The Lords Funeral (RPG Blog Carnival)

This months blog carnival from Forsaken Garden has the topic of Haves & Have Nots - so I was inspired to write about an old lords funeral some family witnessed not so long ago. This is offered up in the spirit of being closer to the kind of country customs most of our adventurers might encounter as opposed to the high pomp and ceremony of British Royal funerals which would the most obvious point of reference otherwise.

The local grand old landholder died recently and his funeral was well attended; a relatively rare glimpse into that old world. Use this for the more traditional, smaller scale events than the grand paegantry we all witnessed for Elizabeth II.

Groups in attendance, in order of social standing, were:
The Family - including the new lord, potentially also including others of the blood family returned from far afield.
The County - the old lords peers, the local nobility and other major land-holders.
Our Friends - the non-noble members of the lairds community, be that co-religionists, or in something more fantasy could be same-species or other affinity group.
Our Betters - important members of local society - non-landed nobility, significant clergy of other religions, community leaders, and so on.
The Neighbours - local farmers and landholders, including the tenants of the laird and other commonfolk who had some sort of connection to the laird through their activities - i.e. they would have been recognised by the laird.
The sixth, unnamed group, are everyone else who has come along, the local peasantry, tradesfolk, passing travellers, others who wish to pay respects. This group will probably be similar in numbers to all the others if not more.

Boiling that down into a table, because after all this is a gaming blog: d100 - who are you meeting at this local nobles funeral
1-2 Family - children, cousins, aged siblings or cousins
3-8 Peers - other local noblility; could be the nobles themselves could be various representatives, minor family members and so on
9-22 Faithful - people who shared some notable commonality with the deceased; in our fantasy games that could be religion, it could be plane of origin, it could be species.
23-43 Respectables - regional notables, not quite nobles, nor sharing the notable trait of the deceased, but the 'leaders of the community' who would need to be seen attending
44-50 Known Commoners - local dwellers, could be tenant farmers, old hirelings, homunculi, craftsfolk - those who would have actually worked with and for the deceased - the most likely to both know useful things and share them with strangers come to town (such as adventurers)
51-100 Masses - everyone else; while plenty happy to talk about the deceased, "facts" discussed may be wildly unreliable.

While the demographic split above is reasonable, attitudes and atmosphere can vary wildly, from the tension of an heirless throne to the fond celebration of life for a respected and long-lived lord. Tensions between those of the 'notable trait' and everyone else can also be played upon - appearing in particular between the Peers and the Respectables, the Faithful and the Massses. Depending on what exactly the old lord liked to do with his time, the Family may or may not be happy to see the Known Commoners present and/or to see them talk with outsiders.

Lots of social potential to be had at a funeral, in particular because lots of folk who would normally quarrel, possibly violently, will hold themselves in check for this occassion only out of respect.

Shiny TTRPG links #199

Links from about the interwebs - feeds, sidebars and discord conversations mostly. For more, see the previous list found here or you can check the RPG Blog Carnival or on Third Kingdom Games news roundup. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.

Prismatic Weekly gives us They’re Eating the Blogs

Gorgon Bones shares Roleplaying Games are Wargames

Evan Torner on Rascal writes Combat in Dungeons & Dragons

Grumpy Wizard gives us How I Use Published Adventures In A Homebrew Sandbox

Seth Louis Game development writes How I Started a Cairn Open Table

Daily Illuminator shares The Reality Of Tariffs In Tabletop Gaming

House of the New Zodiac asks Are popular bloggers actually good DMs?

Save vs Total Party Kill gives us Negative Space Reprise

Fae Errant gives us In Defence of Mediocre Content

Deep Time Monster Groups - Adversary design notes from Hexcrawloween

Background to the hexcrawloween region that I cooked up was twists on classic monsters - taking the 'niche' of certain monsters and imagining their equivalents for other species and times.

I had a notion of what this patch of the world was - Land of the Dead, ruled by Theocracy of Kirianshalee, currently being invaded by dragon-blooded orcs from the north. After using the Wilderness Generator from Izirions Enchirdion of the West Marches to put some finer texture over that I got a patch of reality where clearly the veil had worn thin - lots of planar, fey and afterlife bleed through - souls not going where they ought to one way or another.

All this following on from the 'epochs' reading I had been doing for GLoGtober got me thinking of how this is the age of humans - or human-like things - but certainly there have been other ages dominated by other beings - and thus there must have been an ecosystem of predators, mimics and suchlike for those other times.

Review: Starlight Arcana

tl:dr; chunky, gorgeous book - great ideas, somewhat heavy to prep but has made it to my table where lots of other stuff has not

I spotted this on Kickstarter and tagged it as a kind of Spelljammer substitute - it was marketed as Voyage Across the Astral, Adventures Across the Starlight Arcana Astral Plane - I read that as something in the "Planejammer" space and was definitely on board for what I didn't get from Spelljammer - ship combat and actual planets to go to. With this coming out of Krakow, Poland I was also happy to support my local game developers.

Art by Joanna 'Dusky Cat' Trzesniewska

First impression of Starlight Arcana is that it is a huge chonky book. About an eighth is the setting crunch, another eighth are the campaign mechanics, a third is the three acts of the campaign and then the back half-ish is the bestiary. It should probably be best conceptualised as a campaign book that comes with its own setting, bespoke mechanics and companion bestiary.

