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
Showing posts with label D&D. Show all posts
Showing posts with label D&D. Show all posts
18 July 2026
11 July 2026
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")
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")
24 June 2026
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
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
20 June 2026
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.
- 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.
17 June 2026
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:
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:
13 June 2026
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.
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.
10 June 2026
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.
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.
06 June 2026
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.
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.
03 June 2026
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.
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.
27 May 2026
Review: Fly Me To The Moon
tl;dr: old school hex crawl on the dream-like moon, lots to dip into for inspiration.
Fly Me To The Moon by Kabuki Kaiser - a lunar hex crawl that I grabbed because it looked like a combo of old school gaming and space antics. Broadly pitched as what you find if the vision of the moon from the early 1900s had it right - a steampunky, fin-de-siecle vibe - but I found it much broader (and perhaps more useful) than that. The vibes I was getting was 'fairy tales of that time' - the kind of thing Rackham would have illustrated or Wilde would have written about. It also feels like a different tree grown in the same soil that got us Barsoom, so fine fodder for sword-and-planet escapades too.
Very much wearing its OSR-allegiance with pride, I initially thought this was an older book given its back-to-basics clean set up and introductory approach - it has been a while since I have come to something with quite this flavour of 'let me briefly explain the concept' approach, calling back to the OSR vernacular of "BX or use whatever system suits" in contrast to declaring for one of the many retroclones - OSE, OSRIC, etc. Reminded me of some of the grand old group projects like Petty Gods.
I got a print-on-demand version from DriveThruRPG and received 166 pages worth of neat little soft cover with a sort of black, blues and white scheme throughout. General format is two columns per page with some singe- and double-page art spreads mixed in. All the writing and design credits are at the back - this had been done up pre-AI OSR style with a bunch of artist credits, public domain art and photography. It gives a nice somewhat Art-Nouveau-in-blue look to the whole thing.
So what's actually in here?
A page of an intro section
A page with the hexmap
Four pages of rule mods, denizens and system use comments
A page Lists of linked locations
131 pages of hexes from the hexmap
18 pages worth of spells
A page discussing lycanthropy on the moon
A page of notes on the Lunar wars
Four pages on cats of the moon
Four pages on the moon-bound balloon the Phalene Celestial
A page of an appendix
A page of credits
Going through this in chunks:
Fly Me To The Moon by Kabuki Kaiser - a lunar hex crawl that I grabbed because it looked like a combo of old school gaming and space antics. Broadly pitched as what you find if the vision of the moon from the early 1900s had it right - a steampunky, fin-de-siecle vibe - but I found it much broader (and perhaps more useful) than that. The vibes I was getting was 'fairy tales of that time' - the kind of thing Rackham would have illustrated or Wilde would have written about. It also feels like a different tree grown in the same soil that got us Barsoom, so fine fodder for sword-and-planet escapades too.
Very much wearing its OSR-allegiance with pride, I initially thought this was an older book given its back-to-basics clean set up and introductory approach - it has been a while since I have come to something with quite this flavour of 'let me briefly explain the concept' approach, calling back to the OSR vernacular of "BX or use whatever system suits" in contrast to declaring for one of the many retroclones - OSE, OSRIC, etc. Reminded me of some of the grand old group projects like Petty Gods.
I got a print-on-demand version from DriveThruRPG and received 166 pages worth of neat little soft cover with a sort of black, blues and white scheme throughout. General format is two columns per page with some singe- and double-page art spreads mixed in. All the writing and design credits are at the back - this had been done up pre-AI OSR style with a bunch of artist credits, public domain art and photography. It gives a nice somewhat Art-Nouveau-in-blue look to the whole thing.
So what's actually in here?
A page of an intro section
A page with the hexmap
Four pages of rule mods, denizens and system use comments
A page Lists of linked locations
131 pages of hexes from the hexmap
18 pages worth of spells
A page discussing lycanthropy on the moon
A page of notes on the Lunar wars
Four pages on cats of the moon
Four pages on the moon-bound balloon the Phalene Celestial
A page of an appendix
A page of credits
Going through this in chunks:
20 May 2026
Picks of #Spelljammer on tumblr
Whenever I trawl through RPG-tumblr I am struck that there is this persistent Spelljammer vibe, a sense that that setting thrives there in campaigns, fan-art, home-brew and general chatter more than anywhere else. I have no explanation but I am fascinated and I think it is great to see.
To contrast, the Planescape tag is channel-jammed by the old computer RPG Planescape: Torment and then what remains is mostly all Sigil - not bad if you like those sort of things but once you go past those two the rest of everything you get is so much more diffuse. There are flashes of brilliance in there for any given thing you might be interested in but with so much involved in the Planescape setting as a whole, you don't get much for any single thing.
I was pondering why I like what I see in the Spelljammer tag and I think it is because you can pretty much grab any good idea you see there and drop it into your own campaign as a wandering encounter, an NPC you run into or a site you find because you could come across anything in Wildspace, anything at all, whereas most other settings, require a touch more filtering for terrain-appropriate ideas (Planescape included, though swap in 'plane-appropriate').
I do not know why Spelljammer strikes a nerve - perhaps 'D&D in Spaaaace' falls closer to peoples hearts than it did, perhaps the kaleidoscopic-skies aesthetic aligns, who knows - but for whatever reason it is, if you are at all interested in Spelljammer, browsing the tag on tumblr is a good place for inspiration. Afterwards Reddit will give you crunch and answer questions once you have specific ones or you can delve into the vast wells of knowledge on forums like The Piazza.
Some of my favourite things I found:
@dailyadventureprompts gives us Drafting an Adventure: Setting Sail in the Astral Sea - good content for the Astral.
@dailyadventureprompts gives us Drafting the Adventure: Spelljamming - significant thought on running Spelljammer right.
@leavingautumn13 gives us Reimagining the Neogi
@madlabgames writes Spelljamming, Reimagined: The Flow, The Void, and The Hull - delving back into AD&D lore and doing a complete rework of the whole concept. A solid alternate concept.
@spyglassrealms shares a More interesting Realmspace
@honourablejester throws out a bunch of Spelljammer Concepts for characters.
@dnd-5e-homebrew compiles some hombrew rules for Sailing the Astral Flow
@flailsnails gives us A Spelljammer Buyer's Guide - your grand list of capsule reviews for all the old AD&D products.
@nothingrpgzone gives us Spelljammer Advanced Sphere Generator - a nice revamp of the old AD&D sphere generator way, way more cleanly put together.
@thatboomerkid collates their SpellJammer: Shadow of the Spider Moon (Special Rules) from their campaign - for Pathfinder, but ideas useable whatever your system.
