Campaign Retrospective: Brancalonia - Bay of Princes

Since a campaign finished, let us do a retrospective Against the Wicked City style as is now traditional.

What it was:

* "Welcome wagon" for friday night open table D&D - catch the newbies with a T1 table.
* Opportunity to bring books I had kickstarted to table - I backed the second one and got the books from the first as add-on

Stats for 27/30 games are here - a year of open table gaming - the last three games did not change the stats - average remained similar at 5.4 players for 4.6 hours on a Friday night. Final total was 77 individual players for 161 slots.

The roster of adventures was 19 games from the Brancalonia books (8 games out of Jinx's Almanac, 6 out of the Macaronicon, 5 out of the Brancalonia core book), 6 from my 'adventure generator' tests, 2 OSR zines (Het Thamsya, Goblin Mail), 2 adventures from Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel and a Dungeon23 snippet (Apocalypse Archive).

Review: Macaronicon

tl;dr: adds cool species for the players, great adventures for the DMs, a solid expansion for Brancalonia.

So, here we have the Macaronicon. It is basically a collection of all the stretch goals from the initial Brancalonia crowdfunding campaign - which is where I got it originally. This was bonus content for me and I have gotten a ton of use out of it. Brancalonia is a "spaghetti fantasy" campaign setting for D&D 5e "based on Italian tradition, folklore, history, landscapes, literature and pop culture" that lets you be a band of roistering Knaves and ne'er do wells out for their latest job. I have reviewed the Brancalonia Core book and Jinx's Almanac before - both great books and the Macaronicon is a close third.

It begs comparison to Jinx's Almanac which are both books of mixed lore, adventures and mechanics. Macaronicon is the more expansive and free-roaming of the pair, coming earlier and being that collection of stretch goals. There is some good stuff in here and plenty of inspiration for DMs thought it has not yet gotten that extra polish to the adventures which comes in Jinx's Almanac, the later book. Not to say that this is not very worthwhile.

As with all the books in the range, the art is great and the book has an aesthetic of old paper ill-used. Pretty like the rest of the range, with great, consistent, evocative art and good clear lay-out.

Actual Test: Donjon Adventure Generator

I tested out the Donjon Adventure Generator - "based upon tables from the Dungeon Master's Design Kit by TSR, Inc." - what you get is just collosal, so much stuff. Written up to follow Gorgon Bones first best practice: "Record your hobby experience" while continuing the DM commentary addition to the session notes.

I pushed the button twice and then followed my usual adventure generator workflow:
* Thread the pieces together
* Conserve NPCs
* Rewrite/polish

Elements I picked from the combined randomly generated stuff (italics is all stuff from Donjon):
* Plot: Event - a tournament, a holiday, a celebration called by the king, a masked ball - as a backdrop.
* Plot A-B-C Quest - the heros are given a task to perform but they find that they must first accomplish some other task(s)
* Climax: Prevented Deed
* General Setting Cosmopolitan City
* Specific Setting I - Palace of the King
* Specific Setting II - Mansion of a Lord
* Master Villain - Advance Agent - This villain is the vanguard of some sort of invastion
* Minor Villain I - Mistress with a Heart of Gold usually accompanies the Master Villain, but sometimes goes on missions of her own
* Minor Villain II Chief Assassin - favorite killer of the Master Villain - first killing witnesses who might prove harmful to his master, then zeroing in on the player-characters
* Chase: Special Terrain - You can make any chase more memorable by having it take place in a setting to which it is utterly unsuited. For instance, horse chases are fine and dramatic when they take place through the forest, out in the open plains, or along a road -- but they become diabolical when they take place inside the Royal Palace or in dangerous, labrynthine, treacherous catacombs.
* Secret Weakness: Love The Master Villain possesses the "weakness" of genuine affection or love -- probably for some NPC
* Special Condition Time Limit - Finally, the most obvious condition to place on an adventure is to give it a time limit.

A year of open table gaming

Some stat's from the regular friday night open table games I have been running.

