Troy Press published a piece "D&D Rules, According to Past Players" based on a survey they did - and I am fascinated by the 'mentioned in passing' implication of a huge amount of non-active D&D players in the USA - something like 1 in 6 USA folk have played D&D at some point, apparently. Does this make sense?
We poked at this before in "Comparing TTRPG player surveys in US and Germany" where we looked at the previous surveys from the same outfit - Researchscape 2022 Survey and 2019 Survey which also look at who among the general US population has played TTRPGs.
Here they pulled in 1,253 US adults and found 16% - 204 people - had played D&D at some point. They mention "the data was weighted to the U.S. population by 9 demographic questions. The credibility interval for closed-end questions answered by all respondents is ±4 percentage points" so we could conservatively say 12% or 1-in-8 is more representative of general population. If you want to go wild, you could say 20%, 1-in-5 have played D&D at some point but that just seems implausible.
If we stick with the 1-in-6 estimate and take the Census.gov estimate of 342.5 million in the USA, this implies about 55 million folk in the USA with D&D experience?
This is *fascinating* to me - because the perception is that the TTRPG industry is niche - in my lived experience, folk have never heard of a dice that is not six-sided, never mind thrown a d20 in anger. WotC themselves made an estimate of "over 40 million fans around the world" in 2020 - M.T. Black tried to sweep up this and other estimates of how many D&D players there are back in 2021 and ended up with 48 million from taking WotC at their word on growth rates.
One possible way to reconcile the 'feel' of this is the point that this '1-in-6' group are folk that ever played D&D in their lives - if we tease out when they last played things change a touch. Of those surveyed:
20% played this year
23% in 24/25
15% in 2020-2023
41% have not played this side of the pandemic
So roughly half of that are active, half are folk who have played a but no longer do. These are still chunky numbers - 23 million folk who played back in the day, 32.5 who played since the pandemic - 11 million who are playing this year. This survey was taken in April and we know that there is a good chunk of folk who do play on an annual basis so some slice of the 24/25 players are probably still active, just have not gotten their games in this year yet.
There are a couple of other stats they pull out that chime with numbers we have seen elsewhere - 20% of male respondants have played D&D, 13% of female respondents - there is the 60/40 male-to-female ratio we have seen before.
So where is everyone?
We get one additional clue in the editions breakdown at the end - 7% of the respondants had last played the new 5.5e, while 35% had last played 5e. That says, assuming everyone who ever tried 5.5e back in 2024 is still playing today, there are nearly double the amount of folk who are playing today, who have not made the jump to the new system. At the most generous, those folk are all playing 5e - so they were buying new books of WotC up to two years ago. I am sure a bunch of folk are still playing previous editions so that number is lower.
I am going to posit here that D&D's general cultural footprint suffers from the fact that for a lot of folk, they just need to buy the tools once, then they're set up. I can throw no rocks, sitting with multiple editions racked up around me, but even I balked at 4e and 5.5e. People can buy the gamebooks once, whatever edition, and never surface again - merrily playing away with their own game table, invisible to the outside.
Apart from 5.5e it is not clear who could be playing which editions - if we can take a hint from what we see on Obsidian Portal I suspect of the older editions we would find 3e/3.5e, BX and AD&D most likely to still be played.
There was a Techraptor report in Jan 2025 that said 3.6 million characters had been created on D&DBeyond for 5.5e after its first year which aligns quite neatly with the 3.9 million 5.5e players suggested by that 7% of respondants. There is almost certainly some fuzz around that - folk making multiple characters, folk trying 5.5e and reverting to an older edition - but it is coming to the same order of magnitude at least.
We see 58% of folk who ever played D&D have done so since the pandemic - and at least a quarter of them are playing older editions because a max of 42% have last played 5e/5.5e - what are the other 16% playing? Those folk are also not on D&DBeyond because older editions are not supported.
At a minimum it says there are a third again of players out there playing offline for whatever number of players are appearing online through use of D&DBeyond. I think that figure is probably far higher since folk on D&DBeyond create multiple characters, so that online footprint represents less actual people and thus the offline ratio is much larger.
All told a fascinating glimpse into that 'silent majority' of offline players out there, playing away and not interacting with the online nexi of RPG discourse, never counted in any of the 'community polls'.
Additionally, it suggests that there are likely a bunch of ex-D&D-players around in the US that no longer game. All our surveys and the like suggest that most of that is driven by lack of group and lack of time, not lack of appetite for the game itself. Perhaps there is an angle to be worked there for drop-in pick-up games?
Sources:
2026 Survey by Researchscape (N = 1253)
2022 Survey by Researchscape (N = 1074)
2019 Survey by Researchscape (N = 942)
04 May 2026
Shiny TTRPG links #275
More links from about the internet. For yet more, see last weeks collection or the weekly r/OSR blogroll or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Bloggie-nominated. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch, delinked by request.
