The Lords Funeral (RPG Blog Carnival)

This months blog carnival from Forsaken Garden has the topic of Haves & Have Nots - so I was inspired to write about an old lords funeral some family witnessed not so long ago. This is offered up in the spirit of being closer to the kind of country customs most of our adventurers might encounter as opposed to the high pomp and ceremony of British Royal funerals which would the most obvious point of reference otherwise.

The local grand old landholder died recently and his funeral was well attended; a relatively rare glimpse into that old world. Use this for the more traditional, smaller scale events than the grand paegantry we all witnessed for Elizabeth II.

Groups in attendance, in order of social standing, were:
The Family - including the new lord, potentially also including others of the blood family returned from far afield.
The County - the old lords peers, the local nobility and other major land-holders.
Our Friends - the non-noble members of the lairds community, be that co-religionists, or in something more fantasy could be same-species or other affinity group.
Our Betters - important members of local society - non-landed nobility, significant clergy of other religions, community leaders, and so on.
The Neighbours - local farmers and landholders, including the tenants of the laird and other commonfolk who had some sort of connection to the laird through their activities - i.e. they would have been recognised by the laird.
The sixth, unnamed group, are everyone else who has come along, the local peasantry, tradesfolk, passing travellers, others who wish to pay respects. This group will probably be similar in numbers to all the others if not more.

Boiling that down into a table, because after all this is a gaming blog: d100 - who are you meeting at this local nobles funeral
1-2 Family - children, cousins, aged siblings or cousins
3-8 Peers - other local noblility; could be the nobles themselves could be various representatives, minor family members and so on
9-22 Faithful - people who shared some notable commonality with the deceased; in our fantasy games that could be religion, it could be plane of origin, it could be species.
23-43 Respectables - regional notables, not quite nobles, nor sharing the notable trait of the deceased, but the 'leaders of the community' who would need to be seen attending
44-50 Known Commoners - local dwellers, could be tenant farmers, old hirelings, homunculi, craftsfolk - those who would have actually worked with and for the deceased - the most likely to both know useful things and share them with strangers come to town (such as adventurers)
51-100 Masses - everyone else; while plenty happy to talk about the deceased, "facts" discussed may be wildly unreliable.

While the demographic split above is reasonable, attitudes and atmosphere can vary wildly, from the tension of an heirless throne to the fond celebration of life for a respected and long-lived lord. Tensions between those of the 'notable trait' and everyone else can also be played upon - appearing in particular between the Peers and the Respectables, the Faithful and the Massses. Depending on what exactly the old lord liked to do with his time, the Family may or may not be happy to see the Known Commoners present and/or to see them talk with outsiders.

Lots of social potential to be had at a funeral, in particular because lots of folk who would normally quarrel, possibly violently, will hold themselves in check for this occassion only out of respect.

Shiny TTRPG links #199

Links from about the interwebs - feeds, sidebars and discord conversations mostly. For 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.

Prismatic Weekly gives us They’re Eating the Blogs

Gorgon Bones shares Roleplaying Games are Wargames

Evan Torner on Rascal writes Combat in Dungeons & Dragons

Grumpy Wizard gives us How I Use Published Adventures In A Homebrew Sandbox

Seth Louis Game development writes How I Started a Cairn Open Table

Daily Illuminator shares The Reality Of Tariffs In Tabletop Gaming

House of the New Zodiac asks Are popular bloggers actually good DMs?

Save vs Total Party Kill gives us Negative Space Reprise

Fae Errant gives us In Defence of Mediocre Content

Deep Time Monster Groups - Adversary design notes from Hexcrawloween

Background to the hexcrawloween region that I cooked up was twists on classic monsters - taking the 'niche' of certain monsters and imagining their equivalents for other species and times.

I had a notion of what this patch of the world was - Land of the Dead, ruled by Theocracy of Kirianshalee, currently being invaded by dragon-blooded orcs from the north. After using the Wilderness Generator from Izirions Enchirdion of the West Marches to put some finer texture over that I got a patch of reality where clearly the veil had worn thin - lots of planar, fey and afterlife bleed through - souls not going where they ought to one way or another.

All this following on from the 'epochs' reading I had been doing for GLoGtober got me thinking of how this is the age of humans - or human-like things - but certainly there have been other ages dominated by other beings - and thus there must have been an ecosystem of predators, mimics and suchlike for those other times.

Review: Starlight Arcana

tl:dr; chunky, gorgeous book - great ideas, somewhat heavy to prep but has made it to my table where lots of other stuff has not

I spotted this on Kickstarter and tagged it as a kind of Spelljammer substitute - it was marketed as Voyage Across the Astral, Adventures Across the Starlight Arcana Astral Plane - I read that as something in the "Planejammer" space and was definitely on board for what I didn't get from Spelljammer - ship combat and actual planets to go to. With this coming out of Krakow, Poland I was also happy to support my local game developers.

Art by Joanna 'Dusky Cat' Trzesniewska

First impression of Starlight Arcana is that it is a huge chonky book. About an eighth is the setting crunch, another eighth are the campaign mechanics, a third is the three acts of the campaign and then the back half-ish is the bestiary. It should probably be best conceptualised as a campaign book that comes with its own setting, bespoke mechanics and companion bestiary.

It is a gorgeous book, the artwork and production values throughout are very very nice. This is a beautiful piece of kit with some great work in here. There is a tarot-themed sorcerer and there was a whole tarot deck with campaign appropriate art as part of the kickstarter. The tarot is also used for a tarot-driven divining of the fates and implementation of game effects while adventuring across planets in the sandbox part of the campaign. I like the idea but my shelves groan with tarot decks so I could not justify getting this one, even if beautiful.

Reference d20 for scale

There is a lot of content in here, that maybe could have benefited from a grizzled editor snarling 'kill your darlings' at the writers. The layout is two columns per page for most of the first half of the book, the bestiary varies from two column/two monster to single monster/stat block per page. Comparing it to something else recent - 5e Spelljammer - you get more for your page count - smaller margins, smaller font, more words on a two page spread. I spotted a couple of typos but overall for a first publication out of a new outfit, pretty damn good. I might have liked things boiled down more in OSR style but stylistically it cleaves to 5e house style.

Shiny TTRPG links #198

Links from about the interwebs, slightly late as I spent my day out in the fog. For 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.