It is a gorgeous book, the artwork and production values throughout are very very nice. This is a beautiful piece of kit with some great work in here. There is a tarot-themed sorcerer and there was a whole tarot deck with campaign appropriate art as part of the kickstarter. The tarot is also used for a tarot-driven divining of the fates and implementation of game effects while adventuring across planets in the sandbox part of the campaign. I like the idea but my shelves groan with tarot decks so I could not justify getting this one, even if beautiful.

Reference d20 for scale

There is a lot of content in here, that maybe could have benefited from a grizzled editor snarling 'kill your darlings' at the writers. The layout is two columns per page for most of the first half of the book, the bestiary varies from two column/two monster to single monster/stat block per page. Comparing it to something else recent - 5e Spelljammer - you get more for your page count - smaller margins, smaller font, more words on a two page spread. I spotted a couple of typos but overall for a first publication out of a new outfit, pretty damn good. I might have liked things boiled down more in OSR style but stylistically it cleaves to 5e house style.

Shiny TTRPG links #198

Links from about the interwebs, slightly late as I spent my day out in the fog. For more, see the previous list found here or you can check the RPG Blog Carnival or on Third Kingdom Games news roundup. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.

All Dead Generations shares GYGAX'S FORTRESS

Occultronics writes OSR Social Resolution Procedures

Tabletop Curiosity Cabinet gives us Animism and dungeons

Weird & Wonderful Worlds gives us Dynamic Reality Gaming

Throne of Salt shares Positively Unhinged Elden Ring Theoryposting: Part 2

Idraluna Archives shares Public Domain Illustrations on Project Gutenberg

cryptickeyway shares Make Ancestries Distinct By Giving Them Mastery of Their Domain

Personable Thoughts gives us Kickstarter FOMO and the Content Firehose

Review: Macaronicon

tl;dr: adds cool species for the players, great adventures for the DMs, a solid expansion for Brancalonia.

So, here we have the Macaronicon. It is basically a collection of all the stretch goals from the initial Brancalonia crowdfunding campaign - which is where I got it originally. This was bonus content for me and I have gotten a ton of use out of it. Brancalonia is a "spaghetti fantasy" campaign setting for D&D 5e "based on Italian tradition, folklore, history, landscapes, literature and pop culture" that lets you be a band of roistering Knaves and ne'er do wells out for their latest job. I have reviewed the Brancalonia Core book and Jinx's Almanac before - both great books and the Macaronicon is a close third.

It begs comparison to Jinx's Almanac which are both books of mixed lore, adventures and mechanics. Macaronicon is the more expansive and free-roaming of the pair, coming earlier and being that collection of stretch goals. There is some good stuff in here and plenty of inspiration for DMs thought it has not yet gotten that extra polish to the adventures which comes in Jinx's Almanac, the later book. Not to say that this is not very worthwhile.

As with all the books in the range, the art is great and the book has an aesthetic of old paper ill-used. Pretty like the rest of the range, with great, consistent, evocative art and good clear lay-out.

The Great Tabletop Roleplaying Survey - Initial Data Comb

All praise to The Scholomance who just released a delightful anonymised dataset of a big survey they ran at the turn of the year. Their initial write up is here.

They got a solid 1902 results and you can see a few direct results on the initial write up which I will not rehash here:
How many tabletop groups are you involved in that regularly play game sessions?
How do you usually play your sessions?
How often do you play tabletop roleplaying games?
How long do your sessions typically last?
What was your first tabletop roleplaying system?
Select your current main system.
How would you rate the importance of a system?
How would you rate the complexity of your current main system?

The huge value in this type of big survey is in the cross-referencing, not the raw numbers. You can test out hypotheses like 'people who meet less often will probably game for longer' - and you've got the frequency of meeting up and duration of gaming to check that.

On a first look, it appears that for folk with monthly or more frequent games, that broadly holds true - more 3-5 hour games among the monthly gamers and more 1-3 hour games for the multiple-times-a-week folk. Folk playing less than once a month flip back to more shorter sessions - makes me suspect that if you do not have a regular monthly game carved out, you are taking whatever opportunitites you have, however long they might be.

There is another neat pair of 'what did you start as' and 'what are you now' for player/DM roles - as might be expected the player-to-DM channel is a one-way ratchet. A fair block of players become DMs, maybe half the DM's get to play sometimes but... ain't no going back to 'just player' for those who started as DMs...

Another one I checked was favourite genre against what people are currently playing - and it looks like a decent chunk are getting to play their favourite games - especially Sci-fi and Pulp games - and Fantasy but that is hardly surprising. Green in each bar below is the fraction of people currently playing in their favourite genre for each of those genres. For 'multiple genres across multiple games' the 'mixed genre' people are getting a partial nod.

Anyway - some quick cuts since the data got released - there is a ton of stuff in here that will merit more careful read through - perhaps using 'first game edition' to try and unpick the elder gamers into finer boxes, pull together a list of what games played and there are tons and tons of comments that will merit reading through in their own right. Lots to chew on, I will return to this.