Capsule Reviews #9: HELLO//GOODBYE Charity Bundle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why war-games make great settings: Iron Kingdoms (RPG Blog Carnival)

Another month and the RPG blog carnival continues at Codex Anathema for the topic of Favourite Settings. You can see the rest of the topics for 2024 on Of Dice And Dragons 2024 Blog Carnival hosting list.

I have a bunch of the old 3.5e era settings sitting on my shelf that I never quite got around to playing - Midnight, Scarred Lands - and some earlier ones similar - Al Qadim, Greyhawk - but one thing I have always had a softspot for is a really distinct aesthetic - and worlds used for miniature games are great examples of this. WHFRP is perhaps the most obvious but Iron Kingdoms is one of my favourites.

I liked the original setting - the combinations of heavy metal mayhem with magical mechs and swashbuckling ethos.

The thrill of "the Find"

I had a refreshing experience recently at Vienna Games Convention - the thrill of 'the find' - something I'd largely missed in this always-on cornucopia we all live in these days. On the way there I was asking myself 'is there anything under the sun that you would actually be looking for' and apart from stumbling over some classic early D&D modules as a general category, the only thing that came to mind that I had sought but not found easily online recently was 'The Plane Above' from 4e.

And lo.

When I saw them on the stack, I was wondering what would be a reasonable price - and when the guy shrugged and said 'tenner' for Plane Above and the Manual of the Planes, the hardest bit was keeping my poker face. He had Plane Below too but it was not one I had been looking for before.

I was looking for Plane Above because as an Astral guide it has suddenly popped back into focus with Spelljammer 5e's new treatment of the realm between planetary systems - was phlogiston with pretty much nothing there - now is the Astral which is stuffed full of adventure. The astral skiffs and clippers in Plane Above had been something frequently mentioned by others in discussions online of Spelljammer so that was a gap in my visibility.

The Manual of the Planes I wanted just to get the baseline for the World Tree cosmology of 4e which was substantially different from the Great Wheel of AD&D that I lived and breathed.

After initially getting the first two, I wandered around a bit, crewed the RPGVienna desk and let 'do I really want the Planes Below' bubble in my mind before arriving at 'yes, I'll kick myself for not having the set' and snaffled it up too on my way out.

All this is something I missed for ages. The last time I got this kind of 'hell, yeah' feeling was walking into my FLGS and spotting Veins of the Earth just sitting on the shelf. Keeping an eye on the kickstarters does mean that I have taken a view on much of what could possibly be there before I ever walk through the door. The surprise factor gets crushed, which is a first world problem, to be sure, but I do recall the time of significantly narrower pipelines of stuff, of what few bits being available on a bookstores small RPG section being the 'take it or leave it' limit.

Mostly I am hugely amused that the only thing I could think of that I was looking for - was found!

Capsule Reviews #7: Castle of the Silver Prince

Since there is just so much content in this entire campaign setting I am going to skim it capsule-review style in recognition of it could be some time before I get through it all in detail. Short answer, this is a colossus of a project, with material for years of play.

You can get the authors own overview of all the bits and pieces in the launch-day blogpost

Castle of the Silver Prince Module - comes in a bunch of variant covers, I went for the limited edition orange spine. This is a donkey-killer of a giant book detailing 470 locations across the 8 levels of the castle. There is a complex interplay of magical seasons that make each entry sizeable - as well as all the descriptive markers of odor, features, structural aspects, hazards (traps, monsters, etc.) and secrets we have some of those changing depending on what 'season' the castle is in - randomly determined on arrival. So in fact we have 470 locations x 4 as places to explore - and a ticking clock every time the party enters the castle - which together make this a colossal place to explore and one that really captures the old-school 'every time, start at the door' feel which makes sharp mapping and discovering short-cuts a key piece of play. This book also has a proposed shared background for party membes - the house of Wicke - which is neat and comes with some nice ties into the campaign background.

The campaign premise is that the party gets a charter to reclaim a border castle between two nations - where that castle construction, its residents, the leadership of one nation, its one-time master and some of the monsters lurking in the region are all linked. Clues to events and elements within the castle can be found out in the wilderness around it and as the campaign begins, two grand competing forces are swinging into play as the campaign begins making the castle the fulcrum around which the fate of the region turns. Events ratchet up overtime, motivating returns to the castle to try and save humanity from two dread fates.