@madlabgames gives us 🦗 The Orthopterans: Threat Assessment & Cosmic Order ⚙️
@dailyadventureprompts gives us Monsters Reimagined: Mindflayers
@elbiotipo has Some thoughts for a D&D Spelljammer setting and gives us another trove of 'take as you please' ideas to tweak your own tables version.
@amarynceus compiles Old Spelljammer Artwork from their high-school game - great notes from someone who used the setting in anger.
@d20-dimwit worked up alternate 5e versions of the Spelljammer Races.
@kor-artificer works up Skyship Weatherlight as a vehicle so needs a touch more conversion work but a good start for a Spelljammer.
@dmsden gives us Shiver Me Timbers - Notes on running a pirate-themed campaign
@madlabgames shares 🔮⚓ Arcane Engines: Three Unique Spelljamming Helms for Your Crew! ⚙️💫
To contrast, the Planescape tag is channel-jammed by the old computer RPG Planescape: Torment and then what remains is mostly all Sigil - not bad if you like those sort of things but once you go past those two the rest of everything you get is so much more diffuse. There are flashes of brilliance in there for any given thing you might be interested in but with so much involved in the Planescape setting as a whole, you don't get much for any single thing.
I was pondering why I like what I see in the Spelljammer tag and I think it is because you can pretty much grab any good idea you see there and drop it into your own campaign as a wandering encounter, an NPC you run into or a site you find because you could come across anything in Wildspace, anything at all, whereas most other settings, require a touch more filtering for terrain-appropriate ideas (Planescape included, though swap in 'plane-appropriate').
I do not know why Spelljammer strikes a nerve - perhaps 'D&D in Spaaaace' falls closer to peoples hearts than it did, perhaps the kaleidoscopic-skies aesthetic aligns, who knows - but for whatever reason it is, if you are at all interested in Spelljammer, browsing the tag on tumblr is a good place for inspiration. Afterwards Reddit will give you crunch and answer questions once you have specific ones or you can delve into the vast wells of knowledge on forums like The Piazza.
Some of my favourite things I found:
@dailyadventureprompts gives us Drafting an Adventure: Setting Sail in the Astral Sea - good content for the Astral.
@dailyadventureprompts gives us Drafting the Adventure: Spelljamming - significant thought on running Spelljammer right.
@leavingautumn13 gives us Reimagining the Neogi
@madlabgames writes Spelljamming, Reimagined: The Flow, The Void, and The Hull - delving back into AD&D lore and doing a complete rework of the whole concept. A solid alternate concept.
@spyglassrealms shares a More interesting Realmspace
@honourablejester throws out a bunch of Spelljammer Concepts for characters.
@dnd-5e-homebrew compiles some hombrew rules for Sailing the Astral Flow
@flailsnails gives us A Spelljammer Buyer's Guide - your grand list of capsule reviews for all the old AD&D products.
@nothingrpgzone gives us Spelljammer Advanced Sphere Generator - a nice revamp of the old AD&D sphere generator way, way more cleanly put together.
@thatboomerkid collates their SpellJammer: Shadow of the Spider Moon (Special Rules) from their campaign - for Pathfinder, but ideas useable whatever your system.
@madlabgames gives us 🦗 The Orthopterans: Threat Assessment & Cosmic Order ⚙️
@dailyadventureprompts gives us Monsters Reimagined: Mindflayers
@elbiotipo has Some thoughts for a D&D Spelljammer setting and gives us another trove of 'take as you please' ideas to tweak your own tables version.
@amarynceus compiles Old Spelljammer Artwork from their high-school game - great notes from someone who used the setting in anger.
@d20-dimwit worked up alternate 5e versions of the Spelljammer Races.
@kor-artificer works up Skyship Weatherlight as a vehicle so needs a touch more conversion work but a good start for a Spelljammer.
@dmsden gives us Shiver Me Timbers - Notes on running a pirate-themed campaign
@madlabgames shares 🔮⚓ Arcane Engines: Three Unique Spelljamming Helms for Your Crew! ⚙️💫
16 May 2026
How quickly can a new D&D edition take over?
I was fascinated by Troy Press recent piece "D&D Rules, According to Past Players" based on a general survey they did which found the D&D players among a broad sample of the population but also asked when and which edition they had last played - with the fascinating insight in that article that where 20% of the respondents had played in 2026 (the past four months), only 7% of respondents had played 5.5e as their last game.
This prompted me to mention this to the author on Mastodon who further revealed "The sample size for those who played in the last three months is small: n=40. Of those: 10% played 5.5, 66% played 5e, 14% played 4e, and no other edition was in the double digits."
This is fascinating - my first question was then "how does this look for an adoption trend for the new edition?" - how does the share of games being played with 5.5e compare to how many folk were playing 4e or 5e this many years after the launch of those editions?
To get an idea, we turn to the Obsidian Portal campaigns launched - taking annual slices we can get a sense of popularity of editions back to 2008.
To recap - this was done by loading the Campaigns page on Obsidian Portal and noting the campaigns per system for each year available (back to 2008) using the Wayback Machine so we capture from 4e dropping through to now.
Originally inspired by Troy Press writing in 2019 on RPG campaigns played by system and I have been tracking this and updating annually for a few years now (2022, 2023, 2024, 2025)
We also have the now-discontinued Orr Reports which gave us the same insight for Roll20. With that and the Obsidian Portal data we can pull three continuous trends and then chuck on whatever single points we have for 5.5e from various sources for comparison.
Looking at what we get we see a pretty clear rapid-switch over to 5e from 4e when it launched. We see an initial high take-up of 4e that started to fade off pretty rapidly (competition from Pathfinder at that point). Pathfinder 1e had a pretty good start to a solid 60% of new campaigns launched on Obsidian Portal the year before 5e dropped.
Comparing those to what we see for 5.5e - the few dots we can scrape together - we do not appear to be seeing the unambiguous take-off that was obvious at this stage for 5e. One could have maybe told a story last year about how 5.5e was having a 5e-equivalent take off as seen on Roll20 but it is hard to continue that. While fully acknowledging that these points are a grab-bag of sources, they are clustering between 10-45% - this is not the ~66-80% range one might expect to see if most folk were playing 5.5e these days.
So returning to our initial seed - that Troy Press finding of only 10% playing 5.5e - it seems on the low side but maybe a real marker for 5.5e being significantly less adopted than 5e was.
Notes
The Roll20 track above was checked against surveys from each end of that time span and matched up with what else I could find online.
The Obsidian Portal data is no longer useful for this because they do not distinguish between 5e and 5.5e - apparently taking WotC at their word that it was not a new edition but not helpful for this exercise.
