Small Gods, Saints and minor divinity! - RPG Blog Carnival Wrap Up

And so we conclude the July 2026 RPG Blog Carnival - our topic was "Small Gods, Saints and minor divinity!" - on my mind was the fun I have had with small gods in my recent campaigns; divinities on a personal scale. This was a double-header hosting with Sea of Stars.

Sea of Stars has done their round up - if you have read that already then Advantage on Arcana 'more little Gods' and Taichara's contributions are the only extras.

We got responses from:


Sea of Stars own response the Fate of the Small Gods in the Sea of Stars nicely talks about where apex monsters like dragons start to overlap with small gods.

52 Monsters on Saints, Oracles, and Their Demons - I really like the superstitions and potential for sainthood.

Vulcan Stev on Berrin & Velquor – Small gods, Saints and minor divinity! gives us a pair of encounterable demigods and lots on how they might turn up at your table.

Advantage on Arcana on Six More Little Gods of Planegea - with the first six for Sea of Stars. As with all things Plangean, these are minor divinities at the start of their journeys which is interesting.

Dungeons & Possums on Small Gods about water incarnate, a species of spirit/hyperlocal nature gods called thinals.

Taichara gives us two - Shrines of the Backways and Unseen Paws - this last with the gods of catkind is great.

A pretty good showing, lots of ideas to incorporate - the great thing about Small Gods is you can usually slot them into your own campaign since they are not so narratively load-bearing as major pantheon deities.

The carnival continues with Of Dice and Dragons themselves hosting! The topic is Time, both in world and above the table, an apt one given scheduling is the slayer of many campaigns.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

The hard graft of inspiration-on-demand (RPG Blog Carnival)

Vulcan Stev's Database gives us this months prompt Inspiration! Where Does Yours Come From? for the RPG Blog Carnival. This post is mostly about turning the inspiration you will surely have into whatever you actually want at the end or as Edison put it "Genius is 1% Inspiration, 99% Perspiration".

My suggestions to anyone trying to reliably 'create on demand':
1. Have your tools ready to catch the sparks
2. Get from zero to something, because you can work with something.
3. Stand on something
4. Sketch out your structure if you risk interruption
5. Save all your ideas

I lay this out for blogging but so too for adventures.

First - have your tools ready

I follow the Egan doctrine, a kind of 'hair-trigger pomodoro' - which is being ready to seize any free 20 mins to just push something along. Small progress, made often, adds to a sizeable movement in the end. To get specific, I put together this list of d20 small viable blogging tasks to illustrate what I mean.

Practically this means being ready to fill in the blanks around the spark of inspiration you have had elsewhere - hitting your slush-list, finding that quote, linking to the survey, jam or challenge that is relevant. You can hack out the *tasks* around putting a post together in chunks once you have the core idea in place.

When I am completely dry, I set up reviews - the block-and-tackle numbers work like counting the section sizes, or block-out weekly link posts. Something from the pile of background tasks I continuously run on the blog that allow me to make progress when I'm not having a moment of inspiration.

Second - getting from zero to something

This blog has always been an advocate of "don't get it right, get it written". Of late, one of my handier tools has been voice transcription - used as for this post while doing laundry. My key learning is that this voice log will be trash. Far more hassle to try and whip it into shape than to just re-read, steal the ideas and re-write. For getting from nothing to something, perfectly adequate.

On getting stuff written, I can point back to one of my ancient blogposts on lessons learned from NaNoWriMo - back before it collapsed in disgrace, I participated often and there were a couple of useful tricks for getting drafts done I learned. Key from the point of view of inspiration was to try and stop in the middle of a thought, so when you came back to the work, you could reread your last bit, finish out that thought and presto, you had a bit of momentum already.

Third - stand on something - use jams and challenges

Question sets, prompt lists and blogwagons help to jump start a post. Just writing down whatever you are participating in or joining gets you that first start. The more structured the challenge, the easier it is to get something done. Working down a question list is usually easier than answering an unstructured, wide-open question.

Campaign retrospectives, session reports and other "factual" write ups can help - one might say those sidestep the idea of "inspiration" entirely since you are documenting what actually happened. However one feels on that question I think those reporting type posts are good for building the muscles of drafting posts and talking about your gaming to make that part easier when you are trying to capture some fickle spark of an idea.

