August 2024 RPG Blog Carnival: It Came From Beyond Time

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

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

Below is my own take on the topic.

Shiny TTRPG links #183

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

Alex Schroeder gives us One Page Dungeon Contest

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

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

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

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

The Latest Enemy wrote A Short Wish List

Aboleth Overlords writes Ye Olde Fantasy: Family Matters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A couple of ways that this could manifest:

Shiny TTRPG links #182

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Campaign Retrospective: Spelljammer Light of Xaryxis

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

Spelljammer: Light Of Xaryxis (2023-24)

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

What worked:

DM201 discussion notes

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

Prepping for one shots

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

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

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

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

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

General game-running

Shiny TTRPG links #181

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

Explorers Design writes on The Art of the RPG Cover

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

d4 Caltrops shared Safari Card Monster Manual

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

Necropraxis gives us XP Potential as Inverse Encumbrance

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

BASTIONLAND asks What's the Point of a Campaign?

Prismatic Wasteland gives us Endangered in Dungeons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Circular Spine (Barkeep Jam)

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

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

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

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

Shiny TTRPG links #180

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

Roll to Doubt gives us Playable Setting Features

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

Aboleth Overlords writes The Myth of Free Improvisation

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

Goblinpunch shares Random Ship Encounters on the Sea of Fish

Campaign Mastery gives us Order In The Sandbox

Weird & Wonderful Worlds gave us Micro-Settings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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