No-prep play, mini Dungeon-Crawler & Zombies
Sleepdrifter's Newsletter #1 📜
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Deep forests, giant mountains & weird dungeons. I speak about TTRPGs, video games, music and what I like.
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Summary
🎲 Rogueland + Hexroll: How To No-Prep Play TTRPGs
⚰ Dark Tomb: A Mini Dungeon-Crawler Boardgame
🧟♂️ Project Zomboid: The Best Zombie Survival PC Game
📚 Read And Watch This Week
🧙♂️ What I’m Up To This Days
Here it is! My very first weekly newsletter post!
I was inspired by Exeunt Press, Blark and Patrick Buechner to make my own newsletter, where I wanted to speak about stuff I love in various media.
This will be a summary of what I’ve played/created/read/listened to this week (from Friday to Friday). I hope I can manage to release it every Friday.
Cheers!
🎲Rogueland + Hexroll: How To No-Prep Play TTRPGs
We are drinking beer and speaking about anything and everything, the evening is running late and I’m dropping some “Hey! Wanna play some TTRPGs ?”.
So, obviously, I’m often not prepared for the game we’re going to play with my table. Usually, I choose a system, take a short adventure or a one-page dungeon and prepare something in 30 minutes.
Then we play. My players like it that way at the moment.
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| Hexroll 2E by Pen, Dice & Paper |
And that’s what Hexroll is all about.
This website by Pen, Dice & Paper, makes you a fully generated world with dungeons, caves, towns, cities, quests, NPCs, monsters etc etc
It’s really impressive and useful to play the no-prep way or even solo.
Last Friday, as Hexroll is OSR compatible, I used it with the amazing short OSR system: Rogueland.
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| Rogueland by Caverns Of Heresy |
Rogueland is a game made by Caverns Of Heresy and it’s inspired by Ben Milton’s Knave. It’s a very rule lite game that I love to play solo or with a group. It got a fast character creation and the rules are easy to understand.
We dive into a generated world on which I put a lil’ quest just to make it fancy. My players of the day (my two brothers) loved it so much that they wanted it to be the start of their very first TTRPG campaign as players!
Rogueland is free on Cavern Of Heresy’s itch.io and Hexroll is free — with extra features available through Patreon. There’s a lot to come for that tool in the near future!
⚰Dark Tomb : A Mini Dungeon-Crawler Boardgame
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| Dark Tomb by Kozz Game |
Back in October, I backed Kozz Game’s 3 Dark Tomb games. If you are familiar with my work, you know that I love very minimalistic games and Dungeon-Crawler, that’s why I made my game GrimRogue in the first place. Here, the simple metal box with cards, a d20 and some wooden tokens did the trick for me and I was pleased with the pocket format idea and the minimalistic vibe of the whole thing.
This game is relatively easy to play and to understand.
Up to 4 players choose their characters, a fifth one can play the monsters, and you can solo play the game.
Then you shuffle the small dungeon (5 cards), the items, the monsters and here you go, you are ready to play.
Each character got their defence value, HP value, a number of movement points, and 4 actions on their own, that usually are different attacks, magic powers and a dash.
Each turn, you move, then you can act but you can’t use the same action as your previous turn.
The whole vibe of the game kind of reminds me of a minimalistic OSR, as it’s a d20 + bonus against the opponent’s defence value and the game is very deadly.
Each box / game is divided into 3 stages.
I passed the very first one on the first game, but I struggled on the second one on multiple playthroughs.
I only played it solo at the moment.
Even if there’s 3 different games, they can be played individually in no particular order.
Dark Tomb was a Kickstarter project, but it seems that you can still get it now (If I’m not mistaken😅 )
🧟♂️Project Zomboid : The Best Zombie Survival PC Game
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| Project Zomboid by The Indie Stone |
You may not be a “gamer”, but if you are into survival, post-apocalyptic stuff and zombies, this might be your thing!
Project Zomboid is a game started by The Indie Stone way back in 2011 and inspired by the great old-school Roguelike Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead (oh yeah, I’m a HUGE Roguelike fan, be sure to hear more about it in the future).
In this game, you play a character that you create at the beginning, with the stats you want. Then you are dropped into a full zombie outbreak, on a giant map, and you have to survive.
There is no story here. You play ‘till you die. That’s it.
But you can do a lot of stuff, A LOT. You can fight, eat, sleep, construct things, break stuff, drive cars, custom things, enter any building...
That’s probably the most “RPG” survival video game with this liberty feeling that you can get.
More than that, the game is fully moddable, meaning that you can add more stuff and modify the whole game to be the way you want.
I always had a blast on it and I solo play it regularly or with my SO on the same computer.
You can get Project Zomboid on Steam or GOG.
📚Read And Watch This Week
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| The Road by Manu Larcenet |
Last year, on May the 7th, it was my 34th birthday. One of my best friends gave me a big comic book called The Road by the amazing French author Larcenet, who made Blast. As its name suggests, it’s an interpretation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, a story of a boy and his father struggling to survive in a decaying post-apocalyptic world where all hope is gone.
I finally read the whole 160 beautifully illustrated pages in a row last week, captivated by the book’s mood.
It’s raw, dark, poetic and depressive at the same time.
Reading this while watching the current geopolitical states of the world gives it a way more anxious feeling than it already has.
Truly a masterpiece, such as the movie and the original book.
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| The Substance by Coralie Fargeat |
Last evening, we watched The Substance by French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat.
Inspired by movies like Cronenberg’s The Fly but with gorgeous shots, The Substance is about a fading TV star who starts to takes a weird drug as it was the Fountain of Youth as she starts to feels old.
As someone not very confident about his own body, this body horror movie hit the right spot the most gruesome way.
The whole movie is awesomely executed and the shots ideas are brilliants!
🧙♂️What I’m Up To This Days
Well, if you read this newsletter it means that I successfully launched it and I’ll try to keep it weekly!
More than that, I’m working on a Youtube channel that’ll speak about game design in TTRPGs, physical games, old school video games etc.
I’m currently writing the very first script and this will take some time because I want a particular mood, with some nice shots, French and English audio, and I even compose the music for that video.
Yes, that’s a huge project and I wanted to make it for a very long time now.
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| The Beast Of Gévaudan |
I’m also working on a TTRPG system agnostic setting on the French Gévaudan during the 1764 Beast Of The Gévaudan panic. A well known story in France, about a presumed wolf that killed 113 people during a dark time in a grim place.
Yes, that’s a real story but we don't know if it really was a wolf or multiple wolves, or something else, like a killer.
I want it to be in that rural place of France because it has a very cool grim mood and I've been fascinated by this story since I’m a kid.
I want it to be fantastic, meaning that there will be some weird creatures to encounters.
That’s it for this week!
Let me know if you enjoyed this article, if you played/read/watch any of the stuff I mentioned this week 😀
See you next Friday!
Cheers !
Sleepdrifter
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