Weekly links from about the web - final Feb '23 edition. More can be found on the previous list found here. The original inspiration for all of this is weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links. You can find even more links on the newly-automated weekly blogroll on r/OSR or the RPG Blog Carnival or a roundup of non-blog news on Third Kingdom Games roundup.
The Alexandrian gives us Untested 5E – Dynamic Save Responses
Richard's Dystopian Pokeverse gives us Some Basic Anthropology Texts For DMs
Traverse Fantasy highlights D&D 5e's Dialogue Procedure & NPC Traits
Whose Measure God Could Not Take gives us Another Method for Meaningful Terrain Generation
The Lizard Man Diaries on Making more interesting fantasy wargame units with A.I
The Ongoing Campaign points out Some Obscure But Fun Small Rules
Aiee! Run From Kelvin's Brainsplurge! has a view on Charisma in Le Stat d'Dump
27 February 2023
25 February 2023
Review: Rackham Vale Paintbox Edition
tl:dr; gorgeous art decorate a surprisingly cunning DM's toolkit
Supported the kickstarter - Rackham Vale: Paintbox Edition - for this "award-winning, fey-filled TTRPG setting" which is built around "the art of master fantasist Arthur Rackham" and statted up for OSE. All this done by the Crowbar Collective, Brian Saliba and Craig Schaffer.
I am a fan of Rackhams art from the original fairy tales and other places they turned up and I have always liked how his art has cropped up through-out the OSR - out of copyright and right up our street. When I backed this, I had in fact already picked up a copy of the slimmer first edition through Print on Demand but it was still no question to back the kickstarter for the bonus extra goodness.
Pulling it out of the packing, it was wrapped in stamped brown paper, and then within the book was wrapped in a fabric printed map! Delightful and entirely on theme. The book itself was a neat A5 hardback size, 196 pages. Originally the fruit of Zinequest, it charmingly continues to refer to itself as a zine despite now being a chunky hardback.
Supported the kickstarter - Rackham Vale: Paintbox Edition - for this "award-winning, fey-filled TTRPG setting" which is built around "the art of master fantasist Arthur Rackham" and statted up for OSE. All this done by the Crowbar Collective, Brian Saliba and Craig Schaffer.
I am a fan of Rackhams art from the original fairy tales and other places they turned up and I have always liked how his art has cropped up through-out the OSR - out of copyright and right up our street. When I backed this, I had in fact already picked up a copy of the slimmer first edition through Print on Demand but it was still no question to back the kickstarter for the bonus extra goodness.
Rackham Vale Paintbox Edition with cover by Arthur Rackham
Pulling it out of the packing, it was wrapped in stamped brown paper, and then within the book was wrapped in a fabric printed map! Delightful and entirely on theme. The book itself was a neat A5 hardback size, 196 pages. Originally the fruit of Zinequest, it charmingly continues to refer to itself as a zine despite now being a chunky hardback.
22 February 2023
Procedure: Overloaded Wilderness Encounters
To participate in this months blog carnival - hosted by Plastic Polyhedra on the topic of Procedures I want to share the procedure for exploration I have bolted together.
A little background - of campaigns I have run recently - one was a series of one-shots, one was a book campaign and one was a very high social/politicking game with little travel - none of which were great for frequent use of encounter tables from being out and about. A new campaign I have launched (see here, here and here) has a lot more exploration and hex-crawling to it which has given me the opportunity to improve my approach to encounter tables by picking up some of the best practice out there.
I wrote before about the core encounter table getting built - an unlockable table which could stay random but shift the probabilities around depending on whether you roll 2d12, 3d8, 3d6 or 6d4. I have combined this with an overloaded encounter die for what specifically is encountered during a given hour for traversing the wilderness.
The version of the overloaded encounter die I use is from Hexploring by Meandering Banter as I like the inclusion of weather:
1. Encounter: live, moving entities off the encounter table
2. Setback/hazard: a passive encounter, trap or hazard associated with the roll from the main table
3. Expiration/Fatigue: consumption of resource/delay/end of effects
4. Weather (outdoors) / Locality aspect (weather shielded)
5. Percept: Spoor, traces or clues to the thing rolled
6. Advantage: some boon or hidden feature is revealed
So together we get the below - a flat chance of it being the type of encounter from the d6 and the probability curve of it being whatever is out there wandering about.
A little background - of campaigns I have run recently - one was a series of one-shots, one was a book campaign and one was a very high social/politicking game with little travel - none of which were great for frequent use of encounter tables from being out and about. A new campaign I have launched (see here, here and here) has a lot more exploration and hex-crawling to it which has given me the opportunity to improve my approach to encounter tables by picking up some of the best practice out there.