All Dead Generations shares GYGAX'S FORTRESS

Occultronics writes OSR Social Resolution Procedures

Tabletop Curiosity Cabinet gives us Animism and dungeons

Weird & Wonderful Worlds gives us Dynamic Reality Gaming

Throne of Salt shares Positively Unhinged Elden Ring Theoryposting: Part 2

Idraluna Archives shares Public Domain Illustrations on Project Gutenberg

cryptickeyway shares Make Ancestries Distinct By Giving Them Mastery of Their Domain

Personable Thoughts gives us Kickstarter FOMO and the Content Firehose

Review: Macaronicon

tl;dr: adds cool species for the players, great adventures for the DMs, a solid expansion for Brancalonia.

So, here we have the Macaronicon. It is basically a collection of all the stretch goals from the initial Brancalonia crowdfunding campaign - which is where I got it originally. This was bonus content for me and I have gotten a ton of use out of it. Brancalonia is a "spaghetti fantasy" campaign setting for D&D 5e "based on Italian tradition, folklore, history, landscapes, literature and pop culture" that lets you be a band of roistering Knaves and ne'er do wells out for their latest job. I have reviewed the Brancalonia Core book and Jinx's Almanac before - both great books and the Macaronicon is a close third.

It begs comparison to Jinx's Almanac which are both books of mixed lore, adventures and mechanics. Macaronicon is the more expansive and free-roaming of the pair, coming earlier and being that collection of stretch goals. There is some good stuff in here and plenty of inspiration for DMs thought it has not yet gotten that extra polish to the adventures which comes in Jinx's Almanac, the later book. Not to say that this is not very worthwhile.

As with all the books in the range, the art is great and the book has an aesthetic of old paper ill-used. Pretty like the rest of the range, with great, consistent, evocative art and good clear lay-out.

The Great Tabletop Roleplaying Survey - Initial Data Comb

All praise to The Scholomance who just released a delightful anonymised dataset of a big survey they ran at the turn of the year. Their initial write up is here.

They got a solid 1902 results and you can see a few direct results on the initial write up which I will not rehash here:
How many tabletop groups are you involved in that regularly play game sessions?
How do you usually play your sessions?
How often do you play tabletop roleplaying games?
How long do your sessions typically last?
What was your first tabletop roleplaying system?
Select your current main system.
How would you rate the importance of a system?
How would you rate the complexity of your current main system?

The huge value in this type of big survey is in the cross-referencing, not the raw numbers. You can test out hypotheses like 'people who meet less often will probably game for longer' - and you've got the frequency of meeting up and duration of gaming to check that.

On a first look, it appears that for folk with monthly or more frequent games, that broadly holds true - more 3-5 hour games among the monthly gamers and more 1-3 hour games for the multiple-times-a-week folk. Folk playing less than once a month flip back to more shorter sessions - makes me suspect that if you do not have a regular monthly game carved out, you are taking whatever opportunitites you have, however long they might be.

There is another neat pair of 'what did you start as' and 'what are you now' for player/DM roles - as might be expected the player-to-DM channel is a one-way ratchet. A fair block of players become DMs, maybe half the DM's get to play sometimes but... ain't no going back to 'just player' for those who started as DMs...

Another one I checked was favourite genre against what people are currently playing - and it looks like a decent chunk are getting to play their favourite games - especially Sci-fi and Pulp games - and Fantasy but that is hardly surprising. Green in each bar below is the fraction of people currently playing in their favourite genre for each of those genres. For 'multiple genres across multiple games' the 'mixed genre' people are getting a partial nod.

Anyway - some quick cuts since the data got released - there is a ton of stuff in here that will merit more careful read through - perhaps using 'first game edition' to try and unpick the elder gamers into finer boxes, pull together a list of what games played and there are tons and tons of comments that will merit reading through in their own right. Lots to chew on, I will return to this.

Shiny TTRPG links #197

Links from about the interwebs, fresh and time-seasoned. For 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.

Forsaken Garden launches the Haves & Have Nots RPG Blog Carnival

RPGFeed swears by this Super Simple Solo Oracle

Creative Wronging wrote Useful NPC, The Urbanite, Week 2: The Socialite

Of Gods and Gamemasters shared The Third Space

DIY & dragons gave us 5e - Alternatives to Darkvision

Notes on D&D Meetup Group Experiment

Meetup jacked up its subscription costs (174%!) so I cancelled my own sub, our game group as a whole sees no value in paying for one and the thing apparently drifted from my hands this past midnight. This seems like a good point to do a post-mortem - for all that it may stagger on another month as it auto-pings all the members looking for someone else willing to stump up to take the group over.

The group was conceived in a moment of seeking to get the word out and test whether we could pull of a significant expansion, sufficient to justify the running costs of the formal club structure here in Austria - bank accounts, chairfolk, book-keeping, all that jazz. We figured we needed to bump our regular attendees from ~25 to ~120 to bear the kinds of costs associated with having our own venue and all that. At that point we had not done anything, just had our forum and welcomed anyone who found us. This was an experiment in getting the word out to see what might happen.

We were blessed with two tailwinds, one foreseen, one not - the D&D movie and Baldurs Gate 3. We figured there would be a bunch of folk looking to try D&D following those so we initially set up the 'Night of the Rolling Dice' for after the movie - a ten table session for beginners - and created the meetup group. As you can see below, numbers went up like a rocket. We got 60 sign-ups, 45 of whom showed up, a good time was had. Then we did it twice more - once to capitalise on Baldurs Gate 3 and a last the following February to see if we had the process down to a low-friction playbook.
Each time we launched and event, typically ~ 60 days beforehand, we got a kick of new members into the Meetup group.

The folk who came to the Nights of the Rolling Dice occassionally showed up at our regular nights - 2-3 out of each batch of 45. Our open nights were what we were really trying to grow, getting those weekly Friday night open table games up. After the second one we started to slam the capacity of our venue and fished around a bit for another site. With two sites we could continue to grow and from there ramped up to... almost double our size. Almost.

I took over stewardship of the meetup group after the second event and started to block in our regular Friday night sessions into the Meetup group so people could see there would be a game a few weeks out rather than just ~4 days beforehand. We know people came in through these Meetups because we had regular deconfliction problems between both folk who signed up on the Meetup and no-showed and folk who rocked up to the events without mentioning on the sign-up thread that they were coming. Again, a fair few people said they found us through Meetup but only a handful on any given week.

Even once we restricted attendance, the 'out weeks' were not filling up with lots of folk - no indication that telegraphing that these were regular games that happened every Friday was making any difference to folk beyond an isolated case or two.

Overall the Meetup group probably funneled folk towards us but when I queried the webmaster of our forum, the actual core organising venue for our group, they said that it was mere tens of click-throughs from Meetup versus high hundreds coming off Google.

