Vox Arcana - Blog

  I’ve mentioned this before on the show, but wasn’t able to extrapolate on what I believe to be one of my greatest innovations.

This is a great, weird book, if you're willing to do some work.

  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 chara...

A small section of my world map. It's based on a published product, but took on a life of its own over the 11 months we played.   I know I massively fell behind on these session reports. Although COVID-19 ruined a lot of things, it didn't stop my group from meeting. It's hard to piece together the exact things that happened simply by my notes, but I'll share some of the more notable events. This was the first time any of us played an OSR-style game, and we all learned a lot. I can say with much authority, even while editing this is halfway through 2025, that this was the greatest campaign I've ever had the pleasure to GM.

If you've been listening to our episodes from November and December, you might be aware that I (William) have shifted away from a heroic fantasy-style of game.