Category: Games

What to do when you don’t know what to do (RPG edition)

February 8, 2026 / JennyDetroit / 0 Comments

In my monthly DCC RPG game recently, the players decided NOT to go to the Caverns of Thracia for their usual dungeon crawl of doom. Instead, they noticed a set of smaller ruins off the beaten path between their village and the Caverns (ruins that were created by Goodman Games for their Backerkit hexcrawl of the island of Thracia that I’ve been using as my overland map for the game).

Unfortunately, the entry in Goodman Games’s hexcrawl book doesn’t have much to say about these ruins: the villagers from the Hamlet avoid them, and there might be a tunnel/series of tunnels connecting this ruined village to another ruined village several miles to the west.

That’s it. That’s all I had to go on and use on the fly for this detour by my players.

I probably should have told the group that I wasn’t prepared for a trip to these little ruins and maybe we could just move on to exploring the Caverns, per usual.

But I didn’t want to take away player agency, so I figured I could improvise something using the details from the hexcrawl supplement. There are tunnels/a tunnel connecting two sets of ruins. Maybe something is in the tunnel(s)? Maybe they’ll find treasure in the other set of ruins?

My first mistake was trying to make all this up on the spot. I should have asked for a ten minute break to plan *something* instead of ad-libbing everything and ending up with a rather lame location and confusing encounter with a ghost.

I didn’t act prudently at all, and so what resulted was almost two hours of a weird, rather stupidly long tunnel that connected the two sets of ruins, a ghost with a missing hand who was full of hate but couldn’t actually do much damage to the players (DCC RPG’s ghost entry in the Monster section is pretty weak, and I didn’t know that before I decided to have a ghost be waiting in the tunnel… the ghost doesn’t do any damage just has these special abilities, and a lot of them didn’t make sense for what I had narrated already, so I ended up with a ghost who can show players a vision of their own deaths and not much else).

By the end of the encounter, the group had found the other set of ruins and I put a box with some treasure there so they didn’t feel it was a total waste of time, but honestly, it was a total waste of time. Not a very fun encounter, not a very interesting location, and all of it ended up confusing them instead of entertaining them.

Ugh.

Again, I should have simply asked them to go to the Caverns, promising to develop other locations and hexes for next time if they wanted to do more exploration.

But I didn’t, and we ended up with a weird and wasteful two hours of game time.

Instead of totally improvising and ending up with a mess, what if I had a ready-to-go toolkit for improvising locations and encounters on the fly? What if I could let the players explore things without asking them to wait until next session?

Hours after our game session ended, I realized I DO have a ready-to-go toolkit for improvising locations and encounters. I just didn’t bring it to the session. I didn’t even THINK to bring it the session, and that was a mistake.

I have Bob World-Builder’s Skrym zine, a toolkit for creating wilderness sites, encounters, and treasure (compatible with DCC RPG!) and I could have rolled up something in five minutes if I’d had it with me at the disastrous session.

There’s some ruins, eh? A ruined village, according to the Goodman Games supplement.

Okay, so roll for encounter in some ruins (2d6)… I got berserker.

I also rolled to see if maybe there was anything else near the ruins and I rolled again (2d6) and ended up with a cave. So maybe a little bit off the borders of the ruined village is a cave (and maybe this cave is where the tunnel is to the other ruined village miles away).

Random encounter for the cave… a giant spider.

Then I rolled four dice for a “small location” (the toolkit says roll 5d6, but I only had four dice at hand). Where those dice landed on my notebook page is where buildings are intact, ready to be explored. The number facing up on each die determines what’s in that location, so I ended up with a chest (6), two minion locations (4), and one hazard (3).

I decided the berserker was in one of the buildings with some minions. The berserker description in the toolkit mentions that its a dirty, cannibalistic human, so I figured the minions might be some giant rats he’s befriended.

I rolled for the hazard and ended up rolling “collapsing,” so that means maybe the wall of the building is unstable and will collapse if any rubble near it is moved, 1d6 damage or half if a Reflex save is successful.

Then I rolled for loot to see what was in the chest (maybe these were things the cannibal had collected after killing his victims?). Rolled up a hexarone handaxe (a kind of dwarven metal with special properties), a cask of mead, and a leg of turkey (maybe the players don’t know what kind of meat it is… fearing it may be human).