I wrote before about the core encounter table getting built - an unlockable table which could stay random but shift the probabilities around depending on whether you roll 2d12, 3d8, 3d6 or 6d4. I have combined this with an overloaded encounter die for what specifically is encountered during a given hour for traversing the wilderness.
The version of the overloaded encounter die I use is from Hexploring by Meandering Banter as I like the inclusion of weather:
1. Encounter: live, moving entities off the encounter table
2. Setback/hazard: a passive encounter, trap or hazard associated with the roll from the main table
3. Expiration/Fatigue: consumption of resource/delay/end of effects
4. Weather (outdoors) / Locality aspect (weather shielded)
5. Percept: Spoor, traces or clues to the thing rolled
6. Advantage: some boon or hidden feature is revealed
So together we get the below - a flat chance of it being the type of encounter from the d6 and the probability curve of it being whatever is out there wandering about.
Overload Wilderness die vs Unlockable Wildnerness Encounter Table
20 February 2023
Shiny TTRPG links #108
Links from a week where the value of blogrolls has been hotly debated! More can be found on the previous list found here. The original inspiration for all of this is weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links. You can find even more links on the newly-automated weekly blogroll on r/OSR or the RPG Blog Carnival or a roundup of non-blog news on Third Kingdom Games roundup.
The Arcane Library shares Open Table: How The Creators Of D&D Ran Their Games
Papers and Pencils updates Magic Words 2
Vague Countries shares Methods Workbench: Determining the Presence of Monsters and Treasure in Wilderness Hex-Crawl Ruins
Archive diving Trilemma Adventures for Non-Mechanical Difficulty Levels for Monstrous Threats
Alchemist Nocturne ponders Monster Territories
@kensanata@tabletop.social toots Rule of Cool for encumbrance tracking:
minorbug location gives us A Quick Thought on Combat
The Arcane Library shares Open Table: How The Creators Of D&D Ran Their Games
Papers and Pencils updates Magic Words 2
Vague Countries shares Methods Workbench: Determining the Presence of Monsters and Treasure in Wilderness Hex-Crawl Ruins
Archive diving Trilemma Adventures for Non-Mechanical Difficulty Levels for Monstrous Threats
Alchemist Nocturne ponders Monster Territories
@kensanata@tabletop.social toots Rule of Cool for encumbrance tracking:
minorbug location gives us A Quick Thought on Combat
18 February 2023
A Beastman Came Upon A Beast - d8 superstitions around who can be eaten
Coming from a couple of angles, the question of who can eat who has become a live one in building the world of a new campaign.
I have long been poking around in a maximalist interpretation of 'who is people' - and while running session zero for my latest game we got a flag for 'no cannibalism' which immediately made me ask about how do animal-folk view this and where are we on the scale from child-safe Rupert Bear to Grimms Faerie Tales where all sorts of people went into the pot at various points.
There are plenty of canon animal-folk (Tortle, Tabaxi, Aarackocra, Owlins, Harengons, Kenku, Lizardfolk, Kenku, Giff, Hadozee, Grung, Minotaurs, Loxodon and Locathah) and the possibility of Awakened animals running about the place.
Blend this in with animist religions where everything, even objects and places can possess a distinct spiritual essence, how does one draw a line?
I also love this take on how we get more elves - "An elf who wishes to produce offspring selects an ordinary animal and begins teaching it" from David J. Prokopetz. I have taken that as a corner stone of my menagerie world setting - with many sub-species, race-oids, and kin at various points along a continuum from "food" through "an animal that can talk" to "tax-paying subject of the crown".
In our world we are used to being at the top of the food pyramid but in standard fantasy world most sentients are a few rungs down with big magical predators like manticores and dragons about the place.
I would have taken my yard-stick as classic fairy tales - the Big Bad Wolf will eat you and anyone he comes across. There are many things in the forest that are man-eaters and might eat you depending on how hungry they are - Shere Khan of the Jungle Book would fit well. Similarly, the classic tales of a rabbit being caught by a wolf and winning their freedom through cunning shows the same 'law of the jungle' approach to things.
So my immediate thought is that there would be some sort of ritual greetings "Hail Brother Bear" style in most cases that functions a bit like "Parlay" in Pirates of the Carribean - it buys you a couple of moments to convince whoever you are facing not to eat you, but that is it.
This then makes the beast / monster split relatively clear - monsters will kill and consume sentients knowingly, beasts are unaware they are doing so.
d8 Rituals and Supersitions of the menagerie world
I have long been poking around in a maximalist interpretation of 'who is people' - and while running session zero for my latest game we got a flag for 'no cannibalism' which immediately made me ask about how do animal-folk view this and where are we on the scale from child-safe Rupert Bear to Grimms Faerie Tales where all sorts of people went into the pot at various points.
