Year in Review 2023

2023 was a great year for gaming - a recent, if not all time high

On running things
Ducal House (3.5e) - ran 24 sessions to take us up to 102 during the year, covering mostly the long road home from closing out a major quest and its fall out. I've written an in-flight retrospective from DM'ing it here. I have a dig into all the plot arcs, problems solved and in-world events to come. Below, behold the sorcerer, drawn by the bard.

Spelljammer - Light of Xaryxis Remix (5e) - 19 sessions running a sand-boxed Light of Xaryxis, smoothing out as we went through the year and settled onto a regular schedule. Ramped up from 4th to 8th level, closing in on the campaign finale. I have stayed a bit quiet about this since it is a big arc in progress but I have been having fun

Spelljammer Academy (5e) - 12 sessions of episodic campaign, mostly a vehicle for venue tests about the city. Ludicrous hi-jinks intercut with some dangerous fights and tours of much of Realmspace. Campaign retrospective here.

Southern Reaches (Brancalonia, 5e) - 22 sessions of open table, light-hearted west-marches type campaign. On hiatus since my evening playing slot has become a lot more tricky, perhaps to be resurrected at some point in the future. Campaign retrospective here.

Bay of Princes (Brancalonia, 5e) - 10 sessions to date of running through the published Brancalonia adventures at my local games society regular Friday night open tables. Using this as the vehicle also to hang newbie induction from Meetup. If judged by the fact that I'll get sign-ups from our regulars any time I run a table, then this is going well. I am enjoying the challenge of working through all the adventures.

On games played during the year
Rime of the Frostmaiden (5e) - continuing with the same crack group of adventurers as Out of the Abyss, 13 sessions saw us progress to level five, traversing Icewind Dale solving problems for every Tom, Dick and Harry and trying to piece together what the hells is going on.

Empyrean Dynasty (FKR) - final wrap up of the epic galactic politics game - bizarrely, my faction-group sort of won? We achieved our goals of becoming the universal religion at the cost of multiple worlds and bitter galactic war.

Scarlet Heroes - some old school open table dungeoneering - henchmen and a sparse handful of hitpoints all that stands between gold and glory or an early grave. Great fun creeping through corridors and then employing flaming oil and caltrops for any edge against a foe. I really liked the fray dice mechanic.

Tyranny of Dragons (5e) - 7 sessions to close out the first book, significant traipsing about the wilderness, an epic fight with a wizard and its minions, duplicates, clones and various other head-fakery, and slowly uncovering the contours of the conspiracy we faced.

Spire (Spire) - played a pair of sessions of this, one shots part of building up a drop in campaign - now four sessions in and the in-house testing team has been getting great fun out of it.

Grand Planar Adventures (5e) - newly joined planescape campaign; running through some 2e classics to level up and synchronise with an existing planar party.

As shown here, monthly sessions played this year was higher in each month than any month in the previous five years. Not sure this tempo will be sustained but a *lot* of gaming got done this year.

The other big thing has been trying to on-ramp some of the legions of D&D interested folk attracted first by Honor Among Thieves and then Baldurs Gate 3. I took on a Meetup group to try and catch those folk and they have been turning up at our tables. I ran a little survey to see what exactly people want and those results seem to have encouraged folk to kickstart some new campaigns and fish for players on the RPGVienna forum which is great.

On blogging content

Since 2022 (blue) total posts are stable at 2/week plus the weekly links. Interestingly for 2023 (orange), pick-up by the Glatisant is no longer my key driver for views - pick-up on the front-page of ENWorld turned out to be the planet-buster numbers spike - the seismographs are still twitching from that *four months* later. Upticks in day-to-day readership is driven by Lemmy and Sly Flourish's TTRPGs feed. Overall, chopping out an estimate of what was leakage from cyberwarfare and AI scraping, it looks like ~ 63% rise in views/year. Who knows how much of that is real people - you are, at least.

Blogging this last half year has seen a switch in focus - from frameworks and ideas to lessons learned and write ups as I have run more stuff and had less time to write creatively. In particular the logistics of wrangling folk for the Meetup group has sapped the exact same well of time to sit at the computer and write that would previously have turned into blogposts.

Blogging projects that got done nonetheless:
- Glass Candles GLoGtober '23 - contributed a list this year
- Campaign retrospectives - following the format from Against the Wicked City
- Monthly RPG Blog Carnival participation and one month hosted

Notable blogposts from the year by views were:
Class/Race archetypes in 1.2 million D&DBeyond characters
Player Class Stability from 1M D&D Beyond Sheets
Reach of the Roach God
Review: Historica Arcanum - The City of Crescent
Class / Race choices in Baldurs Gate 3 vs tabletop 5e
d30 Things Above a Mindflayer World
Campaign Spin-Up VII - When One-Shots Sprawl
Review: Swords of the Serpentine
Masquerade as social depth-crawl (RPG Blog Carnival)

Goals for the coming year

- Continue Ducal House, run out Spelljammer LoX - see what to replace that with afterward (Planescape Turn of Fortunes Wheel?).
- Run more Brancalonia at the Friday night drop in games.
- Run an event, see about doing some DM'ing 101 to get more new folk happy to try and DM their first game.
- Play more Rime, Planescape and perhaps Scarlet Heroes.
- Should things massively break my way timewise I have a notion of some sort of silk-roads campaign.

Overall a focus on gaming at table and trying to help the new folk sloshing into the hobby to get started.

Thanks for reading along, hope you find more to interest and amuse in the coming year. If you have any suggestions or requests, drop them in a comment below or ping me on twitter (while it lasts) or on mastodon or on bluesky - I even have a bunch of invites for that last if anyone else wants one.

Landing the session ending for one-shots (RPG Blog Carnival)

For this months blog carnival - hosted by Plastic Polyhedra on the topic of Endings I have some thoughts on 'sticking the landing for one-shots'. Also, Sign-ups for 2024 Blog Carnival hosting is open on Of Dice And Dragons.

This year I started running a lot more one-shots and a drop-in open table games - both of which being playtypes where session discipline is much more of a thing. Campaigns are forgiving; wherever you need to down tools you can pick up again. For one-shots or episodic play, if you don't know you'll have the same players again you need to come to some kind of finish. A lot of the advice you'll find out there for convention gaming also applies here.

