Masquerade as social depth-crawl (RPG Blog Carnival)

For this months blog carnival - hosted by VDonnut Valley on the topic of Let’s Party! Festivals and ceremonies! I bring Masquerade as social depth-crawl.

In my Spelljammer campaign my players decided to run a shell-game masquerade - they had one princess and decided that all three elven PCs (incl. the barbarian) and three hired locals were going to get the same dress and throw a giant masquerade to put the princess in contact with potential allies while also having cover against the hostile factions and antagonist prince who were also in the city.

I dug out my old Festivities as a social depth-crawl and decided to use that as the chassis - set up an encounter list with the players rolling more and more d4's as things progress.

The key addition for all this is that the players are hosting do they get to drive the 'chaos factor' - each time block they get to amp up or chill out the party - adding a d4 or holding at the current level. Two consequtive rounds of 'chilling' will step the dice count down.

The big thing about a Masquerade is everyone pretends that the disguises work and they do not recognise each other, giving lots of opportunities for breaking social norms and acting out, for good or ill.

I swept the net for some ideas to get started - key was Dungeons & Kobolds - and then tailored those to fit the circumstances. Genericising the events list we get:

d20 Masquerade events
1. Local flavour - fortune tellers, world colour
2. Local flavour - significant NPC introduction
3. Key NPC interaction (low stakes)
4. Hostile encounter (low stakes) - pickpocket/jewel thief
5. Carousing opportunity
6. NPC conflict - bodyguards duelling
7. Gambling opportunity
8. Dancing requirement (medium social stakes)
9. NPC opportunity - guest drops something interesting
10. Overheard information - NPCs flexing the deniability of being masked
11. Duel challenge to PC or allied NPC
12. Hostile encounter - e.g. BBEG run in, social monster like vampire or succubus
13. Allied NPC or PC intoxicated, must be handled
14. Hostile NPC social approach, does not recognise masked PC
15. Spotted schemes and plots - opportunity to spy/disrupt
16. Campaign event trigger (e.g. allied NPC assassination attempt)
17. Stumble onto schemes and plots - as 15 but surprised)
18. Campaign event trigger (e.g. friendly NPCs turned to hostile)
19. Campaign event trigger (e.g. hostile NPC ambushes isolated PC)
20. Positive happenstance (potential ally comes to you)

And the additional wrinkle I am throwing in is four locations -
Interior Rooms - medium visiblity
Private chambers - low visibility
Street and grounds - medium visibility
Balcony - visible from the street and grounds - high visibility

Visibility affects how likely others are to get involved in events. If the players split up and are in private chambers, they are on their own - but also can avoid notice. In medium visibility, locations others have a chance to get involved or assist, both friend and foe. For the balcony anyone who is not in private chambers will be able to get involved if they wish.

As it happened on the night the players did some tweaking of the antagonists noses, gathered an ally and then launched their big visible set piece move which then triggered bad-guy reaction and at that point the Masquerade was gone out the window and we pretty much wrapped the session there. The players never backed off the party, running it all the way to 5d4 rolls directly. The sequence that came up was:
1. The fortune teller reads the colours of a PC, making them the center of attention and giving them a chance to grandstand
2. A skillful jewel thief is spotted and recruited on the basis of their talent
3. One of the princess-dressed PCs spots some gamblers and engages in dice-blowing for luck
4. A duel breaks out between NPC factions, two allied factions to the players build friction between them
5. Another duel breaks out between members of the same non-allied NPC faction
6. An officer of the antagonists does not recognise a PC and seeks to dance with them, putting that PC incognito with the 'foe' when things kick off
7. The BBEG spotted watching the PCs

A lot of the content of the encounter list did not get hit but even so I think it was worth having a mechanical structure for events rather than just freeforming it. I feel that my rolling off an encounter list and them having to deal with events which may or may not segue neatly off what they were just doing is more real than fully 'yes, and'-ing the events of the night. Certainly it helps me because I too am waiting to find out what happens as opposed to just running a railroad.

However, in the same way that combats rarely last more than 3 rounds before the bad guy is toast, you could probably get away with a 12-event list and be pretty safe you have enough. There will likely be some repetition which will stretch the use you get out of it.

Shiny TTRPG links #145

A forage around the past glories of the blogosphere as well as the latest this week. More links can be found on the previous list found here. You can find more links on this weeks r/OSR blogroll or the RPG Blog Carnival or on Third Kingdom Games news roundup. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.