Fourth - sketch out your structure to guard against interruption.

I have of late started this, blocking out my section headers where once I would have just got cracking, Ian Fleming style. Having the key ideas noted down - make your points without justification, enough to remind you what you planned to say. This gets you off zero and gives you a structure you can then build out when time presents itself. It also prevents and untimely interruption causing some chunk of your great idea to be lost before you could commit it to ink.

At this point do no research, do not tab away from the page or change focus until you have the whole outline down. This is not so much about inducing inspiration but about capturing the sparks you do get. Inspiration strikes at the most unlikely places, but then you walk through a doorway or get out of the shower and it is gone. Here my point is to jot down the outline of your whole idea before someone interrupts you and it is all gone like the back three quarters of Kubla Khan. Once you have that view from 50,000ft then you can weather fate trying to mess with you a touch more robustly.

Fifth - Save all your ideas

Then where does inspiration come in and of itself? This can be the hardest - d4 caltrops wrote a good piece on this worth reading. I find frequently rereading the prompt and going away and focussing on something else is helpful, If an idea does not immediately come, nor arrive after a few minutes pondering, then put it down. Tab away to something else and let your subconscious chew on it.

There is a difference between "I have no idea" and "I am not sure how to articulate my point" that warrants slightly different treatment. Above is for "no idea" but if you can feel something nagging you, the classic splinter-in-the-mind, then blocking out the points you do have, leaving a gap for what you are missing can help. I feel this as clearing out mental capacity of the stuff that is solved to give more room for the things remaining unclear. The content of the blank bits sometimes becomes apparent once you have formed the shape of them by putting down what goes around them.

For "no idea" instances - you are going to capture many ideas while out walking around - so have means to capture them. Write yourself a WhatsApp, leave a voicenote, email something to yourself, whatever, just capture the idea, get it down. Once down, it gets soaked into your workflow and feeds into step one.

I have a giant slush pile of blog article headers. One cell in Excel, maybe with a comment and the inspirational link or thought. Typical would be somebodys blog plus my thoughts on a comment or response.

And if you are still stuck try d4 Caltrops great "brainfood for burgeoning blogs" d100 list.

Putting it all together

Moments of inspiration rarely happen when you are sitting down at your desk ready to go - they can, but are typically not so convenient. For me time at desk is processing the ideas list into something useful. Taking those three words on a post-it note and expanding that up to the skeleton sketch, the headers. Then when there is time, fill in each of those headers. Then go back over the whole thing, make sure it's coherent. Then up it goes.

Those are my general tips for inspiration. As you will have no doubt noticed, very little of that is actually about inspiration. Inspiration will happen to you. The key thing is making sure to capture that inspiration, nail it down and turn it into something useful.

do As for blogging, so for adventures

All of the above can replace blog post with D&D adventures and the principles still stand. Capture your ideas when you are out and about. Hack out the outline of the adventure when you get a chance, but skip detail like monster stats or rule lookup or anything like that. Then once you are happy you have the whole idea, go back around and put in the detail to make it table-ready.

Rescaling encounter maps for Tiny Epics (RPG Blog Carnival)

Errant Thinking proposes Tiny Epics: Small Souls in a Big World! for this months prompt for the RPG Blog Carnival. Thinking about the "Dungeons in miniscule" point, I was thinking about the fun to be had with messing with scale. Take a map and tweak the scale from 5' to 10', 15' or 20' as you like.

Castles and dungeons get a whole new lease of life - a window ledge is a great archery position, cavalry charges down corridors make sense, a doorway is not such an easy choke point, an open hall takes more than one turn to cross, all the calculus of moving and fighting within a space changes.

Fun with scale switching

To try and illustrate; I scanned and dropped a grid onto Castle Balronco from the fondly remembered Southern Reaches campaign - it actually looms over the Flytrap bar, haunt of the diminuitive flylings; so was already a place where scales were being fiddled with.
This place started as a repaint of a genuine castle on the Dordogne in France which provided ample detail for the outside - the skeleton of rooms drawn here are wrapped in walls at least as thick as the pointy arrow-slits along the top and bottom left and similarly some of the interior structural walls are very thick indeed. It provides a dungeon-appropriate level of connectivity and served well for the sessions I ran using approx 1 square = 5' scale.

