Tenkar is Raising Money for St Jude's Children's Hospital - Pity the Fool and Show Some Support

Earlier tonight, I did a yoga Livestream with my wife Rachel as my instructor. I was dressed as you see above and we were raising money for St Jude's Children's Hospital. We had an initial goal of $300 and surpassed that in the opening minutes.

As of the writing of this post, we've raised over $785 and hope to raise some more.

At $430, we earned about 8 seconds of Tenkar twerking, so help me God ;)

We have some future "stretch goals".

If we hit $1000 raised before next Friday, I'll die my hair blue and leave it blue for at least a week.

At $1200, I'll walk our dog in Forest Park with my blue hair wearing the outfit shown above. Again, we need to hit this number before Friday, November 5th, 2022.

At $1500, I'll go food shopping with blue hair and "taco cat" pants. The cut-off date on this one is November 30th, 2022.

Again, all for a good cause, and thanks to everyone who has shown support and to all those who do so after reading this post. You f'n rock!

http://events.stjude.org/tenkarstavern

Here's the recording of the Livestream: 

Kickstarter - Seekers of the Un-K'Nown: A Classics Mutated Adventure

A post-apocalyptic, sci-fi adventure compatible with Mutant Crawl Classics.

There is something about post-apocalypse games that I really enjoy, going back to Gamma Word 1e. It's the idea that the common is now rare, and technology is damn near like magic and rarely fully understood. Mutant Crawl Classics takes the genre to 11 in many ways.

With Seekers of the Un-K'Nown, we mix that with some old school sandbox gaming and it might be exactly what I'm looking for. Of course, I might convert it to Mutant Future to allow me to run it with minimal page flipping. Yeah, I have my issues with too much page flippin'! ;)

18 bucks (plus shipping) for the Print plus PDF. Damn near impossible to pass on at that price point.

This has all the dungeon-crawly goodness of those early modules we all used to play but with the added bonus of a "through-line" plot to pull the dungeon encounters together and bring a little conflict/pressure into an otherwise sandbox-style game.  More than that, I've intentionally written in nice spring board moments where judges can connect the game up to other adventures they plan to run or follow this one up with some of the other Classics Mutated adventures we have in the works -like a voyage to the red planet in our next game, "The Time-Lost Citadel." 

 

 The Tavern is supported by readers like you. The easiest way to support The Tavern is to shop via our affiliate links. DTRPG, Amazon, and Humble Bundle are affiliate programs that support The Tavern. 

You can catch the daily Tavern Chat podcast on Anchor, YouTube, or wherever you listen to your podcast collection. - Tenkar 

News - Supply Chain Woes Hit Hasbro

WotC previously announced that its planned holiday releases are being pushed back to January 2022. Now parent company Hasbro has revealed that it has about $100 million in various products that are caught in the snagged supply chain.

Hasbro logged $100 million worth of orders that went unfilled during its third quarter due to shipping supply chain disruptions, including capacity shortages and port congestion.

Shippers have faced both skyrocketing rates and delays as they try to get goods into the U.S. Larger players have more resources and more options to navigate the crisis, but no one can avoid it entirely. Hasbro Chief Financial Officer Deb Thomas said this summer that the company was seeing ocean shipping costs rise fourfold.

 

The Tavern is supported by readers like you. The easiest way to support The Tavern is to shop via our affiliate links. DTRPG, Amazon, and Humble Bundle are affiliate programs that support The Tavern. 

You can catch the daily Tavern Chat podcast on Anchor, YouTube, or wherever you listen to your podcast collection. - Tenkar

Kickstarter - Cha'alt: Chartreuse Shadows (OSR)

Cha'alt: Chartreuse Shadows continues the eldritch, gonzo, science-fantasy, post-apocalypse OSR D&D campaign setting + megadungeon!

I'm always excited when Venger releases something for his gonzo fantasy setting. While I may not use any of it whole cloth, I do find it fun to read and inspiration to use in my own campaigns.

The Cha'alt: Chartreuse Shadows Kickstarter is the third of the potential Cha'alt trilogy. Although V is hedging his bets and admits its possible that the "trilogy" may see a fourth entry ;)

First of all, what is Cha'alt?  A few years ago, I wanted to go balls-deep into building my own campaign world.  This home setting would be influenced by all the things I love.  It would also focus on the kind of adventures and campaigns I like to run - eldritch, gonzo, science-fantasy, and post-apocalypse - where everything feels familiar, yet utterly strange, along with a sense of humor and erotic cherry on top!  

