Review: Calidar: In Stranger Skies

tl:dr; an evocative setting for swashbuckling sky adventures in this first Calidar book.

I came across the Calidar supplements come from Bruce Heard, creator of the magnificent Voyages of the Princess Ark from Dragon Magazine back in the day as a vehicle for him to continue with flying fantasy ships. Given that Princess Ark is one of the original D&D Flying Ships (*the* original?) I grabbed the Calidar books because I love me my flying ships. Reading the intro this is "a story, and background information for any system" - though probably the best overview and high level pitch for the setting is "What is Calidar?" on the authors blog.

Cover art by Ben Wootten

Overall I liked what I got - in particular I think they nailed the tone of the game this setting is for - high kinetic swashbuckling with lots of potential for dramatic scene changes. This all sets up for a certain style of gaming, one where adventurers bestride the world and treat with gods on a fairly regular basis. Throughout the book are great maps and graphics and lovely evocative artwork that pulls together to create Calidar as a setting for high-skies privateering. There is no system for sky-ship combat in the book but you can pull a complete set of mechanics down off the authors blog.

Smaller slices of a bigger pie - older D&D editions on Roll20

With another year past we can update the trend in editions of D&D as played on Roll20.

What we are looking at here is the share of D&D players for the various editions only from among Roll20 (so ~ 60-75% of the total players on Roll20 depending on the year). I have taken the % of campaigns for each edition for the last available report in each year and made that stack 100% in each year so we can see what % of D&D players are playing which edition.

Answering a question from Axian Spice on twitter, the following are my very dirty estimates for absolute numbers of users - with the caveat of noting the pre/post 2019 reporting method changed hence the 'step' in the last 3 years. It is not large so I think our general trend is not bad but still, exercise appropriate caution. Particularly with the 2021 number which is based on an extrapolation ofthe growth in Roll20 users.

Shiny TTRPG links #50

The gold hebdomadariversary of these weekly links! More can be found on the previous list found here. The original inspiration for all of this - weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links. You can find even more links on the weekly blogroll on r/OSR.

Continuing to point to the D&D Research Wizards Tabletop RPG 2021-2022 Survey which is open to the end of January.

Hex Junkie writes On the contradiction in player agency between OSR and 5E D&D which makes a good points - if there is only one reasonable action, do you have much choice to hand?

The Orc Rehabilitation Commission writes [OSR General] AI-Generated Monsters.

Deathtrap Dungeons gives us the Simple Adventure Builder - a really neat generator to get the creative juices flowing.

Monsters and Manuals are "Now Accepting Submissions: Volume 1, In the Hall of the Third Blue Wizard" - a new magazine which publishes hexmaps, dungeons and adventure sites for ‘old school’ fantasy games; art; and fantasy fiction.

Review: A Practical Guide to Medieval Warfare: Exploring History through Wargaming

tl:dr; a great source of detail for medieval warfare that can enrich your TTRPG games.

"A Practical Guide to Medieval Warfare: Exploring History through Wargaming" by Richard Brooks and John Curry was something I stumbled onto trotting about on the web at Weaver.skepti.ch and was seized by an excerpt that tried to reality check behaviour on medieval battlefields using modern analogues as well as original sources. This is both an interesting read and a great source for anyone describing melee combat in TTRPGs. I am reviewing with my table-top GM hat firmly in place, war-gamers will probably get a lot more out of this. I thought it was great even when I was not the target audience.

The kindle version I got has some proofing issues, nothing that made it unreadable but there is an editing pass missing. With that out of the way, this is exactly what it says on the tin - a practical guide. Deeper books of scholarship are certainly out there but to get you up the curve from 'I know nothing' to 'I won't make ridiculous errors' this is great bang for buck.

Player Stats for AideDD Character Builder 2020-2021

AideDD published their Character Builder stats and there are some really interesting trends in those 27k users. I recorded the same data reported in 2020 so let us look at what happened in the past year.

Overall it looks broadly similar to what they had in 2020, consistency in classes choice is coherent with what we have seen elsewhere - general player population is not bouncing around between classes. We have more artificers since that was added later.

Checking against the patterns for apps or forums, we see it maps solidly onto the Apps archetype - favouring fighters and rogues. This is the same pattern seen on D&D Beyond and the OGANM character builder tool. It repeats the pattern we see of character building tools with large user bases showing a different preference for classes than forum surveys. I read this as another point confirming that the general player base (as seen on this tool) has different preferences to those who frequent online forums.

Shiny TTRPG links #49

First links of 2022! More can be found on the previous list found here. The original inspiration for all of this - weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links. You can find even more links on the weekly blogroll on r/OSR.

Continuing to point to the D&D Research Wizards Tabletop RPG 2021-2022 Survey which is still open. This years topics include: Covid-19's impact on TTRPGs, Education and TTRPGs, Online Play Behavior and Future Tech and TTRPGs. The latest from the survey so far can be seen in their newsletter.

I Cast Light has a good frame in Inside The OSR There Are Two Wolves: OSR-V the Revival (Preservation) vs. OSR-N the Renaissance (Principles).

Some unusual hybrids on D&D Homebrew 5e such as aasimar/dragonborn and fey/celestial.

Hack & Slash has "How to Make 5th Edition Dungeons and Dragons more Old School"

Spriggans Den has Shattered Empire D&D 5th edition modifications based on lessons learned from their last campaign.

Simple but cunning - Analogue ‘Fog of War’ hack … | Jigsaw over map by Goblins Henchman

Rise up Comus seeks "to invert the paradigm of "complicated wizard, easy fighter" in Crunchify Me, Captain!

Cavegirl creates a far future Vampire setting with "After Gehenna - A concept for a VtM chronicle"

How to get started in D&D

Rewritten and expanded from a response I wrote to someone asking 'how do you start in D&D' after a buddy of mine pointed them my way.

Starting from the baseline of 'I've heard about this thing, where do I start?' - I would say there are two paths.

First - the long route, which is pretty labour intensive - buy the books, figure out the game, round up a bunch of players yourself and throw dice. It worked for me but it takes a while and you are making a chunky time commitment before you ever get rolling. Lots of fun to be had world building, prepping and so on and when it works, it is magical but this is the high risk, high reward path.

Today, I would suggest the best way to start is to get stuck in; find a new joiners table and say 'I am new' - people are usually welcoming. You may need to hop about a bit to find the people you really gel well with but this is like finding a favourite pub, try it and see. Make contact with folk on forums or wherever and say you are interested - they will point you to the easiest way to get involved. As mentioned on this Adventuring Party episode, there is a ton of free stuff out there because people want to get you playing, this is a social game after all.