Review: Tome of Adventure Design

tl:dr; a creativity boosting tool for the long-haul DM.

Tome of Adventure Design arrived over the Christmas, something that had been on my radar for quite a bit. I had been keeping an eye out for it on this side of the Atlantic in vain so finally it needed to be ordered in. Minor ding in the cover but it got here.

What we get is about 500 pages, a tome as advertised of all sorts of inspirational ideas for setting up adventures. This is very much a DM's tool for long haul DM's.

It hast a nice clean style double column throughout any of the text bits and the rest, the vast majority of the book, is tables. Sometimes these are single column where the prompts expand a little, sometimes they are up to four plus the index columns on the page for where it's just single words.

Shiny TTRPG links #209

The blog fields are rich and provide a fine harvest of links! 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.

New School Revolution proposes Bring on the Discourse

A Knight at the Opera gives us Defeat, Not Death

Weeping Stag gives us Opera, Dungeons, and the Quantum Shark – Building a Dungeon From the Inside Out

Rise Up Comus continues Designing Dungeons with Chapter 5: Dungeon Checklist

Kontent Punch shares Encounter Building Technologies

False Machine gives us Chaos Goblins - VotE Remastered Development

Osraige Press shares Worldbuilding by Implication 3

1pagedungeons gives us Real Time as a Resource

Hexcrawl25 and Hex Kit

Returning to the challenge of juggling between scales of hexes and sub-hexes while bringing my Hexcrawl25 map to table, I switched to Hex Kit. I used the Classic, Fantasyland and Travelling Through Dangerous Scenery hex packs.

Azgaars was good for the 10 mile hex scale but now I wanted to get down to 2.5 mile hex scale. The main thing grinding my gears was getting things consistent between levels, marking in the terrain and all that. To start off with I created a layer and just drew in some hexes to help with orientation. THe gray ones are sub-hexes shared between two macro-hexes. Sub-hex A1 is outlined for orientation.

The chunk of the map I am trying to work up is the centre of this hex grid; hexes A1-A7.

Folk Knowledge of Minor Planar Ways (RPG Blog Carnival)

This months blog carnival from VDonnut Valley has the topic of Other, Between, and Under – The Worlds Beyond - which matches to some ruminations I have been having on minor planar paths.

The key aspect of the minor planar ways is harmony or coherence - when the natural world has conditions that are coherent with whatever planar other-where, a thinness forms and a path can be traversed.

The minor planar ways are long known to the ordinary folk of the realm - people know how to get there, people know the hazards and people know that by far and away these are ways to be treated with caution and respect. For the most part, foot, barge or faithful donkey is far more predictable and reasonable and so most folk stick with those.

Shiny TTRPG links #208

Delightful links for our shared enlightenment! 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.

New Tabletop Adventure Games Discourse Forum

Jeremiah Robert McCoy shares Exploring Exploration

blark blog gives us DRATS! The Single Roll Encounter

dailyadventureprompts writes DM Advice: Ghosts on the Horizon

Martin McKenna on his Flickr page shares Games Workshop original drawings

Monsters and Manuals gives us Distance and Vastness in Hexmaps

Richard's Dystopian Pokeverse gave us A city is not a dungeon

Hexcrawl25 and Azgaar's Fantasy Map Generator

tl:dr; Azgaars Fantasy Map Generator is a good tool to get your broad strokes regions - your hexes - for you to then fill in your sub-hexes.

I set out to do Hexcrawl25 and made some poor decisions. Happily, these have revealed themselves in the first half of January rather than mid-year. I chose to scale up, which was a poor choice, revealed upon actual contact with a table, and so I have adjusted to scale down.

For... reasons I can no-longer recall, all my work on my campaign world so far is mapped with 10 mile hexes. This is not *entirely* useless but it is not great. I have done too much work with things at 10 mile to start changing things now - the campaign map for my home campaign is in 10 mile hexes, I am committed at this point. I used the following settings in Azgaar to get this; in the Style tab, selected the Grid element and set the scale to 0.1333 for 10 mile hexes.

I previously figured since the challenge was 24 mile / 6 mile, I would scale up to 40 mile / 10 mile - which you can see in the images below. Since taking this to table, I realise I have massively overshot and instead will be going 10 mile / 2.5 mile; our adventures will now take place in what would be hex A below and all those 10-mile sub-hexes within it are going to get broken down into 2.5 mile hexe.

I am happy enough with 2.5 mile hexes as close enough to the 3mile hex that is what you can walk in an hour and how far you can see. What is interesting is that zooming down that direction knocks out lots of the big regional shifts in religion/culture/nations.

I grabbed screen-shots of my Azgaars for the area I wanted with a bit of care - fullscreen, overlaid exactly - then fiddled with the full region template until it all lined up. I did this all in powerpoint and then just pushed and pulled different layers forward and back. This is clumsy as hell compared to layer manipulation in a dedicated photo editor but good enough to get by.

Actual test: hexcrawl mechanics (launch session)

Launched a new campaign, trying to bring hex-crawling to my open tables; I thought I would write it up from a deployment of actual hexcrawling mechanics to see how/if this type of play mechanically differed from 'standard 5e with a map'.

