Actual Test: Donjon Adventure Generator

I tested out the Donjon Adventure Generator - "based upon tables from the Dungeon Master's Design Kit by TSR, Inc." - what you get is just collosal, so much stuff. Written up to follow Gorgon Bones first best practice: "Record your hobby experience" while continuing the DM commentary addition to the session notes.

I pushed the button twice and then followed my usual adventure generator workflow:
* Thread the pieces together
* Conserve NPCs
* Rewrite/polish

Elements I picked from the combined randomly generated stuff (italics is all stuff from Donjon):
* Plot: Event - a tournament, a holiday, a celebration called by the king, a masked ball - as a backdrop.
* Plot A-B-C Quest - the heros are given a task to perform but they find that they must first accomplish some other task(s)
* Climax: Prevented Deed
* General Setting Cosmopolitan City
* Specific Setting I - Palace of the King
* Specific Setting II - Mansion of a Lord
* Master Villain - Advance Agent - This villain is the vanguard of some sort of invastion
* Minor Villain I - Mistress with a Heart of Gold usually accompanies the Master Villain, but sometimes goes on missions of her own
* Minor Villain II Chief Assassin - favorite killer of the Master Villain - first killing witnesses who might prove harmful to his master, then zeroing in on the player-characters
* Chase: Special Terrain - You can make any chase more memorable by having it take place in a setting to which it is utterly unsuited. For instance, horse chases are fine and dramatic when they take place through the forest, out in the open plains, or along a road -- but they become diabolical when they take place inside the Royal Palace or in dangerous, labrynthine, treacherous catacombs.
* Secret Weakness: Love The Master Villain possesses the "weakness" of genuine affection or love -- probably for some NPC
* Special Condition Time Limit - Finally, the most obvious condition to place on an adventure is to give it a time limit.

A year of open table gaming

Some stat's from the regular friday night open table games I have been running.

Original set up goals
- be the welcome wagon for friday night open table D&D - catch the newbies by always having a T1 table.
- bring books I had kickstarted to table

Set up a 'campaign background' thread on the forum. I decided to use Brancalonia as a start because it seemed fun and I wanted to give the setting a test run. I made it a bit more of a universal socket to whatever weird characters people might turn up with by crossing it over to my menagerie world setting.

The 'intro' goes - "5000 years ago the elves invaded, conquered everything around here. In this world elves teach things they think show promise how to be elves. About 1000 years ago the elves left, and behind remained lots of 'on-the-way-to-elf' groups that stabilised as rabbitlings, badgerlings, all sorts. Half this world is about 1m tall. You all used to work for a wizard, it was good times, then the wizard got into politics and you are pretty sure they're dead now. You woke up one morning to find wanted posters with your names on them and crimes you may or may not have committed. You all fled south, winding up here, at the Golden Cockerel, the southern node of the wizards old network. Rougher runs the place, begrudgingly taking you in. The wine and the stew have been getting more watery every day for the past week and now, after a night drinking, you have all just woken up feeling nothing but hydrated and hungry."

Filling the tables

Basic stats -
27 games from August 2023 to August 2024
Average session length, 4h 40m
Total hours played - 126
5.3 players per table on average (smallest group 4, biggest 9)
Total of 202 players DM'ed for (butts on seats, some repeat folk)
72 different people threw dice at those games

Shiny TTRPG links #189

Busy week, lots of links! For even more, see the previous list found here or you can check the RPG Blog Carnival or on Third Kingdom Games news roundup. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.

Goblin Punch writes Lessons from Elden Ring

Zzarchov Kowolski responds The forgotten element of adapting Dark Souls

Roll to Doubt gives us “Against” On-Boarding

Kontent Punch shares My Best Mistakes

How to Start a Revolution in 21 Days or Less gave us On Randomness In Character Generation, and Why Old School D&D Is Awesome For New Players

d4 Caltrops gives us B/X Procedural Flow Charts

Smithsonian Magazine gives us How Dungeons & Dragons Sparked a Revolution in How We Play Just About Everything

Actual Test: Scarlet Heroes Adventure Generator

Scarlet Heroes has the adventure generators I was looking for in Worlds Without Number, huh. I decided to test run it for my open table games. Out of the urban/wilderness/dungeon options I liked that the urban options had 'mission' structures so I went with those as most appropriate for a one shot. Written up to follow Gorgon Bones first best practice: "Record your hobby experience" while continuing the DM commentary addition to the session notes.

I rolled up some 'tags' - Foul Sorcery and Holy Site - and a plot - "An Antagonist seeks to steal something precious to a target."

The plot workflow had a few bits:

Draw or choose either the Antagonist or the Target, whichever your hero is most likely to care about.
Draw an unknown actor to be foundy after a successful Investigation scene spent discovering their identity.
Be waylaid by a hostile Actor with a Clue.
The object being stolen is the Target’s most precious possession or something important to the Antagonist that the Target possesses.
Scenes revolve around finding the thieves, guarding the object, and snatching it back if it is stolen.
- Infiltrate a Location where the activities relate to a Clue
- Trick an Actor into revealing a Clue.
- Convince an Actor ally of the foe to betray them

I rolled up a skilled sorcerer and a paid guardsman as actors and some locations - a Public well and a Fighting pit. Combining those with the tags and thinking through how it ties to dangling threads from previous adventures I rewrote all this as:
- Skilled Sorcerer [quest-giver] turns up looking for help
- Antagonist is seeking quest-gives most precious posession - a Tome of forbidden lore
- Figures they are in the city, this is where their networks are, degraded as they maybe
- seen by public well - start there
- get waylaid by bribed guards [catspaws of Maganza], tickets to local fighting pit in their pockets
- Infiltrate a Location where the activities relate to a Clue (fighting pit, predator)
- investigate there, ancient shrine to predator queen - terror bird
- spot servants of antagonist - need an approach angle
- Trick an Actor into revealing a Clue.
- Convince an Actor ally of the foe to betray them
- Plan revealed need to extract and get word back

I then localised it by combing back through old sessions to refresh my memory on locations and players at large to conserve my NPCs, and came up with:

It Came From Beyond Time - RPG Blog Carnival Wrap Up

And so we conclude the August 2024 RPG Blog Carnival - our topic was "It Came From Beyond Time!" - on my mind was the strange effects of long life and magic can have in dredging things up from the deep past and hurl them into your current campaign.