Sources:
2026 Survey by Researchscape (N = 1253)
Campaigns page on Obsidian Portal
D&DBeyond poll (Feb 2025)
Facebook Hombrewers poll (Dec 2025)
Reddit r/LFG analysis (2024)
This prompted me to mention this to the author on Mastodon who further revealed "The sample size for those who played in the last three months is small: n=40. Of those: 10% played 5.5, 66% played 5e, 14% played 4e, and no other edition was in the double digits."
This is fascinating - my first question was then "how does this look for an adoption trend for the new edition?" - how does the share of games being played with 5.5e compare to how many folk were playing 4e or 5e this many years after the launch of those editions?
To get an idea, we turn to the Obsidian Portal campaigns launched - taking annual slices we can get a sense of popularity of editions back to 2008.
To recap - this was done by loading the Campaigns page on Obsidian Portal and noting the campaigns per system for each year available (back to 2008) using the Wayback Machine so we capture from 4e dropping through to now.
Originally inspired by Troy Press writing in 2019 on RPG campaigns played by system and I have been tracking this and updating annually for a few years now (2022, 2023, 2024, 2025)
We also have the now-discontinued Orr Reports which gave us the same insight for Roll20. With that and the Obsidian Portal data we can pull three continuous trends and then chuck on whatever single points we have for 5.5e from various sources for comparison.
Looking at what we get we see a pretty clear rapid-switch over to 5e from 4e when it launched. We see an initial high take-up of 4e that started to fade off pretty rapidly (competition from Pathfinder at that point). Pathfinder 1e had a pretty good start to a solid 60% of new campaigns launched on Obsidian Portal the year before 5e dropped.
Comparing those to what we see for 5.5e - the few dots we can scrape together - we do not appear to be seeing the unambiguous take-off that was obvious at this stage for 5e. One could have maybe told a story last year about how 5.5e was having a 5e-equivalent take off as seen on Roll20 but it is hard to continue that. While fully acknowledging that these points are a grab-bag of sources, they are clustering between 10-45% - this is not the ~66-80% range one might expect to see if most folk were playing 5.5e these days.
So returning to our initial seed - that Troy Press finding of only 10% playing 5.5e - it seems on the low side but maybe a real marker for 5.5e being significantly less adopted than 5e was.
Notes
The Roll20 track above was checked against surveys from each end of that time span and matched up with what else I could find online.
The Obsidian Portal data is no longer useful for this because they do not distinguish between 5e and 5.5e - apparently taking WotC at their word that it was not a new edition but not helpful for this exercise.
Sources:
2026 Survey by Researchscape (N = 1253)
Campaigns page on Obsidian Portal
D&DBeyond poll (Feb 2025)
Facebook Hombrewers poll (Dec 2025)
Reddit r/LFG analysis (2024)
13 May 2026
Art of adventure threading for campaigns
I poked one of the mainstay DM's of our local game society for their top tips on how to stitch scattered adventures together to make a campaign:
- Conservation of NPCs
- Tweak the adventures to fit the theme
- Work in meaningful player choices with meaningful consequences to the ongoing story
You can also consider these for any campaign you may be writing yourself or elements to watch for in written campaigns too.
Why think about stitching adventures together?
In short, to give yourself more options than the two dozen or so famous campaigns.
After the dozen or so 5e campaigns from WotC, the hivemind of the web recommends about another dozen 3rd party campaigns. You can delve into the past for yet more but sometimes even then you cannot find quite the thing you are looking for. There are also loosely tied anthology adventures, Adventurers Guild seasons, old Dungeon magazines and other sources that you might find that fit the campaign you want to run. There is a mass of creativity out there - fit to every flavour and preference of table - but assembling them all into something coherent can be a challenge.
Making the various sessions of your campaign feel coherent is also a base requirement to make it feel like more than just random events happening one after another.
Players like their knowledge to count, so repeatedly encountering the same NPCs allows what they have learned about those NPCs to be relevant and useful. "The Baron hates cats? How about for that distraction we need, let us set a half dozen cats lose at his coronation."
Working in meaningful choices with consequences actualises player agency - their decisions mattered and continued to matter over multiple sessions.
All these things are basic elements of making a good campaign but they are particularly important at the connecting edges of different escapades. Assuming that a given adventure is decent in and of itself, the trick is to make it feel like part of a coherent whole.
Stitching campaigns together from multiple adventures
The trick of campaign threading has been well deployed locally in our gaming group - both 'pre-threaded' connected Adventurers League adventures and through connecting independent adventures.
One comrade at RPGVienna ran a very nifty campaign based on the Storm Kings Thunder adventurers league season - the low-level cycle around Parnast. Over a bunch of Friday nights we got to Parnast, ran a bunch of quests around it then successfully defended the village from siege with the help of allies gathered in the previous adventures. It was perhaps eight sessions or so but it was a great, highly thematic campaign.
There was also a Ravnica mini-campaign built around the 'Secrets of the Triseklion' adventures bulked out with other appropriate adventures. Both of these were proper campaigns in my eye for having consequences to an over-arching sequence of events carrying over sessions - compared to my own Brancalonia games which had consequences but were otherwise fairly episodic, not really a coherent campaign.
The Storm Kings Thunder series were pre-threaded; written with recurring NPCs and as part of an over-arching sequence of events - but the Ravnica campaign was bulked out beyond the core adventures and needed to be reworked to be coherent. As mentioned above this meant:
- Conservation of NPCs
- Tweaking the adventures to fit the theme
- Having player choices with meaningful consequences
- Conservation of NPCs
We have mention conservation of NPCs before - just make similar NPCs be the same person. This can be expanded to have similar 'table function' NPCs be the same person - traders, quest-givers, etc. - where they have the same interaction with the characters, even if quite different as written.
I retained this in the Brancalonia campaign - but the impact was significantly lessened because the rotating cast of players meant that a given NPC appeared much less frequently to any one player so they did not reach the same level of 'that guy' recognisability.
- Tweaking the adventures to fit the theme
Here we have the work of identifying what fits within a campaign style - what can be easily repainted to lie seamlessly with other parts - and how to bulk out a set of adventures with others that were not immediately coherent or that provide options you need.
The first trick here is recognising that while any adventure can be made to fit into a campaign with enough elbow-grease, some are a lot easier to meld together than others. Terrain is a typical common factor to take but an adversary or location could also be used depending on the theme of the campaign - what is the key part of your campaign. If a common adversary, then that same foe on different terrains could be potentially useful. If a type of play - mountain traversal, ship voyages, urban investigations - then those are the factors you want to seek out.
Often this can be a thing that takes some work - an adventure might be set on a ship but make essentially no reference to that beyond the floorplan shape - so identifying whether an adventure truly contains the factors you want can be somewhat tiresome.
The other side of this coin is figuring out where you have a gap to be filled among the adventures you already have - typically done by using level progression for a first estimate but it can also be linked to state of the campaign - you might need some artic wilderness adventure to serve for if the party decides to trek to a given location rather than taking some other route.