If you bunch that up to 1 square is 15' then once you get into room 1, that big hall, it is a long dash to get across to any other exit leaving you exposed to ranged attacks or vulnerable to hit-and-run from mounted foes. Similiarly the doorways go from normal ~ 3' width to treble that, needing two adventurers shoulder to shoulder to hold it. Fireballs and other such area effects are not guaranteed room-clearers anymore. The list goes on.

None of this is too wild - there have been big maps in modules forever, but it is the ease of getting a second solid use out of a map by massively upscaling it, calling it a giants fortress, and setting your adventurer there. There are quite a few examples of this for existing giants fortress but I would also suggest calling it a giants ruin and having anything but giants there would also get you good mileage.

Continuing massively in this direction; bumping the scale up to 100' and making it a floating titans lair that must be traversed with a Spelljammer or some manner of underwater lair needing a submersible could also be fun.

The invert of all of this - down-scaling a map - can also be done but gets tricky because doors and passages rapidly become impassible to adventurers. This could be a neat puzzle, with an entire miniature dungeon that has to be navigated only through use of mage hand, familiars and hooks on lines, but unless size-changing magic is widely available to your party, it is not such a useful trick.

Castle Balronco in play

The Castle had three factions in it; fly-ling smugglers on the ground floor using the lower left rooms, beetlefolk wanderers where were flying in and out of the top of the castle and unbeknownst to the other two groups, a spider-vampire in some isolated rooms near the roof.

It meant that the ground floor was a combination of well trafficked but also partly-trapped - the unsound structure was not being disturbed by the small, light fly-lings marching about but the bigger player characters would set things off.

Beneath the castle was a dungeon - lifted from a photo of woodworm damage - which proved suitably labyrinthine.

If I were to run the place again, rescaled, suddenly all of those arrow slits become an entryway into some sort of grand temple and the now-huge central spiral staircase demands some sort of set-piece confrontation on it.

To close

Running on an up-scaled map changes the calculus of encounters - moves take you less far, ranges matter more, lines of sight, darkvision ranges, all the mechanics of encounters changes. At a minimum, it allows a straight-up recycle of a map, at best you could get some really memorable second uses by re-working who is present and making things different.

Note, there is nothing to stop you just rescaling the opposing forces; having small folk doing 'big' battlefield tactics in medium scaled places.
There is a map there, so I am counting my Joesky tax paid.

This was for the ever appreciated RPG Blog Carnival organised by Of Dice & Dragons.

Using dragons, fiends & other powerful beings (RPG Blog Carnival)

Sea of Stars proposes Dragons, Gods and other Powerful Beings for this months prompt for the RPG Blog Carnival. Inspiration for one big idea did not strike so I am going to do quick-answers to three of the prompts:
* "From the perspective of games mastering the world: how involved do you want these beings to be? They can easily overwhelm the player characters, so what level of involvement works for both you and the players?"
* "How involved do you want the players to be in creating religions, legends, rituals?"
* "Should characters be able to affect these powerful beings? Meet them? Or should they just be background elements in the setting?"

"From the perspective of games mastering the world: how involved do you want these beings to be? They can easily overwhelm the player characters, so what level of involvement works for both you and the players?"

Having extremely powerful beings active in the world can be a useful lever for a certain style of DM'ing. I have always liked worlds where there are some forces that clearly mightier than the PCs in play. For most of my early campaigns those were dragons to the point that players told me later their rule of thumb was "if we don't know where the dragon is, we just have not spotted it yet."

I realise I got a strong stylistic steer on how dragons should from the Wyrms of the Realms series in Dragon magazine which had the 'meddling shapeshifting high-powered dragon' as a staple. I had a stalking shadow dragon as one of the semi-antagonistic patrons if I recall correctly in the Katharsis campaign. Kraken Mesa had a very large old wyrm that lived in the treasure vault of the citadel they inherited.

There were also a number of high-power fiends kicking around in the Kraken Mesa campaign, also counting as that 'involved, near-overwhelmingly powerful being' category. I tended to use those entities as scenary who could talk - there was no point trying to defeat them, you avoided them or you figured out a way to navigate them - and you tended to be way smaller than their concerns so could slip beneath their notice.

