Near Offshore Ruins (GLÅUGUST 2026 #1)

Taking on The Nothic's Eye GLÅUGUST 2026, challenge #1 is from a list by Phlox - "Water Levels."

Inspired by the submerged megalithic structures of Sein Island I was thinking about near offshore ruins and the adventure potential thereof.

I talked a bit in the past about who is about in d20 Aquatic powers and dwellers of the deep and some of the things on the deep sea bed including interactions with the underdark in d12 Settlements of the Undercoast but for this one I wanted to think a bit about shallow-water structures, ones that might once - or recently - have been above surface, or are emerging now due to sea level shifts. All this supposes a shallow depth gradient - any place where you have a sea-cliff like drop off, that much sea going away is an apocalypse scenario harsher that what I am thinking of.

Setting aside how things become above/below water - a myriad of natural or magical effects and disasters could be responsible. Assume that a change in sea level is affecting only the sunlit zone that goes down 1/8 of a mile - the sea-level shift of our world across the last ice age caused only 1/12 miles difference.

Some possible thoughts on what we might end up with on a patch of seabed that was once above the surface:
1. Recently happened - a peninsula sunk, a recent glacier collapse or sea level rise - leaving a structure with potential air pockets within. This would be similar to a flooded dungeon but with some added adventure in getting down there and getting the plunder out.
2. Long ago but known to be rich - last remants of old power still remain - some warded buildings, undead or constructs still roam about the seafloor. There are hazards that can be overcome by using the submerged status and a mix of looted flooded bits and untouched dry bits with residual dangers.
3. Ancient origin and a site for underwater conflict - long flooded, nothing remains but the sturdiest of structural parts and it is just exotic terrain for an underwater fight.

IRL we have our example above of Sein Island and Doggerland - sea levels rising flood out old structure built by land dwellers - 'sunken realms.'

Running this the other way, where the seas retreat and we find structures emerging from the seas - we would have all of the above, once submerged and now re-arisen through some other disaster and accessible - perhaps for a limited time - complete with novel hazards or merely those rooted in long neglect.

Where origins of structures start to get interesting are:
1. Aquatic groups who might have been building there and now abandon their structures as the seas withdraw
2. Groups perfectly happy living in and out of water - storm giants
3. Groups who can live out of water but would not be happy about it - sahuagin and tritons

Sunlight zoners like merfolk, merrow, aquatic elves and locathah would have built structures designed for swimming through which will be awkward to navigate out of water

Monster lairs may be exposed that are challenging hazards to access even before intentional hazards are factored in - aboleth, kraken - where their one time masters abandon them due to inability to operate out of water.

Other monster lairs such as those of Ixitxachitl or illithids might be abandoned because they have no desire to dwell in the light - they could remain and become nocturnal but they find themselves confined to their homes by the hateful glare of the baleful daystar.

Some other highly magical entities like marids and beholders, while capable of operating out of the water would typically have no desire to remain because water is their preferred habitat.

One would assume all around will be devastated kelp forests and dying coral reefs within which maybe the dwellings of things like water nympths, undines or the like - my impression is that few of them would leave much trace.

Structures inhabited by the undead might rise from the depths and be among the least affected

Communities of tortles, lizardfolk and other semi-aquatic groups might find their nice safe flooded cave entrance is no longer so and decide to abandon the place or remain and become drylanders

Storm giants are notably happy above and below the waves but their new shallow-land holdings would be very aesthetically displeasing being neither high mountain or submerged any more and could be found either abandoned or inhabited by a very irritated resident.

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.

#City26 Mid-Year Status

At the mid-point of the year, asking how the #City26 challenge is coming along. On a pure stats, it is not bad - --% of total hex-count for the year achieved with 50% of the time gone. I have not gotten any of this to table but it has proved a nice distraction during travel of all things. Recall the 'rhythm' of the weekly tasks of this challenge with this guide from Pete of Garblag Games. So far I have been all over the place - I tend to do these as one ward in a sitting, with time in between spent considering what might be the 'killer hooks' for incomplete wards so I can just sit down and write when I come to it.

Infographic of City26 Challenge by Peter Lattimore

Anyway, in my 'keep me honest' progress tracker stats:
Progress: 36/52 wards completed
Completion vs target: 69% vs 50% target
Population covered: 76%

Inspirations

A touchstone for all this has been "What is life like on a Hive world?" which has been very helpful to divvy out the fractions of who lives in what conditions across the Upper, Mid and Lower parts of the Hive.

Pure inspiration has been these gorgeous old-school Knight Lancers that I recall from back in the day, in particular this amazing upscaled version someone worked up. These are the few actual Knights that underpin the worlds raison d'etre.

Those of course must be accompanied by dino-riding cavalry - these folk are also the primary Law Enforcers within Hive-RT87

Support will come from beastfolk Imperial Guards all in keeping with the oldest lore.

In parallel I have been reading the Warhammer Crime novels to get that sense of the day-to-day, building on previous reading of the Eisenhorn and Ravenor books and a lifetime marinading in 40k lore.

