Tag Archives: The Blight

Blighted Krevborna: Things You Learn In The Sewer

March 6, 2023 Chuck Leave a comment

Sometimes even experienced players do silly things that can get their characters killed. That’s what happened in this session.

We started the session with some rumors. The one that matters here is, “There are wererats in the sewers.” Then later on the party was hired to go into the sewers and do a seek and destroy on an evil cult’s temple. They went shopping. They some extra lanterns and some better armor for the fighter and then it was into the sewers.

I had this set up as a series of semi-random encounters and the first thing the party runs into was a wererat lair. It was an ugly fight and they barely survived. They crawled out of the sewer and tended their wounds. So what did they do?

They jumped right back into the sewers to get revenge on those dirty wererats. Seemingly to totally ignore that each anyone hit one of the wererats, the GM would say, “You’re blow doesn’t seem to do as much damage as it should.”

The second trip into the sewer went even worse. First, the Magic-User was killed. Then with her last breath, the Plague Doctor pours a Create Zombie potion down the throat of the magic-user. Meanwhile, the dwarf fighter is barely holding his own and the most effect thing he came up with was holding a wererat’s head under “water” (OK, it was raw sewage) until it drowned. The fog of war starts to clear and the Dwarf is down to 1 HP. The wererats are all down. So that leaves him facing the zombie of his friend. He kills the zombie, crawls out of the sewer, and begins drinking heavily.

I asked them, “Why didn’t you get any silver weapons?” The general response was thought about it and dismissed it; and we didn’t want to spend the extra money.

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Adventures in Gaming, Home Brew Hacks

Blighted Krevborna: Session 2.5: Wandering in Castorhage & New House Rules.

February 20, 2023 Chuck Leave a comment

Oh the best laid plains. We were supposed to have a session two weeks ago. Well, we sort of did. Having my players spread geographically that means VTT time. About an hour into the session, I lost power. I know you’ve heard lots of bad things. This time it turned out somebody ran into a transformer and blacked out a decent hunk of town. That meant the session was interrupted and didn’t get that far. And it was a bit difficult to get the momentum going again.

On the bright side, the final player got to join. So here’s the new character. Elisa the Plague Doctor. She’s a farmer from a decaying backwater town and her parents were wrongly executed. Her true love ran off to live a life of crime. So that rounds our party.

The party did release an evil sorceress but they are tying to kiss to her. They realized that they a fake inheritance. And made friends with one of the local thieves. All fun in Castorhage. Like I said, it wasn’t that exciting of a session. Sure there was lot of role play and getting to know the city a bit more.

But the extra time between sessions did let me digest some stuff. I’m using Deathbringer as primary rules source. There are now skills just attributes so those go up quicker than a lot of other games. Compared to other d20 systems, you just used the “modifier” and don’t even write down your good old 3 to 18. The core rules is that you get +1 every odd level. The players weren’t happy about that so I made them offer. Fine you gain a +1 each level but it’s random. They ate it up.

The other rule that I added was something that was bugging me for a long time. And I think I finally came up with a solution. We’ve all watched the movies where there’s an epic sword fight but the characters are also kicking and punching. But we don’t really do that in gaming. I wanted some of that element added. So if they miss their attack roll by 1 then they still hit but with an unarmed attack.

So there you go. The biggest thing was some adjustment to house rules and laying the foundations for more plots and troubles.

Adventures in Gaming, Home Brew Hacks, Spells

Using ICRPG for Ritual Magic

February 7, 2023 Chuck Leave a comment

Yes, I’m a homebrewer/rules hacker sort of guy. It’s what I enjoy doing. Tweaking all sorts of various rules to fit what think would be the best a campaign. Now, my current campaign is mostly based on Professor DM’s Deathbringer with some ICRPG elements and my own weird imagination.

I’m not using all of ICRPG. I might do a campaign for it later on but right now I’m just using it as one of my favorite GM Tool Kits. One of the things that I’m not really using is EFFORT. Well, not completely any way. Normally, EFFORT is basically damage. It’s used to complete dramatic or time sensitive tasks. Make a d20 roll and if you beat the Target Number then you do “damage” to the task. What you roll for damage depends on the character and whatever equipment that they might be using. For this campaign, I decided to use EFFORT only for some very special circumstances. That is for magic. For the purposes of this post, I’m going to only focus on a couple of uses. Summoning demons and banishing/exorcising them.