There are plenty of canon animal-folk (Tortle, Tabaxi, Aarackocra, Owlins, Harengons, Kenku, Lizardfolk, Kenku, Giff, Hadozee, Grung, Minotaurs, Loxodon and Locathah) and the possibility of Awakened animals running about the place.
Blend this in with animist religions where everything, even objects and places can possess a distinct spiritual essence, how does one draw a line?
I also love this take on how we get more elves - "An elf who wishes to produce offspring selects an ordinary animal and begins teaching it" from David J. Prokopetz. I have taken that as a corner stone of my menagerie world setting - with many sub-species, race-oids, and kin at various points along a continuum from "food" through "an animal that can talk" to "tax-paying subject of the crown".
In our world we are used to being at the top of the food pyramid but in standard fantasy world most sentients are a few rungs down with big magical predators like manticores and dragons about the place.
I would have taken my yard-stick as classic fairy tales - the Big Bad Wolf will eat you and anyone he comes across. There are many things in the forest that are man-eaters and might eat you depending on how hungry they are - Shere Khan of the Jungle Book would fit well. Similarly, the classic tales of a rabbit being caught by a wolf and winning their freedom through cunning shows the same 'law of the jungle' approach to things.
So my immediate thought is that there would be some sort of ritual greetings "Hail Brother Bear" style in most cases that functions a bit like "Parlay" in Pirates of the Carribean - it buys you a couple of moments to convince whoever you are facing not to eat you, but that is it.
This then makes the beast / monster split relatively clear - monsters will kill and consume sentients knowingly, beasts are unaware they are doing so.
d8 Rituals and Supersitions of the menagerie world
15 February 2023
Benchmarking random NPC generation (2e DMG vs 5e actual data)
In a deep, deep cut to the first days of this blog - how do the NPC groups generated by the DMG compare to what see at actual tables of players?
My first number-crunching post looked at 5e stats and a group generated by the 3.5e DMG in "Benchmarking random NPC generation (3.5e DMG vs 5e actual data)" - and I just now stumbled upon the AD&D 2e equivalent in the back of the Monstrous Manual (Appendix III:NPCs).
Reading through this we already see a *massive* difference to contemporary parties in that an NPC party should be 2-12 members, with 2-5 leveled classes and the rest henchmen and men-at-arms. We will come back to this but to start, the key comparison we want is the classes. These are massively different to anything we've seen since - assumption is that 40% of an NPC party are fighters, 20% wizards, 20% clerics, 10% Thiefs (Rogues) and 10% for all the rest.
My first number-crunching post looked at 5e stats and a group generated by the 3.5e DMG in "Benchmarking random NPC generation (3.5e DMG vs 5e actual data)" - and I just now stumbled upon the AD&D 2e equivalent in the back of the Monstrous Manual (Appendix III:NPCs).
Reading through this we already see a *massive* difference to contemporary parties in that an NPC party should be 2-12 members, with 2-5 leveled classes and the rest henchmen and men-at-arms. We will come back to this but to start, the key comparison we want is the classes. These are massively different to anything we've seen since - assumption is that 40% of an NPC party are fighters, 20% wizards, 20% clerics, 10% Thiefs (Rogues) and 10% for all the rest.
12 February 2023
Shiny TTRPG links #107
Most fascinating of this weeks web-wanderings. More can be found on the previous list found here. The original inspiration for all of this is weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links. You can find even more links on the newly-automated weekly blogroll on r/OSR or the RPG Blog Carnival or a roundup of non-blog news on Third Kingdom Games roundup.
Le Chaudron Chromatique launches Tales From The Void!
Adventures Buffo asks What Kind of Folk Activity are RPGs?
Plastic Polyhedra shares Working on a #dungeon23 meta (mega?) spark-table-of-spark-tables
Goblin Punch gives us Dragons
A Knight at the Opera gave us Magic Metals and Stuff back in early 2020
Meandering Banter reaches into the archive for Overload Your Encounter Dice - Fear the Passage of Time, Meet New People, Kill Them
Talaraska has good setup thoughts in Consider a Who’s Who for Your Campaign
The Dododecahedron writes Old School Rebellion, Part III
Prismatic Wasteland asks Lore! What Is It Good For?
Le Chaudron Chromatique launches Tales From The Void!
Adventures Buffo asks What Kind of Folk Activity are RPGs?
Plastic Polyhedra shares Working on a #dungeon23 meta (mega?) spark-table-of-spark-tables
Goblin Punch gives us Dragons
A Knight at the Opera gave us Magic Metals and Stuff back in early 2020
Meandering Banter reaches into the archive for Overload Your Encounter Dice - Fear the Passage of Time, Meet New People, Kill Them
Talaraska has good setup thoughts in Consider a Who’s Who for Your Campaign
The Dododecahedron writes Old School Rebellion, Part III
Prismatic Wasteland asks Lore! What Is It Good For?
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