Vulcan Stev's Database launches the May RPGBlog Carnival topic of Inspiration! Where Does Yours Come From?
A shrike for my dreams shares Don’t prep hexcrawls, prep hexframes
Levi Kornelsen posts The Praxic Compendium
Courtney 🌻 The Sunflower Court writes TTRPG Character Creation Challenge Jam
@thydungeongal shares manifold issues with the secondary industry around D&D
AMONG CATS AND BOOKS posts Against Maps
Rise Up Comus writes Tolkien-Style Maps
Valeria Loves writes A Sicko’s Guide to Prepping D&D
Backwards Tabletop gives us Essay: The Problem with Production Value
ZOtRPG ! shares From mechanics to topographics: when the map becomes the medium of the conversation
derekb posts On Pointcrawls
Vulcan Stev's Database launches the May RPGBlog Carnival topic of Inspiration! Where Does Yours Come From?
A shrike for my dreams shares Don’t prep hexcrawls, prep hexframes
Levi Kornelsen posts The Praxic Compendium
Courtney 🌻 The Sunflower Court writes TTRPG Character Creation Challenge Jam
Modified with the approval of creator Evlyn Moreau
@thydungeongal shares manifold issues with the secondary industry around D&D
AMONG CATS AND BOOKS posts Against Maps
Rise Up Comus writes Tolkien-Style Maps
Valeria Loves writes A Sicko’s Guide to Prepping D&D
Backwards Tabletop gives us Essay: The Problem with Production Value
ZOtRPG ! shares From mechanics to topographics: when the map becomes the medium of the conversation
derekb posts On Pointcrawls
02 May 2026
Actual Test: Dungeons of Knock #1
I have been using Knock #1 as my go-to resource for the Hexcrawl25 campaign - the dungeons in the "Extraordinary Excursions" section were my source for complex sites and I got three of them to table. These dungeons were The citadel of Evil by Stuart Robertson, Praise the Fallen by Graphite Prime and Zaratzarats Manse by Nabok the Censored. I used these for two cultist lairs and a random wizards manse stumbled upon. This still leaves one last dungeon for use if needed - all told great value for the size of the book.
I used all of these dungeons as "I need a dungeon in a hurry because the players went off on a side quest" and they worked pretty well. Even the Citadel of Evil, which I initially thought seemed small, turned out to be very worthwhile. All of them got serious use - at least two sessions apiece from each of them with Praise the Fallen needing one big initial session that was a prisoner break-out then a later three-session return to clear it out completely.
Running through them in order encountered by the players:
Praise the Fallen has 15 A5 pages with lots of interesting bits and pieces within. They got to do a bunch of creeping around some of the nice old school spooky things like statues of angels and so on. Some proper old-school traps like compulsions to fling yourself on a blade were good and unsettling even where saves were made.
On the initial excursion the party missed most of the really nasty stuff - they probed the front bit, got into a big fight with a gathering of cultists and prevailed by bottling them up in a room and liberally using flaming oil. Solid tactics and good use of terrain. They did a bit of further creeping around, decided the spookier, deeper rooms were way over their heads and withdrew with the prisoners they had rescued.
The dungeon lurked in the background, oft mentioned, for much of the rest of the campaign until the party finally decided to go in and neutralise the threat. This return was supposed to be a quick raid (according to players plans) plunging deep into the temple to root out the cult leadership. The first session of this 'final' raid went well for the party as they ambushed cultists, sneaked about and bluffed their way past scattered lowly cultists with stolen robes and their acquired lore. The second session, as they ventured deeper they managed to pass many of the set piece wards and guardians using 'pass-pendants' before rousing a very large cave monster and having to fight them on treacherous terrain which left them low on resources and hit points to end the session. They staggered from that into a next set of guardians for the third session, fighting their way through and then getting into another big fight to stop a summoning. This brought out the dungeons arch villain who was invisibly nibbling them to death with summoned minions before they finally managed to reveal them and land the killing blow, just above the initiative tick where the villain was about to flee and become a recurring pest.
The dungeon itself is really nicely done. You get an intro on one page, some notes on rules applicable for the whole dungeon then a random encounter table and the main villainess. A small, total map is then followed by section-zooms with room-by-room detail. There are nice touches like the numbers of the rooms on the margins - a one two three up in the top corner so as you are leafing through you can quickly see where your where your room is. Stat blocks appear on the page where where you should be using them, descriptions are pretty terse, BX-style. The map is doing a lot of work with proper detailing of stairs up, stairs down secret doors and the likes. Good information density overall. I ran it pretty much straight out of the book.
My only advice is to be enthusiastic about rolling encounter chances - you will not always get them and even when you do, not all of them are going to be serious challenges, so roll often to keep the pressure up.
