I spent the week crawling my blog-feeds, found many interesting things! More can be found on the previous list found here. The original inspiration for all of this is weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links. You can find more links (black-out permitting) on weekly blogroll on r/OSR or the RPG Blog Carnival or a roundup of non-blog news on Third Kingdom Games roundup.
In light of current difficulties with Reddit Alex Schroder provides Reddit alternatives
Alone in the Labyrinth writes THE BEYOND: POLARIS REVISITED, via Carcosa and... The Imperium of man?
Dawnfist Games suggests How to think OSR when playing ttrpgs – A movie analogy to help
Wizard Thief Fighter releases UVG2E & the Synthetic Dream Machine
noise sans signal proposes Different DnD editions as ages of the world
Zedeck Siews Writing Hours writes Tone Is Bullshit
Mythmere Games announces Swords & Wizardry: Complete Revised has hit DriveThruRPG
@Roelkonijn tweets about how ancient warriors were not ripped like athletes
A Most Majestic Fly Whisk gives us a coffee and biscuit read in An Empty Africa - PF2E's The Mwangi Expanse and the strange career of Black Atlanticism
RPG WANDERING responds to this months prompt with RPG BLOG CARNIVAL: TRAVEL
Plastic Polyhedra also responds to the RPG Carnival withAn exploration of travelling in TTRPGs
19 June 2023
17 June 2023
Alexandria the Con Scenario Archive
A fascinating thing crossed my radar - reached out directly in fact - the website www.alexandria.dk is gathering convention-history and are adding all the convention scenarios they can get their hands on to the Alexandria library.
Growing from a group of Nordic gamers it is spreading out to the world. They seem to be organising around a facebook group at the moment, with almost 1000 people with some kind of convention-connection.
Stats-wise we have 2581 scenarios available for download out of 14901 known scenarios run at 2317 conventions. Thats roughly 1-in-6, pretty good for all this time passed. The content is strongly weighted to Swedish and Danish but with a good block of English games available, about 20% of the total.
It is also really interesting to see the sheer diversity of systems in stark contrast to the modern D&D 5e systemic dominance. This does chime with my memories of Irish conventions where you had all sorts of weird and wacky systems running as con games - within the list of systems we have a top ten that starts with "System-less" and runs down through #2 Call of Cthulhu, #3 AD&D, #4 Fri Form, #5 D&D 5e, #6 WHFRP, #7 Pathfinder, #8 GURPS, #9 Vampire: The Masquerade, #10 Basic Roleplaying - noting that this covers 30 years of gaming that is still a great range of stuff.
We are also seeing a bunch of skew in what the Alexandria team have gotten to so far - the list of conventions has 873 from Denmark, 672 from Sweden then 212 from the US and 151 from Ireland. While Ireland does have a lot of conventions relative to its size, there is no way we are 3/4 of activity levels in the US. I look forward to seeing how these activity levels change as the team expands its reach.
The site itself has a ton of stuff there already - including stuff I was familiar with myself would be the turn of the millenium Irish convention scene - Leprecon and Gaelcon mostly, a bit of Warpcon too. There was a ton of stuff being written for those con's and now we can have a look again! Tons of content for your one shots and campaigning needs.
I have not yet figured out the best way to find out what is in here; my first thought is to look up some authors who went on to great things in the TTRPG space like Gar Hanrahan - they have 32 scenarios uploaded. One tricky bit is the lack of clarity in lots of convention programs - games were 'D&D', 'WHFRP', etc. and would of course have been understood to be the edition of the day - or maybe not! I do recall writing these programs and getting the blurb right so people had a notion did they want that flavour of game was more critical than getting the system exact.
All in all - a really interesting slice through gaming culture coming from a very different angle than we normally get. While recognising that our friends in the Nordics are up to all sorts of stuff - I have Forbidden Lands and Symbaroum on my shelves here behind me - it is really cool to see even a nascent effort like this. I know there is tons of effort put into writing con scenarios, great that they should be stored in a near accessible way like this.
Edit to add: my own contribution to the effort; two old Gaelcon flyers I had stuffed in my Dragon Magazine collection.
Growing from a group of Nordic gamers it is spreading out to the world. They seem to be organising around a facebook group at the moment, with almost 1000 people with some kind of convention-connection.
Stats-wise we have 2581 scenarios available for download out of 14901 known scenarios run at 2317 conventions. Thats roughly 1-in-6, pretty good for all this time passed. The content is strongly weighted to Swedish and Danish but with a good block of English games available, about 20% of the total.
It is also really interesting to see the sheer diversity of systems in stark contrast to the modern D&D 5e systemic dominance. This does chime with my memories of Irish conventions where you had all sorts of weird and wacky systems running as con games - within the list of systems we have a top ten that starts with "System-less" and runs down through #2 Call of Cthulhu, #3 AD&D, #4 Fri Form, #5 D&D 5e, #6 WHFRP, #7 Pathfinder, #8 GURPS, #9 Vampire: The Masquerade, #10 Basic Roleplaying - noting that this covers 30 years of gaming that is still a great range of stuff.
