Year in Review 2020

tl:dr - spun up my best campaign in years, started this blog, reviewed some rpg books, survived the plague.

Main highlight of this year in gaming was spinning up my Ducal House menagerie-world game. We had the great good fortune to hold session zero in a bar the weekend before lockdown dropped - so we shifted directly to online via Roll20 + Skype. The intended tempo was twice a month, ~5 hour sessions; goal of this was to set expectations for time and make 3 games a month as 'we got in an extra game' not 'we missed a week'. Finally on average we got in 3.4 sessions a month. Stats wise, this puts the game on the average - weekly game is still traditional.

For session times we are skewing towards the long end of the standard hump according to some sources with 5.6 hour long games on average.

Review: Pathfinder Planar Adventures

tl:dr; a good guide for bringing the planes to your table. I; Interesting sites and a focus on visitable spots puts lots of useful inspiration in your hands.

I snaffled the Pathfinder Planar Adventures book up one time I saw it in passing and having read through it now (some years hence) I do not regret my purchase.

(photo of own copy showing cover art by Wayne Reynolds)

Review: Kefitzah Haderech - Incunabulum of the Uncanny Gates and Portals

tl;dr: a neat DMs toolbox for using portals in your game, full of useful generators and pithy guidance.

Originally I found Kefitzah Haderech - Incunabulum of the Uncanny Gates and Portals on a list of 'best OSR things to get off Lulu' and decided to get it sight unseen. I think I did a quick reality check to see what ratings were but otherwise I had no idea what to expect when this turned up.

Done by Lost Pages back in 2013. The back matter puts it very well - "Not traveling but cancelling distance instead. A supplement on portals and dimensional gates for any role-playing game system."

d24: Things happening at night in the magical academy

This was another 'rapid encounter table generation' exercise. Prompt was a post on Reddit requesting random encounters inside the academy. Another good opportunity to test the Bellard tool for quickly boosting tables.

Review: 2 Worm 2 Furious

tl:rd: a squirmy art explosion of a 0-level funnel with a great tension ratchet to have the players running to forestall the Age of the Doombringer Moth

I backed the Kickstarter for 2 Worm 2 Furious and it turned up.

As described in the Kickstarter it is a "deadly funnel that revolves around an ever mutating and evolving moth grub. You’ll want 4-6 players, 15-20 level 0 characters, as it’s a funnel, but it works for levels 1+" - but what turns up is an art explosion. The design and production are gorgeous with lots of strange and interesting art.

Coping with book-goblinism (Pathfinder Humble Bundles)

tl:dr; RPGGeek helps to figure out what to look at first when dealing with massive humble bundles - wisdom of crowds says Paizo's best work is in there

At time of writing Humble Bundle has another Pathfinder 1e bundle this time on Monster Lore which will make the third Pathfinder bundle I have sprung for. This is pure book goblinism; I now have a digital drive at Paizo stuffed with unread Pathfinder PDFs and the challenge of figuring out what I even have.

Review: Dark Roads & Golden Hells plus Shadow Planes & Pocket Worlds

tl:dr; a solid planar guide in two parts, clear and readable with some good bits even for old planar hands.

I found out about this "sourcebook of planar adventure for Pathfinder Roleplaying Game" only recently and even more recently managed to get it printed along with Shadow Planes & Pocket Worlds, a 25 page supplement.

(screen-grab of PDF covers)

On D&D 6e the evolution of the game

There is an interesting view on Deathtrap Games on how "The Critters are the Future of D&D" - I think there is some meat here, worth looking into but if you want to skip the salty wrapper, start 5 paragraphs down.

First off, let us look at what is being discussed - a stream-lined, less lethal ruleset, with more super-heroic characters and a large penumbra of character-focused merch and services. I think as a whole it is a reasonable extrapolation of current trends and is a scenario worth teasing out a bit. I agree that a) it is unlikely to happen soon, that 5e has road ahead of it b) that should it happen it may occur as part of a fork to both keep the existing play base and cater to the new and c) if it happens, it will be after the stickiness of the new generation of gamers has been proven for a little longer.

But imagine this all comes off and we are in the bold new Deathtrap-6e space; what do we see? Short answer:
- a more character centric game, including portability to tie-in media
- a streamlined system
- lots and lots of merch
- adventures focussed on roleplay and guides how to run them

Review: NOD Magazine #11 - Hell Crawl I

tl:dr; review of a hell-crawl and finding lots to use in place or inspire other campaigns.

A batch of NOD magazines came fresh from Lulu.com (praise be the discount code) including the first of the Hell Crawl issues that I have been pondering for a while. In the theme with my looking at various planar supplements, I wanted to see what it was like and I must say I have been pleased.

Review: Ultraviolet Grasslands by Luka Rejec

tl:dr; UVG is great; run it as it is, steal its concepts for the betterment of other games, use it to get those odd books to the table. Tabletop duct tape.

Some time back I backed the UVG kickstarter and lo what loot turned up!

Snazzy dice! A stylish T-shirt!

Campaign inspiration and spinning up settings

Continuing on the vein of 'what do I actually use at my table' I want to go through what seeds grew into the last three campaigns I ran - Hikuru (May-07 to Mar-09), Lizard Kingdoms (Nov-18 - Nov-19, on hiatus) and Ducal House also appearing here in tags as menagerie world (Mar-20, ongoing).

Each came of a different set of drivers, using a different world-building approach and a refinement towards better bang-for-buck in terms of DM effort. These were also the first 'blank slate' worlds I built after running a series of 'kitchen sink' campaigns since early teens which morphed and expanded as Dragon Magazines came in the door or Planescape products were acquired.

Today I will just talk about the first, Hikuru, which was driven by a mash-up impulse - coming after 3e Oriental Adventures and a couple of years of L5R I wanted to do something slightly different. I had played in a Birthright variant with an empire of elven, practically immortal, samurai. I needed something to replicate that and loved Brian Snoddys illustration of a Wang Liang. They had an Empire back in the day according to the bestiary - so this would be set in that day. Extremely long-lived giants with always-on telepathy seemed like a good building block for a globe spanning empire.

Class, background preference link to player personality

After connecting with the team at Quickphix.ch who ran this TTRPH personality survey earlier this year I had a look at some of the outputs.

tl;dr: survey results comparing Big Five Personality Inventory with class and background preferences gives some hints on who likes to play what.

Reasons for coming to the table are pretty clear among the (N = 53) group of respondents: socialising, getting immersed in the world and being creative. A second 'tier' of drivers include system mastery and the thrill of risk.

Actual play: Kobolds Art Exhibition part II - adventures in paintings

Following up on the previous post about playing the Kobolds Art Exhibition zine.

Our party - children of the rulers of the realm - found the Kobolds in the sealed up basements of their family palace as the dying Duke tasked them with reopening things. After a first encounter where the party reopened and defeated the guardians before a masterpiece, the party returns with the Lady of the House while price negotiations for the masterpiece happens. As the Curator and the Lady of the House negotiate the party is pulled aside by one of the junior kobolds. In pidgin draconic they convey that there are kobolds lost in a painting that they need help to recover and the party agrees to help.