So all told, the group seemed to attract numbers and where we had big events we could fill them - neither of these converted into people turning up regularly for whatever reasons. Engagement was practically nil from folk who signed up to any mail shots or via the on-site tools beyond a few isolated requests for what was needed for a first timer.

You can probably barely see at the tail end of the top graph, the curve flattens out. This matches to when I stopped booking in events on the calendar, about a month ago when I decided to cancel the sub - having events on the calendar does bring people into the group, but having them in the group does not seem to do much for you.

All told, I am sure we got a few people into our group through Meetup because I have heard people say it - all of the metrics otherwise say it was a waste of time and certainly not worth ponying up extra cash. When I pulled the plug on it, the immediate response from Meetup was 'we have made it easier to charge your members dues!' which is just mean passing the corporate screw-over down the line. The main thing that changed that I can see between this year and last is they slapped on a bunch of AI tools for auto-generating events which is a completely unhelpful - you don't need randomly generated events, you need to just get the details right and up there. That and getting taken over by 'Bending Spoons' who also took over Evernote and also jacked up the prices there by a giant amount.

So, for us, nothing useful was added to a service that was not core to our operations, I had taken a punt laying down a subscription in the first place to see if it unlocked some large untapped pool of potential players - so all the above and near double the price was not worth it. We already have our venue charge, small and reasonable. The idea of layering on charges to pay off some corporations random price hikes? Not happening, not rewarding corporate bad behaviour like that.

All told, we tested the potential for fast growth and managed to get to double on a good day - I think proving up there was some growth potential for us but not massive x6 amounts. I am intrigued as to whether we will continue to get new folk wandering in once the Meetup evaporates; I reckon yes but let us see.

Invasion of the Land of the Dead - Hexcrawloween Jam 2024

The rules or Hexcrawloween - create a system-agnostic hexcrawl that has:
20 keyed hexes
Settlement w/ NPCs
Dungeon A (6-room)
Dungeon B (6-room)
Dungeon C (6-room)
Dungeon D (24-room)
Dungeon E (12-room)
Bestiary 9 original monsters (3 uniques)
An encounter list with at least 1d20 entries
Hand-drawn maps

Best effort before I ran out of time below; first our Hexes.

This whole region are the foothills of mountains where a wicked god was slain; the veil between planes warped and wounded, souls trapped one place, things from beyond easily entering another. Across all this, conflict rages - the clerics of Kirianshalee driven back by invading dragon-blooded orcs. Once vassal fey-folk now rise in insurrection and simultaneously ancient horrors bottled up by the church of Kirianshalee seize their moment to break out.

Shiny TTRPG links #196

Links from about the interwebs, fresh and time-seasoned. For 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.

Elfmaids & Octopi gives us Dungeons in Decline, seige conditions and desertion

Alone in the Labyrinth shares THEMATIC SAVING THROWS

Playful Void writes Juicy Worms, Local Knowledge and Player Engagement

Kontent Punch gives us Obstacles are the Fun

What a Horrible Night to Have a Curse... shares Hirelings: Making the Players Care

A Knight at the Opera gave us How to Make Problems for Your Players

Setting First wrote The Jumbo Shrimp Rule

INHERENT DICE gives us Why Aren't More People Playing TTRPGs? (Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Move On From D&D) - Perspectives From a Beginner

Meeples for the Win (GLoGtober 7 '24)

Taking on Glass Candles GLoGtober '24, challenge #2 is from a list by TheFirstGokun - "Physical Game Pieces."

I do quite a lot of cafe gaming and my big space saver has been using meeples for combats - does not quite give the square-by-square tactical detail of standard grid combat but 4/5 times it does everything you need - where are the clusters of bad guys, who is on what bit of terrain, who is near who.

I got these four bags from the In-House Testing Team one winter and they have proved remarkably useful. I have settled in on the stars and little circular things (right side) as the usual NPCs/monsters, the middle-right bag of meeples and houses as PCs and allies, and the mid-left bag tended to be the ships for Spelljammer combat.

Given that these are smaller than most dice they work really well by letting you have a whole battle-space on a single sheet of A4 - which in turn means you can use a piece of stiff card in a plastic-pocket plus dry-erase markers as an easily portable reusable battlemat.

All of which then fits neatly into a bag.

This does not support people bringing their Heroforge 28mm minis to table and I fully recognise that there is a chunky wow-factor to being able to haul out your custom 3D-printed bad guys and have your players squinting trying to figure out is that a standard beholder or some sort of other tentacly horror. The wear and tear on my shoulder and pocket book implied by aquiring and hauling around such a collection is a sufficiently high threshold that I am going to stick with my faithful meeples.

Hardbitten veterans, every one of those little blocks, earned their place in Valhalla multiple times over by now.

Strange Stones from Weird Aeons (GLoGtober 6 '24)

Taking on Glass Candles GLoGtober '24, challenge #6 is from my own list - "Secrets of the Stones."

Inspired by Onion Souls idea of Magical accretion and the multiple OSR weird time epochs collected on Coins and Scrolls I was thinking about what kind of strange geology is lying around in the gameworld.

Things are plenty strange already in the real world - I have seen this burning earth with my own eyes.

So these strange deep time periods are all well and good but what actual remnants and extrusions from those times can be stumbled upon?

d10 strange rock formations from weird aeons
1. Shock planes - remnants of particularly outrageous continental drifting during the Turbozoic era, these incredibly hard, thin sheets rise high above the landscape and are extremely damage resistant
2. Fossil supercomputer - intricate circuitry from sublimbed organic supercomputers of the Svahbavan Glaciation - carefully transmutation spellwork might get you a tiny fragment of a once-godlike entity
3. Compacted stars - remnants of sloppy creationeering, discarded stars look like big geodes until they crack and suddenly you have a sun at your feet with all the problems that implies
4. Cathedral channels - remnants of holy mounds, allowing wind to blow through them will randomly cast a divine spell on a random valid target near by
5. Purging Sprite soot - a thin layer, scraped up can be blown or pasted onto things to shatter magical effects
6. Astrogenocene coal - coal-analogue from high energy biosphere - igniting, striking or otherwise disturbing in this lower-energy world causes it to chill, rust, rot and otherwise soak the energy from surrounds
7. World-eater seacucumber - looks like a fossil, is just biding its time, do not get it wet.
8. Serpentis Iradium layer - traces of the sorcerous war that made the God Serpent never have been. Exposure sickens lizard folk or other scaly-kind.
9. First necro-layer - limestone-like crushed bones of the first total victory by necromancers. Anyone foolish enough to carve or cast this into some mobile form will find they are still active
10. Rogue colours - a trapped pocket of colors from the early Great Funkadelican era, releasing long-gone hues on the world once more

Shiny TTRPG links #195

Due to travel, mostly a deep dredge of 'OSR classics'. For 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.