The Citadel of Evil was an identified location that the party knew they were going to go to so went relatively prepared and this ran over three sessions - one getting to the site and scouting from outside, one session of full-on dungeon-bashing and the last spent scouring the now-pacified wreckage for lurking remnants and/or loot.
They worked their way in through the base, up through the mysterious rooms in the middle, focussed on rescuing prisoners of the inhabitants so less on prying up flagstones and loot to start. The whole thing was a nice combination of slightly mysterious design requiring some careful scouting, non-traps that still needed navigating and then lurking cultists for active danger.
My party spent a session working their way up to the core then got in a fight with the main villain and managed to set a serious fire in the staircase that leads up to the citadel above. They did accelerate that fire but effectively they got into the basements and set the whole thing on fire above while they rescued people and fled. This bypassed some fighting in the upper structure but those foes were mostly guards/not the most interesting thing going on.
Then they did another entire session of poking through the ruins, interacting with traps and dangers and the hazards involved with the burnt out husk and the things rising from the dead and so on.
The dungeon is written to cover two pages so this was incredible bang for buck. Very good stuff, got two solid sessions, ten hours of play out of one side of A4.
The last one was the one on the dust cover, Zaratazarat's Manse, where a wizard was wizarding and cooked up a hazardous artefact that has gotten out of control. On this occassion the artefact is he's made "Ragga Gyxy’s Random Encounter Table", basically a monster summoning slab. This was a place the party was pointed at when they asked a settlement 'what kind of problems have you got' and then decided to poke into it.
I did not use the external village as written because I dropped it into an existing campaign but apart from that, I used everything over two sessions. One was an initial reconnaisance by a semi-open table group and the other was by the rest of the party to clear it out.
In both cases I used the mechanics provided - the big random-encounter table, the per-room encounter ladders, the 'find-the-wizard' rolls, the reaction rolls - which were fun. All of this on the inside of the dust-cover for the magazine so quite small text but still functional.
The first session, the party got there, poked around, ran into some random-encounter generated monsters and met some with negotiation, some with swords drawn. They managed to stumble their way past a bunch of things directly to the wizards bedroom and got in a big fight with the mimic-door there, then spent a block of time dealing with the sketchy magic mirror before leaving with some rescuees.
The second time around a slightly different team went in and went room by room trying to figure out what the problem was. They eventually made their way downstairs, took out the artifact that was malfunctioning to spawn all the monsters and installed the wizards apprentice as the new master of the place before leaving with armfuls of loot.
This is the most complex of the dungeons because there are lots of moving parts - more punchy random monsters, large uncertainty over if/where the wizard is found - and the fact that many of the monsters are sentient and randomly summoned from all sorts of places means they may not be hostile or from this world. I had fun having a dwarf be a warhammer old world dwarf, a white ape be a Barsoomian, etc.
From the inside and outside of a dust cover, let's say two and a half pages of A4, I got two solid sessions, great gaming.
I got great use out of those dungeons - while one could make arguments about room for improvements in any of them which other reviews have done, I think the combination of having a bunch of them in a compact format was very useful indeed when running that open format hexcrawl. The players could roam where they willed and I had kick-ass dungeons at my finger-tips whenever I needed them.
In full transparency I must admit this was not the *most* weight efficient way possible to carry those around since Knock #1 is a chunky book but given the minimal effort involved in pulling it off the shelf and slinging it in my go-bag, I could commit the calories to lug it around.
I used all of these dungeons as "I need a dungeon in a hurry because the players went off on a side quest" and they worked pretty well. Even the Citadel of Evil, which I initially thought seemed small, turned out to be very worthwhile. All of them got serious use - at least two sessions apiece from each of them with Praise the Fallen needing one big initial session that was a prisoner break-out then a later three-session return to clear it out completely.
Running through them in order encountered by the players:
Praise the Fallen has 15 A5 pages with lots of interesting bits and pieces within. They got to do a bunch of creeping around some of the nice old school spooky things like statues of angels and so on. Some proper old-school traps like compulsions to fling yourself on a blade were good and unsettling even where saves were made.
On the initial excursion the party missed most of the really nasty stuff - they probed the front bit, got into a big fight with a gathering of cultists and prevailed by bottling them up in a room and liberally using flaming oil. Solid tactics and good use of terrain. They did a bit of further creeping around, decided the spookier, deeper rooms were way over their heads and withdrew with the prisoners they had rescued.