The City - Hive RT-87 Rejoicing Torch

Spires

Knights Martial - planetary nobles, house-keeps, bristling defences, boulevards scaled to knight-parades

Upper Hive

College of Heralds - lineage and inheritance lore-keepers, world use litigation, duel ajudication
Adeptus Munitorium - perpetually swamped in comparative weapons studies as factions scuffle to direct the worlds production
1000 Shields (Knight seneschals, fled nobles, fallen quality) - those with means who fled the fallen nearby hives

Upper Mid Hive

Hive defence fire control (knight-vassals) - seat of the atomantic lances defence web
All Hands (Abhuman efficiency bureau) – talent bazaar; clearing house for mercenaries and all sorts
Infernal cannon maintenance (sarcristans) - most secure workshops of the sacristans maintaining the near lost technologies of the defence web
Optical Masters - Admech Lens Crafters make high performance optics from abundant clay while agitating to make ever bigger laser ones
Central Medicae - where man, beast and beastman are patched together to longer serve the Emperor
Megasaur Mastercrafts - artists and craftsfolk turn megasaur parts into finest luxuries for this world and export

Lower Mid Hive

Promethium works - refineries to process abundant feedstock into promethium
Jet Bike lines - Sacristans hand-craft near-forgotten technologies - jetbikes, imperial robots
Mustering grounds / barracks - beastman regiments forming for onworld training, offworld service
Weapons factories (dispensated non metal) - armours, blades and other works that require as little metal as possible
Dino Servitorisation (mech) - megasaurs turned into industrial machinery
Stonework Specialists - fighting the sysphean fight to maintain the hive structure
Dinochrome - Carnosaur refit (sacristans) where megasaurs are turned into training-rigs and knights-in-waiting prove themselves
Ogryn quarter - dino-wranglers, source of dino-run labour & gangs from 'dead' wasteland ranches
Cold-one scout regiments - house guards, order enforcement, wasteland scouts, Adept. Arbites enclave
The Sieves - ministorum and astra telepathica winnow the population, sifting psykers and heretics out of the workforce
Dino stockyards - minotaur butcherguilds slaughter the megasaur herds that arrive by the shipload
Metal reclamation - hive-breaker yards recycling ruined cities from inland
Knight-parts - macromanufactories; knights and armoured trains, refurbishment facilities for offworld houses
Transhipment hub - focus of the intra-continental maglev lines bringing chunks of abandoned hives in and exporting to the starport
Ministorum - local strains on fanatical abhumans seeking to prove themselves worthy of the God-Emperor through acts of faith
Railheads - the giant rail bringing dinosaur-ships from the southern continents

Lower Hive - description


Bonecraft workcamps - grinding labor to handcarve parts from megasaur bones, squeezed by bone suppliers and predatory acceptance inspectors
Bone reclamation, corpse processing, fleshbees - post-butchery megasaur carcasses sent for scavenging
scalies in deeps + zombies by radioactive archaeotech - the hardiest of mutant survivors
Off-worlder ghetto - for those too strange to be taken by the workcamps, a hub of the cold-trade
Sumpside - abhuman underground railroad, coldtraders - where the paperless arrivals from starport, maglevs wind up
Redemptionists - fanatical beastfolk, eager to prove faith by cleansing with fire any hint of less perfect faith
old ways tribalists / beastman paleoculture - the caverns where the original colony landed hosts beastfolk who cling to the most ancient ways
Slums of the Lost (hives Polaris, FK91) - refugees from the broken hives to sorry or unfortunate to claw into the lower-mid hives
ogryn tallow-works - where worn out ogryns make pilgrimage to be turned into sacred candles
extraction bay slums - clinging beneath the maglevs, above the reactor wastes, but close to patrolled zones above. Safer, not safe.

All told this ccounts for some 3.5 billion souls - out of the 4.6 in the city as a whole. Any one of those wards could be a whole world of adventure to itself.

Round-up of City26 posts

City '26 Launch - outlines the rules of the challenge and my goals to create a hivecity of the old school.

Hive RT-87 Rejoicing Torch - general info + example ward (City26) - gives some layout for the whole hive and delves into the Carnosaur Refit Works - known locally as Dinochrome.

Incentivising challenges with tactility (City26) - talks about the process and about how recycling old boarding passes keeps it interesting and focussed.

Evolving city surroundings (City26) talks about the world emerging around the hive.

Piling high the burdens of ruling #City26 - some historical and high politics background and d20 Reasons Lord Mawcambeth Has An Ulcer.

Dredging old adventures for a campaign #City26 takes a diversion into various megacity adventures for different systems seeking a tone match.

31 40k Hivecity NPCs for #City26 pulls together a selection that represents some of the more interesting adventures hooks walking around the hive.

Getting to City adventures in 26

So far, with a good fraction of the challenge done, the trick ahead is going to be pulling this to table in some form. I need to decide a system, pick which are the most interesting adventures to run - there are campaigns worth of adventure in here unpicking all the knots - and I have a decent idea for a starter one.

With a bit of luck I can get it hacked together, lure some test subjects to an... Imperium Maledictum? Dark Heresy?... table and set them loose. Tempted as I am to roll with Chapter Serf or Warpstar! I think I will stick to the mainline system for just now to give good template adventures to work off while I figure out how to run them myself.

Worms in the deeps (Extremely Byzantine 5-Room Dungeon Jam)

Slothyyyyyyy hosts the Extremely Byzantine 5-Room Dungeon Jam and this is my ashcan entry. I am using an 'out-take' from the d24 woodworm dungeons set. https://itch.io/jam/byzantine-5-room-dungeons.

