Guest posting by Tim Brannan   My kids got me into SCP . Or, more accurately, they told me all about it, pointed me toward the Wiki, and then left me standing there staring at what appears to be several lifetimes’ worth of lore. I am very new to SCP. The sheer amount of material is honestly a little overwhelming, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But I am a horror RPG designer. So once I started reading, one thought kept coming back to me: Can I run this with NIGHT SHIFT ? That answer is absolutely yes . Running this with NIGHT SHIFT: Veterans of the Supernatural Wars? I would say yes. In fact, the more I look it over, the more I am convinced NIGHT SHIFT is already a near-perfect fit for an SCP-style campaign. Now, I do not mean in the sense of replicating every scrap of SCP lore or re-creating each Foundation department and classification. The old hands at SCP know that side of things far better than I do. What I have in mind is the game's fundamental structure. You have...

Guest posting by Tim Brannan Today, August 20, would have been H. P. Lovecraft's 136th birthday. Lovecraft has been part of my gaming DNA for almost as long as D&D has. Maybe not quite as long, but close enough that it is hard for me to separate the two anymore. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, August Derleth, all that wonderful old weird fiction eventually found its way into my games. You can see that in my other blog, The Other Side. You can see it in the kinds of games I talk about. And, of course, there is Call of Cthulhu . I have played Call of Cthulhu on and off for decades. It is one of the great horror RPGs, full stop. If I want the classic experience of investigators slowly uncovering truths humanity was never meant to know, watching their sanity fray while something impossibly old stirs beneath the earth, it remains an obvious choice. But sometimes I want something slightly different. Sometimes I want the Mythos, but I also want witches (ok. I always ...

 Supernatural Attacks in O.G.R.E.S. Art by Bradley K. McDevitt. Used under license. Some questions have come up recently (even in my own gaming group) that highlight something about supernatural attack, about which I was apparently not clear enough in the rules. That, or it's there and just easily overlooked. So here it is. 

I have been working a lot on NIGHT SHIFT  and Wasted Lands  lately, so I see everything through this lens.  So when one of my friends on Facebook posted this idea, you know, I had to run with it.  It is not too far-fetched, as the images of Santa and Father Christmas come to us from the legends of Odin wandering the land in disguise, giving gifts to children. So, for NIGHT SHIFT, imagine this: It is December 13, but it is also Friday the 13th (like today). A group of kids is back from college and getting ready for Christmas. They all get together and talk about how they all nearly died at Camp Crystal Lake one summer. The memories and the date summon Jason Voorhees to start killing again. I imagine a sad and angry Santa Claus (I mean, if Jason is real, why not Santa).   "I knew those children, Freya!" he told Mrs. Claus. "Billy. Susie. Ann. They were on the Nice List most of the time. They were all good kids!"     Mrs. Claus watched him fo...

 Well, folks, the Elf Lair Crew has gone our separate ways once again (we're scattered across three states) and are back home, settled, and (at least in my case) fighting off the old CON CRUD(TM). The con was an absolute blast, with tons of highlights, and I'm not ashamed to say that in a very real way, it may have saved Elf Lair Games.  Resurrecting the Cabal Back in my Eden Studios days (which I honestly still have strong hopes will come again one day - I would dearly love to work on some more Unisystem stuff in the future), I hooked up with two of the greatest guys and game designers you could ever hope to work with: Timothy S. Brannan and Derek Stoelting. Many of you follow Tim's blog, The Other Side .  My main role at Eden was to work on All Flesh Must Be Eaten! sourcebooks, of which I wrote or co-wrote three. Derek also did most of his work on AFMBE, and he was a convention organizer and GM wrangler for cons. Tim was heavily focused on the cinematic end of the spec...

 So this week on social media, we at Elf Lair have been doing a series of "But How Do I...?" posts regarding some popular settings, things to which we don't have a license and cannot provide official rules, but for which most of what you need is already there.  The question, then, remains, "how do I take those encyclopedias of text and flavor, and use them with the O.G.R.E.S. rules?" It's deceptively simple, and it all starts with the basics. Let's break down how you can turn the flavor text and setting material in your favorite video game, novel, television series, or movie into a swords and sorcery, high fantasy, urban fantasy, or gritty horror game using the Night Shift: Veterans of the Supernatural Wars or Wasted Lands: The Dreaming Age Rules. Start with the Basics Starting with the basics means looking at what you've got in front of you. For the most part, you'll need very little new  to use your favorite settings. A warrior character, for e...

