It Came From Beyond Time - RPG Blog Carnival Wrap Up

And so we conclude the August 2024 RPG Blog Carnival - our topic was "It Came From Beyond Time!" - on my mind was the strange effects of long life and magic can have in dredging things up from the deep past and hurl them into your current campaign.

We got responses from:


Sea of Stars on time in their campaign world and who keeps the records.

Foreign Planets with the Ape race-as-class with a glorious d100 random advancements table.

VDonnut Valley with A few treasures of distant past - even more irreplaceable than merely precious or powerful.

Elemental Reductions wrote On Temporal Displacement on the why and how they have used elements of their dungeon project to convey the sense of ancient time.

My own entry has d10 + d6 + d6 ways things from the deep past can return to haunt or save your campaign

You can find some deeper background on the RPG Blog Carnival on 'of Dice and Dragons'. Our next topic is going to be "Wondrous Weapons and Damning Dweomers" hosted by Attronarch's Athenaeum.

Shiny TTRPG links #188

More toothy links from about the internet. For even 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.

RPG Taverns gives us Dungeons & Dragons at Edinburgh Fringe

Blake DeRusha writes D&D’s Lightning In A Bottle: How Moldvay, Marsh, and Cook Got It Right

James Poniewozik for Time writes How D&D Changed the Culture

All Dead Generations shares Mont Sainte Bec

Le Chaudron Chromatique gives us My new Black Sword Hack Campaign

The Land Of Nod wrote Downtime and Special Guest Heroes [Notion]

Roll to Doubt shares What a Horrible Night to Cast a Curse

Vladar's Blog gives us First year of Mystara campaign

Ben Riggs writes D&D Co-Creator Gary Gygax was Sexist. Talking About it is Key to Preserving his Legacy.

RPG-a-Day Speedrun

We got the RPG-a-Day done by Autocratik again this year - I've been hesitant to push them out over socials because I see a lot of snarling about feed-jamming - but the Gartopia discord for Garblag Games has been doing them in a quiet channel and it has been fun so I am collating them here:

Below are the prompts and my answers:
1 - First RPG bought this year - Knave 2e (by payment processed) or Qelong (actual new purchase in FLGS)
2 - Most recently played - 5e (Friday night D&D)
3 - Most often played RPG - 5e (33/49 sessions thie year)
4 - RPG with great art - A Thousand Thousand Islands zines
5 - RPG with great writing - Veins of the Earth
6 - RPG that is easy to use - 5e since everyone knows it? A 5e table fills in a heartbeat, any other system you have to sell it.
7 - RPG with 'good form' - Good Society
8 - An accessory you appreciate - DM screen my home campaign players made for me - big fancy dragon on the front, portraits of the PCs on the initiative trackers, its awesome

9 - An accessory you'd like to see - for VTT's some kind of 'mask and voice' filter that would allow a DM to appear as whatever NPCs - runs as part of a VTT. We have a million daft instagram filters, this should be doable. Even pop-up static portrait and a voice-changer would be cool.
10 - RPG you'd like to see on TV - All my answers are D&D setting answers - I'd love to see either the Mystara setting (Princess Ark) or Spelljammer (or even MtG Weatherlight) tested to see if fantasy flying-ship Star Trek could work.
11 - RPG with well supported one-shots - Dungeon Crawl Classic - famous for its starter funnels.
12 - RPG with well supported campaigns - B/X? If we count it as the lingua franca of the OSR then all the megadungeons like Barrowmaze, Rappan Athuk, Stonehell, Castle Xyntillian etc are a bunch of campaigns
13 - Evocative environments - Veins of the Earth - atomic bees....
14 - Compelling characters - SLA industries - Halloween Jack et al
15 - Great character gear - Dr Grordborts Scientific Adventure Violence - your weapons are gear - your spellcasting uses gear! Your skills are more gear! (though the original 40k Rogue Trader had great gear, tons of which imply it should have been used as a TTRPG not just a wargame)
16 - Quick to learn - Just reading Knave 2e; seems pretty straightforward. Anything without complex character classes and huge spell lists...?
17 - An engaging RPG community - Gartopia which actually ran this - though for me the RPGVienna forum is absolutely where I engage most to get my gaming in with the regular Friday night games.
18 - Memorable moment of play - Recent Rime of the Frostmaiden game where my wizard took dragonbreath to the chest for an insta-kill; took the red slaadi tadpole that was about to hatch down with me, the little sod.
19 - Sensational session - As a player - fighting an Abyssal prince at the mid-point of Out of the Abyss. Deathly silent round the table as the dice decided our face.
20 - Amazing adventure - 'Plague City' game where our party of intrepid heroes ventured forth, tracked down the cultists and then were ready to go 'ok, so let us send word to the King so he can send someone to deal with this' ... and came to the horrified realisation that we *were* the help and there was no more coming.
21 - Classic campaign - Enemy Within. It has been a few years but the randomly rolled characters combined with horrific events that hammer their weak-spots make very memorable gaming.
22 - Notable non-player character - Aubrey, tiefling captain of the guard in my home campaign, player favourite
23 - Peerless player - one buddy is a masterful rules lawyer but uses his powers for good - helping people realize what they want their chars to be, counselling but not directing the plays in fights and generally using their grip on the details to support rather than face down the DM's he plays with. I appreciate it all the more because his unhelpful equivalents are far more common.
24 - Acclaimed advice - recognising that world-building is one activity, game prep is another similar but not the same one
25 - Desirable dice - I love the UVG incredibly unreadable roman numeral ones - those as a Zocchi set would be amazing.
26 - Superb screen - See answer #8. If I have to give a new one, then the classic AD&D Planescape DM screen
27 - Marvellous miniature - I love the aesthetic of the Folk Horrors from Garden of Hecate
28 - Great gamer gadget - clothes pegs as initiative trackers, simple but genius
29 - Awesome app - Beyond20 - plugging Roll20 and D&D Beyond together
30 - Person you'd like to game with - Matt Colville and the MCDM crew - in particular continuing The Chain.
31 - Game or gamer you miss - I've had the great good fortune to still be in touch with pretty much all the gamers I've played with and grace of this new era of VTT gaming we've played more together in the past three years than the 15 before that - so happily, no answer for this one.

