New Campaigns on Obsidian Portal (2024 Update)

tl;dr: very stable on 2023 - 5e still 2/3 of campaigns, Traveler muscles onto non-D&D leaderboard, absolute number of campaigns down 50% of long run average

With the old Roll20 Orr Reports fading ever further into the past , we have to look elsewhere to get a sense of the ebb and flow of games popularity. It has been a whole year so we can turn once more to new campaigns on Obsidian Portal to try and read the tea-leaves of what is going on out there. This was initially sparked by Troy Press writing in 2019 on RPG campaigns played by system and I have been tracking this for a few years now - and we have a 2024 update.

To recap - This was done by loading the Campaigns page on Obsidian Portal and noting the campaigns per system for each year available (back to 2008) using the Wayback Machine. Happily the format never changed to greatly and it is possible to get a roughly mid-year capture for every year.

Looking at the raw numbers of new campaigns added since last we looked, we see a chunky drop off in actual numbers, worse than we've seen post pandemic - now half down off the average for the past ~ 15 years.

If we normalise these varying number of campaigns to see just the relative change in popularity of systems we see things pretty much continue to go sidewayseverything else pretty much goes sideways, slight uptick in 5e share, Pathfinder stable, slight down-tick in the 'smaller' stuff outside the top 10.

Shiny TTRPG links #184

Interesting links from about the TTRPG space. For yet more links, see the previous list found here or you can check the RPG Blog Carnival or on Third Kingdom Games news roundup. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.

AUTOCRATIK Announced #RPGaDAY2024 for August

Attronarch's Athenaeum writes Fight On! issue 15 now available

Unordinary Tales gives us Campaign: Background Connections

Rise Up Comus shares Everybody wants to be initiated, nobody wants to be tricked

Lonely Star gives us NPC Attitude, or Why Social Rolls Bother Me So Much Sometimes

swordshapedleaves shares my best prep tip as a DM

Cavegirl writes I see we're talking about XP!

All Wizards Are Bastards

thydungeongal shares what the rules of modern D&D actually say the game is trying to achieve

Actual Test: Borderland Provinces Journey Generator

Borderland Provinces Journey Generator was a book that came in one of the gigantic Humble Bundles Old School Revival Dragons, Dungeons & Mazes from back in 2020. Since it said generator I thought I would give it a test to create a one shot for my Friday night open tables. I'm writing it up to follow Gorgon Bones first best practice: "Record your hobby experience" while trying to refine this template by adding session notes.

Throwing some dice at the various tables we get:
Patron table - Independent Merchant
Motivation - Returning a favour

Complex Journey table
Objective - catch up with someone else on their way to the destination
Location - Fort
Group - Druids
Threat - Local leader of the destination
Object - ownership documents
Complication - Pursuers

Final Wrap up
Major Problem: the delivery, information, or assistance is rejected for some reason (they don’t want the thing, they don’t believe the information, don’t want the help, suspect the characters of treachery, etc.)

Since there was an Inn generator I rolled up:
Roadside Inn: The Rugged Hearth
Wooden palisade-wall, main inn building, stable, outhouse, 1d3 outbuildings (shed, dovecote, etc.), chicken coops and/or pigsties. With no smithy, an inn this size generally does not have any additional horses
Dish horsemeat in cream sauce

I had a think about all this and tied it back to things sloshing around in the setting. There is a big swamp up river, the ditch of serpents, perfect for druids to lurk. A trip up river would also be a nice break after a bunch of sessions sailing down the coast. Druids with documents and pursuers and refused delivery all sounded like the druids had some ancient charter that would mess with the local status quo. The merchant is acting on an old favour to go to them and get their charter registered at the local city and needs some muscle - hence the PCs.

I blocked this out as:
1. Quest giving - merchant employs and briefs them
2. Set out - on the river
3. Pass local Dukes Castle, notice pursuers
4. Night at Inn: merchant reveals intent to detour to swamp
5. Mad Max style barge chase
6. Arrive at druids fort - make contact, get documents
7. Exit swamp (potential will o'wisps) - back to river - avoid pursuers
8. Refused on arrival - don't believe the information - local powers against them

Actual session play - retagged here to match the elements above.

