Playing Child Friendly OneDice Fantasy on the Edge of the World
Isle of Harris, Scottish Hebrides.
Still bleeding from the last trap, the wounded warrior positions himself against the wall on the hinge side of the door, leans out and turns the handle.
SLAM!
The door swings open with surprising force and whacks him like a fly swat.
And outside the window, the dark clouds sweep in from the Atlantic. Rain rattles on the glass.
Yes, we’re playing OneDice Fantasy on the Isle of Harris, practically the edge of the world. Step out the door and swim the wrong direction and the next stop is the USA. (Go take a look at where we stayed.)
Around the table are my wife and both kids — 13 and 8 –, plus the drummer from my old rock and roll band, his wife — a novice player — and their two kids, 11 and 8. It’s their son’s Fighter who just took several points of damage from an old school dungeon. His little sister, meanwhile, is having fun being an elf.
It’s more adults than I’ve ever GM’d at one go, and actually more people. However, the rules are easy to run so I’m surviving.
Skeletal ferryman aside, it’s not quite Nerd Outreach Beyond the Styx. Our hosts were already keen players of co-op games like Forbidden Island and Warhammer figures have already invaded the table in the lounge. That’s why I brought a selection of OneDice books with me on holiday… that and the chance to actually read them in depth.
The OneDice engine is like Fate, but more simulationist and using only 1D6…
Traveller Rule 0 is, roughly, “The Referee Can Make S…tuff Up.”
There’s a paradox in the nature of a dictionary of monsters. The medieval bestiaries at least claimed to be compendia of actual knowledge. But books like Jorge Luis Borges and Margarita Guerrero’s Book of Imaginary Beings (Manual de zoología fantástica) and perhaps even Katharine Briggs’ Dictionary of Fairies are only superficially rational collections of information. Though alphabetised and cross-referenced, the logical framework’s a way of presenting wild fantasy and dream: basilisks and baldanders, brownies and banshees, sylphs and sphinxes. The Monster Manual, and the role-playing handbooks it inspired, take this contradiction to a new level — detailed statistics for each creature described along with the avowed intent of inspiring new stories featuring the legendary or imaginary entities. Quantified, numerically precise, the monsters in these enchiridia still crack open the inside of the head, driving readers to imagine worlds big enough to hold dungeon-dwellers and dragons. Rupert Bottenberg’s Fourscore Phantasmagores is the newest volume of these wonders for gamers and monster-lovers of all stripes, presenting, as it says on the cover, “A Gathering of Grotequeries for Gapejaws and Gamemasters.” And, conscious of its predecessors, the book’s a rich source of inspiration; a grimoire seeding new myths.