The dungeon lurked in the background, oft mentioned, for much of the rest of the campaign until the party finally decided to go in and neutralise the threat. This return was supposed to be a quick raid (according to players plans) plunging deep into the temple to root out the cult leadership. The first session of this 'final' raid went well for the party as they ambushed cultists, sneaked about and bluffed their way past scattered lowly cultists with stolen robes and their acquired lore. The second session, as they ventured deeper they managed to pass many of the set piece wards and guardians using 'pass-pendants' before rousing a very large cave monster and having to fight them on treacherous terrain which left them low on resources and hit points to end the session. They staggered from that into a next set of guardians for the third session, fighting their way through and then getting into another big fight to stop a summoning. This brought out the dungeons arch villain who was invisibly nibbling them to death with summoned minions before they finally managed to reveal them and land the killing blow, just above the initiative tick where the villain was about to flee and become a recurring pest.
The dungeon itself is really nicely done. You get an intro on one page, some notes on rules applicable for the whole dungeon then a random encounter table and the main villainess. A small, total map is then followed by section-zooms with room-by-room detail. There are nice touches like the numbers of the rooms on the margins - a one two three up in the top corner so as you are leafing through you can quickly see where your where your room is. Stat blocks appear on the page where where you should be using them, descriptions are pretty terse, BX-style. The map is doing a lot of work with proper detailing of stairs up, stairs down secret doors and the likes. Good information density overall. I ran it pretty much straight out of the book.
My only advice is to be enthusiastic about rolling encounter chances - you will not always get them and even when you do, not all of them are going to be serious challenges, so roll often to keep the pressure up.
The Citadel of Evil was an identified location that the party knew they were going to go to so went relatively prepared and this ran over three sessions - one getting to the site and scouting from outside, one session of full-on dungeon-bashing and the last spent scouring the now-pacified wreckage for lurking remnants and/or loot.
They worked their way in through the base, up through the mysterious rooms in the middle, focussed on rescuing prisoners of the inhabitants so less on prying up flagstones and loot to start. The whole thing was a nice combination of slightly mysterious design requiring some careful scouting, non-traps that still needed navigating and then lurking cultists for active danger.
My party spent a session working their way up to the core then got in a fight with the main villain and managed to set a serious fire in the staircase that leads up to the citadel above. They did accelerate that fire but effectively they got into the basements and set the whole thing on fire above while they rescued people and fled. This bypassed some fighting in the upper structure but those foes were mostly guards/not the most interesting thing going on.
Then they did another entire session of poking through the ruins, interacting with traps and dangers and the hazards involved with the burnt out husk and the things rising from the dead and so on.
The dungeon is written to cover two pages so this was incredible bang for buck. Very good stuff, got two solid sessions, ten hours of play out of one side of A4.
The last one was the one on the dust cover, Zaratazarat's Manse, where a wizard was wizarding and cooked up a hazardous artefact that has gotten out of control. On this occassion the artefact is he's made "Ragga Gyxy’s Random Encounter Table", basically a monster summoning slab. This was a place the party was pointed at when they asked a settlement 'what kind of problems have you got' and then decided to poke into it.
I did not use the external village as written because I dropped it into an existing campaign but apart from that, I used everything over two sessions. One was an initial reconnaisance by a semi-open table group and the other was by the rest of the party to clear it out.
In both cases I used the mechanics provided - the big random-encounter table, the per-room encounter ladders, the 'find-the-wizard' rolls, the reaction rolls - which were fun. All of this on the inside of the dust-cover for the magazine so quite small text but still functional.
The first session, the party got there, poked around, ran into some random-encounter generated monsters and met some with negotiation, some with swords drawn. They managed to stumble their way past a bunch of things directly to the wizards bedroom and got in a big fight with the mimic-door there, then spent a block of time dealing with the sketchy magic mirror before leaving with some rescuees.
The second time around a slightly different team went in and went room by room trying to figure out what the problem was. They eventually made their way downstairs, took out the artifact that was malfunctioning to spawn all the monsters and installed the wizards apprentice as the new master of the place before leaving with armfuls of loot.
This is the most complex of the dungeons because there are lots of moving parts - more punchy random monsters, large uncertainty over if/where the wizard is found - and the fact that many of the monsters are sentient and randomly summoned from all sorts of places means they may not be hostile or from this world. I had fun having a dwarf be a warhammer old world dwarf, a white ape be a Barsoomian, etc.
From the inside and outside of a dust cover, let's say two and a half pages of A4, I got two solid sessions, great gaming.
I got great use out of those dungeons - while one could make arguments about room for improvements in any of them which other reviews have done, I think the combination of having a bunch of them in a compact format was very useful indeed when running that open format hexcrawl. The players could roam where they willed and I had kick-ass dungeons at my finger-tips whenever I needed them.
In full transparency I must admit this was not the *most* weight efficient way possible to carry those around since Knock #1 is a chunky book but given the minimal effort involved in pulling it off the shelf and slinging it in my go-bag, I could commit the calories to lug it around.
29 April 2026
Dredging old adventures for a campaign #City26
I have been pondering the nature of adventures to run in this hive-city - what is interesting to run *here* as opposed to just anywhere else.
