The Latest Enemy

  I started a new campaign recently for people from my church who are completely new to RPGs. I thought this would be an excellent time to introduce them to OSR and NSR concepts with them having no preconceptions about DnD or RPGs. Saying that, I did realize that DnD has definitely been absorbed into the cultural consciousness. I had initial ideas about running my hack of different OSR concepts for them but I quickly realized they did have preconceptions about things like race and class combos, 20s being crits, and a few things they had picked up by being aware of DnD 5E without actually having played that. With that in mind I decided to approach this as a minimal version of DnD for them where we had a limited amount of races and classes to combo together. So I settled on Human, Elf, Dwarf, Ratfolk, and Dragonborn as the playable races and Cleric, Fighter, Wizard, and Ranger as the classes. I really, really wanted to have an equal amount of classes as races for this homebrew a...

I need a deity for my upcoming campaign that is a bit gamified. Something that is explicitly transactional and a bit malevolent. I came up with statues of Nuadens to do that: Every city that reaches a certain size has one: a wooden sculpture of a satyr several times the size of the average citizen. Their sinister face is covered in leaves. All is foliage except their left hand reaching out. A hand made of silver clockwork. A hand that will animate if any sacrifice is placed in their outstretched hand, dropping the propitiation into the waist deep, rough hewn, ancient fountain these statues are always set in. A single word is etched into the fountain: Nuadens. Once the sacrifice is swallowed up by the earth beneath the fountain the clockwork hand rotates to its original starting point with a suitable exchange appearing in return. This offered exchange seems to always be related to the original offering in some way. Any person will only receive something in return from the statue once ea...

With my system out for  sale  I am full steam ahead on working on this new setting. The Grand Bazaar will be a pointcrawl or depthcrawl  and will involve trying to follow the byzantine rules of the mysterious Sultan who runs the whole infinite market of the Grand Bazaar. The idea is for most of the shop and cart owners to be relatively normal NPCs having been lost travelers or merchants who just decided to set up shop in the biggest and best market in the multiverse. However if you want the merchants and inhabitants to get a bit weirder, and you should, especially with how weird things can get in the Grand Bazaar, here are 1d100 weird merchants: All shadow. Speaks in a raspy whisper. Has mouths covering their body. Talks only in questions. Draped patterned, coverings over every exposed bit of flesh. Wants a way home. An engorged spider. Friendly but hungry. Spider made of spiders. Hypnotic and a hard bargainer. Person wearing a turban who is in fact a writhing mass of wor...

With my system out there I have shifted gears towards a setting I stumbled on to and am interested in: The Grand Bazaar! https://thelatestenemy.blogspot.com/2020/09/funday-sunday-grand-bazaar.html  I am going to spend the next couple of weeks expanding it out into a full point crawl ala The Gardens of Ynn  or the Stygian Library  two point crawls that are incredibly playable. "Portobello road, Portobello road Street where the riches of ages are stowed. Anything and everything a chap can unload Is sold off the barrow in Portobello road. You’ll find what you want in the Portobello road." Portobello Road, Bedknobs and Broomsticks The Grand Bazaar is a place where ANYTHING can be found for a price. Here is a 1d100 location list that I am going to be fleshing out in detail.  Tea Lanterns Carpets Furniture Book Pawn shop Oddities Potions Clockwork devices Taxidermy Statuary Masks Ships in Bottles Maps Pillows Weapons ...