Original set up goals
- be the welcome wagon for friday night open table D&D - catch the newbies by always having a T1 table.
- bring books I had kickstarted to table

Set up a 'campaign background' thread on the forum. I decided to use Brancalonia as a start because it seemed fun and I wanted to give the setting a test run. I made it a bit more of a universal socket to whatever weird characters people might turn up with by crossing it over to my menagerie world setting.

The 'intro' goes - "5000 years ago the elves invaded, conquered everything around here. In this world elves teach things they think show promise how to be elves. About 1000 years ago the elves left, and behind remained lots of 'on-the-way-to-elf' groups that stabilised as rabbitlings, badgerlings, all sorts. Half this world is about 1m tall. You all used to work for a wizard, it was good times, then the wizard got into politics and you are pretty sure they're dead now. You woke up one morning to find wanted posters with your names on them and crimes you may or may not have committed. You all fled south, winding up here, at the Golden Cockerel, the southern node of the wizards old network. Rougher runs the place, begrudgingly taking you in. The wine and the stew have been getting more watery every day for the past week and now, after a night drinking, you have all just woken up feeling nothing but hydrated and hungry."

Filling the tables

Basic stats -
27 games from August 2023 to August 2024
Average session length, 4h 40m
Total hours played - 126
5.3 players per table on average (smallest group 4, biggest 9)
Total of 202 players DM'ed for (butts on seats, some repeat folk)
72 different people threw dice at those games

Review: Jinx's Almanac (Brancalonia)

tl:dr; a solid adventure anthology that has been a reliable source of one-shots

Is wear on a book from being carted too and from games nights a tragedy or marks of heroic purpose? If we take the latter then Jinx Almanac is one of the most useful books I have gotten my paws on anytime lately. Taking note of the points about whether one can review an RPG that you have not played, this is one book that I have surely earned the right to review.

This is a collection of digital magazine articles, special editions, modules and all sorts of ancilliary stuff that was published for Brancalonia and then collected during the second crowdfunding campaign. It is a big grab bag of stuff that has a surprisingly dense amount of gameable content. I got mine from the second Kickstarter campaign along with the Empire Whacks Back.

Cover art by Lorenzo Nuti

We are well past first impression territory here - we have the same Brancalonia art style - old paper with wine stains on it, consistently pretty and evocative art both new and public domain with nice clear layout from a design sense, even if some decisions about the sequencing of information are a bit odd.

Actual Test: conservation of NPCs in prewritten adventures

I got to recently test Alexandrians Law of the Conservation of NPCs - advice to make equivalent NPCs a repeat appearance of an old NPC - and the results came out well. I'm writing it up to following Gorgon Bones first best practice and "Record your hobby experience."

I first saw it actually done at table as part of a Ravnica mini-campaign run at the local games society during a lull in the pandemic - the DM there took a bunch of pre-written adventures and what was in the book and bolted them together to make a mini-campaign. He wove it all together by making the same archetype be the same NPC - all the Vedalken Izzet Wizards became the one guy, different Dark Elf Findbrokers were merged, etc - and it was remarkable effective at making the whole thing feel connected. There were some serious groan moments when we realised we were going to have to talk to certain NPCs with a really lax view of workplace safety which is good, they stuck in our mind.

For the open table Brancalonia game I am running at the same games soc I am trying to do the same. With very rare exceptions, the pre-written adventures scattered through the Brancalonia books assume you are travelling all over the realm and visiting lots of different places - so you rarely hit the same places twice. This is fine, not actually a problem, but I thought to try having some of the NPCs and locations pop up again to try and make the place feel deeper. Last week was the first live-test of this and it worked very well.

It was a good test session because I needed to mod the adventure anyway - we had run out of time the last session with 3/4 of the adventure done - they had stopped at a good point but there was more left to do: they had rescued the damsel in distress but still needed to free her from a curse. So I had a piece of an adventure but not a lot. To fill out the session I went back to a previous session and a sequence I needed to cut for time and brought that forward, stitching the two together to have enough for the one more session. This seemed like the perfect point to try making it all more coherent not just as a single session but also into the campaign as a whole.

d50 more memorabila to loot

tl;dr: The other half of the d100 trinkets table for a Brancalonia game.