By the numbers these are observations from 34 episodic game sessions (12 Spelljammer Academy (SJA), 22 Southern Reaches) and 10 Brancalonia one-shots. With one exception of a session that wrapped early, Spelljammer Academy (episodic) and Brancalonia (one-shots) ran 4.5-5 hours face to face through my local games society RPGVienna. Southern Reaches (open-table episodics) were 2.5-3 hours run online, with one exception that ran long. Below are tricks I use to run to time - this is no grand theory of game running, just some stuff I try to keep in mind.

Shiny TTRPG links #152

A mix for this Christmas day! More can be found on the previous list found here. You can find more links on this weeks r/OSR blogroll or the RPG Blog Carnival or on Third Kingdom Games news roundup. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.

RPG Diegesis writes rules should be illegal

Daily Adventure Prompts shares advice for running and/or adapting prewritten modules

Wizard Fight Club has Questions About Wizards

Orange Subterfugacious Raccoon gives us Setting Via Equipment Lists (Santicorn 2023)

Sabatini's Scatterbrained Place suggests Swindle Your Players

Whose Measure God Could Not Take gives us Signature Moves for Humanoid Combatants

Silverarm Press writes Glory of the Elder Days: Magic Items and Sandbox Histories

Cannibal Halfling Gaming shares Hobby Economics: RPGs and Bicycles

Library of Attnam gives us 5e House Rules

Tom van Winkles Return to Gaming writes Trust the Dice for Your Fiction

Idiom Drottning shares The Quest Queue

100th session look-back: Ducal House

We hit sessions 100 in my home campaign, 3.5e noble house adventures and I thought it worth marking. My players did too - they made a pie, picture below. I will use the usual campaign retrospective Against the Wicked City style for where we stand today, I will write up more on the plots and in-world activities in a separate piece.

What it is: noble house campaign, running with 3.5e, the players as a cleric, sorcerer and bard as cousins, grand-children of the duke at campaign start. This has been a variant of the 'fortress focussed' model where the party have access to a lot of resources beyond just their character sheets but have also taken on personal responsibility for the realm. Campaign play has been the PCs solving the big problems facing the house. Setting is homebrewed; pitched on the back of scrap paper in session zero then anchored with an Azgaars fantasy map, populated with OSR animal-lings. What we have below is mostly a 'mechanistic' DM's perspective on running it.

What worked:
* Amazing craftiness from the players - artwork from the bard, a DMs screen, and delicious treats.

d50 more memorabila to loot

tl;dr: The other half of the d100 trinkets table for a Brancalonia game.

There is a table of Memorabilia (p69 Brancalonia Spaghetti Fantasy) which are both interesting things to find as part of loot and also legitimate winnings for brawls and the like. The table is referred to relatively often and each entry is supposed to be unique so as a campaign gets going you find yourself burning through them.

According to the book good examples of memorabilia must:

- Have no economic value and no particular use. Generally, they cannot be resold. - Be original. Memorabilia cannot be shoddy or counterfeit, and even if they were, nothing would change. - Be so bizarre and unusual that they could never be confused with other Memorabilia. Each piece is unique.

So I rummaged through old magazines during recycling and cooked up the following. They also reflect the fact that I am using an animal-folk heavy setting for my Brancalonia game, hence the fur, horn and feather references.

d50 memorabilia
1. Tiny carved sea-creatures, well worn to the touch
2. A bottle of mysterious, foul tasting pills - vitamins, good for your long term health, will ward off scurvy for a week
3. A false beard in formal dwarf style, fitted for a goblin or halfling
4. Brightly coloured fur dye
5. Portable shrine (idols rolled up in a mat)
6. Tiny bust of a glowering king - breaks a fear effect
7. Velvet and gilt waistcoat fitted for a small creature
8. Short stub of a fat candle
9. Blue enamel fittings to reinforce something and make it look fancy
10. Genie vase with captive minor imp
11. Pegasus shoe - cold iron, both good luck and good for striking the supernatural
12. Frayed bridle of leaping - fits to any ridable animal, liable to break after one use but triples the distance it can jump

Shiny TTRPG links #151

More can be found on the previous list found here. You can find more links on this weeks r/OSR blogroll or the RPG Blog Carnival or on Third Kingdom Games news roundup. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.

Of Dice and Dragons is taking signups for hosts for 2024 RPG Blog Carnival

Spriggan's Den proposes Lore 24

@shirtlessgoblin rediscovers amazing osr adventures from old copies of Dungeon magazine

Shuttered Room gives us DINOSAURS! - Back to Basic

The Tao of D&D wrote We Know Already How This Works - on populating city crawls

Playful Void shares Fleeing the Dungeon

Alone in the Labyrinth gives us The City Of Ghosts: Sandbox & Playtest

Take on Rules shares My Procedure for Facilitating Open Table Gaming and Expanding on My Procedures for Open Table Gaming

The Retired Adventurer gives us 40,000 Sectors: A Generator

Class / Race choices from 4 months of Baldurs Gate 3 vs tabletop 5e

Larian Studios, makers of Baldurs Gate 3, released an update to their player stats after four months of play including class and race choices of the players. They let us see these immediately after launch and they looked different to the typical tabletop choices despite being a pretty faithful implementation of the 5e ruleset. There were a bunch of theories kicked around at the time, in the comments here and elsewhere that boiled down to a strong hypothesis that people were running charisma-focussed characters since mechanically driven social interaction is much more important in a computer game than at the tabletop.

So here is the rerun of that number crunching - with the launch weekend and 4 month stats.

On class the broad patterns stay the same - way off what the tabletop surveys show but with fighter, rogue and barbarian climbing the leaderboard as paladin, warlock, monk and ranger drop. Clerics also became more popular though still standing last.

Review: Planescape: Adventures in the Multiverse (5e)

tl:dr; surprisingly good return to the planes, anchored around what looks like a fun campaign.

So I threw in my order for this back in the late spring and I've been paying little attention to the hype since. I was going to be getting this no matter what - all I did do was look back at the old Planescape Core Set (AD&D, 1994) to be able to compare what we got then and now. My expectations were rock bottom after Spelljammer, I was expecting a hack job content-wise so I guess they were set up for success from that angle.

Cover by Tony diTerlizzi

First impression - gorgeous art - I expected no less, especially since I heard diTerlizzi was back on board. It is a slightly softer style than his harder edged 90's stuff - I can see the path through childrens literature such as the Spiderwick Chronicles to get here - keeping the weird but sanding off some of the sharper edges. His Lady of Pain looks a lot less arbitrarily lethal than the one on the main covers and she should be terrifying. Maps and layout are good, this is WotC, those things should be taken for granted. Stylistically there is less 'these places are inherently dangerous' than the previous edition, there is a bit more Bond-esque 'heists and tension against fabulous backdrops' style from the art - more glorious, less grim.