I liked dragons, fiends and the like for that position in my campaigns and I was happy for the players to interact with them as puzzles because they were beyond being a combat challenge. Their presence set the tone of not every fight being balanced or one that players could win from the get-go.

"How involved do you want the players to be in creating religions, legends, rituals?"

I like players being involved - of late I greatly enjoyed the use I have gotten in-game from the Small Gods of the animalings - originating from a GLoGtober '22 prompt - and then getting reinforced by the notion of 'Who Hears Your Oath' variant of divine intervention mechanics.

This little framework has given players reasons to pray or seek blessings at sacred or fitting places and gives a chance for things to be listening or respond. So far one of the players in the Hexcrawl25 campaign has been busily developing ritual practice for They Who Hide From Sight, including invisible sacrifices, carving their sigil in hidden places and other such practices.

The spreading of legends in general is something that I like to encourage - in the Ducal House campaign, the Bard leans hard into that - seeding songs throughout the realm and using their rapid-travel capabilities to propagate the sagas they want known far and wide. In the Hexcrawl25 campaign, there was a time-shift and one of the few things they had done before dropping off the timeline for four years was set a bunch of rumours running about one of the party being a mighty wizard - four years has been plenty of time to percolate and now they are often recognised by name when they turn up places.

Similarly as a good anti-blorb doctrinaire, I am happy for players to tell me what rituals and legends might be out there where it is something that could reasonably be known by them - even better when it is something they can base off some other in-world facts or suppositions. Wild whole cloth additions to the world get a bit more of a flavour-check but it is rare that I cannot work an idea in.

"Should characters be able to affect these powerful beings? Meet them? Or should they just be background elements in the setting?"

As mentioned above I think of these powerful beings more or less like terrain - but a sea can be drained or a mountain torn down with enough effort and the right plan. Everything is affectable with enough effort. Meeting powerful beings or especially gods has always been a staple of my games - hiking up Mount Olympus to meet Mars, patron of two of the party, was one of the earliest divine encounters I ran I believe.

There is a fine old tradition in D&D of displacing gods and powerful beings which I can get behind in some circumstances but it is not a thing to treat trivially or else it makes the achievement hollow. To defeat a gods plans, to drive off its servitors - these are the things of epic deed already. To usurp a god and cast them down should be a huge deal, hard won - and creating and seeing that campaign that does such a thing justice through would be a hell of a lot of work.

A port on the deep astral - Gaus Tschaltis (RPG Blog Carnival )

Hipsters & Dragons gives us this months prompt of fantasy locations and from the long list of prompts they suggest I am going with a "homebrew location that fellow GMs can drop into their games." Find below the astral outpost of Gaus Tschaltis - a leviathan-hunting port on the far fringes of the Githyanki empire.

As mentioned in The Githyanki Main I used the set up of "not enough hands" - a local githyanki regent having to hold down some far-flung reach of the astral with few githyanki and using Letters of Marque and mercenaries to solve problems. This makes this place a great jumping off place for Spelljamming campaigns or a stop-over on astral traverses for Spelljammer or Planescape.

This port is built on the drifting skeleton of a colossal astral whale - the slaying of which was the founding legend of Yvre Tchaltis, first master of the port. These are actual bones not the rocky remnants of a dead god and a roving astral ranger once said it was clear the creature must have been on the verge of death from age if it was this large but noone heeded that liar. The initial butchery and processing of the carcass kept the first crew here busy so long that they did many runs back to other githyanki outposts and the place became known. Some decades of merry anarchy followed before the eye of Vlaakith finally fell upon the activities of her children and since then a Githyanki Knight oversees her will. In practice, Vlaakith mostly wills that the leviathan hunters, pirates and raiders handover a share of their whatever they haul back and otherwise is content to let them about their business.

The port itself has a handful of major locations. The populace is half githyanki, half whatever-came-in-on-a-Spelljammer. Order is held down by House Tschaltis cracking heads if anyone gets too rowdy. The Law extends about as far as Hrin can see. Everything else is at a strangers own risk.

Apocalypse for thee, but not for us (RPG Blog Carnival )

This month the RPG blog carnival is hosted by Advantage on Arcana and has the topic of The End Times And After - which is an interesting one.

