Actual Play: Where The Wheat Grows Tall

I got to bring the zine recently reviewed Where The Wheat Grows Tall by Evlyn Moreau and Camilla Greer to the table. I worked in the unbalance of the day and night spirits as the driving force behind an environmental disturbance randomly generated in my campaign sandbox using the Deck of Worlds. The forever-shining sun was drying out a local swamp and the players headed down to investigate. My tweak to the set up was that inside the field, day and night remained as normal, but outside - at the farm and in the region all around - the sun was blazing ceaselessly and drying up the swamps, their rice crops and shrimp fishing.

Spoilers abound from here on.

Zine and Playnotes

Play Report

Shiny TTRPG links #113

A deep venture into the hinterweb this week. 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.

Hex Brawler Games shares Tools in the Toolbox

Le Chaudron Chromatique launches A Feast For A Sphinx

Methods & Madness proposes Adding skills and feats makes OSR games SIMPLER

Caltrops for Breakfast gives us Character Stables: Hiatuses

Throne of Salt has Some Thoughts About Language in RPGs

Numbers Aren't Real shares 41 Feasts (GLOG Setting)

Trilemma Adventures cuts close to the bone with The Cyberpunk We Got

Revenant's Quill creates the Sulphur Mage

A world with 3d6 shares Underwater City Generator

Goblin Punch shares a collaboration w/ Whose Measure God Could Not Take: The Dwarf in the Glass

What is our preferred table size?

tl;dr: a larger than normal poll gives a different result to 'what is the ideal TTRPG table size' - a sign of how most gamers actually play?

@lincodega got a big sample size when they asked "ideal TTRPG party/table size?" - 18,480 votes - with 64.1% saying 5 including the DM. This seemed intuitively right to me - I asserted DM+4 as typical when doing a back of the envelope estimate recently.

Following our theme of deep cuts to the early blog - complete with indecipherable graph - I was looking to drop this in on top of our other surveys and confirm that this broadly matches. Instead, I find myself confused - this latest poll is on the right.

Bars and Taverns of Thenya

To participate in this months blog carnival - hosted by Sea of Stars on the topic of Taverns, Bars and places to meet I want to write about what has made an often-revisited meeting space in my on-going (now 82 session, 3 year) home campaign.

Over the course of the first 60 sessions spent in the starting city of Thenya a lot of inns and taverns featured and were visited. What has been interesting is how critical these public gathering spaces have been to a highly social/political campaign - as dungeons to your standard sword swinging game, so courts and tap-rooms are to the clues and whispers game.

The set up for the campaign is that the party are children of the ruling house, the old Duke having just now passed on at time of writing, but for most of the campaign they were on their home terrain with effectively unlimited force to back them up. This made the challenges all around figuring out who and where the opposition was - and for that, bars and taverns.

Portrait of the bard simplifying things

Shiny TTRPG links #112

Fine links from about the net, all sorts of interesting things. 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.

Goblin Punch writes Critical GLOG: Base Resolution Mechanics

Sſtabhmontown Adventures expands on mini-domain turns with Merchants, heretics, and special advisors

Was It Likely? gives us the automatic sage: a legend generator for the populating of histories with fragmented wonders

Le Chaudron Chromatique shares Ghoulies replacement characters

The Lizard Man Diaries proposes Some Freeform Domain Play Guidelines/Structure

Goblin's Henchman asks Perception-like checks too transparent? | add an ‘uncertainty/opacity die’ ?

level2janitor proposes The Ticking Clock - My favorite mechanic for Death

The Coliar Run - Cooking up Spelljammer one-shots

This is a quick run through of the mission plus some thoughts on running Spelljammer I'm finding from table play. Off the back of the Spelljammer Academy (SJA) adventure 4-parter I needed some one-shot ideas. I did not want to ramp into Light of Xaryx because I am doing that with another group.

Happily 'ship goes on a mission' is a solid set up for nice, contained adventures. To start off, we had the tiny Realmspace gazetteer in the back of SJA part 3 - and I liked the look of Coliar. A giant air-world, they have lizardfolk who trade with spelljammers, lots of potential here.

The setup.

For a hook, I just had an envoy come hire the players and their ship as a deniable asset. Due to the players previous actions the academy as a whole is short on cash so they were strongly inclined to take whatever jobs were going. This envoy, a representative of one of the fractions within the lizardfolk commune, needed someone to go after a downed ship in dragon territory. They were not able to do it themselves without causing a potential war so they needed outsiders, off-worlders to do it.

Session plan, first version

Ease DM'ing tasks with the Egan Doctrine

tl;dr: know what DM prep you need to do in the next 20 mins you have spare so that small chunk of time is well spent.

The prep needed to DM is often pointed to as burdensome with the addition of 'when to get any of this done.' Our wargaming friends have had a good idea for us to steal - the Egan Doctrine. Friend of the blog C. Kinch replied to "What is the #egandoctrine?" with:

"It’s an idea that @tomjmegan came up with. A lot of us were bemoaning the fact that we don’t do enough figure painting.

He came up with the idea of setting up a small job and keeping at it. 20 mins a day. It’s short enough that it’s achievable. Thus #egandoctrine."

The refinement that I follow from C. Kinch is to not just find a small task but also to be ready to seize that 20mins available and get right to the task. For miniature painting (Kinch's personal focus) - have a biscuit tin lid with your two brushes, the one or two colours you are going to apply and the 3-6 miniatures that are going to get done in this round. Lay out your tools so you can get right to the task.

For TTRPG DMs - or at least for me - this means identifying what needs to get done and chunking it out so that you can sit down and crack on when you get a few moments. The main time sink otherwise is the 'spin-up' time of figuring out what you need to do which can easily eat a good ten minutes before you even know where you ought to start.