Review: Wormskin zines 1-8

Given the upcoming Dolmenwood kickstarter and the neat thematic fit with my menagerie world campaign I thought it would make sense to talk about the Wormskin zines.

tl:dr; these zines are the pieces to either run the setting or pull out selected cool sub-pieces to enhance your own home-brew or tailore the flavour of other settings. If you want to inject a little fae forest into your game - whether whimsical or fierce, the Wormskin zines are both tool-kit and toybox.

Review: We Have Lost

A "small game, previously playtested by some at Warpcon" to quote the author Donogh McCarthy, this is a GM-less story game for 3-6 players. With art by Wayne O’Connor of whom I am a big fan.

This is a 4 page game where all players are - were - companions of the Empress who has just died. Aspects of everyones character and the set-up are defined by choice from a list or vote and then the game itself is in remembering the Empress. Over a number of rounds you go about the table and each tells a tale of your times with the Empress.

What is very cool about this is the 'bennie' type mechanics - with red and black stones that trade hands depending on whether the tales told in a round move you in one direction or another. At the end the counts of those stones determine who gets to tell the definitive story of the Empress death and its aftermath.

With a page to set the context, a page to say who the players are, a page for the mechanics and a page for inspiration this is a taut, neat game that I will be giving a go at next opportunity. I think there is potentially a nice synergy with Microscope or a potentially a great place as a flash-back within a more classical campaign besides its potential as a fun one-shot game.

Blog challenge: posts that improved my gaming

A CHALLENGE from Sundered Shillings off the the OSR Discord server: Hunt down the blog posts that have forever changed how you have run your games, prepped your games, done your game design, or is otherwise terribly significant or personal to you.

Some of these may be obvious but while they are fresh on my mind:

Actual play: Wolpertinger, Were-rat ... Well

tl;dr - a great urban module to drop in with some nice on-ramps and trailing hooks; add it to any city you run.

I ran Wolpertinger, Wererat - Well! as an urban encounter within my house campaign. As of time of writing its a Gold seller on DriveThruRPG, rocking a 5 star rating.

The blurb goes "[t]his adventure is an unapologetically linear dungeon crawl [that] follows the three-pillar principle: combat, exploration, social interaction. The idea is to spice up the classic formula with varied challenges that result in a short, entertaining session. This makes this an excellent adventure for beginner players and DMs! Detailed support is provided for the DM in the form of roleplay advice for six completely fleshed out original NPCs, advice on the three pillars in each scene, and scenic sensory descriptions for every scene to make the adventure come to life."

* * * Spoilers Below! * * *

Review: Creatures

I backed the Kickstarter for Creatures which billed itself as "Designed by the creators of Shadows of Esteren and Fateforge, Creatures is a love letter to fantasy bestiaries." Still waiting on the hard copy to arrive, I am going to talk through the draft document I have my hands on. Things may change, grain of salt etc.

tl;dr - nice product, a new angle on classic city and fantasy countrside plus a whole new steppe setting; I will be putting it to use.

First impressions on a flick through is that its gorgeous and exactly what I hoped it would be - one of those bestiary / setting combos similar to Veins of the Earth. The art is great, all tied together in a more 'pencils and watercolours of a real place' than the high fantasy standard of D&D main line products.

Plot creation: lessons for DMs from 10 years of Nanowrimo

tl:dr - for games as for books, plots spring from characters running about under their own impetus

I completed National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) again this year which makes 10 years I have been doing it to varying levels of suces. Short version - 3 first drafts worth a damn, 4 I never finished, 3 that probably could be salvaged for parts. Maybe.

Change in preference for D&D edition

This was done as a check on survey responses for D&D Research Wizards to see which of two survey blocks was more representative. Gathered in September and November 2020, it seems odd that the editions preference should be so different.

Short answer - more recent block B is more representative. First block A had a strangely high group of 3.5e respondents within it compared to the understanding of the general player population. Using Roll20 player data as reported by Orr Reports we can see the shift in preference for different editions over time. This also happened during a large increase in players on Roll20 so we need to verify this.

Review: Thousand Thousand Islands

I went on a jag almost exactly a year ago, looking for RPG sources I would not normally pick up and followed the whisperings of something truly remarkable until I found the Thousand Thousand Islands. Then I ordered everything I could get my hands on.

Review: MÖRK BORG

To quote the site "Pitch-black apocalyptic fantasy OSR RPG about miserable bastards doing their best/worst in a bleak, dying world." Its arrival has made such a seismic clang it reached as far as the Guardian.

I backed the kickstarter because it looked cool and I got a snootful of loot, see below.

Hailed as "the most dangerous tabletop role playing game" I love the tear off pad for character sheets - it is a beautiful detail to emphasis 'do not get too attached to your character, life is cheap'. The system is a great, stripped down d20 based one. The summary of the rules on the inside back cover fill an A5 double spread - everything you need can be printed on a single A4.

But whats it actually like? Well for me, gorgeous, evocative art and a great set up for 'everything you need in one book'. I suggest it would be tricky if it was the first ever RPG product you picked up as there is no 'what do I do with this' but for anyone with a basic handle on the past-time I think there are good lessons here for paring back a game to be all muscle and sinew, nothing wasted. A fast, mean, predator of a game.

The blacker than the blackest black ethos is one I am down for but my current table likes things slightly more genteel and less gruesome, so we are waiting until the Corona-times pass. I think it will be excellent for one shot, high-kinetic games and look forward to giving it a shot.

Even without playing is though I adore the up-welling of content around it and some of the resources to help Game Masters and Players navigate MÖRK BORG are really useful no matte what you play. I particularly love DNGN Maker which is a great location creator when you want an evocative dungeon in a hurry.

Should you want more infor - another review of this "dark and bloody pinnacle" on Gaming Trend.

Results #1 from D&D Research Wizards

The Tabletop RPG Research Survey 2020 - 2021 Results Update #1 shows a first pass on results from their surveys - some interesting outputs and some verifications of things we might have expected.

The geographic balance of responses looks similar to other surveys - 96% from North America, Europe and Australia + New Zealand. It looks like a slightly stronger Europe response compared to other surveys seen and a lower response from the South America community (the Brazilian community appears abesent for whatever reason).

Looking at the European breakdown we see there is a lot of variation in the response from different countries between surveys. The UK is consistently the largest European presence in surveys but the variation between other countries shows an element of luck is involved in whether or not people respond - see the strong response from Germany and Ireland to this survey compared to others and lower response from Denmark. This suggests to me that the European scene is more atomised with pockets of the hobby existing with not so many interconnections.

The age profile of the respondents is in line with 'new generation' players - as confirmed by 92% playing 5e currently.

Very, very interesting to me is the response to the 3 pillars of TTRPG - combat remains flat across all age groups but the division between Roleplay vs Exploration is very strongly age dependent - this is super interesting - implying older gamers are in for the puzzles and the lore and younger ones are more interested in the chance to roleplay.

I am looking forward to seeing what outputs are gleaned from processing all the interviews.

NPC motivations to meet player role-play preference

tl:dr - popularity of RP suggest more easy NPC motivator/goal generators would be handy.

The various polls that say that for ~50% of people, their favourite pillar of TTRPGS is roleplaying, ~33% is exploration / problem-solving and ~17% is combat imply that the arguments we hear about systems and editions of games are overly focused on their combat systems.

From this great list of "Ten Challenges I Love in Games" only 2 of 10 options are combat - 1 is fighting, 1 is evading. 3 are variations on cold 'problem-solving' which the players not their character need to solve and 5 are role-playing - more or less matching to survey responses.