The End Times for a given world are not 'the End of all things' and things continue thereafter - see the weird time epochs collected on Coins and Scrolls or last summers Blog Carnival topic "It Came From Beyond Time" where I went into some of the ways that things can survive through 'deep time'. We also see that 'the end times' of a given people may be little to nothing for their neighbours (d6 Sites of the Long Wars) and also that adventure can be found in the immediate aftermath of the end-times: d12 post-apocalyptic worlds (GLoGtober '22).

Things eventually bounce back - especially when we are dealing with a multiverse teeming with life - even a world burnt to a cinder is briefly a paradise for fire-elementals before turning into a rock suitable for dao, xorn and other rock-creatures.

All this assumes your apocalypse hit hard enough to disrupt the underdark and the oceans, both of which provide vast reservoirs of hardy life which can re-seed a devastated land.

Menagerieworld has four great extinction events - where "the fate lines pinched out" - running back to the distant past. Multiple devastating conflicts and continent shaking events barely register on such a scale.

One can have truly global 'end times' with nuclear winters, the fading of life and the long wait for re-seeding from the seas, underdark, wildspace of the planes - but one can get most of the same adventurable bang-for-buck from a continental apocalypse; sufficiently large that it is practically beyond escaping but still leaving the possibility of remnants out there.

One kind of 'post apocalypse as we don't generally understand them' is something unique to our fantasy realms - where a thriving civilization can essentially be cut down while its neighbours or even some of its citizens carry on.

d6 possible 'post-apocalyptic' games
1. The elves of this world all just withered away - their soul-tree in Arvandor died. What is found in their forest holds? What treasures slipped from their fingers? What gates they held barred now fall open?
2. An illithid invasion swept this world, nautiloids hang in the skies and subterranean cities are being constructed. You are one of the inedible races - warforged, plasmoids, dhampir - carve out a niche in the new order
3. The seas rose, much has drowned - you are in one of the few remaining spots of protruding land - adapt to this new water world and its now pre-eminent aquatic masters
4. Princes of Undeath - you and your peers have out-lasted the mortals, as was always the plan. They had some ragnarok, all souls went on and now, finally, the gameboard is clear and long-held grand ambitions can be pursued
5. The great chill - volcanic plumes have darkened the skies, sufficient to hold off the baleful sun - forests spread, the deserts shrink, the claw-locked grip of the lizard-folk empire are loosened. As they skulk off into hibernation or away to warmer climes, what to do?
6. The great migration - everyone just up and left, reasons unknown. Rumours of strange heralds beckoning and driving all through portals that opened everywhere. Are they gone for good? If not, when will they return?

The broad theme here is a massive shake to the system that opens a window for outsiders to potentially forge a new destiny in the abandoned palaces or ruins of the old.

Leafwander festival for the ruin-filled swamplands (RPG Blog Carnival )

This months prompt for the RPG Blog Carnival is by the long-time host of Dice and Dragons themselves - Feasts and Festivals in Your TTRPG Campaign.

In honour of this I will be adding in a 'background festival' to tweak the existing carousing routine. My Hexcrawl25 table has proven receptive to burning off their gold for XP by carousing so I have 'used up' a fair few entries on the previous d20 Carousing table for the ruin-filled swamplands.

Inspired by player activities to trample in trade routes and try to forge a realm out of the various swamp peoples, we see a revitalisation of the old festival of Leafwander. Here herbalists of all sorts trek a great circuit of the swamps visiting all sorts of communities they would not often to swap and sample leaves, herbs, berries, roots, nuts, fruit and seeds.

Reason for Celebration: The ancient rootes of this are fey, when the veil between worlds was thinner, and the fey courts visited. Now it is an early harvest festival, effectively marking the end of the summer markets. The number of travellers abroad for Leafwander is taken as an omen of how hard the winter will be, that generosity to strangers now will bring a good harvest. While not wrong, the truth is that hard times and unrest block travellers and herald foraging parties taxing the harvests and/or slaying / drafting the farmers.

Traditions and Rituals: Mostly marked by hanging out dried sprigs from doorways and setting an extra place at the table in case of a traveller. Should a travelling herbalist turn-up, often there will be an improptu gathering at a hosts house, with samples of all the best local things brought to try, news and tales exchanged, music played and the herbalists wares tried.