The CRPG Addict shares BRIEF: Everything We Know About 1970s Mainframe RPGs We Can No Longer Play

All Dead Generations writes Dungeon Skrimishing

Methods & Madness gave us O5R in actual play: playing 5e the old school way

Coins and Scrolls wrote Converting 5E to OSR

Throne of Salt shareds Kicking it Old-School with 5e: Character Creation

Hex Culture proposed Lamentations of the Fifth Princess

Gazing Hermit works up F is for Frequently Asked Questions based on twenty quick questions for your campaign setting from Jeffs Gameblog and 20 Quick Questions: Rules from Necropraxis.

Daily Adventure Prompts gives us The Daily Adventure Prompts Masterpost

Review: Uncharted Journeys

tl:dr; well regarded journey mechanics plus a worlds worth of encounters.

I grabbed this off a kickstarter vaguely understanding it was the ripped out and expanded 5e version of well regarded journey rules from Cubicle 7's Middle Earth game. That coupled with 'support your European game houses' got me to lay my money down.

Cover art by Antonio de Luca

First impression - unexpectedly chonky! Great art, nice interiors, good printer smell. Lots and lots of stuff in here. After reading through it I realise this is a giant nouveau cuisine hexcrawl - all the good stuff you need to populate hexmaps in a wide variety of terrains are just shifted into lists instead of a map key. Even if you never use the journey rules, 5/6ths of the content in here is great inspiration for populating your worlds.

So what is all this stuff you get in the book?

Class preference among games society new-joiners

Trinity College's tabletop gaming society posted a photo from their latest Freshers week where they polled new society joiners on what was their favourite D&D class. I snip the relevant bit below:

They got another 50 odd folk between this photo and wrapping up and kindly stuck the numbers up on their discord - recovered here and compared to the patterns we have seen elsewhere.

Two thoughts - first - that is not a fit with either of the dominant trends - fighter first or spellcaster first - this is a new thing - outdoorsy led with ranger and druid having a strong showing.

Second thought - if this is how people joining games socs are posing, where is our exploration pillar stuff? The people cry out for the chance to run around in the wilderness!

All this of course with a grain of salt, sample size is what it is, etc. This was my old uni games soc... a bit ago so I when I saw this I thought it was fun.

Shiny TTRPG links #144

Interesting TTRPG posts from about the web - more links can be found on the previous list found here. You can find more links on this weeks r/OSR blogroll or the RPG Blog Carnival or a roundup of non-blog news on Third Kingdom Games roundup. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.

Githyanki Diaspora ponders Ancient D&D and asks Ancient D&D 2: What do you do?

Ropeblogi does another meaty theory round-up in TEORI-INDBLIK #134

Dice Goblin asks Why Venture Into The Dungeon?

Attronarch's Athenaeum lays out Dragon Magazine: Judge Advice Collection and begins with (Part 1 of 8)

Spider Queen compares Capital-L Lore vs actionable info

The Great Wheel of the Far North (GLoGtober 7 '23)

Last of Glass Candles GLoGtober '23, challenge #7 is from their own list - "A post about a weird train." Here endeth my run at GLoGtober for 2023!

The technologies of the Forge clan are misunderstood. Outsiders think their discussions of agitating water and fire elementals by proximity to one another are their crude ways of describing steam technologies. In fact it is more like 'cats-in-a-sack' drive.

The pinnacle of their works is the Great Wheel. A towering framework, a pyramid on sleds with a roaring, spinning disk in the centre. Within the disk, an unlikely prize - a fire elemental that is fascinated by artifice and adores clambering around inside the labyrinth within the disk. The outside of the disk is grooved with treads that bites into the glaciers and tundra and hurls the train along.

Behind are great sleds with lesser sleds and wagons tied down under rickety frames on which catch dries, travellers loaf and sight-seers perch for the view. The Great Wheel grinds along throughout the year, shuttling nomadic communities around on the great ice-fields, bringing fishers from the rivers to the sea, herdsmen across the tundra and above all towing the workshops and stores of the clan in an endless trading circuit.

The Great Wheel itself is attended by a dedicated group of artificers from the Forge clan, some old conjuring hands who commune with the fire elemental, danger-addicts who maintain the ever-spinning parts, and apprentices come to learn from the others at this culmination of their craft.

