Blog Graveyard Vol 3: Balthazar's Bloviations

     Balthazar's Bloviations, last seen February of 2020, was a more general RPG blog that covered content across multiple games, 5E, DCC, FASERIP, and a few others. He covered something near and dear to my heart, Superhero RPGs. Recent posts should tell you that I love superhero games. You don't see a lot of overlap in this sphere with superhero games. He also talks a bit about "cloud campaigns" which I'll share below and might be good for you. Overall I have gone back to this blog many times over the years for inspiration and just fun things to read. He loved tinkering with tables and many other things that feel near and dear to my heart. So here are some treasures from Balthazar's Bloviations to get you started!

 

Alignment Based Disapproval Tables: I really love these. Prior to stumbling on his post for this, I found myself thinking that this would be a good thing to have, splitting out disapproval based on alignment, if not the gods. If you don't want to write out a custom disapproval table but want it to feel more tailored to alignment, Balthazar has what you need.

Cloud Games: I think this is such a good take on the west marches style of game which I'm sure more than a few of you are familiar with. At its heart it is just a west marches style but it's meant to be episodic and have an indeterminate group of players. He has 4 posts about this and I suggest reading them. It feels a little like how I've treated every campaign as the same setting for years and years. I think I'm going to make the superhero game I end up running soon with each session being episodic.

Carousing Tables: I try to collect these left and right. I love a good carousing table. It is such a good little generator for interesting little moments, developments, and sinking money. There are quite a few over on Balthazar's Bloviations, including one if you are boring and want to lay low. Take a look, filter for carousing tables and have a good time looking at tables for the core classes. Keep in mind these are made for Skull Mountain but there is no reason you cant change things just a little and use these tables anyways. I know I have.

Shrunken PCs: This entry includes a table, a scenario, and tips for running that scenario. It is part of his "Steal This" series and honestly every entry in this series has something interesting to inspire or one to one rip and run at your own table. Give this series a look. Personally, I fantasize about running a game about a group of Tiny PCs once a month. Fighting insects, navigating the forest of someone's front garden, scaling massive structures of furniture, going on dungeon crawls in the walls of a house. 

 

    This one was fun to run back through. Balthazar's Bloviations ran for about 5ish years, give or take. I'll consider myself lucky if i can run that long. He hosts a second blog for a game called "The Dragonreach Campaign" which is mostly a chronicle of the game. By my best estimates it seems like it went on as recently as 2023, the only evidence I have for that is the house rule packet being updated in 2023. This isn't strictly a DCC blog but you can feel the years of experience coming through the posts with this one. I encourage you to go check him out, there is always something to take away from any source.

Class: Vigilante

     Another class made for compatibility with Evolved and Comic Crawl Classics. This time I wanted to emulate a street level Batman. Batman the animated series was the guiding light of writing this one. I wanted the character to feel like a detective and a bit of a scrappy fighter. The Utility belt also felt important to the identity of the class. I really started to lean into the comic terminology here, calling sessions "issues" or things that happen off screen "between the panels". I think as I write these and my own superhero rules I'm going to lean into this more.

    You might notice that The Vigilante starts with a super vehicle but there are no rules presented for them. I promise those are forthcoming, I'm still tweaking them and will probably release them some time before I release the rules for the Armored Hero class. 

 

The Vigilante 

Champions of Tibault: Vol 8

     This session brought the most wealth I think the party has ever held at a single time. The players sold a tube fed shotgun to the Gunsmith's guild who were all too eager to pay for this strange new design that didn't at all follow the rules of firearms in the setting. Eskel has yet to see any royalties from this yet, behind the scenes the Gunsmith's Guild is suppressing the technology, worried that it might change the balance of power if guns are no longer difficult to produce works of art. As time passes in the setting a new type of firearm will be released eventually but for now, the tube fed system remains a secret.

    This was also the first time someone use the DCC multiclassing rules. I gotta say it was pretty cool. This person saw a chance to make their character a better fighter and took it, letting her support herself in the arena, in a pinch.

 

Session 8:

Eskel courted with featherfolk gunsmiths about selling his newly acquired weapon. They asked him to come back when they could have more experienced look at the strange new weapon. He hired Quill, a featherfolk lawyer to represent him to this gunsmith and the gunsmiths guild. Wanting to help her friend, Talshu hired the Black Eye kobold gang to watch the featherfolk overnight. The expert gunsmith who came to represent the guild was an emperor penguin who seemed very eager to get his hands on this weapon. Ultimately the deal was that Eskel would receive 1000gp in advance, a favor worth 400gp, and a 5% royalty on any weapons made based on this design. Interested in becoming a better hand to hand combatant, Talshu started to study under the gladiator Arin. 

