Core Gameplay Loop for Sector Defense Game

Pondering on how to run "Your Sector, Your Problem" - "SHIELD or Stargate Command but you are responsible for a sector of inhabited alien worlds" - it lurks in my mind like a splinter.

Questions I have been having are 'what exactly is the fun here', 'why is this not a board game',and then 'what is the minimum viable game to get going'. I have written about this before in 'DIO - Cosmic Defense Brigade' and d20 Sector Defense Assets - the high concept is that you are responsible for holding down a sector your corporation has newly acquired protectorship of and have a scarce amount of assets of varying levels of effectiveness and you have to deal with all the problems that come across your desk with those.

Looking at the first of the questions - 'what exactly is the fun here?' - the core gameplay loop I have in mind is:
- "spot the problems" - gather info, figure out what is going on across your sector
- deploy your resources - typically not enough for easy answers
- resolve incidents
- recover/maintain your resources

Shiny TTRPG links #248

Fresh links from around the web. For more, see last weeks collection found here or on the weekly r/OSR blogroll or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.

Swan and Raven Studio hosts the last days of the HELLO//GOODBYE Charity Bundle for Legal Aid.

DirectSun Games hosts the Puzzle Dungeon Jam

Sam Sorensen launched Mothership Month 2025 Wargame: OVER/UNDER which is where all the noise about that has come from.

Blog of Forlorn Encystment gives us Alignment Languages are Socially Repulsive

Fight in the Shade shares Minimal D&D Stats

Crow’s Corner writes A Taste of Tabletop Roleplaying Games about Vampires

New School Revolution proposes Let's Make a Forest

Viridian Void Productions writes In Praise of Idle Prep

Play Material gives us The Ancient Game of Riddles

Rise Up Comus shares A Camping Procedure

Leicester's Ramble gives us Yet Another Mass Combat Hack - Using "Field Combat Rules for Shadowdark" in OSE

Improved Initiative writes Dungeon Design Tips: You Need To Make Social Skills Viable If You Want Players To Use Them

four letters at random gives us One-shot Good Society: Changes

The Robgoblin wonders Why adventure? Ask the CIA!

Capsule Reviews #9: HELLO//GOODBYE Charity Bundle

Friends of the blog Swan and Raven Studio are hosting the HELLO//GOODBYE Charity Bundle for Legal Aid - I grabbed my copy and am facing the same challenge as with every itch.io bundle - how to even get your arms around the treasures within? By my count 203 items from 114 creators - it is a lot for $15.

I already looked at the Hello/Goodbye zine itself - you can read that review here. Trying to get my arms around 'what is even here' I come back to my classic approach to all these bundles - are there at least a few things in here to justify picking it up and then everything else is bonus, gems to be slowly revealed over time.

I draw on the wisdom of crowds somewhat here - the thinks I have seen others rave about as reasons to pick this up are Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast, Paris Gondo - The Life-Saving Magic of Inventorying, Rosewood Abbey, Arkyvr and DNGN + DRGN. If you want back up for those recommendations you can see the reviews of others here:
Playful Void reads Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast
LunarShadow Designs gives a quick review of Paris Gondo - The Life-Saving Magic of Inventorying
Burn After Running reviews Rosewood Abbey
Rob Wieland reviews Arkyvr on Enworld
Deathtrap Dungeon reviews DNGN

Ones that I have experience with - mostly from the local crowd here in Vienna -

Worldbreaker by CrowberryCake - the serpent Jörmungandr grows, waters rise, villages vanish and the players are those who remain. A one-page of mechanics plus bonus second page bestiary and third page of character sheets. Characters have eleven stats split into two groups (pillars and virtues) with dice assigned to them - combine two for your roll to resolve challenges. Failures in a roll advance the 13-step 'clock' of serpent growth until the world is wholly taken over - complete your goals before that. A whole system with plenty of flexibility to run different things, lots packed into three pages.

GREEN CORRIDOR - MixUpPixels - players are agents of REWIND, a group of survivors of the climate catastrophe and corporatism that has ravaged the world. Agents seek out pockets of The Green, habitable regions where people and wildlife can flourish, aimiung to rebuild the world one ecolocial pathway at a time. A punchy tri-fold pamphlet game, agents have three stats, challenges are resolved by roll under system. Designed to be played with a hex-map where the players travel, face down challenges and to create 'green corridors' across it. Pithy and stripped down, a good seed that lends itself to inspiring a GM to pick up and run with it.