One odd thing though is the weird smell, enough that even the in-house testing team commented on it. Normally cracking the book and taking a deep breath is one of the nice parts of getting a book not a pdf but in this case I'm getting a touch of a headache from having the things sitting open in front of me.

All contents of the slipcase, art by Tony diTerlizzi

So what is all this stuff you get in the slipcase?

Shiny TTRPG links #150

Significant doings in the TTRPG space this week. More can be found on the previous list found here. You can find more links on this weeks r/OSR blogroll or the RPG Blog Carnival or on Third Kingdom Games news roundup. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.

Traverse Fantasy gives us Kubular & Other Attack Methods

Tales of the Lunar Lands writes I Love Underused Monsters

OSR VAULT gives us 100 Good/Evil Faction Motivations

Grumpy Wizard asks How Do I Keep Players From Ignoring Adventures In My Sandbox Campaigns?

The Fantastic is Fact on Getting Started with OD&D

Methods & Madness discusses The BECMI reaction table

Campaign Spin-Up VIII - Fuzzier West March Sandboxes

I ran an open table game and wanted to dig into a little how it all came off from the DM prep point of view. There are some player session write-ups that went up on Obsidian Portal.

Deliberate aspects of this campaign were:
- open table, drop-in game - go whenever 3 were available
- follow the players, drop hooks but no big plot
- minimise prep - I had three other campaigns running, there was no time for more prep
- newbie friendly

The tools used in sessions were
- a hidden depths table for the wilderness
- Brancalonia non-lethal brawl rules to make non-wilds/underground less dangerous but still fun
- an overloaded encounter table for the tunnels beneath their base
- a semi-randomly generated dungeon made with a map and tables from the DMG 3.5e
- someone elses Dungeon 23 run for the big hidden dungeon
- maps from photos - woodworm burrows, tourist guide to a castle, hexmap
- a city page generated using my workflow - the In Corpathium and Infinigrad generators combined with Stupidly Quick City-Building from r/DNDBehindTheScreen and steps 3 & 4 from creating fantasy villages, towns and cities to get the layout
- a few special sessions built off a dedicated tool - two from Where the Wheat Grows Tall, one from the bathhouse table

Going session by session on what drove play each time a group sat to table:

It Has A Name (NPC Management)

tl;dr: Name your NPCs to avoid slips and obfuscate who is important.

A theme of this year has been a lot more one shots and published material - me reading and assimilating other peoples stuff with not so much prep time before running it - Light of Xaryxis campaign and the Fistful of Quatrins series in the Bracalonia book among others. What I have found this has lead to is problems for me where NPCs have false identities or hidden aspects.

Examples:
This person they found has a core aspect of their identity that is not obvious on first glance.
That sailor is a shapeshifter? How to avoid slipping and referring to him by 'cultist' or 'shapeshifter'.
That voice behind the door is a monster? Better not refer to it as what it is.
That guy has a connection to people that is his only characterisation but you do not want that to spring out at folk

Solution - name them and never give another reference, even after things become clear.

Best part of this is that even after things come to blows and there are pieces on the battlefield, you just have different looking pieces but the names still obfuscate exactly what it is.

Spoilers ahead for light of Xaryxis (LoX).

Shiny TTRPG links #149

A wider ranging ramble about the web this week. More can be found on the previous list found here. You can find more links on this weeks r/OSR blogroll or the RPG Blog Carnival or on Third Kingdom Games news roundup. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.

Plastic Polyhedra start Decembers RPG Blog Carnival: Endings

VDonnut Valley compiles November's Carnival Roundup Post

U.S. Postal Service Reveals Additional Stamps for 2024

Hipsters & Dragons gives us Designing & Running Heists in 5e D&D

Full Moon Storytelling suggests Using ‘third places’ to add cultural depth to your D&D campaign or character

Mazirian's Garden shares Downtime: Home away from Home

Grumpy Wizard asks How Do I Keep Players From Ignoring Adventures In My Sandbox Campaigns?

Table Matching Survey Results

I ran a survey of our local game group to discover preferences and see what else people would like to be playing. From conversations at Night of the Rolling Dice I thought it would be a good idea to survey the group to ask what games people want to play to then try and match up tables. Partially inspired by the frequency of recent group matching posts here, I wanted to try and highlight preferred frequency (weekly, monthly, etc), preferred session length, online/in-person/both so folk could hopefully see that there were others interested in the same timeslots.

Our standard tempo is a Friday night session and a sometimes Saturday brunch session - my hypothesis going into this was these were driven purely by force of habit - those timings generally working and being 'good enough' we left them. I wanted to know if there could be other times that would suit people who could not make the Friday night slots and what those would be.

What stands out to me from the point of view of getting more tables going:
* We have people interested to play most weeknight evenings - plenty of room to fit in a new game.
* We have nine people interested to run a table - behold your player pool!
* 11 of us are happy to play online

People available per day - our regular slot is a Friday due to room availability but it looks like it would be even better for folk on a Saturday or Sunday.

Preferred frequency of play - most people are being covered by our weekly session but we have a fair few that once or twice a month suit better.

Thoughts on a new "DMG of house rules"

Back in Ireland this past weekend I met up with my old Katharsis table and we got to talking about the coming edition - in particular what would need to be in those books to get us to lay down our cash. Running theory is that the PHB will shift huge numbers, because players love options. The Monster Manual will not because there are so many online equivalents and a significantly smaller pool of interested buyers. We were not sure about the DMG; and wondered what we would want to see ourselves - a book full of settings perhaps?

This would be a book with a chapter on each of the major D&D settings to give just enough to get started in any of them - Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, Spelljammer, Planescape, whatever. This would make it something that both players and DM's would want and hugely increase the potential pool of buyers.

For me, a neat edition to this would be optional rules tagged into each setting - Forgotten Realms is heroic fantasy, use the standard rules. Greyhawk is supposed to be more swords and sorcery, maybe use Gritty Realism, etc. All the various optional rules would be grouped and presented with the setting to support the feel of that setting, making there be a reason to play different settings to get different experiences out of the same, known, system. I really like the way that Brancalonia is effectively a 5e mod - it gives a different feel to the setting without have to have people learn a whole new system. Things like ship combat, overland exploration and other mechanics could also be tied in as setting options.