Session log with a mechanics focus

Shiny TTRPG links #207

More links from the depths of the interwebs! 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.

Rolled Low shares Bloggies Library 🗳️

Idraluna Archives gives us Notebook Kayfabe

I Cast Light! writes EYE OF NEWT AND A DASH OF STARDUST: Ingredients for Fairy Tale Adventures

Sword and Scoundrel gives us What I Want in an OSR Game

Seedling Games shares Modified Public Domain Art

Playful Void gives us The Zungeon Manifesto: Demystifying Dungeon Creation

A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry writes Collections: Coinage and the Tyranny of Fantasy ‘Gold’

Tilling the blogsoil

Slowly grinding through the Elusive Shift - a worthy book that I am not finding gripping; having it laid out in detail that we as a hobby have been hashing over the same arguments since the very start does not make for an uplifting book. The detail of how the same arguments have been going over and back since the dawn of the hobby is useful to have on record but I am not finding the book particularly easy going. It is not telling me anything new, it is just providing evidence in great depth that as a hobby we have absolutely no institutional memory and are continuing to go around and around in the same loop.

We apparently have no sign to tap.

Meme from @rolistespod.itch.io on Bluesky

Grow your own DMs - DM-ing Clinic

We ran a DM clinic at one of our Saturday Daytime sessions. We have been kicking around the idea of more experienced DMs within the society coaching newer ones. There have been more of a ride along mechanic, where someone would sit behind the screen with the DM and see basically the sausage get made from that side of things.

I thought to focus on the prep and tricks of the trade side of things and put out the word I was going to host such a session. I got a pretty decent turnout - seven folk turn up of which three of them I would have classed as fairly serious DMs in their own regard. Good for me as there is always something to learn and I to more chair the conversation rather than lecture people. I am writing it up as per Gorgon Bones first best practice: "Record your hobby experience" as a pretty solid reflection of the active questions of 'working DMs' within a pretty busy group.

To try and make sure that we got through to everyone when we joined, I just had everybody give me the topics that they wanted covered. So, the list in no particular order from folk was:
- Encounter design and making it fair, coming from someone who has been of late running Dungeon of the Mad Mage.
- The balance of sandbox versus railroading.
- Realism versus expectations - what where the players do not want to engage with what is logically present in world
- How to end combats where the combat has stopped being fun, but the outcome is not in doubt.
- Social encounters. Should you play that in initiative? How to make sure that everybody gets their time in social encounters.
- What is enough prep and how do you make sure that you're prepping just the important stuff?
- Advice on running prepared adventures, prepping pre-written adventures for taking to table and then similarly structuring notes and how to do that.
- Random encounters, how you come up with them, how you run them, how they basically fit into the whole thing.
- Pacing and just how to make sure a session ends on time.
- Not overdoing the amount of content you are covering in a game.
- Encounter lethality and what to do where people were proving hard to kill.

Shiny TTRPG links #206

Launch into 2025 with a wealth of shiny links! 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.

Sacha Goat compiles the best of last years blogs in 2024 Bloggies commence

VDonnut Valley launches Other, Between, and Under – The Worlds Beyond for RPG Blog Carnival

Mindstorm gives us Baseline Worldbuilding

Ward Against Evil writes Traps Belong on Random Encounter Tables and Why You Should Use Reaction Time for Them

New School Revolution shares Basic OSR Principles

dailyadventureprompts writes Heavy Topics: A Child’s Vision of Evil

Magnolia Keep gives us Accidental Hyperdiegesis and How to Harness It

Grumpy Wizard shares Why, When, and Where I Place Secret Doors In Dungeons

Ducal House Year 6 - DM Challenges

We just kicked off the 6th year of our home campaign, Ducal House, and the players asked me how I was finding it, how it compared to previous campaigns I've done and so on. I needed to check and confirm that it is indeed the longest campaign by sessions, hours and years I have run - and later this year will be longer than the next two campaign I ran stacked together. Two questions came up at the end of the session:
1. What (if anything) am I seeing as an issue?
2. What would I change if I could?

Hexcrawl '25 Launch

For Hexcrawl25, taking the challenge on, I decided to make a couple of modifications out of the gate.

First off being that instead of it being a 24 mile hexes/6 mile sub-hexes, I'll be using a 40 mile-10 mile because my campaign world was already hexed to 10-mile hexes. Rather than subdivide I wuill just block up to a bigger 'regional' hex at 40 miles.

Next I want to use this to feed a West Marches type campaign fairly shortly so this is going to get put into service pretty quickly. I may be accelerating parts of this quite a bit.

Then what I am basically planning to do is cookie cutter a chunk out of an existing block of the world that exists from Azgaars Fantasy Map Generator and use that.

This is replacing the draw a map, hex it up, identify your like sub-hex elements approach. What I will do instead is use the biome, culture, nation, and religion filters on the existing campaign world to provide the seeds for the hex-elements. Hex-creation by interpolation, if you will.