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.

Dragons High! Setting for Legojam

An entry for the Summer LEGO RPG Setting Jam created by DIY & Dragons. If you want to have a go - here are the curated helpful links we were given.

I was too slow with my initial idea (pirates plus atlantis - TableTobRPG did the Azure Archipelago) so it took me a while to come up with a fresh idea - portal invasion! Here we have a world of islands where the resident elves are getting pushed back by clockwork invaders. All is not going well for the invaders however, as it turns out this place is rife with ferocious deep sea monsters and a resident bunch of underwater hostiles. This is a setting about dragon-riding! Aerial combat using the rules of your choice - MCDM's Aces High if you're feeling like quick stuff, Calidar Skyship Combat Mechanics work for monsters if you're on for a challenge.

Shiny TTRPG links #179

Some links, some 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.

lumpley games gives us In Brief, the Problem of RPG Design

Daily Adventure Prompts shares DM TIP: PUZZLING IT OUT

@prokopetz gives us rules don't matter

Torchless writes LOW OPINION: Short-Sighted Focus on Fun Ruins Long-Term Enjoyment of Tabletop Games

The Welsh Piper gave us What’s Your Genre?

Periapt Games Design Blog shares Upon training your character's replacement

Actual Test: Shadowdark adventure generator tables

I gave the the Shadowdark adventure generators a turn to create a session for my Friday night open game. Whenever folk ask about adventure generators it is one that comes up alongside Worlds Without Number and Knave 2e. The Shadowdark one is quite terrain tied with a lot of it being in the 'quest' and 'location' elements backed up by terrain-specific encounter tables.

Throwing some dice at the various tables we get:
Inciting event - runaway wagon
Quest - Spy on the ritual of the Royal Knights
Location - Necropolis of the Enchanted Depths
Opposition - Steel Drakes - known for defeating dragons
Location - Grassland, ruied town


Encounters (grasslands 1) - Beserker hunters that invite you to join them
Encounters (grasslands 2) - Wild boars
Encounters (ruins) - Ogre scrawling grafitti
Encounters (tomb) - wandering merchant trapped in coffin

I also used the settlement generation tools to come up with the destination settlement of Darkwater - those were very good giving me four districts, a handful of landmarks across all of them and enough texture to make the place interesting. Shadowdark being Shadowdark it also has dungeon generation tables but I did not delve that deep for this one-shot session.

Upcycling content - campaign vs one-shot sessions

I gave myself a challenge recently of setting one-shots for other groups in my main campaign world because in theory there are lots of locations that have been visited once where I did a bunch of set up work already and they could just be lifted and replaced, right? Well, not quite so simple but hardly impossible.

The key factors I found are:
- Motivation changes
- Incidental locations
- NPC backgrounds
- Timing

The specific situation I used was a buried but intact temple of Bane.

Shiny TTRPG links #178

More interesting links from a week on the web. 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.

Welcome to the Deathtrap wrote On The Spectrum of Hobbies that Use TTRPGs, and Finding Yours

Ramming the Dungeon launches with DESIGNING A COLLABORATIVE SESSION ZERO

Against The Wicked City gave us On romantic fantasy and OSR D&D

thydungeongal shared On play culture in D&D

666-Sided Dice launches with Thoughts on the Flame Lizard

Zzarchov Kowolski gives us Magical Languages

Review: Dr. Grordborts Scientific Adventure Violence

tl;dr: steampunk planetary romance 5e conversion kit, heavy on the gear, lighter on the setting details.

This was a kickstarter I backed because a) I rode in on the 90s steampunk wave back in the day - Abney Park, the Difference Engine - all that jazz and b) I seriously contemplated getting myself a Weta Workshop raygun once. When Dr. Grordbordts Scientific Adventure Violence dropped on Kickstarter I backed it more on that nostalgia kick than I was expecting something mindblowing but now that I've gotten to reading it I've been pleasantly surprised.

Cover art by Max Chow

This is a 5e conversion book; following a similar course to what I have seen elsewhere of very much running with the system as it exists and applying mods through new conditions, tags and the like. The art is fun, the production values are very good indeed and there is lots of the original Dr. Grordbort material turning up in the pages which is neat. This is a toolkit to do this type of game in 5e, a mod-pack for familiar players, rather than an entry to the hobby for new folk. I would say you would need to be fairly familiar with basic 5e D&D to get the most out of this.

Actual Test: Fictive Fantasies Adventure Generator

After trying the Oracle RPG adventure generator and finding it a bit sparse, I had more luck with Fictive Fantasies version (link to pdf).

Working through the elements in the adventure generator we get:
Quest contact - rumour overheard
Quest - prevent something - interfere, only you can stop
Something = capture/kidnap someone
Location - island: In the seas they appear randomly and many have never been properly cataloged. Undiscovered islands yield many unknown threats and unexpected surprises.
Victim - Royalty
Mcguffin - Secret: Something hidden, which somebody wants to keep hidden. Kingdoms and royalty have plenty of secrets they want nobody to find out about, and people are always willing to pay for those secrets.
Opposition: Guild or Horde: A group of people with one common belief or oath of brotherhood. Their numbers are great and their intimidation mighty.
Twist - Dodgy ally
Dramatic conflict - Truth: Ultimately the players will have to suppress some great truth, or find a way to tell everyone about some great lie. Either way they’re on the side of deception.