We got responses from:


Sea of Stars on time in their campaign world and who keeps the records.

Foreign Planets with the Ape race-as-class with a glorious d100 random advancements table.

VDonnut Valley with A few treasures of distant past - even more irreplaceable than merely precious or powerful.

Elemental Reductions wrote On Temporal Displacement on the why and how they have used elements of their dungeon project to convey the sense of ancient time.

My own entry has d10 + d6 + d6 ways things from the deep past can return to haunt or save your campaign

You can find some deeper background on the RPG Blog Carnival on 'of Dice and Dragons'. Our next topic is going to be "Wondrous Weapons and Damning Dweomers" hosted by Attronarch's Athenaeum.

Shiny TTRPG links #188

More toothy links from about the internet. For even more links, see the previous list found here or you can check the RPG Blog Carnival or on Third Kingdom Games news roundup. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.

RPG Taverns gives us Dungeons & Dragons at Edinburgh Fringe

Blake DeRusha writes D&D’s Lightning In A Bottle: How Moldvay, Marsh, and Cook Got It Right

James Poniewozik for Time writes How D&D Changed the Culture

All Dead Generations shares Mont Sainte Bec

Le Chaudron Chromatique gives us My new Black Sword Hack Campaign

The Land Of Nod wrote Downtime and Special Guest Heroes [Notion]

Roll to Doubt shares What a Horrible Night to Cast a Curse

Vladar's Blog gives us First year of Mystara campaign

Ben Riggs writes D&D Co-Creator Gary Gygax was Sexist. Talking About it is Key to Preserving his Legacy.

RPG-a-Day Speedrun

We got the RPG-a-Day done by Autocratik again this year - I've been hesitant to push them out over socials because I see a lot of snarling about feed-jamming - but the Gartopia discord for Garblag Games has been doing them in a quiet channel and it has been fun so I am collating them here:

Below are the prompts and my answers:
1 - First RPG bought this year - Knave 2e (by payment processed) or Qelong (actual new purchase in FLGS)
2 - Most recently played - 5e (Friday night D&D)
3 - Most often played RPG - 5e (33/49 sessions thie year)
4 - RPG with great art - A Thousand Thousand Islands zines
5 - RPG with great writing - Veins of the Earth
6 - RPG that is easy to use - 5e since everyone knows it? A 5e table fills in a heartbeat, any other system you have to sell it.
7 - RPG with 'good form' - Good Society
8 - An accessory you appreciate - DM screen my home campaign players made for me - big fancy dragon on the front, portraits of the PCs on the initiative trackers, its awesome

9 - An accessory you'd like to see - for VTT's some kind of 'mask and voice' filter that would allow a DM to appear as whatever NPCs - runs as part of a VTT. We have a million daft instagram filters, this should be doable. Even pop-up static portrait and a voice-changer would be cool.
10 - RPG you'd like to see on TV - All my answers are D&D setting answers - I'd love to see either the Mystara setting (Princess Ark) or Spelljammer (or even MtG Weatherlight) tested to see if fantasy flying-ship Star Trek could work.
11 - RPG with well supported one-shots - Dungeon Crawl Classic - famous for its starter funnels.
12 - RPG with well supported campaigns - B/X? If we count it as the lingua franca of the OSR then all the megadungeons like Barrowmaze, Rappan Athuk, Stonehell, Castle Xyntillian etc are a bunch of campaigns
13 - Evocative environments - Veins of the Earth - atomic bees....
14 - Compelling characters - SLA industries - Halloween Jack et al
15 - Great character gear - Dr Grordborts Scientific Adventure Violence - your weapons are gear - your spellcasting uses gear! Your skills are more gear! (though the original 40k Rogue Trader had great gear, tons of which imply it should have been used as a TTRPG not just a wargame)
16 - Quick to learn - Just reading Knave 2e; seems pretty straightforward. Anything without complex character classes and huge spell lists...?
17 - An engaging RPG community - Gartopia which actually ran this - though for me the RPGVienna forum is absolutely where I engage most to get my gaming in with the regular Friday night games.
18 - Memorable moment of play - Recent Rime of the Frostmaiden game where my wizard took dragonbreath to the chest for an insta-kill; took the red slaadi tadpole that was about to hatch down with me, the little sod.
19 - Sensational session - As a player - fighting an Abyssal prince at the mid-point of Out of the Abyss. Deathly silent round the table as the dice decided our face.
20 - Amazing adventure - 'Plague City' game where our party of intrepid heroes ventured forth, tracked down the cultists and then were ready to go 'ok, so let us send word to the King so he can send someone to deal with this' ... and came to the horrified realisation that we *were* the help and there was no more coming.
21 - Classic campaign - Enemy Within. It has been a few years but the randomly rolled characters combined with horrific events that hammer their weak-spots make very memorable gaming.
22 - Notable non-player character - Aubrey, tiefling captain of the guard in my home campaign, player favourite
23 - Peerless player - one buddy is a masterful rules lawyer but uses his powers for good - helping people realize what they want their chars to be, counselling but not directing the plays in fights and generally using their grip on the details to support rather than face down the DM's he plays with. I appreciate it all the more because his unhelpful equivalents are far more common.
24 - Acclaimed advice - recognising that world-building is one activity, game prep is another similar but not the same one
25 - Desirable dice - I love the UVG incredibly unreadable roman numeral ones - those as a Zocchi set would be amazing.
26 - Superb screen - See answer #8. If I have to give a new one, then the classic AD&D Planescape DM screen
27 - Marvellous miniature - I love the aesthetic of the Folk Horrors from Garden of Hecate
28 - Great gamer gadget - clothes pegs as initiative trackers, simple but genius
29 - Awesome app - Beyond20 - plugging Roll20 and D&D Beyond together
30 - Person you'd like to game with - Matt Colville and the MCDM crew - in particular continuing The Chain.
31 - Game or gamer you miss - I've had the great good fortune to still be in touch with pretty much all the gamers I've played with and grace of this new era of VTT gaming we've played more together in the past three years than the 15 before that - so happily, no answer for this one.

Review: Feather, Beak + Bone and Claw Atlas

tl:dr; awesome map-labelling game, build a city together, perfect for a collaborative session zero.

