• A character sheet in French for Black Sword Hack

    Posté le 2023-03-02 | JDR, OSR

    I'm not too fond of The Black Hack, and the last game using this system I played was rather disappointing. Why, then, did I buy Black Sword Hack: Ultimate Chaos Edition? My understanding was that the game was going to be published under the Creative Commons Attribution licence, and I wanted to support the initiative. Alas, that was not to be, only the rules were released under a free licence, not the rest of the game :-(.

    Once again, I'm translating a character sheet hoping that I'll never be asked for compensation by a copyright holder down the line because I reused layout and illustrations to make the game accessible to more players. I'm sure there would be plenty of interesting stuff to be done had the game been completely freed: write pregens illustrated with the book's characters, publish follow-ups to the included modules, make supplements using the same layout…

    The same is true of CRACK by the same editor (whom I otherwise greatly appreciate). "CC BY 4.0" is displayed proudly on the cover, but the credits only apply the licence to the text.

    But let's not look a gift horse in the mouth, it's a step in the right direction. I merely hope that one day we might be able to reuse game illustrations and layout as easily as we now can reuse text.

    Back to the character sheet, I only translated a single format (A5, full colour) because that's enough for my one-shot this week. The game's author being francophone, the full range of formats will most likely get and official tanslation soon anyway.

    Character sheet preview

  • 2023 TTRPG plans

    Posté le 2022-12-27 | JDR

    2022 is coming to a close, let's list my TTRPG projects for 2023, by decreasing order of priority. Everything will, as usual, be published for free under Free Art Licence once cleaned up.

    A three-referees-on-three-tables module for convention play, due in March for Histoire de Jouer 16. The idea is to have the three groups of players working together with limited means of interaction until the big finale. It'll be a planar adventure about saving the material plane, run with Coureurs d'Orages. Adventurers will communicate with other groups through artifacts, and jump from one group to another thanks to some magical shenanigans.

    A 4-hours LARP set in Chicago in the 1920s, due in June. Service clubs and crime families trying to rebuild the city in their image, while uncovering the intrigue-heavy ties between their organizations. Around 40 players expected.

    Rose des Sables, a short fantasy module for beginner referees and first-level characters sent to explore a strange facility built under a sand dune, populated with friendly roly-polies operating a power plant as a cargo cult. Jan Van Houten was nice enough to provide me with gorgeous illustrations for this module, here is one:

    Roly-polies illustration by Jan Van Houten, distributed under LAL 1.3

    #dungeon23, the 2023 challenge started by Sean McCoy of Mothership fame. I'll post more about it in another blog post in a few days, I'm going for an urban fantasy megadungeon laid below an underground car park.

    ∆v, a sci-fi TTRPG geared toward open-table convention play: players can sit down for 5 minutes (or 3 hours), leave whenever they want, and the adventure keeps going with a rolling cast of players and characters over the day. I have been playtesting it for years, explained it to other people who ran it successfully as well, it's a perfect introduction to TTRPGs for anyone that would be put-off by the idea of sitting for an hour or more at a game table.

    Grands Exploits & Petites Mains, an FKR-inspired tongue-in-cheek fantasy game. Instead of playing the epic hero chosen by the prophecy, players take the role of their backstage crew: selling goodies, booking inns, managing the hero's public image, damage control… Each character has a single spell and a few descriptive traits, no numeric stats. Ran it four times so far, we had a blast.

    I have other project on the backburner like Patchwork Manor and Cytoplasm, but do not expect to make any significant progress on them in 2023. If I can get through everything listed in this post, I'll already be pretty impressed with myself!

  • A collaborative map to fill together

    Posté le 2022-05-17 | JDR

    I made a blank map that can be used to create a setting collaboratively. I hereby publish it under the CC0 license, it's the closest I can get to the public domain without breaking any law (or dying). Feel free to share, reuse and remix it as you see fit!

    Here are two examples of completed settings (in French):

    For best results, I would advise to ask your co-authors to put references in their contribution to elements that have already been established by others. It really ties the setting together.

    Carte collaborative vierge

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