Yak-Hack gave us Table-Centric Design

The Retired Adventurer wrote Six Cultures of Play

GROGNARDIA shared The Ages of D&D

Trollsmyth wrote Shields Shall be Splintered!

Jeffs Gameblog shared Party like it's 999

Hereticwerks wrote Roofcrawling: Intro (and Links)

Rotten Pulp shared The Underworld

Delta's D&D Hotspot gave us Basic D&D: On Archery

Scantabulous! wrote Petrifying!

Mazirian's Garden wrote The Hidden Metamorphoses

Rise Up Comus shared 1937 Hobbit as a Setting

DIY & dragons wrote Landmark, Hidden, Secret

TableTobRPG gives us Building a City with His Majesty the Worm

Wombat's Gaming Den of Iniquity gave us [Got Loot?] The 3 Types of Loot

AMONG CATS AND BOOKS shared How to Set Up and Use Faction Turns: Addendum

Widdershins Wanderings asked What Makes A Good Player-Facing Pointcrawl?

From the Sorcerer's Skull wrote The Titan and the City

False Machine gives us Echoing Stars - 12 Forms of Posthuman Corporations

Middenmurk gave us On Fantasy

Settlement morale check (GLoGtober 5 '24)

Taking on Glass Candles GLoGtober '24, challenge #2 is from a list by Phlox - "A procedure relating to a city."

Maybe useful as a mechanism to implement 'things fall apart' adventures like "Recruiters" from Well of Worlds or other siege or high tension situations.

You could use this with or linked to a chaos index or other kind of doom clock.

Proceedure
- roll morale check for the settlement
- apply any adjustments due to events
- apply consequences of morale check result

Intention is that people should be able to feel if the city is on edge and know if they spend their time causing chaos or calming things down will it likely achieve the desired effect

Initial morale score for a settlement should tie to scale - it is hard to shift the attitude of a big metropolis but easier to do it for a thorp.

Settlement	Pop	Morale
Thorp	50	5
Hamlet	240	6
Village	650	7
Small town	1450	8
Large town	3500	9
Small city	8500	10
Large city	18500	11
Metropolis	25000	12

Target is roll under on 2d6 - a little Thorp without anything to reassure it is going to be very jittery.

High morale just means cohesive, tending towards 'business as usual' - it does not mean nice, noble, or any other positive connotation.

Stuff getting weird imposes a morale check, nothing notable happens recently? No morale check. Sleepy thorp remains sleepy.

Where a settlement fails its morale check, cohesiveness breaks down temporarily, there may be panic, riots, looting and whatever response from authorities those warrant. Anything that requires processes or trade becomes hard as things shut and people are busy tending to their own affairs. Anything that prospers in chaos like heists, revolution or the like will go more easily.

Things that move the needle for a morale check at a settlement:

You get -1 to the roll for:
- Grand speeches or other crowd-interactions that were seen at least 10% of the population
- Nearby threats defeated of HD = 10% of population
- Recovery of treasure nearby equal to 100gp per population
- Arrival or emergence of popular public figure

You get +1 to the roll for:
- Sightings of threats of HD = 10% of population
- Death within the settlement of 5% of population
- Great magical workings, without clear benevolent intent
- Unexpected death of significant public figure (popular or notorious)
- Significant damage (e.g. fire)

You need to do a lot to shake a metropolis into chaos, conversely small settlements hang together only because nothing is threatening them - likely they will pack up and head for the hills if anything scary comes their way.

What dwells within the dwarf roads (GLoGtober 4 '24)

Taking on Glass Candles GLoGtober '24, challenge #4 is from a list by Shadowfray - "Infrastructure & Logistics." - with special thanks to Walfalcon for unsticking my writers block with their own post on the topic. For my contribution we return to the Dwarf Roads and the things you find down there.

Long ago, during the Membrane Wars, the dwarves retreated from the Last Star and built the under-roads in a frenzy to reconnect their scattered holdings as their previous airship-empire failed beneath the tainted light. Their alchemical-botanic mastery was turned to wringing fuels from the blood of the earth and they ground out the under-roads then fought the cult of the Last Star to a standstill in the dark.

The roads are now long abandoned, ancient defences still lurk and automata still roam but some things have made their home and some brave venturers traverse the paths once more. Few are good to meet.

Whatever else is found, there are usually dazzler walls - they make shadows leap and dance confusingly to the light of a normal flame but even unlit they are glaringly irritating to those with darkvision rapidly inducing headaches and making anything requiring vision exhausting and difficult.

Traps
1. Bulwark doors - Most renowned aspect of the Dwarf roads - known as Gnashing Doors for their fail-closed multiple redundancies
2. Darkness cascade - stinging chill showers of liquid darkness, typically matched with slopes and spiked pits
3. Lightning Arcs - discharging along dazzler walls in blinding torrents
4. Turret traps - throwing a variety of poisons, incendiaries, and caustics
5. Mellified beast release - honey-bottled monsters in arcane stasis, released. Basilisks a favourite
Hazards
6 - Maintenance golem - ever-burning elemental core heat the great rock-scrapers it has used to shore up the tunnels these past millenium
7 - Haunted train - a near intact war-borer train - too intact for the dead crew will rise to defend their charge
8 - Hypnotic archives - missing interface psychadelics might be found and information gleaned
9 - Unstable magazine - alchemical fire, night bombs, seeker swords - lethal things stored uncarefully by soldiers under pressure
10 - Breached fuel unit - dripping caustic and flamable pools, clouds of noxious gas fill the local area
Monstrous residents
11 - Weretoads - loners, often heard long before seen croaking low-wave messages along the roads
12 - Crocodile cultists - pale, trogoldyte forms, highly territorial of their glorious depths
13 - Dwarven shades - death has not released them from their dutiful defence
14 - Giant spiders - keeping the giant flies down
15 - Myconids - inheritors of the dwarves deep-botanical endowment
Intruders
16 - Humanoid raiding team - soldiers of one of the realms above, trying to outflank their foes from beneath
17 - Questing adventurers - pursuing something or someone that has fled here
18 - Blockade runners - smugglers trying to worm their way past surface hostilities and customs barriers
19 - Treasure Seekers - trying to search out some last forgotten coin
20 - Dwarven Reconquistadors - reclaiming their ancient birthright

We have visited these roads before with Small god: Lady Deephome (GLoGtober 2 '23).

