Breaking trail on the Great Ring - which planes need more adventures?

tl;dr: are people going to the same cardinal iconic planes because the adventures exist or because they prefer to go there?

As part of thinking about a potential new Planar campaign I had a notion about visiting the lesser known planes. I wanted to test whether the planes we hear less about are unpopular or just have less adventures available for them. To get an idea I looked at the Elderbrain survey and compared that to the numbers of adventures available for each of the planes on DrivethruRPG and DMsGuild.

First thought was - do people have a specific preference for where to go on their planar adventures? According to Elderbrain just over half do have a specific preference and of the rest ~1/10 don't like planar nonsense at all, ~1/3 are happy to walk the Great Ring to anywhere.

Surveys check: are a majority of players new?

tl:dr; Asked 'whether a majority of D&D players are new?' - it appears not, but depending where you ask the question it might look like it.

I looked at a block of surveys going back to 2016 that asked how long people had been playing. We know that a lot of new people have joined the hobby with 5e and the question is whether so many people have joined that they now outnumber those still playing from all the previous years and editions. If this was true, then for all these surveys, we should see a majority of people who have joined since 2015 responding.

What we see is that for some groups there is indeed a majority of recently joined folk - the discord server for the DM Academy Reddit page which opened in 2020 was mostly populated by people new to the hobby, same with a 2020 Reddit survey - but both of those are rooted in Reddit. We do not see a similar effect on Facebook or Twitter-sourced polls. I would tentatively conclude this says the hobby is not yet a majority of recent joiners and still has a way to go to get there.

Shiny TTRPG links collection #32

A short handful this week as I have been on the road and unable to do my usual deep trawl of the treasures of the web. Previous list found here. This week definitely check out the original inspiration for all of this - a ton of good links on weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links. You can find more links on the weekly blogroll on r/OSR.

Adventure Gaming without the Heads-Up Display on Alone in the Labyrinth.

This is great stuff from Methods and Madness - Easy worldbuilding with Pareto and Price - once you have some high level principles like these for setting out your realm you can turn to all your random generation tables and roll up whatever you like knowing it will still broadly fit in and make sense.

How to Grow Old in Tabletop RPGs on Alphastream

Dweller of the Forbidden City writes some good thoughts on PC death in Ask Not for Whom the Bell Tolls... Roll the Dice!

To quote: "a revisionist history of #gamebooks from Awesome Lies, thank you very much."

Two cracking articles from weaver.skepti.ch this week - first Clinker Built or how there is lots of good fun to be had with D&D sea-faring that is more viking, less anachronistic Pirates of the Carribean. Second, on Dwarf Fortress's amazing world building engine.

Actual Test: Wilderness Generator from Izirions Enchirdion of the West Marches

This is a review of the wilderness generator that came as part of Izirions Enchiridion of the West Marches that I backed on Kickstarter. I reviewed the DM's Screen and wilderness generator before and noted the wilderness generator in particular it was a lot of fun to play with.

I used it to map out a region around a city that had suddenly sprung into focus in my home campaign and it was remarkable how the cards managed to fall in line with the sketch of the region I had and then generated many more hooks and possibilities from their combinations.

Review: Through Ultans Door #3 + Beneath The Moss Courts

tl:dr; the fabulous output of the Through Ultans Door #3 kickstarter brings more great locations, wierd afflictions, strange treasures and lots of scope for adventure in Immortal Zyan.

Here we have another of the fabled zines of the OSR, Through Ultans Door describes the dream-city of Immortal Zyan. I talked about issues #1 and #2 shortly before I backed the kickstarter for issue #3.

photo of newly arrived issue #3, showing cover art by Huargo

Shiny TTRPG links collection #31

Previous list found here. Inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links. You can find more links on the weekly blogroll on r/OSR.

Instant and Meanders on weaver.skepti.ch on how history is forged both in decisive moments and in the morass between. To my mind a mall band adventurers are far more suited to wrestling a stack of small events their way and thus bending the course of history to their will.

The Palace Of Masques - on Daily Adventure Prompts on tumblr.

Setting thoughts from World Building and Woolgathering on The Hobbesian Theory of Tabletop War Games which also serves for thinking about any factions in your worldbuilding.

Archons Marsh On has d20 x 5 Sword and Sorcery City States.

Actual Test: Calidar (Fantasy Space Combat Rules Part 4)

tl;dr: fantasy flying ship combat where the wind direction matters - surprisingly easy to pick up, lots of fun and some great old school damage tables detail that makes ship combat more than just slugging away at hull points.

After testing two magazine-published sets of rules for fighting magical flying ships - the 3e adaptation Shadow of the Spider Moon and the 5e Aces High aerial combat rules from Arcadia #3 published by MCDM as well as the original AD&D Spelljammer we come to the thing that kicked all this off - Calidar.