MiniTALES & MiniTACTICS: d20 Tiny Backgrounds and 30 Interesting Combat Actions for GLoG and OSR

 Wow that's a title!

"Cookbook" by Brittnie

When I wrote MiniGLoG a few weeks back, I realized it's incredibly minimalist, and honestly I like that. It offers the bare bones of an OSR game, and is completely playable in its given form. But what if we want to put a little more meat on its bones, what if we offer players some more choices?

MiniTALES

The first asset I wanted is inspired by the work I did on my Burning Wheel hack. Essentially a quick way of rolling up "What was I before?" MiniTALES gives players a flavorful background Title, some starting gear, a rollable skill, and, most interesting in my opinion, a Passion. 

Passions are simple actions a character can take during play that may not always be optimal, but evoke their character's drive. When a character acts on their passion, they gain one point of Fate. Characters can hold up to 5 Fate at a time, and may spend Fate to gain 50 XP, decrease the impact of falling to negative HP, or gain a single Boon (sorta like advantage) to a d20 roll.

Players can change their passion at the end of a session, but it should always reflect their character's driving beliefs about the world around them.

A generous GM may even allow their players to have 2 such passions.

MiniTACTICS

Secondly, I get bored of OSR combat sometimes. I enjoy the RP, and exploring, and tinkering with weird things, but combat often ends up being more random chance than interesting tactics. Hence my attempt to simplify it that one time. The biggest question is whether characters should Fight or Flee, and maybe the wizard decides to use a spell.

While a good GM can often mitigate this to some extent by adding other considerations to the combat field (Vivanter, for example, once added a lit cannon to a combat I played in. I've never gotten over it.), this can be difficult to do for every single combat.

In addition to clever scenic devices, I'd like to offer my players interesting buttons to push. This is not to the exclusion of pushing the attack button or even the daring improvisation button, but is a way of giving players a few (no more than 5 for a max level character) advanced tactics they can try out.

Tactics are divided by Fighter / Expert / Sage. At level 1, gain 2 tactics from the appropriate school, and gain 1 tactic each time you gain a class template, from any appropriate school.

Notably, these tactics are for MiniGLoG, so they include things that MiniGLoG just couldn't, like a thief's Backstab (Expert Class: Cruelty), or a Barbarian style fighter's Wrath. However, they also include cool things for every type of character, such as Grandiose Casting and Spy Weakness.

I'm happy with these tactics, and I hope you find them fun as well!