For the giant spider in the cave, I figured she had four victims in her web so I rolled up four more pieces of loot and ended up with a special longbow, special armor, 10 feet of chain, and some regular chainmail.

All of this random rolling took me roughly five minutes. I could have done it while the group was setting up their marching order and making some Sneak Silently rolls or whatever. I could have also done it as they went from room to room in the ruins. IF I’d had the Skrym zine with me.

Lesson learned. From now on, I bring this zine and if players ever go “off-book” into something I haven’t prepared for, all I need to do is spend a couple of minutes rolling on these tables and I’ll have a ready-to-go site and encounter for them to explore.

I feel stupid, of course, for having this awesome resource and not using it in my last session. And for someone else’s game, Skrym might not be the right tool. But I think it behooves any game master to have something like Skrym at the ready: a short, easy to use, on-the-fly toolkit for generating locations and encounters.

The Skrym zine is only about twenty-five pages; I printed it at home and stapled it, making a half-page booklet. Instead of trying to roll on random tables in a larger rulebook (like Shadowdark RPG or OSE) where some of this stuff is on different pages, Skrym has everything within a couple of pages; easy to flip through and fast to use. So whatever resource a GM uses, I would suggest it be short and sweet, something zine-like or even a single page maybe, that can be used quickly at the table without downtime or having to pause the action.

I feel foolish for my blunders in our last session, but going forward, I know I won’t make the same mistake again. And I won’t run a session of DCC RPG without bringing Skrym along to help me.

More Middle-Earth RPG Noodling

October 26, 2025 / JennyDetroit / 1 Comment

Making my Middle-Earth role-playing game heartbreaker using DCC RPG as the chassis and adding in various other elements from games like The One Ring, Nimble 2e, Dolmenwood, Shadowdark, MERP, Pendragon, and others has been both exhilarating and dispiriting, often in equal measures.

As I got deep into the weeds of character stats, magic systems, Luck/Hope/Despair mechanics, I was suddenly left wondering if maybe I should just learn The One Ring after all and call it a day. Why fight the system that everyone seems to agree “gets” Tolkien the best?

But my Middle-Earth RPG isn’t trying to capture TOLKIEN’s Middle-Earth; it’s trying to capture MY Middle-Earth: the one that I created as a kid via various versions including the Tolkien books, and cartoon movies, and other fantasy-related games, books, and media, and the aforementioned MERP, and my own ten-year-old imagination.

I want a Middle-Earth RPG that’s more 1960s “Frodo Lives” counter-culture and 1970s and 80s American fantasy publishing and Angus McBride MERP illustrations. That’s why I settled on DCC RPG as the main rule-set for my homebrew. DCC gives the right vibes of loose-goosey, pre-codified Dungeons and Dragons generic fantasy that feels right for how I imagine my own head-cannon Middle-Earth.

The One Ring, for all its virtues, is very much in line with the aesthetics and interpretation of Tolkien’s legendarium post-Jackson’s film trilogy. It’s got that WETA Workshop feeling–and listen, I love that WETA Workshop feeling! But I want something different for my homebrew game. I want something that takes me back to my kid days, when Middle-Earth wasn’t so “fixed” in everybody’s minds (including my own). It’s hard to describe this “kid-version” of Middle-Earth, but it was somehow more fluid, more malleable. My imagined Middle-Earth was more of a hodge-podge, and as good as the Peter Jackson films are, and as beautiful as Alan Lee’s and Ted Nasmith’s illustrations are, they aren’t my head-version of Middle-Earth.

Anyway, despite my frustrations, I don’t want to abandon my attempts. I’m a bit stuck on the Hope/Despair mechanic and how it will work. I want it to be similar to the Luck mechanic in DCC, but I’ve been toying with using Pendragon’s personality traits mechanic, where Hope and Despair are two opposed scores that add up to 20. If Hope is 10, Despair is 10; if Hope is 13, Despair is 7; etc.

But then what happens if a player spends Hope? Hope goes down, Despair goes up. This might disincentivize players from using Hope (a la Luck), which is one of my favorite DCC mechanics.

No. The Despair score needs to be something else.

This is where I thought maybe Despair might replace the DCC mechanic of Disapproval. Players start with Disapproval of 1, and it goes up by one point each time a character…what? Fails a Hope check? Falls unconscious? Hmm.