M is for Muscle - Wasbart - a 4-page game where a group of enormously bulky giants must drop their adopted 5-year old off at day-care in a world was made for puny weak people. Grapple the world with your squeeze, think or feel muscles with d6, d8 or d12 assigned. Take on challenges with a roll-over system and chance inflating your muscles to bump your die to a d20 or fail and deflate to d4. A page of tables at the back provides sample challenges for the gang to encounter on the way to kindergarten drop-off. Looks good for quick one-shots, a great beer-and-pretzels game.

Rockpool by Jubal Barca - is a "tiny RPG about tiny Rockpool creatures" with their own aims in the bounded, busy world of a rockpool. Twelve pages gives you a page to set your aims, two to build your character with their three stats of Tidefast, Shelltwirled and Spinethrown, two pages of 'occurences', five pages of bestiary, a half page of things to find in the rockpool and some flavour text to close. Self-contained and a distinct vibe of striving to achieve small goals in a world in flux.

Also throwing in Just Make Shit - Diogo Nogueira - a 13-point manifesto and guind on getting things done and making the things you want to make. Useful.

Honorable mention to:
Songbirds an eldritch fantasy game.
The Lyric Game Manifesto-Essay on "Why you should make a lyric game"
The Obligatory Fishing Minigame is a system agnostic Tabletop RPG about going fishing!
Begin Transmission - A planet exploration letter-writing game for 1-2 players
Galaxy Black - Space Fantasy Adventure in the collapsing universe
Sprouts is a family-friendly game of hand-drawn creatures traveling across real-life terrain.
Tea & Toadstools: a solo GM-less journaling game in which you play as a hedgehog in a twill vest who just wants to be left in peace!

All of which just scratch the surface of this bundle but I hope provides confidence that there is enough in here to justify the price - and lots more to provide future pleasant surprises.

Setting up coherent other worlds for Scale-and-Planet campaign (RPG Blog Carnival )

In My Campaign gives us this months prompt Other Worlds for the RPG Blog Carnival.

Portraying Other Worlds

Considering how to make worlds that are different but feel coherent within the same campaign - what are the dials you twiddle and what stays the same?

This is an idea I am road testing with my 2d20 Lizard Kings campaign; the core theme of it all is that the scalyfolk are in a post-imperial expansion - but have just retrenched not gone away. There are tons of things littered around from different eras of their imperium, representing different ideas they had - including their push to their nearby worlds.

This is a live, relevant question because I am returning to Corrus, the world of the Lizard Kings, where one of the core setting ideas was the concept of Near Mars and Far Venus - a thinly atmosphered world nearer the sun and a thickly atmosphered one further out would cancel out to be roughly habitable - making three worlds in this system operating on a John Carter-esque sword-and-planet paradigm. Inter-planetary escapades were always intended as part of the mix - but now I have the wisdom to front-load the good stuff and thus I ought to be figuring out that world-striding aspect of things.

Original system sketch from ~ 2019

It may be smudged and barely legible but those notes read "Near Mars, Ancient civilizations, canals" and "Distant Venus, Jungle world w/ Saur Cavalry [crocodile worshippers?]" and I have some more notes that tag distant venus with giants and dinosaurs, near mars with Dune-esque deserts, gnolls, crystal forging, miners and alchemists with great tree.

So how to make these three worlds - tentatively named Nemas, Corrus and Favens - feel coherent, yet different?

I've had some thoughts before on distinguishing mirror worlds with house-rules and modified rules for those worlds feels like a good idea but one tool in the box but it does not go far enough. Mirror worlds should be very similar, with a twist, these other worlds should feel distinctly different within a shared milieu.

I want the 'Still Here' motifs of the lizardfolk across all worlds:
- lizardy deep time nonsense
- a multiplicity of heat cults
- nature-bending
- same general pantheon

Traffic between them has been complex but achievable for a good long period of time - so like very distant continents, semi-legendary lands that few have actually been to and many disbelieve exist.

Common across them all will be relics and ruins of the 'high tide' of the lizard imperium - portals within those ruins will be the easiest means for the unofficial travel of adventurers.

Rapidly filling out worlds

With whole other worlds to play with, I think batching some off-the-shelf ideas by theme might be good to start.

