, I returned to my country. I’m still moving between places while I look for somewhere to settle, but at last things are less chaotic than before, so I have some time to tell you a little about the things I’ve been working on.

Today, I want to share the new extra material I’ve added for “Runner of the Wastelands” after we reached the second goal of $40! (also at itch.io).

For this second extra material, there were a lot of things I wanted to do; one of them was rules for “looting and crafting”. However, I wasn’t sure how to do it, and more importantly, how to do it without disrupting the main loop of the game.

I had some ideas, but it wasn’t until I read on Reddit about the adventures of Saari, the meerkat runner, that I had some sort of more defined direction. The way in which Saari had no-combat encounters using the combat grid made everything click in my mind.

From here, what were once rules for “crafting and looting” became rules for “exploring and looting”.

But unlike the first extra material, which was an oracle, this one would be more deeply intertwined with the rules of the game, which means only one thing: lots of testing!

Testing was really fun. I made a lot of progress on the adventures of my character Marla while testing this new material, and I even created a character from scratch to determine if the new alternative rules could ruin a game that started from zero. After tweaking certain numbers and rules and playing about twenty-something games with this new character, everything works well, and most importantly, it’s still a lot of fun!

Now, let me show you what the new “Exploring and Looting” rules look like!!

TWO MODES OF EXPLORING AND LOOTING

The way in which I included these rules into the loop of the game was to include them as one of the things that you can do in the wastes (the others being Advance 1 HEX, Travel Stealthily, Hunt/Gather food, and Hide Camp).

I did it this way because it grounds it to the main question that is the starting point of each game-loop and that drives the action within the game: “In what will I expend my energy (E) today?”

So, as for any of the other things you can do in the wastes, if you want to “Explore and Loot”, you will have to expend 1E to do it.

At first, I thought about doing something akin to “Hunting/Gathering food,” just one roll, and then something happening or not depending on the roll, to keep the game running (pun intended), but after reading Saari’s adventure, I thought better of it and decided to have two modes for “Exploring and Looting.” Which one you use depends on whether you want something light and fast, or something deeper and probably more challenging. The good thing is that it doesn’t always have to be the same!

JUST ROLLS: Fast fun with tables (back cover)

This is the fast and easy mode of exploring and looting, just a few rolls, to spark the lay outimagination and determine what happens and the value in coin (C) of your loot.

As for “Hunting/Gathering food,” if what you find is too valuable, then probably someone or something else has also found its way to it: encounter time!!!

HEX GRID: Danger and fun in a grid (inner pages)

Now, here is the more in-depth, rules-heavy mode of exploring and looting. It also uses the back cover exploration rules to help you create the characteristics of the place you are exploring, but you will need to place on the table an “exploring grid” and set up obstacles, zones, exits, and entries within that grid.

In this mode, to loot, you will have to expend energy or try your luck while being adjacent to an obstacle. However, as in the Just Rolls mode, if you get loot with too high a value (5C or 6C), then an encounter happens.

Also, each obstacle/zone that is in the exploring grid has one or more “types”. These “types” refer only to the effect that an obstacle/zone has, and are broad enough that different phenomena, objects, conditions, etc., can be the source of the same effect.

So if on one occasion you are exploring a laboratory with aromatic flowers and on another the ruins of a building, and on both occasions there is an obstacle/zone of the “Attract” type, they are probably different phenomena or objects (in this example, it could be that the scent of the flowers hacks your brain to attract you, while, in the ruined building the floor is sloped and makes you slide to one side every time you move).

The idea is that, based on the distribution of these obstacles and zones, as well as their types, each place you explore has the potential to be different, with enough variety in the challenges you’ll have to overcome if you want to explore and loot the secrets hidden in the wastelands.

But there is more: as some obstacles can be connections, the place you are exploring could have multiple levels, so, if you want and have enough energy (E), you can go deeper and deeper to discover the secrets and treasures hidden in the sprawling net of levels.

For making this sprawling exploration easier, I also made a “Level Sheet” where you can record the configuration of each level (with a set of practical keys at the bottom of the page).

If you have 10mm miniatures (or any small token), you could use this as the exploring grid, which I did a couple of times using one of my Warmaster miniatures, which helped a lot when playing on a smaller table.

PRINT IT AND FOLD IT!

As for the oracle, I have compiled everything on a single A4 page, which can then be folded into a small A6-size “booklet”. This is how you can fold it:

And here is the A4 page in case you want to print it and fold it to make your own booklet (the pdf version is on itch.io, DriveThruRPG, and Wargame Vault).

