Actual Play: Stirring the Hornet's Nest at Het Thamsya

I got to take Stirring the Hornet's Nest at Het Thamsya to one of my open table sessions and it ran pretty well - some squeaks but those were driven by the typical open table stuff - no filtering of play-style, no session zero, ended up with a massive table (nine) of which six were new to me, four of those were new to D&D. Review of the module is here. Writing it up as per Gorgon Bones Record your hobby experience.

This is a big site - 25 rooms - and an intriguing heist/rescue. Spoilers abound from here on.

Shiny TTRPG links #169

Substantial archive dive this week. For 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.

Grumpy Wizard gives us Tolkien’s Elves, Dwarves, and Hobbits Don’t Belong in Dungeons & Dragons

Built by Gods Long Forgotten wrote DMing tricks vs. rules changes

Rise Up Comus gives us Interesting Social Situations, or The Discourse Post

James Cook University write Dungeons and Dragons may improve mental health

Known World, Old World gave us Fantasy Religion?

The Nine and Thirty Kingdoms wrote Dungeon Module Design

Aeons & Augauries shared Making Ogres Tougher or "How to implement Old Rules to make tough combatants tougher."

Why war-games make great settings: Iron Kingdoms (RPG Blog Carnival)

Another month and the RPG blog carnival continues at Codex Anathema for the topic of Favourite Settings. You can see the rest of the topics for 2024 on Of Dice And Dragons 2024 Blog Carnival hosting list.

I have a bunch of the old 3.5e era settings sitting on my shelf that I never quite got around to playing - Midnight, Scarred Lands - and some earlier ones similar - Al Qadim, Greyhawk - but one thing I have always had a softspot for is a really distinct aesthetic - and worlds used for miniature games are great examples of this. WHFRP is perhaps the most obvious but Iron Kingdoms is one of my favourites.

I liked the original setting - the combinations of heavy metal mayhem with magical mechs and swashbuckling ethos.

Growing your game group (5yr Blog-iversary)

To mark the 5th anniversary of spinning up this blog I find the theme this past year has been 'getting more people gaming' - from running events to helping bring more people into our local game group to trying to connect up disparate D&D folk - nothing has been particularly innovative or high style just the shovel-work of running open tables and pointing people at other people.

One thing I did find inspirational from the broader blogger community was Gorgon Bones best practices - Record your hobby experience, Introduce others to your hobby and Participate in a hobby community - having that list was a weirdly helpful acknowledgement that we got to get the basics right - find the people, figure out when they can be at tables, find places with tables - before we can start doing the rest of it.

The things I've put my shoulder to over the year has been
- maintained the Meetup 'funnel' to bring people to our local gaming groups forum
- simplifying the big beginner events (Night of the Rolling Dice) so they demand less of us to run them
- helping expand to a second location for the regular Friday nights - mostly by just being one of the regular DMs there
- linking up a whole new bunch of local D&D folk with the DM supergroup - they've done some stuff already while my calendars been a shambles

The online stuff - Meetup, the RPGVienna forum, the discords - have got their memes and minor connections but there are a lot of folk who chirp up when booking their place at one of the open table sessions that we never hear from otherwise. I read this as the majority view the online spaces as somewhere face-to-face gaming is coordinated.

Online is all well and good for what it is, but for folk who want to go offline - who are sometimes folk with thriving online gaming - it is hard to do that from a cold start so giving them a helping hand is worthwhile. My own online gaming got nuked by the smallest householders shifting sleeping patterns - last year I was able to near guarantee they would be asleep by a time - enough that I ran the whole Southern Reaches campaign on weekdays after bedtime. This year - no such luck, even getting the last few episodes of Light of Xaryxis done is proving tricky.

Instead I've put the bits and pieces of time I have in evenings towards helping to try coordinate face to face gaming over weekend slots, both for myself and others.

Having that big online footprint is bringing folk in, both regular gamers and more unusual things like someone who's turned up to do an ethnographic study for their course. We have enough presence that we appear when you search so good enough. Certainly at this point, when I've been ill things have trundled merrily along without me doing anything which is good.

d6 Ways to funnel folk to your game group
1. Make sure something pops up when someone googles 'D&D' and your locality
2. Run open tables where people with no experience can rock up and game for the first time
3. Be flexible as DM's so you can say yes to whoever wants to join you; one of the people attending having a T1 game in their back pocket in case folk turn up but also being happy to play too
4. Figure out where is good to play - and when you start to hit the limits on a venue, be prepared to run multiple locations - so when they show up you can seat them
5. Tell your Friendly Local Games Store your group exists and is open to new folk - they'll cheerfully tell anyone who comes in shopping for the books
6. Trial periods on 'connector' social networks like Meetup, Couchsurfing, Internations, even Facebook can be low-effort ways to get the word out to people who are not actively looking for you (those people found you from point 1.

I figure there are lots of better game designers and OSR theoreticians out there, if I can road test and document what helps with getting those tables clattering with dice, that is probably a worthy use of this place - til the 6th anniversary at least.

Shiny TTRPG links #168

Interesting links tripped over this past week. 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.

Tabletop Curiosity Cabinet gives us Resurrection: Having my cake and eating it too

The Voyager’s Workshop shares Dungeons & Dragons & Lego

JEFF'S GAME BOX asks What Did Medieval Fantasy Look Like Before Tolkien?