So I got Feather, Beak + Bone and the Claw Atlas expansion as part of the 'Details of our Escape' Kickstarter. I picked them up as add-ons but it can also be found on itch.io. I recall it seeing it crop up with people saying "hey yeah this is cool" a fair few times and particularly talking about map making so I thought "sounds like my kind of thing". A slimmer pamphlet than I was expecting, definitely in the zine class of game, really punchy, with nice presentation.

Cover by Austin Breed

So all told this is a nice straightforward game with the usual zine high content to weight ratio in here. Fully self-contained with good line art that gets the whole feel across. Good stuff.

It comes bundled with three blank maps and you get another example of the map inside the front and back covers of the book - so strictly five blanks of the map come with it and then you could photocopy for further versions.

Shiny TTRPG links #187

A fair few gems from the past this week. For even more links, see the previous list found here or you can check the RPG Blog Carnival or on Third Kingdom Games news roundup. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.

I am currently hosting this months RPG Blog Carnival - It Came From Beyond Time - on ways things from the deep past (or far future!) can haunt or save your campaign - you still have a week to get an entry in!

Sea of Stars contributes with Time and Ages the Sea of Stars – RPG Blog Carnival

I Cast Light! shares ASIMOVIC ANDROIDS: A Tweak For Mothership Androids

A Knight at the Opera gave us The Differences in Mystara, Greyhawk, and Forgotten Realms (Part 1)

Simulacrum: Exploring OSR Design wrote A Historical Look at the OSR — Part I

Press The Beast gives us Daemonium: Retrospective

Traverse Fantasy shares D&D Fifth Edition: Death & Rebirth

August Blog Bandwagon: Setting Pitch for the Lizard Kingdom Deeps

tl:dr; I wanna run an explo campaign because I have a map too cool to never see the light of day.

This is bandwagoning in after The Foot of Blue Mountain Setting Post! Talking About the Spokelands and Draw the Rest of the Owlbear Setting Pitch for the Tower Lands, seasoned with some of Matt Colvilles campaign pitch formatting.

The Pretentious Doc / Region Info / Pitch:

The Lizardfolk built a great empire, said to encompass most of the world. It is said they ventured forth from the steaming depths of the land that lies deep below the levels of the sea. Noone is sure because for centuries they have been walled in behind the dragons who lair along their borders. The dragons have gone, who knows for how long before the probing of a brave or foolhardy few revealed the borders were now passable.

Art by Evlyn Moreau

Tales come back, of dwarfholds conquered and abandoned, of cities of the lizardfolk consumed by the jungles, of towering walls to keep away titanic lizards, of great fish drawn from oceans beneath the earth, of impossible flying creatures that soar the abyssal forests.

The more learned say that something has happened, a shift among the lizardfolk, that has them abandon their old borderlands.

Now adventurers, both crown sponsored and freelance, venture forth to see gold and glory is now free for the taking.

The Player Doc / Player Buy-in

Sandbox Adventure in a Mysterious Jungle Empire

Summary of campaign style: Exploration, Mystery, Deep Time, Factions, Ruins

The scaled-lands are the high-standing border lands between the lands you come from and the deep abyssal basin where the lizardfolk dwell

Blank basin map by Evlyn Moreau

Mechanically this would be an large roster of players, run when there are at least three, aiming to be as close to episodic 'ending back at base' as possible.

Ruleset - would love to try Shadowdark, could go with 5e with gritty realism if that is what people prefer.

Shop Talk
Combat: Medium
Roleplay: High
Travel: High
Starting Level: 1

This is a resurrection of old campaign material - but less a rework of the setting and more a repositioning of the start point to put the players in the thick of it directly. This is me slamming the levers over and going straight to the good stuff - the deep abyss...

I did a bunch of work in this setting, first setting up the original Lizard Kings game which flared out ~ 5 years ago and culminating in a NaNoWriMo novel draft in November 2019. I got art including maps done for this by OSR luminary Evlyn Moreau. Part of the motivation for all this is to finally be able to bring out the magnificent map she did of the lizardfolk imperial core - the completed version of the structural form above.

Art by Evlyn Moreau

Despite all this world-building, one thing I would love to deploy kicking this off would be Beak, Feather + Bone to collaboratively build a starting city.

Class/race choices from 1 year of Baldur's Gate 3 vs tabletop 5e

Larian Studios, makers of Baldurs Gate 3, bless their transparent little hearts, have released another update to their player stats - now after a year of play. Once again we get class and race choices of the players. We got two previous updates - the weekend after launch and an update after four months of play that looked different to the typical tabletop choices despite being a pretty faithful implementation of the 5e ruleset.

So here is the rerun of that number crunching - with the launch weekend and 4 month stats in with this 1 year set and the patterns from a bunch of forum surveys and 5e character building apps.

On class the broad patterns stay the same - since the 4 month update - a completely different pattern to the tabletop game with Paladin and Sorcerer much more popular, wizards, warlocks and clerics way down off what the tabletop surveys show. What is especially interesting is that we now see a steadying of choice between the 4 and 12 month surveys compared to the launch weekend. Paladins and rangers launched well but faded off a bit - though paladin still stayed top of the heap. Clerics and fighters were less preferred on launch weekend but became more popular over time.

Shiny TTRPG links #186

Some slightly out of sync links while I was out of town. For yet more links, see the previous list found here or you can check the RPG Blog Carnival or on Third Kingdom Games news roundup. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.

Beneath Foreign Planets shares Words! Linguistics, Etymology and Onomatology - Blog Carnival Roundup

Recall this months blog carvnial right here - It Came From Beyond Time

Mazirian's Garden announces Ultan's Door Patreon Launches!

