Shiny TTRPG links #231

Links to wrap up the first half of the year. For more, see the previous list found here or on the weekly r/OSR blogroll or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.

Swan and Raven Studio & Tall Bird host HELLO//GOODBYE Charity Bundle for Legal Aid in the US and are looking for contributors.

Crow’s Corner gives one contributors behind-the-scenes view in Writing "These Blooming Delights"

Old Men Running The World gives us The Seven Part Pact: the First Actual GM-Full Game

I Cast Light! writes PRACTICAL MAGIC: The Collection

Spriggan's Den gives us Dynamic Stories in a Static World

Bocoloid from Southern Edge shares The Freedom of Having Less: OSR Lessons from Brandonsford

Patchwork Paladin gives us The Seven Types of DMs

Blog of Forlorn Encystment shares The Village of Hommlet is Too Much: Minimalist Location Sketches for Sandbox Prep

theresattrpgforthat compiles Mint's TTRPG Library

Dungeon Merlin shares The Taste Gap, or: On the weirdness of learning how to be a better Dungeon Master

Beardmancer Bungalow gives us One Method to Prep for Improvisation

Dragon Peak Publishing writes Hexcrawling non-geographical landscapes

OSR Rocks! gives us The 1-in-1,280 Death

Sultan's Musings shares Shorter, More Frequent Sessions

Planarian Calamarium gives us Hit Points as Doom Timer

Rebooting a campaign with 2d20 Conan

Previous campaign was a decent knock-around game - run with Brancalonia so drawn steel led to 5e combat with all its flaws and extravagant abilities and less than that was Brancalonia Brawl rules fisticuffs which could be very entertaining, could be a bit of a drag depending on how the players leaned into it and how interesting the surroundings were.

The factor that ended that campaign originally was the destabilisation of the smallest householders sleeping schedule which wiped out the predictable late evening slot this campaign lived in. Recently that sleep schedule has restabilised and the time slot has opened up again - I would like to get some more gaming in, all the old players I spoke with remain keen but ... I felt not fully enthused to just fire it back up as was.

Kicking it around a bit, I think my issue is that I do not want to run 5e yet again; the fantasy super-heroes vibe of 5e (let alone 5.5e) is not what I want - too much magic-driven problem-crushing, not enough cunning use of terrain and trickery or desperate schemes and risks.

To test this, I am going to try re-booting the campaign with 2d20 Conan - I liked what I got from the 2d20 Klingon session I ran and I think there is potential here for the 'momentum/doom' collective pool to capture the right sort of 'all in this together' vibes that the campaign already leaned towards.

On 2d20 and doom pools

I got most of the Conan 2d20 back catalogue from a bundle but I think the quickstart guide should be enough to get going.

I think the attributes and skills side of things for character building should be manageable for the players, the 2d20 system I think I can walk them through and the key thing that is giving me the pep to actually run this is the whole 'doom pool' use to run adventures as a DM.

I have player experience with Spire which has those narrative gaming tools - various classes flex their abilities and suddenly there is (always was) a party, a corpse, a weapon, a clue. I am a pretty well practiced D&D GM where, to my perception, the situation is set and then revealed as the players encounter it. The narrative-gaming approach of players shoe-horning true facts in always rubbed me the wrong way, remembering arguments about tangents and derailing around game tables back in the day. I should get over this - if I am fine with anti-blorbo style player generated facts, then why not have those be active abilities?

My twitch about the doom pool is that I am hesitant to randomly crank up the difficulty of an encounter as the encounter progresses - pre-set triggers, sure, things that were already there, sure - but I have the 'oh, you are having a hard time, I halve the hit points' or 'oh, I have not gotten to use the big bosses fancy move, that attack does not kill him' - if feels like the worst type of squidgy, vibe-driven gaming that makes a mockery of players agency and effort.

The doom pool is a clearly visible to players warning that things could be about to get tough so they can gird themselves appropriately. It is permission to me as the DM to turn the screws without people getting sore that I am just ignoring the efforts they have put in to take down a foe.

Fit for purpose

The original Southern Reaches campaign was a goofball campaign with some of the most adorably raggedy characters I ever had turn up to my tables. The premise for it all was the staff of a great noble house stole the silver and ran off together and all washed up together at a tavern in the aforementioned Southern Reaches. A rolling open-table cast got up to dungeon delving, hex-crawling and political finagling with very few fatalities though a lot of fisticuffs were thrown and wild flights made.

