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Words from a grognard

Month: January 2026

Design: Travel Navigation

January 29, 2026 / / 0 Comments

I’ve been wrestling with how to make travel the equivalent of dungeon exploration in activity (my bespoke system is entitled “Legendary Journeys,” after all). I think I cracked that nut.

It’s typical to have a navigation check when parties are wandering in the countryside. Their fearless leader checks to see if they’ve wandered off course during the day and are lost. Well, what if we change that up a bit?

Suppose the navigation roll does two different things. First, it slows the party by some amount, measured in time or movement points or whatever your system uses to measure progress when traveling. Assume the party gets it sorted out by discovering the error and getting headed in the correct direction from where they are. This, I think, can offer that “wandering in the wilderness” feeling without the wholesale “getting lost” condition.

What it also does, secondly, is provide an opportunity for the party to find/stumble upon Points of Interest they would otherwise have missed. So, if we make the navigation check a bit more difficult so the party wanders a bit more often, they can find a lot more stuff to eat their faces…er, explore.

Each time the party travels through the hex, the navigation check can result in the party traipsing along a different path and finding something new. If we want to, we can restructure the navigation roll to reflect that each trip through is likely to be a bit different which allows for new discoveries. Indeed, we can structure things so each trip through a hex is just different enough that new discoveries are possible.

That would provide more possible interaction and greater interest in travel situations. The wilderness and travel should just be something to endure before getting to the good stuff at the destination. Traveling should be an adventure of itself. It should be possible to have the journey to a location to be more involved than what happens at the location, which upends the usual circumstances of play.

On Evil Monsters

January 19, 2026 / / 0 Comments

There are topics that seem to rise again and again in RPG fora like undead horses to be flogged. This comes about because of the regular influx of gamers to discussions, so evergreen discussions are to be expected despite the eyerolls they garner from veterans. One such horse carcass is that of evil monsters, particularly humanoid monsters.

The argument against having such moves along the path of “innately evil humanoids don’t stand to reason because there’s going to be good individuals even in an evil culture and it’s horrible to say they’re all evil” and then to move on to how it’s inherently racist to have evil non-humans.

Stop. Stop right there.

The problem I see is simple: these claims rely on the notion that non-human critters are simply humans in funny suits. That what one can expect from human cultures is what one can expect from non-humans. That non-human thought and feeling and understanding is exactly the same as with humans.

I’ll offer up that non-humans aren’t humans in funny suits, that they are, indeed, non-human and that expecting the human experience to map onto the non-human experience is foolish and leads to bad fantasy. The non-human experience should NOT map directly onto human experience.

Now, for us, as humans, to be able to use non-humans in play, yes, we have to be have enough similarity between the two for us to use — for us to understand so we can portray elves and dwarves and so on — and still be different enough to set them apart as not human. (Yes, RPG play has long suffered from elves and dwarves as simply humans in funny suits.) The Venn diagram humans and non-humans should never be a perfect circle, even if there’s relatively little space separate.

So I’ll observe that we humans can’t comprehend all of the non-human experience, so we’ll never understand why some non-humans are what we find to be irredeemably evil. They’re not poor, downtrodden souls being wrongly persecuted for being in the wrong place, they’re inherently evil creatures creeping into human domains and a threat to all humans.

Even if they’re bipedal and human-like in form, they aren’t human. They’re not stand-ins for oppressed peoples. They’re non-human monsters and a threat to us all.

Non-human creatures that aren’t evil should also be viewed as not being fully understandable by humans, and thus by the players at the table, for much the same reason. They may not be the inherent threat the evil monsters are, yet some of their behavior should certainly be inscrutable to humans to preserve the weirdness of the fantasy.

To pay the Joesky tax, I offer up the Shadow Curs, as yet untested kobold substitutes:

  • NO. APPEARING: 10-100
  • ARMOR CLASS: 7
  • MOVE: 12″ / 9″
  • HIT DICE: 2-5 hp
  • NO. OF ATTACKS: 1
  • DAMAGE/ATTACK: 1-4 or by weapon
  • SPCL ATTACKS: none
  • SPCL DEFENSE: none
  • MAGIC RESIST: standard
  • INTELLIGENCE: low
  • ALIGNMENT: Lawful Evil
  • SIZE: Small (2 1/2′ – 3′)

The curs have two forms, that of a dog and that of a dog-faced humanoid, similar to a werewolf. When in the dog form, a cur has capabilities as a dog. In the humanoid form, a cur has opposable thumbs and can wield weapons accordingly. Transforming from one form to the other takes but a couple of seconds and doesn’t affect the cur’s ability to move and fight.

In either form, a cur looks like a mongrel dog, with fur and fangs accordingly. Small packs are families led by the sire and dame. Large groups are composed of multiple family packs and typically led by the largest of the pack leaders.

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