A Book Goblins Shelves

Just ahead of moving location I thought I would share my shelfies as they currently sit (stand?) with an eye to what of all this stuff am I actually using?

Start with my desk-side reference shelf - this is the Most Frequently Used stuff. The red frame has my Ducal House folder and Southern Reaches sitting on top of it. The ragged pappers along the top at right is the Spelljammer Academy notes. The Spelljammer folder is my the Smoulderspace campaign - a Light of Xaryxis remix. The 3.5e core books are for Ducal House, the 5e books are for the rest. Worlds Without Number, Fire of the Velvet Horizon and a less visible d30 Sandbox Companion, d30 DMs Companion, Planar Adventures and Kontext Spiel Collection are mostly used to support Ducal House, sometimes Southern Reaches.

From top to bottom on my core shelving: my OG Rogue Trader from ~93, my core 5e stuff, the various things I picked up for my Hikuru campaign plus some of the first OSR things I grabbed. Of what is in this picture, the AD&D DMG got a lot of use early on, perhaps the most individually use. The 5e core books have gotten a lot of use, the modules, apart from Spelljammer, less so. Of the other stuff O drew on the Iron Kingdoms books and the Oriental Adventures books for inspiration in some short run campaign - did get some use, not for very long.

Campaign Retrospective: Spelljammer Academy

Since a mini-campaign actually finished, let us do a retrospective Against the Wicked City style as we have previously.

Spelljammer Academy, 12 Sessions (Feb-June 2023)
What it was: semi-open table run continuation of the Spelljammer Academy adventure. It initially was the hook for us to test new venues for our games club so it was episodic one-shots I banged together fairly haphazardly and just let it evolve as it went
What worked: Episodic nature worked well, set-up tolerated a changing cast week on week really well. People were able to pick up the 'D&D in Space' vibe pretty well. I got to improve my 'minimum viable prep' muscles. We found some kick-ass venues, people were understanding when the venues were sub-par;
What didn't: Trying to be authentic and use the Realmspace supplement. Slogging into the morass of old Oriental Adventures content. What rose-tinted glasses I may have had about AD&D Spelljammer or Oriental Adventures were ripped off and ground underfoot. Some time management issues but that is perpetual with the drop in games. Some venues worked better than others.
Lessons learned:
Fixing two dates a month and asking a bunch of people to get a minimum table of 3 is much better for my stress levels than trying to align peoples schedules
Reduce what you need to carry by challenging yourself to run games with only what is in one or two books
Episodic things like this or Adventurers League are ideal for open tables but you can get much of the campaign 'actions have meaning' feeling with even one or two players continuing session to session
Read the abilities of your monsters and how they interact with players on ships - area effects like dragons-breath, banshee wails, etc. are a lot more effective because people cannot spread out

Shiny TTRPG links #129

A short stack of links as I was afk at the seaside. 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 on weekly blogroll on r/OSR or the RPG Blog Carnival or a roundup of non-blog news on Third Kingdom Games roundup.

@wldenning tweets on "blogs leave ruins"

Flintlocks and Witchery summarises the sad news of the Dissolution of ATTI?

Charlie's Diary has an Announcement: 2nd edition Laundry Files RPG is coming

Weaver.skepti.ch gives us 3d6 2d10 1d20

Sly Flourish writes Ensure the Resilience of Your RPGs

Apotheosis of the Invisible City gives us Medieval Demographics Done RIGHT (Pt I) and (Pt II)

Moondog Gospel writes Domain-Level play, Reasons for adventuring, and Crack Cocaine.

D.I.O. Abyssal Thunder Run

I mentioned a while back that I think there is a trick missing in approaches to the lower planes and another idea has been scratching at my mind. Following Grumpy Wizards steer - if we want it done, we'll have to do it ourselves.