Elemental Reductions gives us How I Generate Home Brew Fantasy Towns Quickly

Mindstorm writes Adding Congruency to Anti Canon Worldbuilding

Torchless gives us Letters from "Readers": Dungeons & Dragons 5e vs Baldur's Gate 3

Fail Forward shares Microblog: The Chorus

Monsters and Manuals gives us Top 10 Early OSR Blogs, Now Defunct

Joy and Forgetfulness writes Heroquest - the best thing about it.

d30 creatures in this unseelie nobles entourage

Taking the unseelie court as a mix of the takes of 'dark mirror of the seelie' with beautiful-but-terrible combined with 'the court of misfit things' with goblins, monsters and other rejects from the seelie plus also recognising that any courtly entourage comprises not just its native members but also those who have come to petition the couty. All together we get the following mix of people in the entourage of your unseelie noble.

d30 entourage member role
1. bewitched mortal
2. desperate supplicant
3. gleeful cultist
4. bored relative
5. climbing noble
6. sadistic duelist
7. prancing fool
8. harassed page
9. serene handmaiden
10. overloaded scribe
11. gaudy herald
12. lurking bodyguard
13. peering apothecary
14. preening companion
15. detached shadow
16. leashed monster
17. unkindness of ravens
18. magic mirror bearer
19. bestial knight
20. savage hunter
21. snarling heir
22. bombastic sorcerer
23. smirking almoner
24. scowling cupbearer
25. glowering guard captain
26. overbearing sage
27. beast-leashed huntmaster
28. animated armorsuit
29. shadow dryad
30. orbiting fey musician

d20 entourage member origin
1-3 eladrin
4-5 shadar-kai
6-7 elf, other
8 sprites (d4)
9 dryad
10 faun
11 brownies (d4)
12 quickling
13 awakened animal (terrain appropriate)
14 fairies (d4)
15 satyr
16 redcap
17 yeth-hound
18 bugbear
19 goblins
20 mortal, random

Actual Play: The Apocalypse Annex

I took a slice - the first twelve rooms - of Bearded Devils awesome Apocalypse Archive to by Friday Night open table as the Apocalypse Annex. It was a little bit of a tone shift vs the usual Brancalonia fare but I think it worked well. I ran some rooms 'as is' but then clipped some of the 'bottled horrors' to make it a harbinger of the main threat rather than the final boss.

Party was Zell - Tabaxi warlock, Francis Loxodon bard, Drog hobgoblin sorcerer, Alex human cleric - system was 5e using Gritty Realism (strictly also Brancalonia rules but none of them became relevant). Write up below is from the post-session report our DMs do after every session on our forum. I have added in DM commentary to give the 'how I ran it' perspective and tag what came from where in the Apocalypse Archive.

Session Report: The Apocalypse Annex

With funds and food running short, Rougher approaches our heroes with a scrap page "recovered" from others of the group at the Golden Cockerel, a page from the Great Red Book marked with dwarven sites from the time of the elven invasion. He points out that all the other sites on the page have detailed catalogs of the contents but this one does not - it must be still sealed and therefore full of treasure! The site lies in the Ditch of Serpents, up near Appollonia - familiar terrain, Rougher assures them that no doubt the job will be easy

[DM Commentary: This is my standard one-shot launch "the stew and the wine are getting more watered down. Today is a grim morning where you had a lot of both last night but wake up today hydrated and hungry. The running gag is Rougher is usually right about there being treasure, dead wrong about the level of hazard]

Sceptical but hungry our heroes hitch a barge ride up the river, noting someone tailing them as they leave and boarding another barge behind them. Laying a false trail that they disembarked at the end of the day at the Rugged Hearth, the riverside inn, they travel on a little more and disembark at the nearest point on the river to the place they seek.

[DM Commentary: We had a four-man party this time - Zell - Tabaxi warlock of some undead patron, Francis Loxodon bard (both PCs with 6+ sessions at my open table), Drog hobgoblin sorcerer (experienced player with new L1 character), Alex human cleric (new guy with L5 cleric of the some twilight domain deity).]

Hiking through the forest to the edge of the Ditch of Serpents as night falls, they spy campfires and move towards them. Finding some common folk from Appollonia in religious festival costumes camped for the night they join their camp.

Asked if they shared their dreams about the New Sun, our heroes lie that they do, put together the Appollonians tale with the festival cooked up by others from the Golden Cockerel a month previously and in the morning tell them they have had further revelatory dreams and lead them to the mapped site.

[** DM Commentary: At this point the players (and PC's) were waiting for Roughers other shoe to drop and probed these cultists pretty hard. They spotted that some of the costumes had bits and pieces from their colleagues, backtracked the timeline and made some decent Religion rolls to twig that while this did look like the thing their comrades had set in motion, nothing any of them were aware of explained how that false festival could have evolved into dreams so quickly.]

After some searching and more digging the find a stubby archaeolith tower, force the door and descend into the pitch blackness. Natural darkvision and gifts from patrons and deities furnish all the party ability to see in the dark but still it is disquieting as they descend.

[** DM Commentary: Actually cracking into the content here although as per standard with 5e, seeing in the dark was trivially easy to solve. The door was Room 1 - Trapdoor Entrance.]

A spiral stair opens to a great ramp, both stained with ancient blood, watched over by a bastion. At the base of the ramp they find another door into darkness so complete even their gifted sight fails. Alek ventures in and plunges from the tilting blocks of the bridge into the frigid pool of liquid darkness beneath. Hauled back out by his comrades, Zell draws on his tabaxi gifts and boons granted by all his comrades and sprints across.

[** DM Commentary: The stair was Room 2 - Staircase, the ramp was made up new and the 'spinning block bridge' was room 5 'darkness bath' with a trapped bridge over it to create a 'darklock' in front of this dwarven bastion. Though they sensibly chose to have someone scout ahead with a rope attached, once the cleric went into the pool (and found it frigid and damaging) they chose to futz about poking at things and taking more damage until their comrades pulled them out.]

Locking the bridge on the far side lets the rest cross and they find a barrack room and a sizzling mutated goblin corpse. Poking at it a bit Zell consults his patron and is told this thing is anathema.

[** DM Commentary: I made the bridge lockable so they just needed to solve it once and I wanted to get everything done in one session. The barracks was a reskinned Room 4 andthey poked the Illumined vessel a bit and got their first failed saves vs. Radiation - enough to clue them in that this bad light is bad. The way the flaming eyes followed them while the body was apparently dead had them pretty sure that 'the light' was bad - their theory was it was a puppeteering influence from some entity elsewhere.]

Covering it with a blanket and trapping it beneath a chest, the party proceeds upstairs to the spiral library. There they find a shelves packed with scrolls that they figure must be valuable and start stuffing them into their bags. Distracted, they are ambushed by two more mutated goblins, these blazing with sickly light. Tipping a shelf and then casting back their physical forms before banishing them entirely, the party wins some quiet to further explore.