Can I use this in another hex-crawl?

Well... it depends. These rules are designed to be compatible with “Runner of the Wastelands” and have been tested to be integrated into its game loop.

However, if you like how these rules work and can find a meta-currency or statistic in the game you are playing that can replace Energy (E), in principle, you could use these rules.

I can imagine someone using them in an OSR, converting Energy to HP and Coins to Gold/Silver, but there are probably better procedures to use in OSR games.

Furthermore, encounters are difficult to adapt to other games, and probably, if you use encounters, you should use the combat rules from Runner of the Wasteland. But if you are already using both the combat rules and the exploration + looting rules, it is probably better to play “Runner of the Wastelands” or make a hack of it. If you do, tell me about it, I would love to collab or hear about it!!!

So this is it for today. If you want to see more extra material for “Runner of the Wastelands”, remember that you can help by buying it, sharing it with your friends, or commenting/reviewing it on itch.io, DriveThruRPG, or Wargame Vault. For every 20, let’s make 1 extra new thing!

See you next time!

Today, I wanted to share the new extra material I’ve added for “Runner of the Wastelands” after we reached the first goal of $20!

Also, I wanted to let you know that over the next two or three months, I will be reducing the frequency of my posts (probably to two per month), as things are changing in my life (new job + moving back to my country), and I have a lot of things to close, move, and deal with.

Now, let me show you the new oracle for “Runner of the Wastelands”!!

2d12 oracle + spark table + thread/focus table

Three layers of answers

When I started this oracle, I wanted it to have three different layers of depth, or three different things you could get from it with just one roll, without being overly complicated:

1. Yes or No.

2. Degree of the Yes or No.

3. Additional But/Because/And + Spark table to inspire them.

On my first attempt, I tried to devise a mechanic to access these layers with just 2d6, using all possible combinations and doing all the juggling I could think of with just these two dice. But after several days of playing with probabilities, I realized that what I wanted to do with them didn’t result in an oracle with the same probability for all its combinations.

In most cases, it wasn’t a big difference in probability, but if these biases were to remain, they could only do so if they deliberately supported the narrative of the game, which was not the case.

So, to keep my idea of a three-layered answer —and use as few dice as possible— I decided to change the size of the dice to d12s, since with them I came up with a way to do the same thing while keeping the same probability for all the combinations of outcomes (I could have also rolled 1d6 for each layer of the answer, which would have ensured an evenly distributed probability, but I was looking for that more “cohesive” feeling you get when you roll fewer dice and use the interaction between the results as part of the mechanics).

“And” and the thread/focus table

Also, one of the things I wanted to add to the oracle —which is one of the things I like most from Mythic GM emulator 2e— is a thread table: something that ties the answer you get from the oracle with the different threads your character is following. I wanted to design this bit in such a way that when rolling the dice, something special would be perceived visually, so I decided to use pairs as the “key” for threads (plus, their probability of occurrence for 2d12 is only 8.33%, which makes them even more special).

The oracle

After playing around and thinking about it, this is the oracle I have come up with. The idea is that not all questions will require the use of all three layers. Sometimes you will just want a yes or no, but other times you will want to dig deeper and get a degree and a possible “because/but/and” added to that answer.

Sparks, thread, and focus table

If you are using the third layer of the oracle (where you can get a “but”, “because”, or “and”), the idea is that you think of the first three things that come to your mind as seed to this extra part of the answer.

However, if you need something to ignite your imagination, I’ve made two spark tables (each with 36 entries) that can also be used to answer open-ended questions (without a clear yes/no answer). For me, having just a couple of tables to inspire my answer is something that works very well. More than that can slow down my reaction time too much, as searching for the “right” table through a library of tables adds more seconds between the question and the answer, which makes me feel more disconnected and less immersed in the moment.

If you roll pairs in the 2d12, you get an “and”: this is the moment to see which of the threads your character follows is related to the answer. As the thread table is just a collection of characters, factions, plots, places, and items your character is most interested in, it will probably be empty at first, so I’ve added a focus table next to it that you can use instead of the thread table (in case it is empty or when rolling on it, you fall in a empty box). Then, if what you get from the focus is interesting enough —adding all the specificities that come from your character’s context and history— you can fill in that empty box in the thread table with this new entry created from the focus table.

Print it and fold it!