Good stuff to work with from OFTHEHILLPEOPLE - a few more random elements and it all feels slightly more defined and targeted for some reason.

From random rolls to adventure draft

Shiny TTRPG links #177

A more typical number of links fresh from the internet. 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.

Welcome to the Deathtrap gives us Making Best Use of Downtime

u/SprocketSaga wrote Use the "Improvisation Tax" rule of thumb for unexpected PC actions

sachagoat continues Re-inventing the Wilderness: Part 6 - Landmarks

Tales of the Lunar Lands gives us Legojam: Cedric the Bull and the Canton of Ochsebad

Trollsmyth writes Grimdark vs. Eucatastrophe

A Knight at the Opera compiles EVERY Initiative Method??

Actual Test: Oldskull Adventure Generator

tl;dr: a great big adventure generator that gives you enough for even wild player side-tracks.

This came into my hands through a bundle of tons of Oldskull stuff from Kent David Kelly. They sure are prolific, full marks for that - 30 odd files came in the bundle and it was just a selection. I found myself running out of published adventures for my Friday night Brancalonia one-shots so I thought I would take the Adventure Generator for a spin and see if it served.

First, this thing is a beast - 702 pages - and a self-declared 'mega-supplement' to serve as the 'Rosetta stone of the Castle Oldskull system' - a 'massive unified imagination engine' with a workflow of 16 steps spread over 10 chapters. There is a fair bit of background and philosophy of adventure creation in there but I focused on just generating adventure seeds for now.

This 'imagination engine' comprises many, many random tables within a 16 step workflow:
[1] Adventure Title Creation
[2] The Framing Event
[3] The Benefactor
[4] The Promised Reward
[5] The Adventure Journey
[6] The Adventure Destination
[7] The Chaotic Descriptor Tool
[8] The Quest Designer
[9] The Secondary Quest Designer
[10] The Complication Generator
[11] The Ally Creator
[12] Tasks Before Departure
[13] The Abstract Weather Tool
[14] The Villain Generator
[15] The Unexpected Adversary Tool
[16] The Monster Selection Tool

The first block of steps are pretty quick - varying between d1000 and d100 you roll up the adventure title for inspiration then the situation, person providing the hook and the reward for getting involved. Nice and neat. I cam up with 'Tomb of the Screaming Skull' as our title where the Elder Sign is our inciting vent, the benefactor is a Reborn Marchioness (a famed one) and the prize at the end is an illusionist henchman. Interesting! I can work with this, let us proceed.

The next block of things addresses the journey required to resolve things - we roll up that our overall environment is Temperate Forest, that the destination itself comprises echo chambers and wind tunnels and then things get a bit more complex. We roll up a number of locations cross referencing the Temperate Forest table then a number of 'descriptors' on the Chaotic Descriptor Table to get a spin on each of these locations. These should all then be dropped into a 3x3 grid around the target. I ended up with about an equal three way split between Redwoods, other 'normal' forests and 'weird' forests.

After this I got a quest of 'poison a [person/critter/faction] at [place]' and some further rolls got me a fighter in a corrupted forest - a location that fit well. The fighter was qualified as a 'battler/skull-crusher' which was a really helpful little detail to make them pop.

The Secondary Quest designer was another four rolls getting me a 'compete in a tournament/game of honor', 'repair a bridge/door', 'decipher an inscription' and 'find a hidden locale/dungeon level'. I patched these into the locations where they seemed to fit - bridge repair at the 'Terrifying Brushwood Fall', tournament at the 'thundering copse'.

The Complication Generator gave me three more twists - abduction of a PC, fog getting people lost and a race against time. Given this was for a one shot I was hesitant to further complicate the session with these but held the fog in reserve as something to do if things were moving too rapidly.

Next the Ally Creator turned out to be some Lower level Illustionists - which harmonised nicely with the illusionist henchman reward - perhaps they came along on the quest too?

Next Tasks Before Departure gave me five elements - waiting for an astral event, listening to a survivors account, researching the locale, researching the journey and acquiring a sidequest to slay a monster. This was another element I was wary off given the one-shot nature of the session I was planning - however it turned out to be really handy because when the table derailed and struck out for the distant horizons of side-tangents. All these secondary activities provided ample landing zone for all sorts of shenanigans to reconnect back to the main adventure.

The Abstract Weather Tool came up with a nice 'clear, wind in their favour' which was a minor boon. Other weather conditions could definitely change the tone and it is often something I forget to properly bring into play on my own.

The Villain Generator rolled up a Thief, Lock-breaker, motivated by vengeance for a slain sibling, suffering from memory gaps and fond of working through blights and plagues. This came a little late in the process for me - I already had a decent view of what was going on with the skull-crusher fighter in his forest lair needing to get poisoned - so this villain became more of a background villain not an active player. It was good to have them though, as knowing them and thus the flavour of their minions became handy during the Great Derailing.

