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...

I've gotten deeper into my House Rules for Warriors of the Red Planet, and regrettably my Gaming Primitive project is at a temporary standstill until this is done. But I've made many interesting changes to the House Rules since my last post.  The setting will remain on the Martian moon Cluros (Deimos), and will be governed by the Edgar Rice Burroughs unique cosmic law known as the "compensatory habituation of masses." That is, objects approaching Cluros decrease to a proportional size, so that the small radius of Cluros will effectively become a large world ripe with opportunities for adventure. Once on Cluros, adventurers will be stuck in something of a snow globe. Leaving the land and entering the Cosmos will allow a star sailing ship to exit the bottom of the map and reappear on the top. The Cosmos also is slowly devouring the land. The Cosmos is dangerous because sailors need to wear sealed air helmets. The only way to escape Cluros or to save Cluros from the Cosm...

I like the idea of a concrete adventure map with details for solo play, and the use of a map is more in keeping with the style of play suggested in Gaming Primitive. For the Escape from Dlantes scenario, all modes of play whether using the pariah human Mux who was raised by the Snow Warriors, a condemned Snow Warrior, or a human(s) captured by the snow warriors, will be played with a cave map mostly made prior to gaming.  Gaming Primitive also suggests using a battle map with adventurers and foes placed on it to add strategic elements to deepen the game play experience during encounters. The use of a battle map need not be anything elaborate. In fact, roughly sketched for each battle, this would work quite well. I have already enlarged a grid paper onto two A3 sheets of paper with squares of roughly 1 inch in size to represent 5 feet squares according Gaming Primitive rules. These I inserted into clear plastic sleeves that can be used with white board erasable markers. So, no inves...

The last post gave a basic outline for the first scene or adventure in my solo game play of  Gaming Primitive  RPG. In this post, I have added a description of the Snow Warrior, and even consider how to use one as a player character. I then developed a Snow Warrior random name table for male and female names, and the names of Snow Warrior places and deities. In the spirit of keeping this part of a light rules system, it is a d6 table. All of this will start to bring the Escape from Dlatanes scene closer to the gaming table. So, what exactly is the new anthropoid I called the Snow Warrior? In the Foes section of Gaming Primitive on page 42 is a description of Apes which is at least useful to describe the physicality of Snow Warriors. Since I was going for something more akin to the sophistication of a Neanderthal, the description is lacking in some areas. The Snow Warrior is not a jungle or tree dweller, but more of an archaic human of human-like ancestor. It lives in tribes c...

During Covid, I acquired a massive collection of games, largely PDFs, but I have been a poor player of them. Or, perhaps I have always desired a way to play RPGs alone. So, I have read up and tried to learn how to play solo RPGs with various oracle engines including small ones, and big ones such as Mythic, various random table books, ideas from games like Micro RPG or Four Against Darkness, and some other self-storytelling techniques. I finally reached a point where I stopped collecting, and I decided I have enough tools to finally embark on my own solo game. The first step in this journey is the character, and what the first adventure is going to be about. I may apply different tools as I go and share what I use. It is my first attempt at doing this, so I will post my progress little by little. For this, I wanted to choose a set of rules that would allow me to really personalize my characters and be very open to applying various RPG mechanics and tools, as I felt were needed to make a...