This is the lair of hiver-bugs - a parasite/predator of insectfolk (see Deep Time Monster Groups and Culture of the insectfolk - Beetlescale) - gnawed deep into the roots of mountains. Trapped within for a very long time, chaos on the surface has finally unmanned the watch-posts and seen the seals broken.

These things are the vampire analogs from a time when everything had exoskeletons and their crushing jaws are their adaption. They are tough, swift and dangerous in melee with pheremonic 'charm' equivalent, and a penchant for whole innards, not just blood. They believe themselves the last 'real' people left alive amidst these disgusting, swarming mammals. Below is a typical lair of theirs, chewed from the bowels of the earth over aeons.

1. Chasm of Echos - screams and cries of historical events reverberate from the deeps as one clambers aound it along perilous ledges
1. - calls for help, lost
2. - clash of battle
3. - screams of ambushed
4. - buzz of hivers flying
5. - tramp of marching feet
6. - crunching of chitin being crushed in the maws of hiverbugs

2. Cavern of Shadows - phosphorescent, dim light
1. - shadows, insectfolk form
2. - bats
3. - illusion-hidden pits
4. - piercers
5. - ropers
6. - uneven-floor trip-hazards onto caltrop-like spiky flooring beyond

3. Labyrinth of Illusions (d6 per dungeon turn)
1. - maze of tunnels with rushing footsteps echoing
2. - charge of insectfolk thralls from illusory corridors entrances
3. - stalking small insectfolk, fire at range and flee
4. - loops with cloaked exit
5. - incredibly obvious trap - for those who do not perceive by sight
6. - lurking insectfolk guards - just propped up shells

4. dominated hives - thrall insect folk living vampiric dominance nightmare
1. - masses and masses of enthralled insectfolk laboring
2. - body-snatcher shrieks if strangers spotted
3. - insectfolk carrying a dead fellow on a ceremonial bier - large bite hole chewed through head
4. - fungal garden growing on dead insectfolk, spore clouds mildly poisonous, soporific
5. - insectfolk paying homage at statue of another bigger, sleeker insectfolk
6. - ceremonially garbed insectfolk choosing from crowd and daubing them with paint

5. myriad of misdirection - very dark, lots of carved statuary, hunting perches, ambush hollows
1. - swoop down from hunting perch, shove off ledge into gulley and follow, grappling
2. - echo-chittering from hollow statues, allows ambush from behind
3. - ambush hollow - statue facing one way, open at the back, snatch someone into opening, block visibility while fighting them
4. - stalking grilles - sneak in close, openings allow stab, domination effect, then withdraw
5. - recently dead insectfolk, chewed open and partially drained, lying in a line in a small grotto
6. - decorated chamber, illusion of gloating hiverbug atop plinth, monologues while real ones leap from niches above door

Notes: I initially had an idea for leaning into the weird and making each room its own byzantine process but decided that just made this whole thing a blogging gag not a useable piece of kit and chose against that. The room themes would have been:
Room 1 - Zocchi dice based encounter table
Room 2 - d1000 fibonnacci sequence
Room 3 - monster of variable properties
Room 4 - variable terrain effects
Room 5 - cross reference the results of all previous rooms to get the 'final boss'
Passages between rooms would have been portals of variable destination

In Favor Of Repetition

Standing up from my last campaign my players said something that I was not sure should I feel hurt by - that my last couple of campaigns had the same feel. I thought I ran some fairly different things
- Brancalonia
- Spelljammer
- Hexcrawl25 But I wonder if they feel the same because these players have other very different GMs to compare against so the innate similarities of my DM style overwhelmed all other differences? I ran them differently enough to my own perceptions that I got three completely different things out of them but I guess I must reuse parts more than I thought...

At this point I am old and ugly enough to recognise the wisdom of not attempting to make everything unique. "Just Use Bears" is a load-bearing stone on my own personal journey to wisdom.

In the interest of being honest, there are certainly things I reuse
- the campaign world / lore - I have a small handful of players who have popped up in more than one campaign who then recognize some of the tales of the hazards below them or have run into aspects of factions in other guises faraway. This I think is the best kind of repetition, the rest just make my life easier.
- menagerie world / kaleidoscope species - at this point the utility of this 'universal socket' world for open table gaming has been proven and reproven. Variety in the d100 NPC species table that makes "Sword Coast Diversity" look like a klan rally in comparison. Want to be some odd species? No problem, noone even looks sideways at you. Talking goose? Can do.
- opportunity to think around obstacles / no-roll success for good ideas - tell me your sufficiently cunning and creative plan and I'll be happy to say you just succeed.
- one-shot framework (Splinters, Brancalonia) - Brancalonia was 'the money's been drunk, the booze is run out, your patron/landlord has a job for you' with a side order of 'I am assured the dragon is dead this time'. For Splinters it was 'hop through this portal, fetch that bit of wood we need for our ritual' - both worked well to get things rolling.

Within campaigns, but not across them I guess repetition is a motif as well
- For Spelljammer, ship deck plans came up again and again, where most other combats usually happen on some different backing, the fact that of course a fight involving your ship means you break out the same deckplan gets really noticeable after a while.
- NPCs (as per adventure threading) - within a campaign I try to reuse the cast, I have snuck in a mention or two of NPCs from one campaign to another but the differences in tone have never really made 'guest appearances' make much sense.

