Ethereal Games

In my last post, I made a critical decision to not just create a soloable supplement for Warriors of the Red Planet RPG, but to make a stripped down version that would ultimately be a stand alone game. I entertained the following design philosophy: remove all OSR styles classes, and make everything "ancestry-as-class." remove all 3-18 range ability stats common to these games (and often seldom used). remove all the tricky dice and use only d6s remove the game referee from the game If you look back, you will see that my fancy Skill Ability only Ancestries template that I posted were not necessarily simple. Each Ancestry is unique and has many possibilities, so no two characters of one Ancestry will be the same. Now I've since gone on to refine all of these, and the final game will include 9 different Ancestries. As I was working on the game more the last two weeks, I had another thought experiment to add to my design philosophy: In a typical OSR, there is a to-hit rol...

A wonderful aspect of OSR games like Warriors of the Red Planet (WotRP) is that the rules are broad enough that you can adapt, modify, or add to the material in the game. Making a setting is a great way to do this, and let's go even further by adding that OSR games are a great chassis, or base if you like, for developing your entirely original game. Last post, I introduced some purely OSR style ancestries/races to a supplement I was working on for my WotRP supplement, and felt that I was beginning to work the rules in such a way that the game was beginning to feel like mine. The act of creation is a pleasure when you can feel like the work you produce was done wholly by you. Then out of the blue these other thoughts kept creeping into my mind: the art that sets the mood for my work is public domain art by underpaid comic book artists who aren't in any sense on board with my project or getting credit for any of it. Also, I thought that it the end, people might be able to lop off...