Shiny TTRPG links #85

Back at base with 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 or a roundup of non-blog news on Third Kingdom Games roundup.

Mindstorm writes on Stealth Turns

Spooky Rusty makes a good point in "if you like someone's writing tell them or put it on the internet somewhere that you like their writing and they will live longer and write more"

Bat in the Attic adds to their downloadable Stuff in the Attic - a pair of bestiaries.

Spineless Grimoire gives us Home sweet home

Xenio in a Bottle writes Factions, Updated

Coins and Scrolls announces the launch of their OSR: The Monster Overhaul

Delta's D&D Hotspot gives us OED Expanded Edition

The Alexandrian gives us a great toolkit to break down societies and consider how fantastic elements would run theirs in Random Worldbuilding – Fantastical Nations

Tales of the Lunar Lands writes Meet the Flintstones on historical norms in games.

Review: Threshold #15: Mystaraspace

"The fifteenth issue of the Mystara Magazine, piercing into the black void to explore the planets of Mystaraspace and beyond." Of all the many Threshold magazines to take a deeper look at I figured this space-themed issue would be both topical and interesting. The original flying D&D ship, the Princess Ark, was after all flying about on Mystara. These magazines are the distillation of forum discussions centered around thePiazza.org and its deep well of active old school fans.

Screenshot of Threshold #15 covers with art by I. Calvin & Athenarius

From a layout point of view, the pdf is sized to A4. The fortification headers, footers and overall layout are a deep callback to the old Mystara gazetteers and the design in general takes a lot of guidance from those publications. I compare it to my nearest one (GAZ12 - the Golden Khan) and we have two columns in Threshold compared to three in the TSR publication but otherwise the fonts, the styles, it is all pretty faithful. One thing that amuses me greatly is the abundant footnotes, often with hyperlinks to threads on The Piazza - this really is a "by the locals, for the locals" zine and I heartily approve. This kind of dense footnoting also allows others to catch up on the conversation which becomes invaluable as time passes. Formatwise, I believe they are set up as POD files that one can get hardcopies of via Lulu, I have not tried this myself but certainly they look like they would be a pretty addition to ones shelves.

Les Rollistes - AideDD stats, le Thiase surveys give a look at TTRPGs in France

Revisiting the AideDD app stats to take a look at race and location data. We saw before that the app is showing the 'generalist' profile same as D&D Beyond or other online tools with fighters and rogues preferred compared to heavy spell-caster preference of forums. From last years data we also saw that preference for races is more stable in apps compared to the forums.

Looking at the respondent profile - AideDD originating in France - has a large French user-base not seen in other polls and anglosphere parts of the hobby.

Given the large fraction of users from US, Canada, UK, Australia, we could take this as a maximalist estimate for the share of D&D that is played in France and an indication of the size of the jeu-de-role scene that we do not hear so much about because of language barriers.

The fantastic Le Thiase surveys give us a window into the jdr scene - three surveys conducted in 2010, 2014 and 2018 - and due again in 2022. Comparing what is in these surveys we see a few interesting points.

Shiny TTRPG links #84

Less than usual this week as I pack up for travel. 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.

Save vs. Worm gives us Pygmy Giants

Dreaming Dragonslayer gives us Mulan, OSR Queen

Attronarch's Athenaeum completes #RPGaDAY2022 – Day 31

Silverarm writes The Wilderness is a Dungeon: Jaquaysing Your RPG Sandbox

The Latest Enemy writes Skalds, Bards, and Warrior Poets

Goobernuts Blog gives us Bamboo – 10-foot pole but better

Weaver.skepti.ch reviews Creature Caches

Classic Fantasy Adventure Games are Infinite on Grumpy Wizard

Late Night Zen gives us Magic item: Latimer's ring

Vdonnut Vallet muses on Everything is (?) a Framework

In Search of Treasure gives us Jester (New Class) & Wild Elf Revised

Methods & Madness writes Can "Old School" work with feats?

Worlds Await writes The Dreamscape, Part 3 – Journeys, Environs And Hazards

My Creative Reset Button: GISH Week by Soft Chaos

Scraped from a twitter thread of great blogs that have not updated in a while: World of Alshain; Drama, Dice & Damsons; Valley of the Blue Snails; Straits of Anian

Capsule Reviews #4: Flying Ship Combat Rules

Since the new Spelljammer dropped there has been an explosion of new rulesets or new spotlight cast on existing ones. Below are the ones I have found worthy of the name:

1. Tales from the Glass Guarded World, a spelljamming podcast has had their own narrative flying ship combat rules available for a while. Runs with distance bands and a focus on actions available to PC's playing officers - bosun, helmsman, weapon crew, etc. 20 pages.

2. Old Dungeon Master updated a set of OD&D skyship combat rules to 5e - the provenance can be seen in they are called Skyships not Spelljammers. This is their set of house rules which I find reassuring - other peoples table-tested stuff is always good. There is old-school crunch in here, with base stats and condition multipliers. Interesting in that it is gridless but still crunchy with pursuit and evasion rules and things like crew archery as well as PC officer actions. 22 pages.

3. Seafaring in Fifth Edition by u/RocksInMyDryer are ship rules that include up and down within them, not specifically flying ship rules but they can work. Draws on lots of 3.5e resources for structures then updates them to get a comprehensive 5e ruleset. Aimed at seafaring but the combat system could be used for flying ships. Based off which of the ships is "favoured" by conditions in a given round. 30 pages, includes ships, encounters & monsters.