That’s the sticking point. In normal DCC, Disapproval goes up if a Cleric fails a spell check. But in my Middle-Earth homebrew, I’m considering getting rid of spell checks and using a mana point system for magic instead. So when does Disapproval/Despair go up?

This has led me back to Pendragon’s personality traits. Perhaps I keep DCC’s Luck mechanic as-is. Players can spend Luck and it works the same as the rules as written in DCC.

But in addition to Luck, there’s now a Hope/Despair trait. Players start with a base of 12 for Hope and 8 for Despair. They can make a Hope check right from the get-go in character creation, and if they roll under 12, they can add +1 to their Hope score.

Mechanically, players can ask for a Hope check at any time to help them on their journey. Maybe they need something really good to happen that can’t be covered by any other rule or mechanic, like they are in a tricky spot against an overwhelming number of goblins. They can ask to make a Hope check, and if it succeeds, then something good does happen–maybe a tunnel gets spotted that allows the party to escape the goblins, or one of the goblins gets too cocky and accidentally trips himself and several of his comrades. Maybe everyone in the party gets +2 to armor class or something during the fight. The player making the Hope check can decide in conversation with the GM. Later, after the session, they make a Hope check again, and a success means Hope goes up by one point (and Despair down by one).

But if the Hope roll during the game fails, then the player must put a check mark next to Despair, and at the end of the session, they make a Despair check, and success makes Despair go up (and Hope go down).

When Despair is higher than Hope, the player falls under the Shadow… not sure how this will work yet. Maybe I make this more of a role-playing thing and less mechanical. As Despair increases, the player must play their character as falling further and further under the sway of the Shadow, and that means they become more Denethor-like, or even Saruman-like. At some point, the PC might even reach a Despair of 19 or 20, in which case they might cease to be playable because they are too under the sway of the Dark Lord.

There’s also a possibility that Hope can get a check even without a player asking for a Hope roll. Maybe the GM can award a check for the party’s success in a difficult situation, and everyone can get a chance to increase their Hope. Similarly, Despair can also get a check when, let’s say, one of the party dies or is seriously injured without healing at the end of the adventure. PCs will have to make a Despair roll at the end of the session to make sure they aren’t overcome by the bad situation.

Maybe this is too swingy or fiddly, but if I make rising Despair into something that is more about role-playing and less about a mechanical disadvantage, then that might give players freedom to ask for Hope rolls during the game to advantage themselves, knowing that if Despair goes up, it’s more about the storytelling than about making their character less effective mechanically.

I’m also curious to try the Nimble 2e (and Cairn/Into the Odd’s) mechanic of only rolling for damage. This would mean hit points need to be slightly higher at first level, and I’m not sure I would use Nimble’s exploding crits mechanic (but I would keep its normal crit rule, where rolling the highest number on the die equals a crit and you can roll again and add to the total). I would keep Nimble’s rule of missing on a roll of 1 too.

I would also use Nimble’s armor class rule, where the AC is lower (normal AC score minus 8), and that’s what gets absorbed on a hit (but only when using Defend as a reaction, see below). Everything hits, basically, except a roll of 1.

Similarly, I would also keep Nimble’s action economy. Every PC gets three actions per round, and those can be used outside their turn as Reactions too (help, interpose, defend, opportunity attack). A PC could potentially attack three times in one round, but the second and third attacks are rolled with increasing disadvantage. Monsters would not get three actions; they would most likely get two actions (move and something else). The more dangerous the monster, the more actions they would get (using DCC’s action dice rules).

I think warriors and dwarves at higher levels will get more actions or special actions to make their classes special.

I would also steal Nimble’s magic system, where PCs would spend mana to cast instead of rolling. I feel like magic in Tolkien’s Middle-Earth rarely “fails.” I’ll keep the DCC spells, though (with a few subtractions… the ones that don’t fit the flavor of Middle-Earth).

My next big step in all this is to make a character sheet, come up with a starting occupations table that’s more Middle-Earth-centric (no gongfarmers, lol), and create the patron tables for Elbereth, Aule, Manwe, and Sauron. Then I gotta cut down the magic spells lists, figure out how to modify the DCC Annual’s Canticles rules to fit with Middle-Earth sensibilities, and playtest with some of my new rules (the Nimble combat and magic stuff, and the Hope/Despair mechanics especially).