Shiny TTRPG links #148

A short set of links due to travel. More can be found on the previous list found here. You can find more links on this weeks r/OSR blogroll or the RPG Blog Carnival or on Third Kingdom Games news roundup. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.

Scholomance has launched The Great Tabletop Roleplaying Survey - get your views in!

The Burnt World of Athas shares Scale, Tail, and Claw - The Reptilian Peoples of Athas

A Knight at the Opera gives us Action Mysteries

Well well well, look what the shoggoth dragged in shares My Arden Vul campaign, 6 months in

The Lady and Tiger gives us One and a Half Month OSR Retrospective

David J Prokopetz compiles Tumblr 200-Word RPGs 2023

Eldritch Fields gives us Wilderness Encounter Details/Activities

Methods & Madness seeks Good generic wilderness encounter tables? (B/X vs. AD&D vs. 5e)

Bjarke the Bard writes Downtime Activities Leveled Up: A Comparative Review of A5E and D&D 5E

Darkplane shares Popping the Hood on Published Scenarios

Signals from Delta Pavonis asks GM Screens - what is their Glorious Purpose?

Vladar's Blog writes Planescape review: The March Begins

Tales of the Lunar Lands shares Friday Encounter: Fire in the Hole

The Ideocron of the Oracular Somnambulist gives us Bone Fire

Mythlands of Erce writes Standing up for D&D's Gen X: 2e (Part 1)

OSR VAULT gives us 100 Curses

Rolling With Us shares The Shadow Over Yuletide: Free Christmas D&D Adventure

Mindstorm presents Gulch

Gaming setup - to sprawl or not to sprawl

A follow on from the 'tools of the trade' post - here is what my cafe gaming set up looks like. Pretty tight in but it works. Spares breaking my shoulder which would be pointless anyway because there is not room for more stuff.

It did put me in mind of how much space do I use when space is no object - what is my home table set up? This partly came from a conversation around 'what do have in a D&D room if you could have one' and myself and my home campaign were racking our brains. The screen here was a gift from my crafty players.

Review: Skyrealms

tl:dr; a neat little setting for exploration, with a whimsical tone but some real teeth to adventure hooks here.

I backed the kickstarter as part of Zinequest #4 I think? First peered in for the Evlyn Moreau art then backed it when I saw floating islands.

Art by Evlyn Moreau

First impression is of a surprisingly chunky set of zines in a stuffed packet of things. The cardstock is nice, the whole thing has a great tactility. As mentioned multiple times throughout the zines, these are also meant for colouring in and they have that arty feel. The interior lay outs have lots of white space and easy to absorb. The art by Evlyn Moreau is a treat, as always. Favourites for me were the Emobeast, the Crystal Kingdom and the Goosedemon.

Shiny TTRPG links #147

This weeks links from about the internet. More links can be found on the previous list found here. You can find more links on this weeks r/OSR blogroll or the RPG Blog Carnival or on Third Kingdom Games news roundup. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.

Graphite Prime provides Spotlight: OSRIC Player's Guide

Nicholas Hendriks asks Problem: How to inject more roleplaying into your West Marches Hexcrawl?

Cavegirl's Game Stuff gave us Duels in OSR

Sam Sorenson proposes New Simulationism

The Colours of Pentagrams and Their Meanings gives us 15 tips and advices for GMs

The Bone Box Chant wrote on Revisiting the NSR

Campaign Retrospective: Southern Reaches

An open table sort-of-West Marches game has stalled out so let us do a retrospective Against the Wicked City style to see what we can learn and decide if it is worth reviving. Previous retrospectives were done on campaigns of yore and recently a Spelljammer Academy mini-campaign.

Southern Reaches, 23 Sessions (Dec 2022 - July 2023)
What it was: open table sandbox test using Brancalonia rules. I was approached to run it by one of my home-campaign players while they were overseas studying. They roped together a gang of folk. I also ran a 'B table' through the same set up as a test and that turned into fun combinations later.

For me this was a test of West Marchesstyle - as closely as could be done - no plots, no plans, each session started "you've come down to breakfast in the Flytrap Inn, this is who you see around the table, what are you up to today?" It was also an arena to try out things from various OSR blogs (biblio below) and has been my most formal 'method test' campaign so far where I was attempting to follow a style of game running as much as I was creating a world.

This is the campaign mentioned in Chekovs Hooks II: Refreshing Rumours.

What comes after the Nights of the Rolling Dice?

I have ended up running a D&D Meetup group and have been trying to figure out what to do with it.

We ran two big events - Night of the Rolling Dice and Night of the Rolling Dice 2: This Time By Daylight - both 10 tables of DM + 5 using DM's from RPG Vienna. Packed out, 40-50 players turned up for each, with waitlists too. All good.

I feel people can be better served than by occassional big set piece gaming meetups. We have regular Friday night open tables (as discussed before) and I have been putting them up on the meetup with low response on the Meetup itself (2-3 folk, maybe, often none at all) but we do seem to get twos and threes rocking up at the door.

Shiny TTRPG links #146

More links can be found on the previous list found here. You can find more links on this weeks r/OSR blogroll or the RPG Blog Carnival or on Third Kingdom Games news roundup. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.

Wanderer Bill's New Journal asks is there A Pattern to Arnesonian Dungeons?

Cavegirl's Game Stuff gives us Theory - Hard & Soft Tools

Grognardia exhorts Be a Creator, Not a Consumer

DMDave gives us The City of Torch | New Base of Operations for 5e (Bloody Bunch Spoilers)

Tom Van Winkle's Return To Gaming writes Character Motivation is the Player's Responsibility

Attronarch's Athenaeum gives us On Character Death and Long-Term Play

Chekovs Hooks III: Loose Ends from Written Modules

tl;dr: a 'rumours as campaign glue' treatment for an open table running published adventures (Brancalonia core book + Jinx Almanac).

I wrote previous about refreshing the hooks for a quasi west-march open table where multiple groups leave a lot of open items based on sweeping up hooks after a year of campaign play.

This time I have been running through the Brancalonia published adventures - mostly in the Core Book and Jinx's Almanac - in an open table format and I want to run a similar exercise to start setting up for when I run out of adventures and to reward those players who have done a few of them with recognition of their agency.