I think the collective meta-currency of momentum, though designed for the desperate deeds of sword-and-sorcery games, could fit well to this campaign, encouraging the 'hang together' desperate band of desperadoes vibe - they might get things done if they all play their part - more than the approach I had previously of using gritty realism. Gritty realism worked to a point, people used their significant arsenal of magical powers sparingly, but it still meant that when they got to a serious fight they had that 'go nova' capability in their back pocket - they could always just bludgeon their way out.

I am having trouble fully articulating what aspect of the playstyle of that campaign seems such a good fit with the 2d20 system but my instincts are telling me it ought to be, so I think that is worth testing. Perhaps a few games in I will be better able to describe exactly why it works.

Running a beach episode

Home campaign players recently pulled off a substantial win - wanted a vacation episode - effectively a 'played through do-nothing downtime'. Writing it up as per Gorgon Bones Record your hobby experience.

The sorcerer and bard were adamant they deserved a day on the beach. Even the somewhat workaholic cleric of Kord went along as they had been pounded by a clay golem and had a bunch of cursed wounds to deal with.

The practical challenge for me was to set up for this downtime session while being flexible over where they could end up as the wonders of teleport were now theirs to command so which beach they went to could vary for the whole coast. Their intention was to go for a day and be back to sleep. As a DM that meant how to prep enough to support this chill-out downtime session without over-preparing some place that was unlikely to be returned to.

Powerpoint-filter-fuzzed beach photo

Prepping the beach session

So I figured my approach was to prepare an overlay of activities that could then be dropped on top of wherever they went to.

Thus
1. plan out the session in broad strokes that could be tailored to location
2. sweep up known aspects and differences in the southern cities they could go to

Shiny TTRPG links #230

More links for a round number report! For more, see the previous list found here or on the weekly r/OSR blogroll or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.

Soup of the Night opens with RPG Advice I Wish I Had Received As A New GM

Sundered Shields and Silver Shillings gives us d20 animating conflicts (+weird terrains!)

pjamesstuart shares Loopy Tombs

many_bubble writes How To Encourage 'Quest for It'

PresGas Words gives us Hard Mode and Modularity

From the Sorcerer's Skull shares Weird Revisited: The Moving Pointcrawl

The Robgoblin joins the RPG Blog Carnival with Magic Dealers

This Vorpal Coil gives us The Dice Bank

Hobby Games Recce shares Advice & Inspiration for Gaming Andor

The Man With A Hammer gives us Observations on Onboarding

Actual Test: Yaksha's Hexfill Method

I saw this on Brian Yaksha of Goatman's Goblet's bluesky feed - and have been looking for an opportunity to test it. Interestingly, on a first attempt it flared out and did not work for me where I already had too many ideas, it worked really well for a different region where I only had some vague ones.

The framework that Yaksha pulled together has the following:
- 1 Unique Encounter
- 2 Tools/Gimmicks for the region
- d10+d4 Local Encounters
- d10 Small Jobs
- d6 Big Jobs
- d20 Scene-setting sights/stage design
- d6 bounties/location implications
- d6 ways to expand/change-up the area set to tone.
- 3d10 names for places (locales/nature sights/crossings.)

The area where it worked (red circle below), I had just a few facts. I had previously attempted to run it for the hex below, the yellow-boxes and it just bogged down for me. I will do a post-mortem at the end on the failure.

For context, the party had just made their way from the bold outlined hex on a rescue, climbing up onto the plateau region (yellow boxes) effecting a rescue at the south-eastern-most yellow box and then dashing for the nearest edge of the escarpment with a large caravan of rescued prisoners. Their theory was that the plateau rainforests were unknown, terrain, home to the people they had just raided while the swamps below were more familiar terrain for most party members and they prefered that, even if it were an unknown part of the swamps.

Working the process

Towards a Clockwork Universe (Prep Bandwagon)

Having seen the inception of this challenge, I am going to take the same format as Weird Writers 'How I Prep' masterpost for my own.