The party then decided they needed closure on Eskel’s death and returned to the Macphadin clanhold, finding his spirit residing there in the hero’s tomb. In his final moment he was elevated to the clan’s new Hero spirit. Here, in this place of heroes, The Architect arrived to make a formal patron bond with the party, making them truly bonded as patron and petitioner. To celebrate, on the way home they killed the petulant tree on the road, damaging it until it could no longer talk or move.

 

Class: Manhunter

    Lately I've been thinking about Evolved RPG. I'll be honest, I have a lot of gripes with it. It fascinated me when I first heard about it, grafting super heroic rules onto the DCC ruleset? Sounded wonderful. In some ways it nails it, in others it feels like it is fighting tooth and nail against the genre it wants to emulate.

    I grew up on Heroes Unlimited, I want danger. Some punk with a gun should still be a threat to someone who has no defensive powers. But Evolved pushes past this into actively unreliable. Powers are completely unpredictable and unreliable and Heroic characters die easily. The tone pushes far away from heroic. 

    On top of that, the original release went out... rough. The table of contents was missing, it was riddled with errors, wrong page numbers, missing rules, and more. It came out feeling like a game that was just shy of being finished.  

    Then I found the "Justice Edition". It cleaned up these errors, made navigation possible, filled in missing rules, but most importantly it stripped away the Evolved default setting which was mechanically tied to the entire book.

    Justice Edition has its own problems, chiefly its total lack of support for entire archetypes of heroes, Especially those who don't have powers.  

    This is the first of my series of posts to correct the lack of almost any other archetype of hero in the rules. Today I give you the Manhunter! Inspired by heroes such as the Punisher, Vigilante, or Red Hood. This is a person armed with guns, guts, and tactics they use to throw themselves into fights way above their weight class. They run on nothing but determination to finish their never ending mission.

 

The Manhunter 

Blog d100: Superstitions

 Continuing the Blog d100 series laid down by Buster!

 

Rolled 54: Common Superstitions in your setting

 So with Hodas I've been letting the players coming up with the superstitions in the regions they play in. They continue to build the world around themselves even after the game of wasteland has been completed years ago. So I'm gonna offer you one from each group of the races decided as the major people in Hodas.

 

Goblins: When someone dies, you open all the doors and windows to allow the spirit to escape the building. This has resulted in significantly less spirits among goblins in a setting where spirits are relatively common. 

Featherfolk: It is bad luck to directly hand someone a weapon. This means that featherfolk, who make most of the guns, set them on the counter before selling. They toss them short distances in combat. Some wealthy merchants will have a statue that is meant to be a middle person between the buyer and seller.

Kobolds: Lava is evil and seeks to consume kobolds, wearing it's colors is unlucky. They live mostly underground and lava is dangerous, it seems simple on the surface. The person who put them into the setting eventually said that the lava is a metaphor from ages ago, kobolds wearing red started a rebellion that surged up through "the high kobold city", turning them into the slum dwelling nomads they are now. They are a people with no written history, passing on their history through oral tradition, so naturally the story has degraded over time to be lava.

Ooze: It is bad luck to clean another living being. Ooze believe that this could kill the person being cleaned. This hasn't stopped one industrious player from creating an "ooze bathhouse" where ooze are used to clean people in places where water is scarce. The oozes who participate in this are probably frowned at by their kin but they are exceptionally rare so they might not know how their kin feel.

Minotaur: The minotaur believe they must offer hospitality to anyone visiting their home and requesting it. This means providing safe place to rest and food. Minotaur believe that guests are offered 3 days of hospitality at minimum and to fail to honor this hospitality invites ruin onto your clan. Every minotaur clan knows the story of a clan that refused hospitality and was wiped out only days later.

Mountainborn: The Mountainborn believe that the mountains are always pulling towards the moon, so digging through them is to invite their anger. They live in harmony with the mountain, living in natural caves at the peaks or asking the mountain permission before shaping passages. To dig in the mountain invites it to crush you. This hasn't played out much, most of our adventures haven't spent much time in mountains.

Furies: Furies believe they can detect each other's lies and to lie to another fury will other you. Furies in the setting have been brutally honest in the form of both PCs and NPCs. Even when it isn't another fury they are addressing. It seems that Furies just have an aversion to lying in general so lying to someone they consider an equal must have special weight to them

 

This was a bit of a short one but I will admit I am having a hard time keeping up with 2 posts a week, I might cut it down to 1 a week for my own sanity.

As always, if you make a post in this series or even in the original post from d4 caltrops let me know in the comments and I'll make sure to link you in the next one!

