Author Archives: randalls

Mini-Setting: The Pan-Sentient Confederation (Part 3)

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The StarForce

The StarForce is the Confederation’s military arm. It is charged with the defense of the Confederation, the enforcement of Confederation law in space (and, when necessary, on member planets to the limited extent allowed by the Confederation constitution), and exploration. Most of the Confederation budget goes to its support.

StarForce Ship Designs

Due to the requirements of Confederation hyperspace drive technology, most large starships are a snub-nosed wedge with twin outrider hyperdrive pods containing the hyperdrives port and starboard toward the aft. Small starcraft (under 75 meters in length) are more varied in design.

StarForce capital ships generally fall in one of the following classes: Scout, Destroyer, Light Cruiser, Heavy Cruiser, Starcruiser, Battleship.… Read the rest

Dreamlands as a Multisetting Campaign Device

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One of my players said that it would be fantastic if there was a way to play a single character in every universe possible with the Tiny D6 rules. Naturally, I came up with several ways this could be handled as we were talking about the idea to the slight shock of my players who are too new to playing with me to know than I can usually “spin up” ideas for settings and such on the fly. Here’s a brief write-up of the idea they liked best. It’s an obvious variation on Lovecraft’s “dreamlands”. It is not play-tested at all and is somewhat rough around the edges.… Read the rest

Mini-Setting: The Pan-Sentient Confederation (Part 2)

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This is the second part of a short series of posts on the Pan Sentient Confederation, a system neutral “final frontier” mini-setting. The first post is here.

Please remember that this material was created in the 1990s for SRRT3 on the Genie online service with writing fiction in mind, so it probably goes into more (or less, in some cases) detail than needed for a tabletop RPG on some background material  This writeup was produced by taking messages I posted on SFRT3, editing them slightly to correct typos (and probably to add different typos), and rearranging the posted material to be somewhat more organized.… Read the rest

Kickstarter: By This Axe: The Cyclopedia of Dwarven Civilization

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Autarch has a new Kickstarter for ACKS and other OSR games: By This Axe: The Cyclopedia of Dwarven Civilization — a 200 page compendium of information on dwarves. The first day isn’t over as I write this and By the Axe has already funded. From the Kickstarter page:

In this tome you will find the secrets of the great and proud race of dwarves, compiled, codified, and curated for use in your favorite old-school fantasy role-playing game….. By This Axe is organized into ten chapters:

      • Chapter 1, Introduction, details the audience, purpose, and approach for this book.
      • Chapter 2, Dwarven Lore, provides an overview of the ethnicity, physiology, language, and customs of dwarves.
… Read the rest

Mini-Setting: The Pan-Sentient Confederation (Part 1)

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I’ve occasionally heard people say they would like to run campaigns in the Traveller’s Third Imperium universe, the Star Trek universe, the Star Wars universe, etc., but they never do because they don’t want to deal with the canon fanatics. My solution is to just not play with canon fanatics. However, I realize that this may not be possible for everyone. Another solution is to file the numbers off the setting by creating a new setting that can be used for very similar adventures/stories but is different enough that the old canon obviously would not apply.

Back in the 1990s, when I was an assistant sysop on GEnie’s Third Science Fiction Roundtable (SFRT3), we had a similar situation.… Read the rest

To Sail the Savage Seas of Zankhara?

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When we started the new Tiny Dungeon 2e Sunday game about a month ago, the players choose to play in my Empire of Arn setting. I warned them in advance that Arn was a strange and even weird setting. I told them we’d try it for 4 to 6 weeks and if they discovered it wasn’t for them, I’d be happy to restart the campaign in a different and more normal setting. They said that was good, but they were sure Arn would be fine. After our fourth session last Sunday, they decided that Arn was, as I was afraid, indeed too weird to be as much fun as they’d like.… Read the rest

Now Playing Tiny Dungeon 2e — And It’s Great

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Nota Bene: This post first appeared in my RetroRoleplaying Blog on May 30, 2022. I’m posting it here as well because it seems to be a great article to start off this new blog as running my first session of Tiny Dungeon 2e is what got me interested in writing blog posts again. BTW, we finished our third session last Sunday.

Several years ago I picked up a number of Tiny D6 games in a couple of game bundles. I was interested because from what I had read about Tiny Dungeon 2e, the system sounded quite similar to a two-page RPG I had written up in the late 1980s called “Generic Quick Simple RPG” (another of my infamously bad names).… Read the rest

New Beginnings

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Welcome to my new blog/website focused on rules light RPGs of all types. Originally, I was planning to restart my RetroRoleplaying Blog and switch its focus from rules-light old school games to rules light games in general. After some thought, however, I decided make a clean start with a new web site and a new blog. The RetroRoleplaying site will continue to host my old blog with its posts on old school games and all the RPGs I’ve designed in the last 12-14 years, while this new site will focus on news and articles about rules light RPGs in general.

I stopped posting much on the old RetroRoleplaying blog because I lacked the time and because all the politics the OSR field often descends into turned me off.… Read the rest