To return to the specific point of my blogwagon comrades, there are typically four types of dungeon - reliably abandoned and dangerous structures - in menagerie world (on the continent everything has happened on so far) drawn from great buried hazard-strata from the continental history
- ruined temples from the cult purge a few decades back - these are for unquiet spirits, undead, bloody rituals and cults. Shallowly buried threats being dug up by fanatics.
- fortified shrines of the predator queens many hundreds of years ago. There are for running into the petty gods, hideous artefacts, and determined relic hunters looking for war-winning weapons.
- bunkers and fortresses from the first dwarven empires war against the Final Star many thousands of years ago. These are sections of the Apocalypse Archive; for the spooky tense 'this is not a place of honour' crawls through a place where something terrible obviously happened, with lots and lots of grim defenses pointed toward some as yet un-found horror.
- wizard towers abandoned by their masters at all points down the timeline. Wildcards, but always hazardous because wizards.


It bears repeating.


It bears repeating.


It bears repeating.


It bears repeating.


It bears repeating.


It bears repeating.

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.

Lady Luck smile upon thee often (Randomness Blogwagon)

tl;dr: complex randomisers like depth-crawls, chaos-clocks, etc. need high frequency use to be appreciated by players; otherwise stick to simpler, flatter tables.

This is for the Random Blogwagon from Prismatic Wasteland. I diced up my inputs - 6 on the d20 gets me June 6th, 8 on 2d6 gets me a post length of "As short or long as you desire" and my card came up as the 2 of Spades so I am geased to include a reference to "Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque".

This is all to my cosmic good because I had this post tentatively scheduled for June 6th already; huzzah. Not sure how I am going to work in the mighty repository of gothic inspiration that is Jack Shear's opus but I will have figured it out by the end.

My thought is that there is a different interaction with chance and randomness happening on the two sides of the DM's screen. Even setting aside any intentional choices that the DM is making - those are not random at all - there are two different systems in the hands of the folk around the table. The players are using their d20s, complete with its swinginess, the DM is often rolling on the encounter tables, reaction rolls and other bits that are either a weighted d20 table or actually rolled on with 2d6 or the like for a true bell curve.

DMs are dealing with 'gradation' results where many different outcomes can potentially drop out of a roll while players are typically rolling hit/miss at a greater or lesser likelyhood. As a player, fine, it means that I decide my course, throw the dice and take my chances.

Players get to experience their 'toolkit' round by round in combat and so are well acclimated to it. DMs get to build their tools and think about them even if they do not use them at table. Players only get to experience the DM toolkit at table - at a much lower cycle.

Own table experiences

My recently completed Hexcrawl25 campaign just used the overloaded encounter die thoughout and the players got nicely familiar with that straight-forward randomiser. Low bad, high good on a d6 was memorable even it was infrequent.

Way back for my Southern Reaches campaign I tried to similarly deploy the hidden depths tables for wilderness travel - and it never got a chance to shine because the frequency of rolls was just too low. Too many things happened between various travel rolls to stick in peoples mind.

I did manage to deploy those hidden depths tables for masquerades and parties - as a social depth crawl - which worked better because the tempo of rolling was much higher. The shifting-gears of the rolled dice going from 6d4 to 4d6 to 3d8 to 2d12 to d20+d4 provided a 'cadence' for the night, with things getting more interesting.

Another randomness tool I deployed was the 'big d30' which players got intuitively - once a session they get to roll a d30 in place of a d20 - and even though it was actually rolled infrequently, it felt more present because it was in the players toolbox.

Lessons learned

Things like chaos clocks, depth-crawls and other changing 'randomisers' that players encounter need to turn up with a frequency high enough that players grasp some sense of each state before it shifts to the next. Otherwise any cunning or contours within the design of the table that you are hoping players might seize and use to their advantage is wasted. They will not have enough jigsaw pieces to fill in the picture before the state shifts to a new picture needing new pieces.

For something in continuous use over the long-haul of a campaign, you might anticipate the complexity will eventually be grasped. For single sessions, or infrequently deployed randomisers, the tempo of use needs to be high enough to get multiple 'views' of each state or the randomiser needs to be simple enough to be grasped even through infrequent use.

This could be read as an argument for sticking with a mechanically simple randomiser with whatever cunning and complexity going in at the back end when populating it. Feels a bit 'keep it simple, stupid' and stick to encounter tables or resign yourself to only you the DM appreciating the elegance of whatever variable randomiser you have deployed.

Paying my Joesky tax

Sending the invoice for a "NEW COOL RULE, OR A MONSTER(S), OR SOME SPELLS, OR MAGIC ITEMS OR REGULAR ITEMS THAT ARE DIFFERENT, OR EVEN BETTER A MAP" to Jack of "Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque" and pointing to their cool idea from back in 2017 of Momentous Events: A Replacement for Inspiration in 5e D&D - basically benefiting from inspiration where you can tie an attempted roll back to one of your self-chosen legends, the Momentous Events.

31 40k Hivecity NPCs for #City26

Returning to RT-87, our hivecity to peek at a roster of its NPCs and also do the "TTRPG Character Creation Challenge Jam".

