The War Sword's Thirst: harvesting 4X games for world events

tl;dr: second in the series on using side events in 4X and other games for inspiration at your table

A second in a series about drawing inspiration from 4x games. We return to Fall From Heaven II but this more as a series of events that gives a great emergent high magic disaster.

Once there was a land with a prophecy of doom - four horsemen would come, one after the other, and in their wake the world would be destroyed. First would be Stephanos, who bore a Crown that would seduce those who stood against them to serve him. Second would be Buboes, whos great Sword of War would hasten the apocalypse with every soul it slew. Third would be Yersina bore a plagued sword and would slay cities with their tread. Fourth would be Ars Moriendi who would enslave the souls of those they slew as wraiths to spread further destruction.

In this land there was a great warrior, a mighty giant, who had risen to glory fighting the beasts and raiders of the wilderness. When first Stephanos came to the land this champion faced and slew them with the fiery Axe of Orthus. Later Buboes appeared far away on the far end of the continent from the giants home. Buboes roamed freely, slaying all who faced them, across realms of mages and elves. All who faced them died and hastened the coming of the next troubles.

Actual Play: Kobolds Art Exhibition part VI - The Chase

The kobolds of the Kobolds Art Exhibition zine by Evlyn Moreau return once more. Links to the review and part I of play using it, Part II, Part III, Part IV and Part V.

The party stumbles home from a long day and tucks up in bed. They had not acted on their discussion to move the portraits out of their bedrooms and all are sleeping soundly when the next tour of the Kobolds arrives. The Sorceror is woken to find Historian Drap, two of the Clerics sisters and some other mixed nobles of the city filing in.

With some sputtering and complaint the Sorceror orders everyone out, but with the nature of tours, people are filing in to get the message and then shuffling past each other in the doorway to leave. The Bard and Cleric have both been woken by the commotion and the Cleric steps out into the passage way in her housecoat to see what is up. The Bard guesses correctly what is going on, pens a 'do not enter note' to hang on her door, arms her bat-cat-imp thing with a poker and shoves it out into the hall on guard duty. The imp-thing hams up its role and snarls and froths before the Bards door, making the tour members in the hall back away down towards the other rooms where another cousin and one of her entourage have opened their doors.

Meanwhile the Sorceror, muzzy with sleep, decides the best way to emphasize his point is to summon a giant spider to scare everyone off. This works to a point; the giant spider accelerates the departure of the few remaining tour members but then fails in that it is an actual monstrous spider. Usually the Sorcerer summons celestials he can talk to but this is a standard big spider and he promptly loses control and it leaps on Historian Drap.

Getting more gaming in - how long and how often

I saw a post to a group asking 'was it normal to game 6-7 hours sessions twice a week' for 12-14 hours of table time per week. Short answer - that is a lot of gaming, well over what most people seem to be getting in.

Sweeping up a bunch of surveys to try and get a sense of whether players are playing more through time it appears the answer is yes; this could be down to virtual tools enabling quality online gaming or just a wider player base allowing more people to find a table.

So it appears from the larger surveys (2014 onwards) that at least half of respondents are getting in that weekly game, with about 1 in 3 of those people playing again in the week.

Shiny TTRPG links collection #12

Twelve weeks! Twelve weeks we have been doing this and still there are more interesting TTRPG things on the internet! Previous list found here. Inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.

A pair of magnificent planar cosmology variations for your sages to argue over - Hexian cosmologies by Bearded Devil and Planescape variations by Locheil.

Cool magical cloaks from Chaudron Chromatique.

I saw someone ask after 'where are my wierd race combos' - which I had seen on tumblr by 'homebrew from the void' and flag here in case anyone else missed it.

Tao of D&D talks about followers for high-level characters and experiences dealing with 'but we are lone wolves!' reaction to this.

Seeking inspiration in Kickstarters

In conversation on the tweet-machine about the desired properties of RPG supplements I framed it up as: "I want more art, lore and random tables in books; help me run the same six foes at the party in a dozen fascinating ways in your setting - circumstances, terrain, etc. Better same monsters, better environment than weirder foe in same 10 x 10 room."

WotC or whomever can sell me these things by the bucket load - I backed a bunch of kickstarters purely on the basis of getting my hands on this kind of content. I want windows into cultures I did not grow up in. I want genius ideas. Fever dream strangeness - anything and everything that I would not have come up with myself. The concept of Appendix N is exactly what I am talking about - folding in inspirations from all sorts of sources into campaigns. I will do another post on books to read.

A quick summary of 'setting driven' purchase decisions over the past while are below; these were all things I went after for the content and setting, independent of the system.

Still Here: Lizardfolk culture post

I like lizardfolk and all their many scaly-kin cousins. Given the explosion of variety we know happened in our own world back before the unpleasantness with the asteroid I think it is reasonable to say that injecting magic and dragons into the pot with basic lizardfolk should yield a lot more interesting things than 'lives in a swamp, focused on survival'.

The big hook I use for lizardfolk is stability and long, long cycle culture. Crocodiles showed up pretty early, realised they were on to a good thing and just stopped where they were. Crocodiles saw the dinosaurs come, crocodiles survived the dinosaurs going away, crocodiles are still here. I think that is a great hook to build on.

Lizardfolk by their hearth by Evlyn Moreau

So what are the aspects of our lizardfolk culture?

Changing popularity of PC races with age & experience

tl;dr: examining the preference for top 14 races shows age-related trends - humans, half-elves, dwarves prefered by older players, tieflings, dragonborn by younger players.

Returning once again to Mia Gojaks survey from the 5e Facebook group we want to look at the preferences for races by age and search if there were any patterns that could be pulled out. This will hopefully let us go deeper than previous race preference checks. Breaking out the preference of each age cohort for the various races we see some interesting trends.

Looking at the data, I am again mostly surprised that there are any trends visible at all.