Author Archives: Newt

About Newt

Games Designer, Publisher, Web Developer, Dad.

What I did on my Summer 2024 holidays part 2

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[This post was originally made back in September of last year, after a family Summer holiday in North Norfolk, see part 1.]

This is a sort of “soft launch” of something I’ve hinted I’ve been working on for BRP previously.

So I took my laptop with me, mainly to game/stream in the evening, but also to do some writing if the family allowed it – which they did, now that everyone is hooked to their phones/devices! I made a deal with myself that I was only going to do fun RPG writing, rather than stuff that is “get it damn well finished!” :

Previously, when I last had a holiday during Easter break, I had a good tinker with the BRP-ORC SRD (aka the entire text of Basic Roleplaying Universal Game Engine). The aim was to get a straightforward Fantasy-BRP game out it. Well, I’ve been fiddling with the embryonic game that emerged from those writing sessions on and off. Despite my reservations, it started shipping up to something I enjoy writing. So this became a light, fun project over my recent family holiday in North Norfolk. I got up early and got set for the day (ie. did my dad duties around the cottage), and then while the family had a sleep in I would work on the document. Go out for the day, and once everyone had settled for the evening, write up whatever my brain had come up with in the background during the day.

My design process has been roughly the following for the game, which has the working title Legacy.

Legacy Logo by Dan Barker
Legacy Logo by Dan Barker

1. Take the base of RuneQuest 3 – which, minus the three Gloranthan magic systems is in BRUGE – much to my delight, and bash it into the same length and scope as the old Games Workshop core RQ3 book, which was my first serious entry point into BRP back in the late 80s. In fact here its.

Games Workshop's RuneQuest 3 book

Note that Legacy is not an RQ clone, despite the SRD it developed from having much of the text. It’s more of a what-if project: “What if we take core RQ3 and develop it so it’s easier to play and supports sandbox-style play out of the box?”

2. Make character generation fun. It’s now a seven-step process, with a final eighth step that gets the players to consider how their characters met and formed their adventuring company. Skills remain the focus, and players gain them through from the following sources.

  • Personality Type. Expanded to include two new ones, so all the characteristics except SIZ, have one associated with them
  • Profession of which there are five groupings: Magician, Rogue, Rural, Urban, Warrior each with five professions, so a total of 30 FUN fantasy professions, like Knight, Oracle, Occultist etc
  • A free choice of a hundred Free skill points.

Equipment is picked up from that listed under the profession, and everyone gets a Family Heirloom, a minor magical item with its own Wyrd.

3. Every character is a champion with a Wyrd (or destiny). This sets the character out from the stay-at-home folks, and in-game terms allows rerolls and bonuses to various rolls upon spending Wyrd Points. It’s a modernising touch, and one that should make the characters more epic than their Old School BRP ancestors.

4. Only Magicians have magic. The Magic chapter is but one, alongside Combat, and there is one magic system (BRUGE’s Magic, more or less as is, with enough extra spells to support the game’s five Magician Professions)

5. Streamline systems while still keeping it BRP. So gone is the Resistance table, and resistance rolls are now a subset of characteristic rolls modified by difficulty. So for example a POT 20 poison vs a character with CON 15 would be a Difficult Stamina roll to resist. I’ve also standardised the criticals and specials chance table into a much shorter table where they are listed by competency.

6. Fun Combat. Yes, hit locations are back because I miss them from my 90s RQ3 days (and remember, BRUGE is a lot of RQ3). As is the DEX initiative model of BRP inherited from early editions of Call of Cthulhu is one I know works for me. Not that hated strike ranks are available via BRUGE – because that would allow people to make RQ clones. All the fumble tables have been condensed into one and all those wacky roll again once/twice/three times results that get oh so boring in play have new results. Also the “you hit nearest friend” results. Because no one really wants that :). Overall aim is to make BRP combat as quick and smooth as I’ve done with OpenQuest but without gutting what people see as BRP (so specials are still there)

7, Sandbox adventure creation. Don’t get me wrong, I love the guided scene-by-scene or location-based adventures I write for OpenQuest, but there’s time when I wish I could just turn up for game night with a page of bullet points, all the important monsters statted up, and a couple of random tables to support improvised play. So, this is the route I’m taking here.

