Locations and terrain as puzzles

tl;dr: On places as puzzles and setting your players on problems where you don't know the answer

This talks through how I cobble together and then use locations using an recent session example. I have less 'big set piece combats' and more 'forces loose in a place' model.

The location.

I needed something cool for the end of a hunt. I knew it was a dwarven location, high in the mountains, where a physically large artefact could have gotten lost. I had been thinking it was a shattered dwarven ruin until I got Sly Flourish's Fantastic Adventures in a sale. It had the Dam of the Beselmir Kings in it. This also featured in an article on his blog that I loved about adapting Storm Kings Thunder. I loved the aesthetic of the dwarven heads pouring water out as beards, so I wanted to try and use that.

For the set up I mashed together the sub-locations from "The Dam of the Besilmer Kings" for Storm Kings Thunder with the "Queen of Red Water" in Fantastic Adventures. That gave me a dam, with lots of internal locations and gubbins, under assault by giants. I set out the locations within and around the dam in a point-crawl format so I knew how they related to each other and that was it for prep. The main modification I made was to have three water-spouting heads on the dam instead of four.

Not just simply evil

To frame this all up - here is my 'philosophy of D&D alignment'. The internet being what it is, let me first state that what you read below is my view. You run your table in a way that works for your table. What I am talking to here is what I have come up with from my time running tables, in particular Planescape games, to make things make sense.

I come to this from reading the online discussions that build off the premise of some sentient races being essentially evil. I find myself looking through a window into a variant of the game that I do not recognise at all. The idea that you just plough into other sentients without accounting for why they are doing what they are doing makes no sense to me and never did. I could happily play Heroquest (kick in the door, kill 'em all) but as soon as I had a copy of the old black box, I was trying to figure out the why's of the dungeons. Someone had to be eating something, the water had to come from somewhere. Things had to make sense. Similarly, if there were things living down here, unless they were oozes or the undead or some sort of magical construct, there had to be some sort of sense to their actions.

For as long as I have been running games I thought it was unfair to the players to have the opposition, who ever it was, just be randomly doing things. Without a driving motivation the players could figure out there was no way for them to outsmart the foe. If the goblins are scouting for food, bribe them to your side with rations. Maybe something is so aggressive they will be unflinchingly hostile - the ogre is going to attack immediately if you trespass in his territory - then you can work around that by avoiding the ogres patch. You could also kite the ogre out of position if you *know* it will attack whomever it sees. The idea that sentient monsters are up to what they are up to because they are simply evil just seems a massive wasted opportunity.

Shiny TTRPG links collection #33

Previous list found here. The original inspiration for all of this - weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links. You can find more links on the weekly blogroll on r/OSR.

Sentimental thoughts about the OSR on Zedeck Siews Writing Hours.

The Ten-Year Clips Show - a retrospective on False Machine.

Asking "What Then?", or, What Makes a Good Setting Good? on Monsters and Manuals.

Maximalist Weird Fiction City-State and Cultural Creation Tables on Grand Commodore.

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.