1. Approached by Folbitz, a black-marketeer operating out of the Golden Cockerel, our party agrees to help escort him on a trading run up the river to Appollonia. Our heroes are Missy the centaur fighter, Sylvio the elven cleric annd humans Craig the brawler, Ashington the rogue and Marcillus the gladiator.

2. Setting out on a barge, the party notes some shady characters approaching the Golden Cockerel as they round the river bend out of sight.

3. Further up the river, swiftly driven by the strong efforts of Missy, Craig and Marcillus, they spy guards from Cat Castle also on the watch for traffic on the river but Folbitz has hidden amongst the cargo and they pass unnoticed.

4. Arriving at the riverside Inn of the Rugged Hearth, Folbitz has them stop early for the night then reveals that the real purpose of their trip is to pick up cargo from contacts of his inland. A barge full of obviously disguised river-patrol arrive and the players engage them in cards while Folbitz hides out the back. After taking most of the guards cash, angering the sergeant with talk of unions and hearing that Folbitz is wanted as a trader in hallucinogens and inciter of revolutions, the party venture out back and rough up Folbitz to check his story. Folbitz insists that the facts are the same but the perspective is different - the guards want him because new perspectives cause them to question the status quo. Squeezing him for more money the party ups their promised pay with performance bonii.

Departing the Inn they camp in the forest then venture into the Ditch of Serpents swamp the next day, stumbling over a dreadful Sleech which chews up Craig and Missy before being downed.

6. Arriving to Ironoak, a druidfort, they are welcomed and granted hospitality and guided through the druids various brews and produce before being sent back on their way with cargo and a charter to trade their hallucinogenic mushroom wine.

7. Trekking back across the swamp and around the inn they load their barge and set off up river, getting a good head start before the guards notice and give chase.

5. A long chase up river sees them in sight of Appollonia before they run the barge aground and offload the illicit cargo into the woods. Missy starts and argument with the guards, insisting they need better pay and lighter duties which leaves them arguing on their boat as they drift back downriver.

8. To finally enter Appollonia they spend a day creating a religious parade with wicker costume and sun masks for a festival to Pelor. Marching on the city their convincing display attracts more locals and further persuasive argument wins them entry to the city with Folbitz unnoticed among them. Folbitz delivers the ancient trade charter to the merchants guild then sells the now-legal mushroom wine, thanking the party for their assistance.

Session report ends

All told this ran squeaky due to the table - three of the players hit the beers hard, way up on what we usually get and by the end of it were slurring and slow which was a pain. Worse, early on as soon as they walked into the Rugged Hearth one player (man) went to spike Missy's (woman) apple juice and I just said no, not happening. Can't be dealing with that, but man, having it even come up is a drag. Happily, benefit of open tables is you don't have to deal with this stuff often and I won't have to run for these guys again.

That aside, some bits of my lay out got adjusted on the fly - the barge-pursuit got swapped to a later stage of the river travel, which was fine, and the night ended with a truly preposterous Pelorite heresy with a cooked up religious festival to make their way into the city - but content wise it worked ok. The Borderlands Generator gave enough to work with - I thought it was going to be a little sparse but turned out it was plenty.

August 2024 RPG Blog Carnival: It Came From Beyond Time

Welcome to the new month for the RPG Blog Carnival - our topic for August 2024 is "It Came From Beyond Time" - on my mind is the stramge effects of long life and magic can have in dredging things up from the deep past and hurl them into your current campaign. You can find some deeper background on the RPG Blog Carnival on 'of Dice and Dragons'.

If you want to join the carnival, write up your own entry and post it in a comment below, send me a link (my username at gmail.com) or ping me on the 'blog-carnival' OSR discord channel or find me bluesky, twitter or mastodon. I will gather all the participants into a wrap-up post on September 4th.

Below is my own take on the topic.

Shiny TTRPG links #183

More interesting links from about the net. For yet more links, see the previous list found here or you can check the RPG Blog Carnival or on Third Kingdom Games news roundup. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.

Alex Schroeder gives us One Page Dungeon Contest

Welcome to the Deathtrap writes The Adventure Game Part of D&D Directs the Faction-Driven Wargame Part

Grumpy Wizard explains How I Referee Large Groups of Players in Old School D&D

of Dice and Dragons gave us Use a burn down list to keep from running out of ideas

Whose Measure God Could Not Take shares Simple Underdark Point of Interest Generator

The Latest Enemy wrote A Short Wish List

Aboleth Overlords writes Ye Olde Fantasy: Family Matters

Your great-grand-elf's elvish: long lives slowing language change (RPG Blog Carnival)

/The RPG Blog Carnival prompt from Beneath Foreign Planets of WORDS! Etymology, Onomatology and Linguistics sparked some other thoughts for me - on the stability of language when there are very long-lived organisms around.

