Props driven investigations for Imperium Maledictum #City26

Two sessions in to the IM City26 game I have been having a go at conveying the atmosphere with physical printout for some of the things they find during their investigation - partly to reflect the grinding bureaucracy of the Warhammer 40k Imperium but also to convey some of the voices of the factions through vox-log transcripts.

Engagement seems ok, getting everyone to read a handout is a bit of a time sink but when there is a handful of them in play that people can rotate between them it seems to work. At player request I have set up a thread on our gaming society forum with all those uploaded, we will see if that gets much interaction.

Formats for a future yet to come

I combed through official sourcebooks to get a standard handout format - starting with the old Rogue Trader '87 and working up through Dark Heresy and Imperium Maledictum. There is happily a lot of content out there on 40k lore which puts lots of the icons and images easily to hand.

One of my favourite things I learned doing this was how the date format worked - the first digit is a check-sum type confidence interval depending on how close the connection is to Terra. Up to 5, it is a continuous chain, 6-8 are increasing levels of 'we can tie it back to a date we think we know when it happened' by margins of less than a year, less than ten years and more than ten years. Lastly we have 9 which is 'a xenos wrote this, do not trust it' which is entirely apt for the setting.

I worked some things up in Word with basic fonts, used the formats I pieced together - headers of subject, date, classification, who transcribed it, ancillary references at the bottom. For drafting Imperial documentation one does well to channel the stereotypical secret policeman - the content is one thing but precision about who, where, when is critical so whoever is responsible can be found and blamed afterwards.

To reflect the vast timescales for the setting I aged up some of the documents to reflect how noone had looked at the issue for ages - this involved printing it off then scrubbing the inside of the heating furnace with it, with particular attention to the edges which worked well.

Progress logs at table

Since vox-transcripts are so prevalent in the setting I am also trialing a new means of session logging - I throw down a voice recorder at the end of the session and get the players to record their report to their Patron. This is then transcribed and I clean it up and give it an appropriate header to become another handout. I would not be entirely regretful for this campaign to flare-out and another party to have to try and pick things up from these ... terse... activity logs.

So far it is working, the table has logs to work from at the start of each session, let us see how it evolves over the half dozen sessions we have left. That sentiment broadly stands for the props in general - good so far, not sure about the overall effort-reward ratio, will hold off

Overall #City26 progress tracker stats:
Progress: 44/52 wards completed
Completion vs target: 85% vs 73% target
Population covered: 87%

Shiny TTRPG links #295

Slightly late shiny links gathered from around the web. For more, try last weeks set found here or the weekly r/OSR blogroll or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Bloggie-nominated. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch, delinked by request.

Thriftomancer shares Hexcrawloween 2

The Nothic's Eye writes Inadvisable Decisions (GLΔG)

Bat in the Attic shares Why is the Ogre there?

Blog of Forlorn Encystment shares Developing the Sandbox: The Campaign Calendar

Games Workshop posts Necromunda RPG

Rise Up Comus shares Beholders are intellectual property, eh?

Crow’s Corner posts Surviving in a Male-Dominated Hobby

Trick's Tales writes DRGE (Dice Roller Game Engine)

The Onion gives us Olivia Rodrigo Releases Fantasy Tabletop Game ‘The High Winter Elves Of Girlville’

Among Cats and Books gives us Rub My Body in Goose Fat, Daddy, I Want to Fly

Zanzibar Games shares Toyetic Wizardry

Whose Measure God Could Not Take writes Downtime and “””Stronghold Management”””

Lonely Star shares I dislike "worldbuilding"

The Black Citadel posts KILL THE CUCKOLD SELF

BASTIONLAND gives us Workflow Eats Features for Breakfast

Kludge Kauldron writes Finishing Campaigns

Store Brand Danger shares Big Map Progression

The Dolent Chronicle posts On Halo

SlothBorg writes Five Room Dungeon Generator

Review + Actual Play: Emelda's Song

tl:dr; a three part adventure with an investigation, infiltration and tomb-dive; neatly presented and fun to run.

I got this as part of my Dolmenwood order - it turned up in the giant box - and on the basis of it getting hailed as a great one-shot adventure I decided to run it at one of my open table sessions.

The book is a 36-page A5 hardback - the Dolmenwood/OSE standard - with maps on the inside covers and double columns with art throughout. The format within is that well-thought-out Dolmenwood approach of 'location, box with key descriptive items, likely actions, stats for anything present' that makes it pretty easy to use. One could give it a go un-read I suspect but it might get tricky.

So what do you actually get in the book?

Shiny TTRPG links #294

New shiny links from a new week on the web. For more, try last weeks set found here or the weekly r/OSR blogroll or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Bloggie-nominated. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch, delinked by request.