There is a table of Memorabilia (p69 Brancalonia Spaghetti Fantasy) which are both interesting things to find as part of loot and also legitimate winnings for brawls and the like. The table is referred to relatively often and each entry is supposed to be unique so as a campaign gets going you find yourself burning through them.

According to the book good examples of memorabilia must:

- Have no economic value and no particular use. Generally, they cannot be resold. - Be original. Memorabilia cannot be shoddy or counterfeit, and even if they were, nothing would change. - Be so bizarre and unusual that they could never be confused with other Memorabilia. Each piece is unique.

So I rummaged through old magazines during recycling and cooked up the following. They also reflect the fact that I am using an animal-folk heavy setting for my Brancalonia game, hence the fur, horn and feather references.

d50 memorabilia
1. Tiny carved sea-creatures, well worn to the touch
2. A bottle of mysterious, foul tasting pills - vitamins, good for your long term health, will ward off scurvy for a week
3. A false beard in formal dwarf style, fitted for a goblin or halfling
4. Brightly coloured fur dye
5. Portable shrine (idols rolled up in a mat)
6. Tiny bust of a glowering king - breaks a fear effect
7. Velvet and gilt waistcoat fitted for a small creature
8. Short stub of a fat candle
9. Blue enamel fittings to reinforce something and make it look fancy
10. Genie vase with captive minor imp
11. Pegasus shoe - cold iron, both good luck and good for striking the supernatural
12. Frayed bridle of leaping - fits to any ridable animal, liable to break after one use but triples the distance it can jump

Campaign Spin-Up VIII - Fuzzier West March Sandboxes

I ran an open table game and wanted to dig into a little how it all came off from the DM prep point of view. There are some player session write-ups that went up on Obsidian Portal.

Deliberate aspects of this campaign were:
- open table, drop-in game - go whenever 3 were available
- follow the players, drop hooks but no big plot
- minimise prep - I had three other campaigns running, there was no time for more prep
- newbie friendly

The tools used in sessions were
- a hidden depths table for the wilderness
- Brancalonia non-lethal brawl rules to make non-wilds/underground less dangerous but still fun
- an overloaded encounter table for the tunnels beneath their base
- a semi-randomly generated dungeon made with a map and tables from the DMG 3.5e
- someone elses Dungeon 23 run for the big hidden dungeon
- maps from photos - woodworm burrows, tourist guide to a castle, hexmap
- a city page generated using my workflow - the In Corpathium and Infinigrad generators combined with Stupidly Quick City-Building from r/DNDBehindTheScreen and steps 3 & 4 from creating fantasy villages, towns and cities to get the layout
- a few special sessions built off a dedicated tool - two from Where the Wheat Grows Tall, one from the bathhouse table

Going session by session on what drove play each time a group sat to table:

Campaign Retrospective: Southern Reaches

An open table sort-of-West Marches game has stalled out so let us do a retrospective Against the Wicked City style to see what we can learn and decide if it is worth reviving. Previous retrospectives were done on campaigns of yore and recently a Spelljammer Academy mini-campaign.

Southern Reaches, 23 Sessions (Dec 2022 - July 2023)
What it was: open table sandbox test using Brancalonia rules. I was approached to run it by one of my home-campaign players while they were overseas studying. They roped together a gang of folk. I also ran a 'B table' through the same set up as a test and that turned into fun combinations later.

For me this was a test of West Marches-style - as closely as could be done - no plots, no plans, each session started "you've come down to breakfast in the Flytrap Inn, this is who you see around the table, what are you up to today?" It was also an arena to try out things from various OSR blogs (biblio below) and has been my most formal 'method test' campaign so far where I was attempting to follow a style of game running as much as I was creating a world.

