Shiny TTRPG links #287

Another deep time collection - links posted on various discords as recommendations when the topic came up. Taking this 'stands the test of time' aspect as a quality filter, here they are.

For more, see last weeks collection found here or on the weekly r/OSR blogroll or check the RPG Blog Carnival.

Rise Up Comus posted A Campaign Where There is One of Anything

TRAIPSE wrote 1, 10, or 1000000

Save.vs. Total Party Kill gave us The Monster

Necropraxis shared Sui generia

modified with the approval of creator Evlyn Moreau

DIY & dragons wrote 8 Abilities - 6, 3, or 4 Ability Scores?

@SprintingOwlGameDesigns gave us TRPGs As Terrariums For Blorbos

The-Magic-Sword on EnWorld shared Thinking About the Purpose of Mechanics from a Neo-Trad Perspective

JDCSpot Run posted Old RPG Gamers and The Streaming Youth - From a Dark Forest

u/jimbaby on r/DnD wrote My friends and I have something called "Knife Theory"

Idraluna Archives gave us A Tutorial for Making Hexcrawl Maps in QGIS

The Tea-Set of Civility shared Veins of The Earthjammer

Bernie the Flumph posted Carousing and Philanthropy

Against The Wicked City gave us When all you have is a hammer: item-based problem-solving in OSR D&D

Bones of Contention shared Grave Trespass - Jim Henson's Labyrinth: The Adventure Game

Traverse Fantasy posted FAQ U: What is a Blorbo?

False Machine wrote Held Kinetic Energy in Old School Combat Arenas

Rise Up Comus gave us Steal this rule microblog: "How do you vanquish this foe?"

Ten Foot Polemic shared TFP DMG: How I Use Skills

Was It Likely? posted your system’s not the game it’s just a player

The Great Game wrote My top 10 Dungeons and Dragons adventures of all time

d4 Caltrops gave us d100 - Methods of Magical Item Identification

Eldritch Fields shared Wilderness Encounter Details/Activities

Hill Cantons posted Fantasy F*ckin' Vietnam

James Mendez Hodes wrote Orcs, Britons, and the Martial Race Myth, Part I: A Species Built for Racial Terror

A Knight at the Opera gave us I Don't Think I'm Going to Allow Elves to be Playable Anymore

Greyhawk Grognard shared Do you use gunpowder or not?

#City26 Slush Pile: Adventure potential of Hive-city RT-87

Inspired by Tabletop Curiosity Cabinet's slush pile post for #Dungeon23 below are a dozen or so ideas lying around in the setting.

So for #City26 what are the most fun adventure potential things I got? Why go near RT-87?

1. Swashbuckling heist-likes around the cyber-saurs used to train knights. Most iconic has to a "capture the runaway carnasaur" quest. Something that delves into the ogryn megasaur-wranglers subculture, the knight houses and their mecha-driving culture, the sacristans and their weird-tech, all of tied up in the core identity of the world. A missing carnasaur with a control-throne is something the Adeptus Mechanicus, cold traders and all sorts of wild and woolly groups will be trying to get their hands on ahead of the legitimate knight-house authorities.

2. Sniffing out corruption and sabotage in the dino processing cycle, in the hauling up of the big ships on the preposterous conveyor from where the shoreline now is, the Ogryn Wranglers bringing the dinosaurs through the Minotaur Slaughtermen and the cults going on there, with a big side order of Ministorum clergy and parades and processions followed by where the precious meat goes, how the bone gets reused, the oppressive demands of the Imperial tithe and everything that happens in that dino meat focus.

3. Counter-espionage and overwatch. This Knight-world is early exodus with Dark Age of Technology legacy - there is a fairly chunky strategic priority to keeping the the lathe of St. Simeon STC running and No one's sure the AdMech could take it over. A whole stack of different rungs going. There are reasons to tread tread carefully here, wanting to maintain the sacristans capabilities for their pdf gear repair yard and wanting to maintain the this place as a as a knight's repair dock or a repair dock for you know weird old gear. The small legitimate

4. Serve as guards for the hive recycling industry - where the scarcity of materials centers around the maglev rail heads, the rail guilds and merchant combines defending their monopolies on salvaging the ruins. Bandits try to prey on operations breaking up and hauling in of the abandoned outer hives, defending those trains against wasteland raiders, potentially punitive raids with houseguard groups - getting to see beastmen cavalry on cold ones - and all dealing with the really nasty environment out there.

5. Seek and destroy the second order consequences of hauling in and breaking-up the old hives - things lurking in the remnants, chaotic artifacts, Genestealer cultists - all things to be hunted down in the depths. In parallel the wealth of the salvage trade, the rare materials broken out of the hive-fragments, plus other plunder found on site and brought back. All of this hiding an illicit 'technology laundering' circuit that drops in forbiggen xeno- and dangerous archaeo-tech.

6. Spying and sneaking within the upper hive. The planning and lawfare loop, the high intrigue fiddling of studies and thumbs on the scales and the combing of data files and the forging of test reports and the redactions and the warping of history - all to try and swing the fate of the whole world between being dedicated as a Knight House or being ground under as a hiveworld.

7. Get drafted into planetary defense. As a semi-generalist world the place is prey for chaos, corsairs, etc. - so you've got the active sabotage loop of the ongoing fights against Chaos Raiders, Offworld Corsairs, all of that. The fading nuclear winter from the last raids, the planetary defence auspex trains, the ancient hive defence towers, the saboteurs and raiders.

8. Venture forth to untangle the ancient Exodite connection - dinosaurs, eldar - buried deep in the wilds. The cold trade is a deadly threat because they really do not want the Xenos poking their noses in. The Eldar are persona non grata here. However, there is a strong interest in market in exotic dino parts and shipping those off to people who are interested.

9. Dive into the beastman underground railroad. While bringing abhumans to this place of (relative) acceptance, the folk being inducted sparking friction with the "must be holier than holy" beastfolk imperial cults. Those cults are seeking to find the first abhuman saint, feed the Astra Telepathica Tithes for the Black Ships and support the Imperial tithe with beastfolk manpower - trading tolerance of horrific conditions for some manner of acceptance.

10. Manage the ferocity and collateral of the clash of faiths - abhumans trying to be holy-beyond-question to gain some shred of acceptance; with hair-trigger vigilance against heresy. The chaos and genestealer cults that lead to the ruination of the other planetary hives are being brutally hunted in the depths of the hive with a lot of collateral damage.

11. Quell abhuman/human tensions and root out the vilest abuses of the weakest as fanatical beastmen seeking to be blemishless in the eyes of the Emperor and the refugees filtering in from the ruins of the fallen hives all bitterly compete for places in the horrific bone-recovery work-camps.

12. Against-the-clock de-snagging of the endless shoring up of the concrete and stonework cityworks rotting in the ruined atmosphere. The building of bone form-works, the swarms of workers carrying plaskrete, the endless labor to maintain the structures.

13. Social intrigue and dirt tricks in the competition between the '1000 Shields' noble houses from the ruined hives, besmirched by the loss of their powerbases and the merchant costers running offworld military support and repair and refit for active Knight houses. Pride versus practicality.

14. Competition and kidnapping around the high-hive talent market where off-world power players seek to pluck up the 'knight-trainees' for whom no Knight awaits. Inquisitors, mercenaries, specialists and the ambitious of all flavours are looking to attract the right kind of attention.

15. Sneaking and skulduggery in the shadows of the technology trade. The black markets hiding beneath the legitimate repair and refurbishment trade or the artisanly crafted jetbikes and Imperial robots where the Sacristans sell the fruits of their carefully husbanded secrets.

Campaign Themes

I think a 'Administratum' themed campaign with the players running around as fixers trying to keep the show on the road could be fun, it aligns them to the mire of compromises made from the top down as everyone struggles to meet the Emperors Tithe - purge abhumans or retain their labour, stop hauling in hazardous bits of cult-infested hives or go without scarce raw materials, etc.

