Shiny TTRPG links #42

The links that are the answer to life, the universe and everything. For more Shiny TTRPG links see the 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.

Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque creates "The Cult of the Rotmaiden" for Ravenloft but useable as scary druids anywhere.

Weaver.skepti.ch looks at Empire of the Deceased Sun a 'pico' game and setting in mythic Japan.

Alone in the Labyrinth pulls apart Ulysses 31 as an inspiration for OSR-in-space!

Alone in the Labyrinth writes "Generic Adventure Game: HIT PROTECTION & HIT DICE" - looking at mechanics for what happens at 0hp.

Kobolds from Pocketss - good example of what the kobolds are up to when you encounter them.

Campaign Concept - Great Planar Scavenger Hunt

tl;dr: a campaign set up for touring the planes with a drop-in, drop-out table

Starting from a place where:
- opportunities to travel the stranger corners of the planes are limited - see the gaps in available adventures set on the planes
- planar exploration takes a distant back foot to rocking up and murdering the locals

I want a campaign skeleton that lets me delve into all the varied corners of the planes. I need a universal socket to support whatever planar one-shots I could come up with and after thinking for a bit what I arrived at this. We draw on two pieces of background inspiration - low background steel and the familicide spell from Order of the Stick.

How do those fit together? Glad you asked; our pitch:

Many elven populations are tied to a world tree in the deep woods of Arvandor on the plane of Arborea; each tree acting as anchor for all the souls of a particular world. When they die, this tie guides them to their rest. Long, long ago there was a world that was attacked during the Unhuman wars and devoured by a witchlight marauder. Some elves escaped that disaster long ago but are still tied to that tree of their now dead and barren world.

Recently, an elf became a problem for someone. That person consulted an oracle who told them - 'kill this tree and your foe will perish'. This was true but the unintended consequences are that all descendents of any elf from that world will also sicken and die.

The inhabitants of Arvandor realised what was happening and while the original tree is past saving, there is still time to transfer the soul anchor if another tree can be found from that world. Thus the task - help is needed to find wood that was taken off world before the world was destroyed. From fragments of wood, a new shoot can be encouraged but it needs to be found, scattered wherever across the Planes.

This is the pitch - each session would be the available heroes, mercenaries and adventurers being dispatched after a lead on a remaining fragment of wood. The cast could rotate. Difficulties could be tuned session on session for those available, assuming the desperate elves are spread very thin and using the minimum capabilities they can for every hunt to seek in as many locations as possible.

What edition did you start with?

Matt Colville got a monstrous 12k response to "Which was the first edition of D&D you played?" so I swept up some comparable surveys to see if things had changed over time. Short answer, all is confusion and I think the answer depends on where you ask the question. Data is in table at bottom of page.

There were a couple of interesting things to read in all this:
That almost half of the respondents to the 2021 survey have started since 5e appeared ~6 years ago.
Apart from just before 5e dropped (2014), 4e never appears as the main on-ramp for players.
Just as 4e came out (2009) apparently the people playing had mostly started with 1e/2e.
The OSR Gateway people were only half actual old-school (pre-3e) players - the rest started with 3e/PF or later editions.

To me the only point that could be taken as 'confirmed' from all of these is that 4e brought a low fraction of todays players to the table. Most other surveys show closer to ~2/3 of players started playing with 3e/Pathfinder or an earlier edition.

Shiny TTRPG links #41

More links for the link-god - and if this is not enough Shiny TTRPG links see the 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.

Monsters and Manuals writes on the importance of "The Consolidation Session" in long haul campaigns.

Awesome piece on False Machine about making settings Feel Big.

Tabletop Curiosity Cabinet writes Dancing Woods: a rules agnostic adventure location with D10 Landmarks and D10 Residents.

A Banking Wizard - a fun GLoG class in the service of Dragon Banks by Numbers Aren't Real

Some cool thoughts on fantasy languages in "Languages of Pb" by Sundered Shields and Silver Shillings

Elfmaids & Octopi had some reading time and we benefit from a bunch of mini-reviews!

On running large open table games

tl;dr: large open tables have their own rules, needing more viking-hat* DM-ing and a focus on pace to keep the show moving.

On request from friends of the blog The Adventuring Party these are my notes on running large open tables. For background, while talking about Gygaxian tables with a large, rotating cast Savage, co-host of the Adventuring Party, mentioned the 'regular game with an irregular cast' that I used to run. As mentioned, we were never sure who would show up and sometimes it ran as seperate groups, depending on who was there when. Eventually my regular home game became a subset of that open table group but there were still irregular adventures run with the rest of the group as available over years. Nowadays we might call it an overly elongated funnel - a bunch of randomly generated characters thrown into hazard together until eventually out the far side a group of unlikely companions emerges.

Roster of open-table regulars, circa 1997

The key point made in the description, that I want to dive into here is the question of whether there were any formal systems for managing all these players and their PCs - short answer no. The following are my lessons learned from running big tables - the key difference to standard (~6 or less) tables is you need to be extra sensitive to keep momentum up and make sure that everyone has something to do.

Checking demand for high level adventures from surveys

tl:dr; I tried to verify/disprove the graph of campaign levels from D&D Beyond against other surveys - looks like there is more high level play than implied by D&D Beyond and potential demand for Tier III, Tier IV modules.

A discussion of how much high level D&D play is out there was raised on twitter with the point that this chart below from D&D Beyond is probably under-representing high level play. Conversation was started with "There is a difference between saying "high level adventures don't sell, so we don't make them" and "people don't play high level, so we won't make rules for it." by MT Black and one response was that "people use D&D Beyond for purposes other than maintaining a character they're actively playing, which biases the data." by Justin Alexander.

Shiny TTRPG links collection #40

40 weeks of sweeping up the finest of links from the TTRPG blog-o-sphere and beyond. If want even more Shiny TTRPG links see the 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. I hope to return with more links next week.

Improved Initiative has some interesting thoughts in "Orcs, Vikings, and Bias Within Survivor Narratives" on perception of cultures and peoples springing from the part most others interact with

"We need to craft more third party modules for small games." - a rallying cry on Le Chaudron Chromatique

Something Something Dice gives us a bunch of "Strongholds by any other name" - interesting structures to host your dungeons or fill your hexes.

d66 Classless Kobolds writes Faction Procedures + Dolmenwood Example