The City26 template itself does mandate adventure hooks, random encounters and NPCs and these are useful but do not quite snap together into full sessions. I also realised as I have been preparing this graphic that I misread the instructions and have been coming up with d6 plot hooks & quests for each ward to go with the d12 random encounters and 7 NPCs - which is not actually what is requested.
I think the unique stories to tell here are the 'teeter-totter' ones - where there is motivation to minimise damage as opposed to just glass everything. Looking at the corpus of Imperium Maledictum and Dark Heresy adventures, we do not actually get a lot of them, in particular there are not so many that see you committed to a single hive as opposed to doing the Inquisitions will across the sector.
Casting about for other potential sources I looked at a few -
- Riffing off the 'megacity' aspect - old Judge Dredd adventures in White Dwarf / elsewhere
- Focussing on the 'weird investigation' aspect - Delta Green
- Taking the 'anachronistic technology' swords-and-robots angle - Eberron and Iron Kingdoms
- Returning to the sources - Necromunda skirmish wargame scenarios
It was a fascinating dive to fish out the best-of Judge Dredd adventures and recall my old 2000AD reading days but ultimately while there are some interesting adventures the flavour is too gonzo in Dredd and only a few could be retrofitted without wringing all the interesting bits out. There were a couple of potential ones - a murder investigation on a mobile mega-highway rest stop and a bang raid by rubber-ball bouncing thieves - that could potentially be workable but this is not the rich deep vein of adventures I wanted.
The Delta Green angle seems most promising - having read through Warhammer Crime novels recently, I appreciate that a standard criminal investigation gets interesting when you have to contend with all the nonsense of the 40k universe. There are libraries of freely available one-shots and the 'mythos threat' and cultists of Delta Green is easily reskinned as 'chaos threat' for 40k. This is a motherlode of content but complex and requiring a fair amount of red-penning to re-align it from mythos to chaos.
Looking at Eberron there are good adventures here - lightning rail heists, intrigue and mystery as a focus - but a lot of running around the continents. Similarly with Iron Kingdoms - much of the action takes place out in the wilds. There are probably some good things here but when I look at the recommendations for urban adventures, the advice seems to be to convert yet other standard D&D campaigns to Ebberon, so not quite what I need.
There is good thematic fodder in the Necromunda scenarios - a pair of good summaries are here and here but these are more fodder for tactical combats or conflicts to work around than for the overarching framing of an adventure. Useful, because once you get any sort of big hook you can then bulk it out with some of these encounters en route, but not the whole thing.
All told this suggest that tailoring an adventure creation workflow for the investigations in this hive-city might actually be the way to go - identify the factions in play and clarify their resources, pull on some of the plot-hooks and then fold the whole thing together by picking some of the random encounters or some Necromunda fight scenarios to be site of interest, salt those with clues to the plot hooks (potentially delivered via the 7 NPCs) and then think through the locations where resolution could happen.
The key difference compared to most of the standard fantasy adventuring I would run is that there are a lot more opportunities to do stand-off investigating and research in such a setting - pulling auspex logs, querying records with local Arbites divisions, etc.
The other bit I think I need to ponder is capturing the different flavours of adventures available on a Hive of a Knight-world. I think a campaign set here would be an exploration of all the dreadful things that can go wrong just on world, as inspired by my recent Rogue Trader CRPG run where nothing ever stayed fixed. It points towards the players being potentially Administratum tithe-auditors or their equivalents working directly for the Knight-house Sacristans - the classic general trouble-shooters with a strong side-order of getting things done quietly before higher authorities decide to stop being subtle and drop the hammer on the whole world.
All this does point back to the importance of 'intro adventures' to showcase a setting. Once more, we discover the wheel.
Anyway, in my 'keep me honest' progress tracker stats:
Progress: 23/56 wards completed
Completion vs target: 42% vs 33% target
Population covered: 56%
So far doing ok but I think I have creamed off the best inspiration and things are slowing down a chunk. I already reworked my initial list of wards to drop in a new trio I came up with, I think this approach will serve well as we go because things that are currently looking a bit beige to me will become interesting as two or more previous things get mashed together because I need the space for other good ideas.
The City26 template itself does mandate adventure hooks, random encounters and NPCs and these are useful but do not quite snap together into full sessions. I also realised as I have been preparing this graphic that I misread the instructions and have been coming up with d6 plot hooks & quests for each ward to go with the d12 random encounters and 7 NPCs - which is not actually what is requested.
I think the unique stories to tell here are the 'teeter-totter' ones - where there is motivation to minimise damage as opposed to just glass everything. Looking at the corpus of Imperium Maledictum and Dark Heresy adventures, we do not actually get a lot of them, in particular there are not so many that see you committed to a single hive as opposed to doing the Inquisitions will across the sector.