Nemas - all of the desert tropes, harsh, high entropy system of sandstorms burying and uncovering the past - al Qadim, John Carter, Ultraviolet Grasslands, Painted Wastelands, Nagash-type undead, Skorne of Iron Kingdoms.

Favens - giants and bigger dinosaurs - stranger jungles, fungal, seas and swamps - highly contested, previous inhabitants have not gone quietly - Lustria, Thousand Thousand Islands, Yoon Suin, Moonsoon. The core world already has deep, hot jungles in the abyssal dry sea - some dinosaurs already live there. Perhaps dinosaurs are an invasive clade here that has thrived?

Binding worlds together

To pull all this together I need some coherent overlays to allow them to form a connected scale-and-planet setting. Thematically this is how an empire falls apart in three bits:
- on Nemas, the fading remnants of the old ways persist amid the shifting sands and along with the remnants of others
- on Corrus, the rump empire continues, retrenched to the deep abyss - here mammals contest them
- on Favens, invigorated but chaotic - the lizardfolk thrive but have slipped the yoke of empire and all sorts of polities are active

The driver for all lizardfolk is heat - such as the sun; Favens was the original homeworld of the lizardfolk, the thick atmosphere retaining the dimmer sunlight; Corrus is where they found a balance of heat and space, Nemas borders too hot, but the solar cults thrive here. Nemas has more weird arcano-tech, Favens has mutants and war-beasts plus the original homelands of the lizards.

Culturally Nemas is a split between true believer solar cultists who are willing to suffer for proximity to the sun, the remnants of the colonial lords and their holdings and a strong culture of xeno-arcanists who pore over the magical secrets of the ruins and ancient cultures here. The other antique cultures also persist - insects, trilobites, liches of all sorts.

Favens is dominated by strong and highly splintered culture - many subspecies of lizardfolk, serpentfolk, grippli - it is as Africa to humans, the font of diversity, many languages and peoples, along with scalykind analogs of giants, dwarves, etc. With dinosaurs and giants thriving, settlements are clustered in defensible positions with large parts of the world 'wild'.

We also have multiple spiritual poles - on Nemas, closest to the heat of the sun, it is the promised land. On Corrus, there are the most diverse of all the cults with many of the non-solar heat-worshippers present as well as the largest realm with the old orthodox solar religion as state religion. On Favens there are the sacred origin sites and a plethora of traditionalist sects and non-solar cults as well as the current reformed heat-cult.

Wrap-up

Falling back on my 'Azgaars' factors of culture, nation, biome and religion we have more or less dinged all of these giving us a decent enough framework to work within. The same generic encounter table combined with the planet-appropriate filters would allow different-but-coherent encounters to be generated for those other worlds. With more time, tailored encounter tables would be good to have but until it is clear that planet-hopping is imminent I am going to focus prep elsewhere.

For locations, I will do the sweep up of sources mentioned above, note a dozen or so interesting ones for each worlds and then use that as the structure to build around.

Together those would give locations and encounters specific to the worlds and then I can drop the players into some sort of coherent sandbox should they manage to find an old interplanetary portal. Which can also be phrased as "I now have license to drop functional interplanetary portals into the campaign" because I can catch them on the other side should they choose to step through.

Shiny TTRPG links #247

Fresh links from around the web. For more, see last weeks collection found here or on the weekly r/OSR blogroll or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.

Swan and Raven Studio hosts the HELLO//GOODBYE Charity Bundle for Legal Aid

Fail Forward gives us Coloring Book Game Design

400 independent bathrooms shares rules that expand

Ward Against Evil writes Shield Walls – from Someone with “Riot Control” Training

Tales of the Lunar Lands gives us Timekeeping in the Lunar Lands

Puzzle Dungeon writes We need more puzzle dungeons!

Methods & Madness gives us Random stopwatch encounters

Dungeonfruit shares ONCE (A Worldbuilding Game)

Farmer Gadda's TTRPG Hayloft asks Crash Course: What is the OSR (And Why Do I Care?)

Blog of Forlorn Encystment gives us Speak with Monsters: The Languages of AD&D and the Adventurous Linguist

Save vs TPK shares The New Novelty

In My Campaign gives us Other Worlds: Trapping Construction

This Vorpal Coil writes Two Perspectives On Bleed

Actual Play: Waking of Willoughby Hall

tl;dr: lessons learned from bringing a good adventure to a bad open table.

