Late & messy today due to working off mobile on holidays. More links 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.
Blue Bard gives us Running Your First AD&D Campaign
All Dead Generations gives us 7 Maxims of the OSR
14 August 2023
12 August 2023
Review: Home - A Light In The Darkness
tl:dr; a neat, curated set of modular hex-crawl rules for a more faction-oriented game with a focus on securing resources.
I backed the zine 'Home - A light in the Darkness' which is billed as a sandbox toolkit for TTRPGs. Given the mileage I've gotten out of the d30 Sandbox Companion I thought this was worth a look.
This is a lot packed into a 36 page zine, a little sparse for someone coming new to the concept but a great, taut workflow for those who know the basics already.
What do you get in it?
I backed the zine 'Home - A light in the Darkness' which is billed as a sandbox toolkit for TTRPGs. Given the mileage I've gotten out of the d30 Sandbox Companion I thought this was worth a look.
This is a lot packed into a 36 page zine, a little sparse for someone coming new to the concept but a great, taut workflow for those who know the basics already.
What do you get in it?
09 August 2023
Campaign Spin-Up VII - When One-Shots Sprawl
tl;dr: I ran Spelljammer Academy and then... just sort of kept going. This is about how I cooked up the additional episodes for the mini-campaign.
I have unexpectedly run a 'tour of the system' Spelljammer campaign, starting off with running Spelljammer Academy for my local gaming group. I was running Light of Xaryxis for another table and this group was drop-in/drop-out so I decided to just continue as one shots and it has been an interesting exercise. This write up focuses on where I got the session content from for all these one-shots, I wrote up the mechanics of running it in a Campaign Retrospective.
The key aspects of this were:
- open table
- no big idea just a knock-about game to allow venue testing
- unexpectedly ended up with 'core crew' at this open table
- got to trigger 'cool hooks' much more often than my standard campaign mode
- tried to integrate the advice from You Suck at Keeping your One-Offs as One-Offs by A Knight at the Opera
I have unexpectedly run a 'tour of the system' Spelljammer campaign, starting off with running Spelljammer Academy for my local gaming group. I was running Light of Xaryxis for another table and this group was drop-in/drop-out so I decided to just continue as one shots and it has been an interesting exercise. This write up focuses on where I got the session content from for all these one-shots, I wrote up the mechanics of running it in a Campaign Retrospective.
The key aspects of this were:
- open table
- no big idea just a knock-about game to allow venue testing
- unexpectedly ended up with 'core crew' at this open table
- got to trigger 'cool hooks' much more often than my standard campaign mode
- tried to integrate the advice from You Suck at Keeping your One-Offs as One-Offs by A Knight at the Opera
07 August 2023
Shiny TTRPG links #132
More links from across the web, some interesting stuff from the archives! 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.
Deeper In The Game shares We Built This City – Before and Now
Probable Train gives us Old-School Dungeon Maps Made Easy
Autocratik launches This August - the 10th RPGaDAY
Moondog Gospel gives us Mental Encumbrance
Swords & Stitchery shares 1d20 Random Sword & Sorcery Traits of The Nephilim Background Table For Your Old School & OSR Game Campaigns
Mazirian's Garden writes The Problem of Spotlight Management in OSR Games
DELTA'S D&D HOTSPOT gives us Violence Inherent in the System (of Art)
David J Prokopetz suggests Proposals to refer to One D&D as “6th Edition” in order to spite Hasbro marketing don’t go far enough
Deeper In The Game shares We Built This City – Before and Now
Probable Train gives us Old-School Dungeon Maps Made Easy
Autocratik launches This August - the 10th RPGaDAY
Moondog Gospel gives us Mental Encumbrance
Swords & Stitchery shares 1d20 Random Sword & Sorcery Traits of The Nephilim Background Table For Your Old School & OSR Game Campaigns
Mazirian's Garden writes The Problem of Spotlight Management in OSR Games
DELTA'S D&D HOTSPOT gives us Violence Inherent in the System (of Art)
David J Prokopetz suggests Proposals to refer to One D&D as “6th Edition” in order to spite Hasbro marketing don’t go far enough
05 August 2023
Class/Race archetypes in 1.2 million D&DBeyond characters
tl;dr: giant dataset from D&DBeyond shows us that over half of characters created are the same few (30) race/class combos.
dice-scroller.com pulled over a million character sheets of D&DBeyond to give us Most popular D&D Classes and Races and I wanted to revisit some work I did last year on Player choice of unusual races within D&D classes. Caveats about all this at the bottom of the post but short version - this is probably not Big-T-Truth, no dataset can be, but I think it is still worth looking at what shapes and patterns might become visible.
Just eyeballing the work that dice-scroller did we can see the same concentration as before - this is not a gently-fading colour map, we have points of heat speckled across our race/class grid that shows strong preferences for certain combinations. Interestingly for such a large data set we *still* have some race/class combos missing saying that eight years after the game launched not all things have necessarily been tried.
The significantly lower frequency of Artificers and to an extent Bloodhunters says that those being gated behind paywalls on DnDBeyond is having an affect, as could be expected.
dice-scroller.com pulled over a million character sheets of D&DBeyond to give us Most popular D&D Classes and Races and I wanted to revisit some work I did last year on Player choice of unusual races within D&D classes. Caveats about all this at the bottom of the post but short version - this is probably not Big-T-Truth, no dataset can be, but I think it is still worth looking at what shapes and patterns might become visible.
Just eyeballing the work that dice-scroller did we can see the same concentration as before - this is not a gently-fading colour map, we have points of heat speckled across our race/class grid that shows strong preferences for certain combinations. Interestingly for such a large data set we *still* have some race/class combos missing saying that eight years after the game launched not all things have necessarily been tried.
