Shiny TTRPG links #190

More links from about the web! 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.

Glass Candles launches blogging challenge GLOGtober '24

Roll to Doubt gives us Setting up an OSR Sandbox

Graeme Davis collates his back catalogue of articles on Freebies

Mazirian's Garden shares Good Lore/Bad Lore

Rise Up Comus gave us Pointcrawling Character Creation

Actual Test: Donjon Adventure Generator

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

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

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

A year of open table gaming

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

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

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

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

Filling the tables

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

Shiny TTRPG links #189

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

Goblin Punch writes Lessons from Elden Ring

Zzarchov Kowolski responds The forgotten element of adapting Dark Souls

Roll to Doubt gives us “Against” On-Boarding

Kontent Punch shares My Best Mistakes

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

d4 Caltrops gives us B/X Procedural Flow Charts

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

Actual Test: Scarlet Heroes Adventure Generator

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

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

The plot workflow had a few bits:

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

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

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

It Came From Beyond Time - RPG Blog Carnival Wrap Up

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

We got responses from:


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

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

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

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

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

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

Shiny TTRPG links #188

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

RPG Taverns gives us Dungeons & Dragons at Edinburgh Fringe

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

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

All Dead Generations shares Mont Sainte Bec

Le Chaudron Chromatique gives us My new Black Sword Hack Campaign

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

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

Vladar's Blog gives us First year of Mystara campaign

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