Sudden Deadline: refocusing a campaign

My traditional approach is to just let a campaign follow its nose, let the players run down whatever alleys they want, but I recently found my home campaign had a clock put on it - so what to do? Experience with previous campaigns of this sort is that it can be pretty unsatisfying to just stop as if there is going to be another game next week and never come back to it.

So how to bring things to some sort of satisfying conclusion? This tweet provided a map - "Payoff. Payoff of narrative, of personal story arcs, of loose threads, etc."

First off is to sort the signal from the noise - what are things that the players are just up to - things that we can box under 'sharpening the saw'. Things in this category are nice in and of themselves but without a chance to use them for great glory they fall a bit flat. Things like finally getting that magic carpet to work - nice, but if there is no session where the party gets to use the flying carpet to save the day then that is not as good as it could have been.

Review: Thousand Thousand Islands #7 + Drawings #2

tl;dr: another fascinating location and drawings to introduce your seaborne Thousand Thousand Islands campaign.

The missing boxes of materials turned up and these last zines were restocked, I ordered them and lo, they have arrived! I previous reviewed the first block of zines here and 5, 6 and 8 here.

Shiny TTRPG links collection #23

Previous list found here. Inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links who has a particularly delicious collection this week and I have knocked out the duplicates.

"If you want frequent player-character death in your games [...] make it easy to live again" - some great ideas on maintaining fun in high lethality campaigns by Prismatic Wasteland.

Some good thinking on ensuring Rat Bastard mode works in your dungeons by Spiceomancy. Also true for urban settings.

An optional heroic sacrifice mechanic - I am a big fan of this kind of tool in the toolkit, for that last desperate push.

Dump Stat Adventures with some good thoughts on problem solving - to build player skill more than for the PCs.

Robin D. Laws on recruiting people to new systems.

Know Us By Our Trail Food (d20 Cuisine Generator)

As an additional tool for city building, cuisine is a nice one - certainly nothing makes a city memorable like the entire food economy being based around an odd local crop or reflecting an unusual local taste.

As adventurers are typically new to town, the partys experience of a city is going to be through tavern fare and street food rather than food in the home. There are any number of fantasy tavern fare generators our there so let us consider that angle covered and focus on street food.

Revisiting D&D race preference by source

Prompted by an expression of surprise that a twitter poll was showing ~1/4 players choose human, I want to revisit the question at it and share the datasets. This is partly in response to realising my old go-to player race article is not good, hence this update.

As of time of hitting publish these were the results of the poll, where human/other has been rising and dwarf trending down overnight.

Shiny TTRPG links collection #22

More links for the link-god. Previous list found here. Inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.

I liked this - proposing the inspiration for Mystara as Earth of 135 Million years ago - and rendering it as a globe. What really strikes me, as we look at the animations - could have been whole other continents on those old plates that went under.

Continuing the theme of maps - Bat in the Attic has mapped all the locations of the original Wilderlands adventures - or 'what happens when you venture out of the City State of the Invincible Overlord'

Good thinking on 'what level are kings' on weaver.skepti.ch.

A brief world-building checklist from Dungeons & Kobolds

A great write up of the No Room For A Wallflower LANCER campaign - 8 sessions written up so far on Glimmerings and Musings

Further on reviews - the Bones of Contention review blog has launched to provide a broad perspective through multiple authors.

Spiceomancy talking about why humans oughtn't have any bonii on principle

Actual Test: Aces High (Fantasy Space Combat Rules Part 2)

Continuing testing of fantasy space combat systems following our first go with Shadow of the Spider Moon, we come to our second test: Aces High, the 5e aerial combat rules from Arcadia #3 published by MCDM earlier this year.

This is designed for flying mounts and big monsters so it needed a little bricolage to make work for flying ship combat - but not much. The main 'work' was extending the flight modifiers table to account for colossal things - such as a 120 hull point drow Deathspider.

We took the same stat sheets from Spider Moon for the ships - 3.5e being close enough to 5e - but here the victory conditions were adjusted. Aces High assumes a tight hairball of a combat with no lateral movement, just altitude, so there was no 'off the board' escape route, just climbing up and out.

Owing to a screw-up in my reading of the rules we did two tests but I think both are interesting and hinge on one missed set of 3 words.