Herbalists themselves partaking of Leafwander will wear a crown of simple greenery - grass, common leaves or twigs - that they make afresh after each sharing. A traveller with a wilted crown will often be stopped by whatever others they meet - be they shepherds or charcoalers - to share whatever they have.

Atmosphere: for a smaller place, Leafwander will strongly resemble a village feast with the wanderer presiding. For large places, where many travellers have come together, Leafwander more resembles a market that goes on into the small hours with little to no coin changing hand. Strange smells of smokes and scents of teas are common, as cookfires roasting and boiling a variety of oddly spiced dishes. Weirder things like biting and stinging insects and frogs to be licked may also be found, at the asking of seekers, rarely openly offered.

Leafwander typically extends over a week, often sprawling to ten-days, as a relatively relaxed celebration of the variety of herbs, spices and food to be found in the swamp-lands.

At table

Thematically this is a small festival that can be used as a back-drop for other events or - as I need - something to modify and renew an existing carousing table - use as you see fit.

d6 twists to carousing during the Leafwander Festival
1. A provider of fine (strong) cigar-like leafs is here, enthusiastically joining in and rendering all proceedings somewhat breathless and dizzy.
2. An acrid tarpot burns beneath a pan of bubbling frog-sweat. Needles dipped and licked render participants langorous and intensely focussed.
3. A somewhat jittery traveller is serving a very spicy stew, giving handfuls of spicy leaves to everyone and insisting folk use them if people start acting not themselves.
4. A serpent-folk purveyor offers oddly-fitting vials filled with herb-steeped nectars, invigorating and clearing the mind.
5. A young herbalist toting an enormous ancient tome offers cold-teas brewed in pitcher-plants, astringent, calming and mildly-painkilling, they quiz people a little impolitely on how they like what they try.
6. A swamp trader with a wide range of goblin fare - fruit, seed and root combinations that yield psychadelic results, no two the same nor any effect replicable in true goblin fashion.

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

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

Portraying Other Worlds

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

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

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

Original system sketch from ~ 2019

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rapidly filling out worlds

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

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

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

Binding worlds together

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

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

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

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

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

Wrap-up

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

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

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

Adventuresome Times Getting Your Magic Rocks (RPG Blog Carnival)

Wobble Rocket gives us this months prompt Magic Rocks for the RPG Blog Carnival.

This is a build-out of an ideas-bouncing conversation with Robyn Proffer on a shared discord where they were looking for a "metal that gets mined that has terrible consequences and people wanna figure out how to use it" - where my immediate thought was 'steal and repaint warpstone' that staple of Warhammer techno-arcanic genius-geniuses the Skaven. Warpstone is mutagenic, magic-boosting and addictive, snort it to enhance your spells, forge it into armour-piercing bullets, grind it to make explosives, use it in flamethrowers, leave it in your beast pens to grow exciting new mutants - all for the low-low price of madness, mutation and death - either through affliction or explosive-mishap.

Another possible idea is 'earthblood' like liquid metal or crude-oil like substance that conveys similar magical properties.

Don't Tell Me It's Raining

Bearer of the RPG Blog Carnival torch Scott Newbury themselves gives us this months prompt Good Morning, Dave on ways that you’re using AI in your gaming. Below my view on AI as it is pitched to us today, and its fitness-for-purpose for TTRPGs to the limit of my patience since I deal with it professionally too. The super short version, I am no AI zealot either way but AI is not yet pulling its weight for me and my DM-ing workflow and the 'outsource my braining' aspect of it does not appeal.

Experience so far

On the basis of lived experience I think my over all view can be summed up in that I gave using AI tools a shot back in ~2020-2021 and was generally dissatisfied with what they could give me so I chucked it. I had a go at LLMs to boost encounter tables across the pandemic - mostly attempting to increase lists - so very well 'prompted' and the effort required for setting it up and cleaning up the output was not worth it. See examples of villanous escapes, night events, living doors and mythic shoreline encounters.

Improv To Warm Up A Table (RPG Blog Carnival)

Chaotican Writer gives us this months prompt Improv, Roleplay, and Warmups by Chaotican Writer for the RPG Blog Carnival. Below some thoughts on a rapid-fire recap or introduction activity.