[** DM Commentary: The voidskin scrolls were an object of fascination - and they were paying no attention even when I said there were light sources elsewhere so the other illumined vessels got the drop on them. This was a straight port of Room 6 - Voidskin Scroll Archive. The light cast by the illumined was a nice, scary effect and there was some proper panicking while they figured out who of the cleric, warlock, sorcerer and bard was supposed to be in front. In the end the warlock flexed 'Among the Dead' at a choke point where, grace of some failed saves, the illumined vessels got stalled long enough for the cleric to turn them.]

At the top of the library, the top of the bastion they had seen from without, they find a dwarven planning station and glean snippets of the Membrane Wars and the infectious light of a strange sun that spreads to herald its coming. The also find notes that this place is a containment unit and sigh as they realise the have to check whatever it contains is still there.

[** DM Commentary: we flexed the gritty realism rules and let a pair of second level spells get burned off for a casting of Tongues by the cleric so they could decrypt all the books in Aklo, Sidereal script and Dwarven. I figured with no time pressure and some spare spell energy in the tank this was not unreasonable.]

Making their way back down they find that the Illumined vessel they had trapped under a chest is awake and trying to free itself. They fail to snipe it from ambush and then have to sneak up on it from behind light-blocking blankets before dousing it with liquid darkness from the bridge room.

[** DM Commentary: were I meaner I might just allow blankets blocking the light to only provide advantage against saves but I liked the ingenuity and wanted to keep things moving along. Plus I figured they would have to expose themselves to get things done later.]

Fetching buckets of liquid darkness from the bridge room they proceed past many disturbed warning signs and find a pair of mutated goblins gnawing on the biomechanical roots of a great dome within which liquid darkness sloshes. The damage from the gnawing causes brief gaps in the darkness and when those capture the light of the goblins, the chamber blazes with the sickly light. Our heroes shelter beneath a blanket tetsudo and chase the goblins with mage-handed buckets of darkness as Zell stays out, braves the light and acts as spotter.

[DM Commentary: This room was a combo of Room 12 - Ember of the Final Star and Room 8. Captured Beacon - the apparatus was from Room 12 but the thing inside containment was only an infectous beacon. There was a brief discussion about whether invisibility makes you immune to the light, since you cast no shadow, therefore you are not blocking/absorbing any of the light. In the interests of keeping things rolling, I went with yes. This got them an attack from ambush on one of the goblins.]

Finally a mildly irradiated Zell guides the others to dousing the last goblin with liquid darkness and they set to work Mending and Healing the contraption before retreating and shoring up the damaged barriers.

[DM Commentary: I played this as there being periodic full room 'flashes' from the beacon as the sloshing of the partially damaged darkness cascade let the goblins gaze light it up. A couple of failed saves in and Zell was up to second level of radiation with infravision and sparkly eyes. He was thrilled and happy to keep this, then sad when he fell into the darkness bath on the way out and lost it.]

Back at the surface, with flasks of darkness and pockets full of scrolls, they exhort the New Sun cultists that they have been successful, that their work today will cause the New Sun to rise tomorrow but they must never speak of this place. Highly persuasive, the cultists are raised to a pitch of fanatical devotion and vow to take the secret to their graves.

[DM Commentary: this was an interesting one where they actually played their hand really well with the cultists leaving them convinced that something had genuinely happened but that they must never speak of this place. To be seen exactly how this weird little Pelorite heresy will evolve.]

Session report ends

All told this ran well - people said they liked it, we got all this done in 4.5 hours. Probably not as grim an experience as the author might have originally intended but they were properly spooked by the light of the Last Star and were absolutely convinced they had to make sure this thing never escaped so I consider that a success.

Shiny TTRPG links #185

Some slightly out of sync links while I am out of town. For yet more links, see the previous list found here or you can check the RPG Blog Carnival or on Third Kingdom Games news roundup. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.

Sinusoidal freakshow gives us D6 ways to kill an ogre

Shadow & Fae gives us No God But Their Stomachs - d3 Ogre Encounters to Haunt Your Wilds

The Dripping Tap gives us Interesting Dialects for GLoG

Unlawful Games gives us What is in Pocket Wizard’s d100 Pockets?!

Grackle Court gives us [RPG Blog Carnival] Languages of the Underworld

Path Unending gives us Crime, Profession, Social Class

Elemental Reductions gives us On Names

Aiee! Run From Kelvin's Brainsplurge! gave us Die Drop Campaign Maps at the Whistle Stop Cafe

Starshine Scribbles gives us TTRPG Creator Resources Masterpost

Dungeonfruit gives us Asking The Right Questions (Worldbuilding By Bibliomancy)

i'm going to blog here gives us There SHOULD only be One - Exclusive Class-as-Hirelings Options for OSR Games

Draw the Rest of the Owlbear gives us I CAST TESTICULAR TORSION

The Pastel Dungeon gives us Doors, Gates, and Metroidvania Dungeon Design Cannibal Halfling Gaming gives us Black Sword Hack and the evolving OSR TableTobRPG gives us On Bucket Lists and fighting the real enemy: Time Management Campaign Mastery gives us Metagame blogdex page

The Flytrap (Barkeep Jam)

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

Situated in the repurposed stable-block of an allegedly haunted castle, atop a tunnel-riddled rise, the Flytrap is always abuzz. The Flytrap has a street entrance and a not-very-secret entrance through the tunnels up from the river. The Fly Traps greatest strength and weakness is the sheer volume of goblin-like flylings eating, drinking, coming and going at all hours. They are seen marching in and out of doors that apparently lead nowhere, along the tops of the castle walls outside, up and down the stairs to the cellar and latrines. Every hour of day and night the light blaze and the barkeep is slinging their cheapest drinks and serving bowls of their eternal gumbo. Despite, or perhaps because of, the numbers too-ing and fro-ing, the relatively minor disruptions rapidly lead to panic, shrieking, wailing, and chaotic running around.

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

d6 Staff & Regulars
1. Zadu - kenku barkeep, apparently never sleeps wth dreadful memory - actually a pair of equally taciturn twins that switch out regularly
2. Fuzzelina and Zuzabelle, fly-ling barmaids, frenetic, overly cheerful, easily panicked
3. Chestnut the hedgehog-ling cook - focussed on making faux shrimp out of other bugs found about the place
4. Alf - Ratling bard - flashily dressed, works the room being impressed with peoples tales
5. Chiming Zam - flyling godfather - holds quiet court at a back table with other elderly flylings, misses nothing
6. Mahew - human smuggler, permanent stoop from hiking about in the tunnels beneath, tells lurid tales of hazards beneath.

