Roll20 4Q21 numbers & future edition thoughts

Reading the tea-leaves of the last Roll20 Orr report and why it points to the 50th anniversary edition of D&D being no radical change.

Looking at Roll20 numbers
- after a drop from a peak in 2019 on Roll20, 5e increases a bit, remains largest with >50%
- the is coherent with trend seen on Obsidian Portal, both show lots of other games, no single major challenger
- in contrast to the 4e era, there is no obvious threat (then Pathfinder) to fight off with a radical redesign
- there seems to be a ceiling for D&D at ~ 75-80% of TTRPG players
- this shows why the mood music from WotC points to the planned 50th anniversary edition in 2024 being a continuity edition not a radical change

Looking at the latest from Roll20 and setting them as the full-year 2021 representative we can now set out the last seven years, charting the rise of 5e. This continues the discussion on edition evolution we have been having here for a bit.

The down-tick in 5e numbers over 2020 and 2021 does not read to me like cause for rushing a new edition in 2024, mainly because while 5e is down a chunk, there is no serious contender to capture back a chunk of the market from. Things have diffused, people have wandered off in a bunch of different directions, but for the core block of people playing something that looks like D&D, they are mostly playing 5e.

Capsule Reviews #3: Long-running Setting Zines

Some of the old D&D settings have very impressive fanzines with large back catalogues - lots of content for the great price of free.

Oerth Journal - for Greyhawk Online - 36 issues.

"Dedicated to the World of Greyhawk, and is written by and for fans. It has been published since 1995. Originally produced by the “Council of Greyhawk”, there have been several Editors and a plethora of different authors and artists who’ve contributed to it. There’s an abundance of great content here, just waiting to be placed in your campaign! There’s many new NPCs, side treks, gods, equipment, and things you may’ve never thought of like the constellations of Greyhawk."

Keeps an old style alive of dense gazetteer, with festival practices, alternative-Oerths, cities and personalities and histories being the standard fare. Chewy lore for Greyhawk, with lots of ideas packed in. Style is a standard double-column, with more art and a stronger 'design' flourishes in the later issues.

4/5 on inspiring fluff
3/5 on useable crunch
3/5 on joy to read

Threshold - The Mystara Magazine on Pandius.com - 29 issues.

"The aims of Threshold magazine:
▪ to provide a venue for community members to present material
▪ to promote the Vaults of Pandius and the material there
▪ to increase the exposure of existing and new articles"

Another gazetteer type with new classes, a bunch of spells, new system rules, tons and tons of setting lore in a really charming layout stuffed with maps and public domain art. Statted for BECMI, this is a very nice zine expanding on the Mystara setting. Weighing in north of 200 pages per issue for recent issues, these are thick slices of content - ideal for anyone using Mystara but rich inspiration for any game. Print-on-demand versions are available if you want to run off your own copies on Lulu.com.

4/5 on inspiring fluff
4/5 on useable crunch
4/5 on joy to read

Footprints - e-zine of the Dragonsfoot forums - 25 issues.

"Footprints, our very own e-zine, is a wealth of material for any Original AD&D campaign, with variant rules, monsters, articles, cartoons and a mini-module in every issue. All original, never before published material, submitted by Dragonsfoot forum members, many of whom have been old-school AD&D fans since well before it was old-school!"

"Variant rules, monsters, articles, cartoons and a mini-module in every issue" - more strongly reminiscent of Knockspell or Fight On! or old Dragon or White Dwarf than a gazetteer. This is a dense zine more geared towards general content like new dungeons, classes and monsters than expanding on a setting. A much wider variety of stuff from more creators and so the look of articles changes from page to the next. Worth checking out as there is almost certainly something inspiring in any given issue.

3/5 on inspiring fluff
5/5 on useable crunch
3/5 on joy to read

Shiny TTRPG links #75

Links for this 4th of July. 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.

Unlawful Games writes a d100 Crazy Castle Generator

From The Furtive Goblin's Burrow we get Mechanical Musings: A Couple Random House Rule Concepts I've Never Used

Grappling Hook kicks off their blog with On being Mostly Dead: Rediscovering the Old School way of Death and Scarring and Dungeoncrawling toward Joseph Campbell's "Inmost Cave."

Alone in the Labyrinth writes I heard a rumour: seeding a sandbox

d4 Caltrops gives us d100 - Haven Happenstances for dressing up any downtime in towns and villages and d100 - Mercurial Mentors & Weird Wizards

Matrix Campaign Structures on Mindstorm

Prismatic Wasteland discusses What Even Is a “Procedure”?

Review of Casus Belli 40 the main francophone TTRPG magazine by Weaver.skepti.ch

"Crafty as a Giants Cook" - d30 offal ideas for giant appetites

Noodling around trying to figure out what would be a reasonable density of giants for a giant civilization, I found some papers trying to estimate the same for dinosaurs which factored in body weight to be sustained as the big factor in judging food needs.