For ease of use, I have compiled everything on a single A4 page, which can then be folded into a small A6-size “booklet”.

And here is the A4 page in case you want to print and use this oracle.

Can I use this oracle in other games?

Well… yes! You can use this oracle in other games without any problems. The only thing is that you should change the focus table, as some of its entries are related to the setting of “Runner of the Wastelands”. If some of you would like to use it for your solo games, let me know in the comments, and I can upload a version with a more setting-agnostic focus table or with an empty focus table for you to fill in.

So this is it for today. If you want to see more extra material for “Runner of the Wastelands”, remember that you can help by buying it, sharing it with your friends, or commenting/reviewing it on itch.io, DriveThruRPG, or Wargame Vault. For every 20, let’s make 1 extra new thing!

See you next time!

Warmaster

by Rick Priestley and published by Games Workshop

This year, I have been going deeper into the wargaming hobby, more than in previous years, and in some way, I have been able to “see” the source for the creation of the modern TTRPG in these games. It is amazing how, in those moments of failure when playing, when the dice pushes you toward the most unlikely scenario, or whenever you are very focused on painting one of your minis, stories arise naturally. In these blank spaces, these miniatures become characters, and their failures, stories, and in that sense, I think I have felt how TTRPGs naturally arise from these games.

But it has also been interesting to see how these two branches from the same tree (wargames and traditional TTRPGs) diverged from one another. And how some TTRPGs that kept the focus of their mechanics in combat (especially modern dnd adjacent games) now feel somehow frozen in time, or somehow stagnant, in comparison to the games on the wargame-branch, where combat has evolved into so many other interesting shades and shapes.

One of these games that has surprised me with a “new” take on combat is Warmaster and all its descendants as Black Powder or Hail Cesar.

In all these games, the main focus of the system is on “command”: how effective the commanders of your army (called characters on Warmaster) are at dispatching orders to the different units. This is resolved with a very simple core mechanism: if you want a unit to do something in your turn, they have to receive a command from one of your characters. To do so, you roll 2d6; if the result is smaller than the Command stat of the character giving the order, they succeed in issuing and delivering the order to that unit, and then the unit can move (there are some penalties to this roll, like distance, terrain, or the proximity of enemy units). If you fail this roll, the order does not reach the unit (the messenger was killed? the commander wasn’t clear enough? or perhaps the confusion of war prevented the unit from carrying out the order? That’s for you to interpret, more blank spaces!).

With this simple core mechanic, the idea of activation, initiative, and turns becomes the main focus of the game, and, in my opinion, the most interesting one, which is impressive, as sometimes this seems like one of the most tedious parts of combat.

And this is not the only wargame that has an interesting take on activation. The more I delve into wargames, I have found that activation and round “architecture” are one of the main means that games use to set the vibe and theme of the game.

So yes, I recommend you to play Warmaster, but also to look at all the wargames out there in search of new ideas to include in your TTRPGs when dealing with combat.

Mount and blade: warband

by Armağan Yavuz, Steve Negus & Cem Çimenbiçer, and published by Paradox Interactive.

I stumbled upon this game because of something very simple: I was searching for a medieval RPG, and as I have Linux, I don’t have a huge catalogue to look up on Steam (and forget about the latest games; they wouldn’t run on my computer, let alone be available for Linux).

So I installed this game after reading almost nothing, and I was impressed. I was expecting a simple medieval RPG, but I found much more, because this is the thing: Mount and Blade is an RPG, yes, but it is also a simulation.

In the game, you make your character from scratch, defining its stats, backstory, and look, and the main “goal” (I’m using this term loosely because there is no real goal in the game) is to rise in fame and power while building your army. But really, you can do whatever you want; there is no story arc, no constraint, the world moves forward despite you, if you want you can stay as a mercenary that loots every town and caravan in your path, or you can become a merchant, and research the prices of every good, and travel trough the land to buy them from their “source” where they are cheaper, to then sell them in other realms and live from the profit.

The game feels alive, and in between all its mechanics for war, commerce, reputation, NPCs, etc, you begin to fill the blank spaces with a story, and a narrative begins to arise. And that’s the amazing thing, it feels like playing solo RPGs, like a set of rules that are there to support the narrative of your character.

I’m still playing it, and after I finishing it, I think I will have to look back to the full experience and probably I will have more to say about the game (I don’t even know if there is an end to it), but what I can say now is that if you enjoy solo RPGs, I think you will find something to love and learn from inside this simulation/game.