OK. Here’s where you’re going to learn more about ICRPG. First, the GM will set the Target Number. This should be from about 10 to 18. Sort of the overall difficulty. It’s part art and part science setting that number. Then how much EFFORT will it take? That’s the easy part. It’s Hit Points. So how EFFORT do you do with a successful roll? Well, if you’re just using magic words and waving around your hands that’s d4 (Basic). If you’re using better and better spell components, materials, tomes, or whatever then work you’re way up the die chain; d6, d8, d10, and d12. What about bonuses? Since I’m not using the full ICRPG rules that would be INT bonus to casting but the magic using types would add that to their EFFORT. Roll that Nat 1 along the way then things go bad. Roll a Nat 20 then that’s a crit.

This will probably freak out the folks who are used to ICRPG and folks who don’t know it, will be scratching their heads. Think about it. Apply it how you want. And have fun.

Adventures in Gaming, Home Brew Hacks

Blighted Krevborna: Session 1

January 23, 2023 Chuck Leave a comment

Our little group kicked off the Blighted Krevborna campaign. So setting wise I’ve kit bashed The Blight by Frog God Games and Krevborna by Dolorous Exhumation Press. The primary chassis of the rules is Deathbringer with other mechanics from Index Card RPG and Shadowdark.

Let’s start off with the characters because that’s the main thing that we did.

Millianna (Grimscribe) A former nun who found an ancient tome and discovered magic is a quicker path to power than prayer. She fled the church after her blackmail plot against one of her superiors went south in the process she incurred a large debt to a crime lord.

Then there’s Stryn (Deathbringer). He’s on the run from the law for allegedly murdering his father. The law and his siblings aren’t too happy about it.

Highlights of the session:

After a roadside ambush, Stryn will now be known as “Righty” since a Chaos Cannibal Mutant gnawed off his left hand. This left the party really banged up and not a healer in group. It’s Deathbringer so that healing is really slow.

Most exciting encounter was the fight with headless zombies atop a speed coach. Zombies jump on the coach. Characters barely hanging on. It was fun and exciting.

I’m not going to write really long session summaries with every detail. But here’s a bit of analysis of the mechanics. Get ICRPG. That really kept the game moving. Get Deathbring too. You have fast simple character generation and some ready made random tables for a grim back story. And, of course, I did use some house rules on it too.

Home Brew Hacks, My Gaming Projects, World Building

The Blight+Krevborna

August 23, 2022 Chuck Leave a comment

Yes, I’m already playing around with ideas for my next campaign and brain is going to something a bit darker with more horror type elements. So as I was brainstorming, it came to me that The Blight and Krevborna could be easily combined.

I was running The Blight with Swords & Wizardry before the whole Covid thing and I’ve been itching to get back to it. You can see my more in depth review here. As a brief overview, The Blight centers around a large, corrupted city. It’s pretty grim dark. The river is polluted with alchemical waste. The fog can be poisonous. And the nobility is out right insane. Where it overlaps with Krevborna is that carries a lot of Gothic horror elements in it. There’s a Dracula uber-vampire type. There’s the Grand Promethean as Frankenstein’s monster. Lycanthropes running street gangs and so on. There’s a few elements that I’d have to adjust but I like doing that sort thing.

I just talked about Krevborna a while ago. And this part of my whole sneaky plan. You see I wanted something beyond the city of Castorhage and Krevborna as a generic setting supplement was exactly what I was looking for. Out of the ordinary. Gothic style horror. But I’m little crazy. There’s already a little Lovecraftian influence in The Blight by way of what is called The Between which is sort of like the Dreamlands. Plus I like some of those classic horror movies. So the final end kitbash is going to something like a combination of Hammer/Universal/Gothic/Lovecraftian Horror.

Ah but what game system? There in lies the rub. And it’s always kind of the hard part of finding something that manages to hit all the right notes. My first inclination is Deathbringer. It’s easy and has familiar D20 mechanics. It’s got it’s own grim dark take things so it make a good fit. Coming in second is Warlock! This one is inspired by 1st Edition Warhammer Fantasy so that makes it good fit in my opinion. It’s fairly rules light and uses a d20 system so it won’t be hard for my players to grasp. And rounding out my thoughts is some of weird old-school kit bash that will probably have some OSE and LotFP influences or maybe White Box or Shadowdark. Heck, if I want to go totally crazy I could put something together with the Cepheus Engine. I’ve got time to mess around it and if you know me always kitbash the rules. Just putting my ideas together.