The question I would pull out of this is what sources can we lean on to meet this apparent large chunk of the game? D&D carries a great deal of combat system with it - it did grow out of wargames after all. While 5e DMG has NPC ideals, bonds and flaws (pp90-91) and schemes and methods for villains (pp94-95) these are a little light for people who do not want to conquer the world. I like the NPC motivations dice-drop sheet from Rolang or you get 'instincts' and 'obligations' from this NPC generator tool.

My personal approach is to quickly get RP hooks for NPCs is to tag them to their daily activities if there is no over-riding plot hook and then use a factional or 'fronts' style approach. So I will know what 'petty nobles of the Duchy' or 'major craft guilds' or 'good-aligned temples' are generally doing and what this front thinks of various things so these can be subbed in for any given NPC. The party goals table in 5e DMG pp72-73 can be used to generate faction goals though these may be far removed from the aims of an individual NPC. If the minor nobility has a goal of 'hunting a specific monster' then perhaps it will be the topic of conversation at a ball or the obsession over who killed the larges one last season rather than a thing they are all actively doing just now. Once you have that hook, pp244-245 of 5e DMG has a framework for Social interaction assuming everyone starts at indifferent unless there is reason to say otherwise.

Personally I like the 5 steps of the old 3.5e NPC attitudes (pp72 in the 3.5e PHB) which adds unfriendly (between hostile and indifferent) and helpful above friendly. Particularly where weight is being put on role-play and potentially achieving goals without combat, I think this is a helpful increase in granularity. The table has detail but generally DC 15 for Charisma/Diplomacy can bump attitude a step, DC 25 to bump it two steps. The actions that correspond to the attitudes are a neat cheat sheet to help manage face to face encounters without having to think too much on 'what would this NPC be willing to do at this point'.

The other two dials I tend to use is a) how informed the NPC is so whether what they know is close to reality or filtered through fourth-hand tavern talk and b) how much they care about what is going on which will manifest as how intensely they react to things; will they argue their factions point or just shrug and ignore if someone tries to needle them. I have not formalised this as a table, but I tend to block is as a d20 with 1-5 as 'low' 6-15 as 'medium' and 16-20 as 'high' whether that is information or engagement.

Going deeper on all this, I think sources from writing that discuss personality conflicts could be a useful addition to reading lists as sources to loot for NPC drivers and motivations.

7-step session prep in action

Have deliberately left using my '7-step single page prep' late to drive urgency:

Step 0 - open the toolkit - Excel sheet with all my tables and models, powerpoint with realm maps, powerpoint with the palace layout. Sources for all reference I will go into anon. Set out the papers - session sheets, blank, reference stack.

Step 1 - set the time - no problem; work out weather for the next day since we are starting in the evening. If in doubt I use the random weather generator here.

Step 2 - copy over all the events. While doing this a number of events will compress to just tags back to detailed notes on previous sheet. Any obvious extra ones in mind will be added now. Next is to review what happened in the part 5 & 6 of previous week - what happened and where the PCs plan to go. Each of these gets either a tag back to the relevant source or will be expanded on now, envisioning that the PCs will get to them. What did the players flag as the things they would likely go do this week. As I spot these gaps I do a quick fill out into block 4.

Step 3 - Look at the timeline and think how things may play out. What if the party zips through or skips certain activities; what is the next thing they are likely to end up at? In this case the curtain goes up on the immediate aftermath of a tournament where the players did well - lots of glory but zeroed out on resources.

Step 4 - in this case I ended up with some of the scantest notes I have done in a while - a list of additional guests at the feast, some thought in how to do the mechanics for a big tournament event, and a 'what everyone thought' of the main events from the last session. 45mins all told. Tools I actually used: my trusty family tree for the noble house we are playing ( a big excel table ), my calendar to check the names of days, Google (for names in relevant culture) and Ulraunts Guide to Acheron to fluff out a hook that did not get used. That was it, feel like I got away lightly.

Step 5 - Of 13 hooks that were on the list to start the game, 4 got used in a 4.5 hour session; 2 major sections were ad-libbed where the players pulled on hooks from major NPCs, 1 light combat encounter where a clutch 'calm emotions' from the bart pretty much won the day.

Step 6 - "at table" - after we called the end of session but still on the call we booked the next session and I got 7 things the players were planning to go after next. At this point I will also round out the notes I took at table; expanding the 'aide memoire' scribbles; adding names, noting down things I made up on the fly.

Step 7 - I will not try to work up implications immediately; usually I try to down tools for a while after a session. If I do not get the chance to do it until next sessions prep starts then this is the first things to do. Perhaps it ought to be step zero?

Swamping the DM-ing apprenticeship model with players

There was a twitter thread mentioning the passing of tribal knowledge within D&D players. The key point was that many assumptions are not made explicit in the guides as it is assumed that the players are embedded within play groups, learning to DM from other DMs with very few DMs starting from the books alone. This can no longer be sustained as the high growth following the release of D&D 5e has changed the paradigm.

From previous post on the rate of new joiners I thought to try and estimate how many new joiners might have been expected to join based on the long run trajectory from the past 30 years.

If the trend of the present day OSR players can be taken as broadly representative of the long-run trend extending through to today then we can make an estimate of what players would have joined if the long run trends had been sustained - approx 20% of the current population.

This suggests that the need to transmit the craft of dungeon mastering must be transmitted through different channels than the apprenticeship model. The original thread suggested this needs to be better DMs guides but I suspect we may see a more multi-channel approach such as watching actual plays such as Dimension 20 and Critical Role, DM guides such as Matt Colvilles Running the Game series or finding assistance in peer communities on Discord or forums such as Reddit or in wise writings on blogs.

I think calls for 'DMs to do more work' and accept more people to their tables are misplaced - DMs cannot do the work required even if they turned their tables into factory farms. Not every player wants to DM, not everone will be local to someone who could teach them even if they wanted. Far better if the conditions are created to allow tables to spontaneously generate. Let a thousand flowers bloom. It worked for me.

Sources are:
OSR Gateway Survey (2019, N=2764)
R/DnDNext 5e Survey (2019, N=745)
NB: link to PDF
Dungeons and Dragons and Data: The Demographics of Players and Their Impact on Character Creation and Game Play (2019, N=1130)

Conceptual density or why I had favorite RPG books

I have been buying RPG products for 30 years now. A friend called me out recently by identifying me as a big-spender among what I had thought was a pretty hard core group. I felt very seen, so time to look at what all this has taught me (if anything).

In common with a few things about gaming recently, Against the Wicked City in the OSR articulated the phrase that nailed what I had been feeling and the scales fell from my eyes - "conceptual density" - that an RPG product "contents need to be something better than you could come up with, unaided, simply by following cliches and/or random madlibbing". The blog post uses the exemplary Hill Cantons as an example which I would agree with but also take it a level further - in that Hill Cantons was inspired by Slavic warbear art; why not go direct to the source?

Art books and illustrated fables are almost as good as a dedicated RPG product - examples that I realise are sunk deep into my mind are:
- The Book of Conquests by Jim Fitzpatrick - based on the early mythological cycle of Irish stories. Epic, gorgeous, full stop.
- Wherever you can find Arthur Rackhams illustrations - I think I know him from Oscar Wildes fairy tales?