Shiny TTRPG links #286

A deep time collection - links posted on various discords as recommendations when the topic came up. Taking this as the 'stands the test of time' quality filter, here they are.

For more, see last weeks collection found here or on the weekly r/OSR blogroll or check the RPG Blog Carnival.

modified with the approval of creator Evlyn Moreau

One Man and his Dice gives us The Secret Brilliance of The Black Hack

A Knight at the Opera gives us Not All Crunch Is the Same

Wampus Country gives us An Entire Post About Hats

d4 Caltrops gives us Dolmenwood Dozen

Troy Press gives us RPG Session Prep Techniques

Troy Press gives us Dungeon Prep

DIY & dragons gives us Dungeon Alphabet Dozen - M is also for MAPS

Superhero Necromancer wrote The Great Dungeon Caper

Superhero Necromancer gives us The Heist Clock

Glorb's 11 Foot Ladder gives us Save to Avoid Bad Stuff: Proper Saving Throw Usage

Hack & Slash gives us On Abstraction and Saving Throws

The Marquisat gives us Exploring Characters pt.5: Saves

BEARDED DEVIL gives us How I Run a Citycrawl Campaign

Necropraxis gives us Solipsistic hexes

Necropraxis gives us Hazard System v0.3

The Retired Adventurer gives us The Encounter Grid: Six Years Out

Eldritch Fields gives us Six Grasslands Lairs/Encounters

Eldritch Fields gives us Quick humanoid lair generator for wilderness stocking

Eldritch Fields gives us Wilderness Encounter Details/Activities

d20 careless archmage devastations

Pondering arch-mages again, on the lines of 'what do you do when you get total control of reality' - previous I wrote on their goals, the status flexes of individuals beyond want. Now I have been pondering what kind of casual horrors they inflict on those around them through sheer carelessness and self-absorption without any accountability and way too much agency.

d20 regional impacts of careless archmages

1. their tower is absolutely crammed with automata who spend more time going "excuse me" and attempting to work around each other with their countermanding orders because nobody has priority. Nothing gets done and the wizard's idea is then "well nothing's getting done, I must add more automata obviously". They are overworked and so the cycle has worked itself into a teeming hive of jammed up autonomous automata. The entire place is a sink for magical energies and ores and dwarvish engineering. The dwarves love it. The gnomes dislike it, but view it as better the gold is in their hands than in that lunatic wizard's.

2. An entirely illusory tower where it appears to be absolutely fantastic but people keep dying because the guests are in fact exposed to the elements even where the illusion appear they are sheltered. The illusions are impeccable and very well supported but the wizard himself having a couple of rings of elemental endurance fails to recognize this is the problem.

3. Classic hybridization, chimerization program where they have simply too much time and industry and attempt to make the perfect fill-in-the-blank and of course have a whole bunch of misbegotten failed experiments roaming the countryside.

4. The giant churning forge where the wizard was incensed at local craftsmen's temerity has spent a significant amount of time rendering them all obsolete and has flooded everything around with okay smith goods equivalen. Only okay is good enough for most people and the remaining demand for quality is insufficient to sustain a population of skilled craftsmen and it is now becoming absolutely impossible to get decent gear anywhere around here to the point that the king is worried that his military forces are unready.

5. The wizard has created a library of old knowledge clones of himself that wander the realms answering questions. These questions are just wrong based on a hasty stitching together of factoids from a set of raiders that destroyed all the local libraries

6. A wizard has stolen all the groundwater for water elementals to guard their tower and also run their fancy fountains because they are from a coastal nation and they're feeling homesick.

7. Stole all the groundwater because they are attempting to fill an ocean within their own private demi-plane. This is the only way that they can get the authentic flavor of their local spring water.

8. Stole all the groundwater because a local dryad refused to take up with them on the basis that they're simply a heinous individual.

9. Devastated all the local forests by casting a summon woodlands spell and then marching off to battle with another wizard and getting the entire forest either killed in battle or stranded in a desert to eventually die.

10. Devastated the local locality by diverting a river to create enough ice for their new hobby of ice crafting.

11. ruined the local ecology by continuously summoning storms to their local mountain top tower and creating a freakish rain shadow across a continent, a series of storm attracting lightning rods marches across the landscape.

12. A badly thought out but highly effective mine has been digging away. Elements have collapsed and flooded twice now. However, the internal mine protocols were have been clever enough to keep them in operation, but not clever enough to recognize the damage that they're doing.

13. Created an artificial god from whole cloth to prove it could be done by importing a large amount of koa-toa and embarking on a generations-long social engineering project.

14. an attempt to win a bet with another wizard has resulted in the excavation of a truly colossal marine trench that has allowed huge ocean predators to come much closer inshore than they normally can. The local cliffs act as something like a salt lick to these monsters and they have been slowly eroding the ground with their activities.

15. A failed attempt at trying a pillar of flame wizard's tower has been abandoned. Said tower has ignited fires across most of the local landscape and rendered everything to an ashy wasteland the the tower itself has since gone out for want of fuel.

16. An attempt to resolve a wrong-headed argument about the nature of the cosmos has created a portal to a nightmare realm from which spews ceaseless nightmares. The wizard is long dead, no longer capable of regretting his folly, and yet the nightmares persist.

17. An illusionist attempting to demonstrate the superiority of their craft has microcosm where nothing is real or to be trusted. They all craft work within a certain region has a half chance of being simply illusionary.

18. in an attempt to make an easy access to his local thing, this wizard has created an unstable set of portal networks which allow weird migratory behaviors. The local wildlife have adapted. There is now an entire cohort and subspecies of migratory beasts that use the portals for their seasonal wanderings. The nearby ecosystems have been altered by this. However, they have stabilized into a new equilibrium, which is in fact working perfectly well, but it is not entirely native.

19. A wizard has released bunch of servitors to improve the local ecosystem and this is an ongoing forced evolution cautionary tale showcase. Every fix needs another fix. It is in fact a a glorious endorsement of the foolishness of messing with nature when you don't really understand what you're doing.

20. They have released monsters because they like the sounds they make and because they are no threat to the wizard they do not account that these things are deathly dangerous to 99% of the rest of the population

Shiny TTRPG links #285

More links from about the internet - for still more, check out the huge set from the previous list found here or the weekly r/OSR blogroll or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Bloggie-nominated. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch, delinked by request.

AMONG CATS AND BOOKS shares rootring months later

Goblin Archives, Unenthuser & Emo Sludge host LIMINAL HORROR SUMMER JAM 2026

Weeping Stag gives us Learning to Draw and Not Feeling Like Crap About It

Troy Press writes Participating in Blaugust 2026

Empire of Crust gives us On the Cancer of Creation for Others

Sultan's Musings posts Pirate Chill

Huovila, Hiski gives us Telegraphed Dangers — Enemy Intercompatibility in D20-Based Fantasy OSR Tabletop Roleplaying Games

@rxsesroots shares Boo! Did I Scare Ya..?

Campaign Mastery posts Worldbuilding Through Encounters

Bommyknocker Press writes High Level Play and Scaffolding

Insurers estimate of the population of gamers

In my quest to find data points on how many D&D players there are out there I stumbled upon this "The tabletop gamers’ survey" by Compare The Market - the general gist of which is "there are a lot of gamers out there, have you got insurance for all those out of print RPG books and precious, precious miniatures?" - which fair play, they are transparent in their angle in all of this, respect the hustle and so on.

They do give us some interesting insight with a 3000 person survey equally split across the US, Canada and Australia - finding that ~ 30% of US and Canadians (about half that for Australia) play or played tabletop games and the most popular of those games in every case was Dungeons and Dragons.