The books are supposed to be used with the Module open on the location you are at, the Maps book open to the right map and then you can look up the bits and pieces at that location in the Appendix. With a little wearing-in I can see this working quite well = Map book changes slowy, locations in the Module change as the party moves and you can flip over and back through the Appendix. I cnn see the Maps books will need to be weighed down at the corners but it does all feel suitably epic.

Treasures of the cupboard top - Heroquest (1989)

Continuing to clear shelves and poke in attics, this time with the aid of a stepladder, I found another treasure - my old Heroquest box, probably from 1989-91. This was my on ramp into the whole TTRPG space - this connected to Games Workshop, GW published White Dwarf which also had articles on things like WHFRP, got me aware other things existed and from there to Black Box D&D.

Friends of the blog The Adventuring Party recently talked about the new Heroquest rerelease and how the mechanics of the game have not changed - though the bits and models have which is good to hear. They mentioned some mechanical foibles that I do recall after all the time like sometimes it was really hard and sometimes things seemed to be just 'gotcha's' and it is nice to know my impressions at the time weren't completely wrong.

D.I.O. Ultimate Steppes Campaign

I have had a thought rolling about in my head for a bit to work up some sort of steppes campaign - built around a moving base that is either a nomadic tribe or a silk road caravan. I think a lot of this could be built off Ultraviolet Grasslands but I want the science-fantasy weirdness dialled more towards sword-and-sorcery weirdness. Throwing it out here on the D.I.O. principle.

An objective would be to bring to the table a bunch of books I have on my shelves - the long list being
Ultraviolet Grasslands
Metis Creative’s catalogue - City of the Crescent and Empires of the Silk Road
Wayfarer's Nomadic Realms
Studio Agates Great Kaan from Eana
Valley of the Five Fires
The Golden Khan of Ethengar (Known World Gazetteer GAZ12)

Another big influence on all this is the Dothraki Horde articles on A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry (ACOUP) which is a fascinating series.

Another objective of this would be a chance to visit some of the lesser known areas of famous campaign worlds since most of them do have a steppe location in it - Ethengar for the Known World, the Endless Wastes or the Hordelands for Forgotten Realms, the Dry Steppes for Greyhawk, Great Kaan for Eana, Khanate of Khazzaki for Midgard. Noting the strong similarities between all of these - effectively "if Steppe, therefore Mongol-types" much of what is available should be readily portable side-to-side. The Great Kaan and Nomadic Realms stand out for doing something a bit different. The way the ACOUP blog series looks at the parallels between horse-nomad cultures in North America and Asia provides another source of influences to draw on.

The campaign structure would be the caravan mechanics from UVG, a big theme being the 'moving across the map' huge scale of the thing. Sites would come within reach and be accessible for a period of time, the party roaming out from the mobile home base before moving on. It would prompt some different play styles in that you could play some situations as pure raids - stirring up a hornets nest and escaping into the great grasslands, confident that you are rapidly moving beyond the reach of vengeance.

The combination between 'explorers of the unknown' and 'community base' is the unusual thing to lean into. With a caravan, there are strong similarities to a ship based campaign, but with a nomad community than there are a lot more interesting relationships, a lot more going on but also a block more obligations and potential hooks related to the fact that *everyone* is along on the journey. In both cases there is a slow-moving core that needs to be protected or have enemies diverted away from it - sheep and goat flocks, the young and old of the community, the caravan goods, etc.

Thoughts for hooks would be: 1. Known hazards we need checked out to plan our route - are our sworn foes at their northern or southern camp grounds so we can avoid them, have the seals held on the tomb of great evil 2. Scout the route ahead - should be an easy ride, plenty of time for a side endeavour 3. Some predator is snatching from the flocks/mounts - deal with it 4. Tales tell of a treasure near our next camp ground - we should investigate 5. Ahead is one of the great cities - opportunity for trade and information gathering but all the risks that cities bring 6. Some so-called ruler of the steppe has sent emissaries - go back with them and try to get us in the least trouble

System wise the sources are 50/50 between 5e or BX compatible. I wouldn't mind trying an older edition to give a bit more focus onto solutions not on your character sheet and see people use their mounts more.