If the Risk Die rolls a Setback while the jolly crew is approaching this pub, roll 2d6 on the table below if approaching by the front, 2d8 if by tunnel.
2. Arguing adventurers with a mud covered tax chest, aggresive is they notice you noticing them
3. Bar regulars hauling in a fresh giant crab, insist on you helping
4. A flood of panicking flyings dashing the opposite direction wailing about spider vampires
5. Cranky locals complaining about missing beer shipment, try to get you to help, payment promises are vague
6. Overly enthusiastic adventurers who rope you into an argument about the mythic past
7. Flying smugglers carting awkwardly large crates
8. Muddy, sunburned travellers just in from the swamp
9. Dusty, frazzled tunnel-divers emerge from depths
10. Flylings loudly discussing the horrors of the lands outside town, from bandits to monsters
11. Frantic looking local with a cloth wrapped bundle they swear is a powerful magic tome they will attempt to sell to you for a handful of silver
12. Wizard antique-hunter prowls around, very interested in anything people know about this place and its surrounds
13. Wrong turn into tunnel labyrinth
14. Teetering crates of a smugglers stash collapse onto the party
15. Conversations echo through the tunnels providing discussing (roll d8 on this table)
16. Dread reliefs, freshly uncovered, speak of the awful cultists that recently inhabited the tunnels

If the Risk Die rolls a Setback while the jolly crew is inside this pub, roll 2d6 on the table below.

2. Giant Crab submersible crashes about the room while the pilots desperately yank on the cables within to steer it
3. Fake Latrine opens into tunnel labyrinth, lingering too long here has people turn up coming or going
4. Spider cultists attempt to tie up a victim and haul them off to their master in the castle
5. Argument between barkeep and regulars about bar tabs and the nature of money - "the level of money in the money pot is right, therefore all is well"
6. Food too big for the pot, mass brawl after the chef demands people eat more to clear space
7. Grim weather outside has far too many people crowd in, tempers flare and pocket-picking fingers wander
8. Grozzle stored to near the cooking fire catches light to much panic and hilarity
9. Local villager attempts to persuade adventurers to take on a completely mundane problem
10. Found relic, being examined on back table of bar, goes haywire
11. Predator queen cultist starts raving about the return of their dark master, half the crowd panics, half starts arguing back
12. Spider vampire appears in a dramatic flash, to screams, running around, panic and chaos.

Signature Drinks for the Flytrap
1 silver coin - Grozzle - mixed fruit schnapps, different every time
2 silver coins - Stilt-town Cider - good, local cider
3 silver coins - Stilt-town Abbey Wine - very good vintage from local holyfolk
4 silver coins - Dwarven ale - from casks brought in with the smuggling
5 silver coins - Swamp wine - dug up bottles of fine elven vintage, perfectly preserved in the swamp
1 gold coin - Labyrinth mead - made from ancient honey stocks from the tunnels

A log of adventures centered around the Flytrap can be found here.

New Campaigns on Obsidian Portal (2024 Update)

tl;dr: very stable on 2023 - 5e still 2/3 of campaigns, Traveler muscles onto non-D&D leaderboard, absolute number of campaigns down 50% of long run average

With the old Roll20 Orr Reports fading ever further into the past , we have to look elsewhere to get a sense of the ebb and flow of games popularity. It has been a whole year so we can turn once more to new campaigns on Obsidian Portal to try and read the tea-leaves of what is going on out there. This was initially sparked by Troy Press writing in 2019 on RPG campaigns played by system and I have been tracking this for a few years now - and we have a 2024 update.

To recap - This was done by loading the Campaigns page on Obsidian Portal and noting the campaigns per system for each year available (back to 2008) using the Wayback Machine. Happily the format never changed to greatly and it is possible to get a roughly mid-year capture for every year.

Looking at the raw numbers of new campaigns added since last we looked, we see a chunky drop off in actual numbers, worse than we've seen post pandemic - now half down off the average for the past ~ 15 years.

If we normalise these varying number of campaigns to see just the relative change in popularity of systems we see things pretty much continue to go sidewayseverything else pretty much goes sideways, slight uptick in 5e share, Pathfinder stable, slight down-tick in the 'smaller' stuff outside the top 10.

Shiny TTRPG links #184

Interesting links from about the TTRPG space. For yet more links, see the previous list found here or you can check the RPG Blog Carnival or on Third Kingdom Games news roundup. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.

AUTOCRATIK Announced #RPGaDAY2024 for August

Attronarch's Athenaeum writes Fight On! issue 15 now available

Unordinary Tales gives us Campaign: Background Connections

Rise Up Comus shares Everybody wants to be initiated, nobody wants to be tricked

Lonely Star gives us NPC Attitude, or Why Social Rolls Bother Me So Much Sometimes

swordshapedleaves shares my best prep tip as a DM

Cavegirl writes I see we're talking about XP!

All Wizards Are Bastards

thydungeongal shares what the rules of modern D&D actually say the game is trying to achieve

Actual Test: Borderland Provinces Journey Generator

Borderland Provinces Journey Generator was a book that came in one of the gigantic Humble Bundles Old School Revival Dragons, Dungeons & Mazes from back in 2020. Since it said generator I thought I would give it a test to create a one shot for my Friday night open tables. I'm writing it up to follow Gorgon Bones first best practice: "Record your hobby experience" while trying to refine this template by adding session notes.

Throwing some dice at the various tables we get:
Patron table - Independent Merchant
Motivation - Returning a favour

Complex Journey table
Objective - catch up with someone else on their way to the destination
Location - Fort
Group - Druids
Threat - Local leader of the destination
Object - ownership documents
Complication - Pursuers

Final Wrap up
Major Problem: the delivery, information, or assistance is rejected for some reason (they don’t want the thing, they don’t believe the information, don’t want the help, suspect the characters of treachery, etc.)

