Long-delayed, but finally here! I've adapted three older posts of mine into pamphlets (using Luka's handy template), which you may now download and print at your leisure for the low, low price of Free, right over here. They include:
- Break Their Pride By A Woman's Hand - A
bronze-age adventure where the PCs participate in the liberation or an
occupied city (and maybe kill a god while they are at it.).
System-neutral OSR. Pamphlet template by Luka Rejec.
- Lighthouse on the Spur
- A creepy abandoned lighthouse, with random tables to flesh it out.
Can be easily used as the basis for an investigation, or just as a neat
location for PCs to visit. No system. Pamphlet template by Luka Rejec.
- Dungeon Hobos: Their Signs and Slang
- A glimpse into the culture of wandering adventures. Add flavor to
your NPCs, mark up your dungeons with clues.Pamphlet template by Luka
Rejec. Interior art by Charles Ferguson-Avery (used with permission)
- Vectorized Dungeon Hobo Signs - A zip file of all the hobo signs in the pamphlet. You're free to use these with your own projects, even commercial ones.
- Dog God Deluxe - An inspirational cutup zine. Hand-made, hand-scanned, 100% jank.
Enjoy!
Hopefully this shall encourage me to do more.
ReplyDeleteThank you.
ReplyDeleteYou are very welcome!
DeleteCan't believe we get this stuff for free. The dungeon hobo pamphlet is super cool as is, but my favorite part of it is the title's implication that it's a part of a broader ethnographic study of delving cultures. There's a dissertation that utilizes a blend of history and ethnography to cover mercenary companies-turned-wandering communities in the 1620s called "The War People: A Social History of Saxon Soldiers during the Thirty Years’ War." It focuses on the culture, history, and personalities of the Mansfeld Regiment…and reads shockingly like a description of a B/X party after a long time running around collecting gold and followers. The parallel between dungeon slang/soldier slang is what clicked for me, but upon review I feel like all of these could be describing the kinds of folks who would wind up etching hobo signs into a dungeon wall:
ReplyDelete"A soldier who lived the way you were supposed to--who was brave, duelled or scrapped when he was called out, paid for his share of the drinks, and deserted if his friends told him to--was a rechtschaffener Kerl, a 'righteous guy.' This was the jargon in the Mansfeld Regiment and in other units…soldiers did not use it to describe people who obeyed orders. An obedient soldier, who followed orders and could be relied upon by his superiors, was redlich, 'upright.' Rechtschaffen was a word soldiers and officers used when they were standing up for themselves."
"…soldiers probably had fewer goods than everyone else but more cash. Sometimes a great deal more, common soldiers carrying multiple thalers at a time. Estate inventories reveal non-soldiers kept little money and stored their wealth in material objects instead. Objects were harder to steal and non-soldiers did not have to think about how easy their possessions were for a woman to carry on foot. Peter Hagendorf called his things 'his linens' (Weißzeug); he was limited to how much his wife or boy servant Bartelt could carry on a horse. Everything else, like the belts and pitcher his wife brought out of Magdeburg, they flipped for cash as fast as possible."
"It’s difficult to translate the snappy polyglot sizzle of seventeenth-century soldiers’ German. The Mansfeld Regiment had its own slang. 'To pull leather' is to draw your sword, to 'take care of your earthworks' to mind your business."
"A mercenary 'without a lord' was auf dem garten, 'on the guard;' civilians feared and loathed a Garteknecht."
"They participated in combat for reasons including dynastic loyalty, personal loyalty, or ideology…and above all to not let their friends down, and so their friends would think they were honorable."
"Like other communities the Mansfeld Regiment was pervaded by networks of credit and debt. The Mansfelder use of the word 'honoured' to describe payback of a debt illustrates what one historian called the moral economy of early-modern credit: like soldiers’ pay, credit was not solely economic but depended on interpersonal relationships, reciprocity, and mutual trust."
"Soldiers gained experience slowly through long participation in the military way of life. Many soldiers not only stayed in the army for a long time, they did so in groups of family or friends. Units were made up of thick networks of personal relationships…the difference between noble and commoner was looser, seniority may have been more important than birth."
"Compared to the catastrophes that followed, the war that brought the Mansfeld Regiment down to Milan was not very important. It is now almost entirely forgotten. The only people whose lives the Mansfelders ruined when they went down to Italy were some civilians, and themselves."
Anyways, I loved the pamphlets and making them free is a rechtschaffener Kerl's move, thanks again! May all your party members be ready to mutiny for you and all your loot easily convertible into traveler's coin.
Oh this is excellent! Thanks for bringing it to my attention
DeleteWith luck, I will be doing more pamphlets / blogpost cleanup in the future.