Gaius Invictus writes Book Club: “Digital Minimalism”

The thrill of "the Find"

I had a refreshing experience recently at Vienna Games Convention - the thrill of 'the find' - something I'd largely missed in this always-on cornucopia we all live in these days. On the way there I was asking myself 'is there anything under the sun that you would actually be looking for' and apart from stumbling over some classic early D&D modules as a general category, the only thing that came to mind that I had sought but not found easily online recently was 'The Plane Above' from 4e.

And lo.

When I saw them on the stack, I was wondering what would be a reasonable price - and when the guy shrugged and said 'tenner' for Plane Above and the Manual of the Planes, the hardest bit was keeping my poker face. He had Plane Below too but it was not one I had been looking for before.

I was looking for Plane Above because as an Astral guide it has suddenly popped back into focus with Spelljammer 5e's new treatment of the realm between planetary systems - was phlogiston with pretty much nothing there - now is the Astral which is stuffed full of adventure. The astral skiffs and clippers in Plane Above had been something frequently mentioned by others in discussions online of Spelljammer so that was a gap in my visibility.

The Manual of the Planes I wanted just to get the baseline for the World Tree cosmology of 4e which was substantially different from the Great Wheel of AD&D that I lived and breathed.

After initially getting the first two, I wandered around a bit, crewed the RPGVienna desk and let 'do I really want the Planes Below' bubble in my mind before arriving at 'yes, I'll kick myself for not having the set' and snaffled it up too on my way out.

All this is something I missed for ages. The last time I got this kind of 'hell, yeah' feeling was walking into my FLGS and spotting Veins of the Earth just sitting on the shelf. Keeping an eye on the kickstarters does mean that I have taken a view on much of what could possibly be there before I ever walk through the door. The surprise factor gets crushed, which is a first world problem, to be sure, but I do recall the time of significantly narrower pipelines of stuff, of what few bits being available on a bookstores small RPG section being the 'take it or leave it' limit.

Mostly I am hugely amused that the only thing I could think of that I was looking for - was found!

Review: Zariel's Guide to the Seven Heavens

tl:dr; a useful toolkit on making lawful good celestials interesting to play, as NPCs and as adversaries for adventurers.

From Sven Truckenbrodt, someone I've been following a while (see Wolpertinger, Wererat - Well!) we get a supplement talking about celestials and how to make them adversaries and/or use them to drive adventures. I am always keen to read into the topic because it is indeed a tricky one to address. The Lawful Good Seven Heavens are hard to pry adventure out of - the place is a fortress crammed with angels, what is an adventurers angle? The broader question of how to generate adventure on the good side of the upper planes can be a tricky one and this is a good delve into the residents to try and answer that.

Cover by WarmTail

First impression - good art, nice design, an interesting reds and golds general palette which is different to the usual celestial white and blue one might expect. It works well here.

Shiny TTRPG links #167

More links from about the internet. 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.

Greyhawk Grognard shares Free Greyhawk Resources

Le Chaudron Chromatique gives us Update and Marchebranche is getting in print!

The Foot of Blue Mountain shares Connecting the Hex; Creating Full Hexes with Meaningful Encounters

Ludological Alchemy writes The Incentive to Kill in Dungeons & Dragons

Elfmaids & Octopi gives us Morale & Guards & Patrols

Stumbling into a Forever DM Support Group

I found another nest of TTRPG-ers by the simple method of mentioning D&D in public and watching who's ears prick up. We were crewing the desk of a charity ball, had a few % no-shows and I mentioned this was great compared to ~25% for a group I help run - what kind of group - D&D - oh really, well I too... and click, connection made.

This has lead to them organising a DM Supergroup to test run the stuff that forever DMs have trouble getting their players to try - very topical as I was just looking at my numbers and I play very little that is not D&D any more.

The money question however was 'what do you want to run' - a proper poser. I have a bunch of *campaign* ideas I want to try and scope to run whatever 5e episodic things I might want at the regular Friday night sessions - but what of the towering wall behind me do I actually want to try at table where I am testing a proper unknown?

Others in the group have proposed intersting stuff that I'm happy to try but never heard of plus stuff that I have heard of and was on my to-do list - Mork Borg, Star Trek Adventures, Band of Blades. What do I want to suggest?

My focus this year so far has just been scaling up the local games society - onboarding new folk and tweaking venue issues. The mass of folk ouy there seem to be coming in off Baldurs Gate 3 so you can take anything 5e and find players easily if you DM. Players for anything else is a lot more tricky, so I've set tons of stuff aside as just not worth the hassle and focussed on bringing new folk aboard, running welcome-wagon 5e Brancalonia D&D. But if I now have the opportunity to *try* that odder stuff, what do I want to try?

After pondering it a bit, I found four themes I want to investigate:

Review: Stirring the Hornet's Nest at Het Thamsya

tl:dr; evocative 25 room dungeon packed with factions, puzzles and threats set in a fantasy world centred on Southeast Asia.

This comes straight off the internet - I spotted Munkao had dropped this new adventure - Stirring the Hornet's Nest at Het Thamsya - and better yet was doing a launch sale and I'm not so proud to deny I slammed that 'Add to Cart' button as quick as I could. This is the launch adventure for the Kala Mandala setting - a meditating abbot in grave danger and needing rescue.

This is a good old zine - 15 pages that looks like I could be a 32 page booklet - with the clean layout style and wonderful drawings that have always characterised Munkao's works. What you get is a big site - 25 rooms - and an intriguing heist/rescue.

Shiny TTRPG links #166

A short stack this week as I have been ill. Seek more on 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.