Also, there are tons of mods to add more features to the game, as diplomacy —which allows you to go deeper into the management and political aspect of the game— to mods that totally change the setting: do you want the same experience but in the Middle-earth? Check!, or maybe you want to play on Westeros or a version of old 7th-century Britain? double check!!

Other things to share

My game “Runner of the Wastelands” is now available on itch.io and DriveThruRPG. It reached its first goal of 20 dollars, so next week I will probably upload new material for the game, likely including more solo tools. Also, I recorded an actual play of it, which you can find HERE.

See you next week!

However, since I have created a lot of material for the game, I have to decide what to include in the first zine and, equally important, how to make these parts compatible with Cairn.

The first thing I thought was to try to guide my efforts toward “theme”, and the parts of the game that where more important to it. When talking to my players, I realized that the “theme” of the game —“facing and unveiling your character’s tragedy and its origin. While dealing with the possibilities of revenge and weighing its repercussions on those close to you and your land.”— was being supported by setting but also strongly driven by the background of their characters, so this seemed like a good first step.

Now the question was how to redesign the backgrounds I have created for NPFTH into a “Cairn style”.

Thankfully, Cairn 2E has already answered this question by presenting its own backgrounds (and a guide to make your own), so the task was much simpler: I just needed to accomodate what I have already created into the background style of Carin 2e.

And that’s exactly what I’ve been doing lately: I’ve been reworking the backgrounds in this style, which is an ongoing and interesting task, as it allows me to see the backgrounds I’ve already created from a different angle. And by using tables on the “Cairn 2e background style”, I’ve been able to further develop the theme of each background and turn it into something that is, in a way, very specific to the setting, but that still has some internal variability and blank spaces to accommodate the ideas of the players.

This is one of my attempts towards this end with the Half Ivunche:

There are some differences in style, and I had to add an additional table for the things the character believes they must accomplish to reach this mythical land beyond the reach of conquistadors. However, I think it’s on the right track, and it has been refreshing to see the game through a new lens.

What do you think? Does this new style preserve what was previously in NPFTH? Would you like to play a character with this background? I would love to hear your opinions!

I’ve also been thinking a lot about art, what kind of art I’ll use for this new interpretation of NPFTH. Maybe I’ll experiment with a looser drawing style, no digital art, just ink pens, to see if anything comes of it. If not, I’ll use the illustrations I’ve already created for the game.

Thats for this week.

See you next time!

The last time I wrote about the game, I was deciding what to do with it, both in terms of format and direction. Because of that, I made a poll, so you could help me with that decision, as I wanted this game to be a space of collaboration, and I thought that starting with a poll could be a good first step towards that goal.

What I was deciding was whether to frame the game as an OSR, or not, and if the best format for it would be multiple zines or a big book with everything in it.

After reading some comments and the result of the poll, I saw that what some of you told me aligned with what I felt was best for the game: make it a zine, make it an OSR.

But this week, when I started the zine, collecting everything I have written on Substack for the NPFTH (and some things I haven’t shared on here), I realized that the number of intertwined rules will make the game difficult to spread across multiple zines. Adding to this: Space is a problem, as I would like to present the basics of the rules, but also the basics of the setting in the first zine.

So the second-guessing started again. What if I put everything in a book? What if the game isn’t really an OSR? Or what if there is another play style that would provide a better space to develop the ideas I wanted to explore in the game? And remembering the play tests I had run for the game, I asked myself, and the people that played with me: What is the core of the game?

Yes, that’s indeed something you should ask yourself before having written more than one hundred pages for a game, but I guess that at every step of the creative process it is important to interrogate one’s goals.

And what I realized, after talking to one of my players, my partner, was that the core of the experience when playing NPFTH was facing and unveiling your character's tragedy and its origin. While dealing with the possibilities of revenge and weighing its repercussions on those close to you. This is beautiful, and sad, and was what happened at our table.

With this in mind, with this clearer view of the heart of the game, I thought of other play styles, and systems, that will be better suited for a game trying to convey this experience, and I lay my eyes on “belonging outside belonging”, a system by Avery Alder, that I have seen beatifully weaven stories of outsiders on games like “Dream Askew" and “BALIKBAYAN”.