1. Loose Ends: same as the Chekovs adventure hooks as before
2. Allies and Rivals: NPCs and factions now aware of the PCs who may generate hooks
3. Rumours: what becomes visible of the previous two, strongly inspired by Hill Cantons "News as Campaign Glue"

For feedstock in all of these I have a slightly different set of inputs - these are not my own fevered imaginings or NPCs I came up with, I ran them out of the book and a lot fell by the wayside as we went. Going through it I realise I need to spot loose ends but filter them by gameable potential. I also need to catch the flavour of the setting correctly. For 'leading hooks' I wanted to minimise the books I am carrying around so stick just to Jinx Almanac for now.

I did a first pass of noting the loose ends and events. Second pass was running through the hooks for the further adventures in Jinx Almanac. I tried to thread those hooks back to player actions from previous adventures. I want to leave a sense of player actions impact the world so kept in some rumours as pure aftermath/consequence, included all the 'hook-tied-to-consequence' I could and left in pure hooks where I had to.

With all this mechanical part done, the next actions were 'flavourising' it to make it more true to the world and tying it back to previously met NPCs to obey Alexandrians 'law of conservation of NPCs'. The final result is below.

Brancalonia Rumour Table
1. Peach Cider, the most appreciated drink of the Golden Sun tavern, has deteriorated significantly in the past months - people aren't getting drunk anymore! Someone needs to go Tassonia and get them to sort it out. (Players actions from Rugantino, Hook for Pickled Rich - The Gangover)

2. New Duke Sarion de Savedra at Cat Castle fears horses and is setting up hunts in the forest of Batta for wild ones. (Aftermath of See Acquaviva and Die! Hook for Pesto all Lungarivese)

3. Famed bigat-slayers Alermo and Francis are said to have parted ways after killing the Bigat of the Bottacione just when we need them as a beast prowls the streets. Well, small strange creature - but you can never be too careful! (Aftermath of Bride of the Bigat, Hook for Wolpertinger, Wererat, Well)

4. Someone has been telling fools the fishing in the Avicelline swamp is worth getting killed over - and they have been (Players actions from The Good The Bad and the Marionette)

5. Preachers normally confined to their posts on the road to Penumbria have begun prowling further afield with accusations of blasphemy, complaining about peoples fun. They are especially incensed about the approaching Red Carnival with its revelry, parties and indecencies set to engulf the city of Amnasseanase (Players actions from Penumbria Jeez Festival, Hook for The Red Carnival)

6. Queens Guard have been spotted in the Ditch of Serpents, rumoured to be chasing Ghino de Fosca's band after a massacre (Aftermath of See Acquaviva and Die!, Hook for The Red Carnival)

Throw in additional module rumours

7. An old soldiers map points to a treasure buried near a farm, the current holder of the map willing to sell because of tales of a fearsomly scarred viperwolf has emerged from the mists around Penumbria and prowls the countryside. (Aftermath of Penumbria Jeez Festival, Hook for Where the Wheat Stands Tall)

8. Mighty Rum distillery has been restarted at a secret location and the Queens Excisemen are offering a bounty for the location. Someone out that way heard a big voice coming from a shed and it scared them off - they came back muttering about the root of all evil. (Players actions from Rugantino, Hook for Beets for the Beet God of What Ho, Frog Demons!)

9. A printmaker named Ultan, is said to have found a door under his stairs that was not there the previous day. He claims even more implausibly, that it leads to the sewers of Zyan, the infamous floating city of Wishery and will permit entrance for 10 gold pieces a head, no questions asked. (Hook for Through Ultans Door)

Stuff set aside for now as I could not build a hook around it or it was just news without a point.
From "The Treasure of the Bigat" - Granny remains in the woods
From "Big Trouble in Borgoratto" - We now have the forest around Borgoratto quiet and unhaunted
From "Bride of the Bigat" A family of owlings have set up a mouse soup stall, attracting rave reviews and Cheap plush bigat slayers being given away with everything

Masquerade as social depth-crawl (RPG Blog Carnival)

For this months blog carnival - hosted by VDonnut Valley on the topic of Let’s Party! Festivals and ceremonies! I bring Masquerade as social depth-crawl.

In my Spelljammer campaign my players decided to run a shell-game masquerade - they had one princess and decided that all three elven PCs (incl. the barbarian) and three hired locals were going to get the same dress and throw a giant masquerade to put the princess in contact with potential allies while also having cover against the hostile factions and antagonist prince who were also in the city.

I dug out my old Festivities as a social depth-crawl and decided to use that as the chassis - set up an encounter list with the players rolling more and more d4's as things progress.

The key addition for all this is that the players are hosting do they get to drive the 'chaos factor' - each time block they get to amp up or chill out the party - adding a d4 or holding at the current level. Two consequtive rounds of 'chilling' will step the dice count down.

The big thing about a Masquerade is everyone pretends that the disguises work and they do not recognise each other, giving lots of opportunities for breaking social norms and acting out, for good or ill.

I swept the net for some ideas to get started - key was Dungeons & Kobolds - and then tailored those to fit the circumstances. Genericising the events list we get:

d20 Masquerade events
1. Local flavour - fortune tellers, world colour
2. Local flavour - significant NPC introduction
3. Key NPC interaction (low stakes)
4. Hostile encounter (low stakes) - pickpocket/jewel thief
5. Carousing opportunity
6. NPC conflict - bodyguards duelling
7. Gambling opportunity
8. Dancing requirement (medium social stakes)
9. NPC opportunity - guest drops something interesting
10. Overheard information - NPCs flexing the deniability of being masked
11. Duel challenge to PC or allied NPC
12. Hostile encounter - e.g. BBEG run in, social monster like vampire or succubus
13. Allied NPC or PC intoxicated, must be handled
14. Hostile NPC social approach, does not recognise masked PC
15. Spotted schemes and plots - opportunity to spy/disrupt
16. Campaign event trigger (e.g. allied NPC assassination attempt)
17. Stumble onto schemes and plots - as 15 but surprised)
18. Campaign event trigger (e.g. friendly NPCs turned to hostile)
19. Campaign event trigger (e.g. hostile NPC ambushes isolated PC)
20. Positive happenstance (potential ally comes to you)

And the additional wrinkle I am throwing in is four locations -
Interior Rooms - medium visiblity
Private chambers - low visibility
Street and grounds - medium visibility
Balcony - visible from the street and grounds - high visibility

Visibility affects how likely others are to get involved in events. If the players split up and are in private chambers, they are on their own - but also can avoid notice. In medium visibility, locations others have a chance to get involved or assist, both friend and foe. For the balcony anyone who is not in private chambers will be able to get involved if they wish.