Lizardman Diaries brings the concept into play well with 'visual quirk generators' - an example of this is the Transient Bazaar - putting a grid over suitably evocative images to randomly find on-theme inspiration.

The key point here is that all of this more or less abandons crunch. No new rules, nor classes nor anything, this is purely about inspiration. I have shelves upon shelves of rules and I realised I have jettisoned or never activated most of them. In another piece of insight that helped me clarify what I had felt as a hunch - I do not need more mechanics because basically everything can be a bear.

Even in Planescape which I ran a lot, even during a relatively crunchy phase, the fiddly rules about magic items power waning and waxing across different locations, spells requiring keys and clerics being hamstrung by distance from their deity got mostly left at the door. What I did use, and all the time, were the lore descriptions, what the monsters were *like*, where they lived, what conditions on the planes were, in what nooks and crevasses could someone survive on, say, Pandemonium or Gehenna. There were some mechanical rules but if you were contesting the environment regularly, you were going to lose eventually.

I realise what I will buy a product for has evolved now that I know what I like. Of old I loved the Planescape Monstrous Compendiums; simply looking at entries in the monstrous compendiums and thinking about what those critters would do in the wild. I bought Midnight, Ptolus, and a bunch of other weighty books and found myself never using them. I now realise because I could not find art within that drove me. Ptolus because everything was already detailed out, cross referenced and pinned out like a conspiracy room. Great for what it is - not what I love. What I need are ideas to make it feel different, an element of randomness to kick me out of the rut of my own habits that I would drift towards without guidance.

Of supplements I own, going by what looks most raggedy, the most use I got of old was from:
The Planewalker's Handbook
Planescape Monstrous Compendium Appendix
Planescape Monstrous Compendium Appendix II
Planes of Chaos

Maybe I should have just bought DiTerlizzi artbooks.

"I was raised on the Lower Planes" - on running Planescape

I have been thinking about the difference between Spelljammer and Planescape and to me Spelljammer is about having a mobile base for your road adventures while in Planescape you have a static one or none at all such as being a caravan. Here we are going to go a little deeper into my experiences running Planescape.

I got my hands on my copy of Planescape on a summer holiday and all my games after that were Planescape. Sometimes they might have started on or crossed the Prime, but anything I ran there were two guarantees - there would be planeswalking and somewhere a dragon was involved.

I ran three signature Planescape campaigns - one that started on the prime and then headed to the planes, two that were planar from the get go.

First was the Katharsis campaign - classic AD&D - running about a kingdom, fighting a goblin crusade, finding the portal that the demon-prophet had been trying to capture... then ripping it open and bailing offworld to dodge the coming demon invasion. From there it turned into a caravan across the planes, slowly losing hangers-on and gear, turning into a pure monster-of-the-week almost 'Sliders' style "what can we do here before we leave by the next portal". This was a mid-teens game, with a 3 core players and a rotating cast of others in a quasi-west marches style. Plane-hopping let me fold in whatever interesting turned up through Dragon magazine or whatever other inspirations crossed my radar at short notice.

The big 'Planescape signatures' I would tag here was the rapid switching between terrains, the continuous 'a stranger walks into town' effect and the chance to do some crazily epic things like hike up Mount Olympus to meet Ares (patron of two of the party).

The second campaign I ran - Kraken Mesa, a.k.a. Babylon 666 - was hung on the idea of the party getting abducted from their village on the Prime by a bunch of yugoloths on Gehenna who tasked them with clearing out and gaining control of an illithid fortress they had dragged to Avalas (first layer of Gehenna). This was supposed to be faction juggling, clearing out wierd aspects of their fortress, and trying to glean clues from what was going on around them. This was a college era game, initially 6 players, then 5 for the second year.

The big 'Planescape signatures' was being present on Gehenna, dealing with demons and devils on a regular basis who were too powerful to straight up fight, interacting with lots of the odder features of Planescape as parties interested in profitting off the Blood War made their way to their door. My players would probably recall the ridiculously over-engineered props I made up including a hand drawn cloth map of Avalas that was kept in a bag of soot for the authentic smell and filth.

The third campaign - JCQ - was entirely over AIM chat circa 2005. This had the player as fixers for an interplanar trading combine that had just gotten hit by some foes big play and they players made travelled the planes rescuing their colleagues, murdering their foes and trying to figure out who the enemy was.

This campaign was very dear to my heart because all the players were veterans of Kraken Mesa and as one would later say as in our title "I feel I was raised on the Lower planes" - and so I could push subtle lore stuff to them which would be picked up. "These brigands had green steel coin in their purses - Ba'atezu paid them, whats their angle here..."

The common factor among all these campaigns is the great freedom to throw anything you like at the party - next portal can lead to a dessicated sea where they face a mummified kraken, or to a jungle glade with a silent temple where a god sleeps, or through a hive of psychic wasps. Nothing was too strange because strange was to be expected. Planescape frees you from certain limits of versimilitude because Anything Goes on the planes, they are infinite. You just have to never flinch, keep your foot down on the accelerator and leave the players with the sense that they got away with something daring just by skipping through this place and surviving. Planescape should be plots in the shadows with angels and demons and sprints across the open to seize an opportunity before something of god-like power notices you.

To that note, for any DM thinking of running Planescape I would suggest spot the bits that really appeal to you and just do those bits. Some of what is out there will not appeal but there is so much good stuff and the to-ing and fro-ing of the infinite planes will generate so much material as you go that you will have a long, long campaign working through all the bits you really wanted to do.

Comparing polls on game session length (2014-2020)

tl,dr: typical session length remains stable at ~ 4-5 hours in polls over time.

Attempting a wisom of crowds, crude longitudinal survey I compiled a bunch of different player surveys over time. First off thanks to all those out there who leave clear, findable records of their surveys. Kudos.

Second - the major problem with this kind of survey is that people bucket their time ranges very differently from coarse "1-2, 3-4, 4+" style to 'enter a number' clear space which leads sometimes to mini-essays that are difficult to parse (what was one supposed to make of "currently X but had a lot of Y"?). Hence the cumulative population curves to try and squeeze an apples to apples comparison out of all this.

Overall the story appears to be that most of the player population is getting in 2-6 hour sessions, with 2.5-5 hours covering about half of all players. This gels with what we typically see on the front of Adventurers league modules and what we used to run for a convention slot at Leprecon.

However, this then tells me my 'normal' gaming experience is pretty atypical. The yellow curve on the graphs is a slightly different question from the 2014 survey asking 'how much gaming per week' and the lows and highs indicate that a) some people are not getting in any gaming (~15% of respondents at the time) and some portion of the population is getting in a hell of a lot of gaming ~30% getting in 2 typical sessions and ~5% playing very long haul sessions.

Taking the 4 examples from my own experiences
- my local Adventurers Leauge Friday night meetup gang used to meet at 7pm and run regularly to past midnight on what were supposed to be 2-3 hour modules.
- my current home game started as a 4.5 hour evening slot - 7pm to midnight by design, aiming for every second week and had crept up towards weekly 6+ slots. This may be pandemic driven of course.
- I played a friends L5R campaign that was a weekly after work 7pm to 11:30 (4.5 on the nose).
- years ago we ran Living Arcanis modules which were similar 7pm to midnight 5hr sessions.