In this process, I tried to see if I could disassemble NPFTH and still keep something of it to fit on this other style of playing. I was on the rabbit hole, rethinking everything, studying and reading all the games I could, until I forced myself to stop. At that moment, I knew what I was doing: I was making an entirely different game, because all the things I had built for NPFTH were being tossed aside in the search for this “perfect” set of rules that supposedly would facilitate the kind of stories that, talking with my partner, we had identify as the core of the game. But the fact is that we had already been telling those tragic stories with the game as it was, so was the change necessary? And if not, what part of the game did those stories come from?

The answer was the setting, the backstory given to each player by the origin they have chosen, and the “goals” each of these origins gave to them.

I really think that system and mechanics matter, and that they determine the type of experience you will have in a game, but for NPFTH, what mainly drove the experience was the setting.

I suppose you all have already guessed where this is going. After going round and round in circles, I have decided to keep NPFTH on the OSR frame, but as a setting zine, to use with your favorite OSR ruleset, where, from time to time, I will include modular rules/procedures that you can include on top of the rules you are already using.

Obviously, not all OSRs are the same, and as such, I will focus the compatibility of my procedures on one set of rules with which I have experience: “Cairn” by Yochai Gal.

But that’s not all, because there is a part of NPFTH that goes outside the scope of OSR and story games like “Dream Askew”: the skirmish rules. To these I plan to give a space in one or two of the zine issues, probably as a small wargame (more excuses to build and paint minis!) interwinded with faction/land-control mechanics that connect with the setting.

So this is it for today. I just want to share with you the direction NPFTH is taking, and also to assure you that I will continue working on it. And if you are interested in my solo/miniatures TTRPG game “Runner of the Wastelands”, you still can help me do more for it by buying it, sharing it with other friends, or commenting/reviewing it on itch.io, DriveThruRPG, or Wargame Vault.

See you next time!

Today I want to share my third playthrough of “Runner of the Wastelands” (game available on itch.io, DriveThruRPG, and Wargame Vault).

In this episode, we included a goal for our runner and added a bit more narrative weight to their journey. I had a lot of fun in this session, and I hope you enjoy it too!

I've tried to make it shorter because I understand that watching an hour-long solo game can be a bit exhausting. Also, this time we have music!

If you prefer to watch it on YouTube, HERE IT IS.

If you like the video, it would be amazing if you could help me by leaving a comment and giving it a “Like” on YouTube!

We are getting close to 20 dollars (we are at 15), which means that we are very close to “unlocking” the first additional material for the game. If you want to help me do more for this game, you can buy it or leave comments/reviews at itch.io or DriveThruRPG (for every 20 reviews/comments, I will also make additional material).

See you next time!

Today I want to share my second playthrough of “Runner of the Wastelands” (available on itch.io, DriveThruRPG, and Wargame Vault).

I finally got a printer, so in this video, I was able to show what the game really looks like, instead of my “homemade” version of it.

If you prefer to watch it on YouTube, HERE IT IS.

If you like the video, it would be amazing if you could help me by leaving a comment and giving it a “Like” on YouTube. Thanks!

And after you watch, you can answer the poll to see what will happen next!

Also, we are getting close to 20 dollars (we are at 15), which means that we are very close to “unlocking” the first additional material for the game. If you want to help, you can buy the game or leave comments/reviews at itch.io or DriveThruRPG (for every 20 reviews/comments, I will also make additional material).

See you next week!

Today, I want to give a shout-out to the game “Mordheim” and to “North Stars” miniatures, because they have opened up a space for creativity that I didn't know I had at my disposal.

My love of miniatures started as a spectator of what others could do with them, and one of the people who really captivated me in this regard was miscast. But he was an artist, a builder, a creator, and a sculptor, and I didn’t think that I could experience the hobby as he did.

My next step was a stroke of luck: I found a super cheap box of Dungeon Bowl, with 24 miniatures and lots of material to delve deeper into the game.

I painted those miniatures with the help of a friend, and I fell in love. I didn’t think that would be like that. I was afraid that I wouldn't enjoy painting minis, but it was an amazingly meditative and fun process.

And then, after finishing those minis, I searched for the next game, for the next excuse to paint more miniatures, and I found Mordheim.

Mordheim

Mordheim is a game published in October 1999 by Games Workshop (GW). It is a skirmish game, so you need just a few miniatures to play it, up to 12 or 20, depending on the warband you choose (something I was searching for). It is set in the grimdark world of Warhammer Fantasy, during a civil war in the Empire, and after the destruction of the city of Mordheim by a comet (which was first thought as a good omen of the god Sigmar). Your warband is one of many that have come to the ruins of Mordheim to recover the riches hidden among the rubble, one of which, brought by the comet itself, is wyrdstone: the ultimate manifestation of pure, chaotic magic in the form of a stone.