8. There is an implied setting, The Realm. This is the character’s civilisation surrounded on all sides by hostile borderlands, beyond which are hostile nations and even wilderness ravaged by the Warp, an chaotic mutating power that occasionally intrudes into reality, leaving destruction in its wake. The players and the GM discover and fill out details during play. Guidance on how is currently earmarked to go in the unwritten GM’s Guidance chapter and peppered throughout the rules.

Lastly, I kept the following two questions and answers in mind while hacking away at the rules.

Does this mean I’m throwing OpenQuest or Sky Pirates under the bus? Heck no, I love OQ and have fun playing it regularly on OpenQuest Thursday game nights, during my regular Empire of Gatan campaign. Sky Pirates is still happening. Most of it is written but may be pipped to the post by Legacy, simply because I’ve already happily got the art for it.

Ultimately, why am I doing this?  This scratches a different itch of D100 gaming. The need as a longtime BRP fan to have a quick plug-and-play version of Fantasy BRP, based on my nostalgia for my very early experiences with RQ3 before it got cluttered and frankly very confused with all the options in the Advanced RQ3 book that Games Workshop brought out a couple of months after the core book. Where I just drew a map, made up a few monsters, called some mates round who quickly generated characters, and boom had a series of happy afternoons of carefree adventuring with no grand meta-plot lurking in the background. BRP unleashed and supported the players’ creativity, used to the restraints of D&D.

Update: the above was a snapshot of where I was with Legacy in September 2024. I put it to one side once my holidays ended and didn’t pick it up again until Christmas. Since then I have steadily been working on it on and off since then. It’s now at the point where it’s being internally playtested, has a logo courtesy of Dan Barker, and is being polished up for a public playtest, possibly leading into a Kickstarter in early summer. However, my internal playtest has thrown up many changes. The biggest one is a complete rewrite of the game’s magic system, making it more flexible and, dare I say it, free-form, yet still familiar to old hands. I know that’s a big aim, but that’s where I’m going with it. Overall, the game is rapidly evolving into its own thing, without ceasing to be BRP. I’m playing OpenQuest online in the same week-cycle as my Legacy playtest, and while they both share the same roll under D100 skill mechanic, they are very different games, which is very satisfying. I’ll post a more formal announcement when the game goes into public playtest.

What I did on my Summer 2024 Holidays Part 1

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(originally posted last year back in September on the now defunct Fantastic Odysseys Patreon)

I’ve just returned from my summer family holiday—or Jolliday, as I call it—on the North Norfolk coast. I stayed not far from the seaside town of Hunstanton and the old port of King’s Lynn (formerly Bishops Lynn until Henry VIII renamed it ). The whole area drips history, both as a region and in a personal sense, since my Father’s side comes from there, and I’ve been visiting since I was a child.

A clear example of this is when we went to Burnham Market, famous for being Admiral Lord Nelson’s (hero of the Battle of Trafalgar) birthplace. As we walked from the car park, a “history path” noted various historical events throughout English History, right back to the Stone Age.

First up for a visit was the open day held at the former RAF Bircham and Newton airbase. This was one of the first airbases during WWI and was part of a plan to bomb Berlin that was shelved because the war ended. It was Fleet Air Command’s HQ during WW2 and became a training centre after the war. The base briefly saw testing of the new Harrier jump jets towards its end of life in the 1960s on its grass runways.

The Fleet Air Arm stuff during WW2 was particularly interesting. Norfolk had many RAF bases during the war. It’s why my Grandfather, originally from the South of England, came to the region to fix Lancaster Bombers. This is another personal connection since I now live down the road from where they built them in Avro’s factory in Chadderton. There, he met my Grandma at some dance or another. Last Norfolk holiday, two years ago, we visited the Langham Dome, where they trained anti-aircraft gunners on one of the first simulators projected on the inside. The farm next door still has the runways and some of the hangers of RAF Langham (which was a base for the Fleet Air Arm). And further north, near the coast, Muckleburgh Barracks ,where the same trainees would get to practice on actual guns with live ammunition firing out over the sea.

Castle Rising, one of my favourite castles, was up next. It has been a royal hunting lodge, an open prison for Edward II’s treacherous wife, Queen Isabella, a police station, and, at one point, an insane asylum for one inmate!