The train is a perpetual nomads conclave, the default seat of government of the Forge clan since more likely than not the largest concentration of the clan elders will probably be on-board at any given time.

d6 groups onboard just now
1. forge mages with acolytes and arcane equipment
2. skimmer crews with their ice-sleds
3. herdsfolk with their herd
4. nomads with dwellings, packbeasts, families
5. workers and crafters, processing some of the cargo in transit
6. dungeon-divers with packs of equipment en route to a site

The Great Wheel descends on a location like an anteater come to a nest, disgorging tribesfolk and warrior bands, cracking open dungeons, uprooting wizard towers and breaching fortresses that what lies within can be hauled out and carried away back to the icefields.

d6 raw plunder being carried
1. raiders with hand-carried winnings from raids
2. a whole ship, dragged from the sea
3. a mine, dismantled
4. quarried materials, for a new fortress
5. a great beast, being butchered and rendered down on the move
6. a wizards tower, wrenched whole from it foundations

It is said with some encouragement the spirit of the wheel can do more than simply drive it. Witnesses say they have seen it form a great humanoid shape and fling things - barrels of pitch, rocks and even grappling hooks to drag things to it. Mostly those who witness this and live to tell the tale recall the unnerving joyful yells of the creature, cheery 'yaaahhhgs' ringing our across the tundra as it visits chaos wherever it has arrived.

d20 Puzzle boxes. (GLoGtober 6 '23)

Taking on Glass Candles GLoGtober '23, challenge #6 is from a list by metalsnail - "Puzzle boxes."

Taking a puzzle box as a thing that requires certain actions to unlock it that are more than just 'insert key'.

This puzzling box is...
1. A key itself - rotate it and a demi-planar structure opens up with many things stored within it.
2. A bioform larvae - effectively a seed; this box unlocks into different forms depending on what it is planted in. Rich soil begets a bush that delivers nourishing fruit. Sands and gravels gives a woody vine that provides spices. Precious metals yields a geode-like tuber that can be cracked open for semi-precious gems. Blood or corpses sprout a fearsome hunting beast.
3. covered with tiny sockets. If the gems that once were there are replaced with similar tiny diamonds (400gp worth) and left out under the stars that match the constellation formed, it opens.
4. A memory palace - touching this puzzle box dumps someone elses memory palace into your mind; finding their knowledge is easy, understanding it is harder and finding yourself again at the end might be very tricky.
5. A grimoire - unfolding each panel of this puzzle box reveals magical texts and minor trials of arcane knowledge to unlock further panels. This is an elaborate tutorial from a bygone era.
6. A labyrinth - correctly triggering the 'lock' transports anyone nearby into the intricately carved folds of the box. The things stored within are magically shrunken.
7. Covered with tiny pins - pushing them in or out to form the likeness of someone animates it into their behaviours, aiding in attempts to impersonate that person
8. Very faintly carved along its faces - inking and printing off the faces will reveal a riddle that must be solved to open the box
9. An engine - unlocking it reveals some gears that deliver a low revolution, effectively infinite torque. The 'lock' is just a safety mechanism.
10. Covered with intricate patterns with a number of tiny flaws that must be very carefully pushed back into place to unlock it.
11. Faced with hollow chimes that must be rung to play the creators favourite tune. It remains a popular ditty, you will get earwormed.
12. Made with sides that must be pried off and formed into keys. These fit together to unlock other sides and unfold the box into a large extradimensional space.
13. Wrapped about with a very long, fragile string that must be carefully unwound in just the right way or it breaks and you must start again. Some find it soothing.
14. Carved with channels down which strong liquor must be poured and then ignited before the box will open. A flaw in the design means you can just sit it in a bowl of flaming alcohol also.
15. Etched with lines from various poems, some obvious, some obscure. All the poems must be recited in full to the box before it opens.
16. Openable only when breathed upon after you have eaten something painfully spicy.
17. Made with a single white side that must be coloured in with a new colour to open. It has been around a while and finding a new unique colour has been tricky for some time.
18. Carved with lines of qualith and has grasping tentacles carved along the edges. You must hold it to your forehead and sacrifice a memory to open it. You get the last memory sacrificed.
19. Stamped with the icon of a solar god and opens after being left in view of the sun for a full dawn-to-dusk cycle. Any shadow during this time resets it.
20. Clearly marked with instructions to solve the complex push-button problem but is very hard to read and operate alone. Easily done with assistance.