Category: campaign

Three Princesses: First Dungeon

We’re over 2,500 words into this session report, that’s how much you can accomplish in a single session with old school D&D.  Our three heroines were slated for the marriage duty, but fate had other plans.  Their ship was blown a thousand miles off-course, to wash up on the...

Three Princesses: Captain(s) Jack

In the interests of adding some factional play to the un-named island campaign featuring three lovely young ladies, I’ve asked a million of my closest friends to run the troubled character of Captain Jack Cardinal. He’s the guy charged with bringing the Three Princesses back to civilization and he...

Three Princesses: Off the Beach

With the firsday’s business of survival done, Captain Jack Cardinal sets watch and orders his men to rest.  To his three charges, princesses of the southern kingdoms, he admonishes caution. It doesn’t work. Shipwrecked on a mysterious island a thousand miles outside the known trade routes, our players have...

News You Can Use: Hex Stuff

At some point somebody is going to ask where they can get a copy of this AD&D inspired hex-clearing and domain building blank canvas. So here it is: I’ll have a video up on my channel showing how I used this to organize the exploration and hex-clearing portion of...

Three Princesses: The Beginning

His Imperial Majesty, desperately clinging to the tatters of a failing reign, hits upon the time-honored solution to the “barbarian problem” of marriage as a stop gap.  He orders three princesses of minor southern subject kingdoms to sail off and marry the sons of the smelly bearded boat guys...

Pen and Paper Wargaming: Battle Resolution

My Hellfire campaign to build a kingdom from the tattered scraps on the edge of a falling empire has been going well, but it’s not much of a miniature wargame.  It’s strictly been a pen and paper endeavor with elements of solo, and logistic, and strategic gaming.  Early battles...

Hellfire 2952: Kingdom Come Apart

The Decapolis survived another year without the aid of the Imperial Navy, but the situation continues to deteriorate. At the start of every year following the retreat of the Kaisan Empire, you roll for each city in the Decapolis with each having a 10% chance of losing population.  The...

Hellfire 2951: It Gets Worse

The default game design for solo miniature wargames is “make them feel like they are about to lose, until the end of the game when they pull it out and win at the end”.  I have it on good authority that this is the case.  [llink to Rule of...

Random Tables and Simulated Worlds: An Exercise

The thing about random tables – or “procedural generation” if you’re one of those midwits that thinks extra syllables makes you sound smarter than you really are – is that they are a shortcut method to operating the machinery of a game world in a way that makes you...

Hellfire: From Bad to Worse

It’s the year 2950 and we’re going to need a bigger army. And that bigger army is going to need some bigger tanks. The city of Damascus has been taken, after some vicious fighting, by our neighbor to the southeast, the Tillian Republic.  We know they mean to take...