The more I think on this, the more it strikes me this is a rolling hex-crawl where there is time pressure to check things out before they fall beyond reach and fun to be had in the constant balance of 'grab what we can and go' versus 'delve deeper, knowing we have to travel ever further to catch up'. Some things will stay constant while others will change frequently.

Appendix N: sources of inspiration from beyond RPGs (GLoGtober 4 '23)

Taking on Glass Candles GLoGtober '23, challenge #1 is from a list by SunderedWorldDM - "Essential, non-RPG reading for any GM."

In case you have not yet seen it Kill 6 Billion Demons is magnificent. The planar wierdness, the cosmic powers, fabulous grist to the mill if you are a DM looking for ideas. Gaze upon some of the giant illustrations of Throne and let the muse whisper in your ear...

As a grand theme anything that asks how did the sinews of medieval times work is great source material. Histories of pretty much anything are always good. Online, the magnificent 'Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry' is a gold mine for world-building and just getting a reasonable understanding of how most of typical fantasy-land might be thought to work. Works over Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings, Dune and other good sources for great examples.

For strange digital lands to wander through to inspire your own settings:

The Seed Of Worlds (GLoGtober 3 '23)

Taking on Glass Candles GLoGtober '23, challenge #1 is from a list by semiurge - "Adventure, location, character, item, class, or whatever else based on the name of your blog."

The Seed of Worlds is a demi-plane extruder. It looks like a polished rock with a metal mesh around it that makes a very ergonomic, obvious way to hold it. It is typically found in a sealed box with multiple broken seals, new seals applied over them and large 'do not open' messages chalked on it.

To bust this fourth wall wide open - if a player at your table triggers the Seed of Worlds, roll a d100, count that number of books into your gamebook collection starting at the leftmost lowest book near the door you entered through and going right, then up. Take that book and have the players generate new characters appropriate to that gamebook. Subtract the smallest digit of the two d10s in your d100 from the largest, this is the number of hours you must play the new gamebook before this world implodes and you resume your previous game. The characters retain all memories.

Lets see how this would work at home...

First roll was 06 - which leads me to WH40K Dark Heresy Codex Anathema. This triggering of the Seed of Worlds leads us to six hours of bug-hunting in the grimdark future.

Second test was 28 - 3.5e Magic of Faerun; we are going on a jaunt to pre-sundering Faerun, also for six (8-2) hours.

If you find you have a lot of shelves to get through, roll a d6 first and count in that number of shelves before you start going book by book.

Inspired by the Inner Light Star Trek TNG episode and shelfies.

Capsule Reviews #6: Codex Martialis

I was directed to this by friend of the blog C. Kinch some while back. The tag across the front cover is "Hard core, fast-paced, historical combat. New options that won't bog down your game." The core concept, as writted across the Players Guide is "HEMA-inspired d20 combat. Magic as Medieval scholars actually believed. Everything you need for a fast, bloody and immersive historical game" which sets out their stall nicely. Since this has been sitting glaring at me from my slush folder for a full year now, we are going to press on and do capsule reviews of the core set to get something done.

Three books in the core set:
Codex Martialis Core Rules (2021 Edition) - 97 pages
Codex Integrum Players Guide - 182 pages
The Reiver's Lament - 141 pages

The set as a whole includes expansions for armour & missiles, medieval weapons, a Baltic setting, spells & talismen.

A Book Goblins Shelves

Just ahead of moving location I thought I would share my shelfies as they currently sit (stand?) with an eye to what of all this stuff am I actually using?

Start with my desk-side reference shelf - this is the Most Frequently Used stuff. The red frame has my Ducal House folder and Southern Reaches sitting on top of it. The ragged pappers along the top at right is the Spelljammer Academy notes. The Spelljammer folder is my the Smoulderspace campaign - a Light of Xaryxis remix. The 3.5e core books are for Ducal House, the 5e books are for the rest. Worlds Without Number, Fire of the Velvet Horizon and a less visible d30 Sandbox Companion, d30 DMs Companion, Planar Adventures and Kontext Spiel Collection are mostly used to support Ducal House, sometimes Southern Reaches.