The Unexpected Adversary rolled up a 'Benefactors Envious Disciple' - obviously another illusionist which plugged in nicely to what we had already.

Finally the Monster Selection Tool got me some Goblins and Beastmen so I split them up into a relatively hapless bunch of goblin foresters working the Redwoods, territorial beastmen in the rest of the forests. A bunch of the location qualifiers from the Chaotic Descriptor tool implied the presence of celestials so I added them as a third group.

Once all this was rolled up I shoved the pieces around a bit and re-wrote it into
* A renowned bard, the Marchioness - killed by Skullcrusher, now reborn
* They want you to go to a corrupted forest and poison the screaming skull with holy water
* They have a troupe of illusionists who can support you now, and one might stay with you after as a reward
* Skullcrusher lairs in echoing wind tunnels, trust nothing you hear there
* Skullcrusher is the primary minion of the Gatebreaker - a deranged thief, driven mad by grief for their slain sibling, now they spread blights in vengeance and kill by breaking in with plague-ridden knives
* One of the Marchioness disciples, an illusionist, is envious the party has been sought for assistance and seeks to see them fail
* The woods are full of goblins and beastmen

Lots of the elements of preparation for the journey and secondary quests were initially set aside and only came into play when the party set off for the horizons. The whole illusionist ally and then potential rival thing never came off because the players left them at home when they set out on the quest. The Gatebreaker was never seen but his minion network was stumbled over then sought out and I was able to ad-lib them effectively knowing who they were working for.

All told, what initially seemed like way too much stuff with multiple independent threads actually turned out to be handy at an open table session where they took an age before engaging with the wilderness part of the journey. A chunky system to work through but gives you a wealth of stuff - even if not all of it will come into play, it was good to have it to hand.

Post-dragon attack regional ecology (RPG Blog Carnival)

For this months RPG Blog Carnival because the prompt 'after the dragon' from Sea of Stars is a great prompt with tons inside it. I was sure this was covered by an old Malhavoc press book but no - I was thinking of Requiem for a God which is not quite the same thing.

What we have below is probably best for terrain set up early in a campaign or when venturing into a new location because this stuff is slower and should probably be baked into the terrain players encounter. You could use this as an encounter generator for an immediate dragon attack or as some spillover from an attack last year but I think it might be best done as time-layers and then encountered from outside in by journeying PCs.

Stealing three of the five steps from the disaster management cycle we have:
1. Impact
2. Immediate aftermath
3. Post-disaster change

Shiny TTRPG links #176

A giant block of links with a significant archive dive this week. 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.

Mazirian's Garden gives us Group Downtime Activities: Remembering the Dead

Mindstorm gives us A Person-Shaped Hole

I Cast Light! wrote DUNGEON WEATHER: For your overloaded encounter die

Provinto RPG gives us 10-Room Dungeon Brainstorm: Tomb of the Honorable Order of Glory (& Possibly Justice)

The Blue Bard writes Down Come the Claws

Half Again as Much starts with What is an Elemental Plane, Anyway?

Tribute to Collaborative Dungeon Creation

tl;dr: trying to recall a genius blogpost on collaborative dungeon creation as 'forces of nature'

This is an attempt to replicate a genius blogpost I found years ago and has eluded me since. Hopefully the original author will rock up and go 'hey, thats my idea' so I can finally link it. In the absence, let me tell you a tale of a genius idea, gather round the campfire comrades... The inestimable DIY & Dragons questioned if it might be Tom Dowlers "How to Host A Dungeon" - and from that tip I found the post I was thinking off - Dyson Logos doing a test of How to Host a Dungeon. So I am actually mis-remembering this as a multi-player experience which perhaps could be another way to do it. Anyway, all that follows was written before I found this out, please view it in that light.

Fado, fado, there was an idea that if you were a DM with access to multiple pools of players, you could use some of them to set situations that would then serve as challenges for others.

The original post addressed dungeons but in the hope of appeasing Joesky's ghost I am going to generalise it a bit to make it a tool for any setting.

So breaking that down into a procedure:
1. Kick it off by picking a base location type - a temple, dungeon, cavern, etc. Sketch out some part of that to get things started.
2. Everyone around the table then chooses to act as a force that has altered the space over time - dwarven miners, burrowing dragons, lava flows, a wizard (there is always a wizard).
3. Go around the table adding to or modifying the base location in a way that matches thematically to that force.
4. Repeat #3 until you have a sufficiently large or interesting location

Review: Where Evil Lives

tl;dr: MCDM action-oriented monsters in their lairs - 22 lairs with neat set-piece battles for a range from level 2 to 20.

"Where Evil Lives: The MCDM book of boss battles" - does what it says on the tin. I got this because I went in on the Flee, Mortals! kickstarter and they succeeded so hard the project blew out to create another book. So I more or less got this at cost of postage only - and despite that being ridiculous rates to Europe, at that point as per Shakespeare "I am in blood/ Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o’er." So this one landed with next to no expectations on my side and from looking at Flee, Mortals! this is cool stuff but not the style I am taking to my fluffier tables just now. Seeing that it is being sold on D&D Beyond I thought it might be good to take a second look and get it reviewed.