Their focus was a little unusual because it was about the physical stuff - with questions like 'I play, but I always borrowed minis' - more than whether people were current or lapsed players. If we bucket it all together as 'how many folk ever played D&D - now or in the past' we can compared to other sources and build some confidence in our understanding of what is going on.

Taking all the answers on whether folk ever played and collected a tabletop-roleplaying game or wargame we get
US - 29%
Canada - 32%
Australia - 16%

The found D&D was the most popular tabletop RPG or Wargame in each country and that combining all the survey results gave 32% of respondants selecting it. I do not think we can assume a flat ratio across the three countries and say therefore we have a thid of each survey response group saying they play or have played D&D - ~10% of all surveyed folk for US/Canada, ~5% for Australia.

There is a bit of a range in there - I spitballed back in 2022 that there might be ~33-43 million USA "fans" based on assumptions M.T. Black made on trends from WotCs 2020 claim of "over 40 million fans around the world." Recognising there was a daisy-chain of assumptions in there, it translates to 9-13% of USA folk being fans. Coming in the same ballpark but still a pretty wide range.

Recognising there is fuzz in there, I think "about one-in-eight folk in the US play or have played D&D" feels more plausible than the high-ball "about one-in-three have".

There are other bits and pieces like Cyberpunk and Call of Cthulu also being mentioned in there but given that we have no other sources for even as rough an analysis as this for those games, there is nothing I can do with those.

Sources

2026 Survey by Researchscape (N = 1253)

2025 The tabletop gamers’ survey (N = 3035)

2022 Survey by Researchscape (N = 1074)

2019 Survey by Researchscape (N = 942)

2000 Adventure Game Industry Market Research Summary (RPGs) V1.0 (N = "about a thousand")

Shiny TTRPG links #284

A lighter set of links as I was travelling - but for more, check out the huge set from the previous list found here or the weekly r/OSR blogroll or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Bloggie-nominated. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch, delinked by request.

The Nothic's Eye launches G L Å U G U S T 2 0 2 6

Sundered Shields and Silver Shillings writes Do every challenge in 500 words or less: an elaboration

Dank Dungeons hosts Appx. N Jam 2026

Sea of Stars posts Beginning this month’s RPG Blog Carnival – Small Gods, Saints, and other minor divinities

Advantage on Arcana writes June 2026 RPG Blog Carnival Round-up: Cyclopes, Ettins, Hill Giants, and Ogres

Casting Shadows shares #RPGaDAY2026 starts August 1st

Root Devil posts Use Tracing Paper

Ill Met by Morrslieb writes The Philosophy of Symbaroum

Writing my Odd Game gives us Combat as Failstate

Fail Forward shares Combat as Art - Boss Design and Reflections on Violence

Valeria Loves posts People Walk Too Fast

Capsule Reviews #10: Kala Mandala Zines

I grabbed the set of Kala Mandala zines after the Hey Centaur shop went online. These are great zines of the old school OSR glory days - easily earning their shelf space beside any of the greats. We get a great setting in the Playbook and two Art Research zines, further expanded by three juicy adventures - all site exploration with a twist for each.

Six books existing in the core set at time of writing:
Kala Mandala Playbook - 42 pages, system
Stirring the Hornets Nest at Het Thamsya - 26 pages, adventure
Deluge at Drizzle Distillery - 42 pages, adventure
Tragedy at Zaya's Theatre - 26 pages, adventure
Earthly Beings - 38 pages, gazetteer
Heavenly Bodies - 38 pages, gazetteer

Plus the Paper Minis set. As a whole this is the character generation and system in the playbook, three adventures (Het Thamsya, Drizzle Distillery and Zaya's Theatre) and two world-books/gazetteers (Earthly Beings and Heavenly Bodies)

I did have a minor logistics issue in that I ordered the stickers collection and got a second playbook - strictly this has worked in my benefit because the playbook is a touch more expensive than the stickers. From a point of view of trying to get Kala Mandala to table, having a second playbook might end up being more helpful. So I am going to call it a wash, all to the good.

July 2026 RPG Blog Carnival: Small Gods, Saints and minor divinity!

Welcome to the new month for the RPG Blog Carnival - our topic for July 2026 is "Small Gods, Saints and minor divinity!" You can find some deeper background on the RPG Blog Carnival on 'of Dice and Dragons'. Write what you like around the prompt or see the suggestions below. This month, hosting is being shared with Sea of Stars - see their launch post for yet more inspirational ideas.

If you want to join the carnival, write up your own entry and post it in a comment below, send me a link (my username at gmail.com) or ping me on the 'blog-carnival' OSR discord channel or find me bluesky or mastodon. I will gather all the participants into a wrap-up post on August 8th.

For d6 prompts:
1. Talk about how your divine magic system works e.g. Who hears your oath?
2. Describe some of the minor divinities e.g. d14 small gods of the animal-lings
3. Share some shrines or locations e.g. d6 Sites of the Long Wars
4. Tell of aspects of the divine e.g. d8 natures of this quasi-godlike entity
5. Write up a specific god or saint e.g. Small god: Lady Deephome
6. Describe a faction or cult e.g. Commission for the ethical sourcing of construct souls

For my own take, I wanted to revamp my house rules from Who hears your oath? - d100 roll under your level, +10 per factor in your favour.

Shiny TTRPG links #283

A lighter set of links as I was travelling - but for more, check out the huge set from the previous list found here or the weekly r/OSR blogroll or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Bloggie-nominated. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch, delinked by request.

On a housekeeping announcement, for the rest of this year, I am shifting down to a Shiny Links + one post per week schedule (Saturdays) for burnout avoidance. We will see how things look as we approach 2027 on keeping/reverting.

Pikliz Dungeon writes The Black Hack 10th Anniversary Game Jam

The Lich's Library gives us Prepping for the next level of a Megadungeon!

Traveler's Rest shares Generating Elevation in a Hexcrawl

The Other Side blog posts BECMI Binders

RPGTrader writes Free RPG Day 2026 Bundle

Rise Up Comus gives us The Secret History of The Castle Automatic

Billhook Blog shares Your Favorite Game (You Haven't Played Yet)

Crow’s Corner posts Table-Tested Review of the “Fomoria” Quickstart

Patchwork Paladin writes Playing the Social Game

AMONG CATS AND BOOKS pens Cultures, not Games

False Machine gives us A Review of Forgotten Realms; Underdark

shifty louts writes Another Reflection on Writing for the Antarctica Jam

#City26 Mid-Year Status

At the mid-point of the year, asking how the #City26 challenge is coming along. On a pure stats, it is not bad - --% of total hex-count for the year achieved with 50% of the time gone. I have not gotten any of this to table but it has proved a nice distraction during travel of all things. Recall the 'rhythm' of the weekly tasks of this challenge with this guide from Pete of Garblag Games. So far I have been all over the place - I tend to do these as one ward in a sitting, with time in between spent considering what might be the 'killer hooks' for incomplete wards so I can just sit down and write when I come to it.

Infographic of City26 Challenge by Peter Lattimore

Anyway, in my 'keep me honest' progress tracker stats:
Progress: 36/52 wards completed
Completion vs target: 69% vs 50% target
Population covered: 76%

Inspirations

A touchstone for all this has been "What is life like on a Hive world?" which has been very helpful to divvy out the fractions of who lives in what conditions across the Upper, Mid and Lower parts of the Hive.

Pure inspiration has been these gorgeous old-school Knight Lancers that I recall from back in the day, in particular this amazing upscaled version someone worked up. These are the few actual Knights that underpin the worlds raison d'etre.

Those of course must be accompanied by dino-riding cavalry - these folk are also the primary Law Enforcers within Hive-RT87

Support will come from beastfolk Imperial Guards all in keeping with the oldest lore.

