Dispatches from Nowhere

In another short trip to the countryside of my state in Brazil, I was lucky enough to visit one of the most beautiful and isolated waterfalls I have ever seen. In my perspective, the reason for its isolation is that it is very, very hard to reach there.  Of course, my RPG mind made some parallels and tried to figure how to transfer the challenge/adventure I have lived, to a game mechanic. Most wilderness encounters in d&d-like games are monsters, some modules have some odd places, climate challenges, and of course they all make a lot of sense.   But if we consider the OS/OSR paradigm that the characters are not heroes but common people, as I indeed am, I can tell that a trail like this can be very difficult and challenging, it surely can cost the characters lives. All I am asking is for any wilderness random encounter table to have a 10% chance of A WILDERNESS CHALLENGE, and, of course, I will describe below a proto rule for it. (Yes, I am aware of the cool 4e rule of...

Yesterday I finally dreamed with Tiago. For a brief moment in my current life I felt a relief, the one I was craving when he was in the ICU, which never came, instead came the searing pain. We were in a car, he was driving, this scene was repeated several times in my life. We talked about frivolities, the gossip of everyday life, things we always did. Few moments with my brother were really just ours, we always shared with other people: music, RPG, and we were surrounded by friends and family. Our rides to these places or to pick up the lunchbox on Saturdays were just our moments. That's why the dream reproduced it. I remember, throughout the dream, breathing a sigh of relief, trying to search in my memory how he came out of his illness, how he got well. And as the dream passed, I realized what it really was and more than that, how life is.  I see in my children my relationship with Tiago, how we didn't declare to each other, but we influenced each other, we shared everything a...