LoSS Core is a hit!

It's been a wild 24 hours, with a release dropped right into the middle of the busiest time at work and home...The Holidays!

Not to mentionlaunching a new release a week before Christmas when peoples money is pretty tied up.

But it's been a great success!

The core book is having the best first sale dale in spooky room history with 12 copies selling in the first 24 hours. Not bad at all!

I decided to shift focus back to the core rules instead of releasing another 2 issues this year because it really needed to be done. Lot's of people were downloading the issues but I was getting the feeling that alot of people were buying them, thinking all the background stuff was great and cool, and that the rules were pretty neat, but that when it got down to playtime not having all the rules in one place was making gameplay difficult for those that don't already know the system.

I also wanted to make Lair of Sword & Sorcery accessible to those who had never played a role-playing game before. For someone with no background experience of a Roleplaying game the rules could seem a little difficult to understand, especially with no overview like, "what is a role-playing game" and "how do you play" along with things like examples of play, etc.

And this book is chock full of those! Lot's of examples, diagrams, even an expanded an organized equipment list.

What it doesn't contain is all the world of Kartharka stuff. I decided to make that all into a seperate books since a) this one was already huge, and b) I wanted to present the world book as a dual book for Lair of Sword and Sorcery and traditional OSR game play, so that you can use the world of Kartharka with any system.

So if you haven't heard yet, or you heard and forgot, the Core rulebook is here and you can get it at DRIVETHRURPG. Click the link and head there now!

~Ripley

LoSS Core rules Released, Get it Now!

Well here we are!
The 2nd edition of LoSS is finally here! This Core rulebook contains all the rules from the first 5 issues of LoSS magazine and so much more!

It's a complete roleplaying game all in one book, the rules are meant to be used with the Sword and Sorcery world of Kartharka detailed in the LoSS magazine. But any world will do, make up your own or use one you already have.

For those of you already in on the secret of LoSS you'll be glad to see these rules are fully revised, edited and expanded, with a full table of Contents!
Also included are some instructions for a super simple demonboard to get you by till you make a full demonborrd as described in issue 1.

New players will find they can jump in right away without reading all the rules. They can read the first section "the basics" and jump right in to playing the LoSS Skirmish game also included in the book.

When the players have learned enough of the rules they can use the included example hero or make their own to play the included campaing "spider time".

Want to learn more? Go check it out at Drive Thru RPG now!

Now that the hard sell is out of the way I want to thank all of you who have supported the game for so long, I couldn't have made it this far without you. Special thanks to +Raymond Saulnier +Adam Muszkiewicz +avantpulp +kreg Mosier +Donn Stroud +edchuk sockmonkey +Mike Evans and everyone in the LoSS playtest group.

And all the rest of you who have commented +1'd, shared, reshared or downloaded the game.
Here's to a wild new year!

To all my Blood Reavers, I salute you!

~Ripley Stonebrook

LoSS core rules are coming! I swear!

LoSS Core Rules still coming soon!

With the writing of the LoSS Core rules I was going to originally just have the rules, only the rules, and nothing but the rules.

But once your a year into a project you can't help adding a few things to make it complete!

Also to be included in LoSS Core Rules:

Everything!
Just kidding, but alot

. I decided to include the bestiary and the guidelines for creating your own monsters, enemies and spirits. Both to make the book a complete roleplaying game, and because the Sorcery rules cross reference the spirit creation rules so much it was just easier to put them in than to completely rewrite something new for the book.

Also included are some more things to make the book a complete role-playing game:

I wanted the Core rules to be readable and understood by anyone, not just people already playing role-playing games.

So I included things like:

An example of play, a few pages describing a typical game of Lair

A brand new campaign just for this book "Spider Time" specifically written to introduce the new game master to roleplaying and to explain the rules as you go along.

A "how to get started" section, describing just enough of the game so the players and Demonlord don't have to read the whole book before playing their first game (It's at about 150 pages at the moment)

I also didn't want people to have to go and download all the issues of LoSS and have to read them before making use of the Core book, so included in Core is the "Super Simple" Demonboard instructions, just good enough for your first few games.

