Dredging old adventures for a campaign #City26

I have been pondering the nature of adventures to run in this hive-city - what is interesting to run *here* as opposed to just anywhere else.

The City26 template itself does mandate adventure hooks, random encounters and NPCs and these are useful but do not quite snap together into full sessions. I also realised as I have been preparing this graphic that I misread the instructions and have been coming up with d6 plot hooks & quests for each ward to go with the d12 random encounters and 7 NPCs - which is not actually what is requested.

I think the unique stories to tell here are the 'teeter-totter' ones - where there is motivation to minimise damage as opposed to just glass everything. Looking at the corpus of Imperium Maledictum and Dark Heresy adventures, we do not actually get a lot of them, in particular there are not so many that see you committed to a single hive as opposed to doing the Inquisitions will across the sector.

Casting about for other potential sources I looked at a few -
- Riffing off the 'megacity' aspect - old Judge Dredd adventures in White Dwarf / elsewhere
- Focussing on the 'weird investigation' aspect - Delta Green
- Taking the 'anachronistic technology' swords-and-robots angle - Eberron and Iron Kingdoms
- Returning to the sources - Necromunda skirmish wargame scenarios

It was a fascinating dive to fish out the best-of Judge Dredd adventures and recall my old 2000AD reading days but ultimately while there are some interesting adventures the flavour is too gonzo in Dredd and only a few could be retrofitted without wringing all the interesting bits out. There were a couple of potential ones - a murder investigation on a mobile mega-highway rest stop and a bang raid by rubber-ball bouncing thieves - that could potentially be workable but this is not the rich deep vein of adventures I wanted.

The Delta Green angle seems most promising - having read through Warhammer Crime novels recently, I appreciate that a standard criminal investigation gets interesting when you have to contend with all the nonsense of the 40k universe. There are libraries of freely available one-shots and the 'mythos threat' and cultists of Delta Green is easily reskinned as 'chaos threat' for 40k. This is a motherlode of content but complex and requiring a fair amount of red-penning to re-align it from mythos to chaos.

Looking at Eberron there are good adventures here - lightning rail heists, intrigue and mystery as a focus - but a lot of running around the continents. Similarly with Iron Kingdoms - much of the action takes place out in the wilds. There are probably some good things here but when I look at the recommendations for urban adventures, the advice seems to be to convert yet other standard D&D campaigns to Ebberon, so not quite what I need.

There is good thematic fodder in the Necromunda scenarios - a pair of good summaries are here and here but these are more fodder for tactical combats or conflicts to work around than for the overarching framing of an adventure. Useful, because once you get any sort of big hook you can then bulk it out with some of these encounters en route, but not the whole thing.

All told this suggest that tailoring an adventure creation workflow for the investigations in this hive-city might actually be the way to go - identify the factions in play and clarify their resources, pull on some of the plot-hooks and then fold the whole thing together by picking some of the random encounters or some Necromunda fight scenarios to be site of interest, salt those with clues to the plot hooks (potentially delivered via the 7 NPCs) and then think through the locations where resolution could happen.

The key difference compared to most of the standard fantasy adventuring I would run is that there are a lot more opportunities to do stand-off investigating and research in such a setting - pulling auspex logs, querying records with local Arbites divisions, etc.

The other bit I think I need to ponder is capturing the different flavours of adventures available on a Hive of a Knight-world. I think a campaign set here would be an exploration of all the dreadful things that can go wrong just on world, as inspired by my recent Rogue Trader CRPG run where nothing ever stayed fixed. It points towards the players being potentially Administratum tithe-auditors or their equivalents working directly for the Knight-house Sacristans - the classic general trouble-shooters with a strong side-order of getting things done quietly before higher authorities decide to stop being subtle and drop the hammer on the whole world.

All this does point back to the importance of 'intro adventures' to showcase a setting. Once more, we discover the wheel.

Anyway, in my 'keep me honest' progress tracker stats:
Progress: 23/56 wards completed
Completion vs target: 42% vs 33% target
Population covered: 56%

So far doing ok but I think I have creamed off the best inspiration and things are slowing down a chunk. I already reworked my initial list of wards to drop in a new trio I came up with, I think this approach will serve well as we go because things that are currently looking a bit beige to me will become interesting as two or more previous things get mashed together because I need the space for other good ideas.

Shiny TTRPG links #274

Interesting links from across the internet. For more, see last weeks collection or the weekly r/OSR blogroll or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Bloggie-nominated. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch, delinked by request.