This is one that builds out from the infernal war-machines of Descent into Avernus, nods to some of the other appearances of huge, awful war-constructs that appear through-out Planescape lore (the Ships of Chaos from "In the Abyss", the many mentions of big ruined war machines through out the Blood War lore, etc.) Our core campaign is going to be hex-crawling the Plane of Infinite Portals, juggling wear-and-tear on the War Engine and picking the battles to fight in the deep Abyss

Excerpt from the poster map in Planes of Chaos, by Robert Lazzaretti

The key concept on this is that the party gets sent on a ground level planar run with an infernal engine out of the Nine Hells and off on some mission. The campaign conceit is that you are starting as weaker characters in a powerful machine, and would expect to get more powerful (levelling up) as your machine is battered to pieces beneath you. The trick will be to keep the thing running long enough to get you far enough back out that you can hike home.

Strictly speaking this would be a 'Planejammer' hybrid rather than true Planescape going by our grid but never mind. Parts of this would be to allow a tour of the truly awful parts of the planes, unsurvivable unless you are buttoned up in a dread engine of the Blood War. Parts of this would be to give a big, charismatic vessel that would not be easily replaceable - they get one and have to manage it.

Player Class Stability from 1M D&D Beyond Sheets

Regular readers will know I do love a good D&D Dataset and Dice-Scroller gives us a good one! Through some Python wizardry they scrapped ~1.2 *million* character sheets off D&DBeyond and made them available for our wonder and delight!

You can find the dataset on Kaggle and see their own neat little dashboard and analysis here. What I want to do here is take this as the new baseline for our understanding of the 'general gamer' and see what it tells us.

The 'general gamer' is a pattern I have been finding in lots of datasets - where they are from forums, twitter, anything that implies an engagement with the hobby away from the playing table we see a pattern of favouring spell-casting classes. Where we get the data from tools that help people at the table we see a different pattern with a heavier favour on fighters and rogues. I want to update the comparisons with this new giant dataset - starting gnarly and clarifying from there.

Start with our 'everything in' star-plot - we see the general/forum gamer split; oranges are the app-derived datasets, blues are the surveys and polls.

Distill that down and we have a new 'general gamer' baseline from this monstrous dataset; our story remains the same (Fighters, Rogues beloved by those people who are appear in these giant datasets but not in the forums)

Shiny TTRPG links #128

A minor archive dive while I am on vacation. 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 on weekly blogroll pinned on r/OSR or the RPG Blog Carnival or a roundup of non-blog news on Third Kingdom Games roundup.

Bruce Heard writes About Middle Ages Naval Logistics

A Knight at the Opera shares How I Run the Table

Deeper in the Game gives us Down the Road: Local Situation Design

Recalling a classic of Ashiel on Paizo Forums describing High level demon armies

Gorgon Bones gives us Between the Serpents of Smoke & Steel - Campaign Retrospective and Lessons

Tales of the Lunar Lands suggests Random Encounters From Your Miniature Drawer

Throne of Salt shares A Weird History of A Stranger Earth

Review: Demiverse

tl:dr; a zines of planes, full of interesting variety from the many contributors. Add a few to any game or form a feywild/shadowfell campaign from all of them

Backed this one by Gnome Mage Games on Kickstarter looking for some planar action, something a little different. I had been tracking Fernando Salvaterra through his hex-art and that lead me to this one - pitched as "loosely connected fantasy demiplanes are all that's left of a fractured multiverse" for Those Who Wander and 5e systems. The various contributors of the individual planes were a who's-who of interesting creators so this whole effort harkened back to some of the great works of the 2010's OSR like Petty Gods.

Cover design by Joshua Mendenhall with art by Fernando Salvaterra

What we get is an 80 page book that covers 15 demiplanes and 6 pocket planes await in this original fantasy campaign setting." Each demiplane is a fragment of reality from a multiverse that shattered - each ranging from dungeon-sized to a few thousand square miles at most. These are all connected by interplanar gates to allow marvel-seekers to pursue adventure across these reality splinters.