If you can get your hands on a good review archive that helps you determine a) what is good and b) what adventures have what elements within them those are great tools for identifying good starting points to start finishing things.
- Having player choices with meaningful consequences
With pre-threaded adventures this is already done by the writers (one hopes) but in assembling disparate adventures the achievements and consequences of one ought to knock on to subsequent adventures beyond just levelling up.
Note, one or two isolated adventures can be fine as a change of pace or palate cleanser but, to make it feel like the adventures are part of a coherent whole, there ought to be decisions to make and consequences that come from those.
This one is hard to generalise because the decisions to be made are heavily dependent on the individual adventures. How the consequences of those decisions ripple through the rest of the campaign will be reliant on the nature of that campaign. The main lens I can suggest is to note what factions and foes make gains or suffer losses during an adventure and how, then consider how those will affect other things later - even if only through rumours and tales in taverns later on. Other elements like destruction of sites or establishment of new ones can also be big markers of consequence.
Plan to test
I will be trying these principles out with the old Dungeon Magazine Spelljammer adventures and will write up how those go. I had the great good fortune to find a copy of 'Under the Dark Fist' being sold by someone apparently divesting themselves of their whole D&D collection (!) and so I may even try and work in some of the official materials too.
- Conservation of NPCs
- Tweak the adventures to fit the theme
- Work in meaningful player choices with meaningful consequences to the ongoing story
You can also consider these for any campaign you may be writing yourself or elements to watch for in written campaigns too.
Why think about stitching adventures together?
In short, to give yourself more options than the two dozen or so famous campaigns.
After the dozen or so 5e campaigns from WotC, the hivemind of the web recommends about another dozen 3rd party campaigns. You can delve into the past for yet more but sometimes even then you cannot find quite the thing you are looking for. There are also loosely tied anthology adventures, Adventurers Guild seasons, old Dungeon magazines and other sources that you might find that fit the campaign you want to run. There is a mass of creativity out there - fit to every flavour and preference of table - but assembling them all into something coherent can be a challenge.
Making the various sessions of your campaign feel coherent is also a base requirement to make it feel like more than just random events happening one after another.
Players like their knowledge to count, so repeatedly encountering the same NPCs allows what they have learned about those NPCs to be relevant and useful. "The Baron hates cats? How about for that distraction we need, let us set a half dozen cats lose at his coronation."
Working in meaningful choices with consequences actualises player agency - their decisions mattered and continued to matter over multiple sessions.
All these things are basic elements of making a good campaign but they are particularly important at the connecting edges of different escapades. Assuming that a given adventure is decent in and of itself, the trick is to make it feel like part of a coherent whole.
Stitching campaigns together from multiple adventures
The trick of campaign threading has been well deployed locally in our gaming group - both 'pre-threaded' connected Adventurers League adventures and through connecting independent adventures.
One comrade at RPGVienna ran a very nifty campaign based on the Storm Kings Thunder adventurers league season - the low-level cycle around Parnast. Over a bunch of Friday nights we got to Parnast, ran a bunch of quests around it then successfully defended the village from siege with the help of allies gathered in the previous adventures. It was perhaps eight sessions or so but it was a great, highly thematic campaign.
There was also a Ravnica mini-campaign built around the 'Secrets of the Triseklion' adventures bulked out with other appropriate adventures. Both of these were proper campaigns in my eye for having consequences to an over-arching sequence of events carrying over sessions - compared to my own Brancalonia games which had consequences but were otherwise fairly episodic, not really a coherent campaign.
The Storm Kings Thunder series were pre-threaded; written with recurring NPCs and as part of an over-arching sequence of events - but the Ravnica campaign was bulked out beyond the core adventures and needed to be reworked to be coherent. As mentioned above this meant:
- Conservation of NPCs
- Tweaking the adventures to fit the theme
- Having player choices with meaningful consequences
- Conservation of NPCs
We have mention conservation of NPCs before - just make similar NPCs be the same person. This can be expanded to have similar 'table function' NPCs be the same person - traders, quest-givers, etc. - where they have the same interaction with the characters, even if quite different as written.
I retained this in the Brancalonia campaign - but the impact was significantly lessened because the rotating cast of players meant that a given NPC appeared much less frequently to any one player so they did not reach the same level of 'that guy' recognisability.
- Tweaking the adventures to fit the theme
Here we have the work of identifying what fits within a campaign style - what can be easily repainted to lie seamlessly with other parts - and how to bulk out a set of adventures with others that were not immediately coherent or that provide options you need.
The first trick here is recognising that while any adventure can be made to fit into a campaign with enough elbow-grease, some are a lot easier to meld together than others. Terrain is a typical common factor to take but an adversary or location could also be used depending on the theme of the campaign - what is the key part of your campaign. If a common adversary, then that same foe on different terrains could be potentially useful. If a type of play - mountain traversal, ship voyages, urban investigations - then those are the factors you want to seek out.
Often this can be a thing that takes some work - an adventure might be set on a ship but make essentially no reference to that beyond the floorplan shape - so identifying whether an adventure truly contains the factors you want can be somewhat tiresome.
The other side of this coin is figuring out where you have a gap to be filled among the adventures you already have - typically done by using level progression for a first estimate but it can also be linked to state of the campaign - you might need some artic wilderness adventure to serve for if the party decides to trek to a given location rather than taking some other route.
If you can get your hands on a good review archive that helps you determine a) what is good and b) what adventures have what elements within them those are great tools for identifying good starting points to start finishing things.
- Having player choices with meaningful consequences
With pre-threaded adventures this is already done by the writers (one hopes) but in assembling disparate adventures the achievements and consequences of one ought to knock on to subsequent adventures beyond just levelling up.
Note, one or two isolated adventures can be fine as a change of pace or palate cleanser but, to make it feel like the adventures are part of a coherent whole, there ought to be decisions to make and consequences that come from those.
This one is hard to generalise because the decisions to be made are heavily dependent on the individual adventures. How the consequences of those decisions ripple through the rest of the campaign will be reliant on the nature of that campaign. The main lens I can suggest is to note what factions and foes make gains or suffer losses during an adventure and how, then consider how those will affect other things later - even if only through rumours and tales in taverns later on. Other elements like destruction of sites or establishment of new ones can also be big markers of consequence.
Plan to test
I will be trying these principles out with the old Dungeon Magazine Spelljammer adventures and will write up how those go. I had the great good fortune to find a copy of 'Under the Dark Fist' being sold by someone apparently divesting themselves of their whole D&D collection (!) and so I may even try and work in some of the official materials too.
06 May 2026
How deep the bench of legacy D&D players?
