Total Party Kill - Properly Challenging Encounters for OSR and Similar Games (PDF)

THE GAMES MASTER IS OUT TO GET YOU

This time, it is written into the rules.

Players are dicks.

You create a detailed adventure full of memorable encounters, significant characters and carefully planted clues. They ignore all of it, adopt the comedy goblin from the coaching inn and wander off in the opposite direction.

Sometimes the Games Master deserves a little payback.

Total Party Kill presents a deliberately adversarial mode of play for OSR and similar roleplaying games. Instead of cooperating with the players to shape the story, the Games Master becomes their active opponent and sets out to challenge, defeat and potentially kill their characters.

The players must work together, use their resources intelligently and outmanoeuvre someone who knows all their usual tricks.

This is not permission for arbitrary punishment, impossible opposition or simply dropping a thousand tyrannosaurs on a first-level party. The Games Master must work within agreed limits, construct coherent challenges and give the players a genuine fighting chance.

Then everyone can find out who is actually better at this.

INSIDE YOU’LL FIND

• Rules for creating properly challenging encounters.

• Guidance for running an explicitly adversarial Games Master.

• Monsters, puzzles, traps, hazards and other forms of opposition.

• Advice on keeping challenges coherent rather than merely capricious.

• A competitive mode that still requires cooperation between the players.

• Material addressing what players can do in the dungeon after their characters die.

• Rules and ideas suitable for OSR and similar fantasy roleplaying games.

Total Party Kill turns the traditional relationship between players and Games Master into an open contest. Everyone knows the objective, everyone agrees to the increased danger and nobody can complain that the Games Master is trying to kill them.

That is the entire point.

PDF EDITION

• Digital PDF download.

• Rules and Games Master advice.

• Designed for OSR and similar roleplaying games.

• Written by James “Grim” Desborough.

• Originally released in 2023.

This is a supplementary rules booklet rather than a standalone roleplaying game. A compatible fantasy roleplaying system is required for play.

PRODUCTION NOTE

The book contains artwork from several sources, including AI-assisted material.