Shiny TTRPG links #296

More shiny links from around the web. For even more, try last weeks set 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.

Bastardica shares A foundry for bastard web fonts.

Store Brand Danger shares Domain Play Starts When Players Start Caring

Kind of Old Games asks What if stronghold construction *is* the adventure?

Pages Brittle with Sun and Salt posts Lord Problems

Snakebite posts Systems You Don't Think You Need: the Designated Survivor

I Cast Light! posts THE SERPENT SONG HYMNAL: My Collection of Tables & Such for Running BX Dungeons & Dragons

Afraid of Encounters posts A TTRPG Playstyle Rant

Leonardo Andrade for Typebar Magazine writes ChatGPT, LLMs, and Automating the Fun Out of Roleplaying

BASTIONLAND posts Breaking the Wave

Dice Goblin writes Safe Transit, Dangerous Transit: Two Ways of Adding Juice to Interstellar Travel in TTRPGs

Spears & Spreadsheets gives us Looking Upon the Face of a Dead God: the aftermath of a 1D10/1D100 SAN test

The Garden Below posts So, i’m running a megagame

Pool Time with Swim Allen posts Do not Overthink the City

To Be Resolved writes Historical Reconstruction as Play

The Madman's Menagerie posts 1 CORINTHIANS 13:12 (Mask Relay 40)

Props driven investigations for Imperium Maledictum #City26

Two sessions in to the IM City26 game I have been having a go at conveying the atmosphere with physical printout for some of the things they find during their investigation - partly to reflect the grinding bureaucracy of the Warhammer 40k Imperium but also to convey some of the voices of the factions through vox-log transcripts.

Engagement seems ok, getting everyone to read a handout is a bit of a time sink but when there is a handful of them in play that people can rotate between them it seems to work. At player request I have set up a thread on our gaming society forum with all those uploaded, we will see if that gets much interaction.

Formats for a future yet to come

I combed through official sourcebooks to get a standard handout format - starting with the old Rogue Trader '87 and working up through Dark Heresy and Imperium Maledictum. There is happily a lot of content out there on 40k lore which puts lots of the icons and images easily to hand.

Shiny TTRPG links #295

Slightly late shiny links gathered from around the web. For more, try last weeks set 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.

Thriftomancer shares Hexcrawloween 2

The Nothic's Eye writes Inadvisable Decisions (GLΔG)

Bat in the Attic shares Why is the Ogre there?

Blog of Forlorn Encystment shares Developing the Sandbox: The Campaign Calendar

Games Workshop posts Necromunda RPG

Rise Up Comus shares Beholders are intellectual property, eh?

Crow’s Corner posts Surviving in a Male-Dominated Hobby

Trick's Tales writes DRGE (Dice Roller Game Engine)

The Onion gives us Olivia Rodrigo Releases Fantasy Tabletop Game ‘The High Winter Elves Of Girlville’

Among Cats and Books gives us Rub My Body in Goose Fat, Daddy, I Want to Fly

Zanzibar Games shares Toyetic Wizardry

Whose Measure God Could Not Take writes Downtime and “””Stronghold Management”””

Lonely Star shares I dislike "worldbuilding"

The Black Citadel posts KILL THE CUCKOLD SELF

BASTIONLAND gives us Workflow Eats Features for Breakfast

Kludge Kauldron writes Finishing Campaigns

Store Brand Danger shares Big Map Progression

The Dolent Chronicle posts On Halo

SlothBorg writes Five Room Dungeon Generator

Review + Actual Play: Emelda's Song

tl:dr; a three part adventure with an investigation, infiltration and tomb-dive; neatly presented and fun to run.

I got this as part of my Dolmenwood order - it turned up in the giant box - and on the basis of it getting hailed as a great one-shot adventure I decided to run it at one of my open table sessions.

The book is a 36-page A5 hardback - the Dolmenwood/OSE standard - with maps on the inside covers and double columns with art throughout. The format within is that well-thought-out Dolmenwood approach of 'location, box with key descriptive items, likely actions, stats for anything present' that makes it pretty easy to use. One could give it a go un-read I suspect but it might get tricky.