Other references:
The Last Star - Bearded Devil
Jungle Dwarves of Forgotten Gorzu - Lizardman Diaries

Shiny TTRPG links #194

Short list as ill this week. For 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.

Trilemma Adventures gave us An Era of Standard RPG Terminology

Tower of the Lonely GM shares Knockback rules from TOR 1st to d20 games

Slight Adjustments shared FIGHT / DEMONS

levikornelsen gives us Post-Politicized Procedure

thydungeongal hosts a discussion on tumblr on D&D is easy to learn

Kill It With Fire! gave us Check-off boxes, not HP

ars ludi writes West Marches: Finding the Dungeons

Dice Goblin gives us The Two-Tiered Reaction Roll

Widdershins Wanderings shares The Magic Tree House Spectrum of OSR Player Behavior

Personable Thoughts gives us A method for condensed worldbuilding

Don't Split the Party wrote If Your Torches Burn for only One Hour your NPCs will be More Important

Torchless gives us LOW OPINION: System Matters

Hive Kratos launches with Introduction

Death by a Thousand Claws (RPG Blog Carnival)

This months blog carnival from The Other Side has the topic of Horror and Fantasy - so I was inspired to write about implementing the dread of the onrushing doom.
Thinking through what is dreadful and horrifying to a group of typically well armed and cunning adventurers, I had a few thoughts - most of which stem from lack of knowledge.

Menace for highly experienced players are signs that point to multiple dangerous options, signs not clear enough to allow countermeasures to be chosen. Menace to newbies is anything, with the caveat that they will not recognise the threat signs more experienced players would nor understand the scale of thing they might face in some cases. The weird monster is a traditional approach - like critters from Fire on the Velvet Horizon - things operating out of a non-standard game-space where the players do not know the rules this monster is operating.

Tricks to pull this off are
- reskin monsters - the familar becomes unrecognisable
- tweak abilities - the element of an attack or the stat that is attacked

These root in the horror of doom, which requires finesse to avoid tipping into despair - you want the grim, tense silence of the narrow margin fight around the table not the glum resignation of the lost battle.

ONe thought on making this work - you want a monster which is difficult to pick off at range or en masse - very few hit points, comes in groups, glass-hammers some stat-drain then dies.

Our concept here would be the horde of little things of which any individual one is not hard to deal with, and you're unlikely to get hit by any given one, but should they manage to lay a hand on you, that is damage.

Darkling Wisp (B/X)
AC 6, HD 1-1, #AT 1, D 1+special, MV (30’), Save F 2, ML 12, No. Appearing 1d6
If a darkling wisp scores a hit, it drains a point of Constitution in addition to normal damage. This lasts for 24 hours.

In pitch darkness it has a faint violet flickering outline, somewhat ball-like with a suggestion of mephit-like wings and spindly limbs. In light it appears as a scintillating shadow of the same. They pop into existence in hordes at places where the veil between the Feywild or Shadowfell is changing, typically dawn or dusk, lunar cycles or seasons turnings. They rush in hordes for a time, snatching vitality from whatever they encounter, before flickering out of existence. Prolonged exposure to these things cause the lands where the veil is thin to have their ephemeral aspect.

Darkling Wisp (5e) Small fey, chaotic evil

Armor Class 12
Hit Points 4 (1d6)
Speed 30 ft.

STR DEX CON INT WIS CHA
6 (-2) 14 (+2) 10 (0) 6 (-2) 10 (+0) 8 (-1)
Skills Stealth +4
Damage Vulnerabilities radiant
Damage Resistances acid, cold, fire, lightning, thunder; bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing from nonmagical attacks
Damage Immunities necrotic, poison
Condition Immunities exhaustion, frightened, grappled, paralyzed, petrified, poisoned, prone, restrained
Senses darkvision 60 ft., passive Perception 10
Languages –
Challenge 1/4 (50 XP)

Darkling Touch: Melee Weapon Attack: +4 to hit, reach 5 ft., one creature. Hit: 1pt necrotic damage and the target’s Constitution score is reduced by 1d4. The target dies if this reduces its Constitution to 0. The target can recover their level worth of Constitution points when they finish a long rest.

Hidden depth of domain encounters (GLoGtober 3 '24)

Taking on Glass Candles GLoGtober '24, challenge #2 is from a list by Vivanter - "An encounter table for domain-level play."

So for this I thought of the many things that would crop up in domain play and thought I would have another go at a universal chart. For a domain level game, the problems scale up but the boons also change. For me domain level means 'so big, the king needs to send ...' either the cavalry or the tax wagons because it makes a difference on the scale of hundreds to thousands of people. The problems, if left unattended would threaten the viability of the realm itself. The type of stuff even high level adventurers would get out of bed for.

I blocked things out into a couple of groups
Catastrophes - big, rare things going very wrong in the deep wilds
Bad Times - things that hit 'civilization'
Critters - all the usual sorts of monsters but more of them or bigger.
Pesky Humans - people, either the neighbours or outlaws, being the nuisance
Civil Matters - things happening in the towns and cities
Stars Align - other peoples magical fantasy nonsense happening to you and your realm

Then blocked out a hidden depths table with the first four blocks and filled it out to a potential d30 roll with the last group.

You could run this as a chaos clock - switching 6d4 > 4d6 > 3d8 > 2d12 > d24 > d30 as things get weirder.

Score	Roll	Group	Event
2	d4d20	Stars Align	Treasure hoard uncovered
2	d4d20	Catastrophe	Major volcano
3	d4d20	Catastrophe	Fey incursion
4	d4d20	Catastrophe	Plague
5	2d12	Bad Times	Terrible Weather -
6	2d12	Bad Times	Crop Failures - peasants on the move
7	3d8	Critters	Minor monster tribe
8	3d8	Critters	Beast herds
9	3d8	Critters	Bountiful harvest
10	3d8	Critters	Insect swarms
11	4d6	Pesky Humans	Cult outbreak
12	4d6	Pesky Humans	Banditry
13	4d6	Pesky Humans	Herdbeast rustling
14	6d4	Civil Matters	Festival
15	6d4	Civil Matters	New construction
16	6d4	Civil Matters	Trade fair
17	6d4	Civil Matters	Crimewave
18	6d4	Civil Matters	Riots
19	4d6	Pesky Humans	Raiders
20	4d6	Pesky Humans	Siege
21	3d8	Critters	Big Scary Individual Monster
22	2d12	Bad Times	General Revolt
23	2d12	Bad Times	Plague
24	d4d20	Catastrophe	Divine incursion
25	d30	Stars Align	Lost secrets unearthed
26	d30	Stars Align	A mighty warrior arises
27	d30	Stars Align	Blood War Incursion
28	d30	Stars Align	A craft falls to earth
29	d30	Stars Align	Titans War breaks out (giants, dragons, etc)
30	d30	Stars Align	An archmage takes up a new goal

Shiny TTRPG links #193

Links from about the interwebs, both new and time-tested. 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.