The game hasn’t been supported by the company for a long time (the last thing that GW “published” for Mordheim was in 2004 on the Specialist Games website). However, it is still alive and supported by an amazing community.

As the game was discontinued, GW hasn’t made any new miniatures for it, and the official ones are old, difficult to find, and expensive. So the game has become a miniature-agnostic game (I would argue that every miniature game is a miniature-agnostic game; this mostly depends on its community), and this has translated into an amazingly creative ground and a very welcoming space to experiment with kitbashing and to bring your own vision into “the city of the damned”.

When I found Mordheim (almost 1 year ago), I got totally absorbed by it. Its lore was defined in a few powerful strokes; it felt mythical, obscure, and somehow, real, and the art was intertwined with the words, like a spell, increasing the sense of ambiguity, power, and possibility.

But yet, despite the chaotic energy, inside there was a game to play that was fun, and that had an amazingly narrative style. This narrative web that interconnected the combats and scenarios of the game opened my eyes to the possibilities of miniature games, and for me, blurred the lines between TTRPGS and wargaming.

That’s why I felt the necessity to talk about this game, because I finally made a small game with miniatures, called “Runner of the Wastelands”, and this game couldn’t exist if I hadn’t had the luck of finding Mordheim.

North Star’s Frostgrave and Stargrave

When I started delving into the amazing world of Mordheim, a need awakened in me: to find miniatures to be molded into what I was imagining my first warband to be.

Don’t get me wrong, the new GW miniatures are amazing, beautiful, they are peak artistry.

However, two factors make them a little more difficult for beginners who want to modify them:

• They are expensive, and so the fear of ruining them is truly paralyzing.

• The edges that are glued together are not located at the joints of the miniature, but are positioned so that they are as inconspicuous as possible, which is ideal if you want the miniature to remain as it is, but also makes any modifications more difficult.

So here enter North Stars miniatures, particularly Frostgrave and Stargrave miniatures, to save the day!

I don’t remember how I got my eyes into these miniatures, but I was searching for some women for my mercenaries of Marienburg (thematically, I like the idea of being all women, to mirror the struggle between Lady Margaritta, regent of Marienburg, and the other, all men, forces that fight for the throne). And I found this amazing box:

Here started my delve into kitbashing, thanks to this kit, because it was amazingly versatile and was presented in a way that invites you to arrange the different pieces as you wish, giving you total freedom in the creation of your minis.

After getting this box, I began to look at the entire Frostgrave line, and I was amazed by its variety and how much you could do with them, so I got my hands on a couple more boxes and began to mix them (with some old bits of GW Empire militia) to make my first Mordheim warband:

So my recommendation is: if you want to get into miniature painting and kitbashing, get some of these boxes. They are much cheaper than GW miniatures, and they are amazingly versatile. Then you can get your hand in other miniatures, which will expand even further the horizon of possibilities, as Wargame Atlantic, Perry Miniatures, Fireforge, and Warlord Games.

And whatever you want to make for your miniatures, for whatever spark of your imagination that you can’t find on these kits, there is always Milliput and Green Stuff. Grab some and sculpt something simple. It’s amazingly rewarding to see one of your painted miniatures with some custom pieces, even if they aren’t perfect.

This will open more possibilities, and then, every character, of every game or story, may somehow become a possible miniature, and then the miniatures you make will become stories in your mind. A perfect circle of hobbie-madness.

Other things to share:

• My game “Runner of the Wastelands” is now available on itch.io and DriveThruRPG.

• I made an actual play of “Runner of the Wastelands”; you can find it HERE.

• If you like the art of Mordheim, I really recommend you have a look at Voodoo Forest and Scions of Voodoo, these are art-lore books by the amazing John Blanche, the artist behind Mordheim, and “old” Warhammer 40K.

See you next week!

Today, I wanted to try a new format, so I recorded an actual play of my game, “Runner of the Wastelands”.

I wanted to share it without editing, so it ended up being a bit long, but I think this can help illustrate the process of playing a solo TTRPG, or at least how I approach it.

If you prefer to watch it on YouTube, HERE IT IS.

Hope you like it!

PS: I forgot one rule (yes, of my own game): that when enemies hit you, there is 1-in-4 chance that they hit the package you carry.