In parallel I have been reading the Warhammer Crime novels to get that sense of the day-to-day, building on previous reading of the Eisenhorn and Ravenor books and a lifetime marinading in 40k lore.

The City - Hive RT-87 Rejoicing Torch

Spires

Knights Martial - planetary nobles, house-keeps, bristling defences, boulevards scaled to knight-parades

Upper Hive

College of Heralds - lineage and inheritance lore-keepers, world use litigation, duel ajudication
Adeptus Munitorium - perpetually swamped in comparative weapons studies as factions scuffle to direct the worlds production
1000 Shields (Knight seneschals, fled nobles, fallen quality) - those with means who fled the fallen nearby hives

Upper Mid Hive

Hive defence fire control (knight-vassals) - seat of the atomantic lances defence web
All Hands (Abhuman efficiency bureau) – talent bazaar; clearing house for mercenaries and all sorts
Infernal cannon maintenance (sarcristans) - most secure workshops of the sacristans maintaining the near lost technologies of the defence web
Optical Masters - Admech Lens Crafters make high performance optics from abundant clay while agitating to make ever bigger laser ones
Central Medicae - where man, beast and beastman are patched together to longer serve the Emperor
Megasaur Mastercrafts - artists and craftsfolk turn megasaur parts into finest luxuries for this world and export

Lower Mid Hive

Promethium works - refineries to process abundant feedstock into promethium
Jet Bike lines - Sacristans hand-craft near-forgotten technologies - jetbikes, imperial robots
Mustering grounds / barracks - beastman regiments forming for onworld training, offworld service
Weapons factories (dispensated non metal) - armours, blades and other works that require as little metal as possible
Dino Servitorisation (mech) - megasaurs turned into industrial machinery
Stonework Specialists - fighting the sysphean fight to maintain the hive structure
Dinochrome - Carnosaur refit (sacristans) where megasaurs are turned into training-rigs and knights-in-waiting prove themselves
Ogryn quarter - dino-wranglers, source of dino-run labour & gangs from 'dead' wasteland ranches
Cold-one scout regiments - house guards, order enforcement, wasteland scouts, Adept. Arbites enclave
The Sieves - ministorum and astra telepathica winnow the population, sifting psykers and heretics out of the workforce
Dino stockyards - minotaur butcherguilds slaughter the megasaur herds that arrive by the shipload
Metal reclamation - hive-breaker yards recycling ruined cities from inland
Knight-parts - macromanufactories; knights and armoured trains, refurbishment facilities for offworld houses
Transhipment hub - focus of the intra-continental maglev lines bringing chunks of abandoned hives in and exporting to the starport
Ministorum - local strains on fanatical abhumans seeking to prove themselves worthy of the God-Emperor through acts of faith
Railheads - the giant rail bringing dinosaur-ships from the southern continents

Lower Hive - description


Bonecraft workcamps - grinding labor to handcarve parts from megasaur bones, squeezed by bone suppliers and predatory acceptance inspectors
Bone reclamation, corpse processing, fleshbees - post-butchery megasaur carcasses sent for scavenging
scalies in deeps + zombies by radioactive archaeotech - the hardiest of mutant survivors
Off-worlder ghetto - for those too strange to be taken by the workcamps, a hub of the cold-trade
Sumpside - abhuman underground railroad, coldtraders - where the paperless arrivals from starport, maglevs wind up
Redemptionists - fanatical beastfolk, eager to prove faith by cleansing with fire any hint of less perfect faith
old ways tribalists / beastman paleoculture - the caverns where the original colony landed hosts beastfolk who cling to the most ancient ways
Slums of the Lost (hives Polaris, FK91) - refugees from the broken hives to sorry or unfortunate to claw into the lower-mid hives
ogryn tallow-works - where worn out ogryns make pilgrimage to be turned into sacred candles
extraction bay slums - clinging beneath the maglevs, above the reactor wastes, but close to patrolled zones above. Safer, not safe.

All told this ccounts for some 3.5 billion souls - out of the 4.6 in the city as a whole. Any one of those wards could be a whole world of adventure to itself.

Round-up of City26 posts

City '26 Launch - outlines the rules of the challenge and my goals to create a hivecity of the old school.

Hive RT-87 Rejoicing Torch - general info + example ward (City26) - gives some layout for the whole hive and delves into the Carnosaur Refit Works - known locally as Dinochrome.

Incentivising challenges with tactility (City26) - talks about the process and about how recycling old boarding passes keeps it interesting and focussed.

Evolving city surroundings (City26) talks about the world emerging around the hive.

Piling high the burdens of ruling #City26 - some historical and high politics background and d20 Reasons Lord Mawcambeth Has An Ulcer.

Dredging old adventures for a campaign #City26 takes a diversion into various megacity adventures for different systems seeking a tone match.

31 40k Hivecity NPCs for #City26 pulls together a selection that represents some of the more interesting adventures hooks walking around the hive.

Getting to City adventures in 26

So far, with a good fraction of the challenge done, the trick ahead is going to be pulling this to table in some form. I need to decide a system, pick which are the most interesting adventures to run - there are campaigns worth of adventure in here unpicking all the knots - and I have a decent idea for a starter one.

With a bit of luck I can get it hacked together, lure some test subjects to an... Imperium Maledictum? Dark Heresy?... table and set them loose. Tempted as I am to roll with Chapter Serf or Warpstar! I think I will stick to the mainline system for just now to give good template adventures to work off while I figure out how to run them myself.

Worms in the deeps (Extremely Byzantine 5-Room Dungeon Jam)

Slothyyyyyyy hosts the Extremely Byzantine 5-Room Dungeon Jam and this is my ashcan entry. I am using an 'out-take' from the d24 woodworm dungeons set. https://itch.io/jam/byzantine-5-room-dungeons.

This is the lair of hiver-bugs - a parasite/predator of insectfolk (see Deep Time Monster Groups and Culture of the insectfolk - Beetlescale) - gnawed deep into the roots of mountains. Trapped within for a very long time, chaos on the surface has finally unmanned the watch-posts and seen the seals broken.

These things are the vampire analogs from a time when everything had exoskeletons and their crushing jaws are their adaption. They are tough, swift and dangerous in melee with pheremonic 'charm' equivalent, and a penchant for whole innards, not just blood. They believe themselves the last 'real' people left alive amidst these disgusting, swarming mammals. Below is a typical lair of theirs, chewed from the bowels of the earth over aeons.

1. Chasm of Echos - screams and cries of historical events reverberate from the deeps as one clambers aound it along perilous ledges
1. - calls for help, lost
2. - clash of battle
3. - screams of ambushed
4. - buzz of hivers flying
5. - tramp of marching feet
6. - crunching of chitin being crushed in the maws of hiverbugs

2. Cavern of Shadows - phosphorescent, dim light
1. - shadows, insectfolk form
2. - bats
3. - illusion-hidden pits
4. - piercers
5. - ropers
6. - uneven-floor trip-hazards onto caltrop-like spiky flooring beyond

3. Labyrinth of Illusions (d6 per dungeon turn)
1. - maze of tunnels with rushing footsteps echoing
2. - charge of insectfolk thralls from illusory corridors entrances
3. - stalking small insectfolk, fire at range and flee
4. - loops with cloaked exit
5. - incredibly obvious trap - for those who do not perceive by sight
6. - lurking insectfolk guards - just propped up shells

4. dominated hives - thrall insect folk living vampiric dominance nightmare
1. - masses and masses of enthralled insectfolk laboring
2. - body-snatcher shrieks if strangers spotted
3. - insectfolk carrying a dead fellow on a ceremonial bier - large bite hole chewed through head
4. - fungal garden growing on dead insectfolk, spore clouds mildly poisonous, soporific
5. - insectfolk paying homage at statue of another bigger, sleeker insectfolk
6. - ceremonially garbed insectfolk choosing from crowd and daubing them with paint

