Vox Arcana Podcast - Blog

  The Age of Sigmar is a vast and epic place, but I find the constant epic-ness exhausting. I also want to know what it’s like to actually live in such a world as this. After some reading, watching and listening, here are some of the major themes I’ve observed Technology Level: Although the original Warhammer was essentially set in the Middle Ages, Age of Sigmar is more like the Renaissance, after an apocalypse. Massive Space: The “world” is made of 8 separate realms, best thought of as themed planets. These planets are practically endless; I imagine an Earth-like planet with the radius the size of the sun. This means that local travel is impractical, and it’s easier to travel via portals. Portals: The 8 planets are connected via thousands of portals. These portals make travel fast, easy and safe, and effectively “shrink” the size of planets. They vary in physical size and destination. Some have been sealed. Some have been hijacked by chaos. Massive cities: The constant danger of dem

  I’ve become interested, once again, in Hot Springs Island (which remains one of the greatest published products I own ). Who knows when I’ll get to run any form of D&D again, so I’ll just have some lonely fun for now.

  I recently came across a product that I found interesting: The Barbarian Conquerors of Kenahu. This is an official published campaign setting that is similar to something like John Carter of Mars, though played more straight-faced, because it’s Autarch publishing it. The setting is sword-and-planet, or swords-and-rayguns (kind of), depending on what the GM wants to emphasize. At first, I was turned off by the beastial and alien player characters; there are Geckomen, Bugmen and Lizardmen, plus some genetically-modified humans that are mixes of other mammals, but they look more like Norsemen than cat or dog people (thank God). The humans of the setting are two types of terrans: people who got trapped in this world from the 20th or 21st century, and those from the 22nd or 23rd century. This leads to some really fun dynamics when you can have a bomber pilot from WWII who flew through a portal by accident, and a guy from a Star Trek-like reality, all teamed up with some freaky character

  Yesterday I remembered that a few years ago I purchased a huge collection of Pathfinder PDFs. I recall it being a humble bundle (or something similar) and that I acquired approximately $350 worth of product for around $20. Always on the hunt for inspiration (and new monsters) I dusted off my Paizo account and downloaded a few. After skimming about half a dozen products from this collection, I have determined that Pathfinder is of no interest to me. Interestingly, I found a very good blog that feels the same way. He takes the objectively railroady, overwritten and heavily-padded Pathfinder adventures and turns them into OSR gold (or at least silver). Plus, he usually reduces the word count by about 95%. I'm not kidding, he made the 600 page Kingmaker module into a 3-page hex crawl. I'm impressed with the result, because if he wasn't doing this, I would have no reason to even think about Pathfinder. This comes back to another issue I've been grappling with for about a

  My forays into WFRP have got me thinking about adventure design from the lens of the Old World. I wanted to see what a D&D 5e adventure might be like from that perspective. The result? A much better, though entirely different adventure. Overview The backwoods little village of Steinbruchstadt (Phandalin from 5e) lies deep in the Skaag hills, southwest of Carroburg, and west of Kalegan. The nearest trading town is Prie, to the northwest, which sits on the river Reik. This hilly region was once home to various mining towns, but over the last few hundred years, they’ve played out and the towns were abandoned. Nature has reclaimed most of them. The exception is, of course, Steinbruchstadt, which survived by quarrying limestone. This quaint town sits on a vast lake called Skaag Lake. Folk are suspicious of newcomers, and rightfully so; they live in constant danger. Their town is recently-built (only about 200 years old) and encircled by a tall stone wall. They have been attacked man

  I ran the first half of the starter set adventure last night. It was a significant change compared to what we're used to in our ongoing ACKS game. My first thought is that the system is very fast. Surprisingly so. Everything is resolved with a single d% roll, with nothing to look up. I fumbled a little with how toughness stats are derived, and I found the beginner sheets to be less useful than the normal character sheets. In the future, I might "rebuild" the starter characters onto a normal sheet so we can easily see how things fit together. As it stands, there are no advanced skills, and the math is mysterious in the beginner set. I was also a little bothered by the linearity of the adventure; it heavily prescribes and assumes the actions of the characters, with zero room for player agency. I have really good, imaginative players, as we've seen from the last YEAR of play in ACKS. If I were to run WFRP as a campaign, I would make every effort to separate the situa

  If I were to run WFRPG, there are some changes I need to make to the game. As it is, prepping for the game would look much like prepping for 5e. As I am on the record saying, I don't have the time or creative energy to keep that kind of game running for long.

  How can someone expect to run a game with such a robust and well-known world, such as WFRPG? There are a lot of moving parts. Here are my thoughts.

  I found an old book called Renegade Crowns that helps aspiring GMs generate a sandbox in the Old World. I thought it was interesting, so I followed the steps, rolled the dice and came up with what you see.