Castle Acre Priory down the road was also visited. The ruins are truly epic, and you get a good sense of how big the place was. When the majority of the Priory was destroyed during Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries, they kept the “priory house” intact so that the new landowners could use it as a residence. The whole site is part of Norman planned town, which also includes a motte and bailey castle, which unfortunately, we didn’t have time to visit, and whole grid street design is still visible in the layout of the modern town. I could easily write a medieval adventure set in it since it shows clearly how the three classes, “them that work” (peasants), “them that pray” (the monks at the priory) and “them that fight and rule” (knights and nobility) lived.

I’ve had this sense of history growing up and going around places on my holidays. As well as Norfolk, the Cotswolds is particularly huge in this regard. In my roleplaying career, it is probably why I’ve gravitated to games that have settings with a well-defined sense of history, like RuneQuest and Call of Cthulhu, and been less than impressed with some of the loosely defined but otherwise fanciful D&D settings. But I’ve never been brave enough to do any directly Historic games. Publishing Paul Mitchener’s Hunters of Alexandria was as close as I’ve got – and that is but the briefest of touch. I guess my main reason why is the balancing act between providing genuinely exciting game material that is deep enough to engage the interest of the audience without being overly challenged by self-acknowledged experts. I guess I’m a bit lazy and cowardly in that regard. Although, as a one-man publishing outfit I defend my right to do so. Instead, I use my historical imaginings to inform my fantasy games. So don’t be surprised if you see a planned town like Castle Acre in a future OpenQuest Gatan adventure. Castle Rising has already been featured as the fictional Castle Uprising in my ongoing OQ campaign.

We came, we gamed, we Grogmeeted!

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So it was Grogmeet 2025 last Saturday, and I spent eight hours in the Whitworth Locke side of the convention, running games and catching up with folk.

This is the Grognard Files podcast’s annual convention, attended by Grognards of all ages. It is not specifically an OSR or OSR-inspired convention, but games tended to hark back to the 80s and early 90s, when many attendees took a break for careers and raising families (aka going into deep freeze) before returning to gaming recently.

Grogmeet 2025 at Whitworth Locke, Manchester
OMG its all full of Grogs!

It was the convention of the Ziggurat! If you followed the madness that was the Raise the Ziggurat sale at the end of last year, I brought it, and a couple of tubs of old 80s Citadel figures and some aquarium scenery to act as props for my two games.

Game 1 Saturday Morning: Ziggurat of Gloom

System: Grim and Dangerous (an Oldhammer RPG)

Beddington’s Brewery has hired your battalion of adventurers to escort a wagon train carrying barrels of its finest brew from Dwarfchester across the Painine Way to the thirsty students at the Royal College of Magic in the town of Uddersfield. 

The problem is that Night Goblins are following you and have been forced to take defensive positions off-road at the strange rain-soaked stone structure locals call The Ziggurat of Gloom!

Grim and Dangerous is a reimagined roleplaying game inspired by the early editions of Warhammer, aka Oldhammer. It has a simple roll under D20 mechanic, with characters having career focuses and special abilities to distinguish themselves from one another. This adventure draws heavily on the White Box of Warhammer, Warhammer 1st Edition.   Please note that this game is in development at playtest stage.

I’ll be posting more about Grim and Dangerous in its own future post when it gets revealed. This is game in development looks hard at the Oldhammer games (Warhammer 1st, its second edition Warhammer Fantasy Battle, up to first edition Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay) and inspired by the feel of those games and does its own rules light roll under skill on a D20 thing. This was its inaugural game, and overall, the prototype rules held up and did what I wanted them to, aided and abetted by players who grasped its concepts and ran like heck with them.

Happy players at Grogmeet 2025
Happy players after their characters had defeated waves of screaming Night Goblins and cracked open the Ziggurat.

Special thanks to Andy Hemming (pictured on the far right in the above photo), who provided the entire force of Night Goblins (from the 80s!), some female adventurers and dignified elven followers to compliment my scruffy 80s Citadel lead. To say Andy was like a child in a sweet shop would be an understatement.

Ziggurat of Gloom at Grogmeet 2025
Initial troop deployments at the Ziggurat of Gloom
GM Newt Newport at Grogmeet 2025
Myself in my element GMing

Intermission: Newt Socialises!

A three-hour break(?) due to unexpected scheduling adjustments gave me ample opportunity to catch up with folks I’ve not spoken to in a couple of years. This was one of my aims of the day, because I unexpectedly had to drop out of my regular convention attendance a couple of years ago due to family commitments. This really was nice because the space and time around the games to chat and catch up really makes a con for me.