1. Morer Baranyx - Carnotaur Arena Knight-Pledge - recently granted their augmented-carnotaur, already a decorated cavalry officer, now they fight in the great arena to prove their worthiness to maybe, one-day pilot a Knight. Deep down they know Knights will not be available in their lifetime.
2. Grak the Crummy - Tallow-works Foreman (abhuman) - fur perpetually slick from the grease-fumes of the tallow-works, they drive their crew hard in their holy duty, rendering down the worthy Ogryn who survived pilgrims way into sacred candles.
3. Yellow Cew - Megasaurherder crew-boss (ogryn) - forest-smart, grizzled and megasaur scarred, they might be found wrestling their team out of the drinking-dens that will have them before departing for another run down to pick up a herd. Speeders would make the journey in hours but the cavernous megasaur carrier ships will take long weeks.
4. Ologus-77 - Augmetic-weapon-lens crafter - senior sacristan tech-magos, so filthy it is hard to tell their affiliation. Obsessed with creating ever more powerful lasing lenses from the favourable native clays. Personal crusade to construct a planetary defense las so mighty his peers will have to accept the replacement of the dark age of technology infernal cannons. Multiple cybernetic adaptations for the making and testing of las-lenses.
5. Venric the Impermeable - Munitorum tithe assessor (lasers, soldiers) - grizzled, dispeptic official in fine but worn uniform, continuously reviewing data slates and hardcopy, shouting observations at a trailing auto-scribe servitor. Certain that everyone is trying to swindle the Imperium from its rightful tithe through wickedness or incompetence and but for their diligent prying it would succeed.
6. Sepia Dismas - Abbess of Hospitaller-sisters - gentle voice and floating choir of servitor-skulls bring an aura of calm, useful for triage of the mutant, industrially-wounded or broken-minded. Equally willing to deploy their medikit or bolt-pistol depending on their assessment of your remaining utility to the Emperor.
7. Astraea the Staunch - Chief of megasaur & abhuman medicine - loud, enthusiastic, brutally scarred from an insufficiently sedated patient. A familiar face to all from popular 'how it works' autopsy videos found on most public pict-displays.
8. Billhoook Pluto - Bone-grading inspector - megasaur-scale apron and elaborate auspex headset complement flak-armour and a fast-draw autopistol holster. Feline-like tendency to turn up unexpectedly, lives for the hunt of stopping bone-smugglers
9. Turquoise-lure Lorell - Tanners-guild head - a burly, elaborately head-dressed micromanager, interrupted by shrilling vox-link of order confirmations. To their great annoyance, megasaur skins refuse to come in standard sizes.
10. Calibre Zaddion - Munitorum strategos-savant - dressed like last seasons fashionista, eyes glittering from dataveil links. Rumoured to have the entire 'big picture' of the planetary tithe in their head, they are frequently found around travel-hubs talking logistics.
11. Milliasaur Balfrymownde - Coordinator of visitors (offworlders) - stoically polite, with perfect etiquette and an encyclopedic knowledge of the off-world customs. Lays ground work for visits by dignitaries which involves telling the locals exactly what they are going to do or face the wrath of the Lord-Castellan.
12. Okheus-44 - Magos Robotica - but for the Sacristan robes this one is the archetypal tech-priest. No sign of flesh remains, often found accompanying robots on field trials, muttering "the flesh is weak".
13. Omion-39 - Servitor-wright - hurried, impatient, trailing a small retinue of servitors with equipment, constantly bemoans the difficulties of pairing augmetics with the varied abhuman bodyforms, blames the servitor-candidates for not being more uniform
14 Displacer Dyademe - Maglev-guild trainboss - canny, greedy, with obvious high quality augmetics, rich garments and prominent exotic shields. Surrounded by vox-chatter from transcontinental maglev crews and traders and emissaries looking for favours and better prices on chunks of salvage from the dead hives
15 Helene the Hexed - Maglev-cleansing inspector - handflamer, sooty armour and a perpetual smell of burnt promethium. Thorough and cunning, expert at finding hidden contraband and stowaway monsters on the hive-city chunks hauled in for recycling from the wastes
16 Lucerus Elusyx - Administorum salvage assessor - sleek and glossy, clad in a regulation uniform made from the finest materials. Delights in ferreting out attempts to avoid import tax and claiming the finders bounty.
17 Typhon the Mighty - Butchers guild line-leader (minotaur) - brawny and focussed, views their work in the slaughterhouses as a sacred duty, matching their Emperor-given strenghth and masterwork chainaxe against the tough hides and titanic carcasses of the megasaurs
18. Timon the Silver-lure - Freelance protein procurer - a greasy, wheeling-dealing spiv, able to grade megasaur offcuts, corpse starch and anything else that could be grist for the protein-mills. Laughs to much at his own jokes about "you'd make good sausages yourself"
19. Cilice Gyn Barik - Offworlder abhuman - swathed in venturing robes, even when far too hot to hide their distinctive offworld horn structure. Scrapes out a living trading on their knowledge of far away places and things
20. Garak the Jolterhead - Abhuman redemptionist preacher - festooned in holy-seals, clanking with devotional-icons, bleeding from self-flagellation they will be found braying reprentance to crowds. Fiery eyed in their zealotry and harshest to judge their fellow abhumans
21. Omax-98 - Macro-augmeticist magos - can conceive no greater privilege than what the Omnissiah requires of him in this life, to render megasaurs into the mega-servitors. Massive with exoskeletal augmentation to work on the huge beasts.
22. Lrix the Jackanape - Auspex-whisperer & wreck-surveyor - jittery, shrapnel-scarred, bundled in piecemeal armour, hunched under the weight of the potent auspex-array of uknown provenance they haul around. In demand by the hive-salvage breakers for sniffing out hazards and treasures, good at finding both but not very light on their feet.
23. Stimm Quintos - Breakers guild stimm-dispenser - overly jolly with belts full of sanctioned labor-enhancers and a ready patter of approved encouraging slogans. Dressed like the stereotypical heroic labourer but coughs blood after more than one or two big heaves at a time.
24. Valelan Renard - Houseguard patrol commander (cold one cavalry) - thin-lipped, calculating, spit-shined uniform. Brutal disciplinarian to his men, meaner again to the abhumans among them, irritates the regimental commisar by leaving them little to do. Loves the megaraptor mounts of the patrol, feeds them best prisoner bits.
25. Horgruss Imzel - stevedores guild cold-trader - purposefully fades into the crowd, wary eyes above their guild-jacket collar. Sharp blade, hold-out laspistol and flak armour hidden beneath. Master of the art of casually walking off with contraband from arriving maglevs and innocently stumbling upon interested buyers.
26. Hazael the Antler-wrangler - Maglev network snakehead - duelling scars and prominently cross-strapped pistols. Works to foil screening of arrivals from the wastes habitually. Sometimes it is for a cargo of abhumans from the failed megasaur ranches, sometimes for weirder things, they never ask.
27. Moraner Kasen - Weapon-testing duellist - abrasive and pushy, mercenary for hire. Quick to demand their duelling rights. Paid for field-testing new laslenses.
28. Horrendous Praetus - Dead-ranch ganger - garishly dressed in patched megasaur-skin hand-me-downs, faked wasteland rad-burn, backed up with knife and stubgun. Asserts their rights as a ranch-ganger, though the ranch has long been consumed by the wastelands. Talks a big game about how they will bring a new herd out there are be back in business any month now.
29. Spook Ishkur - Megasaur-runner - genuinely radburned with the scales to prove it hidden beneath their dusty megasaur-skin jacket. Likely found deeply inebriated or foul-temperedly nursing a hangover as they grimly complain about going back out for more megasaurs.
30. Morar Maryan - Houseguard incident sanitiser - disease-gnarled, flamer-toting tabarded agent of the lowest sort for the ruling house. Asks no questions, nonchalantly thorough in their work. Good memory but cares little about whys and wherefores.
31. Smokestack Orl - Deep hive scrap-picker - lethargic elder, grey-skinned where not covered in bandages. Completely divorced from standard day-night cycle, has encyclopedic knowledge of the lower hives. Watched over protectively by most of the locals as their own strange canary - "things cannot be so bad if Smokestack is still trudging about".