I wish I had data enough to cross check against ages - I bet there is a frequency drop, length up-tick that corresponds to people hitting 'serious job + family' - and therefore the logistical trouble to get a table together drives a preference for longer games.

Sources:

Name	Year	Size	Type
Elderbrain	2020	2044	Survey
Facebook D&D 5e	2020	1131	Survey
Sly Flourish DMs	2016	6600	Survey
Reddit D&D	2014	1734	Survey

Review: Veins of the Earth by Patrick Stuart & Scrap Princess

tl:dr; awesome stuff, go get it.

I had the great good fortune in a recent break between local lockdowns here in Vienna to walk into my Friendly Local Games Store and spot Veins of the Earth sitting in the midst of their RPG shelves. One of the easier purchasing decisions I have ever made - I have heard of this book spoken in legend, I even considered buying it online but the shipping scared me off until here it was.

And looking at it, I see why shipping was an issue.

So beautiful, an artefact of a book like few others I have handled recently. Reading through its tales of eldritch underground horrors and leaping subterranean predators has been just the palate-cleansing pick-me-up I have needed from the news during this hell-scape of a year.

The first half is a bestiary with such wonderful entries on creatures and cultures that I have been bugging my SO by reading the best bits out to them. The second half is on running a campaign in the Veins; modifying rules and giving a toolkit to create your own exploration set.

The art by Scrap Princess is magnificent throughout to give the aesthetic, similar to DiTerlizzi for Planescape or Brom for Dark Sun.

What I love most about this, is the voice. From the initial statement of logic about why the book came to be - because we know more about caves now and we know they should be tougher and weirder than walkable caverns of yore - there way that Patrick Stuart lays things out is great to my mind. He tells you the why, and the intended feel, or look, or atmosphere. I like this principle driven way of doing a setting a lot - here is why we are changing this thing, encumbrance, light, climbing - there is detail here, because it is important for the feel for these reasons.

I know I am very late to the table on this - I have seen people rave about Veins of the Earth on the OSR blogs for years, but now having read it all I can say is the hype isn't wrong. This is one of those things that I just cannot explain, you have to pick this book up for yourself. I have held a few beautiful artefact books this year, but this is the honored ancestor. Go see for yourself.

If you want a more detailed breakdown of the content plus some actual play see the Luminescent Lich if you want to read or Questing Beast if you want a video.

On childrens story gaming and later play style

Long, long ago (fado, fado in Eireann) myself and 3 of my primary school buddies cooked up our own story game and I wanted to talk about this as I think it roots my play style since.

Broadly speaking, there was a disc-shaped world (guess what we had been reading) held up by wasps on the back of a giant dolphin. Not sure it would get us around IP infringement today but it served for then. Each of us had a continent on this world of Ping - Pong, Zip, Stink and Kongk - that filled out a copy-book, each of us appeared as a character in the others continent.

Our characters ran about on each others continents doing stuff, mostly putting odd plans in motion, chasing after story hooks and resolving conflicts through argument or essentially a loudly contested GM-fiat system. The fact that each of us ran and played simulutaneously kept things fairly on the level though not without some lumps and bumps.

This would have been ~1990 and at the time we were reading Fighting Fantasy books and White Dwarf and playing Heroquest and Space Crusade. We were way out in the west of Ireland, very little made its way out that far (our original White Dwarf was snatched off a shelf by one of us on a trip to the North), so all of this developed more or less in isolation from any other live gaming inputs. Having figured out there were things out there, we got subscriptions to White Dwarf (1991) then Dragon Magazine (1993). We more or less simultaneously got our hands on some Advanced Fighting Fantasy material and Black Box D&D which told us there were ways to do what we had been doing, but with systems! Dice rolling! Wierd dice! This found an easy welcome.

From there, there was an attempted launch of a AFF game that did not take off. A year or two later I ran a first D&D game which ran for a fair few sessions. At this point there were groups of friends (all boys) who had more or less moved from boardgames onto RPGs, which then got super-charged when Magic: the gathering hit town. The local book store held Friday open table sessions, this allowed like-minded folk to congregate and from there a whole bunch of different games took off - AD&D, World of Darkness, Conspiracy X, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay.

I think the early system-less experiences drilled in a sense of the activity being seperate from the particular system which made the statement 'for a specific setting, use system X' non-controversial for me. Always we had a DM who owned those books, knew the given system and the rest of us sat to table and played.

All this is sparked from a twitter thread I saw saying kids today find the demands of a game having a big-S story, as they have learned from watching streamed games, intimidating and a barrier to entry. While I agree with that specific point, I think the broad point of 'come for the story' refreshing as it implies there is hope that a broad ecosystem of games can flourish, each supporting different styles.

Seperately a lot of the responses to that thread saying 'story driven is bad' I think miss a distinction where people equate 'story driven' with 'rail-road' which is to chop a pretty subtle continuum into just two chunks. I fully agree with the point that if you have a story to tell and you do not want the players to interfere probably you should go write a book instead. If you have some big story hooks to drop and then you are willing to run with what the table does with those hooks - that is going to be a game. Maybe it will be a simple 'players flee the consequence of their actions' monster of the week type thing - thats fine, so long as it all makes sense.

To sum up - we got years of fun out of system-less rule-of-cool and I think that grounding in 'we come together to tell some sort of story' makes for a good foundation to then pick up a variety of systems and settings and enjoy the best of what is out there.

'What I wish I had known' as a starting DM

Some thoughts I pulled together on a private discord:

1. Recognise what elements of world-building actually give you bang for buck. My first game I have designs for the coins of the realm - relevant? Never came up. I detailed whole towns that the players blasted through, talking to 2 people before heading on. So, while it can be lots of fun to work up your world and that can be fun for you outside of the table, my single greatest learning was doing most work on the things players would likely interact with, have a few contingencies, and then a just a list of names to ad-lib anything else they decided to do

2. Mediocre artists borrow, great artists steal. All your favourite things, wherever they came from? You can use all of those for inspiration. Everything goes in the pot, there is no 'legitimate' source of inspiration. Just repaint it enough not to be immediately obvious and you will probably get away with it

3. Session Zero is your friend or Check what your players enjoy and make sure they get a chance to do that. Both a pre-campaign session and a brief post game 'where do you think you'll go after next session' gives you a heads up on where they are likely to go and what type of thing they want to do - tomb-diving, politics, exploring etc. - and makes sure you are preparing hooks they will probably go for.

Note - there is a lot of fun to be had world building things your players will never see - as long as you are clear that this is you noodling about in your world for your own entertainment and you will not feel too sore if it is never interacted with.

For further reading on the topic here are some blogs of wisdom:
Harbinger Games DM tips.
Sly Flourish DM tips.
Advice for OSR DMs from Goblinpunch.
The Ultimate D&D SESSION 0 Checklist has a lot of distilled wisdom in it.

Should you prefer videos then here is a selection of DMs - give them a watch to see who are your favourites to listen to. In my experience all these people speak the truth, the question is which do you find easiest on your ear.
Running the game with Matt Colville.
What Should You Have in a DM Binder? by Dael Kingsmill.
Building Your Own Campaign Setting with Matt Mercer & Brennan Lee Mulligan.

If what you want are podcasts; check out our friends at The Adventuring Party.

