Category Archives: Akkadian Rhythms

Monsters not Knight Eaters

If there is anything that puts me off about modern fantasy role playing games, it’s the obsession with making monsters defined exclusively by how they deal with adventurers. You never encounter a strange bear. You encounter a bear with anti-platemail can opener attachments and the ability to cast spells invented by humans. Why isn’t it just a bear?

What this really means is that games often are limited by their combat system, and both unwilling and unable to have traits outside of combat with people. You end up with horses with no hit points and tigers with tentacles.

Speaking of, the displacer beast is the most significant example of this. A large cat has tentacles specifically to prey on knights. No, tentacle cat it is not a repository for your source code with a funny mascot. It’s something people seriously use to define their franchise. Dragons, chimeras, and hydras were not interesting enough. They needed tentacle cats.

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Epic Poems

In Akkadian Rhythms you play epic heroes. Literally! As the game progresses you write your epic poem.

It describes the biography of who you started as, and includes how you’ve grown along the way in your adventures. It’s works as your renown among. You can even use it to quickly tell other players about your character. It’s how characters know you.

Through the past campaigns, this player’s epic poem has been my favorite.

Simple, yet descriptive.

By the end of the campaign, the player spent their epic verses, the points you gain to progress, on an unusual heroic trait. Every living thing he killed exploded into blood and stained the area around it. Even things not made of blood.

The first time he colored all of the monsters in range a shade of red, they ran. That’s the kind of thing that breaks even the most hardened monster’s morale.

Greylanders are golem-like humanoids made of muck, that usually have no fear. Seeing one of their fellows bleed, when it shouldn’t be possible, changed the way the monsters acted. It lead to some of the most fun combat encounters.

That’s why Akkadian Rhythms sits comfortably in the middle between strong combat strategy, and player narrative control. Although strategy defines a character, it’s their use of narrative devices that makes the most difference.

Get started with the player handouts and monster guide, and keep a look out for expanding your world even further with the GM Guide, coming soon.

Akkadian Rhythms GM Guide – Preview

The game of ancient adventure for epic heroes, Akkadian Rhythms, can be run entirely with the free Player Handouts and the Monster Guide. Now, if you really want to bring your campaign to life, the Game Master’s Guide will fill out how to run the setting, how to build new cultures, and how to expand the content beyond basics.

With new races, new weapons, and new tools for advancement, you can expand beyond the Akkadian lands and build adventures in more ancient cultures. Tell stories of where the humans have gone, why the Greylands have washed in, or how characters who take an artifact for themselves establish their kingdom.

Here is an excerpt about how to run Good and Bad Omens.

Omens
Overview

Whether by act of a Force or fate, good and evil are tangible concepts that affect the world. Omens are a symbol of that good or evil that works as a centered focus for influence on the world. People have learned to look for these symbols and use them to take guesses at their future. Good and evil forces may use these omens to show their influence on a chain of events.

Omens take the shape of things that symbolize good or bad fate, which can be esoteric twists of the natural world, or simple arrangements of natural things. Their form varies, but commonly they are unnatural formations of life, such as a single dark storm cloud in a blue sky raining over one dead tree, or a pile of dead birds in an open path, undisturbed by other animals. Unnatural beings, including monsters from the nether plane can themselves be an omen, the same as the appearance of celestial beings.

People have to be taught about omens, so not everyone can identify them immediately. Use a character’s skillsets to determine how good they are at identifying them. People with spiritual skills are better at spotting omens. High society may be more afraid of them, but people of low society would experience them often and be more familiar. Omens happen more often in nature, and characters with natural skills likely know to avoid them, even if they cannot identify them. Using skill rolls to identify them may be necessary, but it’s better to consider character traits to determine what they would know without requiring a roll.

…

So keep an eye out for the Akkadian Rhythms Game Master’s guide, coming soon!

Monster Portraits

There’s a hearty helping of monsters in the Akkadian Rhythms monster guide. Many were newly added from the playtest group, and were really fun to play. They also needed a home in the monster guide. It’s still under construction but I hope to get it out soon.

These portraits are some of the larger creatures.

So without further introduction, besides this little part where I just delay things more for some reason, here are the new pictures.

Sandstone Warrior
Wretch
Zimzimmu Brute
Water Dragon

Monsters

After grabbing a copy of the AD&D monster manual 1 and 2, it’s painfully obvious that the monsters of the Akkadian Realm need some monochrome sketches. Working on those. Here’s a sneak peak!

These images are CC-BY. Feel free to share and reuse with attribution or a link to this blog.

Playtests are back!

After some major rewrites on character creation and advancement, we are back to play testing Akkadian Rhythms. Things are going really well, and the new advancement system has already naturally self improved itself. It has accidentally evolved into a little bit of imagination fuel for the players.

One older piece of feedback has become more prominent. Both topics of combat engagement and running have come up in combat quite a bit. They are usually related as they are part of characters trying to get to the front lines of battle. In order to help address both I started working on a new type of action.

In most simple fights, keeping really rigid combat engagement that is difficult to break (i.e. characters cannot move until it is broken) and not including a running action works well. The use of ranged and magical combat become unique, and character differences shine on the battle field. Fights that get more complex, like fleeing enemies around a winding corridor, don’t work out so well.

So with that in mind, I introduce combat maneuvers:

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Akkadian Rhythms Playtest Group and More

Since the last update life for everyone has gotten crazy. This social distancing and shelter in place situation has changed everything. There are a whole lot of companies taking advantage of this. If I see one more product use the words “challenging”, “unprecedented”, or “historic” I am going to puke. They are selling you stuff, and they just want you to keep buying.

So the absence of blog posts for Akkadian Rhythms has been a result of not wanting to be a part of this. Turning to online gaming is great, and a lot of new people are getting exposed to it, but I’m not going to be one of the thousands of voices trying to sell a cure for the cabin fever.

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How To Play vs. How To Run

The GM Guide for Akkadian Rhythms is taking shape, and it is not focusing on how to play the game. That information is already available in the Player Handouts, so it is not a major topic of the guide. What it is focusing is on how to run a campaign in this setting.

I think this is an interesting approach, because I feel like most RPG gaming materials follow a very similar pattern. They just check off boxes on whether they have character creation materials, whether there is combat materials, whether there is a spell list and a monster list. Putting them in this order is a common solution to a common problem, but I don’t feel like it works well.

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