Then all of a sudden, the gaming room filled up, and it was time for Game 2.

Game 2 Saturday Afternoon: The Pyramids of Marn

System: Beyond Dread Portals

Three pyramids have been discovered in the jungles of the world of Marn. Three factions are bidding for a license to explore them in the Hall of Departure in the Explorers Guild of Ys. Ys ruler, the Autarch, to prevent in-fighting, is only allowing one group at a time to walk through a portal in the Guild Hall to the ancient ruins. Since your explorers will be risking life and limb in this strange world, they get to choose who will be their patron for this expedition.  Choose wisely. Not only will it determine how profitable the visit to Marn will be, but who you potentially make enemies of.

Beyond Dread Portals is a world-hopping D20 Fantasy game by Paul “The Tweed Meister” Mitchener. Loosely based on early D&D, modified to meet the needs of the setting. A baroque decaying renaissance-era world of the city of Ys and the worlds connected to it by a system of magic portals.  As members of the Explorer’s Guild, there are expeditions to join, loot and secrets to be found, and a web of powerful patrons to navigate carefully. All under the deathly gaze of the undead ruler, the Autarch!

Regular readers of this blog will know Beyond Dread Portals by now. It’s within a hairs breath of being released (just waiting for a proof). This adventure was quickly conjured up, as an excuse to use the Ziggurat again on the table. Combined with the aquarium scenery, that worked very well, and a list of bullet points was fleshed out to become a weird and wonderful game of exploration. Despite the characters being capable 5th level, they managed to weasel their way away from getting involved in any combat, with some very clever problem-solving. I’ll be writing this one up for future release in some format.

And then it was all over and home to an evening back in the loving embrace of my family.

Big thanks to all my players and co-organisers Chris “Dirk the Dice” Hart and Blythy.

Here’s to 2026.

Ziggurat miniture with dice and flyer

BTW, if you are wondering where I got the Ziggurat from, it is made by Ian from Fenris Games and is available via his website.

Oldhammer part 1: White Box, Warhammer Fantasy Battle 1st Edition

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So the Bleak Season is here, and my jolly Summer of Oldhammer becomes a Winter thing. I’m skipping my rather self-indulgent part one, “Warhammer and Me”, and getting straight into looking at the first edition of Warhammer.

I first came across the game in 1986, a good three years or so after Games Workshop released it. Myself and my mate Kevin spent a good hour staring at it, trying to work out what it is was. Was it a wargame or was it a roleplaying game. It was already out of print, in fact Warhammer Battle (2nd Edition) had been released the year before. Kev had swapped it with an older boy, who had thought it was a proper RPG, along with Warhammer Fantasy Batlte, Fantasy Forces (a box of supplements, more on that later) and a starting miniatures collection – which I still have to this day because Kevin always the entrepreneur sold it all on to me since I was interested, but cannily kept the Warhammer 1st Box sensing it would be worth something in the future. He was right, complete boxes go for £100+ on eBay, with individual books going for £40+.

Contents of the White Box

Book 1 Tabletop Battles (softcover, B&W illustrations throughout, pages 50). This is the core rule book with everything you need to know to run the game as a miniatures wargame. It contains Warhammer’s distinctive psychology system, a short bestiary with the iconic Warhammer take on the usual suspects from Western myth, legend and folklore, and the quick scenario of the Ziggurat of Doom.

Book 2 Magic (softcover, B&W illustrations throughout, pages 38). The complete magic system. Wizards and Necromancers, enchanted items and random generation of spell casters for the wargame.

Book 3 Characters (softcover, B&W illustrations throughout, pages 34). This is the companion Roleplaying rules. They add a simple extra layer of rules effectively allowing the player characters who are champions and leaders of units. There are character generation rules, characters having special abilities (in a very basic form compared to WFRP), advancing through experience, random adventure encounters, guidance for creating adventures and the starting adventure/mini-campaign Redwake River Valley.

My takeaways.

Overall this is the UK’s White Box RPG, comparable to the 70s Original Dungeons and Dragons set. It’s recognisably Warhammer in an embryonic form. Some elements will thrive and grow, and some will with and die as we progress, even through the quick succession of editions during the 80s.