Updated class preferences, incl. Twitter, Facebook

Following up on class preferences in D&D 5e players with a few new data sources, it underlines that all online fora seem to respond in a similar manner - Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, down to smaller dedicated forums like Giant in the Playgrounds.

The numbers coming out of the latest poll in the Facebook D&D 5e group show the same pattern. This added to Elderbrain and ThinkDMs twitter polls broadens the catchment outside dedicated forums like Reddit channels or RPGnet.

There is a particularly strong response in favour of clerics and warlocks, a little more favour for fighters and rogues, but the pattern is the same.

The orange line, the numbers from D&D beyond, can be taken as the baseline population and while some forums - as seen here - show some preference for fighter and rogues that is not the strict 'we hate non-spellcaster' archetype, the break below the general population response for Barbarian and Rangers and heightened preference for Warlocks show that surveys are getting responses from a particular sub-group of players.

Noisy version below with all collected surveys - Fighter, Rogue, Wizard can get noisy but always for D&D Beyond or Apps (orange) Barbarians and Rangers have some fans and in every forum they are disfavoured.

City building: Reasons strangers come to Sholtipec

Strangers come to Sholtipec to seek many things. The abandoned parts of the city have been un-evenly gleaned and the active core still produces crafts and answers that can be found nowhere else. Still an administrative centre within the Scaledlands, the ways lead from the dragon cult-cities back to Threshold and the deep homelands.

I built this table to have a skew by using d6+d12 in place of 3d6. This makes the 6-12 block equally probable among themselves to allow equal weight to the main activities of the city. The tails on either side are then reflecting the stranger aspects of the city.

d6+d12	Things to seek in Sholtipec
2	Answers from the Great Library
3	Military assistance (official or mercenary)
4	Gemwork
5	Decisions and warrants from the Temples
6	New intoxicants from the Hives (dusts, honeys or bugs)
7	Eel delicacies from Crystal Ponds
8	Cult affirmation for deeds or sacrifices
9	Sage suppositions from Drumspires
10	Space for dwelling/activities
11	Fuel, heat
12	Fashion, garments
13	Exoteric equipment
14	Reagents & ingredients
15	Information or intelligence
16	Art, culture or performers
17	Vengeance, assassins
18	Magic crafts (made in Drumspires or dug from Rooftops)

The purpose of this table serves both as a motivator for anyone encountered on the street - either as a stranger, this is why they have come, or as a local this is the aspect of the city they are involved in. Similarly for buildings, it can give a tag to the activity within; though for an out-of-district result, this can be assumed to mean that some non-normal activites are dominant at this place just now.

Food in world building

Following up on this post on food in settings on Reddit I thought to go deeper on some of my thoughts.

Mealtimes plays a big part of the current campaign with quite a few memorable meals and the idea of having to stay away from base and miss the dinner hour as a tangible sacrifice. The beats through out day are more or less 'major meal' and 'time between after meal'.

I try to make meals a daily opportunity to gather info, so continually positively reinforce that. I also flag 'its cold, you are burning energy and getting hungry' as a soft timer to drive pace during activities. Lore to the setting is that spell slinging makes you hungry, so the sorcerer is always concious of when the next meal is.

The specific foods that have turned up are ways to showcase one of the fairy tale races of the setting. The atmosphere is Ankh-morpork crossed with the fairy-tale aspects of Arthur Rackhams work and food is a great way to drive that things are not quite the same.

Examples of food preferences becoming tags within the world have been:
Super large mushrooms served whole with baked topping being one for the mountain and cave folk with intact transport being tricky and a safe arrival being cause for a celebration.
Large juicy breadbugs for breakfast, lunch and dinner marked a winter festival being one for the animal-lings.
Pungent stews are a favourite for the weasel-lings and have become a marker for their presence.

When I working food into world-building, I usually derive it from other parts first; if the city generation indicates a couple of obvious food types and sources then those will feature prominently.
Thenya is a city in the interior, on a river but mostly fed by field and mountains nearby. The sea is too far away. So as a first pass, classic medieval fare is a good model.
Sholtipec is a city on a river but with extensive eel farming, large hives and a large part of the city being reclaimed by jungles. Much hotter and with lots of available food in the forest and a significantly higher proportion of insects in the diet as the population is largely reptilian.

Once the general ideas were in place, I pre-generated a couple of food carts using the Dungeonspoon tables from Famous Hippopotamus and also rolled up the stall holders using the appropriate city dweller tables (e.g. these for Sholtipec.)

For my games, lots of useful business has gotten done standing around food carts or sitting to high tables; why not let the food served also drive the atmosphere?

Edit to add: Box Full of Boxes has a great Local Cuisine Generator along the same general concept.

City building: aspects of Sholtipec

Building the centre-piece city of my last campaign, I tried to spend time prepping the toolkit instead of creating specific detail; for instance in the first post on the city we saw what the population make up was. Now we will look at building generation tools.

A lot of this was seeded by the Infinigrad suburb generation tools on Lizardman Diaries but I felt I needed to cook up a few more specific tables to help specific more closely what I wanted.

For background the city, Sholtipec, is old; first growing up around the Great Library, then becoming a bastion of the Lizards Empire after they crushed the Gray invasion force nearby. Buildings and populations reflect all those epochs through to the current long, slow depopulation and retrenchment. So while the generalised chaos and atmosphere of the city can use the Infinigrad generators, beneath that I wanted an original epoch of the building.

So a given building in the city would roll a d10:

d10	Epoch	Building Aspect
1	Ancient	Eldritch carvings, non-euclidian spaces, illithid-inspired
2	Elder	Stilted, tree-dwellings, organically grown, magically mutated
3-4	High Lizard	Fortifications, neuva-aztec; insulated buildings
5-7	Dragon Era	Multi-racial build-outs; different sizes; big dragon-sized
8-10	Late	Repurposed buildings

This would give me a start point for who built the building, replacing the 'raceoid' originators from Infinigrad and then allowing me to use the rest of those generators more or less as is.

The 3 pillars of gameplay beyond D&D

A new survey from D&D Research Wizards (NYU team) is ongoing and they have published some preliminary results. This one is open to all TTRPG players and it is interesting to see it plotted against D&D focused surveys.

The increased importance of role-playing makes some sense as broadening the apeture from D&D to include everything will bring in many games where the classic modes of finding abandoned ruins and searching them for treasure while fighting off beasties are not their primary operating modes. Taking Call of Cthulu as an example - for almost all the games of that I have played, combat was lethal and to be avoided by the squishy humans - the fun was in the investigations (exploration) and the roleplay.

Similarly for World of Darkness - games I have played of that were less exploration focused and more roleplay and combat (fistfuls of d10s!) focused. Investigations and problems solving were usually rapidly brushed over by the application of high level gifts.

The survey is still open, looking for information from all Tabletop RPG players. There is also a raffle with participation prizes which is nice.

Other sources are:
Sven Writes twitter poll (2020)
D&D reddit survey (2014)
Sly Flourish facebook poll (2018)

d20 tricks for a villainous escape, boosted by neural network tools

A few ideas thrown together to challenge high-level PCs. The core assumption being that once the villain is in the clutches of the party, they will be torn down pretty quickly so the theme here is how to prolong the fight.