With thanks to Dread Quill and Fat Dwarf for their respective random name generators.

Stat everyone as a civilian except:
- The Sacristans (Ologus-77, Okheus-44, Omion-39, Omax-98) who stat as tech-priests
- Typhon the Mighty and Yellow Cew who stat as ogryns

Give +10 in the relevant skill of any mentioned equipment.

Anyway, in my 'keep me honest' progress tracker stats:
Progress: 26/56 wards completed
Completion vs target: 50% vs 41% target
Population covered: 58%

Slowed down a lot, been busy but have a couple more good ideas for wards in the can - half way done, a month ahead of schedule.

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.

Mapwork in campaigns (Maps Blogwagon)

tl;dr: get a broad coarse view of your world; there are easy tools to use & you will not regret it when your players head for the horizons.

This is for the Maps Blogwagon from Prismatic Wasteland. This is a paean to leveraging randomly generated or procedurally generated maps to get a rough but broad picture of everything. Dice this up, roll them up with various tools - or create them with intentionality - to get yourself a rough a broad rough cut of everything but only detail what you need. For that broad, shallow view Azgaar's Fantasy Map Generator is great - it randomly blocks out a map with a couple of useful layers; cultures, biomes, national boundaries, and religions which interplay to give interesting results. Zoom down to cities and do the same with Watabou City Generator. This is to have a DM side tool to help you be coherent and consistent in your responses to questions from players. In particular when the player's geographic reach massively expands through access to high-level magics. When players start heading for the horizons, having a coarse, broad assessment of what is going on keeps you calm, helps you stay consistent and keeps the players immersed.

Ducal House Example

i wanted to talk about handling maps for the Ducal house game this is one just shy of 150 sessions. There are two big files - "Stats" the giant Excel with all of my world-building rules of thumb and math and demographic math and everything, and a giant PowerPoint called Maps, currently running at 96 slides. Here is where I stuffed all my map work. The original map for the game was done with Azgaar's fantasy maps and after that I took screenshots of various locales using different features to focus in on what was the actual play space.

This file has grown organically through the campaign, initially because there was a strong virtual component to play during the pandemic lock-down but now simply as it is the central reference for (complex) geography. I use this to figure things out then extract the relevant snippets I need for a session - either resketching the hexmap section or just working up a quick sites-and-connectors point-crawl-like schematic for travel.

Going back over it for writing this I am amused that the eras of the campaign are visible, like rings in a tree, as things were added as they became relevant.

Below I run through
1. Content of the maps file
2. Early game: city scale
3. Expanding to regional travel
4. Realms beyond
5. Sum up

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.