Cover art by Grace Cheung

First impression - as with Flee, Mortals! very glossy and impressive, a chunky book with nice binding. The first of the MCDM books to forgo the dust-jacket and become more like the usual 5e format. The art is, as ever gorgeous - but somewhat familiar in that there is a fair amount of duplication between this and Flee, Mortals! This makes the book either usefully standalone or annoyingly duplicative, depending on how you get to it. I will assume you do not have Flee, Mortals! for the purposes of the rest of this. The art itself is very nice and we have the interesting choice to completely abandon descriptions of monsters in favour of the illustrations - with lesser art this might be an issue but the work in here is just great for that.

Shiny TTRPG links #175

An interesting week for tools of gaming. 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.

The Last Throw gives us Crow's Random Events Table

DIY & dragons shares Helpful Links for the LEGO RPG Jam

drcuriousvii gives us Summer Lego RPG Setting(?) Jam Entry: The Monster (Pod) Manual

Grumpy Wizard shares Writing A Game Master’s Statement

Goblin Punch gives us Deconstructing Random Encounters (+ Spirits of the Underworld)

B/X BLACKRAZOR shares Illusionary Post

Coins and Scrolls gives us OSR: A Material Component Magic System

Anna B Meyer writes MeyerHawk - Magic Travel

OSR Kickstarter Trends

Ben Milton of Questing Beast did some neat work tagging kickstarter projects as OSR or not and played out some of the trends over time - see video. He generously shared his data - [edit: building upon the original dataset by Hans Messersmith] and I wanted to dig through and see what else we can see.

From the data-sheet - classification was done by:
Original = Adventures/supplements/etc. explicity for old forms of D&D; New games that are direct or near directly clones of D&D (e.g. OSE, OSRIC); adventures, supplements for those direct clones
Scene = new games considered to be part of the "OSR scene"; new games inspired by older forms of D&D; adventures/supplements/etc for those games
If a project is listed with multiple systems/games, it will be categorized as Original if at least one of the systems is Original, otherwise Scene
Reprints of actual older D&D products (e.g. the recent reprint of Caverns of Thracia by Goodman Games) are included in Original
Includes projects that started between January 1, 2014 and December 31, 2023, inclusive. Therefore, some projects that started late in 2023 and ended in 2024 are included.
Listed year is the year the project started, not ended

Sticking on my analyst hat we can pull out some interesting trends. First, to recap what was shown in Questing Beasts video and give ourselves a baseline, we see an overall increase in projects for every category.

I did some work to extract the median and top quartile values of project per category to get a sense of what most projects are doing, conscious that the very large projects at the high end skew things significantly otherwise. These are in tables at the bottom of this post. We have seen the median value of project jump about but broadly converge towards the lower end of the $5k-10k bracket.

This I found somewhat surprising - I would have thought that 5e or 'other' categories, representing broader pools of players, would be higher.

Review: Infinigrad: The Weird City Toolkit

tl:dr; a shiny new iteration of the go-to urban generator for Suburbs, Buildings, Guilds, Foes, Dungeons and Quests.

Infinigrad: The Weird City Toolkit by Gorgzu Games is the current iteration of a toolkit I have been gleefully using for years - in its first iteration as it was released in parts on the Lizard Man Diaries blog to create cities for my Lizard Kingdoms campaign and it has remained by go-to whenever I want to get granular and creative in an urban environment. Books like World Without Number give you great high level stuff but Infinigrad is the one that takes you down through the suburbs to the room by room.

Conceptually, I belive this sprang from the authors desire to have a toolkit that would support random generation of episodic weird fantasy heists or cyberpunk style 'runs' - each session would see a newly diced up location in the infinite city complete with atmosphere and opposition and off the players would go. What is is now is a hugely detailed set of urban location generators from the suburb scale down to the people and things in the rooms which can be deployed to support any urban setting from fantasy to far future.

The book itself is, to my mind, a solid improvement in useability on older versions, cleaner text layout, easier to read and same great content expanded in useful places. The art through is AI, by "the Daemon Midjourney", as has been the Authors style for years. This may or may not sit well with you but for the vibes of Infinigrad it works as a dreamy, twisted place where people *do* have the wrong number of fingers and generally look twisted, warped and uncanny.

The DriveThru package also includes a bunch of HTML generators - Building Stocker, Guild Dog Generator, Job Generator, Suburb Generator, Suburb Street Stocker and Universal Stocker - which you can just click-to-use instead of rolling dice to look things up. I think I will be sticking with dice on the table and the pdf but these are a nice quality of life inclusion for those who want them.

Shiny TTRPG links #174

Links from an interesting week on the web, seasoned with a trawl of the archives. 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.