From top to bottom on my core shelving: my OG Rogue Trader from ~93, my core 5e stuff, the various things I picked up for my Hikuru campaign plus some of the first OSR things I grabbed. Of what is in this picture, the AD&D DMG got a lot of use early on, perhaps the most individually use. The 5e core books have gotten a lot of use, the modules, apart from Spelljammer, less so. Of the other stuff O drew on the Iron Kingdoms books and the Oriental Adventures books for inspiration in some short run campaign - did get some use, not for very long.

Alexandria the Con Scenario Archive

A fascinating thing crossed my radar - reached out directly in fact - the website www.alexandria.dk is gathering convention-history and are adding all the convention scenarios they can get their hands on to the Alexandria library.

Growing from a group of Nordic gamers it is spreading out to the world. They seem to be organising around a facebook group at the moment, with almost 1000 people with some kind of convention-connection.

Stats-wise we have 2581 scenarios available for download out of 14901 known scenarios run at 2317 conventions. Thats roughly 1-in-6, pretty good for all this time passed. The content is strongly weighted to Swedish and Danish but with a good block of English games available, about 20% of the total.

It is also really interesting to see the sheer diversity of systems in stark contrast to the modern D&D 5e systemic dominance. This does chime with my memories of Irish conventions where you had all sorts of weird and wacky systems running as con games - within the list of systems we have a top ten that starts with "System-less" and runs down through #2 Call of Cthulhu, #3 AD&D, #4 Fri Form, #5 D&D 5e, #6 WHFRP, #7 Pathfinder, #8 GURPS, #9 Vampire: The Masquerade, #10 Basic Roleplaying - noting that this covers 30 years of gaming that is still a great range of stuff.

We are also seeing a bunch of skew in what the Alexandria team have gotten to so far - the list of conventions has 873 from Denmark, 672 from Sweden then 212 from the US and 151 from Ireland. While Ireland does have a lot of conventions relative to its size, there is no way we are 3/4 of activity levels in the US. I look forward to seeing how these activity levels change as the team expands its reach.

The site itself has a ton of stuff there already - including stuff I was familiar with myself would be the turn of the millenium Irish convention scene - Leprecon and Gaelcon mostly, a bit of Warpcon too. There was a ton of stuff being written for those con's and now we can have a look again! Tons of content for your one shots and campaigning needs.

I have not yet figured out the best way to find out what is in here; my first thought is to look up some authors who went on to great things in the TTRPG space like Gar Hanrahan - they have 32 scenarios uploaded. One tricky bit is the lack of clarity in lots of convention programs - games were 'D&D', 'WHFRP', etc. and would of course have been understood to be the edition of the day - or maybe not! I do recall writing these programs and getting the blurb right so people had a notion did they want that flavour of game was more critical than getting the system exact.

All in all - a really interesting slice through gaming culture coming from a very different angle than we normally get. While recognising that our friends in the Nordics are up to all sorts of stuff - I have Forbidden Lands and Symbaroum on my shelves here behind me - it is really cool to see even a nascent effort like this. I know there is tons of effort put into writing con scenarios, great that they should be stored in a near accessible way like this.

Edit to add: my own contribution to the effort; two old Gaelcon flyers I had stuffed in my Dragon Magazine collection.

Games Are For The Playing

Digging through a set of games in storage in my parents shed I found my old Battlemasters set from MB games. This was a somewhat weird artefact of the ~90s in that I believe it was supposed to be a gateway to Warhammer Fantasy Battle but had very little Games Workshop heraldry apart from the Citadel Minatures tag on the front. My copy never saw use beyond me setting it up and fiddling about with it myself as I went off down an Epic 40k route afterwards (Titans ftw).

Though my hoarding instincts had weakened sufficiently to part company with it, all the gamers I had known for a while were peers and long past this game into full on wargames of whatever sort. This could have been stripped for parts as my old Space Crusade was for 40k but for whatever reason, Battlemasters had stayed (relatively) complete.