What xaosseed's games look like

Following up on Grace of Choir of Fire's idea of laying out how elf-games are played at specific tables so people can see the multitudes that throng beneath the umbrella of 'D&D' or even any sub-division below that.

This is broadly the set-up I came up with, with a fair chunk of 'host/hospitality' mixed in on top. My gaming set up has always had 'home' and 'away' set ups based on how much junk I was willing to haul around. Minis, battlemats and other bits of big hardware were never my thing even when I was home because I ran free-wheeling 'do what you please' games so I was not putting up with the constraints of not having the right minis - we just did theater of the mind and tokens/meeples as needed.

Home Campaign Rig

Ducal House (home campaign) is like a coelecanth; this is me running a 'perpetual campaign' in the grand old AD&D tradition I first learned.
- system is 3.5e
- three players, only play with all three; trying for twice a month, life oft gets in the way but we tend to overbook slots and accept some attrition.
- gather at my place (also shared with one of the players (in-house testing team)).
- three standard modes - morning start (1030), afternoon start (1300) or night slot (2130) which differ in that morning start will include a break for takeout and probably a stop for someone to go to their evening shift or a party. Afternoon slot has no big break, runs to exhaustion or child pickup time. Nightslot runs to exhaustion.
- set up is players on the couch; table stacked with snacks - grapes, dates, crisps, biscuits - plus a carafe of coffee (morning/afternoon) or herbal tea (night). I have my DM screen at the end of the table, set up behind that.
- We typically get in, chat for a bit - any news since last seen; usually just a week or fortnights worth.
- Sessions launch with the bard doing a recap from their notes then I do 'time, place, immediate activities' and then the players decide what they are doing.

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.

Childhood inspirations from a time of shared references

For the 'childhood inspirations' blogwagon that Havoc kicked off - I wrote mine last September - because I cheated by starting at 12 so my Appendix N conformed already.

More interestingly - I recently spent a weekend gaming with my original gaming group from back in the day and among the topics of conversation was that in that time and place it was possible to be a universal geek. So little content made it as far as us that you read or watched or went to see all of it. This ties to the open and closed systems thought that Grumpy Wizard laid out - by the time we all sat to a gaming table in the early 90s we had a pretty common open-system to bring to the closed system rules of AD&D or WHFRP.

Through grim curency exchange rates for the punt and shipping costs, things were expensive and often just not available - a seventh TV channel was a big deal as I recall. VHS players and the one video rental store in town meant we'd all seen the same stuff. Even though we had the luck to be reading in English so were not further bottle-necked by need for translation, books were slow to make it as far as us. For these and other reasons, there was not a huge amount of what we would now call 'content' sloshing around and thus there was a much greater overlap between what any two folk interested in the genres would have encountered.

By comparison, since then three great new 'pools' of stuff have opened up -
* Geographic
* Archive
* New creations

Incentivising challenges with tactility (City26)

Like any 'creation project' the tactility of it is important for me; I find myself picking some slightly novel approach to note taking each time to keep things interesting and to make the projects distinct.

Previous examples:
* For the Spelljammer Academy run, it started as a print of the four official adventures held with treasury tags then various odds and ends of loose paper were added to the back, including some experiments with gate-fold-type planetary system overlays. It was messy but a characterful mess.
* My home campaign is a double stack - world notes plus session notes - all done on the backs of scrap paper and old bills.
* My Friday night hexcrawl campaign is a similar double stack plus a GM binder of plastic-pocket ready reference stuff for gaming-on-the-move; one-page monster manual, code of conduct, treasure tables, etc.

For this City26 campaign I actually got started while flying - so I had some boarding passes to hand and started with those. I have a big stack of old boarding passes that were kept with a half-notion of needing bookmarks, now they can finally be used and it makes this project feel distinct.

A personal quirk, working on the small surface of the back of a boarding pass makes the demand feel less onerous; even if the output demanded is broadly alike, I only have to fill a boarding pass so feels less. I also habitually like to write very small which helps.

This also makes the project feel nicely tactile; as observed by many others elsewhere, it can be easier to get stuff done working physically than typing it up.

After a few weeks of working on this I am broadly following a refinement of my NaNoWriMo process:
- following Fleming - set yourself up to start the next session hot by stopping halfway through a paragraph
- this translates to 'create the template for the next session' by blocking out the next boarding pass
- all good ideas get noted onto the master sheets
- starting a session means blocking out the obvious stuff first, principal features, maybe controlling faction
- with that start done, block out some encounters, maybe plot hooks as they become obvious
- flesh out everything more, only a boarding pass of space to be terse
- NPCs are last; they usually are obvious by then - who is evidently around from the encounters, factions and plot hooks
- do not attempt to roll straight into a second session; take a break first

After a break you may do a second whole session on the same structure. Make your restart as low friction as possible, but do not pre-pick it; leave yourself room to be inspired anew.

My other aides I use;
* Some powerpoint image creation to help understand the shape, block-out how many districts in each part of the hive.
* Voice-transcription to ramble away about ideas while doing laundry.
* Reading through the old Rogue Trader book and noting ideas; trying to stay away from the modern stuff and that 'orthodox 40k' approach.

I am waiting for inspiration to slow and then I will sift back over those ideas and tease out the ones not yet used.

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.