I did a capsule review of Waking of Willoughby Hall a while back, noting I got good use out of this interesting haunted house - but while the adventure was great as an input to the session, the session itself annoyed me and I am going to try and unpack that.

I ran Willoughby Hall for one of the 'off week' sessions of my dual-mode hex-crawl. This meant I had a start point tavern, village, campaign etc. that I was dropping an open table of gamers into for a one shot. This was my first live-fire test of this but subsequent successful uses of the same model (for Hole in the Oak and Winters Daughter) showed this frame for a session works.

System was 5e, since this is what the local open tables run so I doubled all the hp listed for the monsters and NPCs and otherwise used the 'HD = roll bonus' rule of thumb. Immunities and special abilities remained as written.

Session Recap

I got the usual pot pourri of races/classes.
Human Warlock (apparently a farmer)
Dhampire Illrigger (apparently a scholar)
Elf Rogue (apparently a sailor)
Yuan-ti Wizard (apparently a snake trader)
Leonin Barbarian (appears as they are)
Goblin Artificer (appears as they are)

I slotted the adventure in under a request to go investigate a commotion down near the outlying fields; there they found the flattened shrine with missing bell tower and a cowering attendant who pointed them towards the abandoned manor. They arrived to see the Bonebreaker Tom peering in the windows and shouting for his lost goose, Mildred.

The party decided to dash in past the giant to get in - I was pleasantly surprised at their biting on the hook as intended rather than fight or bamboozle the giant. One PC did decide to try and engage the giant, I warned them subtly, then told them it was death to face this monster and yet they persisted. Flexing a number of defensive tricks let them dodge-and-weave one round while Bonebreaker Tom tried to stomp them flat and everyone else got to fling themselves through various doors and windows into the Sitting Room or the Great Hall. The 'distractor' managed to dive in after them and we were inside the house.

After a brief pause to search the sitting room and find the snuffbox they regrouped in the Great Hall and headed upstairs. They eplored the western rooms - poking about the oddments in the Museum and encountering the NPC adventurers at a distance. The NPCs ducked away and the players progressed. They moved on to the gallery and ran into Bonebreaker Tom again - at this point the Death Knight woke and they ended up in a strung out fight between the Death Knight in the Museum and trying to negotiate with Bonebreaker Tom on the balcony. They defeated the Death Knight and its skeletons - meanwhile promising to fetch Mildred for Bonebreaker Tom. From here the party splintered and things got a bit slow - people headed off to different floors, interacted with different things and were poking around all over the place.

Enough seals were broken by now to shift the hall to 'Restless' and they were properly spooked. They managed to corner Mildred the Goose after a lot of running around, and 'nova-ed' their way out of fighting the taxidermied owl-bear with some ability that tosses something into the feywild. They faced down the NPCs and convinced them to try and run for it - it did not end well for the NPCs as the players tipped off Bonebreaker Tom who outpaced the NPCs and messily dealt with them.

Eventually, the Death-Knight reconstituting and coming after them got them to return Mildred the Goose to Bonebreaker Tom and then fleeing the manor, much of the ground floor left un-surveyed.

DM notes

The players came to it with the 5e assumption of all combat is survivably through their suite of abilities - and so the 'plot forcer' of Bonebreaker Tom needed a lot more pushing from me to emphasise that they could not just fight them, nor hope to stand against them.

I missed a trick with counting a seal broken every time Bonebreaker Tom flails the hall with the bell - that would have accelerated things.

The adventure gave me a good template that let me pull an enjoyable game out of the whole thing. Despite being statted and designed for OSR, it survives contact with 5e the system pretty well; if I had more motivation I might have tried to make it a 'teach the old school ways' session but I decided just to see how it would get approached by relatively frequent 5e players doing their usual thing.

As the open table filled up, the first block of sign-ups were all people who had expended my goodwill with them previously and up to the evening before I was strongly contemplating just yanking the table. Three were folk that ground my gears, one I had no problems with but only when the last two joined did I figure the nonsense was dilute enough that I was happy to run. I had tried to catch the old school vibe by pitching the game as 'think hobbit or lord of the rings' and two players rocked up with a yuan-ti abomination and a dhampire illrigger. I sat to table with very low expectations, I should have cancelled.

I run these open tables to decompress after my work week so a session like this where I leave frustrated is too costly a use of my limited free time. I am aware that others similarly do not get to play that often so TPKs have a high opportunitiy cost. On a similar vein when I get a table of players who are just going to argue with me if things are run to their expectations, it is not worth the effort of having the fight to uphold the principle of the thing - because while I am arguing with those folks, everyone else is having their session frittered away.