5. myriad of misdirection - very dark, lots of carved statuary, hunting perches, ambush hollows
1. - swoop down from hunting perch, shove off ledge into gulley and follow, grappling
2. - echo-chittering from hollow statues, allows ambush from behind
3. - ambush hollow - statue facing one way, open at the back, snatch someone into opening, block visibility while fighting them
4. - stalking grilles - sneak in close, openings allow stab, domination effect, then withdraw
5. - recently dead insectfolk, chewed open and partially drained, lying in a line in a small grotto
6. - decorated chamber, illusion of gloating hiverbug atop plinth, monologues while real ones leap from niches above door

Notes: I initially had an idea for leaning into the weird and making each room its own byzantine process but decided that just made this whole thing a blogging gag not a useable piece of kit and chose against that. The room themes would have been:
Room 1 - Zocchi dice based encounter table
Room 2 - d1000 fibonnacci sequence
Room 3 - monster of variable properties
Room 4 - variable terrain effects
Room 5 - cross reference the results of all previous rooms to get the 'final boss'
Passages between rooms would have been portals of variable destination

Shiny TTRPG links #282

A colossal harvest of shiny links - a lot of folk getting extra inspired this past week! If you seek still more, see the previous list found here or the weekly r/OSR blogroll or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Bloggie-nominated. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch, delinked by request.

Dungeonfruit shares In Favor Of Repetition

slothyyyyyyy hosts posts Extremely Byzantine 5-Room Dungeon Jam

Gorgon Bones writes Guest Post: There's No Crying in Elfgames

MurkMail shares How many words should we use?

afcbrodie posts Of Randomisation and Responsibility

All Dead Generations posts The Tyrant's Hand

Trick's Tales writes Lore and Factions of the Endless Plains (For a Game About the Mongolian Empire)

Beau Rancourt Writings gives us On Difficulty

dungeon doll shares od&d combat maneuvers

Bruce Heard posts Pain, Exhaustion, and Morale in D&D BECMI

Throne of Salt writes Language Dungeon Spitballing

Swan And Raven Studio gives us Make A Manifesto, Damn You

For Want of a Silver Bullet writes Why You Should Write Your Games To Be Played At Conventions

Lonely Star posts Lessons from the trad trenches, or How to structure a scenario

Gorgon Bones writes Bugbear June

Snakebite gives us Worldbuilding only matters if the Mechanics Support the World

Richard's Dystopian Pokeverse shares How I read “theory”

In Favor Of Repetition

Standing up from my last campaign my players said something that I was not sure should I feel hurt by - that my last couple of campaigns had the same feel. I thought I ran some fairly different things
- Brancalonia
- Spelljammer
- Hexcrawl25 But I wonder if they feel the same because these players have other very different GMs to compare against so the innate similarities of my DM style overwhelmed all other differences? I ran them differently enough to my own perceptions that I got three completely different things out of them but I guess I must reuse parts more than I thought...

At this point I am old and ugly enough to recognise the wisdom of not attempting to make everything unique. "Just Use Bears" is a load-bearing stone on my own personal journey to wisdom.

In the interest of being honest, there are certainly things I reuse
- the campaign world / lore - I have a small handful of players who have popped up in more than one campaign who then recognize some of the tales of the hazards below them or have run into aspects of factions in other guises faraway. This I think is the best kind of repetition, the rest just make my life easier.
- menagerie world / kaleidoscope species - at this point the utility of this 'universal socket' world for open table gaming has been proven and reproven. Variety in the d100 NPC species table that makes "Sword Coast Diversity" look like a klan rally in comparison. Want to be some odd species? No problem, noone even looks sideways at you. Talking goose? Can do.
- opportunity to think around obstacles / no-roll success for good ideas - tell me your sufficiently cunning and creative plan and I'll be happy to say you just succeed.
- one-shot framework (Splinters, Brancalonia) - Brancalonia was 'the money's been drunk, the booze is run out, your patron/landlord has a job for you' with a side order of 'I am assured the dragon is dead this time'. For Splinters it was 'hop through this portal, fetch that bit of wood we need for our ritual' - both worked well to get things rolling.

Within campaigns, but not across them I guess repetition is a motif as well
- For Spelljammer, ship deck plans came up again and again, where most other combats usually happen on some different backing, the fact that of course a fight involving your ship means you break out the same deckplan gets really noticeable after a while.
- NPCs (as per adventure threading) - within a campaign I try to reuse the cast, I have snuck in a mention or two of NPCs from one campaign to another but the differences in tone have never really made 'guest appearances' make much sense.

To return to the specific point of my blogwagon comrades, there are typically four types of dungeon - reliably abandoned and dangerous structures - in menagerie world (on the continent everything has happened on so far) drawn from great buried hazard-strata from the continental history
- ruined temples from the cult purge a few decades back - these are for unquiet spirits, undead, bloody rituals and cults. Shallowly buried threats being dug up by fanatics.
- fortified shrines of the predator queens many hundreds of years ago. There are for running into the petty gods, hideous artefacts, and determined relic hunters looking for war-winning weapons.
- bunkers and fortresses from the first dwarven empires war against the Final Star many thousands of years ago. These are sections of the Apocalypse Archive; for the spooky tense 'this is not a place of honour' crawls through a place where something terrible obviously happened, with lots and lots of grim defenses pointed toward some as yet un-found horror.
- wizard towers abandoned by their masters at all points down the timeline. Wildcards, but always hazardous because wizards.


It bears repeating.


It bears repeating.


It bears repeating.


It bears repeating.


It bears repeating.


It bears repeating.

Campaign Retrospective: Realm of the Reluctant King (Hexcrawl25 )

Finally ran the last session for the main-line of the Hexcrawl25 campaign, so let us do a retrospective Against the Wicked City style since there were a lot of experimental practices running under the hood in this one.

Realm of the Reluctant King (Hexcrawl25), 28 Sessions (Jan 2025-May 2026)

What it was:

Actually a dual-mode campaign with persistent campaign and one-shot open tables running on the same map. 83% of sessions were the main campaign so we shall focus on that here. I will continue to use this as an easy frame for running one-shots.
- An experiment in bringing an old-school techniques to a typically '5e/Trad/one-shots' crowd.
- Pitched as a classic campaign testing a hexcrawl/west marches model where the players tell me what they want to do of a session.
- Running 5e but with old-school XP accrual - treasure recovery, monsters slain (or overcome/avoided), treasure squandered through carousing, hexes explored.
- Run when we had any three players; sometimes allowing a 'ride-along' open-table player

For completeness, the six adventures used for standalones in parallel were:
Waking of Willoughby Hall
Winters Daughter
Hole In The Oak
Home Reforged
Old Man Katan & Mushroom Band
Splinters: Land of the Dead

What worked:

Shiny TTRPG links #281

Shiny links, get your shiny links! If this rich harvest does not satisfy, see the previous list found here or the weekly r/OSR blogroll or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Bloggie-nominated. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch, delinked by request.

Null Mana Crystal posts Design Talk - Event Crawling

Submystical Aquifer writes OSR Wisdom Distilled

A shrike for my dreams shares Breaking a GM star pattern: d20 more ways

GLAIVE-GUISARME gives us Random Blogwagon: The Die

Valeria Loves writes Fail more, coward 🖤

Methods & Madness posts It is time to ditch the "good GM"

Wombat's Gaming Den of Iniquity writes On the Limits of Random Tables

Exploring Warhammer posts RIP John Blanche, Legend - Exploring Some His Key Early Art

Trick's Tales posts Some Mechanics (and Character Sheet!) for By the Will of Dusassu

MixUpPixels shares Vienna Playstorming: Report #1

Khajeet's tinkerings gives us A 2d20 Voluntary Non-binary Resolution Thing

Red for Roseline shares Archive, it’s important!