We are also seeing a bunch of skew in what the Alexandria team have gotten to so far - the list of conventions has 873 from Denmark, 672 from Sweden then 212 from the US and 151 from Ireland. While Ireland does have a lot of conventions relative to its size, there is no way we are 3/4 of activity levels in the US. I look forward to seeing how these activity levels change as the team expands its reach.
The site itself has a ton of stuff there already - including stuff I was familiar with myself would be the turn of the millenium Irish convention scene - Leprecon and Gaelcon mostly, a bit of Warpcon too. There was a ton of stuff being written for those con's and now we can have a look again! Tons of content for your one shots and campaigning needs.
I have not yet figured out the best way to find out what is in here; my first thought is to look up some authors who went on to great things in the TTRPG space like Gar Hanrahan - they have 32 scenarios uploaded. One tricky bit is the lack of clarity in lots of convention programs - games were 'D&D', 'WHFRP', etc. and would of course have been understood to be the edition of the day - or maybe not! I do recall writing these programs and getting the blurb right so people had a notion did they want that flavour of game was more critical than getting the system exact.
All in all - a really interesting slice through gaming culture coming from a very different angle than we normally get. While recognising that our friends in the Nordics are up to all sorts of stuff - I have Forbidden Lands and Symbaroum on my shelves here behind me - it is really cool to see even a nascent effort like this. I know there is tons of effort put into writing con scenarios, great that they should be stored in a near accessible way like this.
Edit to add: my own contribution to the effort; two old Gaelcon flyers I had stuffed in my Dragon Magazine collection.
14 June 2023
Punnet Squares for Courtly Intrigue
My home campaign players are venturing back into courts and politics after a big block quest on the frontiers with major implications and I need a quick way to work out court factions and intrigue.
My thoughts turned to GRENDEL MENDEL: Using Punnett Squares For Monster Design and Adapting Punnet Squares for Treasure on Mindstorm ... and why not use Punnet Squares?
In this case for politics one could go infinitely deep and subtle but since I have a crowd I need to make sense of, I'm going to just go with our Punnet set up.
Coming in to these courts I can work out lots of the players and what I need is a quick way to batch them up and figure what the groups and factions are. The quick method I am working to here is:
1. List who is present, NPCs, faction representatives, etc.
2. Place them all across the Punnet Square
3. Make sure factions have a representative NPC
4. Figure out what are the 'open court' and 'back channel' settings
Adapting the Punnet Square itself, I set one axis as positive/negative - I tag it 'admire/support' and 'fear/oppose' for a broad sense of the attitude of the NPC. The other axis is 'field/court' with 'open action' and political/intrigue on the other. This is more to reflect the persons strengths, not an exclusive box; you might run into them in open court or in backrooms but where they choose to act will be their preference.
My thoughts turned to GRENDEL MENDEL: Using Punnett Squares For Monster Design and Adapting Punnet Squares for Treasure on Mindstorm ... and why not use Punnet Squares?
In this case for politics one could go infinitely deep and subtle but since I have a crowd I need to make sense of, I'm going to just go with our Punnet set up.
Coming in to these courts I can work out lots of the players and what I need is a quick way to batch them up and figure what the groups and factions are. The quick method I am working to here is:
1. List who is present, NPCs, faction representatives, etc.
2. Place them all across the Punnet Square
3. Make sure factions have a representative NPC
4. Figure out what are the 'open court' and 'back channel' settings
Adapting the Punnet Square itself, I set one axis as positive/negative - I tag it 'admire/support' and 'fear/oppose' for a broad sense of the attitude of the NPC. The other axis is 'field/court' with 'open action' and political/intrigue on the other. This is more to reflect the persons strengths, not an exclusive box; you might run into them in open court or in backrooms but where they choose to act will be their preference.
12 June 2023
Shiny TTRPG links #124
A chunky list of links from trawling the web this week. More can be found on the previous list found here. The original inspiration for all of this is weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links. You can find even more links on the newly-automated weekly blogroll on r/OSR or the RPG Blog Carnival or a roundup of non-blog news on Third Kingdom Games roundup. Note - the reddit link is down for the API protests, it may come back up in future or that may have been it for r/osr.
Rise Up Comus gives us Conversational Spirals - Closure in RPGs
A Knight at the Opera has another great coffee and a biscuit read People Are Problems: NPCs as Challenge Elements
A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry shares Collections: Roman Roads
Race For The Iron Throne writes on Bronze Age monarchies
Charlie's Diary (of Charles Stross, githyanki creator) posits a High Fantasy Magic System that kinda-sorta resembles software engineering in Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
The Pastel Dungeon shares You Enter the Forest Deep Part 1: A System for Generating Intersting and Scary Fantasy Forests
The Wandering Gamist gives us Wind in the Dungeon
CHICAGOWIZ'S GAMES posts their lessons learned from DUNGEON 23 - WK 25 - OVER 500 ROOMS!
