Latest from the Labyrinth #18
New PARIAH chargen
Hello and welcome to September’s mercifully miniscule missive.
Just a very short announcement as I didn’t publish any material through August (my birthday month, incidentally—thank you!), but for the past week or so I’ve been drip-feeding members of the Atelier Hwei discord bits and pieces of a new series of “zinis” I’ve been working on for PARIAH.
The hope is that I can streamline some of the player-facing material while still maintaining OSR compatibility. I know this is sticking point for some (and the edition/genre wars are doomed to continue for the remainder of humanity’s time on this earth), but I think a system is old-school compliant if a PC it generates can be run through any of the adventures/modules/DM kits released between 1974 and 1989 with close to zero conversion, or it least ad hoc conversion only. I think this new set of playing facing rules achieves this, perhaps better than AHP01 .
Similarly, were I to write an OSR compatible adventure, the intention would be that a GM would be able to run it using anything from OD&D through to BECMI through to the GLOG. So, while I plonked an OSR COMPATABLE logo on PARIAH: VOLUME 1, I didn’t do that with Atop the Wailing Dunes.
Sidebar: I appreciate that the OSR refers to a broader playstyle rather than a specific set of rules, and that may/may not coincide with how people played “the game” (haha you just lost) back in the mythical days of yore when everything was embellished with a glorious tint of rose. This is a standard I set for myself, not for others: I'm never going to criticise anyone for claiming their game is OSR compatible while not meeting that criteria. I prefer to judge games and game materials on their own merits rather than against arbitrary taxons, genres, schools etc. For more information about how cultures of play relate to the edition wars, google "Retired Adventurers cultures of play" post.PARIAH 1st Edition? 2nd Edition?
This isn’t a new edition.
This is a series of zinis—
Zini: a double-sided A4 or letter-size pamphlet that can be printed and folded in half to make an A5 or half-letter mini zine. —providing procedures, monsters, magic etc. that can be plugged into a PARIAH (or any old school) campaign. They may be collated into a single volume in the future.
Pariah Chargen
You can download the provisional PDF below, so long as you don’t distribute it for money or claim it as your own work. It’s a WIP and hasn’t been fully tested yet, new PARIAH campaign should kick off Friday 20th September
Big takeaways:
Emphasising the role of hit dice (which was sort of well hidden in volume 1) by changing their name to SPIRIT DICE
Removed traditional ability scores, replaced with optional traits
“Rebranded” saves to correspond to the “Realms” of the PARIAH implied setting
Added attack and defence scores (operate as saves: flat target number)
Provided greater flavour in the backgrounds section (inviting customisation and hacking to suit your own stone-and-sorcery setting)
Emphasised the slot inventory system, inspired by Cairn and its hacks, particularly ECO-MOFOs… conditions, burdens and spell-spirits now reduce the amount a pariah can carry
Three sides of A5 provide enough information to create a new character and give a vague overview of the game, the back page is a WIP character sheet. Next month I’ll (hopefully) have made it form fillable.
Open to feedback in all fronts: game design/mechanics, layout, font size, spelling and grammar, lack of illustration.. go for it, I can take it: I’m much tougher than my brittle online persona suggests.
But wait, there’s more!
Part of this “zini” project addresses the gaps in PARIAH: VOLUME 1. A huge element of the game is the psychedelic, and the use of entheogens to access parallel realities and I don’t think vol.1 gave GMs enough material to run these kind of escapades, so I’m aiming to condense the myriad blog posts I’ve made on this into a series of realm-specific minizines. Long term, I’d like to devote a full 64 page zine to each of the realms, but for now I’d like to provide some condensed, gameable material for Pariah tables ASAP: I’ve been sitting on some of this material for nearly 5 years!
First up is DEATH as I have the most notes prepared on this. There’s still work to be done in terms of fitting it all in the format, so for now consider this a teaser:
Other Game News
My face-to-face group are about halfway through Yochai Gal’s Beyond the Pale: it’s a really strong adventure for the author’s hugely influential Cairn RPG, rooted in Jewish folklore.
having failed at getting my own lunchtime megadungeon game off the ground, I went back to the source of the idea and was fortunate to play in Luke Gearing’s Snackrifice. My level 1 fighter died from a magic sword through the face, thrown by another PC.
Today I was excited to receive May You Fish in Interesting Times by my dear friend, WH Arthur.
It’s a story game centred on a fishing trip made by anthropomorphic birds, traumatised by their role in a failed rebellion against a tyrannical autocrat. Have a look at the game page on itch:
Love the implication that Sorcerers are these buff ripped pinnacles of the magically inclined, like some kind of oiled up evil dark magic overlord with abs peeking through the dark robes in a Franzetta or Brom piece.