This type of stuff is way off my normal patch so I tapped the wisdom of a pal - Tygerkrash - who does theater and most of the following is a mildly sanded and varnished version of their ideas.

What magical items can be found to buy (RPG Blog Carnival)

Advantage on Arcana gives us this months prompt Magic Shops and Their Alternatives for the RPG Blog Carnival. For this I wrote up how it works in my campaigns.

For my menagerie world campaigns, magic items can come from a number of typical sources
- wizard "guilds" - craftsmasters, journeymen making them new as part of learning - what is available is whatever they are teaching/learning
- artificers crafting to order, incl. hedge wizards, shamen, deep forest witches, etc.
- vaults of noble families, temples, etc - incl. caches laid down by previous generations
- hoards/treasuries of monsters and men - 'owned' but not for sale
- battlefields or ruins of previous epochs and civilisations
- traders originating from the above - closest to archetypal magic shops

Who hears your oath? (RPG Blog Carnival)

This month Tabletop Curiosity Cabinet gives us the prompt On my word - Making and breaking promises, vows and oaths for the RPG Blog Carnival.

Assume every deity and powerful being has a constant sussuration of mortal invocations at the edge of their active awareness - the closer you are to their dwelling and their preferred topics, the more likely they are to attend.

Things that make it more likely for your promise, oath or vow to attract 'witnesses'
- invoke a specific god or power ( "By Bahamut, I pledge...")
- make a vow to a god or power ( "To thee, Krom, I vow...")
- if you swear a thing within a powerful beings realm, lair or place of worship
- the topic involved falls within the purview of a deity (e.g. marriage for Hera, crafts for Moradin)

Wizards in Close Proximity (RPG Blog Carnival)

This months blog carnival from Codex Anathema has the topic of Magic in the City. For this I want to riff off Grumpy Wizards 'how many wizards' post to talk about how many I ended up calculating my wizards-per-city numbers - and what I did with that flock of wizards once I had them.

A second inspiration for this was the great blog-post on wizards as concentrators for everything by Polar Frosty - dragons just do treasure but wizards hoard traps, monsters, whatever, for their own reasons. (The original Kill The Wizard (AWAB) gone but All Wizards Are Bastards is the current version I believe.)

On Wizards as Concentrators

Ideas to patch into OSR play (RPG Blog Carnival)

This months blog carnival from Illusory Sensorium has the topic of Over the Garden Wall where they want to hear about what is are things usually held as outside the domain of fantastic medieval adventure games which you think actually fits in quite well? They elaborate on seeking ideas to mix into the OSR from outside the culture of play, outside tabletop gaming and outside of gaming entirely.

I had a couple of ideas mostly things that are present in tabletop gaming just not really main-line OSR -
1. Career based character generation / progression
2. Testing things other than hit-points to face down challenges
3. Contacts as a rewards

d20 neighboring dragons out and about (RPG Blog Carnival)

This month the RPG blog carnival is hosted by Sea of Stars and has the topic of Dragon Neighbors: How do you live with a dragon nearby? - which vexed me! Far more than I thought it would since I have dragons and dragonblooded folk a lot in my home campaign.

Finally inspiration struck - what we have here is a list of expeditionary dragon-related folk away from their home realm and what they might be up to. PCs may be lightly disguised to protect the guilty.

These could equally be relatively non-descript half-dragons as per Dragon #206 or they could be dragonborn as best suits your setting.

d20 neighboring dragons out and about

Folk Knowledge of Minor Planar Ways (RPG Blog Carnival)

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

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

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

Spellburn and spellpoints (RPG Blog Carnival)

This months blog carnival from Elemental Reductions has the topic of Beyond Vancian Magic - so I was inspired to write about Spellburn.

Key point here is that while the Vancian casting system as exists in most recent editions of D&D is fine, it it all a bit clean-cut for chucking raw magical energy around - hence you should be able to push the boundaries in extremis - get more bang for your buck with Spellburn.

I used a variant of More Risky Spellburn from Sheep & Sorcery where a caster take d6 spellburn to a stat of their choice to max out a spell effect; damage, HD turned, etc. or to cast a spell they know how to cast but cannot normally do so again before rest.

I like the general concept of a magic user doesn't 'run dry' when they run out of slots, they just run out of safety margin.