Infernal Pact gives us Adding In Domain Play After The Fact, Part 1 and part 2

Jay's Brick Blog gives us Review: LEGO 21348 Dungeons and Dragons: Red Dragon’s Tale

A Knight at the Opera writes No Foolproof Illusions

The Robgoblin gives us Thievery, or Close-Up Magic? Picking Locks in Fifth Edition

Dungeon Fantastic gives us Mapping Lessons from Ancient Ruins

Osse Rota's Weblog writes Games I've played, and what I thought of them.

Time spent running and playing editions of D&D

A curious thought came to me - how much of each edition have I played? It feels like I have been playing a lot of 5e recently - have I in the grand scheme of things?

Starting off my time was split with different campaigns more or less being different systems - the three big starting ones were World of Darkness, WHFRP and AD&D 2e - that was my teen gaming; threw in a smattering of one shots here and there but that was the bulk of it

Hitting Uni - I ran 3.5e, played more World of Darkness and WHFRP plus some freeform nonsense from time to time.

Post college it became almost all 3.5e - run as PBEM or played as Living Arcarnis - but all the same system. 4e happened but I never picked it up; work was ramping up and my social circle was both smaller and not interested.

Rolling off that into recent years I saw 5e happening but I was buried under career stuff so did not bother to make the leap to the new system. I kicked off a campaign in 2018 using 3.5e and another in 2020 which is still grinding along.

I finally picked up 5e in 2019 when I started going to my local games club - since then I've run and played quite a lot of it there and as part of pandemic-driven online campaigns.

Post-lockdown I've gotten in a few other games - Spire, Scarlet Heroes - but mostly D&D.

So which system have I put most hours on? I went back and checked (best estimates before 2018) and...

...it looks like I *still* put more hours in running AD&D than 5e - and that 3.5e dominates both of them. I guess when you have no other committments as a teen you can really crank those long form campaigns.

Dwarven Synthetic Cuisine (RPG Blog Carnival)

Another idea for VDonnut Valley for the topic of Feasts, Foods and Fancy Drinks, oh my!. You can see the rest of the topics for 2024 on Of Dice And Dragons 2024 Blog Carnival hosting list.

The old Dwarven Empire were masters of alchemy based off botany. The empire fell and with it their easy access to their plants. The cultural tastes remained but the source was gone - everything was recreated from alchemy and minerals. Now dwarves live on mostly synthetic diets and swear they taste better.

Shiny TTRPG links #165

Another stack of links this week. Even more can be found on 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.

Richard's Dystopian Pokeverse gives us Wind, Sand and Stars: reconstructing Dune pt. 1 and Machines As The Measure Of Men: reconstructing Dune pt. 2

@incandescaent tweets 7 things that cookbooks and TTRPG BOOKS do well to make them ultra user/GM-friendly

Roll to Doubt writes RPGs as Craft

Finding Meepo writes Adventure Reports – Reflecting on Running RPGs

The Disoriented Ranger shares Protect your Gamemasters (and don't call it "fudging")

Review: Jinx's Almanac (Brancalonia)

tl:dr; a solid adventure anthology that has been a reliable source of one-shots

Is wear on a book from being carted too and from games nights a tragedy or marks of heroic purpose? If we take the latter then Jinx Almanac is one of the most useful books I have gotten my paws on anytime lately. Taking note of the points about whether one can review an RPG that you have not played, this is one book that I have surely earned the right to review.

This is a collection of digital magazine articles, special editions, modules and all sorts of ancilliary stuff that was published for Brancalonia and then collected during the second crowdfunding campaign. It is a big grab bag of stuff that has a surprisingly dense amount of gameable content. I got mine from the second Kickstarter campaign along with the Empire Whacks Back.

Cover art by Lorenzo Nuti

We are well past first impression territory here - we have the same Brancalonia art style - old paper with wine stains on it, consistently pretty and evocative art both new and public domain with nice clear layout from a design sense, even if some decisions about the sequencing of information are a bit odd.

Rare Feasts from Magical Terrain (RPG Blog Carnival)

A second thought for this months blog carnival from VDonnut Valley for the topic of Feasts, Foods and Fancy Drinks, oh my!.

Based on an anecdote from family about how particular meat from particular places tastes good because of what the wind blows there from a particularly grim industrial accident, stealing a bit from the French idea of terroir, we have reasons that foods might be sought after that tie to where they are from.

This builds from our previous strange weather from magic terrain combined with some food item generators.

As a workflow this is:
1. Figure out your unusual meal courses - great starts for this are Monster Menu-All Part 1: Eating the AD&D Monster Manual by Coins & Scrolls. You could also tap Box Full of Boxes great Local Cuisine Generator or Random Table of the Week's Local delicacies or the d30 offal ideas for giant appetites elsewhere on this blog.

2. See why the source is special. Roll up a strange weather effect and terrain type from strange weather from magic terrain - use the weather effect to give you how the food type was affected and the terrain type to give you the nature of the difference.

3. Spice to taste. Back reference our previous Lavish feasts and high tables and see if you want to layer any additional things on - the 'materials' and 'difficult to execute foods' might be taken care of by what you have rolled up already or maybe you want to spread yet more extravagance into the mix.

My own test case for 'why' the terrain is strange and what is being harvested from it was a house of summoners who threw a big feast to impress their patron - I pulled Mimic, Salamander and Dragonturtle from Coins and Scrolls list, then diced up some magical terrain locations to see where they had come from.

First I got Meteor Fields and Intrusive Outsiders, second I got the Black Earth and Flooding; this gave me mimics that had come down on meteors, grown up in a meteor field and caused wierd extra-sensory effects when consumed followed by Salamanders drowned when positive-energy Black Earth flooded - incredibly nutrious and energising stuff. I felt dragonturtle was interesting enough on its own and served that as was.

