Best of the Web - The Ultimate Heresy, One Pages, Healing Potions

I stumbled across an old post called The Ultimate Heresy in which the Grumpy Old Troll thinks about using Middle Earth in a role playing game. This got me thinking how it could be fun to have a party of adventurers sent out from Rivendell with the intent to fake Sauron. This would probably be a suicide mission and they'd know that of course. Since they are to draw the eye of Sauron day from the  Fellowship the party would need at least one Hobbit and they'd be forced to avoid the path taken by the Fellowship. Since the path of the Fellowship is so well known and the rest of Middle Earth less known you could even plop down the map and tell the players to pick a route. Do they want the Eagles to take them East to draw the eye of Sauron that way? Elrond can arrange that. Do they want a ride down south of Gondor in an Elven ship, well Elrond can arrange that as well. I think it could be a lot of fun.

Also digging through the depths of the OSR I found a post by Methods & Madness about One Page Rules (or: Taking a page from other people's books) in which the site owner Eric Diaz discusses creating rules so that they are one-pagers (the way James V. West at Doomslakers does). How doing this facilitates folks compiling their own book of house rules. I've thought something similar when it comes to bestiaries. See the 2E monstrous compendium had the idea of using a three-ring binder so you could compile a unique bestiary but they had monsters on front and back which screwed up the concept. With PDF you don't need to worry about that sort of thing.

Of course this reminds me of the 1-page dungeon contest and now I've dug up the Sea of O'SR from back in February 2011 (before I'd even heard about the OSR) which challenges folks to make an island n 3-hours. This would a DM to cobble together an archipelago as necessary. Looks like they tossed around the idea of a non-real-roady adventure path but I haven't seen any evidence that got further than the interesting idea stage. Something in me loves these short contained bits of RPG goodness.

Gothridge Manor posts A Take on Healing Potions which describes two types of healing potions, one that is natural plant-based and less effective one that is more magical and more like what we expect from a healing potion. I really like this and will probably build it into my own Fantasy Heartbreaker as my game will need healing and the non-magical healing makes a low magic campaign less deadly.