Afraid of Encounters gives us Indonesian TTRPG Blogwagon ROUNDUP

Peter Hall at Scientific American posts Unique, mathematical 60-sided dice go on display

Charlie's Diary writes Rethinking space opera

Homebrew and Hacking gives us On Running a TTRPG Club

Roleplaying Tips shares When We Improvise Ourselves Into A Corner

subjunctive moods gives us just skip it!

Vaults of Zin shares Org-as-Class for Everything

Other coins or other than coins (RPG Blog Carnival)

Campaign Mastery gives us this months prompt The Face of Money for the RPG Blog Carnival. This post covers my slightly meta-takes at two of the questions posed on the prompting post using my old original AD&D home campaign and its prep. Those questions are:
1. What’s depicted on your coinage and banknotes and what are the stories behind those depictions?
2. What makes the currency of your game world distinctive, and what impact does that have?

When I read the prompt I knew exactly what I wanted to talk about but the question was could I find the evidence now, some thirty-odd years later. Happily, my pack-rat instincts have served me well in this instance and lo, I have unearthed the original drawn up coinage for my first AD&D campaign, in a massively inefficient use of game prep time. This first is an orc who was among the first encounters my players ever ran into - guess what, you do not need to draw portraits of all the foes, nor sketch out the loot they hold.

I did however know exactly what those coins in the orcs pocket looked like because the *second page* of campaign prep I ever did was this - hashing out a map to have the campaign in and then working out the coinage for all those places. Praise be I had the instincts to just work out a core realm and the immediate neighbours and not try to build my own Faerun straight out of the blocks.

Coins similarly turned up in more sophisticated hoards.

So coming back to our questions:
1. What’s depicted on your coinage and banknotes and what are the stories behind those depictions?

For the 'game realm' of the Taran Kingdom, various birds - the eagle, condor and owl - with a gate before a mountain for the reverse. Decent imagery, fairly generic but we are literally in generic fantasy kingdom here so fit for purpose. For the next door Trojan Kingdom we get the Gods of War and Trade on the big coins - complete with phonetically spelt coin names using the greek alphabet and a trireme on the back. Thematically appropriate, guess those guys must have been intended to be ancient greek knock-offs, I do not recall us ever getting that far.

Getting weirder with the other neighbours we have our half slate, half Jesonite 'Maral Riff' worth and EP with a copper... stylised boat?... on the back. Those were from the northern state of Maral of which I remember little beyond I think it was a city-state of some kind? Feels sufficiently hackneyed. The 'ivory skull' pieces of 'Old Salam Tur' I think were the coinage of the northern Domain of the Mage Lord Tarkesh - where he did not bother to mint anything and just ran the place on excavated loot. Or maybe that was the Zarkans to the north west - they also had a Poseidon marked 'Bit' and a 'talon'.

Beyond picking themes that suited the nations, that is matched to whatever lightly reskinned historical earth culture I was ripping off, then there was not much more intent to them beyond that.

2. What makes the currency of your game world distinctive, and what impact does that have?

There was supposed to be some element of that with the orc above - the handful of Maral Riffs was supposed to mean something but it was never picked up by the players and I was way to green at the time to master such things as lore delivery through treasure.

If you want your coins to make a difference, you need to make them make a difference - equivalent to finding a hitman with pockets full of Brazilean Reals - quite specific, definitely worth looking into.

Years later I did manage to pull it off but only after educating my players on the Planes of the Multiverse through the whole Kraken Mesa campaign and then running a few of them through JCQ - green steel in the pockets of a foe they slew tipped them off that the ba'atezu were involved.

I have not, in recent campaigns - neither Hexcrawl25 or the open-table Brancalonia campaign that preceded it put much of a focus on the nature of the cash beyond being a historical marker for how long a hoard stood undisturbed. There were some entertaining rusted-together submerged dragons hoards and some caches of coins that had been undisturbed since the elven reign / the time of the predator queens / the ancient dwarves but the specific heraldy and look of those coins did not get detailed.

For me it was Dragon Magazine #207 - Treasures, Magical & Mundane that pointed me towards having valuable things that were not just hoards of coins and ever since then I have de-focused coins, and thus their specific origins, and foregrounded slightly more awkward and interesting treasures - gold but it is a set of trays, paper deeds to a townhouse in a hostile realm, scrolls, etc. I think this level of 'trade goods and treasures' made for more distinctive world-building than what particular iconography was stamped on this particular set of gold pieces - I certainly got more mileage out of this approach to valuables but of course, your table and players may be different.

Shiny TTRPG links #293

Fresh shiny links from the internet! For more, see last week found here or the weekly r/OSR blogroll or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Bloggie-nominated. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch, delinked by request.

Sage's Sanctum posts Resurrection in Pneumos

Elfmaids & Octopi shares Pacing a campaign

Advantage on Arcana posts Joesky Wants To Tax Me But This Is Boston And It's 1773

Valeria Loves shares How Deadly is the OSR, Actually?