Since there was an Inn generator I rolled up:
Roadside Inn: The Rugged Hearth
Wooden palisade-wall, main inn building, stable, outhouse, 1d3 outbuildings (shed, dovecote, etc.), chicken coops and/or pigsties. With no smithy, an inn this size generally does not have any additional horses
Dish horsemeat in cream sauce

I had a think about all this and tied it back to things sloshing around in the setting. There is a big swamp up river, the ditch of serpents, perfect for druids to lurk. A trip up river would also be a nice break after a bunch of sessions sailing down the coast. Druids with documents and pursuers and refused delivery all sounded like the druids had some ancient charter that would mess with the local status quo. The merchant is acting on an old favour to go to them and get their charter registered at the local city and needs some muscle - hence the PCs.

I blocked this out as:
1. Quest giving - merchant employs and briefs them
2. Set out - on the river
3. Pass local Dukes Castle, notice pursuers
4. Night at Inn: merchant reveals intent to detour to swamp
5. Mad Max style barge chase
6. Arrive at druids fort - make contact, get documents
7. Exit swamp (potential will o'wisps) - back to river - avoid pursuers
8. Refused on arrival - don't believe the information - local powers against them

Actual session play - retagged here to match the elements above.

1. Approached by Folbitz, a black-marketeer operating out of the Golden Cockerel, our party agrees to help escort him on a trading run up the river to Appollonia. Our heroes are Missy the centaur fighter, Sylvio the elven cleric annd humans Craig the brawler, Ashington the rogue and Marcillus the gladiator.

2. Setting out on a barge, the party notes some shady characters approaching the Golden Cockerel as they round the river bend out of sight.

3. Further up the river, swiftly driven by the strong efforts of Missy, Craig and Marcillus, they spy guards from Cat Castle also on the watch for traffic on the river but Folbitz has hidden amongst the cargo and they pass unnoticed.

4. Arriving at the riverside Inn of the Rugged Hearth, Folbitz has them stop early for the night then reveals that the real purpose of their trip is to pick up cargo from contacts of his inland. A barge full of obviously disguised river-patrol arrive and the players engage them in cards while Folbitz hides out the back. After taking most of the guards cash, angering the sergeant with talk of unions and hearing that Folbitz is wanted as a trader in hallucinogens and inciter of revolutions, the party venture out back and rough up Folbitz to check his story. Folbitz insists that the facts are the same but the perspective is different - the guards want him because new perspectives cause them to question the status quo. Squeezing him for more money the party ups their promised pay with performance bonii.

Departing the Inn they camp in the forest then venture into the Ditch of Serpents swamp the next day, stumbling over a dreadful Sleech which chews up Craig and Missy before being downed.

6. Arriving to Ironoak, a druidfort, they are welcomed and granted hospitality and guided through the druids various brews and produce before being sent back on their way with cargo and a charter to trade their hallucinogenic mushroom wine.

7. Trekking back across the swamp and around the inn they load their barge and set off up river, getting a good head start before the guards notice and give chase.

5. A long chase up river sees them in sight of Appollonia before they run the barge aground and offload the illicit cargo into the woods. Missy starts and argument with the guards, insisting they need better pay and lighter duties which leaves them arguing on their boat as they drift back downriver.

8. To finally enter Appollonia they spend a day creating a religious parade with wicker costume and sun masks for a festival to Pelor. Marching on the city their convincing display attracts more locals and further persuasive argument wins them entry to the city with Folbitz unnoticed among them. Folbitz delivers the ancient trade charter to the merchants guild then sells the now-legal mushroom wine, thanking the party for their assistance.

Session report ends

All told this ran squeaky due to the table - three of the players hit the beers hard, way up on what we usually get and by the end of it were slurring and slow which was a pain. Worse, early on as soon as they walked into the Rugged Hearth one player (man) went to spike Missy's (woman) apple juice and I just said no, not happening. Can't be dealing with that, but man, having it even come up is a drag. Happily, benefit of open tables is you don't have to deal with this stuff often and I won't have to run for these guys again.

That aside, some bits of my lay out got adjusted on the fly - the barge-pursuit got swapped to a later stage of the river travel, which was fine, and the night ended with a truly preposterous Pelorite heresy with a cooked up religious festival to make their way into the city - but content wise it worked ok. The Borderlands Generator gave enough to work with - I thought it was going to be a little sparse but turned out it was plenty.

August 2024 RPG Blog Carnival: It Came From Beyond Time

Welcome to the new month for the RPG Blog Carnival - our topic for August 2024 is "It Came From Beyond Time" - on my mind is the stramge effects of long life and magic can have in dredging things up from the deep past and hurl them into your current campaign. You can find some deeper background on the RPG Blog Carnival on 'of Dice and Dragons'.

If you want to join the carnival, write up your own entry and post it in a comment below, send me a link (my username at gmail.com) or ping me on the 'blog-carnival' OSR discord channel or find me bluesky, twitter or mastodon. I will gather all the participants into a wrap-up post on September 4th.

Below is my own take on the topic.

Shiny TTRPG links #183

More interesting links from about the net. For yet more links, see the previous list found here or you can check the RPG Blog Carnival or on Third Kingdom Games news roundup. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.

Alex Schroeder gives us One Page Dungeon Contest

Welcome to the Deathtrap writes The Adventure Game Part of D&D Directs the Faction-Driven Wargame Part

Grumpy Wizard explains How I Referee Large Groups of Players in Old School D&D

of Dice and Dragons gave us Use a burn down list to keep from running out of ideas

Whose Measure God Could Not Take shares Simple Underdark Point of Interest Generator

The Latest Enemy wrote A Short Wish List

Aboleth Overlords writes Ye Olde Fantasy: Family Matters

Your great-grand-elf's elvish: long lives slowing language change (RPG Blog Carnival)

/The RPG Blog Carnival prompt from Beneath Foreign Planets of WORDS! Etymology, Onomatology and Linguistics sparked some other thoughts for me - on the stability of language when there are very long-lived organisms around.

The core thought here is that you can find thousand year old elves, dragons and giants around - presumably still speaking the same language with the same accent as when they learned their languages in their your - so accents and languages would change much more slowly in such settings than in our own world.

In my home campaign one of the key blocks of background was the elven conquest of the main continent about 5000 years ago and their great withdrawal about 1000 years ago. This has been time enough for many, many generations of the various different short lived races to have lived and died - but alongside this there are the children of the elves who departed 1000 years ago.