I’m still teetering on the edge of my own despair (pun intended) that this homebrewed system won’t work or be worth the effort, but my hope hasn’t faded entirely yet. I think once I put some of these ideas into playtest, see how it goes, then perhaps I’ll feel better.

One may ask: “What’s the point of all this labor?” And I’m not sure I have a good answer. All I know is that I want to try it. I have an idea of playing in Middle-Earth, and I want something that keeps me in an OSR-space while also being a bit more Middle-Earthy than normal OSR DnD. For now, I’m still obsessed with making this homebrew, and despite my struggles, I’m still having fun.

Lone Wolf Christmas

December 30, 2024 / JennyDetroit / 0 Comments

I’ve written before about my love for the Long Wolf RPG adventure books, but it was only recently that I found out the books have been reprinted with snazzy new covers in larger paperback format.

So what did I do with my Christmas giftcards? I bought the first two in the series, of course!

When I opened the envelope the other day, my children were all very interested in these books (especially after I explained how much I loved them as a kid), but to my surprise, it was my middle child who asked if I would read the books to him so he could play. He’s not the one I would peg as being “into” fantasy the way my oldest is; I could only guess that he was intrigued by the monsters and potential for fighting. Whatever the reason, he asked several times before I had even thrown the packaging away, so after taking care of the padded envelope, he and I settled onto the couch, pencil and book in hand.

Thus began our nearly ninety-minute gaming excursion in which I got to witness the Lone Wolf books through the eyes of a child.

I had read them most recently on my own, as an adult, and while they were a nostalgic trip for me, I was approaching them with thirty-plus years of life experience and fantasy fandom and all the other things that make a grown-up a bit inoculated to the sheer joy of playing an rpg adventure book like this. I loved them for the memories they conjured, and I liked them for the old-school, somewhat simplistic fun they provided to adult-me.

But playing with my eight-year-old son was something different entirely. Each choice was a considered one, sometimes accompanied by checking the excellent and evocative map of Map of the Lastlands provided in the front, sometimes talking aloud the risks and potential rewards of the various options. My son really weighed each choice, often making his decision because something would be “nice to do” or “helpful” or “because I don’t want to hurt anybody” or simply because venturing forth into a dark tunnel under a hill would be cool.

When we faced off against monsters, and he had to point his finger at the number grid in the back, waiting for me to read the result from the Combat Results Table, there was real tension and anticipation in his face. When he scored victories, he would pump his fist and cry, “Yes!” with such beautiful innocence, that I couldn’t help being overwhelmed at seeing the pureness of his joy.

After he made each choice and waited for me to the turn the page and read the next entry, I could see him tense up, wondering if he’d made the right decision, worried that he hadn’t. And when his choice resulted in something good, the relief on his face was infectious.

I was seeing what it must have been like for me as a kid: the same anticipation, the same dread, the same relief, the same joy. I could no longer experience that innocent pleasure myself, but I could watch it on the face of my child and get a time-traveled glimpse of my own first foray into the world of Lone Wolf. I was the adult, the grown-up, the one whose emotions were a bit too calloused to fist pump after a victory against a burrow-crawler, but I could bear witness to my child’s excitement, to the gleam of wonder in his eyes, and that gleam was surely once my own, when I was eight years old and reading the Lone Wolf books, and the Endless Quest books, and the Choose Your Own Adventure books off in a corner somewhere, lost in my own world of quests and magic.

I’m glad I could give my son the experience of the Lone Wolf books, but I’m also grateful for his gift to me: the gleam in his eyes and the wonder in his smile.

It Came from the Game Closet: Hobbit Tales from the Green Dragon Inn

July 11, 2024 / JennyDetroit / 0 Comments

I teased this ages ago, but it’s finally here. The first installment of what I hope to be a regular series on the blog: “It Came from the Game Closet.”

We have this closet, you see. It is in our living room, and it is quite tall, and it is filled with games. Stuffed. Bursting. Unruly and untapped.

You see, we have filled this closet with games, but we’ve hardly ever played ANY of them, we’ve just let them languish in the game closet and think to ourselves, our heads nodding with pensive melancholy, “Someday… someday…”

And yet, “someday” never comes. We keep putting new games into the closet and never playing them.

Until now.

I’ve opened the weird sliding door of the weird corner closet with the triangle-shaped shelves and I’ve pulled out a game. It’s one of the few games in the closet we’ve actually played, but we haven’t played it in a long time, and it gives me warm fuzzies just looking at the box’s cover art, so it’s the first one I picked.