As it happened on the night the players did some tweaking of the antagonists noses, gathered an ally and then launched their big visible set piece move which then triggered bad-guy reaction and at that point the Masquerade was gone out the window and we pretty much wrapped the session there. The players never backed off the party, running it all the way to 5d4 rolls directly. The sequence that came up was:
1. The fortune teller reads the colours of a PC, making them the center of attention and giving them a chance to grandstand
2. A skillful jewel thief is spotted and recruited on the basis of their talent
3. One of the princess-dressed PCs spots some gamblers and engages in dice-blowing for luck
4. A duel breaks out between NPC factions, two allied factions to the players build friction between them
5. Another duel breaks out between members of the same non-allied NPC faction
6. An officer of the antagonists does not recognise a PC and seeks to dance with them, putting that PC incognito with the 'foe' when things kick off
7. The BBEG spotted watching the PCs

A lot of the content of the encounter list did not get hit but even so I think it was worth having a mechanical structure for events rather than just freeforming it. I feel that my rolling off an encounter list and them having to deal with events which may or may not segue neatly off what they were just doing is more real than fully 'yes, and'-ing the events of the night. Certainly it helps me because I too am waiting to find out what happens as opposed to just running a railroad.

However, in the same way that combats rarely last more than 3 rounds before the bad guy is toast, you could probably get away with a 12-event list and be pretty safe you have enough. There will likely be some repetition which will stretch the use you get out of it.

Shiny TTRPG links #145

A forage around the past glories of the blogosphere as well as the latest this week. More links can be found on the previous list found here. You can find more links on this weeks r/OSR blogroll or the RPG Blog Carnival or on Third Kingdom Games news roundup. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.

The CRPG Addict shares BRIEF: Everything We Know About 1970s Mainframe RPGs We Can No Longer Play

All Dead Generations writes Dungeon Skrimishing

Methods & Madness gave us O5R in actual play: playing 5e the old school way

Coins and Scrolls wrote Converting 5E to OSR

Throne of Salt shareds Kicking it Old-School with 5e: Character Creation

Hex Culture proposed Lamentations of the Fifth Princess

Gazing Hermit works up F is for Frequently Asked Questions based on twenty quick questions for your campaign setting from Jeffs Gameblog and 20 Quick Questions: Rules from Necropraxis.

Daily Adventure Prompts gives us The Daily Adventure Prompts Masterpost

Review: Uncharted Journeys

tl:dr; well regarded journey mechanics plus a worlds worth of encounters.

I grabbed this off a kickstarter vaguely understanding it was the ripped out and expanded 5e version of well regarded journey rules from Cubicle 7's Middle Earth game. That coupled with 'support your European game houses' got me to lay my money down.

Cover art by Antonio de Luca

First impression - unexpectedly chonky! Great art, nice interiors, good printer smell. Lots and lots of stuff in here. After reading through it I realise this is a giant nouveau cuisine hexcrawl - all the good stuff you need to populate hexmaps in a wide variety of terrains are just shifted into lists instead of a map key. Even if you never use the journey rules, 5/6ths of the content in here is great inspiration for populating your worlds.

So what is all this stuff you get in the book?

Class preference among games society new-joiners

Trinity College's tabletop gaming society posted a photo from their latest Freshers week where they polled new society joiners on what was their favourite D&D class. I snip the relevant bit below:

They got another 50 odd folk between this photo and wrapping up and kindly stuck the numbers up on their discord - recovered here and compared to the patterns we have seen elsewhere.

Two thoughts - first - that is not a fit with either of the dominant trends - fighter first or spellcaster first - this is a new thing - outdoorsy led with ranger and druid having a strong showing.

Second thought - if this is how people joining games socs are posing, where is our exploration pillar stuff? The people cry out for the chance to run around in the wilderness!

All this of course with a grain of salt, sample size is what it is, etc. This was my old uni games soc... a bit ago so I when I saw this I thought it was fun.

Shiny TTRPG links #144

Interesting TTRPG posts from about the web - more links can be found on the previous list found here. You can find more links on this weeks r/OSR blogroll or the RPG Blog Carnival or a roundup of non-blog news on Third Kingdom Games roundup. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.

Githyanki Diaspora ponders Ancient D&D and asks Ancient D&D 2: What do you do?

Ropeblogi does another meaty theory round-up in TEORI-INDBLIK #134

Dice Goblin asks Why Venture Into The Dungeon?

Attronarch's Athenaeum lays out Dragon Magazine: Judge Advice Collection and begins with (Part 1 of 8)

Spider Queen compares Capital-L Lore vs actionable info

The Great Wheel of the Far North (GLoGtober 7 '23)

Last of Glass Candles GLoGtober '23, challenge #7 is from their own list - "A post about a weird train." Here endeth my run at GLoGtober for 2023!

The technologies of the Forge clan are misunderstood. Outsiders think their discussions of agitating water and fire elementals by proximity to one another are their crude ways of describing steam technologies. In fact it is more like 'cats-in-a-sack' drive.

The pinnacle of their works is the Great Wheel. A towering framework, a pyramid on sleds with a roaring, spinning disk in the centre. Within the disk, an unlikely prize - a fire elemental that is fascinated by artifice and adores clambering around inside the labyrinth within the disk. The outside of the disk is grooved with treads that bites into the glaciers and tundra and hurls the train along.

Behind are great sleds with lesser sleds and wagons tied down under rickety frames on which catch dries, travellers loaf and sight-seers perch for the view. The Great Wheel grinds along throughout the year, shuttling nomadic communities around on the great ice-fields, bringing fishers from the rivers to the sea, herdsmen across the tundra and above all towing the workshops and stores of the clan in an endless trading circuit.

The Great Wheel itself is attended by a dedicated group of artificers from the Forge clan, some old conjuring hands who commune with the fire elemental, danger-addicts who maintain the ever-spinning parts, and apprentices come to learn from the others at this culmination of their craft.