Troy Press published a piece "D&D Rules, According to Past Players" based on a survey they did - and I am fascinated by the 'mentioned in passing' implication of a huge amount of non-active D&D players in the USA - something like 1 in 6 USA folk have played D&D at some point, apparently. Does this make sense?
We poked at this before in "Comparing TTRPG player surveys in US and Germany" where we looked at the previous surveys from the same outfit - Researchscape 2022 Survey and 2019 Survey which also look at who among the general US population has played TTRPGs.
Here they pulled in 1,253 US adults and found 16% - 204 people - had played D&D at some point. They mention "the data was weighted to the U.S. population by 9 demographic questions. The credibility interval for closed-end questions answered by all respondents is ±4 percentage points" so we could conservatively say 12% or 1-in-8 is more representative of general population. If you want to go wild, you could say 20%, 1-in-5 have played D&D at some point but that just seems implausible.
If we stick with the 1-in-6 estimate and take the Census.gov estimate of 342.5 million in the USA, this implies about 55 million folk in the USA with D&D experience?
This is *fascinating* to me - because the perception is that the TTRPG industry is niche - in my lived experience, folk have never heard of a dice that is not six-sided, never mind thrown a d20 in anger. WotC themselves made an estimate of "over 40 million fans around the world" in 2020 - M.T. Black tried to sweep up this and other estimates of how many D&D players there are back in 2021 and ended up with 48 million from taking WotC at their word on growth rates.
One possible way to reconcile the 'feel' of this is the point that this '1-in-6' group are folk that ever played D&D in their lives - if we tease out when they last played things change a touch. Of those surveyed:
20% played this year
23% in 24/25
15% in 2020-2023
41% have not played this side of the pandemic
So roughly half of that are active, half are folk who have played a but no longer do. These are still chunky numbers - 23 million folk who played back in the day, 32.5 who played since the pandemic - 11 million who are playing this year. This survey was taken in April and we know that there is a good chunk of folk who do play on an annual basis so some slice of the 24/25 players are probably still active, just have not gotten their games in this year yet.
There are a couple of other stats they pull out that chime with numbers we have seen elsewhere - 20% of male respondants have played D&D, 13% of female respondents - there is the 60/40 male-to-female ratio we have seen before.
So where is everyone?
We get one additional clue in the editions breakdown at the end - 7% of the respondants had last played the new 5.5e, while 35% had last played 5e. That says, assuming everyone who ever tried 5.5e back in 2024 is still playing today, there are nearly double the amount of folk who are playing today, who have not made the jump to the new system. At the most generous, those folk are all playing 5e - so they were buying new books of WotC up to two years ago. I am sure a bunch of folk are still playing previous editions so that number is lower.
I am going to posit here that D&D's general cultural footprint suffers from the fact that for a lot of folk, they just need to buy the tools once, then they're set up. I can throw no rocks, sitting with multiple editions racked up around me, but even I balked at 4e and 5.5e. People can buy the gamebooks once, whatever edition, and never surface again - merrily playing away with their own game table, invisible to the outside.
Apart from 5.5e it is not clear who could be playing which editions - if we can take a hint from what we see on Obsidian Portal I suspect of the older editions we would find 3e/3.5e, BX and AD&D most likely to still be played.
There was a Techraptor report in Jan 2025 that said 3.6 million characters had been created on D&DBeyond for 5.5e after its first year which aligns quite neatly with the 3.9 million 5.5e players suggested by that 7% of respondants. There is almost certainly some fuzz around that - folk making multiple characters, folk trying 5.5e and reverting to an older edition - but it is coming to the same order of magnitude at least.
We see 58% of folk who ever played D&D have done so since the pandemic - and at least a quarter of them are playing older editions because a max of 42% have last played 5e/5.5e - what are the other 16% playing? Those folk are also not on D&DBeyond because older editions are not supported.
At a minimum it says there are a third again of players out there playing offline for whatever number of players are appearing online through use of D&DBeyond. I think that figure is probably far higher since folk on D&DBeyond create multiple characters, so that online footprint represents less actual people and thus the offline ratio is much larger.
All told a fascinating glimpse into that 'silent majority' of offline players out there, playing away and not interacting with the online nexi of RPG discourse, never counted in any of the 'community polls'.
Additionally, it suggests that there are likely a bunch of ex-D&D-players around in the US that no longer game. All our surveys and the like suggest that most of that is driven by lack of group and lack of time, not lack of appetite for the game itself. Perhaps there is an angle to be worked there for drop-in pick-up games?
Sources:
2026 Survey by Researchscape (N = 1253)
2022 Survey by Researchscape (N = 1074)
2019 Survey by Researchscape (N = 942)
We poked at this before in "Comparing TTRPG player surveys in US and Germany" where we looked at the previous surveys from the same outfit - Researchscape 2022 Survey and 2019 Survey which also look at who among the general US population has played TTRPGs.
Here they pulled in 1,253 US adults and found 16% - 204 people - had played D&D at some point. They mention "the data was weighted to the U.S. population by 9 demographic questions. The credibility interval for closed-end questions answered by all respondents is ±4 percentage points" so we could conservatively say 12% or 1-in-8 is more representative of general population. If you want to go wild, you could say 20%, 1-in-5 have played D&D at some point but that just seems implausible.
If we stick with the 1-in-6 estimate and take the Census.gov estimate of 342.5 million in the USA, this implies about 55 million folk in the USA with D&D experience?
This is *fascinating* to me - because the perception is that the TTRPG industry is niche - in my lived experience, folk have never heard of a dice that is not six-sided, never mind thrown a d20 in anger. WotC themselves made an estimate of "over 40 million fans around the world" in 2020 - M.T. Black tried to sweep up this and other estimates of how many D&D players there are back in 2021 and ended up with 48 million from taking WotC at their word on growth rates.
One possible way to reconcile the 'feel' of this is the point that this '1-in-6' group are folk that ever played D&D in their lives - if we tease out when they last played things change a touch. Of those surveyed:
20% played this year
23% in 24/25
15% in 2020-2023
41% have not played this side of the pandemic
So roughly half of that are active, half are folk who have played a but no longer do. These are still chunky numbers - 23 million folk who played back in the day, 32.5 who played since the pandemic - 11 million who are playing this year. This survey was taken in April and we know that there is a good chunk of folk who do play on an annual basis so some slice of the 24/25 players are probably still active, just have not gotten their games in this year yet.
There are a couple of other stats they pull out that chime with numbers we have seen elsewhere - 20% of male respondants have played D&D, 13% of female respondents - there is the 60/40 male-to-female ratio we have seen before.
So where is everyone?