The significantly lower frequency of Artificers and to an extent Bloodhunters says that those being gated behind paywalls on DnDBeyond is having an affect, as could be expected.
02 August 2023
Actual Play: giant cannon foundry as terrain
tl;dr: tested out a 'what-if' terrain set up, adding scale and verticality and it worked quite well
Having just listened to Hida-O-Win's lament about the lost opportunity in the final fight in the Enemy Within Book 4 (from the Adventuring Party podcast #752, spoilers ahoy for Enemy Within) I thought I'd try and execute his vision as described in the final fight in my Spelljammer Academy mini-campaign.
The whole session was a bit of bricolage - it was the boarding and clearing of an old Dwarven Citadel taken over by a rogue Astral Elf star empire (the Xaryxians, straight out of the book). it started with a stolen version of the fleet action from Chapter 10 of Light of Xaryxis for the approach then gave the heroes the option to fight the fleet or be the landing party.
They chose landing party and for the interior of the Citadel I used Graphite Primes Mazes set up. The presence of a pair of artificers stood them in good stead getting past hazards but then there were two fights buried in the maze.
First was going to be the Xaryxian command post, second was their Scro allies who were looting technology from the Citadel. The Xaryxian fight was a nasty little brawl in a room, a knife fight in a phone-box that was difficult based off testing a range of the Xaryxian tougher types. There was effectively no terrain in that beyond a few stairways.
The scro fight I attempted to make more interesting. My sketch map below. Here we have high mesh gantries 60 ft up, 10 ft wide on either side of the room. The big thing in the middle is a 40 ft diameter cannon, a main gun for the citadel. 1/4 in from each end of the room and in the middle were a gantry of chain winches, essentially a curtain of chains. The opposition were three pairs of Scro warriors with a chest each they were carrying and a pair of Scro sergeants overseeing them. The two sergeants were up in the chain-gantries keeping an eye on things. The Scro were re-skinned Giff from the Boos Astral Menagerie - the warriors were CR3 Shipmates, the Sergeants CR6 Shock Troopers. They had muskets and grenades, according to the CR calculation widget this should have been a CR16 encounter, classed as Deadly.
The roster for the night was:
Having just listened to Hida-O-Win's lament about the lost opportunity in the final fight in the Enemy Within Book 4 (from the Adventuring Party podcast #752, spoilers ahoy for Enemy Within) I thought I'd try and execute his vision as described in the final fight in my Spelljammer Academy mini-campaign.
The whole session was a bit of bricolage - it was the boarding and clearing of an old Dwarven Citadel taken over by a rogue Astral Elf star empire (the Xaryxians, straight out of the book). it started with a stolen version of the fleet action from Chapter 10 of Light of Xaryxis for the approach then gave the heroes the option to fight the fleet or be the landing party.
They chose landing party and for the interior of the Citadel I used Graphite Primes Mazes set up. The presence of a pair of artificers stood them in good stead getting past hazards but then there were two fights buried in the maze.
First was going to be the Xaryxian command post, second was their Scro allies who were looting technology from the Citadel. The Xaryxian fight was a nasty little brawl in a room, a knife fight in a phone-box that was difficult based off testing a range of the Xaryxian tougher types. There was effectively no terrain in that beyond a few stairways.
The scro fight I attempted to make more interesting. My sketch map below. Here we have high mesh gantries 60 ft up, 10 ft wide on either side of the room. The big thing in the middle is a 40 ft diameter cannon, a main gun for the citadel. 1/4 in from each end of the room and in the middle were a gantry of chain winches, essentially a curtain of chains. The opposition were three pairs of Scro warriors with a chest each they were carrying and a pair of Scro sergeants overseeing them. The two sergeants were up in the chain-gantries keeping an eye on things. The Scro were re-skinned Giff from the Boos Astral Menagerie - the warriors were CR3 Shipmates, the Sergeants CR6 Shock Troopers. They had muskets and grenades, according to the CR calculation widget this should have been a CR16 encounter, classed as Deadly.
The roster for the night was:
31 July 2023
Shiny TTRPG links #131
Some fascinating stirrings among the blogs 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 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.
If you read one thing this week read From A Dark Forest on Old RPG Gamers and The Streaming Youth
Reverse Ettin wins Arcane Librarys adventure design jam with The Tragic Curse of GRIMHILL FORT
The Arcane Library gave us How to Write A D&D Adventure: The Complete Guide
Mazirian's Garden recalls Google Plus Mixtape, Track 03: Savage World of Krül
Periapt Games shares TTRPGs and the state, redux: Looting the dungeon
Wyrd Science gives us The Exploding Plastic Inevitabletop
The Hydra's Grotto writes The Ergonomic 3 Mile Hex
Gundobad Games discusses The Logic of Feudalism
Falling From Orbit has Running a “Political” Game - Campaign Retrospective
Follow Me And Die! celebrates their 14th Blogversary!
If you read one thing this week read From A Dark Forest on Old RPG Gamers and The Streaming Youth
Reverse Ettin wins Arcane Librarys adventure design jam with The Tragic Curse of GRIMHILL FORT
The Arcane Library gave us How to Write A D&D Adventure: The Complete Guide
Mazirian's Garden recalls Google Plus Mixtape, Track 03: Savage World of Krül
Periapt Games shares TTRPGs and the state, redux: Looting the dungeon
Wyrd Science gives us The Exploding Plastic Inevitabletop
The Hydra's Grotto writes The Ergonomic 3 Mile Hex
Gundobad Games discusses The Logic of Feudalism
Falling From Orbit has Running a “Political” Game - Campaign Retrospective
Follow Me And Die! celebrates their 14th Blogversary!
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