The Other Side blog writes ITS OCTOBER 2024!! RPG Blog Carnival and Horror Movie Marathon

Attronarch's Athenaeum compiles RPG Blog Carnival: Wondrous Weapons and Damning Dweomers Round-Up Post

Warhammer Conference has proceedings on their Youtube channel

Direct Sun Games gives us With the Cult of Crimson Revelers

Play Material gives us Putting together the Scene Kit and boiling it waaaaay down

Trilemma Adventures shared Some Thoughts on Intrigue

Sword of Mass Destruction gave us Rethinking clerics and religion, part 1 and part 2

Personable Thoughts gives us The Freedom of Constraints: Game Jam Writing

Play Material writes Doing a TTRPG game jam changed my life

Patrons Seeking Adventurers (GLoGtober 2 '24)

Taking on Glass Candles GLoGtober '24, challenge #2 is from a list by CommonUse - "Patrons: their source of power/wealth and their goals in using the party."

Practical Patrons, their natures and what they seek from their hirelings
1. Sithulf - whiter-than-white, the clergy of Bahamut, support through the church, needs deniable catspaws but if things are done by the book, they can drop the hammer on anything proved
2. Mallory - keen long-haul traders, breathless explorer, demands good notes, provides good briefings, can find or fence anything
3. Master of University - classic wizard, wrong species, lots of weird help to hand out, bound imps, consumable magic
4. Ragnbjorl - delvers into beyond, hunters of eldritch monsters for profit, seek gutsy, ask-no-questions types, support subcontractors, tend towards wild victory parties
5. Rynskald - ancient house, guardian of hazards, dangerous deeds, well paid, good intel, operational support, bloody handed defenders of the realm, everything is expendable
6. Kalfyra - minor members of the ruling house, odd hobbyists, sketchy briefings, official support, shows appreciation through lands and titles.
7. Hentlebrock - minor lordly deeds, local political power, fixers for the common folk, often seek classic adventurers for typical quests
8. Pillars - bordermarch lords, monster expertise, local guides, often seek rescue assistance for lost travellers or cut off settlements
9. Mhysanor - glitteringly wealthy coastal lords, sleek and polished, seek spy-hunters and capables to stalk magical foes on their home terrain
10. Kordites - disorganised church, motivated, messianic, supported by living saint, temple network plus mythic overlap, has prophetic visions to be handled
11. Sellal - river-baron, trade-taxers, covert actors, connections to the seelie courts, seeks sneaks and spies
12. Crown - the realm, ultimate but distant authority, officially their writ is law, lots of support until there isn't, quests often wrong on the details
13. Mysmys - Orthodox Church of Tiamat, guided by oracles, seeks contract killers, ruin delvers and hoard plunderers
14. Alchemists Guild - makers of warforged, tomb-divers and tower-raiders, pay well, need deniable
15. Chiming Zam - smuggling boss, network everywhere, needs discrete, cunning folk to help shift cargos quietly
16. Drizero - looks like a dragon cult, is the local lord, sponsors ruin diving
17. Uncargicks - wealthy smiths guild, pays top coin, needs muscle for clearing mines, path-breaking, caravan escort
18. Thenya Palace - city rulers, the local law, lots of odds and ends the palace guard cannot deal with, mostly message runs or ruin exploration
19. Gray Wasp - sorcerers collective, continuous demand for wierd and exotic fetch errands
20. Garzidh - military stronghold, excellent equipment, henchmen support, steady mercenary work keeping supply routes open

Bonus Eldritch Patrons seen in-world
1. Queen of the Terror Birds - recently dug up after long aeons underground, gleefully seeks to restore avian dominion
2. Last Star - the Special light
3. Ezbotha - your local hag, runs a very charming bathhouse
4. Master of Tongues - gruesome plucker of the strands of fate

Dungeon Cities (GLoGtober 1 '24)

Taking on Glass Candles GLoGtober '24, challenge #1 is from a list by Walfalcon - "A city where you can dungeon crawl."

The key difference between a 'lost city' and a standard dungeon to my mind is that there are a bunch of factions/peoples present who are just living normal lives to a relatively sophisticated standard - it is just that the distance to very dangerous neighbours and deadly ruins is measured in minutes walking rather than days of hiking.

I am using 'Lost Conchordia' from my home campaign for my model here - the city of the Titans, predating giant-kind, from the time of Amman ruling supreme, before the Ordning. I had it lost beneath a glacier but this also works for buried under sand or silt, engulfed by volcanic ash or any other number of cataclysms that would fill the streets and spaces of a city with something solid.

Intent is that your standard urban location toolkit would be used, whatever that is, then layer on these tables below to capture the 'buried city' flavour.

Conchordia beneath ice.

d6 room types
1. dug out of ice
2. old room as was
3. adapted room
4. non-dwelling space but big enough to be room
5. rubble/ruin still navigable
6. bubble/crevasse or other naturally occuring gap

In Conchordia, the original inhabitants were mostly gone but for a very few remnants - automata, undead, moving statues, etc. Things of course had moved into the space over the long run of time - both beasts and people finding spaces to live within the old city. Finally there are other non-dwellers - both welcome visitors and unwelcome intruders that might happen to be there.

d20 things encountered
1-2. original inhabitant
3-8. beastie moved in
9-17. recent dweller
18-20. intruder/adventurer

My suggestion for cities where you dungeon crawl is to set the range on attitude tables as equivalent to cities, and have monsters encountered be both more savvy around humans - like urban bears, crows and coyotes - habituated to people, not man-eaters, and perhaps more of a nuisance, less of a direct threat. Going about your daily business is a little more risky however with things falling on you or out from under you and the poorly ventilated buried nature of the whole place.

d6 background hazards the locals cope with daily
1. rickety walk ways over plunges
2. low door lintels
3. bad food
4. sleep-ruining noise
5. random collapses
6. bad air
7. disease
8. getting lost and disorientation

This would also come into play during any chases.

Shiny TTRPG links #192

Links netted from about the interwebs. 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.