Review: Feather, Beak + Bone and Claw Atlas

tl:dr; awesome map-labelling game, build a city together, perfect for a collaborative session zero.

So I got Feather, Beak + Bone and the Claw Atlas expansion as part of the 'Details of our Escape' Kickstarter. I picked them up as add-ons but it can also be found on itch.io. I recall it seeing it crop up with people saying "hey yeah this is cool" a fair few times and particularly talking about map making so I thought "sounds like my kind of thing". A slimmer pamphlet than I was expecting, definitely in the zine class of game, really punchy, with nice presentation.

Cover by Austin Breed

So all told this is a nice straightforward game with the usual zine high content to weight ratio in here. Fully self-contained with good line art that gets the whole feel across. Good stuff.

It comes bundled with three blank maps and you get another example of the map inside the front and back covers of the book - so strictly five blanks of the map come with it and then you could photocopy for further versions.

Shiny TTRPG links #187

A fair few gems from the past this week. For even 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.

I am currently hosting this months RPG Blog Carnival - It Came From Beyond Time - on ways things from the deep past (or far future!) can haunt or save your campaign - you still have a week to get an entry in!

Sea of Stars contributes with Time and Ages the Sea of Stars – RPG Blog Carnival

I Cast Light! shares ASIMOVIC ANDROIDS: A Tweak For Mothership Androids

A Knight at the Opera gave us The Differences in Mystara, Greyhawk, and Forgotten Realms (Part 1)

Simulacrum: Exploring OSR Design wrote A Historical Look at the OSR — Part I

Press The Beast gives us Daemonium: Retrospective

Traverse Fantasy shares D&D Fifth Edition: Death & Rebirth

August Blog Bandwagon: Setting Pitch for the Lizard Kingdom Deeps

tl:dr; I wanna run an explo campaign because I have a map too cool to never see the light of day.

This is bandwagoning in after The Foot of Blue Mountain Setting Post! Talking About the Spokelands and Draw the Rest of the Owlbear Setting Pitch for the Tower Lands, seasoned with some of Matt Colvilles campaign pitch formatting.

The Pretentious Doc / Region Info / Pitch:

The Lizardfolk built a great empire, said to encompass most of the world. It is said they ventured forth from the steaming depths of the land that lies deep below the levels of the sea. Noone is sure because for centuries they have been walled in behind the dragons who lair along their borders. The dragons have gone, who knows for how long before the probing of a brave or foolhardy few revealed the borders were now passable.

Art by Evlyn Moreau

Tales come back, of dwarfholds conquered and abandoned, of cities of the lizardfolk consumed by the jungles, of towering walls to keep away titanic lizards, of great fish drawn from oceans beneath the earth, of impossible flying creatures that soar the abyssal forests.

The more learned say that something has happened, a shift among the lizardfolk, that has them abandon their old borderlands.

Now adventurers, both crown sponsored and freelance, venture forth to see gold and glory is now free for the taking.

The Player Doc / Player Buy-in

Sandbox Adventure in a Mysterious Jungle Empire

Summary of campaign style: Exploration, Mystery, Deep Time, Factions, Ruins

The scaled-lands are the high-standing border lands between the lands you come from and the deep abyssal basin where the lizardfolk dwell

Blank basin map by Evlyn Moreau

Mechanically this would be an large roster of players, run when there are at least three, aiming to be as close to episodic 'ending back at base' as possible.

Ruleset - would love to try Shadowdark, could go with 5e with gritty realism if that is what people prefer.

Shop Talk
Combat: Medium
Roleplay: High
Travel: High
Starting Level: 1

This is a resurrection of old campaign material - but less a rework of the setting and more a repositioning of the start point to put the players in the thick of it directly. This is me slamming the levers over and going straight to the good stuff - the deep abyss...

I did a bunch of work in this setting, first setting up the original Lizard Kings game which flared out ~ 5 years ago and culminating in a NaNoWriMo novel draft in November 2019. I got art including maps done for this by OSR luminary Evlyn Moreau. Part of the motivation for all this is to finally be able to bring out the magnificent map she did of the lizardfolk imperial core - the completed version of the structural form above.

Art by Evlyn Moreau

Despite all this world-building, one thing I would love to deploy kicking this off would be Beak, Feather + Bone to collaboratively build a starting city.

Class/race choices from 1 year of Baldur's Gate 3 vs tabletop 5e

Larian Studios, makers of Baldurs Gate 3, bless their transparent little hearts, have released another update to their player stats - now after a year of play. Once again we get class and race choices of the players. We got two previous updates - the weekend after launch and an update after four months of play that looked different to the typical tabletop choices despite being a pretty faithful implementation of the 5e ruleset.

So here is the rerun of that number crunching - with the launch weekend and 4 month stats in with this 1 year set and the patterns from a bunch of forum surveys and 5e character building apps.

On class the broad patterns stay the same - since the 4 month update - a completely different pattern to the tabletop game with Paladin and Sorcerer much more popular, wizards, warlocks and clerics way down off what the tabletop surveys show. What is especially interesting is that we now see a steadying of choice between the 4 and 12 month surveys compared to the launch weekend. Paladins and rangers launched well but faded off a bit - though paladin still stayed top of the heap. Clerics and fighters were less preferred on launch weekend but became more popular over time.