Also included is a new and improved Demonlord screen,

And so much More!

New Templates, new character sheets, New Everything!

Are the rules the same?

Yes and no. The rules have been completely rewritten to refer to each other more accurately, and many of the gaps in the original game have been filled in, for example there is now a "movement" and "The Turn" section in the book.

Some things have been changed slightly to take into account the later rules changes which occurred between issues 1 and 5, some things have been slightly re balanced, the armor system is the same but presented differently.

Mostly the new rules are more in line with what I meant the rules to be the first time, as opposed to how they were written in the books before.

How much left to do?

Almost done, again. The book is in it's fourth draft now and there is nothing, absolutely nothing, else I intend to add. The final markup has been finished so it's just going in and fixing all the edits, typos etc. I also have one last photo shoot. So a week or two. You know the usual lies.

Review Copies

Yep this one is going to be a regular priced download, for $1.99. Which I think is fair considering it is a completel role-playing game. If you are a reviewer out there who wants to do a rewiew then let me know and I'll hook you up with a reviewer copy when the book is released.

Hopefully you'll be hearing from me Soon my Blood Reavers!

~Ripley

The Lair of Sword & Sorcery Adventure game, I guess it's OSR?

What is Lair of Sword & Sorcery Adventure Game (LoSS)?

I guess it's OSR?

 (I get a little editorial here, sorry)

When I started this journey to make my own game a couple of years back I would have had a very different answer than I do now.

Originally I avoided the OSR definition as I didn't want any of the baggage that a "d&d" type game carried.

I also avoided the "putting" role playing game, into the title, instead calling it an "adventure game".

All of this was to avoid bringing any unwanted feelings or preconceptions to the LoSS game.

I had wanted to create a game that anyone could play, or would play.

If I could have  I would have made a boxed version of the game in a monopoly shaped box, with a card folding Demon board and plastic Demon blocks, with some little plastic figures to represent the heroes and a different color plastic for the enemies. Ideally it would have come with a rule book that was 50 or 60 pages.

I wanted a game that people could whip out on a Saturday afternoon, dust off their heroes and play for a few hours before going out for Saturday night. Without making a big commitment to becoming a "role player" or joining a "campaign".

Hence my adventures are called "lairs". A map, with some objectives for the heroes, and some rules for some interesting differences between this and every other Lair,

Many "lairs" could be strung into a "story" with each lair played out in an afternoon.

I also wanted the Demonlord (read GM, or DM) to have fun. I wanted a game that required no laborious "prep" for the demon lord. Everything could be right there in the scenario on a couple of sheets that could be run after 5 minutes of reading the Lair.

But you know what? After riding this train for a while, I've been coming to an almost terrifying conclusion. That the inventors of D&D (nope not getting involved in who's who debates at this point) had the same kind of thing in mind in the beginning.

The one sheet dungeons of the past are exactly the same. Throw together some rooms with some different interesting features and have at it.
The mega dungeons as well were just born out of running large war game on big tables, and to accommodate giant parties of players and different groups of players at different times.

I think all of this "prep" time got added on people began to become tired of the "same old dungeon" and started going to cities, wandering the wilderness, exploring whole worlds, necessitating more prep time and more rules for all of those situations.

Indeed right in the first edition books it's clear that it was perfectly acceptable to randomly generate a dungeon layout, randomly fill it with contents, roll up some wandering monsters and have at it.

And all of this "character development", min/maxing, endless options for characters, and even leveling up every 2 or 3 games, all comes from people just wanting to do more than take their level 1 fighters out for a romp through a dungeon.

But here's the problem, all this extra "stuff" is for people who have already had their fun. It's for people who have already slain the dragon, saved the damsel, gotten the treasure and gotten all the way to Level 5.

But what about everybody else? There are so many people out there that want to do that, want to jump in and say "I attack!" for the first time.

They don't want a 2 hour discussion about planning their character build for optimal effect at level 8, and they certainly don't want to spend 3 months of their campaign at the court of King Olaf working as diplomats to broker a treaty with the orcs of the Hinterland Fells.

So for me, yeah, LoSS is OSR. It may not resemble D&D in any way other than there are characters with stats but for me that OSR feeling is still there.