4. Wildjammer (v0.97.2) adapts a bunch of ideas from DarkMatter. Comprehensive ~100 page supplement with species, subclasses, spells, locations, factions etc. Introduces 'mega scale' for handling ship scale ~ 100:1 to normal. Comprehensive, somewhat dense, everything is in here but it requires some careful reading.

5. Spelljammer Combat Expanded (v1.4) is a straight up reaction to the new 5e Spelljammer and patches in missing things. 20 pages with actions for officer positions, takes a 'skill check' driven approach, has solid guidance on how to set up for grids which is good.

6. Snoop's Superb Spelljammer Supplement v7 on GM Binder is one of the more complex set-ups with movement points, some good old-school crunch like minor and major helms but also a handy flowchart at the back to help guide you through the detail.

7. I am also going to check out the old 3e Ship Construction and Combat Rules on Spelljammer.org as one of the projects that progressed during the long twilight between official Spelljammers. Has all the expected 3e crunch including how to handle ships larger than a single hex which is good practical guidance to have.

I hope to get these properly table-tested in the coming months. Others that we tested previously:

8. Shadow of the Spider Moon (3.5e, published in Polygon #151 / Dungeon #92) - our playtest

9. Aces High published in Arcadia issue #3 - our playtest

10. AD&D Spelljammer (AD&D, available as print on demand from DriveThruRPG) - our playtest

11. Calidar skyship combat rules (OD&D, by Bruce Heard who did the original D&D skyship in Voyages of the Princess Ark) - our playtest

Finally this thread on Reddit is a round up of systems - Collection of 5e ship vs. ship combat rules for spelljammers - with a lot of overlap with here but also a few seeds of cool ideas like spell-slots-for-movement-boosts.

Consensus appears to be that PC's should have ship-combat specific actions, there should be some ranged combat system but otherwise there are a lot of variations on the theme here to try out.

Actual Test: Campaign Pitch Document

Some friends gave me a hard nudge when Spelljammer Confirmed to run a game for them once it landed. Now that it is out, that time has come and I have confirmed that indeed it was not just chatter. To get the ball rolling I decided to pitch a bunch of variations to see what kind of campaign people wanted.

I sent around a mail with the following pitches and the request to rank them from favourite to least to see what was popular. The pitches format was adapted from Matt Colville's Pitching Your Campaign with some pretty short, sharp overviews to narrow down on what people sought.
- I noted that all of them would have a roughly equal base-level of puzzles and PC-scale combat.
- I added Scale to indicate on-planet (single world), in-system (multi-world), or intersystem (multi-sphere)
- Politics options : how much NPC interaction is there likely to be
- Tactics options: how much ship-to-ship is likely

I particularly liked the 'player buy-in' note; it helps align everyone for character creation and is helpful to have right up front.

"Intersystem whaling" - destination exploration. There is an ocean world, a place known to locals as the Deep - a place where things long dead elsewhere still thrive. It is a long way out but the value of the haul will be worth it! There are some locals to avoid and of course the beasts themselves to be hunted but gold must be bought with sweat after all...
Scale: In-system
Politics: Medium
Tactics: Medium
Player Buy-in: signed up for a long mission for a big payday.

"The Rescue" - longhaul mission. An elven retreat world is cut off and needs a cruiser to go out there, make contact and bring them components they might need. It is probably nothing, a quiet run, easy in, easy out. Captain's going to retire after this one so he wants this done by the numbers.
Scale: Intersphere
Politics: Low
Tactics: High
Player Buy-in: Crew of an Elven Imperial Navy Man-O-War on a detached mission.

"The King Beyond the Clouds" - interplanetary meddling. A system slipped from the grip of the elves and their rumoured return is nigh. Which side will you take? Can the disparate worlds of the systems be marshalled to keep their independence or persuaded to return to the fold?
Scale: In-system
Politics: High
Tactics: Medium
Player Buy-in: Interfering in the groundling and spacer courts to prepare for an intersphere incursion

"Sky-pirates" - sandbox - bringing a flying ship to a groundling campaign. The captain died, you senior officers have borrowed the ship and are off to pursue your own goals.
Scale: On-planet
Politics: Medium
Tactics: Medium
Player Buy-in: Self-directed, you start with a ship and you decide what hooks and actions to follow.

"Splinters of Hope: Homeworld" - search for artefacts in a "dead sphere." An elven world was eaten by Witchlight Marauders during the Unhuman wars but someone has to go there and find any pieces of wood that were taken off world before the disaster.
Scale: In-system
Politics: Low
Tactics: Medium
Player Buy-in: Your ship and crew have agreed to take this raid mission for the elves.

When I got back everyones rankings I stacked the different campaigns, eliminated those with any 'least favourites' and landed on Intersystem Whaling as the favoured pitch.

King Beyond The Clouds had more favourites but also a least-fave.
The Rescue got ok votes from most, lower rated than Whaling
Splinters & Sky-Pirates both 2 least-faves

Going to use the Gygax 75 generated system and put all that world-building to the test.

Shiny TTRPG links #83

Fine links from about the internet, the shiniest things that caught my magpie eye. 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.

Rise Up Comus has some thoughts on Rest Interrupted

The Alexandrian writes Random Worldbuilding: Fast & Furious Homebrewing

Dungeons & Possums handily collates all the Competing Swordtembers?

Archons March On gives us D6x7 Gith Sects Besides The Githyanki & Githzerai

Matrixhammer Scenario! A Night in the Forest! on The Lizardman Diaries

Grand Commodore writes up a coffee-and-a-biscuit read in City-State RPG Retrospective & Stories from their recent the five-turn, 20-day City-State RPG