Throne of Salt posts Cut-Up Timeline of the Future

Lonely Star writes Player Agency and Planning Autonomy

Beau Rancourt gives us Reflections: OSR

Big Mac shares TSR's lost Educational Adventure series

Towers of spider-haunted mystery posts Sneak peek: Work in progress rules for managing an adventuring guild’s headquarters

Setting up Imperium Maledictum adventures for #City26

I marshalled some players and got through a session zero and simple investigative scene using Imperium Maledictum and have been recently reading back through my old Dark Heresy and the new Imperium Maledictum adventure anthologies to get a sense of the structure of these things - not that I couldn't just do "5-room-dungeon-but-40k" but I wanted to try and get a sense of how 40kRPG games ought to be run officially.

The big difference is they seem to follow a three act structure; each of those then broken down into two bits. There is a thing to find out so go to a place and resolve the problem there to get the clue to lead onwards. Essentially solving minor mysteries to get clues to the meta-conspiracy behind it all. The first and third acts are the set up and resolution respectively and the second act is an accordion you can expand or shrink as much as the mood takes you. Essentially, the 'gather clues' second act can require finding as many clues as you see fit.

The big thing for Dark Heresy or Imperial Maledictum is the players are primarily investigators - even when levelled up and quite punchy, they are not the heavy firepower of the Adeptus Astartes. The thing they can do which the various big guns of the setting cannot is investigation and social pieces. You are not going to sneak your way through a masquerade ball with a Warlord Titan but then that is not its job. Combat in Imperium Maledictum is also pretty vicious with critical hit tables that will see you dead-dead on the first shot if you are unlucky. This is combined with the 'superiority' mechanics of granting chunky bonuses in combat if you have gained intelligence on the adversaries or the battle-site to make pre-confrontation gathering of information highly desirable.

The broad recipe seems to be
- pick three locations, connect them all by a thread
- have two things to do at each location, maybe have an extra clue that might be found
- have a further location where the big bad or revelation is
- front it all with a briefing scene

Note the briefing scene at the front could be a data-dump while the players are strapped into a drop-ship; the Imperium is big on need-to-know.

Reading through the adventure anthologies, GMs guides and the like, I have found a number of sidebars hammering on the point of 'do not gate the adventure behind a single skill roll' which I can definitely see being an issue one could stumble into. There is potentially a '40k GUMSHOE' adaptation out there that might have legs, a bit like Lorefinder where you keep the combat system and GUMSHOE the investigatory elements.

Gathering clues and investigating suspects could take a significant amount of time, in particular with the strange and convoluted technologies and approaches available in the 40k universe, players could come at the problem in many, many ways so being flexible at this point is a must.

The final act three judgement, when enough information has been gathered to drive a confrontation can also vary massively - from handing a compiled file of evidence off to a senior for a corruption prosecution through to door-kicking an active cult-ritual to stop the world being sucked into the warp. The key boundary is the establishment of what is going on, there is another universe of potential for what the players might do about it beyond.

Sketching out a mini-campaign

I will be drawing a lot on my open table one-shots experience here for how to get a table rolling and resolved within a time slot.

The briefings are set up - the patron for the group is a Tithe Prefectus, one very concerned with ensuring industrial output drops not a hair. The overall schtick for the mini-campaign is going to be the players being on-world trouble-shooters sent to fix things before greater and more terrible eyes are drawn to the problem. The cover-up squad, if you will. Each session starting with 'leading indicators for output decline have turned red in this sector, go fix it' should work.

I have many, many locations from the City26 project so that entire element is pre-solved, what I need is to figure out what is going on and where the trail of trouble might lead. I think the big thing to lean into here to capture the flavour of the place is 'hiding in scale' - at one point there are clues and solid leads but they lead onwards to 'the suspect is definitely in Sumpside, along with merely 87 million others'. Similarly, the high ambient background level of violence, from gangs and casual brutality by the authorities through to rotten health and dreadful industrial safety, means that leads dead-ending in a corpse is entirely possible.

I have sketched up a primary spine for a mini-campaign, a central mystery and the false-path that the patrons lackeys have followed in prologue and gotten stumped. The players will take this up with a problem, an investigation log that led nowhere and the instruction to go figure it out. Hopefully this will provide a vehicle for a tour of interesting locations, adventuresome encounters and hopefully build towards a big resolution.

Each session will thus be solving some part of the greater whole and tossing those clues into the big file until they close in on the hidden hand at play.

A thing that is calling to me is handouts - records to reflect the byzantine bureaucracy of the Imperium, a physical pile of clues to hand to players at each new session. It has been some time since last I tried and stumbled doing this, let us try once more and see how it goes.

Overall #City26 progress tracker stats:
Progress: 43/52 wards completed
Completion vs target: 83% vs 68% target
Population covered: 85%