Michelle Jones hosts You Cannot Play This TTRPG Jam

Benign Brown Beast posts Virtual Table-Top Tokens from Tom Gauld: A Story in Images

Fistful of Crits hosts Romantasy TTRPG Jam

Troy Press gives us D&D Rules, According to Past Players

DivNull RPG posts RPGs by Genre

Sly Flourish writes House Rules from Various 5es

@elbiotipo gives us why do adventurers exist in this world at all

afcbrodie shares Seize, Ground, Listen

Crow’s Corner writes Designing Pamphlet Games (With Shitty Printers in Mind)

I Cast Light! gives us DON'T SPLIT THE SESSION: Rule 0 For Avoiding A Play-Killing Mistake In Modern Lives

Congas.blog shares Is the OSR evolving?

@prokopetz posts "the real problem with Dungeons & Dragons is false advertising, not anything that's present in its text"

The Foot of Blue Mountain shares Magical Violence

The Black Citadel gives us WIZARD VIOLENCE

Trick's Tales shares Make Your Own God-Spirits (for a Game About the Mongolian Empire)

d12 Attack flyers for Spelljammers

I see quite a few engined-/fighter-type things in various Spelljammer homebrew and it leaves me surprised we do not have more 'attack critters' for the same purpose but more aligned to the Age of Sail flavour - packs of trained beasts or flying mounts.

The archetype I can think of is the githyanki knight on a Star Lancer from the "Behold... H'Catha!" Spelljammer Academy 5e adventure though there have always been nods towards 'getting monsters on the opposing ship' - with catapults flinging skeleton-balls or bottled green slimes in various Spelljammer 2e adventures.

It feels like there should be more 'ship-based monsters' for boarding action support than we see - especially since in 5e killing the crew is a far more direct path to victory than attempting to batter the opposing ship apart.

Ship-to-ship encounters could be made more interesting with the addition of such 'attack monsters' - it is the equivalent to changing the terrain to make ship-to-ship action feel fresh again when you might be constrained by the ship deck plans or opposing forces otherwise being quite similar - e.g. in a conflict against a faction where you might repeatedly run up against the same ship type (i.e. terrain) and fights might get to feel samey.

My thoughts are that there are a couple of potential options that achieve this while fitting a bit more into the 'age of sail' flavour
- flying-steeds / mounted attackers - as per SJA knight-on-a-star lancer
- attack beasties - harassers, swarms, like a wardog in a dungeon
- flung critters - as above, skeletons, slimes or other 'living munitions'
- the 'fast-moving, damage-flinging single thing' is a mage or a monster - or someone decked out with a flying-carpet and a wand of fireballs.

If there is the means for a small-fast craft lying around, I would see it being more used for sneaky boarding actions rather than engaging something with a lot of weapons while you only have a few.

I think best illustrated by a few examples.

d12 creatures arriving as that craft closes to boarding distance

1. A burly crewman with a boarding pike atop a small wyvern swoops under your hull to attack weapon emplacements from the far side
2. A gallant captain with polished blade and befeathered hat atop a comet steed directly challenges his opposite number
3. Robes billowing behind them as they fly, a mage loops over your ship firing spells at exposed crew
4. An ogre flings howling goblins into the rigging of your ship, some with shortbows, some with firepots, others scuttle down below decks to ambush your crew there
5. Giant wolf-spiders leap from the drow ship, biting crew and darting along the hull
6. Illithids just appeared aboard, firing spells and trying to devour your crews succulent brains
7. Giant toads with psurlons atop them leap aboard and start trying to swallow your crew, fighting over them
8. A flyby from the neogi ship drops a spread of piercers on your deck
9. A squad of dohwar atop space swine swoops down on you weapon emplacements
10. An elf flying a gadabout drags a rope with a trio of fellows into your rigging
11. An enemy catapult flings a jar with a tar-form gehreleth onto your deck with the intention of standing off and allowing the fiend to rampage
12. Catapult flung balls of skeletons land on the deck, un-fold and attack

Restoration of the r/OSR blogroll

tl;dr: a tale of recovering a piece of blogging community infrastructure from bad decisions and technology failure.

Regular readers will have noted I flag the r/OSR blogroll as a place to look for interesting blogposts. I think even in this time of blog-rings, bluesky feeds and other blog aggregators, the r/OSR blogroll serves a purpose in being a low-threshold start point for folk to throw their blogs out in front of a place where their likely audience comes to look.

Around the start of 2023 there was a question about getting the blog-roll pinned to the top of the r/OSR subreddit and at the same time the mods offered to automate its creation which I took them up on. By the end of the year it was clear one or both of these may have been a mistake and I suspect it was both - pinning killed visibilty on mobiles and the automation subsequently broke/stopped updating in early 2024.

After waiting out the year, on the anniversary of things breaking, I relaunched it in the old way - manually done, this time on a Friday, and mercifully it has seemed to reignite, albeit at a lower intensity than before.