This is the campaign mentioned in Chekovs Hooks II: Refreshing Rumours.

Chekovs Hooks III: Loose Ends from Written Modules

tl;dr: a 'rumours as campaign glue' treatment for an open table running published adventures (Brancalonia core book + Jinx Almanac).

I wrote previous about refreshing the hooks for a quasi west-march open table where multiple groups leave a lot of open items based on sweeping up hooks after a year of campaign play.

This time I have been running through the Brancalonia published adventures - mostly in the Core Book and Jinx's Almanac - in an open table format and I want to run a similar exercise to start setting up for when I run out of adventures and to reward those players who have done a few of them with recognition of their agency.

1. Loose Ends: same as the Chekovs adventure hooks as before
2. Allies and Rivals: NPCs and factions now aware of the PCs who may generate hooks
3. Rumours: what becomes visible of the previous two, strongly inspired by Hill Cantons "News as Campaign Glue"

For feedstock in all of these I have a slightly different set of inputs - these are not my own fevered imaginings or NPCs I came up with, I ran them out of the book and a lot fell by the wayside as we went. Going through it I realise I need to spot loose ends but filter them by gameable potential. I also need to catch the flavour of the setting correctly. For 'leading hooks' I wanted to minimise the books I am carrying around so stick just to Jinx Almanac for now.

I did a first pass of noting the loose ends and events. Second pass was running through the hooks for the further adventures in Jinx Almanac. I tried to thread those hooks back to player actions from previous adventures. I want to leave a sense of player actions impact the world so kept in some rumours as pure aftermath/consequence, included all the 'hook-tied-to-consequence' I could and left in pure hooks where I had to.

With all this mechanical part done, the next actions were 'flavourising' it to make it more true to the world and tying it back to previously met NPCs to obey Alexandrians 'law of conservation of NPCs'. The final result is below.

Brancalonia Rumour Table
1. Peach Cider, the most appreciated drink of the Golden Sun tavern, has deteriorated significantly in the past months - people aren't getting drunk anymore! Someone needs to go Tassonia and get them to sort it out. (Players actions from Rugantino, Hook for Pickled Rich - The Gangover)

2. New Duke Sarion de Savedra at Cat Castle fears horses and is setting up hunts in the forest of Batta for wild ones. (Aftermath of See Acquaviva and Die! Hook for Pesto all Lungarivese)

3. Famed bigat-slayers Alermo and Francis are said to have parted ways after killing the Bigat of the Bottacione just when we need them as a beast prowls the streets. Well, small strange creature - but you can never be too careful! (Aftermath of Bride of the Bigat, Hook for Wolpertinger, Wererat, Well)

4. Someone has been telling fools the fishing in the Avicelline swamp is worth getting killed over - and they have been (Players actions from The Good The Bad and the Marionette)

5. Preachers normally confined to their posts on the road to Penumbria have begun prowling further afield with accusations of blasphemy, complaining about peoples fun. They are especially incensed about the approaching Red Carnival with its revelry, parties and indecencies set to engulf the city of Amnasseanase (Players actions from Penumbria Jeez Festival, Hook for The Red Carnival)

6. Queens Guard have been spotted in the Ditch of Serpents, rumoured to be chasing Ghino de Fosca's band after a massacre (Aftermath of See Acquaviva and Die!, Hook for The Red Carnival)

Throw in additional module rumours

7. An old soldiers map points to a treasure buried near a farm, the current holder of the map willing to sell because of tales of a fearsomly scarred viperwolf has emerged from the mists around Penumbria and prowls the countryside. (Aftermath of Penumbria Jeez Festival, Hook for Where the Wheat Stands Tall)

8. Mighty Rum distillery has been restarted at a secret location and the Queens Excisemen are offering a bounty for the location. Someone out that way heard a big voice coming from a shed and it scared them off - they came back muttering about the root of all evil. (Players actions from Rugantino, Hook for Beets for the Beet God of What Ho, Frog Demons!)

