Getting More Gaming In

So 2022 has turned out to be an unexpectedly active year - an overall downtick on hours after 2021's banner year but still a lot more gaming than I might have thought.

I've been running three games - continuing the Ducal House 3.5e home campaign that has been running since 2020 and starting up a series of planar one-shots (5e Planescape: Splinters of Hope) and a 2-shot-turned-into-campaign 5e Spelljammer game (Interstellar Whaling becoming The King Beyond The Clouds).

I got to play a bunch of things too
- lots of hours onto finishing out the Out of the Abyss campaign
- started playing through Tyranny of Dragons
- played some old-school Scarlet Heroes sessions
- attended my local Adventurers League for a few sessions twixt lockdowns
- played in the Empyrean Dynasty online FKR game

Shiny TTRPG links #97

Back at base, trawling through the backlog of shiny TTRPG things from the past fortnight. 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 the RPG Blog Carnival or a roundup of non-blog news on Third Kingdom Games roundup.

Eldritch Fields writes Subterranean Gate: the scariest thing in Heroes III and something I'd like to see more of in hexcrawls

A Slow Circle continues Social Interaction 2: Examples from D&D, Naturalistic Interaction Mechanics, Ability Checks & Reaction Rolls

Cavegirl tweets A thread on making classic D&D races properly weird

David J Prokopetz posts further thoughts on making D&D folk really distinct

What a Horrible Night to Have a Curse... discusses The 5E to OSR Pipeline

Methods & Madness writes The B/X paradox (also: the AD&D paradox, minimum viable D&D)

Barking Alien gives us RPG Reconnect Via RPG Connect

d4 Caltrops shares d100 - Five Hundred Names for Dolmenwood Games

Monsters and Manuals writes on The Phenomenology of Death in D&D

Deeper in the Game gives us Maps for Play 2 – The Ring Map Layout

Campaign spin up IV: letting the map speak

Spinning up a new campaign for the new year I'm folding together two things - a high concept, top-down approach and a geography-is-destiny map-led bottom-up blocking in of details.

Conceptually this is a Brancalonia re-skin (using E6) with lots of animal-lings mixed in, using the southern hemisphere of my home-campaigns world.

In execution this is going to be something like a West Marches campaign in that I want a pool of drop-in, drop-out players with it being relatively resilient to missing players. It will be online as one of the big hooks was to cater to a distant DM-less group of players who reached out to me.

I've skimmed over the implications of geography for this world before and now we go deep into the western edge of the primary trading ocean. Historically this was all once the domain of sea-faring elves, who came, conquered, and raised up the animals to become animal-lings long ago. The elves have since left and our play space is the decaying remains of that empire and the cities within it.

The sketched in workflow I have is:
Work out the cities of the south and ports in communication - cities with the port tag in any of the neighbouring kingdoms plus any large river ports I can spot
See who the likely active factions are in a similar way, then decide their attitudes and major players
Salt in some rumoured dungeons and treasures (likely to be abandoned elf-holds or ruined towns)
Try the 'Downtime in Zyan' generator to layer in some individual-level detail.
Come up with a rumour or two per city based on what it is known for

Closing a old gaming loop

Space allowed recovery of my old Spelljammer folder; cover is one of the divider art pieces that came with Monstrous Compendium Spelljammer Appendix and the spine logo I think was cut out of the cover. It was never actually got to contain a Spelljammer campaign back in the 2e days, it held notes for my sprawling teen AD&D campaign, the Monstrous Compendium pages and miscellanea - until now!

I now have managed to get this relic to my current abode and have now got notes from my 2-shot and what is looking like a remixed Light of Xaryxis campaign.

The original campaign I recall wanting to run was centered around a crashed Gnomish sidewheeler that the adventurers would stumble upon, be fascinated by and then boot-strap their way to the stars from there. Bless my innocence at planning the meat of the campaign to occur only after so many dominoes had fallen the right way. Needless to say, never happened and I had nothing on the cards for after they got space-borne beyond thinking Spelljamming was intrinsically cool. Looking back I would have planted some hooks that needed the players to get up to Wildspace to deal with them, then maybe they would have gone with wizards or pegasi or something but at least it would have been directionally correct.

I did manage a minor cameo for a Mindspider in a planar one-shot I wrote as a convention game in college - they had a rebadged Mindspider as some sort of Tso plane-jammer for a raid on Gehenna. I cannot recall what they were even doing there - the scenario was called Mockingbat Keep, it was infested with Varangoin and they needed to deal with those. It worked well enough in the ship served as a point to HALO jump off, using potions of feather-fall - but that was the extent of my Spelljamming for a good long while.