Now in the stewardship of u/Leicester68 of Leicester's Ramble, the blogroll has run since pre-pandemic I believe - I took over posting them every Sunday in mid-2021 from u/Sofinho1980 of Alone in the Labyrinth as they took it over from u/shuttered_room of Shuttered Room.

Taking "comments" as our core indicator of success - these are the people leaving links to blogs, commenting on the blogs of others and generally participating - we see things are steady since we restored the blogroll, but still only half of where it was before the unintended hiatus of the auto-updater breaking. Being optimistic, there is a suggestion that the new stewardship of Leicester68 might be bringing in some more eyeballs, certainly there is proven, recent potential to be doing better.

Shiny TTRPG links #273

Links of great interest from the breadth of the interweb. Not sated? Try last weeks collection or the weekly r/OSR blogroll or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Bloggie-nominated. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch, delinked by request.

Ye Olde Revivalist posts d66 *Things Going On* in A Bog-Standard Fantasy Town (Table Jam 2026)

The Foot of Blue Mountain posts How to get a game going [on a server]

The B/X Undernauts gives us THE WHITE BOX CHALLENGE

Dungeons & Dragons (WotC) gives us D&D 80s Animated Series

Eldritch Fields posts Take-aways from running quick pick-up games

My Nerdy Hobby posts Masked Bastionland

Jface Games writes Did Usage Dice & Clocks just Evolve?

DIY & dragons posts Experimental Layouts for a Dwarven City Megadungeon

The Novel Game Master writes The Many Editions of D&D

AMONG CATS AND BOOKS writes Fullstack Refereeing

Modified with the approval of creator Evlyn Moreau

MOMMY'S BIG GLASS OF WINE ALONE TIME BLOG MOST FOUL shares Searching for the free games ecosystem (and designing for desire paths)

Mindstorm posts Quick Stakes For Tense Situations

Prismatic Wasteland writes Chain Stocking the Hex Map

Owl Knight Games gives us Roleplaying Games as an Expression of Fandom

To Be Resolved shares Dungeon Stocking with Markov Processes

Review: The Monster Overhaul

tl;dr: its great, if you are in any way generating your own games, get it.

If you are in any way generating your own games, don't even bother reading this review. Go get the Monster Overhaul. It is so useful.

I backed the Monster Overhaul quite some time ago but I write this now, very late to the game, because I finally got it to my own tables so have earned the right to speak. Since then I have been staring at it for a while trying to properly express what it is that makes this just great.

This is an operating manual for a school, a style of gaming. There are terse instructions about how this is all supposed to work but this is a practitioners guide, not an instruction manual. You get the fruits of a movement of gamers and bloggers trying to figure out what is the most useful tool they could have and then creating it.

Noted as a practical bestiary, it says it is "designed for at-table utility." In place of a standard bestiary with a page per critter with all its stats, you get concepts to support running that critter. These entries do not have hundreds of words of detailed, repetitive stat blocks but something more of the old school with stat lines of maybe two sentences. The rest of the space is then given to tons of context - everything you need in the run up to ever drawing steel on this monster. Less stat block, less of the fight-focus and more 'how it turns up in the session'. You are given the hints and clues to bring it to the table - "the space for you to think" as it says in the introduction.

This book is great for pulling off the shelf when you are thinking of using any given critter and looking up some ideas about how to spruce that critter up and make it interesting. Absolutely tons of ideas in here, the distilled wisdom of some people who have gamed hard and thought about how to support that gaming for others. The monster entries are more streamlined so you will need that notch extra of understanding to interpret them but once you are past the point of just wanting to use a critter as-written every single time, then this is your advanced text.

The whole thing feels almost fractal - the contents page doubles up as a random table - d20 categories of monsters, roll on that, then roll on the next thing - lower dice for less weird possibilities. Parts interlock, one monster serving as the reference for the treasures of others or for behaviours etc. There is a level of layout and depth of design that I think is simply a quantum leap beyond anything else. I imagine this was also a heartbreaking amount of effort so we should treasure this example that we have.

The book itself is lovely too. You get standard book paper in here with black and white printing and good margins because this is a book to be written on, annotated and used at table. Multiple artists keep things interesting - the different sections get a different artist each. Inside of the covers, we get a whole bunch of random tables for things like generic creature upgrades, where to find useful sidebars, how your reaction rules are going to go, reasons for an encounter, where the encounter happens indoors and outdoors. These are mirrored inside front and back covers to make it useful from cover to cover. A beautiful artefact of a book - chunky, heavy, distinct. I will be loathe to actually scribble on my copy but it is going to end up festooned with page-markers and post-its.

So what have you actually got in here?

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