The Treasures of the Shed

While back home for the holidays mention was made that "there are some black sacks in the shed with some boardgames" and I went out to see what was there. Short answer; treasure.

At a first look I was a bit concerned - genuine cobwebbed bin bags sitting on a shelf and I had no idea what they could be.

Review: The Folio - Roslof Campaign

One of two sets of adventures that represent my personal tide-line for collection - the Art of the Genres 'The Folio' series has long caught my eye as some extremely pretty content. I have resisted through multiple kickstarter campaigns as already what I have nudges SABLE - that knitters metric of "stash acquired beyond life expectancy" - at this point I am planning to hand my collection down to the next generation. However! I managed to get my hands on some of the Folio series - the Roslof Campaign - in a recent bundle and got to have a look.

Covers of Folio's 1-6 by Jim Roslof & Travis Hanson, Jim Holloway, Todd Lockwood, Daniel Horne, Jeff Dee, David Martin

There is a common structure to all these - nice art work, with a declared mission statement of recreating the old school feel of "adventure through the eyes of artists like Jeff Dee, Erol Otus, Bill Willingham, and Jim Roslof" and giving a framework for running your own sandbox like such classics as The Village of Hommlet and Keep on the Borderlands. I see a lot of the same artists that used to appear in Dragon magazine in the 90s and it definitely brings back that feel for me. Apart from the art we get double-column writing on most pages, mostly good editing with a few typos here and there. Everything is statted for 1e and 5e. We also get some nice maps - both in old school white-on-blue which is fine and also great 3D isometric maps.

Going through the actual content of each of the sections, what do we get?

A hoard reclaimed

Returning home to my parents house for the first time since the pandemic and since I started this blog I got a chance to see what last gleanings of my RPG collection might have remained there. I recalled having pushed a lot out the door to charity shops, to friends starting up and to interested good homes as my call on the shelf space dwindled with the frequency of my visits. I thought I knew what was still there - magazines mostly but no - there were nuggets of gold too!

These particular treasures were a happy surprise - the AD&D Monstrous Manual and '95 DMG together with the Castle Guide and the Complete Book of Villains. I knew I had saved some of my favourites but I was sure all my system books had gone out the door to people just getting into the game last time I was home. In addition the old Deities and Demigods was one I was sure that had gone out the door to a worthy home - well it has come back to an appreciative home now.

Shiny TTRPG links #57

Links for this last day of February. More can be found on the previous list found here. The original inspiration for all of this - weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links. You can find even more links on the weekly blogroll on r/OSR or a roundup of non-blog news on Third Kingdom Games roundup.

Captain Ahab's Leg suggests an interesting alternative initiative in Implementing the initiative mechanic from "Men of Iron"

Making the Most of Your TTRPG Collection by Richard Green - top advice for all those of us suffering from book-goblinism.

Silverarm writes About Damn Times: A Campaign Event Table

Prismatic Wasteland writes Calendars, Not Just Maps

Grumpy Wizard has good suggestions in Player Character continuity is not a big deal.

The Alexandrian writes Random GM Tip: Backup PCs

d66 Classless Kobolds writes about Meta NPCs - Reusing My Favorites Across Game Worlds

On DMs and Players as two communities

Knight at the Opera wrote an interesting post on how DM's and Players appear to him to be two communities, purchasing different products and consuming different media. I think the point on consuming different media - and especially frequenting different online spaces - may have something to it. The rest of this assumes you have read Dwiz's article, so perhaps grab a coffee and a biscuit and take a moment there.

Enjoyed it? Good.

Coping with book-goblinism (Pathfinder Humble Bundles)

tl:dr; RPGGeek helps to figure out what to look at first when dealing with massive humble bundles - wisdom of crowds says Paizo's best work is in there

At time of writing Humble Bundle has another Pathfinder 1e bundle this time on Monster Lore which will make the third Pathfinder bundle I have sprung for. This is pure book goblinism; I now have a digital drive at Paizo stuffed with unread Pathfinder PDFs and the challenge of figuring out what I even have.