"Planars got a lot of words for 'ethereal'" (RPG Blog Carnival)

This months RPG Blog Carnival comes from Beneath Foreign Planets with the prompt WORDS! Etymology, Onomatology and Linguistics.

I have shied away from using language too heavily in world-building because I have not had much luck getting people to follow up on cues tied to language - the base assumption being that names, words, places and the like are the outputs of generic fantasyland slush and not actually backed by anything meaningful and thus not worth digging deeply into.

However, if I was to weave language into a setting more deeply a thread I would follow is the effect of connection to gods and to the planes. These provide a common seeding, almost a stabilising effect across settings - particularly with some groups (elves in particular) having extra-planar populations like eladrin and shadar-kai.

The current implied D&D setting has a lot of planar interaction - if I take a look at the players that pass across my open tables we have a lot of tieflings, genasi, aasimar and the operating assumption most people have coming to table is that these things are unremarkably common.

One would assume this understanding of 'the planes are out there' would lead to a much more finer grained to say 'of planar origin' with the classic 'Irish have a lot of words for rain' higher fidelity around more common aspects.

One line to take would be that this make planar things unworthy of comment, so ordinary as to not need specific words. The other line to take would be that familiarity would be enough that common folk about your setting would have at least passing familiarity with planar effects.

A couple of ways that this could manifest:

Shiny TTRPG links #182

Back at base after travels - an lo, more links have bloomed! For yet more links, 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.

Beneath Foreign Planets launches 'WORDS! Etymology, Onomatology and Linguistics' - A Blog Carnival Call-to-Arms!

Sea of Stars sums up the last Blog Carnival After the Dragon: What happens after the monster attack and after they are defeated?

DIY & dragons writes Congratulations to All the Summer Lego RPG Setting Jam Participants!

Mazirian's Garden gives us The Future of Through Ultan's Door

Playthings of Mad Gods shares Ideas That Kill You: Primer to Infohazards In TTRPGs

Silverarm Press writes Put Your RPG Campaign on a Deadline (It’ll Be Okay.)

Roles, Rules, and Rolls gives us Four-Way Wilderness Descriptions

The Retired Adventurer writes The Basis of the Game is Making Decisions

Campaign Retrospective: Spelljammer Light of Xaryxis

Since a campaign finished, let us do a retrospective Against the Wicked City style as is now traditional.

Spelljammer: Light Of Xaryxis (2023-24)

What it was:
- Follow on from 5e Spelljammer rules test two-shot which were a pure systems test of the Spelljammer 5e rules. People liked that enough that it continued.
- My first attempt to run a 5e campaign off book - which was heavily remixed as described here
- My first 'formal' VTT campaign with battlemaps, tokens, getting the scales right and all that jazz
- 26 sessions from Oct 2022 to April 2024 with a slow burn start of getting in a session a month then a pause through April 23 after struggling to schedule sessions. We finally settled onto a base assumption of 'every second Monday night' which ran relatively smoothly through 2023. After smallest house-holders sleeping pattern fell apart that put a hard crimp on things as both I and the in-house test team were in this one. So we had a couple of chunky gaps for what was nominally a bi-weekly game - Jan-April 2023 and Jan-Feb 2024. The 'finite' nature of the campaign helped get things restarted in the sense that this was not an infinite committment.

What worked:

DM201 discussion notes

Below the notes to the best of my recollection from a wide-ranging 2hr discussion I pitched as an Ask Me Anything session to those who come to our local games session. I thought I'd get a bunch of new folk but half the attendees were familiar faces who've played at my tables - and regularly run their own - so this was a little past the basics and more talked about progressing from good to great.

Prepping for one shots

I lay out the chunks of what will be done in the session and be prepared to snap-out some bits if time is getting tight. The “Five Room Dungeon” model is a good one for laying out sessions - a combat, a puzzle, a roleplay opportunity, the big boss and the reward. If you set it up so one or more of those elements can be skipped if time gets tight, then you can manage the session length that way. Dysons Dodecahedron goes into this a bit more and is a great source for maps.

People will bring their characters, DMs bring situations. It is good to have some ideas of how the players might solve it but players will go off in all sorts of directions or get incredibly lucky or have brilliant creative ideas so be ready for any given obstacle to get solved/eliminated more quickly than you thought.

Generally as set up, prepare a mystery (dungeon to explore, mystery to solve) have some folk in there to interact with and be prepared for people to lean combat or roleplay as they prefer. People say they prefer roleplay in surveys online 1 so be ready for things to get talked at

Prepping a session I try to have all my notes on a single-sheet so everything is in one place for a single glance.