Explorers Design shares Dying from the 1 HP Dragon

How Ogres and the like show up in-world (RPG Blog Carnival)

Advantage on Arcana gives us this months prompt Cyclopes, Ettins, Hill Giants, and Ogres for the RPG Blog Carnival and asks that we come up with something that makes those named monsters more than varying sized bags of dumb, mean aggression.

In much the same was orcs, goblins, hobgoblins, and bugbears need a bit of work to distinguish between each other and that mostly being in how they show up in the game, you can take the same approach with these giant-kin. For the goblinkin, you get the more chaotic ones (orcs), ordered ones (hobgoblins), small sneaky ones (goblins) and big sneaky ones (bugbears) which is not bad but we can do better.

Some factors I have talked about before are lifespans - giants are around a long time - and the constant requirements for these big guys to fuel big frames with big feasts.

Thoughts on our candidates

Cyclopes I think are the easiest one because they are classically children of the gods and enmeshed in the whole divine court. Maybe they live a little bit out of the way, a big rustic dude with their own local business going on but one can always lean into the fact that they have big, weird cousins - gods and monsters both. Slay or grievously irritate a cyclops and you can be sure there will be consequences, probably coming down some strange route like the local god of revellry spoiling all wine in your presence.

They are quite long lived and have been part of this familial too-ing-and-fro-ing for all that time so one could see them as sources of odd lore and strange current gossip. They should be plugged into the local mythical environment in the same way hags are seen to be connected with the fey. Stewards of lore, begrudging or not, but part of it nonetheless. For Cyclopes, crack out your favourite bits of Greek mythology and have them be involved.

Ettins would be the ones, if any, I would leave as closest to the big, mean, simple aggressor. Less because they are dumb but because they are hamstrung by their two heads fighting themselves. An encounter with an Ettin is going to be like running into the angriest local pair of housemates, stuck together for a lifetime, wedged beneath each others skin, with their nerves already frayed to a hair-trigger.

One could play with each head having half-control of the body, or one being the reasonable and savvy one but it is the other ornery one in charge of their body. There is a struggle one can play with there to get around or gain cooperation from Ettins. Another aspect is the sleep-wake cycle, with the heads being offset and treasuring the short peace they get without the other. Sneak in and talk to one head without waking the other.

Next you run into the Hill Giants - and these have a persistent culture. They have like their place in the Ordning and they have plans. They have a permanent scheming underdog vibe. They perceive themselves to be the bottom of what they perceive as their of their peers and so they have to get up to schemes to try and redress that balance. They are also very active in pulling together other allies, dominating monsters and generally building forces in a way other giants do not tend to.

It would be reasonable to have a whole range of archaic courtesies and traditions come into play - no guest can be harmed at a feast, a host can ask a favour of any guest - etc. Classic fairy tale things fit well with giants. One could argue that this framework of tradition and practice might make hill giants much more capable as a group than their individual prowess might suggest. They fall into ancient traditional roles and things get done.

Giants in fairy tale had the original golden goose, a magic harp, and gifted things like magic swords, cloaks and boots - the hoard of magical treasures they like (the former) and cannot use (the latter) could be quite substantial. Quests for items known to be in the careless possession of giants could be a way for this to show up.

An alternate approach would be to say this makes them like goblins but much, much bigger. Take all of the chaos-mongery of goblins and just scale it up and say that is what hill giants are up to. All sorts of badly executed plans to make them equal to storm and cloud giants.

Another thing to play with is 'crewed' giants - hang some netting over their outfit and suddenly humans can climb on them, sit on their shoulder or the like much as a human could have a monkey. Keep a literal pocket sorcerer. Or have goblins or halflings - smaller again - with blowpipes or polearms, fighting their giant like sailors on ship. See the Temeraire books with crewed dragons for notions.

I always loved the old rule that cropped up in Dragon Magazine for AD&D that sufficiently strong things could overcome weapon immunities - specifically a werewolf or vampires immunity to non-magical damage could get overcome by a giant walloping them with a sufficiently large tree. I found that a nice expression of how giants are operating on a different scale.

Lastly we have Ogres - similar to hill giants in that they are often found in groups and ogre clans and warbands are a typical thing. You can run ogres with the werewolf rule - the problem is not so much the one ogre you can see, but all of their pals that are out there. There is good inspiration for such ogres in wargame mini collections from Warhammer through to Confrontation or any of the other miniature ranges. You can tweak these off 'mean, mindless aggression' towards cunning raiders, perhaps light on the grand strategy but more than good enough on tactics that use their brute force advantage.

Another possible angle to take with Ogres is them being the offshout of humanity that is being slowly outcompeted by their smaller, nimbler cousins - like being driven to extinction by halflings. This is how Ogres view the humans they keep running across, chasing them off good hunting grounds, boxing them out of forests and fields and generally assaulting them for the minor crimes of snatching up people and lifestock for the pot. Ogres are living in a world of permanent lean times from their perspective - where once there was rich hunting and gathering, now they are facing a swarming apocalypse.

One thing that often comes through with Ogres is getting mixed up with cults, worship of dark gods and/or a susceptibility to mutation and corruption. Whether driven by a hunger for personal power or a heedlessness of consequences does not matter, those various fonts of grim power form anchors for groups of ogres.

I like Warhammer Chaos Ogres as a good, scary example of what Ogres can be. Wargame ogres also seem to have an affinity for hand-carried plundered cannon, make of that what you will.

How they turn up

Cyclops and Ettins are both going to be relatively solitary and out in the wilderness. Ettins are just barely getting by, trying to cope with living with themselves and are just unfortunate to run into. Cyclops know and are part of things around them - living their rustic life, occassionally hosting visits from the range of their kin, dealing with prophecies, tutoring demigods and the like.

Hill giants can be the solitary giants of fairy tale, beholden to ancient conventions and being about almost incomprehensible traditions or they can show up as the communities that follow the Ordning, occupy fortresses from times long past, and scheme and plot for power to force their larger cousins to respect them. Their hoards and homes might be the focus of some adventures, with the goal being to avoid the giants themselves entirely.

Ogres also turn up communally, either in the more typical solitary brute among a group of other monsters or as part of a warband, raiding and plundering. They are going to be the most angrily aware of humanity, viewing them as a dangerous, invasive pest. Among all these giant-kin, the ones you are are most likely to encounter coming at you proactively will be Ogres, such as when they smash open the inn you are staying at to raid the supplies and guests for their pots.

Never forget that all of these can chuck rocks to deadly effect at significant range but also that a spear-thrower is stone-age technology and makes any of these giant-kin into a walking ballista.

Actual Play: The Hole In The Oak

tl:dr; fun old school dungeon, menace telegraphed by the corpses of adventurers, bigger than it seems with lots of secrets that can get missed even when players pry into things.

Another of the adventures I got when Attronarch sold them off - I did a capsule review of The Hole In The Oak a while back and wanted to expand on the running experience.

As per that capsule review - The Hole in the Oak is an old school style dungeon with odd, unsettling things abounding and plenty of factions around. This is a 32 page zine with art more towards the 'grim things happen to adventurers' style of early D&D. The map is huge with ~ six main sections with lots of empty spaces. The dungeon is well Jayqauysed with many ways to loop around - when I ran it the players noped out of dealing with an obvious trapped arch that they could not figure out and decided to loop around and then later loop around again. The inhabitants all knowing that there were multiple ways to get anywhere also made conversations about directions entertaining.

Session Report: The Hole In The Oak

Party of three - Mountain Dwarf Rogue, Halfling Fighter, Elf Ranger

At the request of the town Arcanist, some wandering adventurers set out to find the wizards lair by a big oak out in the swamp and see how dangerous it might be. After considering enlisting some henchmen and deciding they would rather not split the loot, the party hiked out past the old skyburials, out past the mudpool shrine and after some tense negotiations with a tabaxi hunter, found a mysteriously dry patch in the middle of the swamp with a great gnarled old oak growing on it.

