Andonome

Fantastic suggestions, cheers for the write-up.

General principles are good - with the right design the entire thing should reduce to a flowchart and some tables.

...and then we have magical items and areas, so plenty to conceptual work to do. It's turned into a mammoth discussion on the board.

Probably Don't Sleep, There are Snakes. It's the story of a Christian missionary who goes to convert the Piraha people. Unfortunately, their language stamps empiricism into the verb, so every single sentence has to come with how you learnt the information.

• Learning by experience ("I saw a jaguar")
• Learning by deduction ("There's jaguar poops, and tracks, so a jaguar was here")
• Learning by another's experience ("Someone said she saw a jaguar")

Gossip is grammatically impossible.

So he starts translating the Bible, but they keep trying to clarify what he means.

What colour was Jesus? Black or white?

But he never met Jesus.

Okay, so when your dad met Jesus.....

But his dad never met Jesus, so the translation cannot work.

The book goes over how they craft, their attitudes towards sleep (it's a vice - just don't), the way they think about time.

Eventually, Dan left an atheist. In the end, they converted the missionary through grammar.

My game has fewer rules than Pathfinder by any measure, although 'a page or two' seems a very low number - that sounds more like a little zine than a fully-fledged RPG.

I like this idea, but given that players never read the rules, it's a little like asking my granny what kind of package management system her computer should use.

We're not splintered. We're distributed.

How do you write your own original cultures? Is there a better way than carefully laundering things you’ve stolen from real human societies?

I wish more writers would steal. A lot of fantasy races look like pretty generic, bland, cultures. Reading Anthropology books has shown me cultures far stranger than any of the fantasy races.

Things I've "stolen":

• Languages can be whistled coherently, like entire sentences, communicated only through whistling. The sound travels further in some locations.
• Fire placement in caves is a matter of life or death.
• You don't need words for 'good' or 'bad', for a language to function, but once you meet a culture which doesn't have those words, it's extremely difficult to communicate (and hilarity often ensues).

I'm making a magic system for an NSR/ OSR RPG. It has a few things on the 'must have list'.

System Goals

• The system should have clear rules to make simple spells, so players can use simple spell lists, or make creative spells on-the-fly.
  • Rules for making spells don't have to be simple, because players will mostly just interact with the lists of spells.
• The system must have an underlying structure, and internal logic that makes sense in a Dark Ages setting.
• It has to produce a sizeable chunk of standard fantasy RPG magic tropes, like necromancy, clairvoyance, et c.
• The world should still 'make sense' - if spells impact trade and economics, then that's okay, as long as the world remains coherent.
  • You can't make lots of gold with magic, if gold is used as coinage.

The System So Far

• Each sphere is one of the four classical elements.
• Mages buy Magic Spheres as skills (rated 1-3).
  • E.g. Air 1, Fire 2.
• The mage can target that element with two effects:
  • Detect/ Identify (e.g. 'Detect water')
  • Alter (e.g. 'alter fire' and make a torch explode)
• Spend 1 additional mana point to 'create' something with magic (e.g. 'Create rock')
• Spend X additional mana to make the target 'bigger' (detect fire everywhere in a city, make all the air in the room noxious).
• Every sphere combination allows one additional target.
  • Water + Earth lets you affect life, so you can 'alter life' (and give a cat wings) or 'create life' (and make thorny bushes grow).
• Every mechanic will have a standard effect, e.g.:
  • If a spell can cripple someone, it will inflict a -1 penalty per Mana Point spent, to one Attribute.
  • If a spell can grant the target Damage Resistance, it grants 1 per Mana Point spent.

The conceptual phase is taking a lot longer than I thought, and there's a lot of work to be done.

I like some of the oddities (fire and light will have to lumped in together - I think this makes sense).

Some of the oddities I don't like

• It has no teleportation magic.
• I don't want healing magic, but the chart is just screaming 'Water + Earth makes healing'.

And a lot of it needs to be conceptually tighter (the bottom left corner makes less sense than the top right corner).

Upon stepping into the room, the players are ambushed (see the core rules for ambushes) by a drow mage (see the Monstrous Manual for more on the drow) riding a Grizwoz (see Appendix B: New monsters). The drow is level 7 (the GM should prepare a spell-list before the adventure starts).

About 50% of what I read ~~online~~ is just RSS. For cli fans, newsboat lets you extend the RSS feeds really easily. So far, I have:

• gemini translation, to get gemini feeds, and a hotkey to open them.
• a hotkey to open things in w3m (most articles work fine in the terminal, many are easier to read)
• a hotkey to open youtube videos
• another to download them and watch later

Fite me

I would, but if you lose to an OSR player, you die instantly.

I don't think it much matters.

Virtualbox works fine for me. Just remember to note if you're setting up the VM with a modern EUFI, or an old fashioned BIOS, so you can install the right bootloader.

• A gorgeous excellent apple-tree, with a noose hanging nearby, to remind the servants that the apples are for display, not eating.
• A magical beacon standing on the side of a building. It summons a feint glow around all living creatures in the vicinity. This helps servants move at night, but also draws a lot of attention to anyone standing where they shouldn't. The undead are unaffected.
• Precious garden gnomes. Local gnomes complain the practice is racist, but the Lord doesn't seem to care. They're worth ten years' sallary for the average servant.
• A cage where disobedient servants sit, slowly starving to death. It casts Raise Undead on any corpses inside, which leaves the group inside in a bit of a pickle.