I took other old school adventures - Hole in the Oak and Winters Daughter - to newer groups of players and to other of the 5e players they leaned into the old-school style a bit more, maybe did not poke and pry at things like real old-school OD&D folk might have but they treated hazards as hazardous. Here we had a table steeped in the 5e tradition of 'I can fight my way through anything' and it showed in splitting up, charging into threats alone which slowed things down as I had to juggle multiple people tripping things at the same time and then decide to either run through a time-consuming proper consequences version of what could happen or skip the consequences of some of it to try and keep the table as a whole rolling.

Waking of Willoughby Hall was fun to run despite all that; the lesson learned to me was trust my gut and just pull the session when I see sign-ups I know will be annoying to deal with.

Edit: as I saw the question posed elsewhere - did the players have fun? They said they did at close of the session.

Regional encounters & complications for the Scaled Lands

Setting up Yaksha's hexfill as the 'regional encounter table' for the collapsing lizardfolk imperium of the Scaled Lands - it is the same just making the reference space bigger. I already had the d10xd4 encounters done as penance for screwing it up in my previous test (a d14 table... oops).

To recall - the requirements are:
- 1 Unique Encounter
- 2 Tools/Gimmicks for the region
- d10+d4 Local Encounters
- d10 Small Jobs
- d6 Big Jobs
- d20 Scene-setting sights/stage design
- d6 bounties/location implications
- d6 ways to expand/change-up the area set to tone.
- 3d10 names for places (locales/nature sights/crossings.)

Based on the success of using this method for the fuzzier, less structured parts of the dual-mode hexcrawl campaign, it seemed like the right tool for the Lizard Kings 2d20 Conan campaign where I was not planning to deploy a hex-map at all. There is a map, which will make broad regional chunking be sensible but since I will not be using structured travel mechanics, it seemed like something looser, more point-crawl-like was in order.

The region I am looking at is this escarpment edge above the drop into the deep abyssal basin below. Down there be hot-house jungles, dinosaurs, all sorts of things yet to be discovered. The top edge is the somewhat known space where play starts.

So for the marked in settlements, I already had information, what I need was a set of encounter tables for general out-and-about along the escarpments edge. The first pass of this is below, slightly modified for the 2d20 system by swapping the d6 bounty/location implications to be d6 complications. I wanted these as ready-to-go, 'could happen anywhere' conditions I can throw at players whenever things get worse for them through my spending Doom or their rolling badly.

d10/d4 Encounters in the Scaled Lands
1. Wizard Kingdom Expeditionary Force (1. Couriers, 2. Outland Mercenaries, 3. Spies, 4. Local Auxilliaries)
2. Lizard Imperials (1. Tribune, 2. Taxmen, 3. Magistrate, 4. Regiment)
3. Local Militia (1. Posse, 2. Patrol, 3. Monster Hunters, 4. Garrison)
4. Merchants (1. Blue Dragon Cultists, 2. Shattered City Trading Coster, 3. Local Traders, 4. Imperial Procurers)
5. Adventurers (1. Locals, 2. Imperials (official scalyfolk), 3. Deep Basin Wanderers (private scalyfolk), 4. Extra-planetary Explorers)
6. Nearby Dwellers (1. Farmers, 2. Foresters, 3. Fishers, 4. Herders)
7. Lurkers (1. Small God Cultists, 2. Site Keepers, 3. Minions of an absent master, 4. Lost villagers)
8. Roaming Monsters (1. Shambling Mound, 2. Giant Pitcher Plant, 3. Strangler Vines, 4. Displacer Beast)
9. Beasties (1. Migrating Herd, 2. Roosting Flock, 3. Cubs + Parents, 4. Territorial Titan)
10. Factioneers (1. Red Dragon glory-seekers, 2. Adherents of the Devouring Sun, 3. Followers of the Nourishing Sun, 4. Templars of the Great Fire Beyond)

1 Unique Encounter - venturers seeking to blaze a new descent path to the great basin, certain they know of the location of lost riches

