Review: Reach of the Roach God

tl:dr; a creepy cult and lots of great sites fill this (final) underground expansion for A Thousand Thousand Islands, arriving with bitter news.

This was the juggernaut kickstarter from the Thousand Thousand Islands crew - getting 10x on its target and gifting us this beautiful hardback book to go sit with the Stygian Library and the Veins of the Earth as classics of the OSR. This blog is a long-standing fan of the Thousand Thousand Islands so having this arrive and then not two days later watching Zedeck and Munkao go daggers drawn and declare A Thousand Thousand Islands dead really took the shine off it.

Hardback arrived

First impression is that this is a beautiful artefact even before you crack the cover. The design work is fantastic from the creepy roach legs to the ribbons to the custom Thousand Thousand Islands typeface. Our overarching theme is the struggle against the Roach God Odoyoq - starting with signs of his cultists, then the spread of his influence through underground communities.

Shiny TTRPG links #134

Concentrated goodness as I work down the post-holiday backlog. 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.

Mindstorm writes RINGING THE BELL, A simple reputation system

Prismatic Wasteland complements that with Social Monsters

Jared Sinclair writes Rules Elide and Its Consequences

Argent Interregnum responds with Inevitability of Elision

B/X BLACKRAZOR gives us Learning From The Oldest School

Blood, Death, Satan & Metal gives us Book of the Black Wizards OSR Spellbook Review (w/ bonus playlist!)

Don't Split the Party wrote Terror in the Baneblade

THE BARDIC INQUIRY gives us 4 tips to schedule a consistent DnD group

d20 illithid cultural artefacts

After spending a bunch of time thinking about illithid worlds due to Spelljammer, some general thoughts about things they will have lying around beyond the usual, recognisable stuff.

First, the general aesthetic will be:
- upsettingly asymmetrical because they like to hold things with their tentacles and long-fingered hands and like to know which way is the 'front' by feel
- flanged or ridged design with bits sticking out for ease of tentacle holding
- sensory tools for the senses of a mindflayer - emotion (empath), thought (telepathy), telekinesis, dream (which for them is 'channel the far realm'), body-mastery (a slightly taboo hobby of attuning with whatever form your tadpole took over)
- textural approach - etched in qualith text is very common both as instruction on the item, makers marks, dedications and other notes associated with its use or origin
- materials can include mother-of-pearl and other shell-like substances shaped into desired forms and highly precise carvings rendered using telekinetic abilities

d20 illithid cultural artifacts
1. Qualith meditation beads - quadripartite inscriptions spiralling around beads on a string, a relatively common design with a huge variety of writings available. Can be inscribed with koan-type truths, community doctrines, great questions, forget-me-not messages
2. Infinite sagas - a long flexible spiral, typically an embroidered or otherwise textured ribbon, containing stories that run on forever, reflecting the time-skipping nature of mindflayer dominion itself ".. until once more, at the far end of time, our Empire rose again and..."
3. Empathy detector - equivalent to an ear-horn, particularly for illithids who have spent too much time alone and want a little more clarity. Weakens defenses against 'blast' psychic attacks. Usually a hidden necklace as wearing one is a sign of weakness.
4. Emotional broadcaster - usually a very ostentatious head-piece that makes sure that what you feel, everyone else feels too. Wearing one of these is an illithid boss-move, be very sure of your place on the social ladder.
5. Empathy shield - for when others tiresome emotions are just not worth dealing with. Also provides some limited defense against psychic attacks. Usually a discrete brooch or pendant worn hidden as openly displaying you have one of these is seen as rude.

Fading of the r/OSR blogroll

tl;dr: comments and upvotes are dropping on the r/OSR blogroll - time to de-automate or un-pin?

Every week I flag the r/OSR blogroll as a place to look for interesting blogposts - I took over posting them every Sunday from u/Sofinho1980 of Alone in the Labyrinth as they took it over from u/shuttered_room of Shuttered Room. Around the start of the year there was a question about getting the blog-roll pinned to the top of the r/OSR subreddit and at the same time the mods offered to automate its creation which I took them up on. One or both of these may have been a mistake and I suspect it was pinning.

Taking 'upvotes' as a proxy of who is seeing and engaging with the blogroll, it took a hit immediately and has so far not recovered and is trending further down.

Shiny TTRPG links #133

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

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?

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