NPC mannerisms: d66 animal-folk attitudes

tl;dr: for quick and easy animal-folk cultures watch nature videos or try the d66 table below

Sparked by a twitter poll by Macca the DM asking "Do you include anthropomorphic animals in your #ttrpg games?" I was surprised to see such support for animal-folk. At a first guess, I would have said 'Yes' and 'Only RAW' would be switched.

As alluded to when answering Vayras setting questions I both use a lot of animal-folk in my home campaign and am conscious of the risk of them feeling like 'humans with different heads'. My home game is a menagerie world with 73 species/ancestries rocking about the main city combined from d50 fantasy races from Skerples and the race-oids from Lizardman Diaries Infinigrad, the Endless City and most NPCs are randomly determined unless it is plot-critical (the elven ambassador is going to be an elf).

The oracular dice had established certain groups as dominant within the city when it was first created and then those were run into most as the player interacted with some districts more than others. I recently pinged my players to see if any of the groups had been encountered frequently enough that an impressions of 'what this bunch are like' had stuck. The response was 'partial' as not many of the groups had been encountered sufficiently often for patterns to be established and for some, other factors beyond their personal heritage drove their identity.

Shiny TTRPG links collection #37

Starting Q3 with more links! 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.

This week we had an outbreak of collecting DM-ing wisdom in the "cheap DM tricks" series:
Phlox, the originator.
Cosmic Orrery
Eldritch Fields
Sundered Shillings
Colours of Pentagram
RPG.krassekunst
Spiceomancy
Modron RPGs

To complement those cheap tricks - the dearly bought wisdom on Orbital Crypt of "Marching Back East: Lessons Learned from Running an Open Table Game". Get coffee and a biscuit for this quality long read.

Hidden Depths table - (6d4, 4d6, 3d8, 2d12, d4+d20)

I had an idea for an 'unlockable' encounter table by switching the dice rolled on it. This could also serve as some sort of chaos index. The key point is that a 2-24 table can be rolled with a bunch of different dice combos from the standard set 6d4, 4d6, 3d8, 2d12, d4+d20. Starting with 6d4, you could mostly access the core of the table, with a low chance of the edges, then as things get weirder, deeper, whatever, you change to fewer bigger dice and more of the table becomes probable.

Turning that into a table and heat mapping it we can see the table broadening from ~ 11 probable entries using 6d4 to ~22 using d4 + d20. As well as the entries brought in by reducing the dice count and the minimum possible number, there are entries where the probability changes to make them appearing more likely. Most of the 'unlocked' part of the table is towards the lower end of the scale, hence 'hidden depths' as my working name for this type of thing.

High-speed hex-crawling - exploring with flyers

There are lots of good resources out there for the basics of hex-crawling. Do they still work when your players get a sudden boost of mobility?

In my case it was a flying skiff, perhaps it is seven-league boots, winged steeds, some sort of astral coach - anything that allows them to rapidly traverse the landscape. Note, this is not about 'point-to-point' things like teleports or portals, for those you can just use standard hex-crawl before and after the 'jump'.

In my home game the players assembled a flying skiff out of a number of things and set off into the north west of their realms on a quest. The practical challenge here is that at any significant height, visibility ranges are greatly extended so in theory the players can see everything in all the hexes around them. From own experience with light aircraft, yes, big terrain features can be broadly identified and you can rapidly get a sense of where those mountains, that desert, the coast is. But rivers can be hard to track and you can rapidly lose sight of anything smaller than a large metro area. Unless the party is taking the time to travel for optimum reconnaissance, I would say what they spot is tied to what they happen to cross over, through or by.

Practically this means you can retain a relatively low 'thing per hex' set up and it makes sense.

Shiny TTRPG links collection #36

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.

Lots of good stuff in Knight at the Operas write up of "Model United Nations: the Most Popular FKR Game" and thoughts on "Iterative Design".

Orbital Crypt talks character creation and how sub-optimal char-gen (for newbies) in D&D and its descendents have left folk scalded on the concept of picking up new systems

Sidney Three Nine Three writes a good thread on information flow in games

Skerples has OSR: Baboons, Goblins, and Bicameral Kobolds - "Really interesting fights tend to have three or more sides. In the absence of any other options, one side suitably disinhibited monsters can easily become two sides."

EldritchMouse writes Ladder Tables Or, A Random Table With A Memory

In Tomb for the Soul weaver.skepti.ch looks at RPG as inheritors of an ancient trend in escapism.

D&D campaign share on Roll20 dips: 5e under 50%

tl;dr: new Orr Report on Roll20 stats shows D&D 5e share of campaigns dipping in favour of Call of Cthulu, others.

The new Orr Group report for Q2 2021 has dropped and I chucked the numbers into my big sheet and saw some interesting trends. Note, the numbers quoted on the blog post that accompanies the report do not match the numbers in the report itself. For the purposes of this exercise I am going to compare just the numbers in the report to the numbers in previous reports and not try to figure out why their own article is different. Given that and looking at all the reports since 2019 we see what is beginning to look like a sustained fade in D&D 5e share of campaigns.

Of course this is coupled with a ramp up in players from ~ 5 million to more than 8 million over the same time.

Review: Midgard Campaign Setting

tl;dr - dark fantasy campaign setting with great coiled narrative springs and lots of adventure hooks

I grabbed this as part of the 'DriveThruRPG hiking their colour printing rates' rush - mostly driven by the fact that I liked the look of the Southlands book, liked the general vibe of Kobold Press and figured I would give their core setting a look. In all I am coming at this setting line completely backwards - I bought and reviewed Dark Roads & Golden Hells, the planar supplement for this setting a while back. I backed the Southlands kickstarter, and now finally I pick up the setting core book. At a chunky 300 pages, I am quite content with what I got and it still stands up to this haphazard approach of mine.

First impressions is this is a big block setting book, even though just 20% bigger than a 5e hardcover like Guildmasters Guide to Ravnica it feels a lot thicker due to the paper quality. Art throughout is nice, varied but coherent with nice page border design that looks good without being overly busy or intrusive as you read through it. Primarily written as Pathfinder compatible, there is also a section on using it with the Adventure Game Engine (AGE) system. I picked it up with a view to using it at 3.5e or 5e tables and am finding plenty to use in the fluff alone.