Thriftomancer hosts Hexcrawloween

The Foot of Blue Mountain gives us Having an Opinion; How to Play OSR Games

Zedeck Siew's Writing Hours shares GNS is not a Theory; it is a Tradition

CBC writes How Dungeons & Dragons went from 'satanic panic' to pop culture fixture

u/_Zodaxa discovered A Google groups conversation board for Fantasy RPGs with archived posts dating back to 1982!

In My Campaign gives us Making History

Actual Play: Goblin Mail

I tested out the Goblin Mail - a zine about a chaotic goblin post office I reviewed recently. Written up to follow Gorgon Bones first best practice: "Record your hobby experience".

Cover by Evlyn Moreau

Run as an open table at our regular Friday night sessions using 5e, this was a seven player table and we ran a ~4hr session, half of which was Goblin Mail.

Characters were:
Maxi the Tabaxi - a rogue
Gwensora - a cleric
Giovanni Giovanni - a rogue
Hyperion IV - a barbarian
Thomas Wetsack - a cleric
Archie Gruble - a fighter
Balthus Darkcloud - a cleric

Session Report: Goblin Mail

Our heroes received a letter from the Merchant da Pra, whom they helped previously in Pesto Alla Lungarvese. They ask that a package be delivered to their aunt out in the Penumbria borderlands - with the catch that the package needs to first be retrieved from the goblin post office.

Venturing into town our heroes find the ramshackle goblin post office, barge into the office and are directed to customer service. They point them to the boss. After scrambling up the stairs to find a loud and horrible break room they interrupt a card-game-argument to get directions up to the boss. Forging their way through drifts of letters and thieving gremlins they arrive at a second more civilised breakroom and thence to the bosses office.

[DM Commentary - initial interactions with the goblins went well, a lot of barging past the queues of locals but getting to the front did not make the goblins much more helpful. The coffee and snacks in the break-room proved an unexpected attraction and the gremlins among the letter drifts were a good hazard. I played those more as 'save vs effect' hazards rather than combat since the gremlins were so out matched. One was captured and hauled around for the rest of the adventure cursing its captor.]

The boss queries them then sends them to customer service, where the party splits. Half deciding to just try searching the next room - special package storage - and the rest returning to customer servce. Archie decides to follow the 'faster service' ladder and finds Griselda the All-Seeing. Directed from their to the basement and Agatha then venture down and find Agatha who despite the irregularities, directs them towards the special package storage.

[DM Commentary - by this point 'you need to go see the boss' was causing eye-twitch reactions among some of the party as they were failing to distinguish between who is in charge in this room and who is in charge of the whole building. There was much running up and down to try and out-pace the package. The party split into a group led by Archie who followed the Boss instructions and another of Giovanni, Thomas and Balthus who decided to just start searching for the package themselves.]

Arriving first into special package storage, Thomas, Hyperion and Giovanni poke about in the giant stacks of parcels and when Thomas casts a Detect Magic, filching one or two. As the others arrive, and finally bring some light to the gloomy room, a giant book worm is revealed nibbling packages in the far end of the room. Returning (most of) its packages, they are told the latest delivery has already been sent to the roof.

[DM Commentary - the random package generators came in very handy here as the room was searched and random packages pocketted. Eventually someone cast Dancing Lights and the bookworm woke up - they assumed it was staff and did not fight it.]

Scrambling up the ladder they find a giant stork in its nest and a baffled goblin staring in, with a sack of packages abandoned nearby - and a trio of hogmen sneaking up to grab it. Shooing off the hogmen, our heroes attempt to reconcile the stork and goblins confusion over the hatched winged lizards in the nest before Balthus manages to grievously insult the storks parenting skills and they are chased off.

Archie and Giovanni grab the package they are looking for and dash back down the inside of the post office while everyone else follows the hogmen back down their grappling-rope.

[DM Commentary - the random roll for the Stork and Goblins disposition had them confused over the strange hatching of winged lizards - so I made the mail bandits be a group of sneaking hogmen in place of a loud attack. The players managed to intimidate off the hogmen then tried to help the stork figure out what was going on. This turned into an effort to persuade the stork to give up the hatchlings for adoption by the party that was going ok for a bit until it was blown by implying the stork was a bad parent for building their nest here. Cue angry chase off]

Abandoning their plan to deliver the package today, our heroes return to the Golden Cockerel with two packages - one for the Wizard da Pra and another covered in ancient return addresses and warning stickers. Giovanni cuts this open and find a mysterious animated bug which speaks a strange tongue. They give it a lute and it plays music unlike any they have heard before. Deciding not to worry about it, they leave the bug at the Golden Cockerel and set out again to deliver the package.

Session report for Goblin Mail ends

Overall view - it ran more quickly and less violently than I might have thought, people did not dig into the 'why are there goblin post offices' at all. It very much got across the kafka-esque run-around of being endlessly pointed to different desks. By the time the party left they needed to go for an in-game drink.

All in all a nice little drop in module - use it the once for a sessions of have it in the background to be used and re-used. No reason more goblin post offices might not be encountered in the future.

Field Report: The Arcanists Tavern

Stopped into the Arcanist's Tavern in near Hoxton in London. Billed as "London's first immersive tabletop gaming cafe" I found out about it through Wyrd Science #6 and since I was in London for work I thought to check it out. I caught up with an old gamer pal for a couple of drinks - both of us, ridiculously travel shocked so we weren't exactly up for taking full advantage of the facilities, but it was more of a recon for like, what is this place? The premise sounds awesome but how is it actually?

The place has an upstairs bar/cafe/board-gaming space, the downstairs is the wargaming/TTRPG space. On this occassion we mostly sat upstairs, admiring the giant wall of games and acknowledging that if we were less shattered there were many things we would have gone for. I also had a pint of the tastiest stour I have had in ages, really nice. Overall the place was busy while we were there on a random Wednesday, there seemed to be two shifts of folk in, an early evening bunch and a later bunch and when we packed it in at ten there were still folk chucking dice about in full flow. Vibe was very chill and relaxed, lots of folk running games, including what looked like another TTRPG session running in the upstairs space. A strong 'dark wood walls with weird things mounted on it' vibe wich is just what you want. Lots of nooks about the place for quieter games if you wanted too.

They have a fairly large table space in the upstairs that you take games out of the giant board games library. There's a bar with a couple of available drinks, a selection of pizza's, toasties and nibbles to eat - good to get you through your session. The board games library was a giant wall of games with a great selection of stuff in it. There were some properly chunky ones in there - bless the optimism of someone who's going to pull Twilight Imperium down off of board games library and get stuck in - that game is a full working day worth of play! Plenty of other good ones there too.

