Review: Burgs & Baliffs Warfare Too by Paolo Greco

tl;dr: another dense zine packed with ideas, a great resource for running parties through mass combat events

Burgs & Bailiffs: Warfare Too is only about warfare: from skirmishing to large-scale battles passing by castle-building. As said in the intro, this is about giving you tools to bring medieval warfare to your medieval RPG and you probably will not use all of these but you may well find the ones that suit you.

At €€2.50 this is even better value! As before shipping will kill you if you order it alone but next time you go anywhere near Lulu, throw these in on top, you will not be dissappointed

Shiny TTRPG links #72

Another collection of links to start your week. 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 or a roundup of non-blog news on Third Kingdom Games roundup.

Tales of the Lunar Lands speaks of what sources they have incorporated into their game in Good Artists Borrow...

Prismatic Wasteland talks about time in Tempus, Fudge It

Discussions of nautical rules on the Spelljammer boards lead to The (Sea) Voyage Continues attempting to "provide the closest thing I can to smooth sailing for AD&D nautical adventures" on AD&D Complexities

Tales of the Lunar Lands writes about Brazen Heads. I love a good information-giving magic item.

Sſtabhmontown Adventures gives us Consolidated rules for hirelings

Papers & Pencils gives a great prep overview in Prep Tools, Not Adventures

The Orc Rehabilitation Commission writes [OSR] A Visit from the Goon Squad with some great examples of making the same basic statblock feel different

The Lizard Man Diaries gives us d40 NPC Generator (Travail Saga)

Overloaded Wildspace Voyage Dice & Gravity Slingshots

tl;dr: since space is enormous, keep journeys interesting with overloaded travel encounter dice and a speed-boost from using planetary gravity wells.

One of the things with travel in space is that space is very large which can make travel somewhat dull. I could see the upcoming Spelljammer reboot hand-wave wildspace travel with a serious speed boost for Spelljammers. Currently at 100 million miles/day, I could see a factor of 5 or 10 increase to make interplanetary travel quicker. For comparison - the squares on the right hand inner system are 200 million miles across, those on the left hand outer system are 400 million miles across.

(Digitally) Modified Planetary Display Map from my Spelljammer box

What that means practically - if we take Smoulder-space that I rolled up recently - starting off at Planet 3, the outermost of the inner planets, and heading out to the crystal sphere takes 130 days of travel, never mind wherever you are going after that. Assuming a quick 30 day jaunt to the next system, a similar flight in-system, doing a thing for a fortnight and returning, we rapidly arrive at a two year journey. That is significant travel time and with the removal of crystal spheres and the fade of deep wildspace into the Astral sea, I can see those journey times getting cut down.
While that would be a potential fix, I feel it a bit too hard of a wrench so I would suggest the following alternative: - overload your wildspace encounter dice - give planets a gravity-slingshot speed boost effect

Popularity of games on Obsidian Portal (2008-22)

Troy Press tipped me off to this with their article in 2019 looking at RPG campaigns played by system where they looked at the top 10 games. When I first looked at this I realised Obsidian Portal has been around since 2007 so the Wayback Machine could allow us to push back the veil a couple of years from the earliest Roll20 Orr report in 2014.

This could give another view on the old question of whether 'edition collapse' after the release of 5e had really been as sudden and severe as it looks from Roll20 data. It appeared from Roll20 and pre-2014 surveys that there had been a multi-edition ecosystem with 3.5e, 4e and Pathfinder all being played at the same time. After 2015 it became dominated by 5e almost immediately. This appears to be verified by the Obsidian Portal numbers.

Shiny TTRPG links #71

Interesting links from about the blog-o-sphere and beyond! Slightly late, it being a bank holiday today. 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 or a roundup of non-blog news on Third Kingdom Games roundup.

A great articulation of one of those old 'obvious truths' that noone bothers to actually describe anymore with An Example of Milieu Centricity from Grumpy Wizard

Tales of the Lunar Lands unearths Forgotten Adventure Design: Bar Brawls

The Dream Aesthetics Dilemma on Mazirian's Garden

False Machine gives us deep mythos in Gilding the Shadow

Get yourself a coffee and biscuit for "The OSR Should Die" by Traverse Fantasy - a history of the multiple things called the OSR.

Continue with "Have you tried ANT? A response to Marcia’s “OSR is Dead” post" on Richard's Dystopian Pokeverse. Be sure to read the comments for more thoughts from Traverse Fantasy in response.

A Knight at the Opera writes another interesting long piece in Tabletop is Theatre, Videogames are Film

Glumdark presents a Quest Seed Generator under the marvelous tagline "Even a small idea can yield enormous misery."

State of the Blog (post #300)

tl:dr - views up ~ 44% since post #201, tags in Glatisant suggest some find this place useful. Requests can be made in the comments.

On traffic

Comparing to October last year, the #201 post - monthly averages views are up from ~2900 to ~4200. There seems to be some splash from whatever cyber nonsense is going on around the war in Ukraine (until the war, I had ~40 views/month from Russia, since March that went up to low hundreds. I doubt I have a new diehard fanbase there.
- 878 russian (last 3 months)
- 130 3 months before that
So even scrubbing out what I presume is a cyberwar traffic uptick, numbers look good

Highlights - another mention in the Glatisant! - along with giant spike in views. This time the review of Worlds Without Number and the round up of hexes crawling resources were deemed worthy. I also got a nice mention on AideDD about the analysis of their stats which drove a bunch of connection. This was very interesting to see because it looks to me like an oblique mention on a 'general gamer' resource can be huge. That small slice of the torrent landed close to the weight of the Glatisant traffic, one of the kings of the jungle in curated, subscription news letters.

Revisiting RPG Campaigns by System on Obsidian Portal

Troy Press wrote an interesting article in 2019 looking at RPG campaigns played by system where they looked at the top 10 games. I thought it might be interested to rerun that check today and see what if anything changed.

Similar to what other sources show, the lions share of new campaigns in the past 3 years have been D&D 5e. It looks broadly like a consolidation of systems. - 20 games to get 80% of campaigns for first 12 years - 10 games to get to same mark in last 3