The Welsh Piper gave us Realities of Fantasy Treasure

Goblin Punch wrote Dungeon Checklist

Mindstorm gives us Collaborative Worldbuilding: Glimpses

Great & Small: The Roleplaying Game Of Animal Fantasy gave us Defending Your Territory

Silverarm shares Fixing Moria: Metro System Megadungeon Design

DAILYADVENTUREPROMPTS gives us DM Tip: Lining up the Pieces

Enthusiastic Skeleton Boys wrote D&D isn't fun enough (or: Enthusiastic Skeleton Boys)

Tabletop Curiosity Cabinet gives us Splitting the Overloaded Encounter Die

Remixing: Spelljammer Light of Xaryxis Part III

tl;dr: how the players actually bounced around the sandbox made by chopping up Light of Xaryxis

In the first part of this remix I wrote about what I did
* Read through Light of Xaryxis (LoX) and rework the framing of the campaign.
* Adapt the adventure by breaking it up into 'plot chunks' which could be separated.
* Created a system for all the action to happen in.
* Dropped the various plot chunks into places that made sense - this got more focus in the second part of the write up.

Below are the records of how the players moved among the various planets where the encounters from the adventure were scattered. Overall it worked well, with the start holding fairly true to what the adventure lays out then going all over the place in the middle before running through the ending more or less as planned out in the book.

To give context for all the movements described, the roster of planets in the system was:
0. The Snuffed Star – the guttering remains of a star, where a prototype starseed had fizzled
1. Gorondirs Throne – small, with a fiery moon that makes it habitable, dwelling of the Sussurans, quasi-Xaryxian loyalists
2. Mystra’s Mirror - small, flat waterworld - uninhabited
3. Hrungirs Roar - titanic air world with a fiery moon and a habitable earthen moebius-strip, seat of the local astral elves, system capital
4. The Great Belt - chain of asteroids within an extended atmosphere inhabited by miners of many origins
5. Obsidian Depths - vast water world, inhabited only by great aquatic beasts
6. Fanthirs Ruin – enormous earth world, once populated by dwarves, now a mindflayer hold
7. The Ring Sea – water belt with rocky clusters and a great moon within it
8. Tears of Joy – tiny warm water world with a population of raft-dwellers

Below is a mid game map with the long diagonal mapping the 'rings' of the system using the old Spelljammer notation. The closer rings (top left) are one day travel at Spelljammer speed, the further apart rings are two days travel apiece. The astral boundary is bottom right corner - so a fair ways out. The map is from mid-campaign but as you can see, there is quite a chunk of distance, multiple days travel between the different planets - so this hex-crawl became *lengthy*.

Orc-shifted world (RPG Blog Carnival)

For this months RPG Blog Carnival because the prompt it’s not easy being green from RPG Wandering got me thinking about orcs - and how the world changes, if any, if we slot orcs into the central world spot that humans typically occupy.

What if orcs and goblins were our 'base' for our fantasy world in place of humans? Taking standard D&D fantasy world, you get lots of mixed entities from the influence of magic, the planes, dragons, etc. What does a world look like where the assumed base block of the world is an orc?

This is not Orkworld where we assume Orks are the protagonists in otherwise standard fantasyland, this is assuming a world grown up around orcs rather than one grown up around humans.

There looks to me like three major blocks of creatures that would change to 'orc-based' versions
- those changed by the influence of magical forces - planars
- those combined with other fantasy races through heritage
- those affected/cursed during their life

Shiny TTRPG links #173

Choice links from this week on the interweb including some sweet Jams! 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.

Prismatic Wasteland creates Barkeep Jam

The Colours of Pentagrams proposes reCalled from Action - Blogging Challenge

Gnome Stew gives us Give them a War Room: Player Facing Threat Maps

Rise Up Comus gives us Legojam: Castle Hexcrawl

u/i_am_randy shares 11 years of running open tables at local game stores

Archstone Press writes Running Your First Sandbox

Review: Royal Blood - A Game of Cards

tl:dr; a fun tarot-based heist game, great for whipping up vibrant characters and an intricate challenge for a punchy one-shot.

I got to play this as part of the forever-DMs support group - and it turned out it was on my drives so great chance for a review. Royal Blood is from Rowan Rook and Decard of Spire and Heart fame. I think I got this as part of a bundle and had given the blurb a read but it did not click with me - but now after playing it I have a lot more time for it, I could see this being useful for folk as a world-builder even for other games.

The high concept is that you are a 'Royal' - one of the court cards from the tarot deck - with magic flowing in your veins. Above the world are the Arcane - those who managed to claw or trick their way up to quasi-god-hood, recognised as one of the major arcana of the tarot. The game is about pulling off the heist that tears our the heart of power of one of the Arcane - to ascend yourselves potentially.

Art by Banana Chan

Mechanically it resembles Blades or Spire - not dice thrown but the minor arcana drawn and success depends on the value of the card - yes but, yes and, etc. The design is riotous - great evocative writing set over some bright pages - zine-sized, not a huge amount on each page but punchy and does what it needs to.

Own Personal Blorb/AntiBlorb

tl;dr: I like Blorb because it anchors on the concept of the oracular dice, that the DM facilitiates, guides the odds by writing the tables to be rolled on, but the dice decide fate. I like Anti-Blorb because it reflects how engaged players paint in the world too.