Flyers made an appearance as *anti*-Spelljammer defences in Hikuru - a world that had been oppressed by elves needed means to stave off the Elven Imperial Navy and ended up with large warriors mounted on over-bred wyverns. Not much for off-planet force projection but good for dominating the local skies.

Finally Spelljammer 5e comes around ignites interest in my ancestral gaming group - coupled with all our comfort with remote play a window of opportunity opens and I have managed to stuff through a 2-shot concept test - the Interstellar Whaling game fed by my Gygax-75 run - which proved such a success we are continuing with the same game.

It is a very nice prospect to have a decent shot at filling out this old folder with game notes, I am glad I hung on to it all these years. Much of the content is being generated digitally for maps which is a note if I want anyone to get anything from pulling it down off a shelf in the future - printouts will have to get included or none of it will make sense. We discussed player note taking around the table of a thanks-giving gathering and how hard it would be to draw sense from the average gamers notes - similarly for a DM's notes I fear - so this time I am going to try and give my future self a chance and be more organised.

Shiny TTRPG links #96

Only some high-lights inbetween time on the road. 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 the RPG Blog Carnival or a roundup of non-blog news on Third Kingdom Games roundup.

Talaraska gives us Odd Loot Items

Tales of the Lunar Lands shares Gods of the Lunar Lands

Scriptorium Ludi writes Deeds not Words

Weaver.skepti.ch gives us Orcs of the North

Rise Up Comus joins RPG Blogs as Fantasy Taverns

Gundobad Games writes On Running Very Different Types of Games

liches get stitches gives us Ichi Plains Region: Uncompahgre Basin

A Knight at the Opera shares Dragons of the Great Game

The Wyrd Lands gives us Building Wyrd Beasts: Trolls

Spriggan's Den opines The common narrative of OSR gaming is all wrong!

Domain-level dirty tricks (part 2 - tactical)

Returning to our extracts from an old Birthright game I was involved in, playing the communist goblins of the Bluepeaks islands. Writing this up as a drop-in realm for anyone who might need a competent ally or a dangerously persistent foe - although these tactical ideas could probably suit many smaller scale foes as their 'grand plans' also.

Recalling the realm concept was of goblins having a vision and realising their ill-treatment at the hands of the world, then setting out on a hallucinogenic fueled messianic conversion spree and finding welcoming ears in the scattered minions of a recently deceased dark wizard.

The dark wizards old citadel became a Wizards Academy - the Labyrinth - and was a research powerhouse on the general theme of what can be done with shard-crystals - the crystallisation of magic and its use in various kinds of techno-arcanic lunacy. Large quantities its fairly harmless and inert - i.e. a shardstone vein would sit quietly under a village without having much effect beyond causing a fair few seers and two headed calfs - but broken down to crystals its causes mutations, nightmares, trees to walk, poisons wells, and if you go as far as powdering it, its explosive, unstable, addictive, and when snorted, spiked or smoked gives you incredible power - which you either use or it melts your brain.

In-game this was Birthrights meigbheal being used as these wicked crystals which went into both chargable magical items (straight lifts from Eberron Dragonshard) and into crazy Skaven and Cryx tech - Warpfire throwers, Jezzails and Deathjacks.
- Weaponry – Jezzails with shardcraft bullet, shardfire throwers, shardlightning casters, poison wind globes, explosives, incendiaries
- Artifice – mimirs, navigation arrays, scrying devices – mostly derivatives of well known things except that they would use shard-crystals as fuel and be inert without – real ‘Skaventech’ feel
- Breeding – using shardcraft to develop means to improve beings – would be reflected in ‘grafts’ both surgical and mutated – brains in jars to create rudimentary ‘computers’
- Augmentation – developing a subtler level of use of shardcraft – ingestion focussed. This would be the combat drugs, shardsnuff for magic enhancement
- Winnowing – magical plagues, shard-dust poison gasses
- Eternity Project – retaining the skills and knowledge of the talented through soulcapture

Essentially, the Bluepeaks were very conscious of being very small and very few, so anything that could fight and die in our place, from bacterium up to Helljacks, all to the good.

Below are some of the direct action concepts prepared against the day of need:

Capsule Reviews #5: TTRPG Tsundoku

Inspired by Jeff Grubbs Game Tsundoku blogpost I want to take a glance over my TTRPG book Tsundoku - the books that have piled up.

Actively intended for review (notes in partially complete state)