Casting about for other potential sources I looked at a few -
- Riffing off the 'megacity' aspect - old Judge Dredd adventures in White Dwarf / elsewhere
- Focussing on the 'weird investigation' aspect - Delta Green
- Taking the 'anachronistic technology' swords-and-robots angle - Eberron and Iron Kingdoms
- Returning to the sources - Necromunda skirmish wargame scenarios
It was a fascinating dive to fish out the best-of Judge Dredd adventures and recall my old 2000AD reading days but ultimately while there are some interesting adventures the flavour is too gonzo in Dredd and only a few could be retrofitted without wringing all the interesting bits out. There were a couple of potential ones - a murder investigation on a mobile mega-highway rest stop and a bang raid by rubber-ball bouncing thieves - that could potentially be workable but this is not the rich deep vein of adventures I wanted.
The Delta Green angle seems most promising - having read through Warhammer Crime novels recently, I appreciate that a standard criminal investigation gets interesting when you have to contend with all the nonsense of the 40k universe. There are libraries of freely available one-shots and the 'mythos threat' and cultists of Delta Green is easily reskinned as 'chaos threat' for 40k. This is a motherlode of content but complex and requiring a fair amount of red-penning to re-align it from mythos to chaos.
Looking at Eberron there are good adventures here - lightning rail heists, intrigue and mystery as a focus - but a lot of running around the continents. Similarly with Iron Kingdoms - much of the action takes place out in the wilds. There are probably some good things here but when I look at the recommendations for urban adventures, the advice seems to be to convert yet other standard D&D campaigns to Ebberon, so not quite what I need.
There is good thematic fodder in the Necromunda scenarios - a pair of good summaries are here and here but these are more fodder for tactical combats or conflicts to work around than for the overarching framing of an adventure. Useful, because once you get any sort of big hook you can then bulk it out with some of these encounters en route, but not the whole thing.
All told this suggest that tailoring an adventure creation workflow for the investigations in this hive-city might actually be the way to go - identify the factions in play and clarify their resources, pull on some of the plot-hooks and then fold the whole thing together by picking some of the random encounters or some Necromunda fight scenarios to be site of interest, salt those with clues to the plot hooks (potentially delivered via the 7 NPCs) and then think through the locations where resolution could happen.
The key difference compared to most of the standard fantasy adventuring I would run is that there are a lot more opportunities to do stand-off investigating and research in such a setting - pulling auspex logs, querying records with local Arbites divisions, etc.
The other bit I think I need to ponder is capturing the different flavours of adventures available on a Hive of a Knight-world. I think a campaign set here would be an exploration of all the dreadful things that can go wrong just on world, as inspired by my recent Rogue Trader CRPG run where nothing ever stayed fixed. It points towards the players being potentially Administratum tithe-auditors or their equivalents working directly for the Knight-house Sacristans - the classic general trouble-shooters with a strong side-order of getting things done quietly before higher authorities decide to stop being subtle and drop the hammer on the whole world.
All this does point back to the importance of 'intro adventures' to showcase a setting. Once more, we discover the wheel.
Anyway, in my 'keep me honest' progress tracker stats:
Progress: 23/56 wards completed
Completion vs target: 42% vs 33% target
Population covered: 56%
So far doing ok but I think I have creamed off the best inspiration and things are slowing down a chunk. I already reworked my initial list of wards to drop in a new trio I came up with, I think this approach will serve well as we go because things that are currently looking a bit beige to me will become interesting as two or more previous things get mashed together because I need the space for other good ideas.
27 April 2026
Shiny TTRPG links #274
Interesting links from across the internet. For more, see last weeks collection or the weekly r/OSR blogroll or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Bloggie-nominated. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch, delinked by request.
Michelle Jones hosts You Cannot Play This TTRPG Jam
Benign Brown Beast posts Virtual Table-Top Tokens from Tom Gauld: A Story in Images
Fistful of Crits hosts Romantasy TTRPG Jam
Troy Press gives us D&D Rules, According to Past Players
DivNull RPG posts RPGs by Genre
Sly Flourish writes House Rules from Various 5es
@elbiotipo gives us why do adventurers exist in this world at all
afcbrodie shares Seize, Ground, Listen
Crow’s Corner writes Designing Pamphlet Games (With Shitty Printers in Mind)
I Cast Light! gives us DON'T SPLIT THE SESSION: Rule 0 For Avoiding A Play-Killing Mistake In Modern Lives
Congas.blog shares Is the OSR evolving?
