Review: Beyond Corny Gron

tl:dr; a focussed mountains and caverns setting with great exploration mechanics, world invoked via bestiary and old-school style

Picked this up on kickstarter, part of my 'back the locals' approach and wow, this was something else. From Nerd Sirens based out of Poland, this is an expansion of Corny Groń a solo/micro rpg, with lots of random tables for wilderness and mountain adventures and mechanics referencing Knave but fitting any old school system.

Art by Alicia Wiśniewska

The strongest wow-factor out of the box of anything that I've gotten my hands on recently - it was both larger format and thicker than I was expecting and the cloth and foil cover pops impressively. Inside is cleanly and clearly laid out with a consistent wood-cut/lino-cut art style throughout. There is a really nice touch in the right page border has the chapter list with the chapter you are in bolded - great for quick reference and keeps with the spare, clean style.

There were also four postcard with sites and encounters for mountains and caves bundled in from the kickstarter. These replicate what is on the inside covers, front and back, along with a nice woodcut art piece on the front.

Shiny TTRPG links #159

Only the most curious links, stumbled over in a week of browsing. 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.

Whose Measure God Could Not Take writes Considerations on Jaquaysing the Dungeon br>
Rise Up Comus has Four Tips to Drive Role Playing

Rolltop Indigo gave us Staring Back at the Invisible which started back with The Invisible Rulebooks

Playthings of Mad Gods shares The Power of Messy Success

Pity-Crit gives us The Smallest Gods: Unworthy Divinities For D&D

Laidback DM writes Running Big Parties

Open Table Procedures - Euro Edition

tl;dr: tempo of booking, prepping and running open table games

Take on Rules wrote My Procedure for Facilitating Open Table Gaming and cast a light on a very different gaming set-up to my own so I thought I would document how things are running here in Vienna.

As per Gorgon Bones best practices - though this allows me to hit the trifecta of Record your hobby experience, Introduce others to your hobby and Participate in a hobby community.

Sequence

Long-lead (long beforehand)
- program up the slots in the Meetup group with generic 'visit our forum' links
- pull down pre-gens from the Brancalonia site, print them
- block out Friday nights on my calendar
- put up a setting brief on the forum

D-5/7 - forum opens for the next session
- confirm venue - 99% of the time it is our usual, occassionally we skip to somewhere else. This usual is a club-house for wargamers/card gamers that we connected with last year after a few years of cafe gaming. It is a bit out of the way but cheap. Lots of big tables, a fair amount of seats
- watch for the next Friday thread to go up on the forum; jump on and say if I'm going and what I'll be running/playing. we fill quickly these days so getting in early is important
- usually I run, copy/paste my little Brancalonia pitch
- update the Meetup entry for this date with a link to the specific forum thread
- tweak post-session summary from last time to make a new entry on the campaign log

D-2/5 - prep the session
- of an evening I prep for the game - read the content, write my own timeline
- spot any recurring NPCs, factions or the like for Conservation of NPCs
- one of the forum organisers will tot up the attendees, list the DMs, the players who have expressed a preference for a DM and who is left
- check who I have at my table - any repeat players and any hooks to work in

D-1/Gameday
- pack my go-bag off my checklist
- leave work, big coffee in a thermos for at table, small coffee and muffin for on the way
- get to the venue, check my name off and pony up my €3, find a seat and drag it to the table
- help match open seats with stray players once I get there
- change into my Brancalonia t-shirt because I've got one

Review: Valley of the Five Fires

tl:dr; a dense module of mechanic, lore and adventure sites for nomadic adventure.

This is a 'Fantasy Setting and Adventure Module' that I got print on demand from Lulu grace of the discount stickers and one of the many 'best of the OSR on Lulu' lists. I have been pretty happy with Richard LeBlanc's previous work like d30 Sandbox Companion and this continues that good trend. This is pitched for 0e, 1e and BX but there is lots in here for whatever system you run. I am coming to look at it now on the back of other 'steppe' connected recent releases ranging from Ultraviolet Grasslands through to Empires of the Silk Road and Wayfarer: Nomadic Realms.

Cover art by Nicholas Roerich

Decent production quality from Lulu - black and white art within mostly by the author, all very coherent and clean. Much of the artwork within the book was done by the author and I have a lot of respect for the level of industry involved here.

Shiny TTRPG links #158

A handful of links from a travelling 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.

Illusory Sensorium provides the February RPG Blog Carnival prompt Illusions & Delusions

The Lizard Man Diaries gives us The Tactile and Generic TTRPG - Boardgamey tablefeel using bits and bobs.

TRAIPSE writes Overloading the search die

Goblin Punch gives us Dungeon: Castle of the Gribblies

Illusory Sensorium gives us Doom Clock

Playful Void shares Diagetic advancement and inventory

Methods & Madness gives us Wilderness level tables

TASKERLAND writes Into the OSR: On Diegetic Advancement

Catastrophic Success: Venue Capacity Management

tl;dr: at the limit of venue capacity, how to spin out another venue to avoid turning people away?

We had to do our first turn-aways from our regular Friday night sessions because we simply did not have the chairs in the venue, which sucks but is also kind of impressive. Membership of the Meetup group has been climbing steadily - we're still not seeing more than a tiny fraction of them but even that fraction has been enough to drive up our attendance - and in particular it is the problematic aspect of people not reading the instructions.

Our venue capacity is 25 and a bit - the bit being contingent on how busy the other people who use the space are. If they're not up to much then we can fit another table - if they are busy then we're 25 as a hard limit. We dinged 37 a week or so back - and then some extra folk turned up and we could not accommodate them.

Review: Through Sunken Lands

tl:dr; a book you bring to table to run a sword and sorcery game where noone has prepped, a toolkit for DMs who understand the basics, should work with any edition or retroclone.

I was gifted a copy by friend of the blog C. Kinch over Christmas and am trying to get to it in less than a year this time. I had heard of Through Sunken Lands before, it had been spoken highly of by those talking about retroclones, OSR games and games that were simpler vehicles to deliver the same fun. There had also been mention of playbooks as one of the key things it did which I took for this to be a Powered by the Apocalypse system - very wrongly in fact - but that mistake is what had kept me from checking this out myself for a very long time.

First impression - decent thick hardback, some muted-tone, somewhat spooky art that conveys a more mythos-leaning sword and sorcery game. Lay out is nice and clean with one big 'huh' thing I would query which hides a great deal of the glorious promise of this book unless you hunt for it. When you first pick this up, you get the intro, then you are straight into the system and while the system is grand it is nothing so special to make this stand out from among many similar retroclones. The real meaty goodness of this book are in the later sections - but that is like saying 'the show gets good in season 4' - I'm long gone by then. You should in fact skip the core rules when you read this - intro, then How To Play, then Playbooks and Scenario Packs. Those are the three gold veins in this book.