Primitive layout and art. The distinct infamous “chaos-spikey” bits style is already in place, and there are pieces that are so iconic they will be reused even in Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay years later.

RPGing elements are minimal. There is no cosy GMs guide or “how to play your character” or even copious examples. It’s assumed that you know what you are doing or can quickly work it out from reading the procedural rules. But there’s a big seed of excitement here: you can quickly switch between playing a roleplaying game and, say, playing out a climatic battle as a full-blown wargame. Think The Hobbit, which every UK fantasy fan at the time had read at school. You roleplay the the journey to the Loney Mountain, perhaps fighting Smag the Dragon (or like the book, having the GM fudge it because your characters are too low level) when you get there, and fighting The Battle of Five Armies as a full tabletop wargame as a big finale. Oh the dream!

It has a very broad brush strokes setting, the Old World isn’t even mentioned ye, and while it’s implied, it seems to be assumed that you’ll make your own world up.

If memory serves me correctly, Games Workshop’s Design Studio quickly threw together Warhammer 1st Editon in response to the company merging with Citadel Miniatures. As designer Rick Priestly put it, “we were now selling miniatures, so we needed a set of wargaming rules to go with it.” The roleplaying in Book 3 was almost an afterthought. This will have a big effect on the game’s scope in the future.

Next, the Warhammer 1st edition supplements Forces of Fantasy and the Book of Battalions.

Bit Odd, Innit? A Kickstarter from Cakebread and Walton

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The return of British Table Top Roleplaying stalwarts Cakebread and Walton, with their Kickstarter for their new game Bit Odd, Innit?.

The lazy take on this one is “British Stranger Things”, but I know it will be a full take on British Weird Supernatural Urban Folklore, expertly crafted by Peter Cakebread and his new writing partner Chris Newton.

Welcome to Goreton 

This game is set in a peculiar English Village where strange things happen. You get to play as teen adventurers who have to navigate the everyday horrors of school, home, and eccentric village life – while keeping the creeping darkness at bay.

From age-old folk horrors to experiments gone wrong at the local research facility; from the eldritch powers of the standing stones to the mysteries of the weekly meat raffle; from the ghostly and other-worldly entities that dwell within the village to the Lovecraftian creatures and gods wanting to break through from their own dimensions to invade ours; from enforced community participation weeks to school geography trips to the local Tor; Goreton is a place of thrilling adventures, fun and heartbreak, where true horror awaits! 

The book is standalone and does not require any other of the OneDice books to run, and will include all the rules along with plenty of details about Goreton village and its inhabitants.

Welcome to Goreton – Bit Odd, Innit?

Raising the Ziggurat Sale

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Over at the D101 Games web store, I’m having a big sale of my main rulesets to pay for a very special bit of kit.

This quick sale is running for five days only, Monday 14th October to Friday 18th October. It is a chance for you to pick up our games in PDF at the deeply discounted price of £5 each.

I plan to make a magnificent return to convention gaming in 2025. One of the games I’m planning to demo is an new Oldhammer RPG I’m working on. I want to use Fenris Games’ Ziggurat as the centrepiece of the starter adventure. This awesome mini will raise the spirits of Grognards everywhere. It is modelled on the original Ziggurat of Doom, which was featured in the introductory adventure for Warhammer First Edition.

Unfortunately, this is a serious bit of kit, the price of which I’ve not budgeted for. Also, I need to get it quickly and paint it in time for Grogmeet 2025 in January. Failure to fund will mean that I must deploy the massively less epic cardboard Ziggurat made out of pizza boxes.

So, to raise some quick funds, all the following are currently discounted and only £5 (about $6.50) on the D101 Store on pdf. Also, if you buy a copy now, I’ll send you a 25% off voucher for the physical book once the sale ends.

Click on the links in the following titles for more about each title and product page to buy.

Follow the Rising…

Follow me on Blue Sky, where I’ll post progress, possibly exciting flash sales, and rarities I find in the D101 stock cupboard over the next five days.

Or if you prefer D101 Games is now on Instagram.

So here’s to Happy Raising!

Last day of Lost Shores Deep Ones Kickstarter

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It’s the final day of Fenris Games‘ Kickstarter campaign to bring back their Deep One miniatures in high-quality resin featured in Sandy Petersen’s Cthulhu Wars board game.