Just get some friends together, roll some dice and see what your heroes can do. Sure there's still a ref in the role of the Demon Lord to keep everything on track but he gets to try to take the heroes out too with a fairly determined number of enemies on the board. Sure he'll be thwarted at every turn by the heroes but that's the villains job, and it makes it that much sweeter when he finally gets to take a hero down.

So yeah, I guess it is OSR, it may still say adventure game on the Cover but for me, this is what OSR is all about
For you it may be different, and that's okay, but as I get older and grayer and watch less and less people out there playing roleplaying games I think we all need to take a step back and realize that things have to change, by becoming the same as they were a long time ago.

(And yes 5th edition rocks, I just wish the starter box had a dms booklet and a players booklet with character creation, I mean come on I would have preferred those two books and cheap out on everything else, who needs cardstock character sheets in a starter set?)

Ripley

Loss Core rules, lots of changes

Here's some thoughts of the day kind of stuff for the near future of the Core rules.

I decided to switch the Core rules printed copies over to Drive Thru RPG a while back. 

I'm still printing and shipping them myself at the moment, you can get them here (buy Loss Hardcopies).

When I made that decision I started thinking about whether they should be available separately or compiled into a single volume.

Then I started thinking about maybe reorganizing the material for the single book so That all of the combat would be in one section, all of the lair stuff in another etc.

Then I actually started editing all of that material, reorganizing it and editing it.

I found that if I was going to go through all the trouble I should rewrite a few sections and expand a few little things.

Well it has grown a heck of a lot from there in the past week alone, and is going to take far longer than I thought so my plans have changed.

Publishing schedule (tentative) for Loss in 2016

1. The sorceress of Zhann Lair to be published in the "Free Lairs" section of the website
2. Pay what you want pdfs will be compiled into a single download and switched over to DriveThru RPG.com. This will be the first 5 issues, just as they look now (available thru gumroad here)
3. Print copies of the first 5 issues will be dropped from the Lair of sword and sorcery site. At this time the first 5 copies will be available as a black and white hardcover through DriveThruRPG. There will be no changes or updates or reorganizing of this file, just the first 5 issues all strapped into one hardcover book. Which should be pretty neat.
4. Issue 6 of the magazine, the Brytax campaign will be published. Pay what you want pdf and print copies to be available throught Drive Thru RPG
5. Issue 7: The autumnlands will be published. A guide to adventure in the autumnlands including the mysterious Hunzar jungles (pwyw and print through DriveThuRpg)
6. Issue 8: The far North: A larger campaign with the heroes travelling to the top of the world to the seat of Hein-Goblyn itself.(pwyw and print through DriveThuRpg)
7. Core Rules Redux: The core rules will be compiled edited and expanded.(pwyw and print through DriveThuRpg)

That should take us through the year, with a few more free lairs published on the site, lots more rules as they crop up, and plenty more background rules and info for the world of Kartharka all appearing on the site as we go.

I'll be putting alot of work into the demonboard this year but all of that will be going up on the site, if it gets a little unwieldy to keep in the articles of interest section you'll see a new section open on the site just for the Demonboard.

Patience my Blood Reavers, new content coming soon!

~Ripley

New Logo and Name for Lair

Lair of Sword & Sorcery is officially changing it's name and Logo. 

Long called LoSS by +Adam Muszkiewicz, the name is officially changing on the cover as well.

And with a new name comes a new flashy Logo!

Enjoy!
~Ripley

Prepping a "dungeon" for Lair

I've been trying to prep this next group of scenarios in Lair and I keep going round and round. If this were D&D, or OSR, or something other similar I would have done my usual.

Spend a couple of weeks prepping the Setting, maps, background, basic feel of the areas in the land.

Then I would spend about a week coming up with some content that's a little different from the norm.

After that I'm usually set up enough that I can run a game on Friday and over Saturday and Sunday I can prep the next week's game.

This type of thinking is how I set up the Background of Kartharka when I first started it up (It has grown considerably since then) and how I set up the Adventures for it.

This is also how I set up the Blind Burrower scenarios (coming soon, soon).