Wasted Lands: The Dreaming Age With so much attention on the  Wasted Lands Kickstarter  it's been a minute since we've touched on a behind the curtain for the O.G.R.E.S. System. Fear not, though; we're not done with these behind-the-curtain peeks at how the game works and the design decisions herein. This time we're going to look at the ways you can customize the levels of grit in your game.  Before we move forward, however, here are the prior blogs in the series:  Wasted Lands: The Dreaming Age is Imminent! Will Wasted Lands be a Retroclone? What Are Divine Touchstones? Races (Species) and Cultural Backgrounds How Do Tiered Abilities Work?   Class Abilities in Wasted Lands A Completely Customizable System Levels of Grit in O.G.R.E.S. The O.G.R.E.S. system has three different "levels of grit," that you can mix and match to build exactly the style of play you like. These three levels are "Realistic", the standard or normal assumption for play; Gritty...

Wasted Lands: The Dreaming Age Here we go, folks! The  Wasted Lands Kickstarter has launched ! Fear not, though; we're not done with these behind-the-curtain peeks at how the game works and the design decisions herein. Stay tuned for more behind the curtain looks as the campaign progresses, and in the meantime, head over to the Kickstarter and support the effort! Here are the prior blogs in the series:  Wasted Lands: The Dreaming Age is Imminent! Will Wasted Lands be a Retroclone? What Are Divine Touchstones? Races (Species) and Cultural Backgrounds How Do Tiered Abilities Work?   Class Abilities in Wasted Lands A Completely Customizable System What Is This "Wasted Lands" Thing??? In case you've missed out so far, Wasted Lands: The Dreaming Age is a game of swords and sorcery in a savage lost epoch, set millions of years ago. Instead of playing adventurers tied to the service of mythological deities, you play the all-too-mortal, protohuman origins of the gods of cla...

Here we go, folks! The final blog before the Wasted Lands Kickstarter launches ! Stay tuned for more behind the curtain looks as the campaign progresses, but this one completes the big lead-up!  Previous blogs in this series: Wasted Lands: The Dreaming Age is Imminent! Will Wasted Lands be a Retroclone? What Are Divine Touchstones? Races (Species) and Cultural Backgrounds How Do Tiered Abilities Work?   Class Abilities in Wasted Lands For some time now we've been pushing "Your Game, Your Way" as a slogan for Powered by O.G.R.E.S. games , and many wonder what kind of meaning that carries. After all, everyone claims that their game is the one you've been looking for, and the concept of a universal game system has been around almost as long as RPGs themselves. Even the earliest versions of D&D had sci-fi elements and the first edition DMG discussed melding the system with a range of genres.  So what do we mean exactly when we talk about O.G.R.E.S. as a customizable s...

 Previous blogs in this series: Wasted Lands: The Dreaming Age is Imminent! Will Wasted Lands be a Retroclone? What Are Divine Touchstones? Races (Species) and Cultural Backgrounds How Do Tiered Abilities Work?   Class Abilities - Powered by O.G.R.E.S. In previous blogs we've looked behind the curtain at what  the O.G.R.E.S. system  brings to the table for your fantasy game, whether it is a retroclone or something different, and how features such as Divine Touchstones, nonhuman Species and cultural backgrounds, and Tiered Attributes work in the game. The most recent blog with Tiered Attributes took a look at the ability check mechanic, which functions by rolling a d20, adding applicable bonuses and trying to get a 20 or better.  This blog will look at how class abilities work in the O.G.R.E.S. system. For those who are familiar with old-school gaming, it should look quite familiar, though with a few twists to better codify and unify the mechanic across the board...

 First things first: If you're new to the blog and are curious about other "deep dives" into the Wasted Lands, O.G.R.E.S., and how it all works, check out our other blogs in this series (or just click on one of the label tags):  Races (Species) in Wasted Lands What are Divine Touchstones? Will Wasted Lands Be a Retroclone? Wasted Lands: The Dreaming Age is Imminent! Tiered Abilities in Wasted Lands Wasted Lands is Powered by O.G.R.E.S., the house system for  Elf Lair Games . It uses three base mechanics on the backend: the Check mechanic, the percentile Class Ability mechanic, and the Rule of 2. The most common of these is the straight-up d20 attribute check and combat mechanic, and that is the focus of this blog. This mechanic covers everything from save checks to sneaking, searching for clues in a setting, and anything else that is not covered by a class ability, while also serving as a  backup  for class abilities.  That is to say, if you have a class ab...