9. A printmaker named Ultan, is said to have found a door under his stairs that was not there the previous day. He claims even more implausibly, that it leads to the sewers of Zyan, the infamous floating city of Wishery and will permit entrance for 10 gold pieces a head, no questions asked. (Hook for Through Ultans Door)

Stuff set aside for now as I could not build a hook around it or it was just news without a point.
From "The Treasure of the Bigat" - Granny remains in the woods
From "Big Trouble in Borgoratto" - We now have the forest around Borgoratto quiet and unhaunted
From "Bride of the Bigat" A family of owlings have set up a mouse soup stall, attracting rave reviews and Cheap plush bigat slayers being given away with everything

Creating Unlockable Encounter Tables

Springing from a nice layout on Developing A World Through Encounter Tables by Welcome to the Deathtrap on how they make encounter tables I wanted to walk through how I made mine for Southern Reaches.

Given the drop-in, player-guided nature of the game, it becomes more important to get a bunch of ideas down in an encounter table so when I come cold to some nook of the campaign later, it is all ready to go. For other campaigns the players are on a more steady trajectory but for more open world, they could go anywhere. I decided to dust-off the unlockable 'hidden depths' style of encounter tables so I could get everything down in one place.

Rather than going with all the options which is good for creeping conditions, a chaos scale or the like, I just picked out 6d4 and 2d12 to give a day/night shift. This boils down 30 options (with some duplicates) to 23 but pulls a bunch of the interesting things off a special list with a sub-1% chance of getting rolled to give more variation and make some of them more likely to turn up, especially at night.

Actual Test: Brancalonia Brawling

From the Brancalonia book there is an alternative, non-lethal Brawling combat system and it suits the lower-stakes Southern Reaches game I am spinning up. I wanted to do a quick test to make sure I understood it and I record it here in the hopes it is useful to some.

This is effectively a parallel combat structure for 5e characters; based on your level you have a number of Brawl Features starting with a General Move and a Class Brawl feature at level 1. You get a number of moves per brawl linked to level, starting at two and rising to four by level six.

Any turn you can inflict a beating with your attack action to make an attack roll and deal a whack.

Damage is in 'whacks' with everyone able to sustain six before going down; each non-critical hit deals one whack, each whack lowers your AC by 1 so things can start going sideways quickly once you get on the wrong side of things. A crit deals two whacks. Foes will typically have 2-4 whacks for a mook, 6 for a heavy.

You can grab props, both common (bottles, pots, stools) and epic (barrels, tables, other characters), and use them to boost the number of whacks you inflict, stun opponents, increase your AC or other effects.

Moves are things like, react to an attack to impose disadvantage on the foe (Counterattack for fighters), tripping (general move), attack multiple foes (clothesline, general move) and so on.

The entire brawl is assumed to occur within a bar, alley or other tight quarters and so movement is essentially disregarded - as long as you can move at all, you can get to where you want within the brawl.

Campaign Spin-Up VI - getting the aesthetic across

Spinning up the Southern Reaches campaign, one of the things I did to get my new players on the same page was collage a bunch of art together off the internets to explain what I was going for - a picture worth a thousand words as they say. Monster and Manuals talks about something similar in terms of the concept of your Megadungeon for #dungeon23, where the themes of your dungeon, hex-crawl, city, etc. should be set out before start. They mention three themes - historical, structural and aesthetic - but for launching this campaign I set aside both the historical and structural to start and delved into the aesthetic first. This was to try and get all the players aligned on what is the feel of the place, especially since as my own milieu there is no extant imagery to point to - so how should they know what it is like?

As it turned out, once people had this much it gave them enough of a grip to be able to throw in some suggestions and decide what they wanted. The handout I gave them was a pdf'ed powerpoint since thats what I'm most familiar with working with. Since the spine of all this is a re-skinned Brancalonia and I backed their kickstarter I had a block of nice digital art to draw on from Lorenzo Nuti that got things rolling.