But now that I'm starting on the next one I'm finding it difficult to do that.

I've gone round and round and spent weeks and weeks trying to figure out how to do something that takes a couple of days in a couple of hours.

Lair is about quick and dirty fun

I wanted Lair to be something different, something where the DemonLord can scrawl a few notes on a page, do a quick hand drawn map and the system will pick up the slack. I wanted the demonlord to have use their time to come up with awesome villains and weird traps, not spend their time filling in pages and pages in a notebook.

I wanted Lair to be Low Prep and quick.

So I thought that maybe the key was the format of the scenario.

I took my usual adventure preparation, reformatted it to a Lair scenario, and bam! It was indeed what I was looking for. Didn't have to go over my notes as I played, everything was right where I needed it when I needed it.

But that wasn't enough.

With the next game I was now thinking that since I was going to publish these I should try to come up with a way of laying out the maps better than just pictures of my own demonboard. I then found that the only thing that took longer than laying out all my maps on the Demonboard and taking pictures of them was doing all that and laying them out in a design program. It got very complicated quickly as I felt limited by only laying out what I could definitely build on the the Demonboard. 

So I ended up with something which was far more limiting and constrained then just having fund with blocks and cardboard on the table, I started to say things like, well it's okay if everything looks pretty similar, I mean I do only have blocks and cardboard.

That's when I knew I was on the wrong track.

The same went for the scenario design, exciting adventures ended up becoming a list of enemies on the board with some stats.

I kept saying things like "Well I guess they can fill in the blanks as they go" or "a good Demonlord would know how to prep this for actual play".

These are not the kind of things I wanted in my game and I just didn't want to live this way. Spending weeks doing what used to take me days, and limiting what my choices were to make them easier to publish and write up.

Nope, I might as well chuck the whole thing at that point and go play video games instead.

Back tot he Well

What I did instead was look to something else I already had.

Those of you with a keen eye may have noticed Lair is published by "Spooky Room Productions".

That is because I was originally working on a Horror Roleplaying game in the same vein as Lair turned out to be.

The big difference for that one was that I didn't have the DemonBoard yet. For that one I had envisioned a book full of full size hand drawn floorplans.

I also had some templates made up for my own use. Single double sided pages, on the front was the map and the basic plot points of the adventure, on the back was the map key and the stats for the "monsters".

I had done this to keep all the separate sections of the "mansion" well organized so that I would have all the information I needed for each specific location.

Anyone who has run a good horror roleplaying game will know that usually all the info is piled at the front of a scenario and the maps and keys at the back forcing a good gamemaster to either prep well and know the adventure inside and out, or make a lot of notes for each area detailing what needs to happen in each.

So I pulled out those templates, filled in the new headings for what I needed for Lair and BAM! I had exactly what I needed to create a Lair scenario in half an hour. That's what I was looking for in Lair and I had the damn thing stashed on the shelf all along.

But wait there's more!

As I've been writing this blog I've found more and more that Sword and Sorcery centred fantasy roleplaying has far more similarities to Modern Horror Roleplaying games than it does to classsic fantasy Roleplaying games.

In Lair and similar Ilk, Sorcery is mysterious, dangerous, powerful and corrupting. 

I had a few articles planned on pointing out all the similarities and the actual way of thinking about Sorcery in your fantasy games. But I hadn't thought about the format of presentation of the books and more importantly how to present it to the players during in game play.

This all came together this week as I realised one important thing. You have to plan an adventure for a sword and sorcery game in the same way as you would a horror game. They are very different breeds, the horror game less focused on the cut and thrust of combat and more on investigation, planning, learning.

But what if you changed the one important difference between the horror game and the fantasy game?

In most horror games combat doesn't work. You need to know the spell, the background info that will tell you to burn the painting, when the stars will be right, where the evil cultists will meet.

But what if Combat did work? If you really could just strangle the evil cultist before the ritual completes, or actually slay the evil monster conjured up with 3 feet of burnished copper blade?

Well then my friends, I think you would have Sword & Sorcery, in the true vein of the original Conan stories. What if you think of Conan as a reaction to these occult detective stories of the time, thin effete scholars who walk into a room with mystic words waving their arms about and lighting candles. (Solomon Kane may be a more apt response but not as useful for a fantasy game).