I read the original Blorb article and thought 'yes, of course' then I saw quite a lot of dismissiveness from commenters I otherwise respect that made me question had I missed something. After further digging I figure that the reasons they disagree is the portrayal of the principles of blorb as iron laws as opposed to a neat heuristic to make a GM's life easier. For that I find Blorb is great.

Hacking Technoskalds summary of Sandra's original model we have three tiers of in-world truth when the group sits to table and the curtain raises on the session:
Explicitly-noted facts are in the GM's binder to be uncovered as play begins
Rules or mechanics (including random tables) which generate truths about the world through play and how the dice fall
Improvised facts are things the DM will create in the moment to fill in gaps not covered by the first two

I find the toughest challenge over long form campaigns is keeping things consistent in-world. Everything reverts to the mean fantasy land mulch in my brain if I do not have some big hooks to hang a seperate world off - and things that remind me of the random little stuff I thought up that would be cool at some point. Setting it out in tiers helps me because it recognises the practical reality of some big set pieces get written up that you are going to use once the players find them, some stuff you are going to make up as you go along - but the intermediate tier is little systems and encounter tables is what helps keep things consistent.

I am fascinated by the description of 'blorby' by Fail Forward as a 'highly detailed pre-written setting' because it is to me one of the ways of *minimising* the detail you need to write into your setting. You generate some reasonable principles for the world - a good encounter table permits the players to wander wherever in a hex crawl for as long as they like. Combine that with mechanics like an overloaded encounter dice to allow any given encounter table entry to serve multiple duties - the encounter, the spoor, the lair, etc.

I like the specific expansion of anti-blorb - which again, weird name - because it maps to my table experiences over the long run.

Per Liches Libram Antiblorb follows the hierarchy:
explicit GM notes and overwise established truths, and if none exist
if the facts would be known to PCs, established player headcanon, and if that does not exist or is inapplicable,
if the facts would already by known to PCs, player fiat, and if that is not applicable,
procedures like random tables for generating truths flagged by the GM in advance, and if none exist,
GM fiat

My first read of 'player fiat' was very character driven 'my back story says' but when I think about my tables with longer running campaigns then it is much more the "I figure that..." of players deducing elements of the world that the DM simply had not yet considered. The DM may have arrived at a different answer if they had come to it alone but with the players here creating perfectly world-coherent answers, why not write it down and make it canon.

Pure unstructured improv for me runs the high risk of me whacking into some inconsistency that players will latch onto and either burn time on something that is not there or require immersion-busting back pedaling. The least wild improv I do the better because things getting generated off pre-thought-through procedures ought to be in-world consistent and support the players general vision of the world. Ideally this then sparks more player headcanon and player driven fact-making which then gives me more world-coherent material to riff off.

I like how Knight at the Opera talks through this approach and the benefits of this 'selective prep'.

It is also helpful as anything after long, draining days or weeks when the creativity within any given thing I am improving might be trying to draw from a dry well.

It helps me structure my creativity and keep the worlds consistent and different from each other, especially when there are gaps between games and switching between worlds.

Godspeed to those who can sit down and extemporise entire campaigns - I used to be able to do it back in college running IOU while my expresso machine ran continuously but not no more. These days, I blorb, because if I come up with a good idea, great! If the players tell me what great idea is implied by stuff I told them earlier, great! If I'm stuck but I've got some tables I can pull a quick random-but-tailored encounter out of, also great! And finally if I find myself way down this list - nothing prepped, the players don't know what should be here, it is off the charts of stuff I have thought of before - then we are in genuine blank space of the world and that is also engaging. Whatever I come up with here in this blank space is going to be informed by all the things it wasn't which at least is better than starting from absolute zero.

Joesky Tax - d6 Abandoned Heist Hauls
1. Smashed chest of small coins, obviously fallen from a great height, bloody scrapes along one edge, short trail of coins away
2. Multiple antique urns, with fading illusions to look like one of the urns, which has an illusion to look differently
3. A great rusted pile of chainmail, swords, helmets, halbards and other gear, within which glint gold and some gems
4. A tipped over coffin with a scarred lid, something crudely hacked off the center of it, scrolls tumbling out across the ground
5. An extremely obvious burial sight hides a chest of the local tax collectors. Multiple trails come too and from the burial pit, signs of multiple reburials.
6. Heavy bundles of fresh furs from a large, dangerous predator. Getting a bit gamey but treated soon might be sold for good coin

Shiny TTRPG links #172

A fair few interesting links this week. 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.

DIY & dragons kicks off Summer LEGO RPG Setting Jam

Goblin Punch writes Deconstructing Healing, Potions, and Shrines

Technoskald's Forge gives us Blorb: The Technoskald Interpretation

Planarian Calamarium shares Unified THACO Resolution

Blue Bard gave us Say Yes to the Players

Coins and Scrolls gives us OSR: 1d20 Dungeon Merchants

Traverse Fantasy writes Materialist Magic / Magical Materialism

The Wondering Monster shares Motivating Players to Hexcrawl with Maps Found as Treasure

Hidden in Shadows writes It started with Blackmoor - Firsts

Loot the Room gives us Appendix N Part 2: Games

Nothing's RPG Zone shares Staying Classy in the Stone Age 1

Dice in the North gives us Delver's Tools

Elfmaids & Octopi shares Factions for Chagrinspire For a Prison Adventure

Remixing: Spelljammer Light of Xaryxis Part II

With the campaign over, diving into a chapter-by-chapter pull-apart of Light of Xaryxis and how I turned it into a sandbox.