Blogwagon: Xaosseed's Rule of Three

Sam Seer asks of us "Talk about three games that are important to you" and far be it from me to refuse the call.

Dungeons & Dragons - godzilla in my gaming lexicon. I was a trad AD&D DM, then leaned hard into Planescape then after hiatus came back as a follower of the OSR, even if most often the players were looking to run 5e characters. I got the 'run a good session' down way back on the first time around, but more recently I've gotten a grip on what it takes to get a campaign to run and how to run open tables.

I've gotten decades of good gaming, it broke me into new circles of friends in three different cities.

I bought in heavily two three editions so far - AD&D/Planescape, 3.5e and 5e. Alongside that I have ramped sideways to OSR content - zines like A Thousand Thousand Islands, Through Ultans Door and NOD Magazine, books like Stygian Library, Veins of the Earth and Petty Gods and the endless font of creativity that is the OSR blogosphere. Ultimately this is me very belatedly buying into my old Black Box I guess? That was a whole other realm of 'important' to my own personal gaming journey but all under "getting more out of D&D".

World of Darkness - one I have largely put down but I was once a big WoD player and fan. One of the earliest campaigns I played in was a crossover Werewolf/Vampire/Mage game which we got tons of fun out of. I understood very little of the implications of the setting at that point, ridiculous things were done but it was a blast. In college I played a Sabbat 1920s game that was a rollercoaster of chaos; tons more fun. There was also a Kindred of the East game where we got TPK'ed which was great just for the beautiful instance of a bunch of gwáilóu running into the unknown hard and getting shredded. There were some other legendary WoD games happening among the folk I played with, it was *the thing* at the time.

The huge setting lore, advancing with each new splat book was novel at the time and multiple long-haul train journeys was spent with a fellow gamer discussing The Implications as they landed. The singular, strongly rendered setting was energising, at the time it was *the* hotness. This is one I have almost completely left behind without much interest in going back to - very much a time and a place. I could only see a return for a 'long-haul' multi-century campaign or a brief stop in as a red-team player (essentially a systemless role). It was great then, chucking double-fistfuls of attack and soak dice on the table, but it does not call me back.

The League - bottled lightning - the kids these days would call it a forum LARP - it had an Over/Under-esque impact on our games group, with significant consipring, discussions, fiction writing, scheming and conspiracy theorising. I am so glad Over/Under was the huge obvious success it was because now there is a highly visible example that I can point to and go 'that, it was like that, but for us, back then'. The world that unfolded drove months of gameplay, fiction writing, and forum discussions.

The world it ignited in my mind has stuck there for decades, if I could ever pull off one such similar game to give others the same experience, I would consider my gaming career well spent.

Turning to the bonus questions from Sam Seer:

* What was your process for making your three choices?

Games that got me where I am today; I've held myself to games that I put significant time in at table; other that existed more conceptually or solo, see below. Those that made the grade were the games were I put in the hundreds of hours during my gaming apprenticeship that shaped how I game.

* Looking back over your three picks, do you see a connection between them?

As above - what I put the most hours on across formative years. The common factor with D&D and WoD is the relative main-stream-ness of them; different mechanics but we ran them in similar styles with different settings. The DM had an adventure in mind, the truth was revealed through players being clever or making good rolls with character abilities, combat was typical. I developed a preference for high-trust gaming, or playing with others who also ran games because they too know the struggle and are less likely to deliberately derail your game.

* Did you have any honorable mentions?

Lots here; things that mostly served as fodder for the types of D&D I like to run today.

Spelljammer - this was the setting that actually had me staring at the tiny pictures in the brochure - the pirates fighting on open decks beneath the stars - going 'how do I get this to table' though it was not until post-pandemic that I was actually able to run a Spelljammer campaign and then in 5e.

Fall from Heaven II - a fantasy mod for 4X game Civilization IV; actually built to bring the creators D&D campaign into being as a playable mod. I put many, many hours on this over most of my fallow TTRPG period including times where I was working and living very remotely indeed. The emergent narratives that sprang from unlikely remixes of the basic fantasy archetypes, terrains, religions and who ended up next too who were fascinating. A masterclass in geography driving destiny.

Magic: The Gathering - for the windows on worlds, particularly Mirage, that were incredibly inspiring. The first few decades of Magic were masterclasses in show-don't-tell worldbuilding; with card art and maybe a sentence or two of flavour text conveying a whole world. If they had dropped a 'Spelljammer: Skyship Weatherlight' module I would have been all over it - it was the 'Voyages of the Princess Ark' for the late 90s generation.

Heroquest - foundational dungeon crawler - treasures, lethal combat, claustrophobic tangles of spaces, the running against the clock of monsters closing in on you, great stuff. Also provided a hook out to Games Workshop which was the slippery slope to White Dwarf magazine, thence to Dragon and onwards to Dungeons and Dragons itself.

Rogue Trader ('87) - the classic 'important game I rarely played' - with the meaty book of skirmish combat wargaming - but it had a bestiary, equipment lists, fat wedges of lore, amazing art - this was a hugely inspiring sci-fi universe to encounter. I deflected away towards Adeptus Titanicus and Space Marine (6mm) for yet more windows on the setting but when Dark Heresy finally dropped I snapped it up. After a few years slogging around in the OSR I finally came to the realisation that Rogue Trader could function fairly well as an RPG system - high lethality, sure but so are many others.