As I have been doing lately, I want to use the last week of the month to share with you some of the books, games, and music that have been important to my creative process during the month.

These are my monthly recommendations!

Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake

This is a book I have been wanting to immerse myself in for a long time, as I have been drawn to the magical and strange life of fungi for years. But although they are often on my mind, I only occasionally delve a little deeper into their world.

I have gathered random facts about them, and I have gone photo-hunting for fungi with friends who share this curiosity. I think about them when looking at the lichen beside my window, which a couple of years ago I discovered to be a fungus and an algae in a beautiful symbiosis (in fact, the term symbiosis was born to describe lichen, but now we know that lichens are more than only two organisms on an entangled state, making symbiosis a term that had fallen short to describe lichen).

But I have known for a long time that I need to learn more about them, as every detail I have learned about fungi has opened up a world of possibilities, expanding the repertoire of concepts my mind has when trying to understand life.

So came the wonderful Merlin Sheldrake with his book as a guide to their world. He is a mycologist, and in “Entangled Life: How fungi make our worlds, change our minds, and Shape Our Future” he explores the different aspects that make fungi important and remarkable as a species. He beautifully does this by weaving the connections he has with other researchers, with their discoveries, and his own emotional experiences with fungi. Doing so, he delivers a profound tale of how fungi have been here, as spearheads of evolution, shaping us and the world around us from the beginning.

As an entry point for knowing more about fungi, I think that this book works amazingly. If we are talking about TTRPGs, well, you will find in this book that fungi have a large number of very peculiar behaviours, capacities, and ways of expressing what a living being is, that are perfect as inspiration for the ecology of your worlds, their magic, and the weirdest of creatures you can think of.

Polygondwanaland by King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard

Look at this cover, its small details, the way that the different elements are connected and flowing into each other, as if it were the casting of a spell, or an epic tale with a vast lore. This is how this album sounds.

“King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard” is a band that for years had been lurking at the corner of my ears, appearing from time to time on the lists I hear, and on the online radios I commonly listen to. But it was only thanks to a visit from a couple of friends, fans of the band, that I truly understood how great they are.

The thing that I realized, thanks to these friends, is that their songs are great, but their albums, when listened to from start to finish, are outstanding.

Their albums are storytelling: the way the songs connect suggests the highs and lows of a story. In a way, when listening to their albums, one perceives a world-building that permeates all their musical creation.

Polygondwanaland was the first album by KG & TLW that I listened to from start to finish, and I was enthralled. It made me see a world, made me think of tales, of lore, of magic, and somehow triggered my brain to think of “Runner of the Wasteland”.

If you enjoy pulp fiction, sword and sorcery, or if you play DCC, or you want to run UVG, I think you will find something in their music that will resonate with you.

Hyper Light Drifter by Heart Machine

I was looking for a game that, like “Drova”, would immerse you in the story without any guidance, and that placed the discovery of all its mechanics and lore as a central part of the game.

“Hyper Light Drifter” totally scratched that itch for me, but unlike “Drova”, where the mechanics are accessible through gameplay and story, here it was the story and lore that emerged through gameplay, emphasized by its incredible music, and its beautifully melancholic pixel art (some of the best I've seen so far).

The game begins with captivating images and music that quickly draw you in, and from there, you gradually piece together the “story” through exploration and interactions with other characters. And this is something I loved from this game: when talking with other characters, symbols appear in a little “text box”, as if they were talking to you, but they aren’t words to read, but moods to interpret. Here, you will use the musical cues (and sometimes images of the memories of these characters) to build with your imagination what they are trying to communicate to you.

This is a way of presenting “lore/story” that, in my opinion, works very well because it is more personal, since you project yourself into the blank spaces it leaves. It makes the game feel “profound” and, at times, loaded with meaning, as happens with some dreams.

I have taken this as a lesson, something that I have been nudged towards by various stories/games I have encountered recently: Deliberate, well-thought-out, blank spaces can be a powerful tool to make your worldbuilding emotionally connect with players. That’s why, if you are interested in TTRPGs, I recommend you have a look at this game.

If you want to lose yourself in a world that feels mysterious, emotional, personal, and melancholic, with beautiful art and music, I think you will enjoy “Hyper Light Drifter”.

These are my recommendations for this month; I hope that, in some way, even if only minimally, they help you expand the imaginary worlds that live in your head to places you had never thought of before.

See you next week!