Rise Up Comus gives us Conversational Spirals - Closure in RPGs
A Knight at the Opera has another great coffee and a biscuit read People Are Problems: NPCs as Challenge Elements
A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry shares Collections: Roman Roads
Race For The Iron Throne writes on Bronze Age monarchies
Charlie's Diary (of Charles Stross, githyanki creator) posits a High Fantasy Magic System that kinda-sorta resembles software engineering in Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
The Pastel Dungeon shares You Enter the Forest Deep Part 1: A System for Generating Intersting and Scary Fantasy Forests
The Wandering Gamist gives us Wind in the Dungeon
CHICAGOWIZ'S GAMES posts their lessons learned from DUNGEON 23 - WK 25 - OVER 500 ROOMS!
10 June 2023
Review: Swords of the Serpentine
tl:dr; the GUMSHOE investigative system for fantasy, with a swords-and-sorcery setting and lots of helpful onboarding and running assistance to get you going.
I got in my pre-order of Swords of the Serpentine, looking to get my hands on fantasy GUMSHOE, and started this review with the pdf before finishing it with the book in hand.
I got in my pre-order of Swords of the Serpentine, looking to get my hands on fantasy GUMSHOE, and started this review with the pdf before finishing it with the book in hand.
Cover art by Jerome Huguenin
The writer published a 'How to Read the Rules: a quick-start guide for Swords of the Serpentine' on Pelgrane Press website but I think your best bet for getting a quick handle on how it all fits together is to go straight to the appendices and read the summaries there. These give you the skeleton of the whole game and in nine pages you can get a grip on the whole thing. This is a chunky text at 380 pages and I bounced off trying to brute force my way through but when I came back and used the character creation quick reference (p11 or p363) with the How to Play 101 (p362) it fell into place much more easily.07 June 2023
A Time of Gaming Abundance
I find myself in an unfamiliar position - with access to a huge pool of players and I do not know what to do with them. I talked a little about this in Feast or Famine gaming - but that was about the opportunities in online gaming - now it appears the same points stand in person too.
We (RPGVienna) recently ran an event - Night of the Rolling Dice - a 'come along if you want to try D&D', thinking we might get maybe two dozen newbies and instead we had closer to a hundred come out of the woodwork; a small amount ~ 10% were old hands who were just finding our group but lots were newbies. Entire tables of 'this is my first time' folk - apparently from our post to r/wien.
We (RPGVienna) recently ran an event - Night of the Rolling Dice - a 'come along if you want to try D&D', thinking we might get maybe two dozen newbies and instead we had closer to a hundred come out of the woodwork; a small amount ~ 10% were old hands who were just finding our group but lots were newbies. Entire tables of 'this is my first time' folk - apparently from our post to r/wien.
05 June 2023
Shiny TTRPG links #123
Another short set this week as have been off desk more than usual. More can be found on the previous list found here. The original inspiration for all of this is weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links. You can find even more links on the newly-automated weekly blogroll on r/OSR or the RPG Blog Carnival or a roundup of non-blog news on Third Kingdom Games roundup.
Methods & Madness proposes All elves are half-elves
alch3mist nocturn3 gives us The Game Design Tavern
The Ideocron of the Oracular Somnambulist shares Abandoned Temple Generator
Hex Brawler Games gives us HexBrawlers Making Portals
Leicester's Ramble asks Campaign Journal: Which Way is Up on the Snake?
CHICAGOWIZ'S GAMES shares SESSION SUMMARIES FROM MAY'S AD&D/OD&D GAMES
Revenant's Quill gives us Brutalist Adventure Game Design
Order Of The Crimson Death shares Holy Sh*t! We just hit 300 sessions.
DAILY ADVENTURE PROMPTS gives us SETTLEMENT: HALDERVEINE, HIGHLAND FORTRESS
a village a forest a dungeon a beast provides GENERATORS
Cannibal Halfling Gaming writes a CANDELA OBSCURA QUICKSTART REVIEW
SCROLL FOR INITIATIVE asks What does a 20th-level dungeon look like?
Academy of Doors gives us Simple Naval Combat for Cairn
Methods & Madness proposes All elves are half-elves
alch3mist nocturn3 gives us The Game Design Tavern
The Ideocron of the Oracular Somnambulist shares Abandoned Temple Generator
Hex Brawler Games gives us HexBrawlers Making Portals
Leicester's Ramble asks Campaign Journal: Which Way is Up on the Snake?
CHICAGOWIZ'S GAMES shares SESSION SUMMARIES FROM MAY'S AD&D/OD&D GAMES
Revenant's Quill gives us Brutalist Adventure Game Design
Order Of The Crimson Death shares Holy Sh*t! We just hit 300 sessions.
DAILY ADVENTURE PROMPTS gives us SETTLEMENT: HALDERVEINE, HIGHLAND FORTRESS
a village a forest a dungeon a beast provides GENERATORS
Cannibal Halfling Gaming writes a CANDELA OBSCURA QUICKSTART REVIEW
SCROLL FOR INITIATIVE asks What does a 20th-level dungeon look like?
Academy of Doors gives us Simple Naval Combat for Cairn
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