I wasn’t able to PLAY play it (it’s not really a game that works solo because you need the other players to play the hazard cards), but I did use the cards to make up my own stories and added in a few hazards just to keep it fun. I tried to imagine myself as a hobbit sipping a pint at the Green Dragon, regaling the crowd with my masterful yarn-spinning skills. I felt silly at times, yes, but I had a good time.

Hobbit Tales is a storytelling game, and as such, it lends itself to use as a storytelling tool. As I was playing it solo, I realized how I could use it for my writing and role-playing game prep (I should have realized its use for RPGing sooner, since the game literally bills itself as an aid/companion to the first edition of The One Ring RPG… I feel a bit dumb about not catching that until now).

Each card has a title, a picture, and a quote from Tolkien’s fiction, and thus there are lots of jumping off points for storytelling/prompts for writing and gaming. Yes, there are a gazillion writing prompt-generators out there, digital and analog (I have these really cool Writing Dice, in fact, that my husband got me for Valentine’s Day), but there’s lots of charm in using the simple story seeds from the Hobbit Tales cards.

The open-ended quality of the titles, illustrations, and quotes means they’re flexible enough for any kind of fantasy story, and because they are simple and often archetypal, they prompt lots of symbolic and even mythic ideas.

For instance, one of the random cards I drew “Weather-beaten Traveler.” This immediately prompts me to think of types of weather that could beat someone down: rain showers, snow storm, wind storm, floods, even sandstorms and drought. And the idea of a “traveler” is so basic and yet full of possibilities. The traveler could be a stranger in a strange land, a person seeking a way back home, an explorer, someone on a quest, or someone simply out for a stroll who got caught up in a weather phenomenon.

What would happen if I drew such a card as a prompt for a story, or to give me something to insert into a story where I’m stuck?

I’m currently working on Norse City Limits, an urban fantasy inspired by Icelandic sagas and old 1940s film noir, and my main guy, Grettir, is about to speak to a dead man (could be magic or Grettir could simply be hallucinating due to a drug-induced haze… I don’t know yet). If I wanted to, I could play a free-association game with my “weather-beaten traveler” card.

Perhaps the dead man is a vagrant, caught up in a web of lies and vice that he’s totally alien to, just the wrong man at the wrong time.

Or perhaps he was traveling to find Grettir, got caught and killed by Grettir’s enemies, and now he’s shown up anyway in the form of a corpse.

Or perhaps he wasn’t killed by humans at all. Maybe the weather killed him, an extreme form of weather (and maybe that weather was caused by a spell or a god), and his death is a portent of things to come.

The Hobbit Tales cards are really fun in this regard because they spur ideas, invite me to play with archetypal elements, and provide several points of entry, all without being too specific or “out there” in content. Nothing in these cards will veer my stories wildly off-track or be too wacky.

The uses of these cards for role-playing games is obvious. Instead of a random encounter table, simply draw a card from the deck, or several cards, or a adventure card and a hazard card and try to combine them into a unique encounter, combat, trap, or puzzle.

Sometimes writing prompts from outside sources are too particular or too prescriptive. There are times when that specificity or oddball quality will instigate an exciting and unique story idea, but more often than not, I end up with something that doesn’t fit my sensibilities as a writer.

With the Hobbit Tales cards, I have prompts and ideas that work much better with the kinds of stories I like telling and which can easily be integrated with my current works-in-progress (if need be).

Also, the artwork and aesthetic of the game is charming and a pleasure to interact with. I like taking out the cards and the green coasters and spending time with them.

As a game, Hobbit Tales is low-stakes, congenial, and more about creativity and having fun with mates rather than the competition of who has the most points at the end. Yes, it is “competitive” in that there can be a winner at the end (teller with the highest score at the end of all the rounds), but that’s really not the impetus for playing. It’s much more about enjoying Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, pretending to be a hobbit, and flexing your storytelling muscles.

For people who are intimidated by the improvisational storytelling, the game might not be as enjoyable, or it might take some time to realize that none of these stories will end up being “good.” The fun is in trying to tell the story and include the hazards if necessary, not to be some brilliant performer.

In some ways, it’s a good lesson for everyone, professional storyteller or amateur: Have fun and don’t worry about whether something is “good” or not. Let the creative voice do its thing. Let go of perfection and have a good time.