Shiny TTRPG links #151

More 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.

Of Dice and Dragons is taking signups for hosts for 2024 RPG Blog Carnival

Spriggan's Den proposes Lore 24

@shirtlessgoblin rediscovers amazing osr adventures from old copies of Dungeon magazine

Shuttered Room gives us DINOSAURS! - Back to Basic

The Tao of D&D wrote We Know Already How This Works - on populating city crawls

Playful Void shares Fleeing the Dungeon

Alone in the Labyrinth gives us The City Of Ghosts: Sandbox & Playtest

Take on Rules shares My Procedure for Facilitating Open Table Gaming and Expanding on My Procedures for Open Table Gaming

The Retired Adventurer gives us 40,000 Sectors: A Generator

Class / Race choices from 4 months of Baldurs Gate 3 vs tabletop 5e

Larian Studios, makers of Baldurs Gate 3, released an update to their player stats after four months of play including class and race choices of the players. They let us see these immediately after launch and they looked different to the typical tabletop choices despite being a pretty faithful implementation of the 5e ruleset. There were a bunch of theories kicked around at the time, in the comments here and elsewhere that boiled down to a strong hypothesis that people were running charisma-focussed characters since mechanically driven social interaction is much more important in a computer game than at the tabletop.

So here is the rerun of that number crunching - with the launch weekend and 4 month stats.

On class the broad patterns stay the same - way off what the tabletop surveys show but with fighter, rogue and barbarian climbing the leaderboard as paladin, warlock, monk and ranger drop. Clerics also became more popular though still standing last.

Review: Planescape: Adventures in the Multiverse (5e)

tl:dr; surprisingly good return to the planes, anchored around what looks like a fun campaign.

So I threw in my order for this back in the late spring and I've been paying little attention to the hype since. I was going to be getting this no matter what - all I did do was look back at the old Planescape Core Set (AD&D, 1994) to be able to compare what we got then and now. My expectations were rock bottom after Spelljammer, I was expecting a hack job content-wise so I guess they were set up for success from that angle.

Cover by Tony diTerlizzi

First impression - gorgeous art - I expected no less, especially since I heard diTerlizzi was back on board. It is a slightly softer style than his harder edged 90's stuff - I can see the path through childrens literature such as the Spiderwick Chronicles to get here - keeping the weird but sanding off some of the sharper edges. His Lady of Pain looks a lot less arbitrarily lethal than the one on the main covers and she should be terrifying. Maps and layout are good, this is WotC, those things should be taken for granted. Stylistically there is less 'these places are inherently dangerous' than the previous edition, there is a bit more Bond-esque 'heists and tension against fabulous backdrops' style from the art - more glorious, less grim.

One odd thing though is the weird smell, enough that even the in-house testing team commented on it. Normally cracking the book and taking a deep breath is one of the nice parts of getting a book not a pdf but in this case I'm getting a touch of a headache from having the things sitting open in front of me.

All contents of the slipcase, art by Tony diTerlizzi

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

Shiny TTRPG links #150

Significant doings in the TTRPG space this week. More 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.

Traverse Fantasy gives us Kubular & Other Attack Methods

Tales of the Lunar Lands writes I Love Underused Monsters

OSR VAULT gives us 100 Good/Evil Faction Motivations

Grumpy Wizard asks How Do I Keep Players From Ignoring Adventures In My Sandbox Campaigns?

The Fantastic is Fact on Getting Started with OD&D

Methods & Madness discusses The BECMI reaction table

Campaign Spin-Up VIII - Fuzzier West March Sandboxes

I ran an open table game and wanted to dig into a little how it all came off from the DM prep point of view. There are some player session write-ups that went up on Obsidian Portal.

Deliberate aspects of this campaign were:
- open table, drop-in game - go whenever 3 were available
- follow the players, drop hooks but no big plot
- minimise prep - I had three other campaigns running, there was no time for more prep
- newbie friendly

The tools used in sessions were
- a hidden depths table for the wilderness
- Brancalonia non-lethal brawl rules to make non-wilds/underground less dangerous but still fun
- an overloaded encounter table for the tunnels beneath their base
- a semi-randomly generated dungeon made with a map and tables from the DMG 3.5e
- someone elses Dungeon 23 run for the big hidden dungeon
- maps from photos - woodworm burrows, tourist guide to a castle, hexmap
- a city page generated using my workflow - the In Corpathium and Infinigrad generators combined with Stupidly Quick City-Building from r/DNDBehindTheScreen and steps 3 & 4 from creating fantasy villages, towns and cities to get the layout
- a few special sessions built off a dedicated tool - two from Where the Wheat Grows Tall, one from the bathhouse table

Going session by session on what drove play each time a group sat to table:

It Has A Name (NPC Management)

tl;dr: Name your NPCs to avoid slips and obfuscate who is important.

A theme of this year has been a lot more one shots and published material - me reading and assimilating other peoples stuff with not so much prep time before running it - Light of Xaryxis campaign and the Fistful of Quatrins series in the Bracalonia book among others. What I have found this has lead to is problems for me where NPCs have false identities or hidden aspects.

Examples:
This person they found has a core aspect of their identity that is not obvious on first glance.
That sailor is a shapeshifter? How to avoid slipping and referring to him by 'cultist' or 'shapeshifter'.
That voice behind the door is a monster? Better not refer to it as what it is.
That guy has a connection to people that is his only characterisation but you do not want that to spring out at folk

Solution - name them and never give another reference, even after things become clear.

Best part of this is that even after things come to blows and there are pieces on the battlefield, you just have different looking pieces but the names still obfuscate exactly what it is.

Spoilers ahead for light of Xaryxis (LoX).

Shiny TTRPG links #149

A wider ranging ramble about the web this week. More 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.

Plastic Polyhedra start Decembers RPG Blog Carnival: Endings

VDonnut Valley compiles November's Carnival Roundup Post

U.S. Postal Service Reveals Additional Stamps for 2024

Hipsters & Dragons gives us Designing & Running Heists in 5e D&D

Full Moon Storytelling suggests Using ‘third places’ to add cultural depth to your D&D campaign or character

Mazirian's Garden shares Downtime: Home away from Home

Grumpy Wizard asks How Do I Keep Players From Ignoring Adventures In My Sandbox Campaigns?