Off on the other side you could buy TTRPG stuff - I was very amused to see that there was a copy of Where the Wheat Grows Tall on their little sort of side shelf of indie games. That was cool.

The downstairs has a ton of space for playing war games. Lots of big tables, good space around them in there. There were also six kind of booths for RPGs that each had a private dining niche sized space - imagine that double depth, double width of a family dining table. Not a huge amount of space around the sides, enough to get in and out, but maximised for table-top space. Heavy theatre-curtains close off the front and that would be your space.

There are some fairly significant add ons and widgets like screen-in-table that intrigue me - I would be interested to try out this hardware-heavy mode of play with digital maps and all the good elements of digital gaming there on the table. My standard playing away from home model is pretty light, meeples-and-scribbled maps, it would be fun to test out.

Not super cheap but looked like decent value for the effort gone into it. I think next time I'm back I'll be trying to pull together a table and try it out for real.

I like that this space exists, in fairness in the big bad city of London you can find anything, but I like that this particular little niche is well served, long may it last.

Shiny TTRPG links #191

A busy week scrobbling 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.

Weird Wonder gives us On People-Centered Adventure Design

James M. Spahn's RPG Musings writes The Hobbit Alone

Anna B. Meyer on Patreon wrote Hawk Tales FRP – Goals

Missives From Mooncastle gives us The Gamemaster Pipeline

Personable Thoughts launches with A card-based duelling mechanic

hex culture gave us but i repeat myself

Review: Goblin Mail

tl:dr; neat troika zine about a chaotic goblin post office - a short-ish kafka-esque run-around, drops nicely into settings or adventures.

Backed on the Kickstarter - had a surprisingly chunky feeling 40 page zine turn up. Art by Evlyn Moreau, text by Sofia Ramos, layout by Luna P. I got great mileage out of the Kobolds Art Exibition (play log part I, part II, part III, part IV, part V, part VI, part VII and part VIII) and hope this replicated that 'goblinoids at work' model.

Cover by Evlyn Moreau

First impression - artwork is as ever a joy. This is all statted up for Troika / Fighting Fantasy but is fairly system neutral until you get to the NPC states in the Appendix. A bit of work calibrating off whatever a goblin stats as in your system of choice will make this useable for whatever you care to run.

In the zine you have three sections really with the central one being split into four.
First you have 8 pages of set up - intro, hooks, direction for exploring the place
Next you have the largest part with 20 pages covering the four floors of the post office
Lastly you have a 12 page Appendix with a bunch of useful miscellany

Running through this chunk by chunk:

STarting with the set up - intro, hooks, direction for exploring the place. The mission is always the same 'get your package back from the clutches of the goblin post office' but what the package is and who you are doing this for can vary. We get six example patrons in the intro then the rest is, in no particular order, what the goblins will sell you, what they think their workflow is and then what you will probably have to do to track down your missing package. These are really helpful for setting up the place and knowing what will be happening where as your players get there. We also get the general table for 'goblin mien' once you enter any room and the map of the whole place. Each level has two to three locations within it.

The floor guides - mostly room descriptions take up most of the zine. Going floor by floor we get
First Floor - reception, customer 'service' and delivery/triage area.
Basement - treadmill triage and customs desk.
Second Floor - first break room, letters room, rented room
Third Floor - second break room, boss' office, special storage room and the roof

Each of these locations comes with some flavourful illustrations and random tables of things you can find there. Given the likelihood you may traipse over and back through a few of these more than once trying to make sense of the goblins chaos, these are good tools to have to refresh locations on a repeat encounter. I found it suffered a little by not having a pithy one-liner of what each room was at the top of each entry - when flipping over and back between rooms during play, along with juggling the chaos of a table, that killer one-liner of what the impression of the place is was buried in the text sometimes.

In this section there are no stats, just numbers of things encountered at most. It is pretty clear how things connect, especially with the whole site map in the intro, so it all feels pretty playable straight out of the book. It bears careful reading at least once to spot where all the bits and bobs can be found - one person is missing a thing and it is mentioned in the description of another place but if you were skimming you could miss it and be confused.

The Appendix contains the Labyrinth, generators for packages, clients and goblins and finally a bestiary/stats for everyone to be found in the post office. When I took this to table they ended up arguing with everything so never got in any actual blade-drawn fights - which meant I was not going for the nice little mien tables attached to each of the entries. The random package generator tables got a work-out, especially when players got sticky-fingered while searching for the package themselves.

All in all this went over well at the table when I played through it - they got into the spirit of things and argued with the goblins as opposed to getting violent and killing everything. There is a ton of stuff packed in here, worth marking up with sticky-tags or something for the random patron table and the page with all the maps as you will end up flipping over and back to those a lot. A neat addition to the shelf and potentially re-useable in-game if the players return to the post office or encounter another one elsewhere.

I took it to a 5e table, that worked fine despite it being statted for Troika.

For another view, see Playful Void.

Corrupted Weapons of the Predator Queens (RPG Blog Carnival)

This months blog carnival from Attronarch's Athenaeum has the topic of Wondrous Weapons and Damning Dweomers - so I was inspired to write about what happens when bad people come into an inheritance of other peoples magic.

Once upon a time the elves conquered all the land, ruled millenia, before casting it aside and leaving. Their most terrible servitors fought in the chaos that followed, flailing at each other with the half-understood magics and weapons they clawed into greedy heaps.

The elegant, intelligent weapons of the elves hated their wielders. The predator queens founds ways to adapt.

Theirs was a practical magic, a hands-on, bloody clawed magic - not one that treated much with infernalism or demonology because those were seen as just another flavour of long-living, effortlessly magical overlord, the kind whos promises and entreaties had to be rejected by the strong, by those worthy to seizes power for themselves.

d6 corruptions and the impacts they cause to those struck
1. enslaver runes - twisted through brutal control enchantments applied later, causes stun on strike
2. mind-broken weapons - deranged through misuse, all actions next round penalised
3. vampiric enchantments - addition of life-draining magics, eliciting addictive hungers in the weapon; causes additional d4 piercing damage
4. mounted in barrier grips - will save or must attempt to disarm wielder and 'rescue' weapon
5. darkly imbued - sustained use for grim purposes has sparked independent malevolent will, causes fear on strike
6. arcane cauterisation - washed through with raw, caustic magics, only a shred of the original enchantments remain; 25% chance to dispel any magics affecting a struck target

Where the weapons proved to awkward or powerful to be over-borne by magic or craft, brute force often sufficed.

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