So what do you actually get in the book?

Shiny TTRPG links #294

New shiny links from a new week on the web. For more, try last weeks set 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.

Afraid of Encounters gives us Indonesian TTRPG Blogwagon ROUNDUP

Peter Hall at Scientific American posts Unique, mathematical 60-sided dice go on display

Charlie's Diary writes Rethinking space opera

Homebrew and Hacking gives us On Running a TTRPG Club

Roleplaying Tips shares When We Improvise Ourselves Into A Corner

subjunctive moods gives us just skip it!

Vaults of Zin shares Org-as-Class for Everything

Other coins or other than coins (RPG Blog Carnival)

Campaign Mastery gives us this months prompt The Face of Money for the RPG Blog Carnival. This post covers my slightly meta-takes at two of the questions posed on the prompting post using my old original AD&D home campaign and its prep. Those questions are:
1. What’s depicted on your coinage and banknotes and what are the stories behind those depictions?
2. What makes the currency of your game world distinctive, and what impact does that have?

When I read the prompt I knew exactly what I wanted to talk about but the question was could I find the evidence now, some thirty-odd years later. Happily, my pack-rat instincts have served me well in this instance and lo, I have unearthed the original drawn up coinage for my first AD&D campaign, in a massively inefficient use of game prep time. This first is an orc who was among the first encounters my players ever ran into - guess what, you do not need to draw portraits of all the foes, nor sketch out the loot they hold.

I did however know exactly what those coins in the orcs pocket looked like because the *second page* of campaign prep I ever did was this - hashing out a map to have the campaign in and then working out the coinage for all those places. Praise be I had the instincts to just work out a core realm and the immediate neighbours and not try to build my own Faerun straight out of the blocks.

Coins similarly turned up in more sophisticated hoards.

Shiny TTRPG links #293

Fresh shiny links from the internet! For more, see last week 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.

Sage's Sanctum posts Resurrection in Pneumos

Elfmaids & Octopi shares Pacing a campaign

Advantage on Arcana posts Joesky Wants To Tax Me But This Is Boston And It's 1773

Valeria Loves shares How Deadly is the OSR, Actually?

Throne of Salt posts Cut-Up Timeline of the Future

Lonely Star writes Player Agency and Planning Autonomy

Beau Rancourt gives us Reflections: OSR

Big Mac shares TSR's lost Educational Adventure series

Towers of spider-haunted mystery posts Sneak peek: Work in progress rules for managing an adventuring guild’s headquarters

Setting up Imperium Maledictum adventures for #City26

I marshalled some players and got through a session zero and simple investigative scene using Imperium Maledictum and have been recently reading back through my old Dark Heresy and the new Imperium Maledictum adventure anthologies to get a sense of the structure of these things - not that I couldn't just do "5-room-dungeon-but-40k" but I wanted to try and get a sense of how 40kRPG games ought to be run officially.

The big difference is they seem to follow a three act structure; each of those then broken down into two bits. There is a thing to find out so go to a place and resolve the problem there to get the clue to lead onwards. Essentially solving minor mysteries to get clues to the meta-conspiracy behind it all. The first and third acts are the set up and resolution respectively and the second act is an accordion you can expand or shrink as much as the mood takes you. Essentially, the 'gather clues' second act can require finding as many clues as you see fit.

The big thing for Dark Heresy or Imperial Maledictum is the players are primarily investigators - even when levelled up and quite punchy, they are not the heavy firepower of the Adeptus Astartes. The thing they can do which the various big guns of the setting cannot is investigation and social pieces. You are not going to sneak your way through a masquerade ball with a Warlord Titan but then that is not its job. Combat in Imperium Maledictum is also pretty vicious with critical hit tables that will see you dead-dead on the first shot if you are unlucky. This is combined with the 'superiority' mechanics of granting chunky bonuses in combat if you have gained intelligence on the adversaries or the battle-site to make pre-confrontation gathering of information highly desirable.

The broad recipe seems to be
- pick three locations, connect them all by a thread
- have two things to do at each location, maybe have an extra clue that might be found
- have a further location where the big bad or revelation is
- front it all with a briefing scene