Written adventures will usually have things laid out along these line but it is always worth reading through it and making your own one-sheet reference as they often scatter critical information around in a way that makes it easy to read, not putting it where you need it when you run at the table (major NPC name is in the intro, not at the place where the PCs encounter them, etc.)

General game-running

Shiny TTRPG links #181

A final short set of links during this holiday period. For yet more links, 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.

Explorers Design writes on The Art of the RPG Cover

Play Material gives us Factions in your sandbox want to be light

d4 Caltrops shared Safari Card Monster Manual

Grumpy Wizard asks Where Do I Fall in the Low Prep Vs High Prep Debate?

Necropraxis gives us XP Potential as Inverse Encumbrance

The Retired Adventurer gave us Planning a Campaign as a Series of Decisions

BASTIONLAND asks What's the Point of a Campaign?

Prismatic Wasteland gives us Endangered in Dungeons

Really Bad Eggs shares You Got Your Boot Hill In My Flashing Blades! Reputation and Non-Player Character Reactions

Methods & Madness writes 10:1 combat (B/X, Chainmail, and OD&D)

Sundered’s Encounter Stocking Technique (ZEST) test for Menagerie world

Poking about I stumbled over Sundered Shillings anti-Joesky tax - their Sundered’s Encounter Stocking Technique (ZEST) which I liked the look of because I do love a good unified table you throw different dice at depending on the circumstances.

To summarise the mnemonics -
For random encounters, we get IN FIVE (Interruption, Numerous, Friendly, Indifferent, Violent, Extreme).
For random structures, we get FLAVOR (Fane, Lair, Abandoned, Vault, Oddity, Ruin).

Tweaking their structure to create a combo d12/d20 table by re-stacking the entries we get a way to generate a unified travel/delve table - first IN FIVE then a gap then FLAVOR and a filler gap at the top.

Site Encounter (d12)/Travel Encounter (d20) table
1. Interruption,
2. Numerous,
3. Friendly,
4. Indifferent,
5. Violent,
6. Extreme
7-12. No encounter
13. Fane
14. Lair
15. Abandoned
16. Vault
17. Oddity
18. Ruin
19-20 - no encounter

I recently had a game of my Brancalonia-mod go off the rails and while I was able to catch that one, it struck me that having a good random encounter table for that campaign locale could be helpful.

Version I am taking to table-testing at the Friday night open tables:
1. Interruption - the Law; Queens Guard on patrol against such knaves as the party
2. Numerous - the locals; pilgrims, farmers or others
3. Friendly - travelling performer - puppeteer or seer
4. Indifferent - non-hostile other knaves; curious what the players are up to may be tempted to follow
5. Violent - Hostile knaves - one of the NPC gangs the party has messed around in their adventures
6. Extreme - Stray monster - viperwolf or bavalisk
7-12. No encounter
13. Fane - Animalings - shrine to one of the small gods with lots of offerings
14. Lair - Bevana - cottage-in-the-woods with spooky hag resident
15. Abandoned - Elves - hunting lodge style luxury holiday spot - dangerously decayed magical nonsense
16. Vault - Insectfolk - stacked up eldritch weirdness
17. Oddity - Dwarven Great Works - Borehole - physically hazardous, potentially rewarding
18. Ruin - Predator Queen 'this is not a place of honour' castle-shrine - dreadful, players own fault if they go near it
19-20 - no encounter

The Circular Spine (Barkeep Jam)

As an entry to Barkeep Jam hosted by Prismatic Wasteland - adhering to the Barkeep on the Borderlands Third Party License - we have the Circular Spine.

Marked by the great leviathans back-spine twisted into a ring that hangs above the door, the Circular Spine is a grotty fighting pit that smells like the inside of a sea cave. Muddy floor that floods with the tides, slick with seaweed. A chandelier made of a ships wheel dripping with tallow candles swings from the ceiling. The repurposed hull-planks that make up everything are sticky along the edges with old pitch.

When the jolly crew enters this pub, roll 1d6 on the table below. If a character’s number is equal to or below the result, they are in the pub right now.

d6 Staff & Regulars
1. Glargu the fishman barkeep - gruff until you entertain him, greatly appreciates an act that amps up his bloodthirsty patrons
2. Fleano, member of the Gatebreakers, bravos for hire, cocky, willing to make and take bets
3. Boris, dockmaster, slumming it for thrills
4. Miesmies, server, punk tabaxi, taciturn, observant
5. Bron, rowdy patron, loves the Circular Spine, judges others by whether they love it too
6. Herbert and Charlotte, nervous out of towners, feel out of their depth but were (wrongly) told this place was a must see