We get one additional clue in the editions breakdown at the end - 7% of the respondants had last played the new 5.5e, while 35% had last played 5e. That says, assuming everyone who ever tried 5.5e back in 2024 is still playing today, there are nearly double the amount of folk who are playing today, who have not made the jump to the new system. At the most generous, those folk are all playing 5e - so they were buying new books of WotC up to two years ago. I am sure a bunch of folk are still playing previous editions so that number is lower.
I am going to posit here that D&D's general cultural footprint suffers from the fact that for a lot of folk, they just need to buy the tools once, then they're set up. I can throw no rocks, sitting with multiple editions racked up around me, but even I balked at 4e and 5.5e. People can buy the gamebooks once, whatever edition, and never surface again - merrily playing away with their own game table, invisible to the outside.
Apart from 5.5e it is not clear who could be playing which editions - if we can take a hint from what we see on Obsidian Portal I suspect of the older editions we would find 3e/3.5e, BX and AD&D most likely to still be played.
There was a Techraptor report in Jan 2025 that said 3.6 million characters had been created on D&DBeyond for 5.5e after its first year which aligns quite neatly with the 3.9 million 5.5e players suggested by that 7% of respondants. There is almost certainly some fuzz around that - folk making multiple characters, folk trying 5.5e and reverting to an older edition - but it is coming to the same order of magnitude at least.
We see 58% of folk who ever played D&D have done so since the pandemic - and at least a quarter of them are playing older editions because a max of 42% have last played 5e/5.5e - what are the other 16% playing? Those folk are also not on D&DBeyond because older editions are not supported.
At a minimum it says there are a third again of players out there playing offline for whatever number of players are appearing online through use of D&DBeyond. I think that figure is probably far higher since folk on D&DBeyond create multiple characters, so that online footprint represents less actual people and thus the offline ratio is much larger.
All told a fascinating glimpse into that 'silent majority' of offline players out there, playing away and not interacting with the online nexi of RPG discourse, never counted in any of the 'community polls'.
Additionally, it suggests that there are likely a bunch of ex-D&D-players around in the US that no longer game. All our surveys and the like suggest that most of that is driven by lack of group and lack of time, not lack of appetite for the game itself. Perhaps there is an angle to be worked there for drop-in pick-up games?
Sources:
2026 Survey by Researchscape (N = 1253)
2022 Survey by Researchscape (N = 1074)
2019 Survey by Researchscape (N = 942)
02 May 2026
Actual Test: Dungeons of Knock #1
I have been using Knock #1 as my go-to resource for the Hexcrawl25 campaign - the dungeons in the "Extraordinary Excursions" section were my source for complex sites and I got three of them to table. These dungeons were The citadel of Evil by Stuart Robertson, Praise the Fallen by Graphite Prime and Zaratzarats Manse by Nabok the Censored. I used these for two cultist lairs and a random wizards manse stumbled upon. This still leaves one last dungeon for use if needed - all told great value for the size of the book.
I used all of these dungeons as "I need a dungeon in a hurry because the players went off on a side quest" and they worked pretty well. Even the Citadel of Evil, which I initially thought seemed small, turned out to be very worthwhile. All of them got serious use - at least two sessions apiece from each of them with Praise the Fallen needing one big initial session that was a prisoner break-out then a later three-session return to clear it out completely.
Running through them in order encountered by the players:
Praise the Fallen has 15 A5 pages with lots of interesting bits and pieces within. They got to do a bunch of creeping around some of the nice old school spooky things like statues of angels and so on. Some proper old-school traps like compulsions to fling yourself on a blade were good and unsettling even where saves were made.
On the initial excursion the party missed most of the really nasty stuff - they probed the front bit, got into a big fight with a gathering of cultists and prevailed by bottling them up in a room and liberally using flaming oil. Solid tactics and good use of terrain. They did a bit of further creeping around, decided the spookier, deeper rooms were way over their heads and withdrew with the prisoners they had rescued.
The dungeon lurked in the background, oft mentioned, for much of the rest of the campaign until the party finally decided to go in and neutralise the threat. This return was supposed to be a quick raid (according to players plans) plunging deep into the temple to root out the cult leadership. The first session of this 'final' raid went well for the party as they ambushed cultists, sneaked about and bluffed their way past scattered lowly cultists with stolen robes and their acquired lore. The second session, as they ventured deeper they managed to pass many of the set piece wards and guardians using 'pass-pendants' before rousing a very large cave monster and having to fight them on treacherous terrain which left them low on resources and hit points to end the session. They staggered from that into a next set of guardians for the third session, fighting their way through and then getting into another big fight to stop a summoning. This brought out the dungeons arch villain who was invisibly nibbling them to death with summoned minions before they finally managed to reveal them and land the killing blow, just above the initiative tick where the villain was about to flee and become a recurring pest.
The dungeon itself is really nicely done. You get an intro on one page, some notes on rules applicable for the whole dungeon then a random encounter table and the main villainess. A small, total map is then followed by section-zooms with room-by-room detail. There are nice touches like the numbers of the rooms on the margins - a one two three up in the top corner so as you are leafing through you can quickly see where your where your room is. Stat blocks appear on the page where where you should be using them, descriptions are pretty terse, BX-style. The map is doing a lot of work with proper detailing of stairs up, stairs down secret doors and the likes. Good information density overall. I ran it pretty much straight out of the book.
My only advice is to be enthusiastic about rolling encounter chances - you will not always get them and even when you do, not all of them are going to be serious challenges, so roll often to keep the pressure up.
The Citadel of Evil was an identified location that the party knew they were going to go to so went relatively prepared and this ran over three sessions - one getting to the site and scouting from outside, one session of full-on dungeon-bashing and the last spent scouring the now-pacified wreckage for lurking remnants and/or loot.
They worked their way in through the base, up through the mysterious rooms in the middle, focussed on rescuing prisoners of the inhabitants so less on prying up flagstones and loot to start. The whole thing was a nice combination of slightly mysterious design requiring some careful scouting, non-traps that still needed navigating and then lurking cultists for active danger.
My party spent a session working their way up to the core then got in a fight with the main villain and managed to set a serious fire in the staircase that leads up to the citadel above. They did accelerate that fire but effectively they got into the basements and set the whole thing on fire above while they rescued people and fled. This bypassed some fighting in the upper structure but those foes were mostly guards/not the most interesting thing going on.
Then they did another entire session of poking through the ruins, interacting with traps and dangers and the hazards involved with the burnt out husk and the things rising from the dead and so on.
The dungeon is written to cover two pages so this was incredible bang for buck. Very good stuff, got two solid sessions, ten hours of play out of one side of A4.
The last one was the one on the dust cover, Zaratazarat's Manse, where a wizard was wizarding and cooked up a hazardous artefact that has gotten out of control. On this occassion the artefact is he's made "Ragga Gyxy’s Random Encounter Table", basically a monster summoning slab. This was a place the party was pointed at when they asked a settlement 'what kind of problems have you got' and then decided to poke into it.
