Hitting Kickstarter soon is Owlbear Omelette, the souffle sized edition of an older game, now updated and with all new art from the always spectacular Juan Ochoa.
Owlbear Omelette is a game designed specifically for one-shots, or mini-campaigns. It is a palace crawl (or dungeon crawl, depending on you tastes), in which a team of erstwhile goblins seeks to find some Owlbear eggs for omelette making purposes. Why? Maybe this video can help explain it…
Inside this A6 sized zine you’ll find all the rules you need to play, from deed doing, to goblin creation. There are also a bunch of tables – from the Oh No! table – to find out what happens if you do something silly while carrying an Owlbear egg. To a magic item complication chart.
The rear of the book is dominated by random encounter charts, which can be used to generate corridors, palace and dungeon rooms, encounters, what those encounters are up to, names and more.
To give an idea of how this system works, let’s run through a sample room and encounter, using the Dungeon charts… every number in brackets represents a D6 die roll.
Our goblins make their way down a (5) large corridor. Through the door at the end they find themselves moving into a (4) barracks. Yikes! That’s an extra encounter. Inside the barracks there is (1) a challenge to be faced, and (3) some heroes…
The challenge is (6) that ‘there is something difficult to cross’. Let’s say this difficult to cross thing is a good old chasm, replete with rickety and narrow bridge. On the far side is our extra encounter: heroes, they are (2) rogues and paladins.
What are the heroes up to you ask? (6) Double yikes! They are looking for an easy source of XP to grind! Would that be our erstwhile goblins? But what is the vibe of the room? According to the Vibe table (2), things are about to get wild!
So, after a few dice rolls we have an encounter laid out: Our erstwhile goblins left a large corridor and entered a barracks. Separating our goblins from the rest of the room is a chasm, stretching across which is a rickety narrow bridge. On the far side are some rogues and paladins looking for XP to grind. As the eyes of one (called (5) ‘Zalabar’) notes the entrance of our goblins, their face lights up. Things are about to get wild!
What will our goblins do in the face of this new encounter?
Owlbear Omelette is designed to a be a quick paced and enjoyable game, perfect for those nights when you are looking for something light and fun to play, a palate cleanser, a convention game, can’t decide what to play, or can’t get the usual group all together.
The new edition updates the rules and adds in a bunch of new elements, including the random encounter charts we used to create the sample encounter above. All the art, from cover to cover, is brand new and the product of the magic hands of esteemed RPG artist Juan Ochoa, who has done a stunning job (as always).
I think Owlbear Omelette is a lot of fun. It will be hitting Kickstarter later next month, and you can check out the Kickstarter Notification page here.