Given the fuss that people in the real world make about tiny shifts in soil quality and breeds of crops and animals in the taste of things at their table I am sure that nobles, worse long-lived nobles like elves, worse elven noble mages would have preposterously refined tastes, insisting on things being Just So. This type of thing also makes fabulous treasures - finding some delicacy well preserved on a dark shelf in a dungeon? A fortune to the right buyer... or a quest in its own right.

Shiny TTRPG links #164

A chonky stack of links this week with a significant archive diving block. Even more can be found on the previous list found here or you can check the RPG Blog Carnival or on Third Kingdom Games news roundup. No r/OSR blogroll, reasons remain unknown. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.

Whose Measure God Could Not Take gives us Adventuring Tavern Generator

Dungeon Fantastic gives us What it takes to live & thrive in Felltower, Part I: Characters and What it takes to live & thrive in Felltower, Part II: Players

I Cast Light! writes WHAT INTERESTING ABOUT BASIC DUNGONEERING: And what is not

US National Archives releases early D&D versions in David L. Arneson vs. Gary Gygax and TSR Hobbies, Inc

Blue Bard may vanish on 4th April - We Had A Good Run

Lixu gives us Dark Sun OSE Players Handbook and Dark Sun OSE Game Masters Guide

Capsule Reviews #7: Castle of the Silver Prince

Since there is just so much content in this entire campaign setting I am going to skim it capsule-review style in recognition of it could be some time before I get through it all in detail. Short answer, this is a colossus of a project, with material for years of play.

You can get the authors own overview of all the bits and pieces in the launch-day blogpost

Castle of the Silver Prince Module - comes in a bunch of variant covers, I went for the limited edition orange spine. This is a donkey-killer of a giant book detailing 470 locations across the 8 levels of the castle. There is a complex interplay of magical seasons that make each entry sizeable - as well as all the descriptive markers of odor, features, structural aspects, hazards (traps, monsters, etc.) and secrets we have some of those changing depending on what 'season' the castle is in - randomly determined on arrival. So in fact we have 470 locations x 4 as places to explore - and a ticking clock every time the party enters the castle - which together make this a colossal place to explore and one that really captures the old-school 'every time, start at the door' feel which makes sharp mapping and discovering short-cuts a key piece of play. This book also has a proposed shared background for party membes - the house of Wicke - which is neat and comes with some nice ties into the campaign background.

The campaign premise is that the party gets a charter to reclaim a border castle between two nations - where that castle construction, its residents, the leadership of one nation, its one-time master and some of the monsters lurking in the region are all linked. Clues to events and elements within the castle can be found out in the wilderness around it and as the campaign begins, two grand competing forces are swinging into play as the campaign begins making the castle the fulcrum around which the fate of the region turns. Events ratchet up overtime, motivating returns to the castle to try and save humanity from two dread fates.

The books are supposed to be used with the Module open on the location you are at, the Maps book open to the right map and then you can look up the bits and pieces at that location in the Appendix. With a little wearing-in I can see this working quite well = Map book changes slowy, locations in the Module change as the party moves and you can flip over and back through the Appendix. I cnn see the Maps books will need to be weighed down at the corners but it does all feel suitably epic.

Lavish feasts and high tables (RPG Blog Carnival)

For this months blog carnival we are back to the host VDonnut Valley for the topic of Feasts, Foods and Fancy Drinks, oh my!. You can see the rest of the topics for 2024 on Of Dice And Dragons 2024 Blog Carnival hosting list.

I've talked about Food in world building before, this time we delve deeper into what is served at the noble tables of the dragonbloods - or what is served when the point is to dine extravagantly?

All this will of course be set against the backdrop of the hosts day-to-day extravagance - chairs of rare woods, hangings of extinct beasts, paintings by great masters, war trophies, relics - all the things that are rare and coveted are just the frame for the feast.

For best impression the hosts would like to hit as many of these as they can - getting more extravagant and perhaps reaching the bounds of the hosts tastes and/or courage as we go down.

Shiny TTRPG links #163

Some curious links from about the internet. Even more can be found on the previous list found here or you can check the RPG Blog Carnival or on Third Kingdom Games news roundup. There is no r/OSR blogroll this week for reasons unknown. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.

Various and Sundered Items presents GLOG Class: Flock of Sheeple

The Burnt World of Athas releases the magnificenty Dark Sun 3e

Maynooth University has a Writing for Role-Playing Games Microcredential

Tales of the Lunar Lands gives us Yo Dawg, I Heard You Like RPGs...

Playful Void shares Red Button Monsters

Archstone Press gives us Lonely Fun in the NSR

Pelgrane Press archive diving finds Problem Solving vs Problem Protecting

Trilemma Adventures gives us Whose Mechanic is it Anyway?

All Dead Generations shares Beyond the Crystal Frontier - A Gazetteer of the World

Against The Wicked City gave us Bringing Down the Hammer, part 12: my own private WFRP

RuneHammer writes Plasticity

Sea of Stars gives us Dragons Feasts and Foods

Save vs Total Party Kill shares Mordheim 2024

Flintlocks and Witchery gave us Here's Some F*ckin' DnD!

Player perspective after four years of play

With four years since session zero now under our belt I thought I would pull together some of the player views on the Ducal House campaign.