That's very important because you'll see things in Cha'alt that you ordinarily wouldn't find in other campaign settings.  Jokes and sleaze and meta pop-cultural mash-ups stewing in an unforgettable gumbo a la Venger.

This is book number three of the Cha'alt trilogy!  Is it possible there will be a fourth book in a few years?  Sure, but this is the last Cha'alt book I'm guaranteeing.  What happens in the future is out of my hands (or tentacles), hoss.

The Tavern is supported by readers like you. The easiest way to support The Tavern is to shop via our affiliate links. DTRPG, Amazon, and Humble Bundle are affiliate programs that support The Tavern.  You can catch the daily Tavern Chat cast on Anchor, YouTube,  or wherever you listen to your podcast collection. - Tenkar 

My Thoughts About a Low Magic RPG Campaign

Last night I watched Snake Eyes: GI Joe Origins and while I do not intend to try and review movies here, let me save you a potential waste of 2 hours: its bad.

Yeah I'm not going to start listing the reasons why the movies sucks and right now at least one of you is thinking, "Well then WTF are you even mentioning this bad movie here at the Tavern?" I had already been thinking about magic items and wouldn't you know it, Snake Eyes had a named sword...not magical btw, but it did have an ACTUAL magic item! It was kind of a MacGuffin that came out of nowhere, well the magicality (not sure that is a word, but I'm coining it now) only came out of the blue. I didn't get it....now if the named sword was magical I'd still be WTF since it was GI Joe, but I'd get it.

When it comes to magic in an RPG, I've always been a fan of a relatively low-magic (specifically arcane magic) campaign. Now I don't mean as-in there are no magic items to be had, but that to the average commoner, exposure to magic is a rare, maybe a once-in-a-lifetime event. Sure they know magic exists, but they don't know a Magic-User personally, have never witnessed a spell being cast. A magic item? Maybe they've heard of these things, but they are in the realm of superstition or rumor. Now they may have heard or even seen a magical weapon, but they don't necessarily realize it was magical. I think magical weapons should have names, histories, and have a lore of their own.

Clerical magic is also a bit on the rare side, but a LOT more common because.....well the gawds do like their worshipers. The average commoner goes to church and may have witnessed the low-level Cleric answered prayers. Maybe there is a small stash of Healing potions or a Cure Disease, for emergencies in the congregation.

Most of my favorite fantasy worlds, and clearly I'm not counting GI Joe, are relatively low magic. Lord of the Rings immediately comes to mind, which seems like a misnomer, but aside from the One Ring  the only magical items are the Hobbit's cloaks & clasps, Sting, Gandalf's Staff, and what...the Phial of Galadriel? I'm sure there were some others, but that campaign was EPIC level. The average commoner in Middle Earth might have heard of Narsil and even seen Herugrim, but they probably didn't know that these named blades were magical.

In a lower magic campaign, magical weapons have names. Not really used to seeing non-weapon magical items have names, for the most part, but why not?

I personally like the idea that while common utilitarian magical items, Bags of Holding, Elven Boots, Potions of Healing, etc. can be made, I like the idea that magical arms and armor are created, and not deliberately. Now in the current edition of  HackMaster, IIRC.....the first +'s up to a +5 of a weapon are not magical in nature, but due to higher quality materials and workmanship. I'm ok with that general idea maybe for a +1 or +2 "plain" weapon or armor, but anything else is created by experience. That Sword +1, +3 vs Dragons was a high quality (+1) sword that was the only thing that survived a blast of Dragonfire. It's wielder managed to defeat the Dragon before he expired from his wounds. Now this +1, +3 vs Dragons blade was picked up by the Fighter's companions and dubbed "Dragonsbane" and has been handed down within the deceased fighter's family.

Miscellaneous magical items can be created because of a fortuitous combination of material composition and exposure/experiences. I've written a handful of "mundane" magical items, some for KoDT and some I put up on DTRPG. Mostly items that are magical, but not necessarily known as magical. Stuff that might be considered "lucky" to be used, or a quality heirloom of sorts.

Coming back to the magic in Snake Eyes: GI Joe Origins, that named sword wasn't magical, but it should have been. If it was worthy of a name, it should have been worthy of a backstory, and had some abilities......like maybe it could explain why Snake Eyes, with essentially NO formal sword training, could be a match for Storm Shadow, who clearly had been training for decades. The actual magic item in the movie, the MacGuffin, should have been just a normal, albeit huge, gemstone with a mythological history.