#OSR | Kabuki Kaiser

FLY ME TO THE MOON: BEHIND THE SCENES

Boy, was this one unexpected.

It started while I was working on Death of Temple, a deconstructed Temple of Death, the X5 B/X module. I had a phase, you see, when I was about shattering icons and burning the hype down to the ground. For a while I was mostly turbulence – exhausted by the way everything seemed to be about surface and noise, layout tricks and instant “weird” that felt earned by shock rather than by mood or meaning. I lamented how cheap, how trivial and easy that could be. I lamented the feeling that my game, my D&D, had slipped away into something I did not quite recognise.

That was the bottom of the wave, and still I designed, wrote, experimented, further and further, up to the point everything I did was unintelligible even to me. That was my “burn everything” phase, though it had upsides, such as the tables for the citizens of Hule I hid behind the picture of a yellow dog in my Death of Temple. I give them to you now, hit the pic.

Then I considered: why not hide a full hexcrawl behind a yellow dot on that page (below), so that if anyone clicks haphazardly, they get 169 pages of content they never asked for, three or four people maybe, who I hoped would never tell. Breadcrumbs for the obsessed and the patient ones.

It began with this sentence, taken from X5: On nights of the full moon, a ladder of moonbeams forms between the well and the moon. This ladder may be climbed in one night. It leads to the Kingdom of the Moon. You must create this kingdom. If you do not want the players to go to the moon, you may ignore this power.

I mean, it says “you must create this kingdom”, so I did.

And as I did, it bloomed with a life of its own. Suddenly, there was the Moon, and its light kindled my confidence. Page after page, I read what I had just done and thought this is good, this is too good to hide behind a yellow dot.

Yet I did not trust the market, the platform, the channels – so many new releases every day that anything quiet or odd can simply vanish. Ping ping Reddit, Instagram, TikTok, Discord; hashtags and algorithms and arguments about system compatibility. I realised I did not want to chase that rhythm. This was myth and poetry, I thought, this was the Moon.

Still, I could not just keep it for myself. Here was the design philosophy:

The Moon has laws of its own.
It is meant to be played, even though it is a good read, so everything must be usable, fun, delightful, perilous.
It cannot have a level; it must fit 1st-level characters and 14th-level characters equally, each with challenges and depths of their own.
Every reference, every somnambulist dream about the Moon must be here: Kepler, Cyrano, Munchausen, yes, but also Sailor Moon and Little Nemo.
Every reference must be standalone, hidden, perfectly playable on its own merits without prior knowledge, and yet filled with meaning for those who can spot them.
Hexes must communicate, lead to one another, resound across the map, weave quests and campaigns organically.
Hexes must be dynamic, a moment frozen in time, a situation.

By then I had grown a little tired of hex–crawls that were mostly lists of disconnected curiosities: “100 orcs and 2 ogres” here, “the village of Moss, 1,200 inhabitants, CN” there, chimeric monsters scattered without much reason or purpose. I love many of those books, but I wanted to try something different – something that chased a stronger internal logic of wonder and terror, where the entries were not just places but echoes of each other.

We needed something that cuts deeper, that goes beyond the keyed locations trope, and the Moon seemed the perfect staging ground for this.

As always, the signs began while I was writing. I found an Endymion perfume bottle, kept seeing the Moon everywhere on people’s shirts and storefronts, the Moon nodded, it was good.

And then the miracle happened. I was out of the spite pit, smiling at both New and Old School, ready to give rather than mourn, to kindle the flame of our game, and that was it, the Moon. Ah.

To be fair, I am not watching the numbers, counting the sales, or riding the hype. There is one, a wavelet of a hype, but I try to ignore it so I can focus on writing the next opus. The Moon opened a door.

Thank you, Moon.

FLY ME TO THE MOON

Posted on November 18 by kabuki13

A fantastique OSR hexcrawl of antique lunacy and splendor.

Ladies and Gentlemen: the Moon.

Fly Me to the Moon gives you the fantastique Moon stitched into a majestic hexcrawl where each entry promises sleepless hours of adventure and d’Amberville conundrums, a moose head of a Moon in 168 hexes compatible with everything OSR from Basic to Advanced.