2 Tools/Gimmicks for the region -- dinosaur beasts of burden - spike-tails, club-tails, and tri-horns - all of which have lots of intertia, get cranky and have at least one way to ruin your day. A small tank for the party on a good day, a rampaging beast inside the camp -- verticality - the great escarpment down to the deep basin with lots of scope for fights happening on narrow ledges or within vine bundles or tree roots

d10 Small Jobs
1. Red dragon cultists want you to scout, drive a monster into their ambush
2. Imperial procurers want an updated survey of local settlements, many of whom want to remain forgotten
3. Caravan looking for replacement guards after dinosaur attack
4. Hired by cultists to act as operators of caravanserai to bait ambush
5. Explorers/surveyors looking for some muscle for a ruin-dive
6. Wardens of a shrine need some cultists driven off
7. Outlanders need a message brought to a mercenary camp
8. Local militia want specialists to plumb a catacomb
9. Sage collective want a relic recovered
10. Lizardfolk magistrate wants a fugitive found and brought back alive

d6 Big Jobs
1. Caravan never showed up - attempted message indicates drover dead - dino wandered off, go get it back
2. Lizards mobilising to break Dwaven siege of settlement - run in ahead of them, raid temple
3. Cultists going beserk, summon help - convince the lizard it is worth them getting moving
4. Adventures swear they found treasure in outskirts, died in bar-fight; back-track their movements to find the score
5. Expedition lost at base of escarpment - find and rescue or loot the corpses, as preferred
6. Local aristocrats have depleted local sources of desired spice, descend to the deep basin and fetch more

d20 Scene-setting sights/stage design
1. Daybreak shrine
2. Solar furnaces
3. Hotsprings
4. Heated site
5. Abandoned tower of astronomer
6. Interplanetary portal
7. Star-light capacitor spires
8. Forest-swallowed lizardfolk settlements
9. Towering anti-dinosaur fortifications
10. Cultivated hives of pharmacopeia bees
11. Vault of hibernating lizardfolk regiment
12. Serpentfolk shrines
13. Dinosaur lair
14. Abandoned skyship port
15. Ruined infernal shrine
16. Depopulated settlement (active but far less inhabitants)
17. Elemental fire temple converted to forge
18. Dinosaur caravan
19. Forgotten ruin
20. Ambush aftermath

d6 complications
1. Devouring insects
2. Overwhelming sun
3. Dripping, slimy surfaces
4. Treacherous footing
5. Crumbling structures
6. Stalking dinosaurs

d6 ways to expand/change-up the area set to tone.
1. Originally lizardfolk location being restored and reoccupied by tabaxi
2. Predatory dinosaurs moving in
3. Hallucinogenic honey hive found, locals losing grip
4. Devouring sun cultists turned location into ambush
5. Flooded with refugees from dwaven attack
6. Imperial lizard regiment camped on way to front, old ways being enforced

d20 names for places (locales/nature sights/crossings.)
1. Obsidian Mirror
2. Staircase
3. Threshold
4. Sholtipec
5. Sholimeth
6. Supileth
7. Mersuumaar
8. Bitalen
9. Barianthuul
10. Zaysunthul
11. Chalcedra
12. Tremsaar
13. Narenthul
14. Zomilest
15. Somaroon
16. Tesseral
17. Chumagaar
18. Pun Narenthra
19. Derusal
20. Far Suriel

Shiny TTRPG links #246

TTRPG goodness from about the internet. For more, see last weeks collection found here or on the weekly r/OSR blogroll or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.

Swan and Raven Studio hosts the HELLO//GOODBYE Charity Bundle for Legal Aid

Fluorite Guillotine gives us fabula ultima was made for me

Bat in the Attic asks What is the point of the OSR?

@alexanderwales gives us Majority and Minority

Blog of Forlorn Encystment shares The Monster Economy of AD&D

Ever & Anon publishes Issue #4 of this successor to Alarums & Excursions

World Building and Woolgathering gives us Another Return to Yoon-Suin

Idraluna Archives writes Footnotes in RPGs

PhD20 gives us Unprepared and Never Better

Your Scent Has Attracted A Bear shares Leonard Cohen's Advice for Novice OSR Referees

False Machine gives us A review of The Golden Peaches of Samarkand

Valeria Loves asks Why Don't I Hate Fabula Ultima?

Creighton Broadhurst shares GM Advice: Three-Tier Design for the Busy GM

Garamondia gives us SimAnt Cataphracts - the roughest outline and follows up with More Bugaphracts

On complications and retuning my GM'ing for 2d20

I am a few sessions into running my Lizard Kings campaign - below are my notes on trying to get up the learning curve of running 2d20 by tapping the wisdom of those who have gone before.