I polled my players and a couple of themes droped out:
- depth of the world
- NPC interactions and political intrigue
- no solutions, only problems
- character evolution through their campaign experiences

On depth of the world they said they liked how much time they have spent in the world, how familiar it now is - particularly after the significant amount of time in the starting city. Now as they return after quite a lot of time away - re-encountering NPCs and being back on well known terrain is something they are enjoying. The interaction with the world now has a fluency that is in line with what the characters that actuall dwell in this world ought to.

Deep record keeping is becoming a challenge which ties to long real-world calendar time passing while the game-world turns relatively slowly within it. The Bard has taken to bi-annual re-reads of their notes to try and keep it all in mind. Enjoyment of the world and its intracicies is had despite it being hard to retain.

I enjoy the world and intricacies, but they refuse to stay in my brain (shoutout to our great bard for the notes and our cleric for having the brains)

our actions have consequences, even the minor ones. I very much enjoy hearing rumours filter back or learning that something we neglected in the beginning has not died as a story threat but has been brewing in the background. it feels immensely rewarding and daunting at the same time to know that what you do matters...for the better and for the worse

familiarity with the world from having spent so much time in Thenya, and even after quite a lot of time away - spent the time, got to know the place - and can really look back and see how we have grown. It feels earned.

Review: Flee, Mortals!

tl:dr; a toolbox for building intricate, challenging combat encounters with gorgeous art and tons of encounter ideas.

The MCDM Monster Book - built around 'action oriented monsters' - the revamp of the 5e monster manual that MCDM has been talking about for a while prior to launching the kickstarter. I backed it since I agreed with the thoughts about some of the issues and was interested to see what solutions they came up with.

Gorgeous book, great art, slightly glossier, lighter paper than the standard WotC book but it makes a bigger book not take up more space. The dust cover really makes it stand-out on the shelf. All the little quality elements are great - sewn pages, ribbon, dust cover - the finish is very good. Getting my hands on a copy here in Europe involved shelling out ridiculous shipping fees but in for a penny I guess.

Shiny TTRPG links #162

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

Player Elimination writes The Decline of Miniatures Gaming – A Look Back at Warhammer 40,000 Rogue Trader

The Lizard Man Diaries gives us D&D Quick and Powerful Edition

Le Chaudron Chromatique shares Alignment languages miscommunication

Coins and Scrolls gives us OSR: Holy and Roguish Items, Pocket Debris, and the Ghastly Tomb Tinies

Port Imperiale shares Back to the obscure: Rogue Trader 40k Minotaurs!

Planarian Calamarium gives us Preserving the Mundane Peril of Dungeons at Higher Levels

Tracking "Strict Time Records" in a campaign

tl;dr: reviewing time records from an urban/wilderness campaigns highlight how time is the key resource in cities

Nudged into action by Vladars blog on Strict Time Records I dug out the data for my home campaign. My feeling was it was a less meaningful thing since we started as an urban campaign where the resource is not torches or food but time - and because every half hour was precious we progressed relatively slowly down the calendar. The party was happy to split up to get things done *in space* but not in time - reconvening regularly to compare notes and plan next steps every couple of hours.

I took a look at how we progressed down the calendar over the course of the campaign - each in-world month is 30 days.

Actual Test: House of Illusions (RPG Blog Carnival)

tl;dr: a forewarned party will make mincemeat out of your illusionist.

I table tested the approach to illusions from Bluebard "Death by Illusion" lightly adapted to 3.5e (Illusion save became Will Save) and it worked pretty well. This is also a return to Illusory Sensorum's Illusions & Delusions prompt for the RPG Blog Carnival. I tried to put it into practice and it... kind of worked, kind of went clunk but in a good way.

The background was that the party, children of a noble house, had figured out one of their cousins was being held on their own lands incommunicado by parties unknown. Scrying on them they saw the location they knew with the fittings of a neighbouring realm. Communication attempts through message were interrupted by the scry being countered until someone Sleep'ed their cousin and they saw them being dumped into bed with their also slumbering new wife. Further scrys on known servants revealed them all asleep in the potato cellar. The party deduced that something was going on involving illusions that made the cousin think all was well - they rounded up an 'illusion specialist' by way of the local mages guild and set off down river on a borrowed skiff using their Spelljamming saddle.

From the opposition side - they knew they were blown so they had some time to prepare. They had hostages and were at a fortified chateau, but one they knew the heroes were familiar with.

Philosophical question one - running this somewhat old school should the foes in place be of equal level to challenge the players or should they be of the level equivalent to when this hook was first set up - a force sufficient for the task by the opposition based on the last news the opposition had?

To set this all up I:
First off - I grabbed a map of a fortified chateau as my baseline
Second - I figured out the hostile forces, what they were and what they were disguised as
Third - I gave myself a random roll table of illusionary hazards

Shiny TTRPG links #161

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

Unknown Dungeon compiles Zine Month 2024 Highlight - Part One and Part Two

Levi Kornelsen gives us The D&D Playstyle Block and Block 2: Steelmanning The Cut.

Indie RPG Newsletter shares GM Advice: Theatricality versus Transparency

@zedecksiew writes How To Play The Revolution

Methods & Madness gives us Wargames, storygames and RPGs

Fail Forward writes Gobins

Dice Goblin gives us DIY Ancient Prophecies, Symbols & Lost Languages to Guide Your Campaign

Joy and Forgetfulness documents a game rescued from the shed getting to the table decades later in Battlemasters with Kinchlets

Lessons Learned from large beginners D&D events.

Compiling our lessons learned from our Night of the Rolling Dice beginners intro D&D event as per Gorgon Bones best practices - though this allows me to hit the trifecta of Record your hobby experience, Introduce others to your hobby and Participate in a hobby community. A key focus of this one was to distill it down to something which is as low-touch as possible - we launch it ~ 2 months out, get a roster of DMs then do nothing until a week beforehand. Everyone is busy, this is your 'plug-and-play' event template.