[DM Commentary - to this point the players were hexcrawling out to the adventure site, I was still working out whether wrapping these stand-alone adventures before and after with some hexcrawling was fun or a time sink. It increases the risk of people getting distracted or side tracked but does make the world feel more real with not everything being about the one thing they are looking into. Also in the course of the evening before they set off it became apparent that the halfling was a mighty local athlete of some reknown.]

Venturing down into the hole they found by it they squeezed past some grasping vines, argued with some root faces, trading a famed discus for some answers. The root faces told them that to find the wizard they needed to go back through the roots and the other way. They ranger was unwilling to hazard the roots again and so they set out to find another way around.

They trekked on to a big cavern and thence to a mysterious carved arch with a corpse in front of it. Searching the corpse and archway found the corpse was definitely dead from a big slice and the arch had nothing obvious to it. Some wandering troglodytes struck up a shouted conversation through the archway but with neither group will to cross it, our heroes wandered off to find another route.

[DM Commentary - the wandering monster tables came into play quite interestingly here - the party was semi-stalled out in front of the arch, intimidated by the obvious trap, when some troglodytes turned up - also very much disinclined to deal with the trap. Running into a group that is not inclined to be baited into screaming and charging an obvious death-trap, where the correct answer is to tell them to sod off and go around is pretty iconic for old school dungeon crawling.]

They found a room full of mysterious sand, a spectral fight between man and giant lizard and then arrived into a big hall full of work statues with many doors. Searching there yielded little beyond trails.

The next door they tried revealed another corpse and another arch - they rummaged through the corpses pockets, found some coins and then decided to leave this arch alone too. They decided to try the door on the other side of the hall... and found another arch! A sharp eyed party member spotted the glint of eyes above it then the ferocious halfing charged into combat. Some unlucky misses by the giant spider and a critical hit from a longbow led to a resounding victory and the party pressed onwards through this arch.

Marching past a statue and some mirrors they came to a large room with a big rug - and decided to head north, away from their stated goal of the passage beyond the roots. A careless step and the rogue vanished, snatched away to the bat cavern by an unseen magic circle. The ranger and fighter press on a little, finding a locked room with some troglodytes and after a tense but informative conversation around a scarcely opened door, they too decide to step on the magic circle to follow and find their comrade.

[DM Commentary - this is one of the eternal challenges for how to handle surprise party splits - tell the player who just vanished 'I'll get to you in a minute' and make the rest of the party make suitably uninformed decisions, that at least everyone can listen to? Pull the vanished player to one side and play things out with them while the other cool their heels - the fact that time is required to deal with it being information in itself? Just continue play for the vanished player and let the mystery collapse for the rest? I did the first but pushed pretty hard for a decision from the rest to keep the vanished from getting overly bored.]

The rogue appears elsewhere - in a new part of a familiar bat-stinking cavern - and choose between three doors ahead of them. Skirting some beetles feasting on a kill they squeeze arduosly through a tight, slimy crevasse. By the time they had emerged into an cavern full of stalactites with another door they heard noises on the far side and opened it to find the ranger and fighter just appeared.

They made their way back down the bat cavern, retracing their steps past the sand, the dead spider and carefully around the rug until they entered a passage where an illusory image of the wizard sprang to life with a halting and partially complete welcome. Deciding they had fulfilled the letter of their mission by finding out about the place and being right beside the entrance, they climbed out and hiked home to be paid.

The party netted 2 gold, 14 silver each as their share of the coins found on the dead dwarf; plus payment from the Arcanist that far outstripped that.

[DM Commentary - the route the party took missed pretty much everything valuable; this was poor, hazardous pickings from their point of view. The 'pry up everything, poke in every corner' mentality of real old-school dungeoneering was absent so traps and treasures were missed as the party remained very wary of traps.]

Session Report Ends

It was a little tricky to navigate the book - because it is so Jayquaysed you have rooms connecting which are far apart in the book which drives a fair amount of flipping about. The many corpses of unlucky previous adventures kept the tension very high and inculcated a healthy respect for the traps and hazards they suspected were about. As I previously wrote "The old school approach of 'here is a thing, sticking your hand in is entirely up to you - and entirely optional' is well on display."

This venture was a scouting run - the players declared they had enough to get paid and bailed leaving extensive blocks of the dungeon untouched and without real clues to what might be there beyond a sense the place was definitely bigger. I am not sure the players were even left convinced there was anything worth going back down there for - they missed clues to treasures - and it would pretty much need new rumours to get them to go back.

Overall great adventure-per-weight for gaming away from home - slim and densely packed with lots of directly adventurable content. There was way more thaan I used for this four-hour slot, probably another two similar sessions could be wrung from this, lots of adventuring.

Shiny TTRPG links #280

More interesting links from about the net. For yet more links, see the previous list found here or the weekly r/OSR blogroll or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Bloggie-nominated. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch, delinked by request.

We Are the Mutants writes Seas of Blood, Rains of Fire: The Post-Apocalyptic Worlds of Early ‘Dungeons & Dragons’

I Cast Light! gives us BEHOLD AND BE NOT AFRAID: The Mistaken Divinity Of The Beholder

Blog of Forlorn Encystment shares AD&D's Most Expensive and Irritating NPC

Writing my Odd Game posts Scraps: currency, healing, loot, time, distance, and exp points

ropeblogi posts A sketch of rpg design tradition history

Red for Roseline writes You Need to Learn How to Flirt in Roleplay, Bro!

Dungeonfruit gives us Worldbuilding When You Have No Ideas

Joe B. shares guide to map theft

AMONG CATS AND BOOKS posts A World That Answers

Spiceomancy writes The 5e Conversion Nobody Asked For

Journal of Blake Watson posts Things I enjoy about Dungeons & Dragons

Lady Luck smile upon thee often (Randomness Blogwagon)

tl;dr: complex randomisers like depth-crawls, chaos-clocks, etc. need high frequency use to be appreciated by players; otherwise stick to simpler, flatter tables.

This is for the Random Blogwagon from Prismatic Wasteland. I diced up my inputs - 6 on the d20 gets me June 6th, 8 on 2d6 gets me a post length of "As short or long as you desire" and my card came up as the 2 of Spades so I am geased to include a reference to "Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque".

This is all to my cosmic good because I had this post tentatively scheduled for June 6th already; huzzah. Not sure how I am going to work in the mighty repository of gothic inspiration that is Jack Shear's opus but I will have figured it out by the end.

My thought is that there is a different interaction with chance and randomness happening on the two sides of the DM's screen. Even setting aside any intentional choices that the DM is making - those are not random at all - there are two different systems in the hands of the folk around the table. The players are using their d20s, complete with its swinginess, the DM is often rolling on the encounter tables, reaction rolls and other bits that are either a weighted d20 table or actually rolled on with 2d6 or the like for a true bell curve.

DMs are dealing with 'gradation' results where many different outcomes can potentially drop out of a roll while players are typically rolling hit/miss at a greater or lesser likelyhood. As a player, fine, it means that I decide my course, throw the dice and take my chances.

Players get to experience their 'toolkit' round by round in combat and so are well acclimated to it. DMs get to build their tools and think about them even if they do not use them at table. Players only get to experience the DM toolkit at table - at a much lower cycle.

Own table experiences

My recently completed Hexcrawl25 campaign just used the overloaded encounter die thoughout and the players got nicely familiar with that straight-forward randomiser. Low bad, high good on a d6 was memorable even it was infrequent.

