APPENDIX G: CONTENTS OF A PIT

April 5, 2012 8:22 AM

RPG blog Hack & Slash's Courtney Campbell has written a pair of expansive guides on trap design (PDF) and treasure (PDF). New treasure and traps are also a mainstay of the blog itself.

As far as I can tell, the documents are for use with the 3.0/3.5 edition of the SRD.

posted by griphus (18 comments total)

Crazy. I have gamed with this guy. He lives in my town. Am I famous now?!
posted by Yellowbeard at 9:15 AM on April 5, 2012

God, I miss gaming like this.
posted by never used baby shoes at 10:10 AM on April 5, 2012

Courtney Campbell is a guy? I had no idea.

Also Tricks and Treasure by CC are fantastic resources.
posted by Pseudoephedrine at 11:25 AM on April 5, 2012

For those who don't know, Courtney Campbell is part of the Old School Renaissance, which is a blog and forum driven amateur movement where people self-publish and discuss house rules and new content for the older varieties of Dungeons and Dragons. They also produce new rules sets that tweak all sorts of things

Other OSR bloggers well worth your time if you want to check out the best the movement has to offer:

Nine and Thirty Kingdoms
Untimately
Monsters and Manuals
Roles, Rules and Rolls
Bat in the Attic
Akratic Wizardry
Age of Ravens
Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque
Grognardling
The Metal Earth
Hill Cantons
The Welsh Piper
Abraxas

I run a gaming blog myself (self-link), and these are all people from my blogroll.
posted by Pseudoephedrine at 11:48 AM on April 5, 2012 [9 favorites]

never used baby shoes: "God, I miss gaming like this."

Maybe this will help?
posted by jiawen at 1:36 PM on April 5, 2012

For folks who have busy lives and can't get a gaming group together, but want the old school feel, it might be worth checking out ConstantCon which is played using the "Flailsnails" conventions. It's intended to be beginner friendly, to be compatible with all editions of D&D, and to require only a limited time commitment. It uses Google+ hangouts.
posted by Pseudoephedrine at 3:19 PM on April 5, 2012 [2 favorites]

I just noticed: Politics threads tend to be low favorites and high comments. Gaming threads like this one tend to be high favorites (37) and low comments (6, now 7).
posted by JHarris at 9:14 AM on April 6, 2012

Here is an example of a trick without player agency.
DM: You see a room through the doorway.
PC: We enter the room.
DM: The ceiling falls on you and you die.

Now here is an example of the same trick with player agency.
DM: You see a room through the doorway. The floor inside the room has a
light coating of dust.
PC: We enter the room.
DM: The ceiling falls on you and you die.

Yes, that's much better.
posted by foursentences at 5:03 PM on April 6, 2012

The important part is that there is some fact that could be construed by the players as being dangerous. Any properly paranoid adventuring group will have investigated that dust thoroughly before venturing a step into that room. It's a game that contains divination spells; it's not the DM's fault if the players don't use them.
posted by JHarris at 5:33 PM on April 6, 2012

Pseudoephedrine, that's a nice blog you've got there!
posted by JHarris at 5:55 PM on April 6, 2012

This is fantastic. I've just started up a Pathfinder game with an old school aesthetic, and while I picked up So What's That Shiny Thing, Anyway? I was still having problems trying to do properly random treasure, since PF doesn't have anything like that. This treasure pdf should really be an asset. Thank you for the post.
posted by Caduceus at 6:36 PM on April 6, 2012

JHarris> Thanks! I'm just shy of four months into it.
posted by Pseudoephedrine at 9:42 PM on April 6, 2012

I love stuff like this.

For people who like old school gaming, you might want to check out The Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG. It's designed by guys drawing inspiration from the same sorts of stuff as the D&D posse of the 70s, but with rules designed today. It's not another clone of (Original) D&D. I was going to make a post about this stuffs, but I haven't figure out how to do so and not have it be all pepsi blue.
posted by chunking express at 7:28 PM on April 9, 2012

chunking express, not intending to speak for the mods of course, but to my knowledge there is no problem with making a FPP around a good commercial product, especially if it's independently produced (and not just a way to accumulate wealth in the hands of a corporate behemoth).

Personally though, I don't like to make a FPP unless there's some substantial free content there for people to enjoy. If the Dungeon Crawl Classics people have a free adventure or two up, you could link to that, and include their pay stuff as an aside, maybe? Or maybe you could make the post about old-school adventures in general, that way the DCC stuff would fit in with other content.
posted by JHarris at 9:17 PM on April 9, 2012

If you made it about retroclones more generally, there's tons of free products available. Most of the retroclone corebooks (Dark Dungeons, Swords and Wizardry, Labyrinth Lord, OSRIC) are freely available.

DCC puts me off a bit because of its use of die types outside the normal set used for RPGs, but I've heard lots of praise for it otherwise.
posted by Pseudoephedrine at 10:52 PM on April 9, 2012

JHarris, same: I don't like linking to something if the only thing you can do is buy it. In this case the books are still only available for pre-order to boot. And Pseudoephedrine, I thought someone had already done a post about all the retro-clones, but maybe i'm imaging that. If not, yeah, I should totally get on that.
posted by chunking express at 4:12 AM on April 10, 2012

Chunking> I just checked, and while the OSR has been mentioned a few times, there hasn't been one that specifically covers all the retroclone options on the market.
posted by Pseudoephedrine at 8:57 AM on April 10, 2012

Yeah, I've been meaning to get around to making a general retroclone post. If no one else does it before long I probably will.
posted by JHarris at 10:25 AM on April 10, 2012