Daruna - Tomb Robbery

I run my Daruna game about twice a year, with each session being a two-day marathon. Briefly, the game is a Swords and Sandals campaign with lots of death and mayhem. We're using my homebrew class free rules, which are loosely based on 3.X D&D/ Pathfinder, but, obviously, no classes.

Between the last session and this one, the party had spent a nice chunk of money on buying and rebuilding an old villa just outside Shalish, their base of operations. After hosting a major party for their patrons, associates, and families, they were out and about in the marketplace and ran into Sadine Salar (the extraordinary), a merchant who had treated them quite well in the very first session. Sadine had fallen on hard times, having been boarded by 'pirates' in the war zone up north. The party invites him back to the villa to see if they can help get him back on his feet, and eventually Sadine reveals his last treasure, a map leading to a Lost Kingdoms tomb. He suggests a joint venture to visit the tomb and 'recover' whatever wealth is there. The party, being good little murderhobos, agrees. On then to the game...

Daruna - Alchemy

My Daruna game is a low-magic setting. In the distant past a magical cataclysm corrupted magic, making anything beyond minor spells dangerous to the caster. Despite the threat of permanent corruption, the benefits and advantages granted by even minor spells make such usage an accepted part of society. In addition there are two magic-like spheres on knowledge that are intrinsic to the setting, Alchemy and Artifice. I'm going to talk about Alchemy today, since one of my player's has actually expended character points into learning the skills involved, granting me the opportunity to go down the 'complex system no one but me will ever see' rabbit hole.

Anamika - The River Guardian

Anamika is the river primordial my players encountered during the last session of our Daruna campaign (so keep out guys). The stat block that follows is for my own class free version of D&D, but adapting it to other flavors is pretty trivial.

Magic Item: The Sun Globe

This magical object is a three-inch globe of polished amber, shot through with twisting veins of some deep blue stone. It emits a faint radiance at all times, and once its secret is unlocked it can be commanded to do any of the following:

Daruna Session Notes, Part II

The continuation of the session notes from my most recent Daruna game. This is part two of two. Part one can be found right here. At the end of part one the party had just recovered the icon missing from Anamika's shrine and restored it, allowing the ferry across the Chungal River to start running again.

Daruna Session Notes, Part I

This is part one of a (hopefully) two part series covering events at my last Daruna campaign session. I posted up the teaser last week. Things took a few interesting twists, including a couple major distractions from the main rescue mission plot line.

Daruna - Session Report

A couple of weeks ago I ran the first of hopefully many weekend-long games set in Daruna, my latest campaign world. The session was also the first test run of the Class Free 2.0 system, my home-brew game system loosely based on d20 and 3rd edition D&D, and the first trial of the corrupting magic system I wrote about in a previous post. Aside from the usual goal of seeing my friends and having fun with RPGs, I had three main goals for this session:

• Shake out the bugs in CF2.0. I wasn't terribly concerned with this aspect. Everyone knew it was a new system and that there would likely be changes to the rules.
• Get everyone up to speed with the new system. A bit of work, as the majority of my players were diehard AD&D 1st/2nd edition players. But they're game, I'm game, so... forward.
• See how corrupting magic affected play balance. This was the biggest potential fly in the ointment. I was (and still am to be honest) particularly concerned about healing, since ablative hit points assume a robust healing mechanism.

Daruna - Corruptive Magic

Wow. This place is dusty. Guess I need to break out the vacuum.
I'm finally doing some work on my Daruna campaign again. We're scheduled to play the first session in a few weeks. One aspect of this game is a bit of swords and sorcery feel, with powerful magic a tool of the big bad guys rather than the player characters. To reflect this I've been working on a system of magical corruption. The how and why follow...

What is Class Free?

In a previous post I mentioned I was working on something called Class Free 2.0. I thought I'd explain a bit, since this project is my main reason, er, excuse for not actually writing blog posts.

Current Events

In which I discuss various forms of stuff that I am doing. Last week was a big loss due to a rather nasty bug I caught (along with most of my family). Since I really don't like posting "I'm not posting" posts, things got quiet here. Too quiet. I'm pretty well recovered now, just in time to get hit with more bitterly cold weather. Luckily I managed to get in a nice walk around the neighborhood yesterday, something that's all too rare an occurrence during the winter months here. So with the chit chat out of the way, here's a rundown on the current state of entertainment here.