Way back for my Southern Reaches campaign I tried to similarly deploy the hidden depths tables for wilderness travel - and it never got a chance to shine because the frequency of rolls was just too low. Too many things happened between various travel rolls to stick in peoples mind.

I did manage to deploy those hidden depths tables for masquerades and parties - as a social depth crawl - which worked better because the tempo of rolling was much higher. The shifting-gears of the rolled dice going from 6d4 to 4d6 to 3d8 to 2d12 to d20+d4 provided a 'cadence' for the night, with things getting more interesting.

Another randomness tool I deployed was the 'big d30' which players got intuitively - once a session they get to roll a d30 in place of a d20 - and even though it was actually rolled infrequently, it felt more present because it was in the players toolbox.

Lessons learned

Things like chaos clocks, depth-crawls and other changing 'randomisers' that players encounter need to turn up with a frequency high enough that players grasp some sense of each state before it shifts to the next. Otherwise any cunning or contours within the design of the table that you are hoping players might seize and use to their advantage is wasted. They will not have enough jigsaw pieces to fill in the picture before the state shifts to a new picture needing new pieces.

For something in continuous use over the long-haul of a campaign, you might anticipate the complexity will eventually be grasped. For single sessions, or infrequently deployed randomisers, the tempo of use needs to be high enough to get multiple 'views' of each state or the randomiser needs to be simple enough to be grasped even through infrequent use.

This could be read as an argument for sticking with a mechanically simple randomiser with whatever cunning and complexity going in at the back end when populating it. Feels a bit 'keep it simple, stupid' and stick to encounter tables or resign yourself to only you the DM appreciating the elegance of whatever variable randomiser you have deployed.

Paying my Joesky tax

Sending the invoice for a "NEW COOL RULE, OR A MONSTER(S), OR SOME SPELLS, OR MAGIC ITEMS OR REGULAR ITEMS THAT ARE DIFFERENT, OR EVEN BETTER A MAP" to Jack of "Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque" and pointing to their cool idea from back in 2017 of Momentous Events: A Replacement for Inspiration in 5e D&D - basically benefiting from inspiration where you can tie an attempted roll back to one of your self-chosen legends, the Momentous Events.

Fear not the big booms

tl;dr: no need to be afraid of early-modern fire-arms in your campaign

longstanding question about guns in D&D - my experiences no need to worry too much. I have had gunpowder crop up in two campaigns so far - Spelljammer Light of Xaryxis and Hexcrawl25 Realm of the Reluctant King - and in neither did it wreck the campaign.

First and most simply - one of the party was a musket armed Giff in the Spelljammer game and they played the part of a sniper par excellence - but no moreso than the long-bow wielding elf I adventured alongside in Out of the Abyss. Campaign took place in wildspace/on planets and in any case I was playing the campaign as written so no phlogiston nor the ignition risk of gunpowder associated with that. All in all, it was wholly a flavour thing beyond one trap made out of gunpowder barrels.

The players even made fairly large scale anti-shipping contraptions they launched with some spiky trap things included but never tried to acquire or incorporate gunpowder for whatever reasons.

In the second campaign - the Hexcrawl25 game - gunpowder had a lot more of a place but still did not break the game or ruin the flavour. It was introduced somewhat as an accident because I had resolved to try and use as much of Knock#1 as possible in that campaign and so when they searched the back rooms of a tavern unexpectedly I decided the '20 Gunpowders' table could be fun and it went from there.

The first thing they found was a heap of 'dragonpowder' - magical thermite essentially that "a wizard left there" which they stuffed into a bag and scarpered with. Afterwards I used a usage dice system to track depletion for their rather random use of it. It came in very handy for venturing through an insectfolk labyrinth where they used it to burn open some vaults.

With the knowledge that in-world there were such things, they took themselves to a goblin-market and traded various battlefield lootings for some more explosive powders - a handful of vials of saintsbone and a pouch of organic goblins-own gunpowder that could theoretically be self-replenishing. After this they took themselves off to commission a shotgun/blunderbus type weapon for the dwarf and after that considered themselves ready. These were a few mini-quests over a series of sessions as they were traipsing too and fro across the hexmap so I considered those things well earned.

Their final set up was for the dwarf to have the shotgun with their small squire riding on their shoulder and serving as a loader in fights. They also put a saddle-horn type mount for the gun on the top of their big lizard beast of burden so that the two small minions could operate it from beast-back while everyone else dismounted to fight on foot.

In the end, it never came into play as a game-breaking thing - it let the dwarf fighter participate in fights at range alongside the sorcerer and artificer - at about the same level of effectivenss which I could live with. Often at close quarters the noise of using the shotgun stopped it from being a 'first strike' weapon and the party as a whole leaned more on magic.

The funny thing is that these gunpowders came into play at the climax of each of the dungeons in Knock#1:
- In Citadel of Evil a batch of dragonpowder bundled to a vial of alchemists fire was catapulted into the main stairwell and set off an inferno that both torched out the top floors of the castle but also cut off the main villains line of retreat.
- In Praise the Fallen the main villain was about to teleport away on their initiative when the herbalist-themed artificer catapulted a bundle of all the saintsbone at their feet for great fistfuls of damage dice. This also threw some damage on most of the party and deafened them but it did succeed in over-killing the villain before they could flee
- In Zaratazarat's Manse when they found the mysterious monster-spawning slab they dumped most of their remaining dragonpowder onto it to burn through the slab while they fought the rest of the things around them. If I recall correctly some poor unfortunate bullywug or locathah spawned onto the table in the middle of that inferno and did not have a fun time either.

Otherwise, the dragonpowder saw the most use for burning through things and general destruction and mayhem against non-moving foes or other obstructions. Weirdly, they also decided during one significant night carousing to try inhaling dragonpowder and some more rolls on the goblin activity table established it to be a fairly effective hang-over cure.

There was two other notable uses of explosives throughout the campaign - first to cover a prison escape and second to collapse a doorway with hostiles on the far side.

The prison escape hinged off roping in some dwarven artificers who were part of the group being rescued to set up the trigger mechanisms to turn the explosives the players could supply into the time-delayed inferno they needed. I was pretty happy with this, as it was a pretty cunning plan overall relying on a pushing a rigged mine-cart onto a lift to the enemy camp above and then running like hell. The challenge for the players was not trivialised by the availability of explosives, so all to the good.

The door collapse was during the final session - while fighting thralls in "The Aboleths Dream" by Elven Tower the party had wedged the door leading into room seven while they fought other thralls. More thralls gathered from room(s) eight to bash down the door and had splintered it open Shining style when one of the party Catapults a bundle of vials of explosives wrapped around an alchemists fire. Big kaboom, bought them time to run off, and on their exit up stairs one they touched off the last of their gunpowder to shatter the entrance and let them get away.

In two separate campaigns the players never really went all-in on the potential of having access to explosives - except for the above 'big boss killer' moments. We were not seeing land-mine equivalents, doors being blown off hinges, explosives rolled into enemy strong points or similar item-focussed problem solving.

To mirror this, I did not lean heavily into explosives being in the hands of adversaries - the RAW magical ranged attacks of Astral Elves in the Light of Xaryxis campaign were sufficient for them. For the hexcrawl, the two major groups of adversaries so far have been mobs of cultists ambushed in tunnels and great beasts fought out in the open, neither of which have been made boring by the dwarf having a shotgun. The tunnel fights had a big element of sneaking about to not draw down the rest of the dungeon which kept things interesting. The big beasts were generally big enough that even a shotgun was not going to cut much mustard.

The main lesson I took from all this was that the gamebreaking potential of low-rate of fire weapons is overstated - the magical fire-power of standard classes of characters is equivalent, if not better. I cannot promise if you throw in some odd explosives for flavour, your players won't wreck your campaign but two completely different sets of players (different ages, nationalities, game formats) did not leverage them to wreck mine so maybe you'll be fine too.