Review: Through Sunken Lands

tl:dr; a book you bring to table to run a sword and sorcery game where noone has prepped, a toolkit for DMs who understand the basics, should work with any edition or retroclone.

I was gifted a copy by friend of the blog C. Kinch over Christmas and am trying to get to it in less than a year this time. I had heard of Through Sunken Lands before, it had been spoken highly of by those talking about retroclones, OSR games and games that were simpler vehicles to deliver the same fun. There had also been mention of playbooks as one of the key things it did which I took for this to be a Powered by the Apocalypse system - very wrongly in fact - but that mistake is what had kept me from checking this out myself for a very long time.

First impression - decent thick hardback, some muted-tone, somewhat spooky art that conveys a more mythos-leaning sword and sorcery game. Lay out is nice and clean with one big 'huh' thing I would query which hides a great deal of the glorious promise of this book unless you hunt for it. When you first pick this up, you get the intro, then you are straight into the system and while the system is grand it is nothing so special to make this stand out from among many similar retroclones. The real meaty goodness of this book are in the later sections - but that is like saying 'the show gets good in season 4' - I'm long gone by then. You should in fact skip the core rules when you read this - intro, then How To Play, then Playbooks and Scenario Packs. Those are the three gold veins in this book.

Shiny TTRPG links #157

Lots of interesting links this week - thrown up against the backdrop of the Bloggies! More can be found on the previous list found here. You can find more links on this weeks r/OSR blogroll or the RPG Blog Carnival or on Third Kingdom Games news roundup. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.

I Cast Light! gives us LESSONS FROM HELL: John Romero's Level Design Rules for DOOM

PresGas Wiki Notes and OSR Houserules shares Goblin Punch Lifepath Character Generation Mash-Up

Quickly, Quietly, Carefully gave us 0e/LBB retro-clone Torch & Sword

Whitebeard shares An Owlbear/Discord/DndBeyond checklist for new campaigns

DIY & dragons writes Xandering is Slandering

Treasures of the cupboard top - Heroquest (1989)

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

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

D&DBeyond: Bad Stats, No Biscuit.

tl;dr: frustrated salt post. Why publish spoiled data?

DndBeyond published an article "2023 Unrolled: A Look Back at a Year of Adventure" and I thought "Cool, stats!" - until I found they messed with axes of the only graphs they put in there and now who the hell knows what they say. What the hell guys - 60, 80, 100, 200, 500, 700...? Where did you get that number sequence from? I showed this to the in-house testing team and they were similarly baffled.

Le freaking sigh. Ok. Let us see if we can salvage anything from this mess. I think this is what the Species numbers are.

Shiny TTRPG links #156

Interesting throughts this week abroad on the net. More can be found on the previous list found here. You can find more links on this weeks r/OSR blogroll or the RPG Blog Carnival or on Third Kingdom Games news roundup. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.

Taskerland writes Not Golden like Gold. Golden like a Stone.

BURN AFTER RUNNING: RPG ONE-SHOTS gives us The Golden Age of TTRPGs has Not Even Started

Open Hearth Gaming shares Don't Roll: Great RPG Mechanics #RPGMechanics Week Ten (finale)

A Most Majestic Fly Whisk gives us NEW WISDOMS FOR NEW WORLDS - an oracular """resolution mechanic"""

Prismatic Wasteland shares Schrödinger’s Chat 2: Amended & Restated Quantum Language Rules

Actual Test: conservation of NPCs in prewritten adventures

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

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

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

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

Grow Your Own DMs

Travelling home for Christmas I read old notes and fished out a thoughts we had at a rare non-gaming gathering of our local games soc - one theme was we need to help people start DM'ing.

There is broader chatter about a DM crisis but for us specifically we have been seeing all these people turn up in the forums going ‘hey, I’d love to do more gaming’ and if we can do one or two things to show them “DMing is not that hard! just go for it!” then I think that will be great in the long run.

An open campaign call was 3x over subscribed, the DM did some test sessions to pick out the best fit players - still left a bunch of players who would have been on to play something without a DM. Similiarly we have often had the usual cohort of DM's at our regular Friday night open table games run something last minute when they came to game because we don’t have enough DMs.

We could live without more DMs, sure but but it would be great to sew the seeds of a new crop of DMs when we don’t need them so they are there when we want to step back, people move, get sick, whatever.

Thoughts we had to try and get people relaxed to take the first leap:
1. Create a list of available adventures we would recommend for one-shots
2. "Open Hand DM'in" where you talk through why you are doing as you play
3. "New DM support" where some old hands join a new DMs table explicitly to back them up
4. DM workshops - talking theory and lessons learned outside the games

For the first, there is allegedly a list of recommended adventurers league adventures somewhere on the forum and I am going to try and unearthing that old roster for newbies (or old guard) to know which are the ones worth running e.g. Wolves of Welton, Wild Sheep Chase, Pudding Faire.

"DM with Open Cards” table - where a DM plays a scenario while telling the players / potential new DMs, why certain stuff has been done and why. This has met great interest and as well as being done as dedicated sessions outside our usual gatherings, some folk are being a DM-intern sitting in beside the DM just to watch from behind the curtain for a session. We have had great response from different DM's among the group - ones who are NPC focussed, ones who are combat focussed - to the point that I can see some of us old hands taking up the opportunity to listen in on some of these ourselves.

"Declare a new DM table" - where people can ask for some veterans to join and support them running the first time. I will be doing one of these myself next sessions I go to - someone that has sat to a bunch of my tables and I was honestly surprised to hear had never DM'ed before so I am sure it will be a blast. This is pretty much just the starting-out version of what I would do myself in that I would look to seed a table with at least one friendly face if I'm setting off to do something new (location or open table wise).

DM’ing workshops to get more new DM’s started hitting topics like ‘combat made easy’ and ‘improv need not be intimidating’ - these being shorter times outside of the regular gaming meetups with a bit more prep and theory focus. Some folk wrote up a bunch of stuff on the forums a while back but nothing beats in person talks. I am going to do a session pitched as how I prep a written adventure for our Friday night games though really I am prepared for that to be a more general Q&A session.

If we can get even a half dozen folk to set up their DM screens as part of our regular cohort, that will be a great success. What we will do for chairs and finding space in our venues is a problem for another day.