Write up of the actual night is here: 60 sign ups, 45 attendees, 9/10 tables ran, players seemed to go home happy, feedback on the Meetup is 4.8/5.

What worked well

- Repeatable template - we have a playbook now for how the thing runs and can base decisions on learned experience rather than best guesses.

- Booking well ahead of time (30-50 days) gives plenty of time for the event to percolate in Meetups and other calendars and for people to find their way to us. For both night-time events we hit capacity with a week to go. It does mean re-confirming with your DMs and venue that they have not forgotten but far better that then scrounging for either on short notice

- Venue interaction - we tightened up orders - only drinks before you go to table, food orders get your name on it - which practically eliminated unclaimed (and unpaid) orders at the end of the night. This got arranged by email with the venue beforehand - their standard practice is bringing things to tables which had issues when people were moving around.

- Nudging those signed up to confirm - giving folk a reminder to drop off the list if they cannot go a few days out followed by a 'check if you are up off the waitlist' mail to the same folk the day before served to get over a dozen people to flag they weren't coming and pull a bunch of the waitlist up

- Dice sales - people can borrow dice on deposit for the evening - everyone wants to take them home which generates a few quid to pay off our minimal costs

- Raffle - we did not lean hard on our FLGS this time around so I scrounged my shelves for duplicates and we cooked up another few prizes just to have a few bits for a small one - still worked well.

- Masking tape name tags - a roll of masking tape and a black marker gives good-enough name tags at minimal cost, minimal waste afterwards

- Pre-gen characters - with lots of folk (>60%) saying they were new and needed characters, previous ideas of helping people create their character are not feasible. We created a block of pre-gens and had them ready to hand out. I used Fast Character for mine, it was good enough for the night.

- Safety brief / safety tools - flagged as a thing people appreciated - we have x-cards on the tables and give a 'play nice' intro speech - you can read it all here - but feedback from even my table was immediate and positive so good to know people find it helpful.

What to do differently

Illusions & the gameplay loop (RPG Blog Carnival)

For this months blog carnival we are back to the host Illusory Sensorum for the topic of Illusions & Delusions. You can see the rest of the topics for 2024 on Of Dice And Dragons 2024 Blog Carnival hosting list - there are still a few slots open for those interested.

I found this topic pretty hard because as many of the discussions on this topic rapidly arrive at - illusions mess with the core gameplay loop of TTRPGs - DM narrates what is happening, players declare their actions, DM narrates consequences, return to start. Except with illusions the 'DM narrates' part is twisted because maybe what they perceive is untrue. Here the trick is hitting the balance between the two un-fun ends of "character getting their head lopped off by an illusory scythe trap they couldn't disbelieve" and "players chanting 'I disbelieve' at everything the DM says to slow the game to a crawl."

I'm drawing heavily on Blue Bards articulation of the problem in Death by Illusion... and its follow-up since he does crunch really well - that you get a single save per illusion, fail that and you believe it is real - illusions last until they deal damage then foof - DM checks behind-the-screen if characters twig to the illusion - interaction with the illusion triggers a save.

So with some ground chance to passively avoid illusions for characters (or trigger you the DM handing the players some information on incongruities that ought to trigger suspicion) you can revert to describing things as they appear while still holding that balance between instantly spoiling the illusion or giving the characters no chance at all.

Another useful thought was floated on RPG.net by johnbragg of 'internal' and 'external' illusions - those cast right into someones mind, active illusions, and those that are passively encountered with your ordinary senses. The implication here is with internal illusions everyone can be lost in their own false environment while with external illusions they are commonly perceived and folk can help one another with them.

Shiny TTRPG links #160

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

Illusory Sensorium writes their RPG Blog Carnival entry I Want to Believe

Graphite Prime gave us Strange Things Happen When You Sleep In Dungeons.....

@fuseboy tweets on XP bounties

TOM VAN WINKLE'S RETURN TO GAMING writes Yes, you ARE telling a story.

Chaos Magick-User proposes Let’s make goblins unique

TABLEMÖNGER gives us D20 Descriptions of a New PC Instantly Arriving In-Game

A Knight at the Opera shares A Fracture in Old-School Philosophy: Barbarian or King?

Blog of Forlorn Encystment gives us The Other Side of the Screen: Being the Player You Want to See in the World

After Action Report - Night of the Rolling Dice 3

We ran another of our open table events recently and got a bunch of folk in for it. We use Meetup as the 'on-ramp' and can reliably fill a 50 place event with a waitlist.

One key thing is venue - we found a place with a large back room that is happy to give it to us of a Saturday night with enough warning and without a deposit. At this point we are in virtuous circle territory - the venue is happy we'll fill the venue, so they're happy to give us the space to fill. The first event to prove this is the trick.

DMs are the other limiting factor - scrounge up enough DMs to run the tables you want plus a spare or two - book them in well ahead of time and then make their life as easy as possible - they should turn up ready to run something, you feed them players.

The other key thing is advance planning - get your venue booking in early, and put up the event place holder on Meetup to get that trickle of people started.

We get ~ 15% fade out of people before the event - plans change and confirms turn to no's - but we have a big enough waitlist that they fill automatically. We expect no-show on the night but that should be manageable by running tables with four in place of five players.