It features some top Deep One miniatures, giant-sized aquatic horrors, and fantastic undersea ruins. I’ve backed it because I’ve got plans to use both the figures and the landscape in a future convention scenario 🙂

D&D 2024 Pre-Release Anticipation

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So, I’ve been largely ignoring the new version of D&D, with the exception of the 50th Anniversary Celebration stamps put out by Royal Mail featuring the art of Wayne Reynolds (a personal friend). I’m too busy being obsessive about my own games and the resurgence of Chaosium with RuneQuest (of which I’m a huge fan).

Full disclosure: this is where I stand with D&D, summed up by three takes on it.

  • My D&D: Crypts and Things – which leans heavily into Grimdark Swords and Sorcery genre-wise and uses OD&D (via Swords and Wizardry) as a clean base with some comfort of life changes to make it less creaky. Runner up Beyond Dread Portals,which brings a looser post-D&D but still class/level-based game to the table.
  • My Modern D&D: Vanilla would be 13th Age, and I recently backed the second edition. I’ve played and run this more than I can remember, and every time, it has been a smooth experience that’s made everyone around the table have a good time. Setting-specific and slightly lighter, but in the same narrative ball park, and slightly post-D&D, I’d go with Paul Mitchener’s Beyond Dread Portals game.
  • My OSR D&D. Until recently, I would have said Swords and Wizardry, but Old School Essentials intrigues me greatly and, more importantly, seems to have a greater pull to the table than S&W.

I like 5th Edition. I’ve run a few games, mainly testing/pilots, but I find it lukewarm. While the players have always had a good time, it’s not the AMAZING LET’S PLAY THIS AGAIN time that 13th Age or Beyond Dread Portals is, and I’m a bit ho-hum as a GM.

I had a go at publishing material for 5th Edtion, with the Sorcerer Under the Mountain, and had a line of modules written by others lined up, which will soon see the light of day. Still, COVID really knocked the wind out of my sails on that one. Hence the huge delay and getting the stretch goals for Tales from the Sorcerer of the Mountain Kickstarter out.

But I genuinely like D&D, despite my D100 addiction (see OpenQuest/RuneQuest), so I’ve watched with fascination as Wizards of the Coast has geared up this edition.

Dropping into bullet points, some thoughts while I wait for the book to arrive today.

  • While it was harsh in the amount of upset it caused at the time, I’m actually quite thankful for the OGL Crisis. It showed that despite Corporate owners thinking otherwise, D&D is a public phenomenon that transcends them practically and creatively. It also caused a lot of publishers, including myself, to clear up their relationship with the OGL going forward (or not, as the case may be).
  • The digitalisation of D&D? Whatever, for me, it’s a physical book and friends around a gaming table. I shall be gleefully encouraging this approach but with a group down at a local club or a home family game.
  • One D&D, D&D 6th, D&D 2024? Again, what they call it transcends what the player base calls it (see MyD&D above for my definitions). As a computer software developer it amuses me that they have dropped editions from the nameing, which makes it much easier for them to roll out changes and not have to answer the whole thorny “is this a new edition, do I really need it?” (answer from my 40+ years of experience, no).
  • If D&D 5th was their chance to “unite the tribes” of D&D, perhaps D&D 2024 as well as being their 5.5 part marketing move to make more money out of it, but also a chance to make D&D 5th more its own thing.
  • As a GM I hope to really click with the new version. For the last ten years of 5th Ed has been like some party that the world and his dog have been invited to, and I’ve been strangely absent except for a bit of popping in to see what is going on. I’ll be first to admit that its my own fantastism over D100 games, where its very easy to default to D&D being an inferior game system, and being busy exploring the OSR. Perhaps its time to take the launch of the new version as a chance to run a campaign and take a real deep dive?
  • I’m going to run it. Hopefully, it will be a laid-back, once-a-month/week game, and I can publish anything new I come up with through D101.
  • Is familiarity why I keep coming back to D&D, even when I’m being obsessively nerdy about other games? It’s my wife. When she tells work colleagues what I do with D101 Games, she simply says, “It’s D&D.”
  • I’m genuinely excited about this! (not going to think to hard why).

So Happy D&D Release Day!

Why Do People Become Sky Pirates

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A quick bit of writing before I get dragged off to a University Open Day by my daughter this morning. This is the start of the How to Be a Sky Pirate chapter of Sky Pirates of the Floating Realms.  