Written up to follow Gorgon Bones first best practice: "Record your hobby experience", this is a ressurection of the campaign world I could up after receiving the revelation of the OSR, spun back up on the online open-table model of my Southern Reaches campaign, but switching system to 2d20 Conan on the intuition that the momentum/doom system would better fit the high-energy shenanigans atmosphere.

I have tried to pull forward a lot of what worked - encounter tables / random generation, player-driven action, baiting hooks, open-table/roster system - but after spending the past few years honing my style around player agency and truth-in-the-world along the anti-blorbo line, adapting my DM'ing to 2d20 is a shift.

I have on my shelves 2d20 Homeworld, Star Trek Adventures: Klingon Empire and a ton of pdfs for 2d20 Conan and standard Star Trek Adventures from bundles - all of these I have read through but still ran up against a few things while playing that I am going to put here, a breadcrumb trail for those who come after.

Complications

The biggest trick so far has been calibrating complications or "what to do with the doom pool". I was having some challenges callibrating between 'spend some doom, make some random stuff up' and 'doom has no effect' - trying to hit that sweet spot of doom being consequential but to a somewhat known level. The goal here is that players can see the doom pool ticking up and have some idea of how bad that it. Doom of 4-5 could get a bit hairy but probably handleable. Doom north of 20 is time to abandon this enterprise and just start running.

First, I initially missed that reactions all incur Doom - if you dodge or parry incoming attacks, the GM gets doom points. This is in on top of 'complications' from natural 20's which can be converted to 2 doom or the players giving doom to achieve rolls. This builds the doom pool a lot faster than I initially thought.

Spending doom when there are active foes in play always made sense to me, soak their wounds, add more foes, etc. The bit I was unclear on was calibrating how complicated a complication should be - how to play it out mechanically which was ambiguous even after reading the various rule books.

The first good guide was the 'minor epiphany' Gebir had the grace to post as a comment on the Modiphius forum which exactly answered my question on how impactful complications were supposed to be: "2 Doom or 2# [stress] damage + Effect or D2 Minor Action to Clear". This was the rosetta stone I needed.

There was a great list of example complications posted by Feond on a different thread.

There was also a recommendation for taking a post by The Walking Mind on Risks for FATE but considering it as applicable to 2d20 complications in the sense of what opposes what - for a scene about pursuit, complications can be delay, for one about stealth, complications are being revealed, etc.

General Summaries - this character generator cooked up by Mariano Cavallo is very helpful for quickly getting started, next was the website for The Scrolls of Erathius - just seeing what explainers, cheat-sheets and downloads they thought necessary was a great guide on what comes up a lot and what is unclear.

Session timing - I lost my source but another top tip for trying to time these sessions was to plan ~ 30 mins per scene. The 2d20 style of moving from 'action to action' contrasts with the slightly more wandering around, flexing hexcrawl and encounter tables I have been doing lately, so definitely out of my comfort zone and good to get a frame to think about it.

Intros - another neat tip I got that I think helpful for framing things was to ask players to describe introduce their characters as if for the opening credit sequence of the TV show. Was sufficiently different to other 'describe how you appear in this tavern' intros that it resets expectations.

Campaign So Far

I have been running things as close to RAW as I understand for now, but I am also aware of some modifications from later 2d20 such as having additional d20s beyond the first bought with momentum cost more or be otherwise restricted. Thus far players have been relatively frugal shepherds of their momentum and have not been getting into many fights so doom pools have not been exploding such that I can throw lots of complications at them yet.

In a similar vein, players are proving very conscious of when a scene will end and sap their momentum pool.

The main instance of complications off a rolled 20 was a busted stealth attempt; attempting to be unobtrusive got unlucky and spotted by just the wrong person - consequences may be long term.

d30 Entertainingly Weird Guests

Inspired by @prokopetz making the point that "hospitality was a major part of a wealthy household’s basic social obligations" and "at any given time, a large household might be playing host to a bewildering assortment of friends, relatives, friends of relatives, relatives of friends, celebrities both far-ranging and local, dignitaries, con artists, miscellaneous weirdos, and that one guy who nobody can quite place" so that "you’re missing an opportunity if you never talk about the Guests" here are some entertainingly weird guests that can be hanging around your nobles court or castle - or wizards tower, if they are hospitable, roadside inns while they are travelling or the hostelries of a city in a pinch.