Review: Beyond Corny Gron

tl:dr; a focussed mountains and caverns setting with great exploration mechanics, world invoked via bestiary and old-school style

Picked this up on kickstarter, part of my 'back the locals' approach and wow, this was something else. From Nerd Sirens based out of Poland, this is an expansion of Corny Groń a solo/micro rpg, with lots of random tables for wilderness and mountain adventures and mechanics referencing Knave but fitting any old school system.

Art by Alicia Wiśniewska

The strongest wow-factor out of the box of anything that I've gotten my hands on recently - it was both larger format and thicker than I was expecting and the cloth and foil cover pops impressively. Inside is cleanly and clearly laid out with a consistent wood-cut/lino-cut art style throughout. There is a really nice touch in the right page border has the chapter list with the chapter you are in bolded - great for quick reference and keeps with the spare, clean style.

There were also four postcard with sites and encounters for mountains and caves bundled in from the kickstarter. These replicate what is on the inside covers, front and back, along with a nice woodcut art piece on the front.

Shiny TTRPG links #159

Only the most curious links, stumbled over in a week of browsing. More can be found on the previous list found here. You can find more links on this weeks r/OSR blogroll or the RPG Blog Carnival or on Third Kingdom Games news roundup. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.

Whose Measure God Could Not Take writes Considerations on Jaquaysing the Dungeon br>
Rise Up Comus has Four Tips to Drive Role Playing

Rolltop Indigo gave us Staring Back at the Invisible which started back with The Invisible Rulebooks

Playthings of Mad Gods shares The Power of Messy Success

Pity-Crit gives us The Smallest Gods: Unworthy Divinities For D&D

Laidback DM writes Running Big Parties

Open Table Procedures - Euro Edition

tl;dr: tempo of booking, prepping and running open table games

Take on Rules wrote My Procedure for Facilitating Open Table Gaming and cast a light on a very different gaming set-up to my own so I thought I would document how things are running here in Vienna.

As per Gorgon Bones best practices - though this allows me to hit the trifecta of Record your hobby experience, Introduce others to your hobby and Participate in a hobby community.

Sequence

Long-lead (long beforehand)
- program up the slots in the Meetup group with generic 'visit our forum' links
- pull down pre-gens from the Brancalonia site, print them
- block out Friday nights on my calendar
- put up a setting brief on the forum

D-5/7 - forum opens for the next session
- confirm venue - 99% of the time it is our usual, occassionally we skip to somewhere else. This usual is a club-house for wargamers/card gamers that we connected with last year after a few years of cafe gaming. It is a bit out of the way but cheap. Lots of big tables, a fair amount of seats
- watch for the next Friday thread to go up on the forum; jump on and say if I'm going and what I'll be running/playing. we fill quickly these days so getting in early is important
- usually I run, copy/paste my little Brancalonia pitch
- update the Meetup entry for this date with a link to the specific forum thread
- tweak post-session summary from last time to make a new entry on the campaign log

D-2/5 - prep the session
- of an evening I prep for the game - read the content, write my own timeline
- spot any recurring NPCs, factions or the like for Conservation of NPCs
- one of the forum organisers will tot up the attendees, list the DMs, the players who have expressed a preference for a DM and who is left
- check who I have at my table - any repeat players and any hooks to work in

D-1/Gameday
- pack my go-bag off my checklist
- leave work, big coffee in a thermos for at table, small coffee and muffin for on the way
- get to the venue, check my name off and pony up my €3, find a seat and drag it to the table
- help match open seats with stray players once I get there
- change into my Brancalonia t-shirt because I've got one

Review: Valley of the Five Fires

tl:dr; a dense module of mechanic, lore and adventure sites for nomadic adventure.

This is a 'Fantasy Setting and Adventure Module' that I got print on demand from Lulu grace of the discount stickers and one of the many 'best of the OSR on Lulu' lists. I have been pretty happy with Richard LeBlanc's previous work like d30 Sandbox Companion and this continues that good trend. This is pitched for 0e, 1e and BX but there is lots in here for whatever system you run. I am coming to look at it now on the back of other 'steppe' connected recent releases ranging from Ultraviolet Grasslands through to Empires of the Silk Road and Wayfarer: Nomadic Realms.

Cover art by Nicholas Roerich

Decent production quality from Lulu - black and white art within mostly by the author, all very coherent and clean. Much of the artwork within the book was done by the author and I have a lot of respect for the level of industry involved here.

Shiny TTRPG links #158

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

Illusory Sensorium provides the February RPG Blog Carnival prompt Illusions & Delusions

The Lizard Man Diaries gives us The Tactile and Generic TTRPG - Boardgamey tablefeel using bits and bobs.

TRAIPSE writes Overloading the search die

Goblin Punch gives us Dungeon: Castle of the Gribblies

Illusory Sensorium gives us Doom Clock

Playful Void shares Diagetic advancement and inventory

Methods & Madness gives us Wilderness level tables

TASKERLAND writes Into the OSR: On Diegetic Advancement

Catastrophic Success: Venue Capacity Management

tl;dr: at the limit of venue capacity, how to spin out another venue to avoid turning people away?

We had to do our first turn-aways from our regular Friday night sessions because we simply did not have the chairs in the venue, which sucks but is also kind of impressive. Membership of the Meetup group has been climbing steadily - we're still not seeing more than a tiny fraction of them but even that fraction has been enough to drive up our attendance - and in particular it is the problematic aspect of people not reading the instructions.

Our venue capacity is 25 and a bit - the bit being contingent on how busy the other people who use the space are. If they're not up to much then we can fit another table - if they are busy then we're 25 as a hard limit. We dinged 37 a week or so back - and then some extra folk turned up and we could not accommodate them.