To start, I am a 'never let them see you bleed' DM - never admit you did not have something ready, maintain the facade of a fully realised world and never dump your players out if at all possible. I never call a session early because of lack of prep - the players go off the map, things might get a bit wooly but we keep going as long as people want to. As a happy coincidence I like the lonely fun of game prep quite a lot, so all to the good. As a third point, I get to use lots of my prep as material for this blog so I get dual use out of many things.

At the table I find the blorb/anti-blorb idea of a heirarchy useful for maintaining consistency when busy/tired/worn down. When the show must go on, having some pre-decided stuff you can lean on when the players bolt for the horizon helps. As Jenx pointed out "constant improv wears thin" - blorb/anti-blorb for me is "some rules to avoid defaulting to the thing you always come up with when you improv."

I like to prep sufficient to have what I call 'clockwork universe' - a sense of what big cogs are in motion, ticking along in the background - so whatever the players do, I have some idea of what they might run into where.

The First Steps

Typically new games/campaigns are driven by 'who do I want to play with'. There are so many campaign ideas on the shelf, I will do a session zero with them, then pull down and execute the best fit. I use Colvilles campaign pitch document over email to see who is even interested then run the pre-campaign sequence of
- What is the game we want to play? Spanning from things people do not want to have in through to atmosphere, activities in focus, ruleset.
- How are we going to play together? Includes the nuts-and-bolts logistics but also some ground rules for communication, especially if people do not know one-another already.

Typically this is over email, chats or various side conversations with folk - some of this can be done by other players on my behalf sometimes where those players are old hands and familiar with my style of play.

Of old I used to cook up a whole new world per campaign but in the last few years have come to the realisation that the effort/reward for that was not paying off. The past nine campaigns I ran have included campaign + sequel in Forgotten Realms/Realmspace, a Plane-of-the-week game (continuity-less), a campaign + sequel built around two crystal spheres and a remix of Light of Xaryxis and then by *far and away* the most hours (78%) have been spent on the four campaigns set in menagerie world - my home campaign (Ducal House), my online open table (Southern Reaches), my in-person open tables (Bay of Princes) and my current hexcrawl campaign (Reluctant King).

So for me, this is where a lot of the 'prep' work goes in - worldbuilding, from which factions, hazards (derived from terrain and architecture), encounters (derived from terrain, history and factions) and settlements all cascade. For menagerie world I am underpinning much of it with an Azgaars Fantasy Map Generator map where I strongly adjusted the factions, religions, etc for the first campaign but now for all the surrounding places for subsequent campaigns and later parts of the first campaign, I stare at the map and figure out the implications from whatever terrain, culture, religion and realms are present. See the Hexcrawl25 posts for lots of this.

Choice of ruleset is typically driven by player pool to tap + energy available to learn/teach/pitch a system that is not 5e. This last is usually low so hey-ho, typically 5e - except my home campaign, which is 3.5e.

For the open table games, there is a code of conduct and a tweaked set of the Adventurers League rules so for those sessions lots of the parameters are already set, I play with whoever sits down on that basis.

Campaign Prep vs Session Prep

I hold campaign prep as 'everything that feeds more than one session' - so for the couple of campaigns I have rolling now:
- hexcrawl campaign mode - all the populating of hexes and figuring out what factions are up to
- hexcrawl one-shot mode - nil these are open-tables - past a single session, these only persist as fluff news items
- Ducal House home campaign - macro things that become part of the 'reference' stack - NPC family trees, major locations to be used multiple times, regional maps, faction plans, etc.

Practically this breaks down into two buckets - worldbuilding and continuity.

Macro-worldbuilding activities for the campaign then inform things like encounter tables or give you a sense of what should be where if the PCs hare off the for the horizons. I talk through executing this for my Spelljammer campaign here.

Since most of my campaigns at present are running in different parts of the same continent I am recycling all my prep for deep time - the same crisis, ancient foes, deep-time factions, etc. are turning up in multiple campaigns which is useful. I am keeping them from interfering with each other through geographic spread which has worked so far.

The other bucket - campaign continuity (or "consequences") feeds session prep both through keeping time records and tracking who should have turned up where and triggered what and by figuring out which plans ought to have come to fruition and changed a location.

This is mostly relevant for my Ducal House campaign; I have my thick stack of session sheets that get referenced repeatedly, in particular the timelines where NPCs arrival times at places get tracked. These consequences that tie back to actions players took or failed to take are one of the key contributors to making the place feel real and alive.