The train is a perpetual nomads conclave, the default seat of government of the Forge clan since more likely than not the largest concentration of the clan elders will probably be on-board at any given time.

d6 groups onboard just now
1. forge mages with acolytes and arcane equipment
2. skimmer crews with their ice-sleds
3. herdsfolk with their herd
4. nomads with dwellings, packbeasts, families
5. workers and crafters, processing some of the cargo in transit
6. dungeon-divers with packs of equipment en route to a site

The Great Wheel descends on a location like an anteater come to a nest, disgorging tribesfolk and warrior bands, cracking open dungeons, uprooting wizard towers and breaching fortresses that what lies within can be hauled out and carried away back to the icefields.

d6 raw plunder being carried
1. raiders with hand-carried winnings from raids
2. a whole ship, dragged from the sea
3. a mine, dismantled
4. quarried materials, for a new fortress
5. a great beast, being butchered and rendered down on the move
6. a wizards tower, wrenched whole from it foundations

It is said with some encouragement the spirit of the wheel can do more than simply drive it. Witnesses say they have seen it form a great humanoid shape and fling things - barrels of pitch, rocks and even grappling hooks to drag things to it. Mostly those who witness this and live to tell the tale recall the unnerving joyful yells of the creature, cheery 'yaaahhhgs' ringing our across the tundra as it visits chaos wherever it has arrived.

d20 Puzzle boxes. (GLoGtober 6 '23)

Taking on Glass Candles GLoGtober '23, challenge #6 is from a list by metalsnail - "Puzzle boxes."

Taking a puzzle box as a thing that requires certain actions to unlock it that are more than just 'insert key'.

This puzzling box is...
1. A key itself - rotate it and a demi-planar structure opens up with many things stored within it.
2. A bioform larvae - effectively a seed; this box unlocks into different forms depending on what it is planted in. Rich soil begets a bush that delivers nourishing fruit. Sands and gravels gives a woody vine that provides spices. Precious metals yields a geode-like tuber that can be cracked open for semi-precious gems. Blood or corpses sprout a fearsome hunting beast.
3. covered with tiny sockets. If the gems that once were there are replaced with similar tiny diamonds (400gp worth) and left out under the stars that match the constellation formed, it opens.
4. A memory palace - touching this puzzle box dumps someone elses memory palace into your mind; finding their knowledge is easy, understanding it is harder and finding yourself again at the end might be very tricky.
5. A grimoire - unfolding each panel of this puzzle box reveals magical texts and minor trials of arcane knowledge to unlock further panels. This is an elaborate tutorial from a bygone era.
6. A labyrinth - correctly triggering the 'lock' transports anyone nearby into the intricately carved folds of the box. The things stored within are magically shrunken.
7. Covered with tiny pins - pushing them in or out to form the likeness of someone animates it into their behaviours, aiding in attempts to impersonate that person
8. Very faintly carved along its faces - inking and printing off the faces will reveal a riddle that must be solved to open the box
9. An engine - unlocking it reveals some gears that deliver a low revolution, effectively infinite torque. The 'lock' is just a safety mechanism.
10. Covered with intricate patterns with a number of tiny flaws that must be very carefully pushed back into place to unlock it.
11. Faced with hollow chimes that must be rung to play the creators favourite tune. It remains a popular ditty, you will get earwormed.
12. Made with sides that must be pried off and formed into keys. These fit together to unlock other sides and unfold the box into a large extradimensional space.
13. Wrapped about with a very long, fragile string that must be carefully unwound in just the right way or it breaks and you must start again. Some find it soothing.
14. Carved with channels down which strong liquor must be poured and then ignited before the box will open. A flaw in the design means you can just sit it in a bowl of flaming alcohol also.
15. Etched with lines from various poems, some obvious, some obscure. All the poems must be recited in full to the box before it opens.
16. Openable only when breathed upon after you have eaten something painfully spicy.
17. Made with a single white side that must be coloured in with a new colour to open. It has been around a while and finding a new unique colour has been tricky for some time.
18. Carved with lines of qualith and has grasping tentacles carved along the edges. You must hold it to your forehead and sacrifice a memory to open it. You get the last memory sacrificed.
19. Stamped with the icon of a solar god and opens after being left in view of the sun for a full dawn-to-dusk cycle. Any shadow during this time resets it.
20. Clearly marked with instructions to solve the complex push-button problem but is very hard to read and operate alone. Easily done with assistance.

Shiny TTRPG links #143

Shiny things that caught my eye this last week. More links can be found on the previous list found here. You can find more links on this weeks r/OSR blogroll or the RPG Blog Carnival or a roundup of non-blog news on Third Kingdom Games roundup. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.

Paper Elemental completes their masterwork Wandering Titans (Monster as a Hex/Weather), part II - Fast and Slow , part III - Making Things Personal , part IV - Hot and Cold, Plus Two More to Complete the Set

Benign Brown Beast gives us Recovered: I think I might know someone…

Eldritch Fields asks How do I make dungeon maps? A tutorial...

Knicks & Knacks gives us truly unsafe Challenge 5, #3 [GLOGtober]

Dawnfist Games proposes we Use animal traits to inspire ANYTHING in your world!

redwyrm shares Five Ways to Make Your Monsters More Interesting

Deeper In The Game shares Flag-like Mechanics

Impulsive Necromancy gives us GLOGtober '23 - 5: Flooding Dungeons

Treasure routes & vessels. (GLoGtober 5 '23)

Taking on Glass Candles GLoGtober '23, challenge #5 I did to myself - Glass Candles roped me into this back at the start of September and I was thinking of how sunken treasure galleons provide adventure even today. Vast amounts of adventure in our world was driven by lucrative trade and people trying to get a slice of the action.

A classic trope of dungeon-delving is going after the buried riches of a time before - one key source of this can be lost shipments of wealth - which begs the question of wealth from where to where and by whom. They key rule of "trade routes will form along the easiest, safest, cheapest path between two trade hubs" gets a little odd in our fantasy world. Let us talk about two things - first the things being transported and second how they were being transported.

First, the stuff, the cargo, the treasure. To get down to brass tacks, a merchant caravan on a trade route will carry only as much as a given merchant would have amassed through trade, for the real treasures you want the fruits of a treasure route.

Cartoon by Tom Gauld

In the least bloody case, this is where the amassed wealth of a long-dead realm is being excavated and transported away by newcomers. More likely this is treasure being pried from cooling fingers or worse being acquired through slaves and strip-mining. In our fantasy realm this could be the discovered ruins, hoards of some great magical beasts or potentially the exploitation of some magical anomaly. Whatever the exact source, a treasure route implies that a land far-away found something valuable and is looting it for all it is worth to haul all the wealth back home.