Review: Through Sunken Lands

tl:dr; a book you bring to table to run a sword and sorcery game where noone has prepped, a toolkit for DMs who understand the basics, should work with any edition or retroclone.

I was gifted a copy by friend of the blog C. Kinch over Christmas and am trying to get to it in less than a year this time. I had heard of Through Sunken Lands before, it had been spoken highly of by those talking about retroclones, OSR games and games that were simpler vehicles to deliver the same fun. There had also been mention of playbooks as one of the key things it did which I took for this to be a Powered by the Apocalypse system - very wrongly in fact - but that mistake is what had kept me from checking this out myself for a very long time.

First impression - decent thick hardback, some muted-tone, somewhat spooky art that conveys a more mythos-leaning sword and sorcery game. Lay out is nice and clean with one big 'huh' thing I would query which hides a great deal of the glorious promise of this book unless you hunt for it. When you first pick this up, you get the intro, then you are straight into the system and while the system is grand it is nothing so special to make this stand out from among many similar retroclones. The real meaty goodness of this book are in the later sections - but that is like saying 'the show gets good in season 4' - I'm long gone by then. You should in fact skip the core rules when you read this - intro, then How To Play, then Playbooks and Scenario Packs. Those are the three gold veins in this book.

Shiny TTRPG links #157

Lots of interesting links this week - thrown up against the backdrop of the Bloggies! More can be found on the previous list found here. You can find more links on this weeks r/OSR blogroll or the RPG Blog Carnival or on Third Kingdom Games news roundup. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.

I Cast Light! gives us LESSONS FROM HELL: John Romero's Level Design Rules for DOOM PresGas Wiki Notes and OSR Houserules shares Goblin Punch Lifepath Character Generation Mash-Up

Quickly, Quietly, Carefully gave us 0e/LBB retro-clone Torch & Sword

Whitebeard shares An Owlbear/Discord/DndBeyond checklist for new campaigns

DIY & dragons writes Xandering is Slandering

Treasures of the cupboard top - Heroquest (1989)

Continuing to clear shelves and poke in attics, this time with the aid of a stepladder, I found another treasure - my old Heroquest box, probably from 1989-91. This was my on ramp into the whole TTRPG space - this connected to Games Workshop, GW published White Dwarf which also had articles on things like WHFRP, got me aware other things existed and from there to Black Box D&D.

Friends of the blog The Adventuring Party recently talked about the new Heroquest rerelease and how the mechanics of the game have not changed - though the bits and models have which is good to hear. They mentioned some mechanical foibles that I do recall after all the time like sometimes it was really hard and sometimes things seemed to be just 'gotcha's' and it is nice to know my impressions at the time weren't completely wrong.

D&DBeyond: Bad Stats, No Biscuit.

tl;dr: frustrated salt post. Why publish spoiled data?

DndBeyond published an article "2023 Unrolled: A Look Back at a Year of Adventure" and I thought "Cool, stats!" - until I found they messed with axes of the only graphs they put in there and now who the hell knows what they say. What the hell guys - 60, 80, 100, 200, 500, 700...? Where did you get that number sequence from? I showed this to the in-house testing team and they were similarly baffled.

Le freaking sigh. Ok. Let us see if we can salvage anything from this mess. I think this is what the Species numbers are.

Shiny TTRPG links #156

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

Taskerland writes Not Golden like Gold. Golden like a Stone.

BURN AFTER RUNNING: RPG ONE-SHOTS gives us The Golden Age of TTRPGs has Not Even Started

Open Hearth Gaming shares Don't Roll: Great RPG Mechanics #RPGMechanics Week Ten (finale)

A Most Majestic Fly Whisk gives us NEW WISDOMS FOR NEW WORLDS - an oracular """resolution mechanic"""

Prismatic Wasteland shares Schrödinger’s Chat 2: Amended & Restated Quantum Language Rules

Actual Test: conservation of NPCs in prewritten adventures

I got to recently test Alexandrians Law of the Conservation of NPCs - advice to make equivalent NPCs a repeat appearance of an old NPC - and the results came out well. I'm writing it up to following Gorgon Bones first best practice and "Record your hobby experience."

I first saw it actually done at table as part of a Ravnica mini-campaign run at the local games society during a lull in the pandemic - the DM there took a bunch of pre-written adventures and what was in the book and bolted them together to make a mini-campaign. He wove it all together by making the same archetype be the same NPC - all the Vedalken Izzet Wizards became the one guy, different Dark Elf Findbrokers were merged, etc - and it was remarkable effective at making the whole thing feel connected. There were some serious groan moments when we realised we were going to have to talk to certain NPCs with a really lax view of workplace safety which is good, they stuck in our mind.

For the open table Brancalonia game I am running at the same games soc I am trying to do the same. With very rare exceptions, the pre-written adventures scattered through the Brancalonia books assume you are travelling all over the realm and visiting lots of different places - so you rarely hit the same places twice. This is fine, not actually a problem, but I thought to try having some of the NPCs and locations pop up again to try and make the place feel deeper. Last week was the first live-test of this and it worked very well.

It was a good test session because I needed to mod the adventure anyway - we had run out of time the last session with 3/4 of the adventure done - they had stopped at a good point but there was more left to do: they had rescued the damsel in distress but still needed to free her from a curse. So I had a piece of an adventure but not a lot. To fill out the session I went back to a previous session and a sequence I needed to cut for time and brought that forward, stitching the two together to have enough for the one more session. This seemed like the perfect point to try making it all more coherent not just as a single session but also into the campaign as a whole.