This is generic as much as possible to allow tailoring to the specific terrains you want.
1. Traversible but difficult terrain between the PC and foe; presents the puzzle of just slogging across (a known factor) vs spending resources to rapidly come to grips.
2. Terrain the foe can trigger - e.g. hiding on the far side of a tarpit or oil slick that sucks up movement to cross, that the foe can then ignite while the players are traversing
3. Multi-level close quarters - allowing crossing of paths without opponents blocking; e.g. running around on top of shelves in a library or facing something that can swim under the ice of a shallow lake
4. Highly visible, obvious traps - snares, pitfalls, things that won't kill but will delay individuals either de-activating or extricating themselves from - all action soaks while allowing the foe freedom to attack or flee
5. Living terrain - the foes are in a howdah of a large beast or fleeing past a sleeping dragon - both cases where slips or wild attacks risk bringing a new foe into the fight
6. Collateral innocents - fight happens atop a creature or with the foes holding a hostage - PCs need to defeat them with precision
7. A time limit for action - the foes have escaped into a mine with an avalanche descending or into a passenger pod on a giant turtle about to dive - the PCs must address the environmental challenge before their access is cut off.
8. For truly advanced challenge, crack out the non-eucidean architecture (part 1, and part 2) starting with part 3; wierd gravity.
9. Avoiding multiple objects in one spot - e.g. having to worry about multiple objects being piled up against a wall to allow foe to climb and escape; or bones tumbling from opening tombs that will rise to fight once enough falls in to allow skeletons to form
10. Avoid being surrounded by obstacles - foe tries to keep you in a place because they know they will be able to escape but not you - e.g. water rising toward a drain chute or other exit path that they will be able to slip away down, spiders building webs that will trap the PCs but the foe can slip through
11. Random encounters - The enemy won't just randomly drop on the map when they die e.g. they need to be brought to a place where they can be pinned to finish them off or else will likely escape - e.g. a planar being or vampire will reform elsewhere if killed
12. Endless encounters - prolonged or loud clashes are likely to bring reinforcements or generally worsen the situation - e.g. both parties are thieves/assassins where an alert will rouse the guards
13. Unwanted enemies - crushing the known foes at current location will turn current friendlies against the party - mistakenly assuming you are attacking innocents or breaking hospitality rules or some such
14. Moving on to the next phase - roll twice on this table and combine; success in the first phase shifts the fight to the second so more tactics need to be employed e.g. front-running an avalanche then having to negotiate traps in the cavern everyone is sheltered in
15. Raining - a thunderstorm on icy or rocky surfaces, making them first slick, then flooding, bringing a risk of lightning strikes to those near tall things and making communications and sight difficult as flashes disrupt vision
16. Water - a large area may have pools, rivers, bogs, lakes, swamps, rivers, ponds, deep waters, rivers in tributaries or even entire lakes making pursuit difficult for heavily armoured adventurers
17. Fences - some fortifications with solid walls or fences or trenches that regularly block line of sight and provide lots of close cover
18. Ropes - an area is a maze of spikes that requires pursuit by swinging on ropes- e.g. a huge cave with a lot of spikes or large pits within tunnels
19. Crumbling - an ancient stone floor is crumbling and pursuit paths must be judged by the weight of the pursuer
20. Narrows - the path to the foe requires that players can engage only piecemeal - some must power a lift or hold a rope bridge while others cross - requiring careful choice on who gets to grips in what order

A mightier list of terrain features can be found here to flesh out and modify the high level concepts described above.

Items 1-8 above were standard off the cuff responses to a prompt but from 9 onwards are slightly cleaned up outputs from the GPT-2 network at Bellard.org. I found this through Eldritch Fields. I fed it sub-sets of the 8 prompts I had created, chopping and changing to get more responses. A neat tool for beefing up some content that may be a bit scant.

Note 11 was originally "the map is randomly generated each time you start a new playthrough"
12 was "enemies can be friendly (for instance you can see where they are coming from or they can"
20 was "Tidal wave - a time warp from earlier phases of the fight - either the foes are still trapped deep into the cavern or they are under attack or drowning and need to escape quickly" - too similar to 7

d10 Ways the local thieves guild is going to get back at you

So you, the local thieves guild master have some troublesome adventurers that you cannot go after directly for whatever reason; what are your options to make their lives unpleasant?


1. To just cause trouble for them while you snickers into their pints far away - spread rumours that they are carrying lots of treasure after a successful dungeon run and wait for the random muggers and sneak thieves to have a go.
2. Put the word about that one of them is a minor noble scion and potentially valuable hostage and
3. Spread rumours they have committed heinous deeds against some group likely to take violent reprisal - burned down a shrine, killed a respected elder, etc.
4. If the guild is willing to put in a little legwork then connect with them through a false front, find out what they want, then go about getting it for them with massive collateral damage. When consequences start coming down the trail will lead to them and they genuinely wanted the thing so noone will believe it wasn't their fault
5. Put around rumours they are cultists, blood war mercenaries or other vile souls who bring ruin in their wake - then make sure ruin follows in their wake.
6. Set out bounty notices for some local notables, payment to be collected on delivery of their heads to the party. Even if no-one takes it up, the local guards will be down on them like a landslide. If someone does take it up, better and better
7. Spy on them, infiltrate their residences, blackmail their henchlings and servants to get their plans - then tip off their foes that they are coming.
8. Make some extra coin by selling a foe a full description of what they can do and any known weaknesses
9. Find our their secrets and vices and spread them all over town - best part is that every word will be true
10. Meet some group of up and coming troublemakers and offer them a bounty for every flashy wicked deed they do in the partys name

Notes on 1-page session prep

tl:dr; a walk through of a single-page set up for running sessions with numerous plot lines

For background; I played lots and lots of D&D 2e, 3.5e from early teens up to end of college then sporadically after that for a decade and have now come back to it. In the interim the OSR happened, 5e launched and the myriad of resources available online has exploded. In particular I notice the focus has shifted from 'this is how one must do it, if you are good/serious' to 'the DM is a player too / here is how to make life easier for yourself'. In the spirit of the latter I want to share the way I prep my sessions that I have refined over the past years and two campaigns.

Each prep session, I start with two sheets - the last session and a blank. Current flow for preparation goes:
1. starts with the 'when' layout and weather, including countdown to major events and recurring things happening
2. List outstanding hooks that can be used for the session; this looks scant because most are a tag back to a place where the encounter, plot hook, etc is detailed
3. Blocked out timeline for session - has evolved into Breakfast, morning, lunch, afternoon, dinner, evening, night as the 'action beats' through a day.
4. Detail onto any hook not yet fleshed out if it is small. Larger hooks might get their own page if I expect to reference back to it over multiple sessions
This is all the pre-session prep I will do from here it is during and after.
5. Log of actual play out of the session, with half-hour blocks as the finest level of detail
6. Immediate post session (players still at the table) expected actions for next session, leads on their mind, where they think they are going
7. Post session implications where I work out consequences of player actions, move the timeline along on anything happening in the background that may not have featured at the table.

Note, this is possible because my writing is small and I am happy with tiny script; your mileage may vary.

As noted above starting for a session I will note what parts of section 2 were not covered and port them forward to the new section 2. Where a hook was detailed out in a section 3, I will note which sheet (episode number) has the detail. Next, I go through 5-7 to cook up some new hooks and add them to the new section 2.