d30 Entertainingly Weird Guests
1. Latest playwright, needing inspiration. Slightly desperate to repeat crushing success of recent efforts.
2. Cultural tastemaker hiding from supplicants.
3. Clique of artists.
4. Poets come to attend on the host, their muse. Swing between wild revels and sighing melancholy.
5. Host leading a cultural moment of artists, writers, poets and designers. Other guests liable to be sketched, painted and rendered in prose, verse and song.
6. Illusionist, playful. Noone is clear anymore on exactly how many people are here.
7. Conjurer, practicing. Strange things appear and vanish with flashes and bangs at mysterious times.
8. Planar scholar. Has travelled far to peruse the hosts library and study the details in the background of the family paintings.
9. Visitors from beyond. Almost entirely hidden within high-collared clothes and elaborate wigs. Fascinated by everything, talks to the pot-plants, tastes the fire-irons.
10. Young noble on wandering year. Significant power and responsibility waiting at home, does not want to think about it.

Home campaign Bard plus pal during her wandering years, by The Bard

Shiny TTRPG links #245

Things I found interesting over this last week online. For more, see last weeks collection found here or on the weekly r/OSR blogroll or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.

Swan and Raven Studio hosts the HELLO//GOODBYE Charity Bundle for Legal Aid

@molomoot gives us Crossword Dungeons

Sly Flourish shares Go Easy On Yourself

Blog of Forlorn Encystment writes Warring Guilds and Rogue Assassins Plague the Streets of AD&D

Dungeons & Possums shares Things to Support With Your #$%* Disney Money

d4 Caltrops gives us d100 - “Bottle Episodes" - Seafaring Scenes & Situations

What a Horrible Night to Have a Curse... asks Are You Missing the Forest for the Trees? Plant an Orchard.

The Wondering Monster writes How to Help Your Players Investigate Rumors in an OSR Campaign

Arcane Mutterings gives us The Gap in TTRPG Culture

Smoldering Wizard shares Musings on the OSR Blogosphere and Forums

Review: Hyena Child

tl:dr; a city sandbox with a grounded feel, packed full of hooks, sites and factions to sustain a good chunk of play.

I grabbed this in the last days of Planet Harry's, spotting that it was by Gazerpress, a local RPG shop here in Vienna that I had been on the lookout for. It got brought home and admired but not brought to table until I met the writer at the recent Indie RPG Con which prompted me to pick it up again with a focus on bring it to play - and reading at the level of detail a review requires. I liked it on first impression and after reading it in detail, that has changed to I like it a lot.

Looks wise this is a gorgeous chunky A5 hardback, distinctive black-and-orange, two ribbons, black and white watercolour art by Marianne Musek throughout plus maps by Markus Schauta. Within the text is all double column per page, overall the layout and artwork are great, giving us a clean, clear, uncluttered book. Statted up for Lamentations of the Flame Princess, relatively light mechanical ties throughout mean you can easily adjust to whatever your system of choice is.

So what is do you get in the book?
Introduction 33 pages on Alexandria circa 1632
The Adventures 62 pages with five adventures
The Dungeon 81 pages on the catacombs beneath Alexandria
Appendices 23 pages of factions, rumours, encounters and items

So what is in here chunk by chunk?

Actual Test: Murkmail Mixed Hexes Technique

Murkmail had a cool idea for hex/sub-hex encounter tables - Mixing hexcrawl encounter tables and I gave it a spin as part of Hexcrawl25.

I used it in a case where I had three influences in play - a chaos cult of shaven-headed snatchers who had been kidnapping locals and travellers, the local raccoon population and the beasts of the forest.

There was some adjustment required because the Hexcrawl25 set-up I am using is pointy side up and Murkmail uses flat side up but I was able to muscle through that and fit the cultists (yellow), raccoons (blue) and forest beasts (pink) into the format.

Splitting down the 19 sub-hexes into 7/7/5 was helpful as a concentrator - I was able to use my 'five things a faction is doing' for both the raccoons and the cult - then throw in a few points of mutual interference. After that the forest beasts and provided opportunity to showcase terrain hazards and then throw in some monsters too. I had an existing general monsters encounters list that was usually getting superseded by hex-specific encounters, this provided a good opportunity to refocus on that.

Re-written into Murkmails format