Camping With Owlbears: The Podcast

 All three of you who actually followed this blog might have noticed that it kind of dried up and died back in February. The reason for this is simple: I started podcasting my gaming journal rather that writing it down.

It's been so long that I'm not even sure if I mentioned that here. If I did, this is a reminder post. If I didn't -whoops!

There are nearly 60 episodes of Camping With Owlbears to check out.

They are basically raw takes with very little editing. I kind of consider myself the only audience for the material, thus I treat it more like a gaming journal than something I want to invest hours of editing in.

Maybe some of you will enjoy it: Camping With Owlbears Podcast.

Glaive 2.1

 More than a year out from writing my original Glaive rules based on Ben Milton's Knave I've been getting a very good handle on what works and what doesn't. I've recently been rewriting the game as a GLoG hack. 

The GLoG (Goblin Laws of Gaming) was originally written by Arnold Kemp of Goblin Punch, and really hit its stride when Skerples collected it into a single coherent document. Since then a very active DIY community has sprung up around the GLoG, which is basically a modern hack of the Basic D&D rules. Things are very deadly in the old-school tradition, but the character concepts are interesting and dynamic in a very modern way.

What's different about it? really just two things, but I think they are game changers. The first are the Character Templates. Most classes have 4 templates. You can select one every time you level up. You always start with the first template of a class if you want to multi-class. You can only have 4 templates. At level 5 and beyond a PC can no longer be tormented by the GM and is free to retire. 

Personally, I think D&D REALLY begins to fall apart after 5th level (irregardless of the edition). SO as far as I'm concerned this is brilliant.

The other innovation of the GLoG is the replacement of the Vancian magic system with the extremely intuitive Magic Dice system. It's slightly too involved for me to explain here, but you should follow the link to my own GLoG hack or read Many Rats on Sticks to learn about it. 

Where modern 5e D&D is largely about consuming pre-packaged experiences from Hasbro, the GLoG community is all about making fantasy gaming your own. Personal. Weird. There is a definite gonzo element to most people's interpretation of the GLoG, and after the generic and frankly boring as hell MTG/Forgotten Realms/World of Warcraft fantasy flavor you get out of 5e D&D I think this is a real selling point.

Because it exists in the most public space of the Creative Commons License [Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International(CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)]  it means that nobody owns the GLoG. Given how niche even the most popular of role-playing games is, I think this is a good thing. Not everything we do should be judged by it's ability to return a profit. Sometimes we invest hours and days of our time into a thing simply because we love it. And that's good. 

Here is a link to my revised Glaive rules.

This Google Sheet has links to most active hacks of the GLoG.

Here's a random character out of my Glaive 2.1 hack.