In the first part of this remix I wrote about what I did
Read through Light of Xaryxis (LoX) and rework the framing of the campaign.
Adapt the adventure by breaking it up into 'plot chunks' which could be separated.
Created a system for all the action to happen in.
Dropped the various plot chunks into places that made sense.

This post is going to go into more detail on the last point now - how exactly I pulled apart the adventure into how many chunks. The broad toolkit I was looking towards was The Alexandrian 'How to Remix an Adventure' in making a node based structure - where all the nodes here were planets. My initial work up had Chapter 2 happen then direct to Chapter 4, then Chapter 5 and after into 'sandboxing' where Chapters 3, 6, 7 and 8 were the recruitment quests for a different faction. Chapter 6 ropes in the vampirates, chapters 3 and 8 the mindflayers, chapter 8 the local barons and chapter 7 the local imperial loyalists.

To recap the system I rolled up:
0. The Snuffed Star – the guttering remains of a star
1. Gorondirs Throne – small, with a fiery moon that makes it habitable, dwelling of the Sussurans
2. Mystra’s Mirror - small, flat waterworld
3. Hrungirs Roar - titanic air world with a fiery moon and a habitable earthen moebius-strip, seat of the local astral elves
4. The Great Belt - chain of asteroids within an extended atmosphere, with mines and Bral-like asteroid cities
5. Obsidian Depths - vast water world, inhabited only by great beasts
6. Fanthirs Ruin – enormous earth world, once populated by dwarves, now a mindflayer hold
7. The Ring Sea – water belt with rocky clusters and a great moon within it
8. Tears of Joy – tiny warm water world, with a seafaring/spacefaring culture

Chapter 1 - tossed overboard entirely - replaced with a bridge from a 'space whaling' two-shot. I had the intro as the githyanki whaler captain be so impressed with them that they signed them up for what they figured would be a cushy number of a letter of marque with the Githyanki empire to go find a lost agent. This also served as an on-ramp to add players to the party. None of the book content got used as we never witnessed a Starseed drop from the ground. I could have recycled the Moondancer with Cpt. Sartell, Flapjack the Flumph, Traevus and his mutiny and all that elsewhere but I had no shortage of ships to use so they got sidelined.

Chapter 2 - used the Darkstar encounter more or less as is at the system boundary, just kept a more traditional hadozee crew to make the Dark Star and its mission a more orthodox fleet ship. My players, raised on Master and Commander, of *course* took the Dark Star as a prize. Rock of Bral was swapped out for main port in The Great Belt.

Chapter 3 - wreck of the Lucid Edict is a great encounter, lifted as the 'faction quest' to get the local Mindflayers of Fanthirs Ruin allied against the Xaryxians.

Chapter 4 - the Ebonsnare neogi ship got turned into a wildspace encounter - I did not bring in the Space Galleon rescuers since the PCs were well able to take the Ebonsnare apart alone. The Stalwart and Incorrigible were available for use but never got used. All the content about the Rock of Bral got lifted straight over to the local asteroid port, including the astral elf ambush; interestingly, this set the dogs running for the PCs that the Xaryxians must be running a big spy network, how to find it and rip it out? Krux gets found, mentions the Second Wind but the party has their own ship so they ignore it and head to Topolah's for intel. Fel Ardra got recycled as the Xaryxian spy network encounter later, Flinch and Starbough never got used. Hastain the reigar gets placed as an ambush encounter at the asteroid port but the PC's keep doing fast, cunning port departures and coincidentally spoiling Hastains ambush a few times.

Chapter 5 - Topolah's tower and the scavvers were used as is, placed in the Great Belt. Topolah was much appreciated as a source of good intel and her advice to find Gargenhale was taken seriously. The Kindori pod never got used; but this bunch had already been space-whaling. The Gargenhale content was used as was, placed over Obsidian Depths, the big local ocean planet. Throwaway lines in the Gargenhale set up - two starmoth wrecks, evidence of a fight - all this provided lots of investigation by the players trying to reconstruct the timeline of events which took a lot of DM prep on my side to figure out reasonable answers. The players of *course* stopped to strip the Starmoth wrecks to the deck-nails, looking for valuables and intel.

Chapter 6 - Gargenhale and his mutinous crew played as is - though the TPK potential of the explosive cargo of the Last Breath was something I watched nervously as people split up during the fight. There was also a good chance to blow Xedalli to kingdom come before ever meeting her if things go sideways in the fight with Agony. Xedalli was however found and promptly re-imprisoned by the party aboard their own ship.

Chapter 7 - Xedalli got used as is. Pretty much all the long-haul voyage content is here in the voyage to Doomspace so that got repurposed into general travel encounters. Aartuks of Aruun got recycled as the 'faction onboarding' quest for the ssussurans of Gorondirs Throne, including the bulettes. Doomspace itself got chucked - I kept everything in-system, especially since it turned out to be large with weeks of travel between planets.