This sets up elven as the lingua franca for the local region based on elvish conquests and for that elven to remain recognisably similar because you are talking to the same elves or their immediate offspring. Even within elven populations, since a generation is 100-200 years and their lifespan is ~800 years, then an elven child will learn their elven in part from their great-grand-parent who will still be about. Now, noting not everyone is going to have the same accent as their parents, but this does act as a brake on linguistic drift.

This stabilising influence of very long lived creatures would also apply for giant and draconic and one would assume acting on goliath and dragonborn populations too. The big question is whether these long-lived creatures would also stabilise other langages for other populations? This would be a question of contact - if elves and dwarves are in frequent contact with shorter-lived humans or goblinoids *and* speak with them in their own tongues, it could happen. If contact is less frequent then you would end up with divergence like modern Swiss-German sounding like Ye Olde German to the Austrians and Germans - understandable but not quite the same.

Counter-vailing forces, pushing greater change in language, would be speaking populations isolated from one another and shorter lifespans. I think the shorter life-spans would not necessarily have as strong an effect on causing language drift - but things like populations being able to live in noticeably different environments would.

Greater density of languages and dialects occur around broken up places (mountain valleys, difficult terrain) which keep populations from talking to one another - in D&D you would have a further layer of hazardous barriers (in monsters) and also a broader span of what is habitable - underdark, aquatic, hot and cold environments all have sentients who can dwell there who are 'isolated' from other environments that are uninhabitable to them, but perfectly fine for others.

This sets up two opposing forces - first lots of population groups dwelling in relative isolation and the stabilising anchors of the long-lived. However, assuming the tendency is towards people adopting what most easily allows them to be understood, then where there is contact between the two, it will be change that is slowed and pulled back towards the old ways.

What about transmission along dwarf roads, planar portals and other non-linear connections between places? This would just further serve to stabilise language other greater distances.

For the purposes of world-building and running your game, this means you can with some justification say that adventurers walking around today can understand old, even ancient, languages in a way that would seem quite unreasonable in the real world. Adventurers could well be able to read the script on the ancient tomb or spellbook even before magical assistance. All this is helpful to us as GMs because it gives us a handful of languages we can expect to remain stable for us to deliver our clues in.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A couple of ways that this could manifest:

Shiny TTRPG links #182

Back at base after travels - an lo, more links have bloomed! For yet more links, see the previous list found here or you can check the RPG Blog Carnival or on Third Kingdom Games news roundup. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Campaign Retrospective: Spelljammer Light of Xaryxis

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

Spelljammer: Light Of Xaryxis (2023-24)

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

What worked:

DM201 discussion notes

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

Prepping for one shots

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

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

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

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

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

General game-running

Shiny TTRPG links #181

A final short set of links during this holiday period. For yet more links, see the previous list found here or you can check the RPG Blog Carnival or on Third Kingdom Games news roundup. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.

Explorers Design writes on The Art of the RPG Cover

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

d4 Caltrops shared Safari Card Monster Manual

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

Necropraxis gives us XP Potential as Inverse Encumbrance

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

BASTIONLAND asks What's the Point of a Campaign?

Prismatic Wasteland gives us Endangered in Dungeons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Circular Spine (Barkeep Jam)

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

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

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

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

Shiny TTRPG links #180

More archive diving during this holiday period. For yet more links, see the previous list found here or you can check the RPG Blog Carnival or on Third Kingdom Games news roundup. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.

Roll to Doubt gives us Playable Setting Features

Sea of Stars asks What happened here? for RPG Blog Carnival.

Aboleth Overlords writes The Myth of Free Improvisation

Zedeck Siews Writing Hours asks WHO GETS TO BE A PERSON?

Goblinpunch shares Random Ship Encounters on the Sea of Fish

Campaign Mastery gives us Order In The Sandbox

Weird & Wonderful Worlds gave us Micro-Settings

On the morality and intricacies of love, passions and marriage in dragonblood-led societies

Guest post from the in-house testing team, on topics that have become relevant during our long running Ducal House campaign.

Dragons are among the most unpredictable creatures in existence. When they bred with humanoids, chief among them the ever-unsteady humans, their bloods mixed together in strange ways. All except the most distant of dragonbloods are fundamentally the same, their dominant draconic heritage an internal unifier, almost no matter to which extent their blood carries human, elf, or even, rumor has it, goblinoid parts; and yet, they can be fundamentally different in what drives them. There is no predicting the passions of a dragonblood - only the fact that there will be passion for something, be it buried deep or spilling out of every word and gesture.

A dragonblood-dominated society lives by unwritten, oft unspoken rules where passions of the flesh are concerned, necessitated by the potentially vast differences in the extent of such needs and wants between individuals of even the same clan.

For obvious reasons, marriage and offspring are vitally important concerns to titled individuals and families. Owing to the ancient magical prowess and recipies of the elves, however, these have little bearing on how an individual dragonblood chooses to live out their passions.

Two maxims appear to rule intimate relationships: discretion and plausible deniability. If an innocent bystander observes something they may well have overlooked had their gaze been turned a different direction, it is presumed by all parties that nothing of note occurred. Indiscretion and carelessness, however, are frowned upon and will lead to gossip and/or pointed questioning, particularly in repeat occurrences.

No dragonblood need fear moral outrage for engaging with their passions, even well outside their own species, as long as a certain amount of deniability is maintained.

Two dragonbloods who are courting may do so openly with decorum. Sharing a residence or discreetly sharing a bedroom before or without marriage will not be commented upon by society at large, though it has been observed that the closest acquaintances will take particularly the latter as permission to ask, nudge, jibe and joke with incongruous relentlessness.

Most dragonblood marriages among the higher strata of society take place under the patronage of Bahamut rather than one of the goddesses. What couples promise to one another in front of the altar of the Oath-Keeper allows for some variation, and the clergy of Bahamut does not concern itself with the policing of such vows (any who swore an oath in the Platinum Dragon‘s name will have to answer for its keeping before being granted his eternal rewards, after all), except perhaps for a gentle reminder in particularly ostentatious or high-profile cases.

However, engaging with one‘s passions outside of one‘s established marriage is a vastly more risky proposition among dragonbloods; the reason for this lies not in social repercussions or admonishment by the church, but rather in the well-documented irrationally possessive nature of draconic creatures.