Blog Graveyard Vol 4: Dead Cyclops

     This time on the Blog Graveyard we're gonna talk about Dead Cyclops! MadMoses ran this blog from 2014 all the way until 2020! The blog isn't entirely in English and I won't lie, I can't tell if my translator is working or if the blog uses more than one language. Either way there is a LOT of content here. They cover DCC and Dungeon World stuff but any OSR stuff is always transferable or at least good for inspiration. 

    Something he did that I kinda dig is guest posts. Not every post is from MadMoses himself! Some are from other writers and creators who came and did posts. Something I think is really cool and maybe might think about in the future. 

 

    Dead Cyclops brings us monsters, dungeons, tables, and more! As always with these entries, I'm gonna share a few things I liked over there and hopefully get you to check them out! We're 4 issues deep on this series, you know what I'm gonna do next!

 

Last Resort Menu: This is a d30 table for a tavern or inn's food that can get a little weird. It provides some really weird things that will make any tavern table feel just a little off. He includes effects and side effects of the food when appropriate.  Fun table to whip out on occasion just to keep your players on their toes.

 

Crystal Crypt of Zhool: Possibly fitting because this is the last post on the blog. This is a short adventure that includes excellent art and not a ton of prep. It suggests characters of levels 3-4 and I would probably use a third level party if I ran it. It can probably be hammered out in an evening, maybe a short 3-4 hour sessions depending on the party. Its free, the link to dropbox still works at the writing of this post, check it out! 

 

Twisted and Bloated Ghosts: This one is just a simple monster entry. I love unique monsters. I should really roll up a few more to share... but here are a couple of unique ghosts that could throw your players through a loop, not just A ghost but unique ghosts. I really like that he doesn't just cover the stats but a bit about them, how to adjust them, and weaknesses.  

 

Soul of The Serpent King: Another adventure, this one also pretty short and meant for level 2 characters. You could beef up the level and have less characters pretty comfortably. What I really love about the adventures is the art! this one makes use of black and white illustrations that use a single color for accenting that really make them pop. The adventure itself is good, another one where you can run it in an evening and place it as needed. The encounters feel dangerous but interesting. 

 

Absorber Imp: Okay, it's another monster. I know it's not the most creative name but sometimes monsters are hard to name. I mean, look no further than my own blog and you'll see names like Steam-Blood of the Sandbars, Bones of balance, or The Red Promise. The name is not always the most important part and really, should your players even learn the monster's name in the first place? What I'm saying is look deeper than the name and you see this is a cool little monster that has a real chance to be annoying and interesting to encounter. As a bonus you have a rules for how they behave as familiars!

 

    Overall Dead Cyclops feels like a genuine fan sharing the things they made out of love for the games they play. The content is varied and a lot of it feels like another Judge sharing the stuff they made to use at their table. This one has been on my list for a while but I don't go back to it very often, not because I don't like the content but because I just forget it is there. This post was a nice trip back through some stuff I really enjoyed discovering back in the day. I really think you should go check them out!

 

As always, thanks for reading my stuff! I hope you find something here you can take back to your table, even if it is just as inspiration! 

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.

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!

Blog Graveyard vol 1: Knights in the North

     If you're here then you probably know about at least 3-5 other blogs out there in the DCC sphere. You might also be aware of the number of interesting blogs out there that have fallen silent. I still use a lot of those for reference material and sources of rules, classes, monsters, and really anything related to DCC. So I got a suggestion from a friend of mine to talk about some of the older blogs out there. He's new to DCC and already has the attitude and energy for this game. He's bridging between his home system and DCC so smoothly and with such good energy, he's even contributed an interesting entry to a secret project I'm working on. He was reading something I wrote for another post I am writing where I reference The Secret Santicore and asked if there is any sort of resource list or archive of these blogs that are now silent. The unfortunate answer is that there really isn't. I fear the task to archive and source all of them is beyond me but I can at least talk about some of my favorites and maybe help people who are just getting into DCC find other sources that they might not normally locate. This series will only be covering blogs that have been silent for 3 or more years, and despite the cheeky title I'm not saying these blogs are truly dead and will never come back, I'm not the blog graveyard keeper or blog undertaker.

     So to kick this off we are starting with one of my favorites, Knights in the North! This blog's last post is 12/08/2019, it was to announce their Patreon which also seems to have fallen silent. KitN had a team of writers & artists who really made the blog come to life. Most posts come with some art and something that fits not just DCC but can easily slot into the OSR sphere. They had it all, Classes, Spells, Patrons, Gods, house rules, cool tables, new races, magic items, and ready made encounters. If you're here, you probably have heard of KitN but if you haven't, buckle up!

    I want to share some of the highlights some of my favorites to get you started reading their work and give you enough to decide if you wanna dig deeper (you should).

    The Knight class: This class could be covered under warrior, flavor is free after all. That said, it offers someone a way to play a little more energy leaning into the legends and myths. It included a great piece of art and excellent rules. It hit all the notes I personally would want in this class, it has deeds, fighting style based on alignment, divine leanings, a code of conduct, and can even incur their own version of disaproval. 

Animal companion rules: Animal companions are all over Appendix N, if you've read any of those books you can probably think of one or two off the top of your head. This added a much needed rule for covering animal companions. I know a lot of people will say "quest for it" which I think really is only complimented by this. The PCs can quest for animal companions and the judge has rules already made for this. This offered a simple set of rules to give any character an animal companion, a stat line, and advancement without building out a whole new class for it like a certain blogger who's post you're reading right now.

 Equipment Qualities and Materials: This is a great one that I use all the time. It offers some ways of spicing up weapons and armor without just making them magical. I use it in almost every single magic sword post you might find on my own blog. A weapon that does +1d damage without being magical but looks like a sawtooth sword, something made by elves to be lighter and faster, something forged on another plane that detects as lawful or chaotic, all of these things and more add some real flavor to the weapons and armor you might generate randomly. 

 Down time rules: There are probably tons of these out there by now, I know of at least two others, but these were some of the first ones I ever saw and I loved them. I got a lot of mileage out of them and still come back to them for some games. Excellent for when your players decide they wanna hang out and recover without carousing or creating more problems for themselves.

Random Encounters: This is such a good weird random encounters table. It has a wizard traveling on a scorpion, Fae trickery, roadside monoliths, and candy you find on the ground. I like to break this one out on occasion to keep the world feeling weird.

 House rules: No conversation about KitN would be complete without a mention of these house rules. If you've been reading my blog for a while you'll know how much my own house rules list references these often. There is more than one post on their blog that falls into this category but the two big ones are linked here. I strongly recommend reading through their work. 

 

Knights in the North has been a massive influence on my own blog, in the content I cover, the diversity of topics I want to cover, and the format of adding a PDF to the end of most posts so people can download and have the content in their own folder, even if my blog goes belly up. I strongly recommend digging through their content if you've never been there before. This is the one that inspired me to start to blog, to share the things I made for my own games in a public space for others to enjoy and comment on. I hope my love letter to their blog made you wanna check them out. Writing this was really wonderful, picking through their blog is such a trip down memory lane for me.