JollyOrc

  • a tiny excerpt of a tabletop roleplaying game dungeon, consisting of 9 blocks, with walls and a stair in the back. In the middle there is an adventurer minifigure with a small torch token placed on the miniatures base. The token is a simple torch standing upright on a round base.

    Darkness, light, and props

    Most of the development for the game is triggered by things I discover in playtesting. Last weekend, light became important. The heroes were navigating a forgotten mine, and had to rely on torches to see things. But not all of them were carrying something to illuminate the pitch-black corridors of the mine. So we improvised…

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  • A stylized tapestry-like picture of a warlock casting a fireblade at a group of goblins. The warlock wears a flowing robe with the sleeves cut so the bare arms can be outstretched. The arms are covered in runes that the warlock touches while casting the spell. The goblins seem to be burning up, there are already dead ones on the ground.

    Magic

    As Raiders of Arismyth is a class-less system, learning magic is simply just another skill. Each spell is a skill you can learn, and making it better is done by buying Advancements. To cast a spell, you count the Advancements you have on that skill and that is how many dice you get to roll.…

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  • Carrying capacity and consumables

    When people enter a dungeon, they take things along, that get spent over time: Food rations, water, arrows, torches, and so on. There is a wide variety of ways of how games keep track of these things. Some don’t do that at all, but hand-wave such things away as minor annoyances. Raiders of Arismyth is…

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  • how the dice pools work

    There are a lot of different dice mechanics out there. Percentiles, roll under, roll over, pools, FUDGE dice, and variations for all of them. I started out this game with a simple d20-roll-over-10 mechanic, but eventually realised that this led to a few unconsistencies. After some experiments and calculations with AnyDice, I settled on a…

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  • Why does this exist?

    Well, a few billion years ago, there was the Big Bang and the- ok, let’s be serious: There are oodles of roleplaying games, and a good chunk of them is about dungeons, some even have that in the name! Why am I writing another one of those? I guess the answer is because none of…

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