Assume for a treasure route that the vessels are over-loaded, as these are abnormal volumes being moved, and that time at site after discovery is going to be limited because people know the legends and once they get a sniff that you actually *found* the lost golden sky-whale, you will have cut-throat competition for the site. Also assume that conditions can get volatile around the treasure site - something went wrong to leave this treasure here in the first place and further prevented it from being found and recovered by its original transporters at the time.

d6 What went wrong the first time?

Appendix N: sources of inspiration from beyond RPGs (GLoGtober 4 '23)

Taking on Glass Candles GLoGtober '23, challenge #1 is from a list by SunderedWorldDM - "Essential, non-RPG reading for any GM."

In case you have not yet seen it Kill 6 Billion Demons is magnificent. The planar wierdness, the cosmic powers, fabulous grist to the mill if you are a DM looking for ideas. Gaze upon some of the giant illustrations of Throne and let the muse whisper in your ear...

As a grand theme anything that asks how did the sinews of medieval times work is great source material. Histories of pretty much anything are always good. Online, the magnificent 'Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry' is a gold mine for world-building and just getting a reasonable understanding of how most of typical fantasy-land might be thought to work. Works over Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings, Dune and other good sources for great examples.

For strange digital lands to wander through to inspire your own settings:

Shiny TTRPG links #142

More links can be found on the previous list found here. The original inspiration for all of this is weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links. You can find more links on weekly blogroll on r/OSR or the RPG Blog Carnival or a roundup of non-blog news on Third Kingdom Games roundup.

Stuffed Crocodile does us great service with Download: PD Token Collection (170+ tokens for fantasy games)

Brian Escobar’s Substack asks When do characters define themselves in RPGs?

Traveler's Rest shares Generating Elevation in a Hexcrawl

Aboleth Overlords makes a Play (Fantasy) Worlds idea proposal

Beyond Fomalhaut writes [BLOG] Year Seven: Old School Rebuilding

Liche's Libram gives us GOo5e 🦢 (goblin ordinances of fifth edition)

Grumpy Wizard asks How Do I Get the Best Out of a Game Convention?

The Seed Of Worlds (GLoGtober 3 '23)

Taking on Glass Candles GLoGtober '23, challenge #1 is from a list by semiurge - "Adventure, location, character, item, class, or whatever else based on the name of your blog."

The Seed of Worlds is a demi-plane extruder. It looks like a polished rock with a metal mesh around it that makes a very ergonomic, obvious way to hold it. It is typically found in a sealed box with multiple broken seals, new seals applied over them and large 'do not open' messages chalked on it.

To bust this fourth wall wide open - if a player at your table triggers the Seed of Worlds, roll a d100, count that number of books into your gamebook collection starting at the leftmost lowest book near the door you entered through and going right, then up. Take that book and have the players generate new characters appropriate to that gamebook. Subtract the smallest digit of the two d10s in your d100 from the largest, this is the number of hours you must play the new gamebook before this world implodes and you resume your previous game. The characters retain all memories.

Lets see how this would work at home...

First roll was 06 - which leads me to WH40K Dark Heresy Codex Anathema. This triggering of the Seed of Worlds leads us to six hours of bug-hunting in the grimdark future.

Second test was 28 - 3.5e Magic of Faerun; we are going on a jaunt to pre-sundering Faerun, also for six (8-2) hours.

If you find you have a lot of shelves to get through, roll a d6 first and count in that number of shelves before you start going book by book.

Inspired by the Inner Light Star Trek TNG episode and shelfies.

Small god: Lady Deephome (GLoGtober 2 '23)

Taking on Glass Candles GLoGtober '23, challenge #2 is from a list by Locheil - "Information about a small, local god" - and for this I steal formatting from Orbital Crypt and their Small Gods and Stone Soup: Deities made for Dungeon Crawling and Small Gods 2.

Name - Lady Deephome

Description - The Lady of the Under roads, once a stalwart minor dwarven deity now worshipped by many minor cults centered around her altars throughout the Underdark. Recognised as a protector and a herald of shelter. The nature of worship has diverged so much there is no longer a singular Lady Deephome but many individual small gods who all answer to the name in their location.

Altar - A statue in an weed-filled pool, arms spread in welcome, dressed in dwarven travelling clothes.

Followers - Once, dwarves, now all sorts that live in the deeps. The infrequency of travel along the under roads these days means a high diversity between local cults with very little commonality in practice. This has lead to the adoption of outfits that resemble dwarven travelling clothes by all who move around along the under roads as at least then you get the chance to claim hospitality. The observances of the dwarves are not known, lost when the dwarves left. The current followers have created a faith from stories, best effort reading of dwarven runes and interpretation of what they have taken as omens and divine signs.

d6 These followers of Lady Deephome are:
1. - Pool dwelling crocodilians - watch through the weeds and quick to take offense as missed offerings
2. - Keepers of a reliquary - a split geode shrine the insist wept from a rock face and revealed a gem vein
3. - Hospitable weretoads - dressed as dwarves, attempting to replicate dwarven mores, offer generous portions of strange tasting food
4. - Jittery, pale surface dwellers - willing to share their gleanings from the old dwarven works including honey they have tapped from the preservation vats
5. - Fierce underdarkers - speak quickly to invoke hospitality before you become supplies for them
6. - Heterogenous ritualists - a welcoming mix of many local peoples who insist on teaching you all about their very idiosyncratic interpretation of Her Ways

Shiny TTRPG links #141

Another week, another set of links that caught my eye. More links can be found on the previous list found here. The original inspiration for all of this is weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links. You can find more links on weekly blogroll on r/OSR or the RPG Blog Carnival or a roundup of non-blog news on Third Kingdom Games roundup.

Beneath Foreign Planets does a great Archaeology and Anthropology - Blog Carnival Roundup of last months RPG Blog Carnival.

The Other Side blog kicks off this month: ITS OCTOBER!! RPG Blog Carnival and Horror Movie Marathon

Tom Van Winkle's Return to Gaming suggests Name Your Sessions Afterwards

GLoGtober launches and we get some interesting posts in just this first week:
The Nothic's Eye gives us GLOGTOBER '23: Three Disastrous Blood War Battles
Spiceomancy shares d20 Ways to Keep a Corpse
Journeying Jormungandr writes GLOGtober 2023 #2: d66 Eccentric Encounters On An Ancient Road
Impulsive Necromancy gives us GLOGtober '23 - 2: She Who Sings in Reed and Rush
Owlbears and Chickenhawks shares GLoGTober '23 2.4: Rose Simon

All Dead Generations discusses 7 Maxims of the OSR