Fool's Game Character Card

Further exploration on my silly idea. Testing to begin soon.

The Fool's Game

A dumb idea I had to get out of my head. Have a great weekend all!

Blaster & Hardpack: FKR scifi

My buddy James released his Sword & Backpack: Reforged yesterday and I decided I was happy enough with scifi hack to go ahead and release it. This is my attempt to make a rules-lite, FKR scifi game with just enough meat that you could play out whatevercomestoyourmindversion of scifi. 

Check out James' awesome game that inspired mine:
 https://jamesthook.itch.io/sword-backpack-reforged

Mine holds very close to his but adds more scifi elements to the game and some kickass amazeballs artwork. ;-) It is also free, so take a gander and let me know what you think:
https://mattjackson.itch.io/blaster-hardpack

Antiquus Fabula - a Risus supplement

 

My pal Norbert is celebrating this amazing game by having a Risus Appreciation celebration and posting various cool rules, ideas, and discussions about the game. Check it out at https://darkwormcolt.wordpress.com/

A long time ago - 20 years??? - I discovered a game called Risus and it completely rewrote everything I thought about RPGs at the time and subsequently turned me on to the lighter side of RPGs and my love of rules-lite systems. Now, I wanted Risus to run D&D at the time, so I threw together some ideas and released a Risus supplement to enable a more D&Dish feeling to your games. To keep this Risus love going, I thought I would remind everyone of my Risus Fantasy Supplement. Antiquus Fabula! https://mattjackson.itch.io/antiquusfabula

Sir William's Delve -3

 

[notes] For this I am also using a handful of game books such as Knave 2 (link), Glaive 2e (link), Shadowdark (link), Into the Wyrd and Wild (link), and the Knock zine (link). Really I am using whatever floats my boat at the moment and mostly using random tables to throw a little chaos and whimsy to the game. When I hit a mental barrier and am stuck, I flip through a PDF or toss some words into MidJourney and see if anything sparks my imagination. A perfect example is this entire segment with the hanging tree, MD gave me one image with what appeared a body hanging from it, so I kept digging until I got this image which to me looked like little kids hung and posed (sick fucks). That is something I have never seen in an RPG before, so I ran with it.

When you see the red, blue and white dice I am using my oracle (sometimes called the Freedom Oracle (video link) to help guide the story.

MD art-

PDF link-
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XiErCqAHL075bnonipCQ32xkHQBzuhqh/view?usp=sharing

FKR logo

I like logos, can't help it, I just go. I was talking to a friend of mine about our love of the FKR-style games and the thought occurred to me that maybe a logo might help people identify games fitting this style of play. Maybe? Maybe not? 

The Free Kriegsspiel Revolution kind of feels like it would not support a universal logo, but hey, wtf do I know? Here's a logo, if y'all like it, use it. If not, all's well.

Arneson Gaming

I guess FKR is suddenly cool because some dude named Ben started talking about it, now the little kiddos are fawning all over it. Welcome, we have been here for quite a while.

I made this (oddly) on September 11, 2019 and I honestly cannot recall if I shared it or not. I have uploaded it to itch so you can have it stored in your 'library'. This was my attempt to create something a modern player might accept that is still close to what Dave played. 

So yeah, this probably isn't even close.

Check it out here: https://mattjackson.itch.io/arneson-gaming

Go watch Secrets of Blackmoor, might learn a thing or two.

Odd pre-Christmas thoughts (FKR)

A friend or two alerted me to the Free Kriegsspiel Revolution this last year and I have given it a fair reading a few times. While it never jumped out at me as exceptionally interesting, something keeps itching at the back of my brain regarding FKR. Last year I even delved into the murkiness of the Arnesonian playstyle and wrote my own version of early-play D&D and spoke frequently with my buddy Norbert about that early play style. I think some of that discussion was the forbearer to Norbert creating the FKR play style.

If you are not familiar you can check out Norbert's blog for far, far more details here: http://darkwormcolt.blogspot.com/ but in my amateur opinion it boils down to this:

Only roll the dice to determine an outcome if you cannot do this using good judgement.

Like I said, this has been rolling around in my brain and last night I was reading some FKR stuff about using dice versus not using dice. I found it quite interesting. I woke up this morning with this thought dancing around my brain.

As players, myself included, we would rather leave the story up to random dice than an impartial game master. We accept that some things will happen that are very unlikely to happen, rather than having an impartial GM who would arbitrate the outcome using logic.

Why is that? We have modifiers to the results through attributes, levels, and gear but in the end we allow the dice to completely and arbitrarily determine the results. Seriously, think about it. 

A third level fighter is fighting a single goblin. Player rolls a 1 and the fight goes from a simple thing that the fighter should easily succeed at, to suddenly he lops of his leg/breaks his sword/guts the cleric nearby (again, likely determined by another random roll on a Critical Fumble table). Stepping back and looking at this from a not-in-the-moment viewpoint, if you came across this in a novel or your favorite TV show, I bet you would groan about how silly that was. Here though, we accept it. Why??

Now, a friend of mine would say the following:
1) It adds a level of fun, chaos, interesting and unexpected outcomes.
2) As a GM I have the power to limit that amount of silliness in my game.

I would agree on both these statements. I too enjoy the silliness that results from Tim rolling three "1"s in a row and lopping of Joe's ear, breaking his magical crowbar+2, and setting his hireling on fire. This is hilarious and fun all at the same time. Also correctly, you are right, as the GM I have the innate power to control those aspects of the game, choosing to roll only when I want and deciding when I want to allow the dice to determine the results*.

Anyway, just some thoughts I felt I needed to put down on digital paper and get out of my head this morning.

*As a side note, I would add that as a GM I have often 'rolled the dice' behind the screen and ignored the result, deciding before I roll the outcome and simply narrating the result as I saw fit at the time. Usually this is because of story elements or plot development that I am working on for the larger campaign.