For the open table games I just pick a module and prep it with the single-page session notes below.

Procedures and Rules

My key procedure for prep is my single page session prep - I do this without fail before a session
1. Post session implications/consequences of characters declared actions
2. Check the start time, see how much time passed in-world - for continuous campaigns not one-shots
3. Copy forward any untriggered encounters or events from previous sessions or player intentions from last session
4. Check the timeline and spot and new things due to happen
5. Detail any hooks not yet fleshed out - typically things of the timeline or player intentions

These are complemented by:
6. Session notes on a 30-min chunk timeline
7. Getting player intentions and actions at the end of the session

A walked through example of me doing this (numbering offset but same steps) is here.

For module preparation I use a variant of this; run through the module, figure out the on-ramp, how things could play out, rail-road vs sandboxy-ness of it and then work up a single page sheet for that. Typical things are noting key NPC and location names to have them visible and not be flipping around as I work through the module.

Level of procedures used at table varys hugely - for Ducal House it will be scene-appropriate mechanics like the Aces High rules for aerial combat. For the hex-crawls I have an overloaded encounter dice and some downtime tools.

For both I generate random encounter tables - more formally for the hex-crawl since they are persistently within the same region, Ducal House I just do a half dozen or so interesting things since they have multiple high-speed travel options and bounce around a lot.

Specific Prep

Specific things I find I prep recently are all the hex-locations for the hex crawl; those tend to be relatively light weight and backed up with random encounter tables and some campaign level 'what does a dwarf mine look like' understanding of potential dungeons.

For Ducal House, since there are some specific questlines being pursued, I put work into locations where major conflicts are likely to happen - most of this is done by rummaging through my library looking for a giants stronghold or a demon temple which I can recycle - mostly because those will have figured out a bunch of traps and monsters already and I do not want to put a huge amount of effort into creating a high-level location that the PCs might find a way to bypass.

The main thing I aim for are recyclable tools which I generate using time-management procedures - the Egan doctrine, a kind of 'hair-trigger pomodoro' - which is seize any free 20 mins to just push something along. I find the single page session prep set up combines well with this because if I only punch out one or two of the steps in a free 20 mins, good, 20 mins of work I do not have to do later.

The other major block of 'procedure' I follow is the setting up and running of open tables - mostly all runs as a loop within our local games society regular friday forum posts.

Otherwise I do not have any set procedures I follow religiously - for a given session or two I might test run one or another tool-set someone blogs or I will test an adventure generator from some book or another. A good chunk of this is to keep things interesting for me, I do not find the idea of locking into an overly strict process and then cranking the handle on that forever appealing. There is way too much good stuff on the blogs to not road test it in my games.

Shiny TTRPG links #229

Fresh TTRPG links from around the web. For more, see the previous list found here or on the weekly r/OSR blogroll or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.

Roll to Doubt launches a well-received bandwagon on How I Prep

Responses so far are in from:
Gorgon Bones with How I prep my games
Eldritch Fields with How I prep
Ms. Quixotic Talks About Games with How I Prep (For Arden Vul), part 1: Spreadsheets
Evil Tables with How I Prep Tabletop Games
Playthings of Mad Gods with How I Prep; Or How I Lose My Mind Over Nothing
GLAIVE-GUISARME with How I Prep (Xyntillan Campaign)
The Foot of Blue Mountain with How I Prep
Hexed Press with How I Prep, Part One: Pre-Campaigning
LootLootLore with Prepping and my "Beach Trip" Campaigns
Mediums and Messages with How I Prep
Idraluna Archives with How I Prep
Macropterus with Prep for the Lazy Hack

GROGNARDIA writes So It Begins

Toasted Blogel writes The OSR is teaching me how to cook

zarchov Kowolski shares Everything you think about Game Mastering is probably wrong: Part XIX: Dungeons as a campaign concept

The Colours of Pentagrams gives us Naively simple downtime actions

naybasplacetoputrpgideas shares Expanding upon gift economy

Fight in the Shade gives us Campaign cheating #2: You've got a stew going!

Methods & Madness writes The sandbox railroad part 2 (plus ULTRA-LINEAR encounters)