Light City #3 is now available!

Two posts in one day?  There must be something special going on to get me blogging this much, eh?

Well, yes there is!  (Something special to me, anyway...)  Light City #3 featuring the Amazon class is now up for free download on OneBookShelf.  It's the fifth class overall designed for superheroic roleplaying using the outstanding Swords & Wizardry Light ruleset; you can check it out by clicking here.

Not only that, but +Justin Isaac has beaten me to the punch in blogging about it, and he's already statted up a character (DC's Grace) over at Halls of the Nephilim.  You should check that out here...!

Playing in Light City: Heroic Happenings at the Halls

So while I've been focusing the tiny bit of creative energy I've had lately into the Light City releases, I thankfully have a couple of blogging brethren who have stepped up to spread the word on the project, for which I am very grateful!

Tim over at HeroPress has been kind enough to spotlight both of Light City's first two "issues," a significantly helpful boost to the four-color signal.

And Justin of Halls of the Nephilim has not only given Light City blogging and social media shout-outs, he's constructed a couple of his own characters using the rules, demonstrating that they do, indeed, work!  You should check out Spectrum and El Hijo de Lobo Plata sometime!  (I especially like the seven-level progression he shows for Spectrum...working through the emotional powers of the Green Lantern mythos...!)

Thanks y'all!  (You officially make up the Light City Chamber of Commerce!)

(Any second now, I also expect to see another awesome Light City addition from Justin hit the web for public consumption.  Can't wait...!)

Light City #2 is now up on RPGNow!

Took me long enough!  The second entry in this experiment in superheroics for Swords & Wizardry Light is now available.

Click here to check it out!  (What do you have to lose?  It's free!)

For some reason, it grates on me to have the exact same image two posts in a row.  Guess I need to post more...

Some Nephilim for your Halls

Odds are that if you check in on my blog, you're already aware of this, but I wanted to point out that Justin Isaac of Halls of the Nephilim has just put out a great little supplement for Swords & Wizardry focusing on...well, the Nephilim...

It's four pages of material (plus cover and OGL) well worth the $0.99 price tag.  You get the Nephil as a racial class, four different types of Nephilim as monsters, and some magic items...along with a very interesting racial background that, honestly, could probably be accepted by some theologians who seriously ponder the origins of these giants.  This is clearly a lovingly crafted work, which I guess is what you'd expect from a dude who calls his blog Halls of the Nephilim...!

You can find it on RPGNow right here...and should find use for it in a traditional fantasy game as well as in adventures inspired by the Nephilim.

Heck, maybe you could even (as suggested by Tim Brannan) take some inpiration from Ken Ham himself and have a little campaign based on the world as some believe it was...

Looks like fun to me...!

Light City - Superheroics for Swords & Wizardry Light

Here's a new little experiment I'm hoping to run with...working with supers in the Swords & Wizardry Light framework, one tiny publication at a time...

The first "issue" of Light City is the Brawler class, for street-level heroes that do the hard work with their fists (like our friend the Flame, above!).

It's free over at RPGNow.  Click here to check it out; I'd love to know what you think of it!

Thanks to my blogging bro Justin for his revision advice here.  Hopefully something else will roll out in the Light City series before too long...!

A happy Swords & Wizardry Appreciation Day to one and all!

(And also a happy Earth Day, and a shout-out to all of you Science Marchers out there!)

As you may know, today is Swords & Wizardry Appreciation Day, hosted at the excellent Gamers & Grognards.  While I don't have an awesome new product to release or discount to offer, I do want to join in the festivities...and so I'm presenting what's been jangling around in my head quite a bit lately: alternate classes suitable for Swords & Wizardry Light, simplified even more than the standard classes in some ways, that I've been working out to feature in the card game I'm working on (Dungeonstack).

I present them here to do my own little part in celebrating today, to show a little bit of the logic I'm trying to build the Dungeonstack upon, and to maybe even help out one or two people out there who want to shake things up a little in their game.

Click the link below for the doc in Google Drive, and if you do so, please enjoy!

Alternate Classes for Swords & Wizardry Light

(And yes, I might figure out a good way to work in a backstab ability someday...)

Thinking about an OSR blogging challenge...

So, I've been thinking a bit about April's A to Z blogging challenge and what I might want to take on this year.  One of the ideas that I hit on, and that I think I'd like to pursue, is to take an RPG setting idea (I think I'll go with the Paleolithic Adventures that I mused about in one of my first posts on this blog) and map out its components to the alphabet, so that by the time the month is over, I have something that can be compiled into a form that others might like to see.  It kind of fits an idea I've thought about trying on here, that I call "Filling up a White Box," in which I'd take the OGL skeleton of the Swords & Wizardry WhiteBox Rules and systematically reskin them into a different game.  So, maybe it'd be called "Filling up a White Box with Rocks."  Heh.

Anyway, the more I thought about it, the more I realized how much I'd like to see what other people would do with a similar task.  Ever since the monster known as the d20 system brought us "D&D" for every genre imaginable, I've loved seeing people take the basics of the class+level+icosahedral-combat rules system and expand it into new realms.  Like those old Dungeon magazine microgames...those were awesome, right?  Some people are clearly quite gifted at this (I'm looking at +James Spahn and +Simon Washbourne here, among others), but we could all probably do a decent job with a little structure, eh?

Then I realized that this might be even better as its own "challenge," since it could be ordered based on the needs of the task itself rather than...the alphabet.  Like the challenge goes something like:  (1) Theme, (2) Races and classes, (3) Equipment...etc., with questions for each one that would encourage fleshing out the game.  I just think it'd be awesome to see people pick a topic they've always wanted to explore, or maybe have explored in their games, and bring it to life.  Like someone's game is about juvenile magic-users at a wizard's school, and another one is Matrix-style gnostic cyberpunk, and someone does Super Sentai, and there's a Vampire clone, and...and...maybe someone hits upon something amazing...!

Well, I have about one good idea a week, and I thought I used that up a few hours ago when I decided tonight should be taco night, but I really like thinking about what this could be if others were interested.  So, does anyone have any thoughts on how I could get the most mileage out of this?  What would encourage others to participate?  Or am I just a bit loopy on a Friday afternoon?