I did not use the external village as written because I dropped it into an existing campaign but apart from that, I used everything over two sessions. One was an initial reconnaisance by a semi-open table group and the other was by the rest of the party to clear it out.
In both cases I used the mechanics provided - the big random-encounter table, the per-room encounter ladders, the 'find-the-wizard' rolls, the reaction rolls - which were fun. All of this on the inside of the dust-cover for the magazine so quite small text but still functional.
The first session, the party got there, poked around, ran into some random-encounter generated monsters and met some with negotiation, some with swords drawn. They managed to stumble their way past a bunch of things directly to the wizards bedroom and got in a big fight with the mimic-door there, then spent a block of time dealing with the sketchy magic mirror before leaving with some rescuees.
The second time around a slightly different team went in and went room by room trying to figure out what the problem was. They eventually made their way downstairs, took out the artifact that was malfunctioning to spawn all the monsters and installed the wizards apprentice as the new master of the place before leaving with armfuls of loot.
This is the most complex of the dungeons because there are lots of moving parts - more punchy random monsters, large uncertainty over if/where the wizard is found - and the fact that many of the monsters are sentient and randomly summoned from all sorts of places means they may not be hostile or from this world. I had fun having a dwarf be a warhammer old world dwarf, a white ape be a Barsoomian, etc.
From the inside and outside of a dust cover, let's say two and a half pages of A4, I got two solid sessions, great gaming.
I got great use out of those dungeons - while one could make arguments about room for improvements in any of them which other reviews have done, I think the combination of having a bunch of them in a compact format was very useful indeed when running that open format hexcrawl. The players could roam where they willed and I had kick-ass dungeons at my finger-tips whenever I needed them.
In full transparency I must admit this was not the *most* weight efficient way possible to carry those around since Knock #1 is a chunky book but given the minimal effort involved in pulling it off the shelf and slinging it in my go-bag, I could commit the calories to lug it around.
I used all of these dungeons as "I need a dungeon in a hurry because the players went off on a side quest" and they worked pretty well. Even the Citadel of Evil, which I initially thought seemed small, turned out to be very worthwhile. All of them got serious use - at least two sessions apiece from each of them with Praise the Fallen needing one big initial session that was a prisoner break-out then a later three-session return to clear it out completely.
Running through them in order encountered by the players:
Praise the Fallen has 15 A5 pages with lots of interesting bits and pieces within. They got to do a bunch of creeping around some of the nice old school spooky things like statues of angels and so on. Some proper old-school traps like compulsions to fling yourself on a blade were good and unsettling even where saves were made.
On the initial excursion the party missed most of the really nasty stuff - they probed the front bit, got into a big fight with a gathering of cultists and prevailed by bottling them up in a room and liberally using flaming oil. Solid tactics and good use of terrain. They did a bit of further creeping around, decided the spookier, deeper rooms were way over their heads and withdrew with the prisoners they had rescued.
The dungeon lurked in the background, oft mentioned, for much of the rest of the campaign until the party finally decided to go in and neutralise the threat. This return was supposed to be a quick raid (according to players plans) plunging deep into the temple to root out the cult leadership. The first session of this 'final' raid went well for the party as they ambushed cultists, sneaked about and bluffed their way past scattered lowly cultists with stolen robes and their acquired lore. The second session, as they ventured deeper they managed to pass many of the set piece wards and guardians using 'pass-pendants' before rousing a very large cave monster and having to fight them on treacherous terrain which left them low on resources and hit points to end the session. They staggered from that into a next set of guardians for the third session, fighting their way through and then getting into another big fight to stop a summoning. This brought out the dungeons arch villain who was invisibly nibbling them to death with summoned minions before they finally managed to reveal them and land the killing blow, just above the initiative tick where the villain was about to flee and become a recurring pest.
The dungeon itself is really nicely done. You get an intro on one page, some notes on rules applicable for the whole dungeon then a random encounter table and the main villainess. A small, total map is then followed by section-zooms with room-by-room detail. There are nice touches like the numbers of the rooms on the margins - a one two three up in the top corner so as you are leafing through you can quickly see where your where your room is. Stat blocks appear on the page where where you should be using them, descriptions are pretty terse, BX-style. The map is doing a lot of work with proper detailing of stairs up, stairs down secret doors and the likes. Good information density overall. I ran it pretty much straight out of the book.
My only advice is to be enthusiastic about rolling encounter chances - you will not always get them and even when you do, not all of them are going to be serious challenges, so roll often to keep the pressure up.
The Citadel of Evil was an identified location that the party knew they were going to go to so went relatively prepared and this ran over three sessions - one getting to the site and scouting from outside, one session of full-on dungeon-bashing and the last spent scouring the now-pacified wreckage for lurking remnants and/or loot.
They worked their way in through the base, up through the mysterious rooms in the middle, focussed on rescuing prisoners of the inhabitants so less on prying up flagstones and loot to start. The whole thing was a nice combination of slightly mysterious design requiring some careful scouting, non-traps that still needed navigating and then lurking cultists for active danger.
My party spent a session working their way up to the core then got in a fight with the main villain and managed to set a serious fire in the staircase that leads up to the citadel above. They did accelerate that fire but effectively they got into the basements and set the whole thing on fire above while they rescued people and fled. This bypassed some fighting in the upper structure but those foes were mostly guards/not the most interesting thing going on.
Then they did another entire session of poking through the ruins, interacting with traps and dangers and the hazards involved with the burnt out husk and the things rising from the dead and so on.
The dungeon is written to cover two pages so this was incredible bang for buck. Very good stuff, got two solid sessions, ten hours of play out of one side of A4.
The last one was the one on the dust cover, Zaratazarat's Manse, where a wizard was wizarding and cooked up a hazardous artefact that has gotten out of control. On this occassion the artefact is he's made "Ragga Gyxy’s Random Encounter Table", basically a monster summoning slab. This was a place the party was pointed at when they asked a settlement 'what kind of problems have you got' and then decided to poke into it.
I did not use the external village as written because I dropped it into an existing campaign but apart from that, I used everything over two sessions. One was an initial reconnaisance by a semi-open table group and the other was by the rest of the party to clear it out.
In both cases I used the mechanics provided - the big random-encounter table, the per-room encounter ladders, the 'find-the-wizard' rolls, the reaction rolls - which were fun. All of this on the inside of the dust-cover for the magazine so quite small text but still functional.
The first session, the party got there, poked around, ran into some random-encounter generated monsters and met some with negotiation, some with swords drawn. They managed to stumble their way past a bunch of things directly to the wizards bedroom and got in a big fight with the mimic-door there, then spent a block of time dealing with the sketchy magic mirror before leaving with some rescuees.