With interconnected hexes, subterranean passages stretching over miles, factions, new classes, new spells, artifacts and relics, unique monsters, deities, and demigods, strange incarnations, and invisible cities, the bountiful Moon overflows with gifts and curses that smirk at character level.

It has a logic of its own, you see.

This is the Moon before spaceflight, the Moon of the Renaissance polymaths and the lunatics, the Estates of Cyrano, Lucian, Kepler, Flammarion, and Munchausen. This is the baroque Moon, a spirit-of-the-times Moon seeped in antique tragedy and splendor before we made it into a lifeless rock.

We are going to the Moon. Now. Whether by ladder of argent light rising from a well at the full moon, by a beanstalk, by the back of a giant goose, or in a dream.

Sample hex (0414).

A lone comet shoots above the Mare Vaporum, its rays bursting through mist and water as it descends frantically upon the PCs.

The rays cause 12 hp of damage to everyone (save vs. Petrification halves) before the comet stabilises in midair in front of the PCs, its searing heat acting as a heat metal spell round after round.

The comet, a miniature glowing star in itself, reveals a juvenile face two rounds later, absolutely unfazed by attempts to attack it, and introduces itself as Dravolio of the Tangent Path.

It’s been travelling through space, as is customary for comets, and visits the Moon out of curiosity. It’s very impressed by the PCs since it has never seen the likes of them before, but utterly confused: it talks to their ship as if it were a person (if they have one), wonders if they’re gods (“Ohhhh that would be sooo fun! I’ve never met gods! What do they eat?”), and speaks of its star friends, Furosa and Polixo–36, as if everyone knew them.

Since it has no notion of organic life, it doesn’t understand and may even take offence if the PCs ask it to move a little further. Five rounds of conversation later, it shoots another ray at the PCs out of sheer excitement, with the same effect as the first! Worse, the heat becomes so intense it now causes d6 damage per round, including to the PCs’ ship.

Dravolio of the Tangent Path leaves either when it is seriously insulted or after 10 rounds in total. In that case, it departs happily, and may come to the rescue of its new friends once, as long as they’re on the Moon (a 1–in–20 chance), though the PCs aren’t aware of it.

Dravolio of the Tangent Path (AC 0, HD 16, hp32, Att. starbeam (12 damage on a 20’ wide and 120’ long line), MV Flying 1,200ft., Morale 12, AL CG, immune to everything except annihilation, disintegrate spells, which inflict it d10 damage, and force, which inflict it 1 damage per spell level, permanent heat metal at 100’, cause d6 damage from heat at 100’ when excited or in combat).

A NEW OSR LOGO

Posted on July 2, 2024 by kabuki13

When designing Oh My Lost Darklords, I considered the options I had to feature a logo which could indicate compatibility with all the Old-School Renaissance/Revival games out there.

Using the most widespread existing logo, now unfortunately contested because of his creator’s decision to pull it despite its attached Creative Commons license at the peak of the Google+ days. I felt I needed to respect said decision in spite of its shaky legal grounding, and that using it would involontarily constitute a statement of sorts, which I wanted to avoid.
Using a less widespread one, which frankly, I didn’t deem aesthetically sound.
Making my own, which would remind everyone of the World’s Most Famous Roleplaying Game while retaining originality, something that would trigger a “oh, yes, that’s the OSR” response in anyone seeing it while indicating clearly what it is about the same way, and with the same power the widespread, but controversial one did.

Eventually, I settled for 3), which you can see on the cover of Oh My Lost Darklords.

I considered afterwards that maybe, others were facing the same conundrum, and could make use of the logo I’ve designed with all these elements in mind, which is why…

I am now placing it in the Public Domain under a Creative Commons 0 license (no attribution, full commercial use, remix and remake as you see fit) and offering a few different versions of it on Drivethrurpg, also for free:

White
White contour
Black
OSR Blue
OSR Blue contour

You are now all welcome to download and use any of these versions as you want.

OH MY LOST DARKLORDS

Posted on June 28, 2024 by kabuki13

This is the 1980s, not Hellfire Club, but close enough. C. plays Sadric, his avenger modelled after Elric, the one who wields Blackrazor since we went under a certain white-crested mountain and Y. plays his unstoppable Duellist. I am going with Kurtys Flameblade, my Fighter/Assassin, long before That Time He Was Reincarnated as an Ogre Mage.