There are many reasons why people become sky pirates, including the following.

1.       Out of necessity. Many communities cling to small sky islands and don’t have enough land for even meagre subsistence farming. So, the more able members of these remote communities end up “fishing” in the sky lanes for food and other resources.

2.       As a result of being exiled. Large, organised sky island communities tend to be highly organised and laden with rules and laws simply to survive. The threat of being cast out and abandoned on a distant floating sky rock is something that many lawmakers use to keep their people in line. Also, many communities will have an annual casting of the stones. Where two or more candidates for exile, people who have broken local laws or are simply intolerable in the eyes of their community, receive votes in the form of a stone with their name on it. The candidate with the most must leave the island for a set period (say ten to twenty years) or for life.  

3.       They are misfits. Like being exiled, but a choice rather than something being imposed upon them. Freethinkers, revolutionaries or out-and-out oddballs choose a life aboard a pirate ship, free to explore their ideas and be themselves.

4.       Freed prisoner. Some Tyrants have Sky-Island Prisons, where those who break their laws or simply get on their wrong side end up. The prisons range from camps made up of huts or tents, where the inmates labour in the fields, to highly secure fortresses, where there is a daily schedule of lockdowns, exercise in the yard, and sessions in the workshop making crafted goods for the Tyrant’s enrichment. Fortunately, Sky Pirates often attack these institutions, driven either because they are an affront to the pirates’ sense of freedom or because they need to supplement their crew.

5.       Promises of a life-changing fortune. Some people see it as a job and that they will either accumulate enough treasure over a career or have one big haul that gives them a post-pirate life of comfort in a villa in a big cosmopolitan sky city.

6.       For the sheer high-spirited adventure of it! The life of a sky pirate offers excitement and adventure in a way that many workers in the settlements can only dream of. Many pirates are simply aboard for the lifestyle.

Originally posted on my Patreon for Fantastic Odyseys Zine. Sign up for more posts like this and members-only previews of stuff I’m working on.

The Summer of Oldhammer

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One of the biggest defining moments of my career as a British-based Tabletop Fantasy Gamer is, without a doubt, Warhammer. A constant in the monthly White Dwarf magazine, its grim but darkly humourous take on fantasy gaming, which took in a melting pot of influences (Tolkien, Moorcock, classic British Warmovies), was playing to the crowd of bloodthirsty teenagers who were already addicted to the worlds of imagination shown in early Fighting Fantasy solo game books and of course D&D.

Its been a while since I’ve done a series of linked posts, and I’ve got an ulterior motive in that this is research for a game I’m designing (big reveal later this year). Plus, it will be damn fun to look at the roots of my hobby; this is Warhammer, after all!

One big thing is that I will be looking at early editions—collectively called Oldhammer by Grognards. For reasons that I’ll make clear during my posts, I don’t have such a strong connection with modern editions of the game.

Warhammer 1st Edtion, cover by John Blanche

So here’s an overview of what I plan, which I may deviate from if I get overenthusiastic about something.

  • Warhammer and Me.A personal introductory post where I get out of my system how early editions of the Warhammer games have affected my gaming and publishing.
  • Oldhammer part 1: White Box. Warhammer Fantasy Battle 1st Edition. Primarily a wargame, but with elements of RPGing.
  • Oldhammer part 2: Forces of Fantasy. 1st Edition WFB army lists but packed with extendtions to the base game. The equivalent to the OD&D supplements (Greyhawk etc) that leads to…
  • Oldhammer part 3: Red Box. Warhammer Fantasy Battle 2nd Edition. Now a wargame pure and simple, but still with the narrative background of an RPG.
  • Oldhammer part 4: Red Box supplements. The Tragedy of McDeath, Blood Bath at Orc’s Drift and more! The game’s Grim Dark humour reaches a high mark, a bit too much Carry on Warhammer?
  • Oldhammer part 5: Green Book. We reach the first total RPG take on the Warhammer World. Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying 1st Edition.
  • Olhammer Part 6: Judge Dredd the Roleplaying Game. Perhaps a surprise entry to some in this series, Games Worshops Sci-Fi RPG based around the popular 2000AD comic character.
  • Oldhammer Aftermath: Further editions of WFRP (2nd-4th), what I make of them, and the British OSR games that carry the torch.