Other than this the main sheets kept are locations (dungeon complex, city districts) which are revisited time and again, a heirarchy of local power structures, a sheet of NPCs encountered and 'conspiracy pages' where the active factions are detailed out.

At the table this is then - stack of episode sheets with live hooks to one side, stack of lore sheets to the other side for deeper detail and the live episode sheet in front of me.

Anyone looking for more thinking on this I suggest to check out Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master by Sly Flourish where I pinched the idea of slimming down and simplifying my prep in the first place or there is now another post of this system in action.

Comparison of popularity of gaming in top 20 European countries

I pulled the numbers of members of groups tagged with tabletop gaming tags and spotted 'ttrpg' as the highest level tag. D&D, RPG, and multiple other related tags identify smaller numbers so TTRPG is taken as the max possible indicator.

Social media penetration is similar (~95-97%) across Europe so taking the number of meetup members per million population gives a rough estimate of gamer prevalence.

The stand out difference is that the UK/Ireland have much higher rates that other European countries.

A first question is whether activity levels are in reality similar but are happening off Meetup.com and on other, language localised sites. The similarly flat rates across German, French, Spanish, Dutch and Swedish speaking countries suggests not - it would not be expected to have equally popular local sites in all these different languages.

A second question is whether, as anecdotes suggest, continental board gaming culture does not cross-over to RPGs in the same way as in the UK/Ireland (or indeed America). Discussions with locals in French and German speaking groups suggest that free time is more likely to be spent playing board games as it is easier to round up a group (different family generations playing together was a frequent point) and less prep time is needed compared to RPGs. This is anec-data and thus no stronger than an indicator of what may be going on.

Investigations to continue.

d10 Things the lizardfolk aristocrats are in a twist about

d10 Things the Lizard Aristos are in a twist about this week

1. That someone has bred bees to produce something indistinguishable from moon bee imperial jelly! But the rituals!
2. The dragon gods are thirsty and someone drank the holy offering beer!
3. The war in the East has disrupted trade and the price of scale wax has skyrocketed
4. Cold snap. Everyone slow and grumpy.
5. Imitation gold scale paint now indistinguishable from the real thing. Poor people are wearing it! Existing artful designs now worthless for flaunting.
6. Heirs of two rival castes discovered sharing a sunning stone. Scandalous!
7. The flies taste different since Tuesday. Not bad, per se. But different. And different is bad.
8. Those damned humans left corpses in the swamp. Again. The value of the swampedge property is plummeting.
9. Lady Ysscale is holding a party, but failed to provide adequate frog legs. Some of the guests left hungry.
10. How is green this season's colour? The common lizards are green. It is all because Lord Twiss married that jumped-up serving lizard, and no everyone is slumming it with green scalepaint.

With thanks to: ArkosDawn, Thriftomancer, Vance, Spekkio, stm, MerlynZero, mtb-za

What vengeance is the fey court taking on your town? (d8)

My contributions to a gygaxian democracy effort on a walled garden discord on 'd8 things the party find as they approach the town that has angered the fey lord?'


1 The proper sidhe of legend did their worst tricks were with time - time speeds up towards the centre of the city (cab play out like Inception or Interstellar)
2.'Nothing is what it seems'; manifesting lots of glamours, illusions with the aim of having people coming to harm by walking up stairs that lead to nowhere, falling into pits, walking into fires
3. Children gone for a night, returned as old, old people with mass confusion among the townsfolk
4. People are spirited away; fed fey food, now cannot eat food of the prime - they waste away, starving to death for fey foods at tables laden with their own cooking
5. The fey prince who wants a monument to the folly of those who cross him turns the townsfolk to trees and roots them along all approaches to the city, there to cry warning to any who would come to the city (this stolen from Richard K Morgans 'A land fit for heroes' series)
6. The wyld hunt is a classic, with the twist of turning all the townsfolk into animals for the hunt
7. Animated terrain - a walking clock tower or town gate stomping about seeking folk to squash. This from the legend of the split rock - cross through it three times and it will close on you
8. Noone in the city can recognise beauty that is not the fey, they cannot stand the sight of other humans now and flee in horror from each other

d12 natural items for quest objects

Reworking a conversation on discord into a table of d12 druidic-themed quest objects


1. A fruit, or seed that has been changed or infected - like the boll of a boll-weevil, those grapes that need fungal infestation before you can make certain wines; blue-cheese would be a common example.
2. The blood of a were-wolf drawn at full moon for a time-bound encounter
3. Something like a 7-year locust - it only comes out at certain times and is common as dirt then, but now is an off year and the challenge is to figure out what completionist bug-collector is going to have a couple of these things spare when noone really cares about them
4. A tree that has grown only knowing the light of certain stars and not others - i.e. in a valley that faces in a very specific direction.
5. Seemingly impossible places - this temperature, moisture but that type of rock - find a place where glaciers, volcanic activity, crashed magical cities brought the right kinds of rock/soil far, far off the places they originated
6. All the temple walls show friezes of the McGuffin tree but they were all cut down and burnt as offerings. The ritual needs some to be burnt and they used to grow around here so the players need to find some - e.g. under an ashfall like Pompeii
7. Preserved extinct things such as leaves and seeds can be found trapped in amber in the nearby amber mines
8. Vanished plants or animals in the local nobles residence as the panelling or as the trophy heads mounted on his wall - a heist where the key issue is the size of the thing being stolen
9. The quest item is hiding in plain sight as part of all the ancient imperial mile-makers and signposts but the authorities are going to come after whoever tears them up
10. Finding a critter frozen above the snowline to get a 'fresh' pelt
11. Cultivate a fruit or flower from the last existing seed - maybe the seed needs to be watered with tears or some such ritual madness
12. Certain paths and trails can only be walked at this time of year; e.g. the ritual must be held on a mountain in Asgard; a gate will open at the top of this mountain in X days - the only time you can hike there without being dead yourself.

An inversion of this could be that when these things were made long long ago, the BBEG thought they were making things hard by requiring certain ingredients that were impossible to source at the time but once the party figures out the translation for the named ingredient they realise it is a commonly available spice these days and they probably have some on them.

Big list of TTRPG/D&D surveys

tl:dr; links to where all the numbers come from.

A long planned master post of sources for future reference. First four are the 'general' surveys with many thousands of respondents deriving from tools used to play the game. These are capturing the preferences of players without requiring them to fill out a survey.

The other sources are survey responses, these give more detail of how people are playing the game but are self-selecting. As noted before the preferences of the general population and the survey responding 'enthusiasts' are different.

Name	Year	Size	Type
5.30.8	2017	109000	App
AideDnD	2020	12812	App
DnDBeyond	2020	150000	App
Oganm	2020	5824	App
Trygstad	2019	1130	Thesis
Reddit ML	2019	744	Survey
GitP Forums	2017	1361	Survey
Reddit Subclasses	2019	182	Survey
RPGnet Actual	2017	894	Surey
Elderbrain	2020	2044	Survey
ThinkDM	2020	1150	Survey
Reddit D&D	2014	1734	Survey
Mega DM survey	2017	6421	Survey
Facebook D&D 5e Experiences	2020	1131	Survey
Sly Flourish DMs	2016	6600	Survey
OSR Gateway	2020	2764	Survey