@prokopetz posts "the real problem with Dungeons & Dragons is false advertising, not anything that's present in its text"
The Foot of Blue Mountain shares Magical Violence
The Black Citadel gives us WIZARD VIOLENCE
Trick's Tales shares Make Your Own God-Spirits (for a Game About the Mongolian Empire)
Michelle Jones hosts You Cannot Play This TTRPG Jam
Benign Brown Beast posts Virtual Table-Top Tokens from Tom Gauld: A Story in Images
Fistful of Crits hosts Romantasy TTRPG Jam
Troy Press gives us D&D Rules, According to Past Players
DivNull RPG posts RPGs by Genre
Sly Flourish writes House Rules from Various 5es
@elbiotipo gives us why do adventurers exist in this world at all
afcbrodie shares Seize, Ground, Listen
Crow’s Corner writes Designing Pamphlet Games (With Shitty Printers in Mind)
I Cast Light! gives us DON'T SPLIT THE SESSION: Rule 0 For Avoiding A Play-Killing Mistake In Modern Lives
Congas.blog shares Is the OSR evolving?
@prokopetz posts "the real problem with Dungeons & Dragons is false advertising, not anything that's present in its text"
The Foot of Blue Mountain shares Magical Violence
The Black Citadel gives us WIZARD VIOLENCE
Trick's Tales shares Make Your Own God-Spirits (for a Game About the Mongolian Empire)
25 April 2026
d12 Attack flyers for Spelljammers
I see quite a few engined-/fighter-type things in various Spelljammer homebrew and it leaves me surprised we do not have more 'attack critters' for the same purpose but more aligned to the Age of Sail flavour - packs of trained beasts or flying mounts.
The archetype I can think of is the githyanki knight on a Star Lancer from the "Behold... H'Catha!" Spelljammer Academy 5e adventure though there have always been nods towards 'getting monsters on the opposing ship' - with catapults flinging skeleton-balls or bottled green slimes in various Spelljammer 2e adventures.
It feels like there should be more 'ship-based monsters' for boarding action support than we see - especially since in 5e killing the crew is a far more direct path to victory than attempting to batter the opposing ship apart.
Ship-to-ship encounters could be made more interesting with the addition of such 'attack monsters' - it is the equivalent to changing the terrain to make ship-to-ship action feel fresh again when you might be constrained by the ship deck plans or opposing forces otherwise being quite similar - e.g. in a conflict against a faction where you might repeatedly run up against the same ship type (i.e. terrain) and fights might get to feel samey.
My thoughts are that there are a couple of potential options that achieve this while fitting a bit more into the 'age of sail' flavour
- flying-steeds / mounted attackers - as per SJA knight-on-a-star lancer
- attack beasties - harassers, swarms, like a wardog in a dungeon
- flung critters - as above, skeletons, slimes or other 'living munitions'
- the 'fast-moving, damage-flinging single thing' is a mage or a monster - or someone decked out with a flying-carpet and a wand of fireballs.
If there is the means for a small-fast craft lying around, I would see it being more used for sneaky boarding actions rather than engaging something with a lot of weapons while you only have a few.
I think best illustrated by a few examples.
d12 creatures arriving as that craft closes to boarding distance
1. A burly crewman with a boarding pike atop a small wyvern swoops under your hull to attack weapon emplacements from the far side
2. A gallant captain with polished blade and befeathered hat atop a comet steed directly challenges his opposite number
3. Robes billowing behind them as they fly, a mage loops over your ship firing spells at exposed crew
4. An ogre flings howling goblins into the rigging of your ship, some with shortbows, some with firepots, others scuttle down below decks to ambush your crew there
5. Giant wolf-spiders leap from the drow ship, biting crew and darting along the hull
6. Illithids just appeared aboard, firing spells and trying to devour your crews succulent brains
7. Giant toads with psurlons atop them leap aboard and start trying to swallow your crew, fighting over them
8. A flyby from the neogi ship drops a spread of piercers on your deck
9. A squad of dohwar atop space swine swoops down on you weapon emplacements
10. An elf flying a gadabout drags a rope with a trio of fellows into your rigging
11. An enemy catapult flings a jar with a tar-form gehreleth onto your deck with the intention of standing off and allowing the fiend to rampage
12. Catapult flung balls of skeletons land on the deck, un-fold and attack
The archetype I can think of is the githyanki knight on a Star Lancer from the "Behold... H'Catha!" Spelljammer Academy 5e adventure though there have always been nods towards 'getting monsters on the opposing ship' - with catapults flinging skeleton-balls or bottled green slimes in various Spelljammer 2e adventures.
It feels like there should be more 'ship-based monsters' for boarding action support than we see - especially since in 5e killing the crew is a far more direct path to victory than attempting to batter the opposing ship apart.
Ship-to-ship encounters could be made more interesting with the addition of such 'attack monsters' - it is the equivalent to changing the terrain to make ship-to-ship action feel fresh again when you might be constrained by the ship deck plans or opposing forces otherwise being quite similar - e.g. in a conflict against a faction where you might repeatedly run up against the same ship type (i.e. terrain) and fights might get to feel samey.