The second time around a slightly different team went in and went room by room trying to figure out what the problem was. They eventually made their way downstairs, took out the artifact that was malfunctioning to spawn all the monsters and installed the wizards apprentice as the new master of the place before leaving with armfuls of loot.
This is the most complex of the dungeons because there are lots of moving parts - more punchy random monsters, large uncertainty over if/where the wizard is found - and the fact that many of the monsters are sentient and randomly summoned from all sorts of places means they may not be hostile or from this world. I had fun having a dwarf be a warhammer old world dwarf, a white ape be a Barsoomian, etc.
From the inside and outside of a dust cover, let's say two and a half pages of A4, I got two solid sessions, great gaming.
I got great use out of those dungeons - while one could make arguments about room for improvements in any of them which other reviews have done, I think the combination of having a bunch of them in a compact format was very useful indeed when running that open format hexcrawl. The players could roam where they willed and I had kick-ass dungeons at my finger-tips whenever I needed them.
In full transparency I must admit this was not the *most* weight efficient way possible to carry those around since Knock #1 is a chunky book but given the minimal effort involved in pulling it off the shelf and slinging it in my go-bag, I could commit the calories to lug it around.
25 April 2026
d12 Attack flyers for Spelljammers
I see quite a few engined-/fighter-type things in various Spelljammer homebrew and it leaves me surprised we do not have more 'attack critters' for the same purpose but more aligned to the Age of Sail flavour - packs of trained beasts or flying mounts.
The archetype I can think of is the githyanki knight on a Star Lancer from the "Behold... H'Catha!" Spelljammer Academy 5e adventure though there have always been nods towards 'getting monsters on the opposing ship' - with catapults flinging skeleton-balls or bottled green slimes in various Spelljammer 2e adventures.
It feels like there should be more 'ship-based monsters' for boarding action support than we see - especially since in 5e killing the crew is a far more direct path to victory than attempting to batter the opposing ship apart.
Ship-to-ship encounters could be made more interesting with the addition of such 'attack monsters' - it is the equivalent to changing the terrain to make ship-to-ship action feel fresh again when you might be constrained by the ship deck plans or opposing forces otherwise being quite similar - e.g. in a conflict against a faction where you might repeatedly run up against the same ship type (i.e. terrain) and fights might get to feel samey.
My thoughts are that there are a couple of potential options that achieve this while fitting a bit more into the 'age of sail' flavour
- flying-steeds / mounted attackers - as per SJA knight-on-a-star lancer
- attack beasties - harassers, swarms, like a wardog in a dungeon
- flung critters - as above, skeletons, slimes or other 'living munitions'
- the 'fast-moving, damage-flinging single thing' is a mage or a monster - or someone decked out with a flying-carpet and a wand of fireballs.
If there is the means for a small-fast craft lying around, I would see it being more used for sneaky boarding actions rather than engaging something with a lot of weapons while you only have a few.
I think best illustrated by a few examples.
d12 creatures arriving as that craft closes to boarding distance
1. A burly crewman with a boarding pike atop a small wyvern swoops under your hull to attack weapon emplacements from the far side
2. A gallant captain with polished blade and befeathered hat atop a comet steed directly challenges his opposite number
3. Robes billowing behind them as they fly, a mage loops over your ship firing spells at exposed crew
4. An ogre flings howling goblins into the rigging of your ship, some with shortbows, some with firepots, others scuttle down below decks to ambush your crew there
5. Giant wolf-spiders leap from the drow ship, biting crew and darting along the hull
6. Illithids just appeared aboard, firing spells and trying to devour your crews succulent brains
7. Giant toads with psurlons atop them leap aboard and start trying to swallow your crew, fighting over them
8. A flyby from the neogi ship drops a spread of piercers on your deck
9. A squad of dohwar atop space swine swoops down on you weapon emplacements
10. An elf flying a gadabout drags a rope with a trio of fellows into your rigging
11. An enemy catapult flings a jar with a tar-form gehreleth onto your deck with the intention of standing off and allowing the fiend to rampage
12. Catapult flung balls of skeletons land on the deck, un-fold and attack
The archetype I can think of is the githyanki knight on a Star Lancer from the "Behold... H'Catha!" Spelljammer Academy 5e adventure though there have always been nods towards 'getting monsters on the opposing ship' - with catapults flinging skeleton-balls or bottled green slimes in various Spelljammer 2e adventures.
It feels like there should be more 'ship-based monsters' for boarding action support than we see - especially since in 5e killing the crew is a far more direct path to victory than attempting to batter the opposing ship apart.
Ship-to-ship encounters could be made more interesting with the addition of such 'attack monsters' - it is the equivalent to changing the terrain to make ship-to-ship action feel fresh again when you might be constrained by the ship deck plans or opposing forces otherwise being quite similar - e.g. in a conflict against a faction where you might repeatedly run up against the same ship type (i.e. terrain) and fights might get to feel samey.
My thoughts are that there are a couple of potential options that achieve this while fitting a bit more into the 'age of sail' flavour
- flying-steeds / mounted attackers - as per SJA knight-on-a-star lancer
- attack beasties - harassers, swarms, like a wardog in a dungeon
- flung critters - as above, skeletons, slimes or other 'living munitions'
- the 'fast-moving, damage-flinging single thing' is a mage or a monster - or someone decked out with a flying-carpet and a wand of fireballs.
If there is the means for a small-fast craft lying around, I would see it being more used for sneaky boarding actions rather than engaging something with a lot of weapons while you only have a few.
I think best illustrated by a few examples.
d12 creatures arriving as that craft closes to boarding distance
1. A burly crewman with a boarding pike atop a small wyvern swoops under your hull to attack weapon emplacements from the far side
2. A gallant captain with polished blade and befeathered hat atop a comet steed directly challenges his opposite number
3. Robes billowing behind them as they fly, a mage loops over your ship firing spells at exposed crew
4. An ogre flings howling goblins into the rigging of your ship, some with shortbows, some with firepots, others scuttle down below decks to ambush your crew there
5. Giant wolf-spiders leap from the drow ship, biting crew and darting along the hull
6. Illithids just appeared aboard, firing spells and trying to devour your crews succulent brains
7. Giant toads with psurlons atop them leap aboard and start trying to swallow your crew, fighting over them
8. A flyby from the neogi ship drops a spread of piercers on your deck
9. A squad of dohwar atop space swine swoops down on you weapon emplacements
10. An elf flying a gadabout drags a rope with a trio of fellows into your rigging
11. An enemy catapult flings a jar with a tar-form gehreleth onto your deck with the intention of standing off and allowing the fiend to rampage
12. Catapult flung balls of skeletons land on the deck, un-fold and attack
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