Collating the weights of various giants from the Monster Manual I found a strange thing - there is a rising trend from humans up through ogres to the bigger giants - and two very signficant out-liers.

Up to Ogres, the height/weight ratio is the same as humans - they are scaled up humans, easy. For Minotaurs, Hill and Stone giants, they are about twice as massive for the height as humans. For Frost and Cloud Giants they are 3-5 times the mass per weight - but for Fire and Storm Giants it is nearly 10 times. A Fire Giant is about twice as tall as a man and weighs twenty times as much. Hitting a Fire Giant should be like trying to hack through an anvil. And they then wear armour on top. But this also says Storm Giants and especially Fire Giants are much, much heavier for their height than other giants. For a Frost Giant trying to punch a Fire Giant would be like trying to knock over three Frost Giants at once. This also suggests that Fire and Storm giants should be renowned for their huge appetites, even among giants.

For comparison to thing we find in our world, a Fire Giant weighs more than an average elephant - they are about as heavy as an elephant seal - and a Storm Giant is nearly twice that again. Looking to polar bears, our largest land carnivores, for an idea of how much food a giant would need, we get 150lbs of food in a meal for our ~ one ton bears - roughly a whole roast pig for a meal. Scale that up and our Fire Giants will be eating seven of these in a sitting, our Storm Giants will have an even dozen.

So, as a rule of thumb, assume a Storm Giant has the appetite of thirty - one sits to a table that would be a feast for thirty humans. Whoever is prepping for such a feast is going to be using everything they can get their hands on - from the tail to the squeal as is said. Sausages, broths, offal, everything is going to get cooked up and served.

Review: Ruins of Symbaroum (5e) Gamemaster's Guide

tl:dr; a solid GMs guide to an interesting mod of 5e to deliver the flavour of the Symbaroum setting. Very flavoursome with neat mechanics for where Symbaroum differs from typical 5e D&D. Lots of good practical advice in here too.

This came from backing the Ruins of Symbaroum kickstarter, I liked what I previously got from Free League as part of the Forbidden Lands project so I went for one of the juicy tiers and in came a nice cache of stuff.

The unpacked Kickstarter haul

For this I wanted to take a look through the GMs guide to see how, if at all, Ruins of Symbaroum differentiated from every other dark fantay setting out there. The dark fantasy setting niche being somewhat stuffed, starting from grand-daddy Ravenloft up through the original Midnight d20 through to European contenders like Shadows of Esteren and the original Symbaroum. Original Symbaroum has good word-of-mouth so when I saw this 5e adaptation I jumped for it.

First impressions of the whole package once unboxed? Gorgeous. Great finish, lovely evocative art, a harmonious style to the whole thing. Throughout I found a level of polish that was reminiscent of Worlds Without Number - it felt like an extensively tested flag-ship settings where the team had a clear vision of how it should feel.

So what do you get in the book?

Shiny TTRPG links #74

Links from the crossing of the Solstice. 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.

Against The Wicked City gives us a great piece in Early modern corpse medicine

Link this with Elfmaids & Octopi d100 More Goblin Peddlars

And this - Whose Measure God Could Not Take gives us a great generator for Oddities of the Traveling Merchant

Stalagmite-folk + Process Notes: Overloading the Random Table on Zedeck Siew's Writing Hours reveals their deep process secrets

The Retired Adventurer talks through their hex-filling workflow in Types of Terrain on Hex Maps

Dice Goblin gives a nice piece in The Things We Find Along The Way – Filling The Gaps In A Hexcrawl or Pointcrawl

Combine these with Tales of the Lunar Lands great d20/d4 Local Lore generator

Rosalind Chapman writes on guest-right in Finding a Place to Sleep in the Ruined Queendom

The Alexandrian gives us more solid hexcrawling advice in Designing the Hexcrawl – Part 3: Further Inspiration and Hexcrawl Addendum: Running the Hexcrawl and how this all should flow in Running the Hexcrawl – Example of Play: Thracian Hexcrawl

On retro-clones that last

Digging into trends in campaign data from Obsidian Portal to see how retro-clones were doing; some clear favourites emerge.

To figure out what exactly to count as a retro-clone I went with this "List of D&D-esque Games" which may cast a slightly wide net but I wanted to see what a generous interpretation came up with. This was to allow that perhaps people had moved off older editions into strict retro-clones like For Gold & Glory or Old School Essentials and then on to slightly odder stuff in that same OSR space like Mothership or Mork Borg.

Going back to the data gathered from Obsidian Portal (2008-22) and extracting retro-clones from the 'other' bucket, the surprising answer was that they tracked the behaviour of the older editions quite well. The same up-tick in the 4e era during the big shift to variety then fading back down in the 5e era but much less than older editions so that today there are as many new retroclone campaigns created as 3.5e and earlier editions together. For this iteration I mashed D&D Next together with 5e given that it was a proto-5e rather than a pre-5e edition. Red is 2014, the year before 5e dropped, the height of diversity of systems.