My thoughts are that there are a couple of potential options that achieve this while fitting a bit more into the 'age of sail' flavour
- flying-steeds / mounted attackers - as per SJA knight-on-a-star lancer
- attack beasties - harassers, swarms, like a wardog in a dungeon
- flung critters - as above, skeletons, slimes or other 'living munitions'
- the 'fast-moving, damage-flinging single thing' is a mage or a monster - or someone decked out with a flying-carpet and a wand of fireballs.
If there is the means for a small-fast craft lying around, I would see it being more used for sneaky boarding actions rather than engaging something with a lot of weapons while you only have a few.
I think best illustrated by a few examples.
d12 creatures arriving as that craft closes to boarding distance
1. A burly crewman with a boarding pike atop a small wyvern swoops under your hull to attack weapon emplacements from the far side
2. A gallant captain with polished blade and befeathered hat atop a comet steed directly challenges his opposite number
3. Robes billowing behind them as they fly, a mage loops over your ship firing spells at exposed crew
4. An ogre flings howling goblins into the rigging of your ship, some with shortbows, some with firepots, others scuttle down below decks to ambush your crew there
5. Giant wolf-spiders leap from the drow ship, biting crew and darting along the hull
6. Illithids just appeared aboard, firing spells and trying to devour your crews succulent brains
7. Giant toads with psurlons atop them leap aboard and start trying to swallow your crew, fighting over them
8. A flyby from the neogi ship drops a spread of piercers on your deck
9. A squad of dohwar atop space swine swoops down on you weapon emplacements
10. An elf flying a gadabout drags a rope with a trio of fellows into your rigging
11. An enemy catapult flings a jar with a tar-form gehreleth onto your deck with the intention of standing off and allowing the fiend to rampage
12. Catapult flung balls of skeletons land on the deck, un-fold and attack
22 April 2026
Restoration of the r/OSR blogroll
tl;dr: a tale of recovering a piece of blogging community infrastructure from bad decisions and technology failure.
Regular readers will have noted I flag the r/OSR blogroll as a place to look for interesting blogposts. I think even in this time of blog-rings, bluesky feeds and other blog aggregators, the r/OSR blogroll serves a purpose in being a low-threshold start point for folk to throw their blogs out in front of a place where their likely audience comes to look.
Around the start of 2023 there was a question about getting the blog-roll pinned to the top of the r/OSR subreddit and at the same time the mods offered to automate its creation which I took them up on. By the end of the year it was clear one or both of these may have been a mistake and I suspect it was both - pinning killed visibilty on mobiles and the automation subsequently broke/stopped updating in early 2024.
After waiting out the year, on the anniversary of things breaking, I relaunched it in the old way - manually done, this time on a Friday, and mercifully it has seemed to reignite, albeit at a lower intensity than before.
Now in the stewardship of u/Leicester68 of Leicester's Ramble, the blogroll has run since pre-pandemic I believe - I took over posting them every Sunday in mid-2021 from u/Sofinho1980 of Alone in the Labyrinth as they took it over from u/shuttered_room of Shuttered Room.
Taking "comments" as our core indicator of success - these are the people leaving links to blogs, commenting on the blogs of others and generally participating - we see things are steady since we restored the blogroll, but still only half of where it was before the unintended hiatus of the auto-updater breaking. Being optimistic, there is a suggestion that the new stewardship of Leicester68 might be bringing in some more eyeballs, certainly there is proven, recent potential to be doing better.
Regular readers will have noted I flag the r/OSR blogroll as a place to look for interesting blogposts. I think even in this time of blog-rings, bluesky feeds and other blog aggregators, the r/OSR blogroll serves a purpose in being a low-threshold start point for folk to throw their blogs out in front of a place where their likely audience comes to look.
Around the start of 2023 there was a question about getting the blog-roll pinned to the top of the r/OSR subreddit and at the same time the mods offered to automate its creation which I took them up on. By the end of the year it was clear one or both of these may have been a mistake and I suspect it was both - pinning killed visibilty on mobiles and the automation subsequently broke/stopped updating in early 2024.
After waiting out the year, on the anniversary of things breaking, I relaunched it in the old way - manually done, this time on a Friday, and mercifully it has seemed to reignite, albeit at a lower intensity than before.
Now in the stewardship of u/Leicester68 of Leicester's Ramble, the blogroll has run since pre-pandemic I believe - I took over posting them every Sunday in mid-2021 from u/Sofinho1980 of Alone in the Labyrinth as they took it over from u/shuttered_room of Shuttered Room.
Taking "comments" as our core indicator of success - these are the people leaving links to blogs, commenting on the blogs of others and generally participating - we see things are steady since we restored the blogroll, but still only half of where it was before the unintended hiatus of the auto-updater breaking. Being optimistic, there is a suggestion that the new stewardship of Leicester68 might be bringing in some more eyeballs, certainly there is proven, recent potential to be doing better.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)