So if this is true, then instead of writing pages of notes for what will happen, and when, and when certain events will be triggered lets look to an old friend of the horror game prepper.

The flowchart

Horror preppers often make up a flowchart of the entire adventure as there are often a lot of moving parts.

So I made up a quick flowchart template I could fill in on the fly for Lair campaigns.

Now there are a lot of people out there who will begin to scream "railroading" again, and I hear you. Many feel the bane of the horror game is that if you do not do 1, then 2, then 3, then everyone dies.

Or at least the adventure never happens.

Well us horror people have been fighting that stigma for years.

Good adventure design will involve multiple "hooks" to get the players involved, use the "three-clue" model for every important plot point, where the same thing can be accomplished 3 different ways and in a game where all the characters can go insane half-way through you get used to characters doing random things and going "off the rails". 

Let's also look to the another big difference between Sword and Sorcery and Modern Horror. If the bad guy actually succeeds, no big deal. So the Sorcerer has summoned a demon of unknown power. It's no worse really than the lord one province over amassing an army of thousands of men to invade your town.

Things happen, the heroes move on to the next town, hopefully they will live long enough to maybe come back and take the bad guy out later.

To sum up...

Yep, I've got my scenario template, my flowchart template, a new way at looking at scenario design and I think I'm going to throw back a couple of beers tonight and see if I can set up a campaign in the time it takes to watch a Conan movie. And if I'm successful then I think Lair has a long future in my life. If not, maybe, I'll give that horror game another whirl...

The table runs with blood!

Had a massive playtest on the weekend for the final form of the combat rules. 4 people with 13 heros each ranging from 0 to 2nd rank veterans. Combat rules worked out great, added a couple endurance points to the base endurance and cut armour by a third.
One interesting feature was that 2 different players in two different games decided to turtle up and hide in a single room and in both cases the rank 0's were able to force them out.
Everything played out as I thought it would overall though, The higher rank heroes did indeed cut swathes through the level 0's but were also severely injured in the process.
If the scenario had not been one long pitched battle they surely would have retreated to rest and recover.
High ranking Heroes did show themselves to be capable of getting in and causing a lot of damage but a long drawn out battle with no chance to rest indeed leads to dead heroes.

Rules for playing your own version of the Skirmish game will be included in the Combat issue and it was indeed the best way to teach the Combat system of Lair of Sword and sorcery to new players. In a single 1 hour session you get to learn all the basics, how well your starting heroes will fare against more powerful foes, how many common peasonts they can wipe out, and how far they can push things before they need to pull back.

Strategy and tactics in Lair involve mostly not getting surrounded while trying to gang up as many heroes on a single enemy as possible.

A high ranking enemy will of course send out his minions first saving his own strength for after they have worn down the heroes.  A sure way to kill you big bad boss is to send him in early to take out the heroes minions.  Those 0 rank guys can be brutal.

All in all lots of fun, and a combat system that works perfectly for the genre as well as being fast. We found the action clipped along alot faster than in most table top wargames.

Find out all about the combat rules in the upcoming "Combat issue".

~Ripley

Printer Proofs Approved!

The proofs have returned from the printers and they look great.

It is official, Issue 1 "The Demonboard" issue is ready for sale.

As soon as I get a go ahead from a retailer they will be on the shelves.

I have a few in mind to start but if you would like to see Lair in your local Game/comic shop then send some contact information for them to spookyroomproductions@gmail.com.

Or comment below with the shop you would like us to sell it in,

Issue 1

And the files are off to the Printers!
Issue 1 is in the can and ready to go.

Coming soon to Gamestores and Comicshops near you.

(I hope)

As will be typical the first run will feature the full color cover, while reprints will sport the less awesome black and white cover. So if you see the color versions snap it up cuz it won't be around for long.

First Issue contains an introduction to the game as well as instructions for creating the Demonboard, the playing surface used in the game.

The Lair game absolutely requires the board so this instructional first issue is a must have.

I won't point out how useful the board would be in other RPG's as well, it's just not my style.

~Ripley