Chapter 8 - Vocaths base got re-framed as the mindflayers orbital trade station over Fanthirs Ruin. Arena of Blood got turned into the "mindflayer alliance quest" and went by the numbers. Prince Xeleths ambush of his sister was recycled to trip once Xedalli showed herself in public (wherever). Xeleths back-up snatch team got repurposed into the Xaryxian spy network as an ambush on the capital of Hrungirs Roar.

Chapter 9 - Alliance in Doomspace was re-painted and used as a faction-building challenge series to recruit the quarreling local eleven remnants on Hrungirs Roar, the local capital planet. The goals/ambitions etc remained but I switched the races to be residents of Hrungirs Roar.

Chapter 10 - From here on the adventure ran pretty close to 'script'. Citadel assault was played straight up apart from the githyanki knight encounter getting thrown overboard. With the players allying with mindflayers and *being* the local githyanki force it did not feel like a good fit.

Chapter 11 - Trial by combat went more or less by the numbers - some villain monologuing then a beefy fight with a Zodar.

Chapter 12 - Betrayal, fight-back and then final decision to destroy Xaryxis were used as is.

So after I pulled all those bits out and scattered them around, I threw in another faction on Tears of Joy to be an accelerator - they would join once a majority of others were onboard.

I unleashed the players and after a fairly direct route in to liase with Krux they found themselves aware of the problem (sun is cooling due to starseeds, Xaryxians are assholes, they are attempting to reconquer the place, we need to get the locals off their butts by doing things to get them on-side against the Xaryxians). After that they had a bunch of leads to chase down corresponding to encounters from the book set on different planets and off they went. I did not worry too much about what level things were tuned for because with my experience 5e players can usually nova their way through whatever you throw at them and this table were some hard-bitten 30yr D&D vets.

I retooled the milestone levelling to be check-list - once a certain set of encounters were done, they levelled, which meant that it took a while as they cruised around doing bits and pieces then they started completing things and levelled relatively rapidly into the end game.

All in all it worked pretty well - the players went off on some tangents I was able to catch and over all 80% of the campaign sessions worked through at least some content from the book so we got good use out of it. I will walk through how the players interacted with all this on another post.

Light of Xaryxis lends itself well to remixing this way as there are lots of elements that can be swapped around without greatly impacting it

Further notes on running big open tables

Unplanned I ended up running a big table of nine for one of our open sessions recently - it can work, it is not to be feared and disdained as some might insist. I also got to play in a seven player, multi-faction brawl and ran a seven man table in the past months for other examples. Writing up notes as per Gorgon Bones best practices - Record your hobby experience.

I previously wrote up how I used to make it work in the 90s. In the past months I have run a table of seven and one of nine and it gave me a chance to re-test what I recalled as the way to do it and see was I kidding myself or suffering false memory.

What I remembered of my old methods were:
- make it easy for people to pay attention - either have people involved or make sure things are interesting to watch
- 'just use bears' - keep the monsters straightforward
- take breaks
- run a count down - hold people to making quick decisions
- ambush long discussions with random encounters
- Viking Hat DM'ing - strongly steering the table - though that was just how I ran things back in the day

Since the 90s things I picked up along the way that I thought would help are:
- Puzzles and terrain hazards are great
- Keeping the momentum going by telling people to be ready ahead of their turn

So from these recent sessions, things that stood out to me were:

Lots of bodies makes a mess of combat encounters - a lot of damage gets thrown out before a monster gets a second turn; add foes but keep those foes mechanically simple.

People mostly stuck together - everyone worked well except one or two 'self-centered' characters. Lone-wolves do not work as there is not the time for their running off alone. Getting the party moving through impulsive actions (just pulling the lever) can be fine to break debate-deadlock.

Weird, quirky characters are fine where the player knows how to play them so as not to be a drag. Large headcount tables live in the now, backgrounds are unlikely to feature strongly since there is not time to give everyone that kind of spotlight.

Vary between calling on everyone and letting some drive the action. Some players were happy to sit back and enjoy the ride, if things are being driven forward.

Watch the progress of the group as a whole - as long as things are generally moving forward you are doing ok. Some things get resolved quickly because of many bodies (combat), other things take longer (roleplay).

From the seven player table where sub groups split off regularly on mini-exploration runs, as long as people are doing entertaining things, others will be happy to 'watch the show' - a hub-and-spoke set up works where people do things and come back before doing another thing vs linear where people venture ever further away

From the nine player table - allow folk to run ahead with decisions, in particular being conscious of some players stopping to harvest or cast rituals or other time consuming stuff - note they are stopping to do a thing and see what everyone else is doing with their time. If the party feels it is critical, they will wait, if they feel it is indulgent they will move on and that gives a balance to 'bandwidth jamming'.

Pre-brief folk - recognise it is going to be a big table and ask their help keeping things moving - bring them inside the tent to help.

There was a cool puzzle as part of the nine player adventure, almost a toolbox for players to engage with as much as they wanted (programmable automata) and that worked well.