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I just recently got these "candy corn" dice and I used them in my last Samhain session. I tend to roll out in the open in front of the players for initiative, d6 side initiative, and let me tell you these d6s were on fire. I rolled so many 6s in a row. It got me thinking about why I love dice so much in the first place.

Now as a Harvest Master (game master) I aim to root for my players. I want them to win, but I also want to have a good story told at the table.

Dice are fickle and they should be, that is why we use them. We want them to have low, medium and high results because it tells a story. Dice are what I like to call story stones. They provide the necessary randomness that makes what we do in role-playing so much fun, at least to me.

Story stones don't tell the story for us, they simply introduce the unexpected. The dice that provided a critical success one round may provide you a critical failure the next. Some dice roll high, others roll low, while others are what I like to call "judicious" and roll all over the spectrum, which I love. Ah, dice! I love em! I am a certifiable dice goblin, how about you?

I am thinking about dice today as I am writing the rules set for Samhain: Hearth & Horror (SH&H... or is it SHnH? I can't tell. I'm just trying to get some sort of acronym here, people!). As I have moved from a Hit Point game system to a Hit system, much like EZD6, the necessity of the d4, d8, d10, and d% have really gone away.

It is interesting to note that the dice you needed to play OD&D or White Box, the d20 and the humble d6, are exactly what you need to play Samhain, and I really like that. Even before going to a Hit system we were primarily using d6s for damage. I think this is more of a revelation than anything, interesting to note and nothing beyond that. Oh, and I love a good d66 table!

In the last week the Mugwort: Welcome to the Samhain Vale BETA (available on Patreon) has gone from 72 digest-size pages to over 100 pages! Why? Because I am moving forward with making Samhain into its own system rather than relying on B/X D&D as its main engine.

There will still be B/X and OSR DNA in the rules set, such as d6 per side initiative. That sort of initiative just makes sense to me and my table. But having a Hit system instead of hit points is a welcome relief and game flavor changer. I am still sticking with a classless system, because we have no class... buh-dum-tiss... along with unique spells and roll-to-cast magic. The abilities are being boiled down from six stats to five and renamed for the flavor of the game.

I must say it's coming together pretty fast, relatively speaking, because I had already written a version of the game a few years back called 13RPG (never released, it might be on my patreon somewhere). So it is pretty much a copy and paste and then rewording for consistency. And I am getting pretty excited to share it with my patrons soon.