Magic Scrolls

     The DCCRPG presents a list of unique scroll traits (p. 374). The prior page gives us some things that I really like too, the contents of a scroll table and the casting mechanism. These are important to the game for sure but I think how the scroll looks and the form it takes is also important. Flavor is free and can be added to tell a story about the creator of the scroll or the item's history. I think the Unique traits is an excellent start and would really like to see more to it. So here we are, I have made a short table to roll on and add more detail to a magical item which, by the game's own admission, is a little hard to come by. 

 

Scroll Appearance 

Blog Graveyard vol 2: DIY RPG Productions

     We are gonna continue this series with a blog that eventually gave way to a book that I love dearly, Hubris from Mike Evans. Over on DIY Productions you can see the prototypes and bones that grew into Hubris. You can find things that were left on the cutting room floor and didn't make it into the book. This blog really is a great way to feel out if you're going to like Hubris or not. It is worth noting that this blog has been somewhat active, there hasn't been any RPG related material for a few years now, but there are regular posts presenting a punk song of the day. Not technically dead in the way you might expect as Mike went on to release his book. You'll have to head back to around January of 2025 to see any directly RPG related content but I cannot recommend digging through this one enough. You will find art, monsters, classes, patrons, and more if you dig through their archives!

 

    This is the part where I share some of my favorites, hoping to wet your appetite and send you off to go dig through the content over on DIY Productions, so let us dive right in!

 The Blood Witch: This is one that made it into the final cut of Hubris and is slightly different here from the rule book. This class is a little bit of a magic user but with some unique options that really lean into the visceral world of Hubris. As the name suggests they play with blood a little. Their spellcasting is stunted but they gain things like healing in the form of their Blood Potion. Personally, my favorite item in their toolkit is Blood Walk which was always my favorite feature of the old 3.5 prestige class, the Blood Magus, but updated to feel like it belongs in DCC.

 

The Blood Acolyte: Continuing the trend of blood, this class also gets to play with blood in a different way than the Blood Witch. This class feels a little like a mystic monk but flavored appropriately for Hubris. They can fight unarmed and like to wear light to no armor. Their mystic abilities are fueled by the blood of their foes. Their abilities are diverse and depend on how much blood they want to invest into their abilities. They feel like a good visceral monk and it really is a shame this was released after the Hubris book was released. The only drawback here is that it lacks an attack bonus but that is easily remedied by just giving them a flat 1:1 progression with their level.

 

Orcs: The orcs of Hubris are near and dear to my heart. They are a heavy inspiration for my own orcs in Hodas. The orcs described here bring prisoners back and create abominations with them through dark alchemy practices. They very much are a bad guy species and I really like it that way. The post includes not only a table on how some of the orcs are mutated but also a quick set of rules on creating abominations for the orcs.

 

The Klind: This is another thing I love about Mike Evans' monsters, he doesn't just present a stat block, he pumps out an entire lore and several versions. He talks a little bit about the why and the what. The Klind are another example of the absolute fire writing of Hubris. Its viceral and just a little bit horny. I mean, look around at sword and sorcery art and writing as far back as you like, so much of it was armored bikinis and ripped shirtless men. Why shouldn't Hubris be a little horny?

 

Wizard's Spellbook: Another Entry that is near and dear to my heart, Spellbooks! Mike proposes that a wizard's spellbook should be strange and even have it's own personality. If you've seen my post about spellbooks then you know I think a spellbook can come in a lot of different forms but if one wants to stick to the general book premise then this is a great article. Personally I have integrated this into Hodas in the form of mages before the fall of man were "Magicians" like the class from dying earth and each had a book that was rolled on this table. The modern era of magic is now unstable and full of half remembered learnings that reflect the Core Rules wizard. This is a great entry to generate a villain's spellbook or even a piece of treasure.

 

Ioun Stones: A classic magic item turned into a DCC style. I'm sure Mike isn't the only one to cover these but I've always really liked his handling of them. I've used them a few times in my own games, usually rolling randomly on the table with 40 entries when tossing one into a loot pile or tacking one onto an evil wizard. You can feel the early influences of 3.5 and PF in this one and I think it's perfectly fine to have those influences. A while back I made a class specifically because someone coming from 5e really wanted classes in DCC that felt like some 5e options, so we got the spell drinker.

 

Going back through this blog was such a good time. The early bones of Hubris and other works from Mike Evans really just rocks! I shared two classes but he has a lot of write ups for classes over there and I think you should check them out! His blog and by extension setting are apologetically visceral and horny. The logo he uses is a hand giving the middle finger. Nothing is sanitized. It is a treasure and honestly I feel like more people making content for OSR games should lean into this energy. Mike Evans brought us a blog, then an entire book that doesn't flinch at these things. I cannot say this enough, go read his blog. GO!

Bonus: Buster from 19 Sided Die has also done an entry in this series covering Appendix M! Check out his post!