Lorenzo Nuti, Brancalonia

From there it was a collage of influences to get across the 'menagerie world' aspect - starting with Gwelf by Larry MacDougall, the art from Root by Kyle Ferrin, Wildlands by Stephen Wood, Historia by Mana Project Studio and the art of Omar Rayyan, Saint Monstre and Pocketss.

Setting up for Session Minus One

Setting up a new campaign, it will be remote and with a bunch of folk wrangled together by the bard - a half dozen folk I have never met before. I've got an idea for the campaign but my first area for focus is the session minus one or 'do I want to play with these people, do they want to be in a game I am proposing to DM.' Assuming the answer is yes, we will proceed straight to Session Zero - but the question must be asked first.

This is on my mind as I was subjected to a particularly hectoring pre-game brief recently that made me want to get up from the table and walk just then. Much of it was good in concept but the delivery annoyed me because it took those good ideas and then gave reasons for them that were absolutely not what I would say. To stay and agree to go along with these table rules (reasonable ones) because you were subscribing to some very specific socio-political views not even from the country we were sitting in. Yes I think these tools are good to use. No, I do not agree with certain takes on why we should use them - but let us not mention that and just use the tools.

I have worked a day job where 'safety first' was a mantra, I've done the pre-job briefings, and if you want people to take them seriously, you have to tailor them to the hazards folk are likely to face in that current situation. Devoting time and energy to hazards which do not apply at that job site just make the briefing hot air and people switch off. Part of setting up to make sure a thing gets done right is by pitching your brief at the right level; some things can be just a confirmatory check - we do not have such hazards present here, right? - and then move on. Other things need to be talked out in detail to establish just how we want to approach a matter and making sure that everyone is on the same page. This balance needs to be gotten right so that people present understand that the person going through the topic has paid attention and is not just rote-reading a list they got.

Anyway - I am trying to take this bad feeling onboard and figure out how to set out some table rules, more popularly called safety tools, that will work to get a bunch of strangers playing together with the minimum of friction, maximum of fun - and without fumbling it and having them never darken my table again. As put by the MCDM team - "ways to formalize the process of getting everyone at the table on the same page about the topics and themes you’ll be exploring as you play."

Broadly this breaks down to:
- What is the game we want to play? Spanning from things people do not want to have in through to atmosphere, activities in focus, ruleset.
- How are we going to play together? Includes the nuts-and-bolts logistics but also some ground rules for communication, especially if people do not know one-another already
- Feedback loops to enhance the positive.

Review: Brancalonia

tl:dr; a great fun, evocative sphaghetti fantasy D&D setting with some neat mechanics to capture the rollicking band of knaves style of play.

I picked up Brancalonia in another of my 'darn I missed this first time round' instances - backing the Empire Whacks Back kickstarter, I got the original books as an add-on. Brancalonia - "sphaghetti fantasy" - is a campaign setting for D&D 5e "based on Italian tradition, folklore, history, landscapes, literature and pop culture" - but more than a setting for the game, this is another mod. The classes and background mesh with a collection of new setting rules (and guidance to pick optional rules within the core set) that aims to deliver the experience of being a band of roistering Knaves and ne'er do wells out for their latest job.

The art throughout is great - the book looks like old paper with wine stains on it, stains explained in a chastising front note. Top marks for beautiful, consistent, evocative art - this is a really pretty book. The layout in general is top notch, a nice, clear, easy read with good boxes and sidebars and tables are where you would expect to find them from their mentions in the text.

Opening the book we get a nice Appendix N, and the intro 'this is a world of heroism and heroes - and you are not one of them. You are the ones who step in when things go wrong, dabblers, swindlers, scoundrels and greedy Knaves.' This is a game about being the scoundrels and chancers at the bottom of the heap, where the stakes are a purse full of coins, a good meal and another few days ahead of the law.

What is really interesting here is that this is an E6 game - you run up to 6th level, then whenever you would advance a level after that, instead you get a feat. It means both the rules, the world and the challenges in it are all tailored to a much tighter range than the usual 1-20 level spread which is something quite refreshing.