The core thought here is that you can find thousand year old elves, dragons and giants around - presumably still speaking the same language with the same accent as when they learned their languages in their your - so accents and languages would change much more slowly in such settings than in our own world.

In my home campaign one of the key blocks of background was the elven conquest of the main continent about 5000 years ago and their great withdrawal about 1000 years ago. This has been time enough for many, many generations of the various different short lived races to have lived and died - but alongside this there are the children of the elves who departed 1000 years ago.

This sets up elven as the lingua franca for the local region based on elvish conquests and for that elven to remain recognisably similar because you are talking to the same elves or their immediate offspring. Even within elven populations, since a generation is 100-200 years and their lifespan is ~800 years, then an elven child will learn their elven in part from their great-grand-parent who will still be about. Now, noting not everyone is going to have the same accent as their parents, but this does act as a brake on linguistic drift.

This stabilising influence of very long lived creatures would also apply for giant and draconic and one would assume acting on goliath and dragonborn populations too. The big question is whether these long-lived creatures would also stabilise other langages for other populations? This would be a question of contact - if elves and dwarves are in frequent contact with shorter-lived humans or goblinoids *and* speak with them in their own tongues, it could happen. If contact is less frequent then you would end up with divergence like modern Swiss-German sounding like Ye Olde German to the Austrians and Germans - understandable but not quite the same.

Counter-vailing forces, pushing greater change in language, would be speaking populations isolated from one another and shorter lifespans. I think the shorter life-spans would not necessarily have as strong an effect on causing language drift - but things like populations being able to live in noticeably different environments would.

Greater density of languages and dialects occur around broken up places (mountain valleys, difficult terrain) which keep populations from talking to one another - in D&D you would have a further layer of hazardous barriers (in monsters) and also a broader span of what is habitable - underdark, aquatic, hot and cold environments all have sentients who can dwell there who are 'isolated' from other environments that are uninhabitable to them, but perfectly fine for others.

This sets up two opposing forces - first lots of population groups dwelling in relative isolation and the stabilising anchors of the long-lived. However, assuming the tendency is towards people adopting what most easily allows them to be understood, then where there is contact between the two, it will be change that is slowed and pulled back towards the old ways.

What about transmission along dwarf roads, planar portals and other non-linear connections between places? This would just further serve to stabilise language other greater distances.

For the purposes of world-building and running your game, this means you can with some justification say that adventurers walking around today can understand old, even ancient, languages in a way that would seem quite unreasonable in the real world. Adventurers could well be able to read the script on the ancient tomb or spellbook even before magical assistance. All this is helpful to us as GMs because it gives us a handful of languages we can expect to remain stable for us to deliver our clues in.

"Planars got a lot of words for 'ethereal'" (RPG Blog Carnival)

This months RPG Blog Carnival comes from Beneath Foreign Planets with the prompt WORDS! Etymology, Onomatology and Linguistics.

I have shied away from using language too heavily in world-building because I have not had much luck getting people to follow up on cues tied to language - the base assumption being that names, words, places and the like are the outputs of generic fantasyland slush and not actually backed by anything meaningful and thus not worth digging deeply into.

However, if I was to weave language into a setting more deeply a thread I would follow is the effect of connection to gods and to the planes. These provide a common seeding, almost a stabilising effect across settings - particularly with some groups (elves in particular) having extra-planar populations like eladrin and shadar-kai.

The current implied D&D setting has a lot of planar interaction - if I take a look at the players that pass across my open tables we have a lot of tieflings, genasi, aasimar and the operating assumption most people have coming to table is that these things are unremarkably common.

One would assume this understanding of 'the planes are out there' would lead to a much more finer grained to say 'of planar origin' with the classic 'Irish have a lot of words for rain' higher fidelity around more common aspects.

One line to take would be that this make planar things unworthy of comment, so ordinary as to not need specific words. The other line to take would be that familiarity would be enough that common folk about your setting would have at least passing familiarity with planar effects.

A couple of ways that this could manifest: