Review: Goblin Mail

tl:dr; neat troika zine about a chaotic goblin post office - a short-ish kafka-esque run-around, drops nicely into settings or adventures.

Backed on the Kickstarter - had a surprisingly chunky feeling 40 page zine turn up. Art by Evlyn Moreau, text by Sofia Ramos, layout by Luna P. I got great mileage out of the Kobolds Art Exibition (play log part I, part II, part III, part IV, part V, part VI, part VII and part VIII) and hope this replicated that 'goblinoids at work' model.

Cover by Evlyn Moreau

First impression - artwork is as ever a joy. This is all statted up for Troika / Fighting Fantasy but is fairly system neutral until you get to the NPC states in the Appendix. A bit of work calibrating off whatever a goblin stats as in your system of choice will make this useable for whatever you care to run.

In the zine you have three sections really with the central one being split into four.
First you have 8 pages of set up - intro, hooks, direction for exploring the place
Next you have the largest part with 20 pages covering the four floors of the post office
Lastly you have a 12 page Appendix with a bunch of useful miscellany

Running through this chunk by chunk:

STarting with the set up - intro, hooks, direction for exploring the place. The mission is always the same 'get your package back from the clutches of the goblin post office' but what the package is and who you are doing this for can vary. We get six example patrons in the intro then the rest is, in no particular order, what the goblins will sell you, what they think their workflow is and then what you will probably have to do to track down your missing package. These are really helpful for setting up the place and knowing what will be happening where as your players get there. We also get the general table for 'goblin mien' once you enter any room and the map of the whole place. Each level has two to three locations within it.

The floor guides - mostly room descriptions take up most of the zine. Going floor by floor we get
First Floor - reception, customer 'service' and delivery/triage area.
Basement - treadmill triage and customs desk.
Second Floor - first break room, letters room, rented room
Third Floor - second break room, boss' office, special storage room and the roof

Each of these locations comes with some flavourful illustrations and random tables of things you can find there. Given the likelihood you may traipse over and back through a few of these more than once trying to make sense of the goblins chaos, these are good tools to have to refresh locations on a repeat encounter. I found it suffered a little by not having a pithy one-liner of what each room was at the top of each entry - when flipping over and back between rooms during play, along with juggling the chaos of a table, that killer one-liner of what the impression of the place is was buried in the text sometimes.

In this section there are no stats, just numbers of things encountered at most. It is pretty clear how things connect, especially with the whole site map in the intro, so it all feels pretty playable straight out of the book. It bears careful reading at least once to spot where all the bits and bobs can be found - one person is missing a thing and it is mentioned in the description of another place but if you were skimming you could miss it and be confused.

The Appendix contains the Labyrinth, generators for packages, clients and goblins and finally a bestiary/stats for everyone to be found in the post office. When I took this to table they ended up arguing with everything so never got in any actual blade-drawn fights - which meant I was not going for the nice little mien tables attached to each of the entries. The random package generator tables got a work-out, especially when players got sticky-fingered while searching for the package themselves.

All in all this went over well at the table when I played through it - they got into the spirit of things and argued with the goblins as opposed to getting violent and killing everything. There is a ton of stuff packed in here, worth marking up with sticky-tags or something for the random patron table and the page with all the maps as you will end up flipping over and back to those a lot. A neat addition to the shelf and potentially re-useable in-game if the players return to the post office or encounter another one elsewhere.

I took it to a 5e table, that worked fine despite it being statted for Troika.

For another view, see Playful Void.

Corrupted Weapons of the Predator Queens (RPG Blog Carnival)

This months blog carnival from Attronarch's Athenaeum has the topic of Wondrous Weapons and Damning Dweomers - so I was inspired to write about what happens when bad people come into an inheritance of other peoples magic.

Once upon a time the elves conquered all the land, ruled millenia, before casting it aside and leaving. Their most terrible servitors fought in the chaos that followed, flailing at each other with the half-understood magics and weapons they clawed into greedy heaps.

The elegant, intelligent weapons of the elves hated their wielders. The predator queens founds ways to adapt.

Theirs was a practical magic, a hands-on, bloody clawed magic - not one that treated much with infernalism or demonology because those were seen as just another flavour of long-living, effortlessly magical overlord, the kind whos promises and entreaties had to be rejected by the strong, by those worthy to seizes power for themselves.

d6 corruptions and the impacts they cause to those struck
1. enslaver runes - twisted through brutal control enchantments applied later, causes stun on strike
2. mind-broken weapons - deranged through misuse, all actions next round penalised
3. vampiric enchantments - addition of life-draining magics, eliciting addictive hungers in the weapon; causes additional d4 piercing damage
4. mounted in barrier grips - will save or must attempt to disarm wielder and 'rescue' weapon
5. darkly imbued - sustained use for grim purposes has sparked independent malevolent will, causes fear on strike
6. arcane cauterisation - washed through with raw, caustic magics, only a shred of the original enchantments remain; 25% chance to dispel any magics affecting a struck target

Where the weapons proved to awkward or powerful to be over-borne by magic or craft, brute force often sufficed.

Shiny TTRPG links #190

More links from about the web! For even more, 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.

Glass Candles launches blogging challenge GLOGtober '24

Roll to Doubt gives us Setting up an OSR Sandbox

Graeme Davis collates his back catalogue of articles on Freebies

Mazirian's Garden shares Good Lore/Bad Lore

Rise Up Comus gave us Pointcrawling Character Creation

Actual Test: Donjon Adventure Generator

I tested out the Donjon Adventure Generator - "based upon tables from the Dungeon Master's Design Kit by TSR, Inc." - what you get is just collosal, so much stuff. Written up to follow Gorgon Bones first best practice: "Record your hobby experience" while continuing the DM commentary addition to the session notes.

I pushed the button twice and then followed my usual adventure generator workflow:
* Thread the pieces together
* Conserve NPCs
* Rewrite/polish

Elements I picked from the combined randomly generated stuff (italics is all stuff from Donjon):
* Plot: Event - a tournament, a holiday, a celebration called by the king, a masked ball - as a backdrop.
* Plot A-B-C Quest - the heros are given a task to perform but they find that they must first accomplish some other task(s)
* Climax: Prevented Deed
* General Setting Cosmopolitan City
* Specific Setting I - Palace of the King
* Specific Setting II - Mansion of a Lord
* Master Villain - Advance Agent - This villain is the vanguard of some sort of invastion
* Minor Villain I - Mistress with a Heart of Gold usually accompanies the Master Villain, but sometimes goes on missions of her own
* Minor Villain II Chief Assassin - favorite killer of the Master Villain - first killing witnesses who might prove harmful to his master, then zeroing in on the player-characters
* Chase: Special Terrain - You can make any chase more memorable by having it take place in a setting to which it is utterly unsuited. For instance, horse chases are fine and dramatic when they take place through the forest, out in the open plains, or along a road -- but they become diabolical when they take place inside the Royal Palace or in dangerous, labrynthine, treacherous catacombs.
* Secret Weakness: Love The Master Villain possesses the "weakness" of genuine affection or love -- probably for some NPC
* Special Condition Time Limit - Finally, the most obvious condition to place on an adventure is to give it a time limit.

A year of open table gaming

Some stat's from the regular friday night open table games I have been running.

Original set up goals
- be the welcome wagon for friday night open table D&D - catch the newbies by always having a T1 table.
- bring books I had kickstarted to table

Set up a 'campaign background' thread on the forum. I decided to use Brancalonia as a start because it seemed fun and I wanted to give the setting a test run. I made it a bit more of a universal socket to whatever weird characters people might turn up with by crossing it over to my menagerie world setting.

The 'intro' goes - "5000 years ago the elves invaded, conquered everything around here. In this world elves teach things they think show promise how to be elves. About 1000 years ago the elves left, and behind remained lots of 'on-the-way-to-elf' groups that stabilised as rabbitlings, badgerlings, all sorts. Half this world is about 1m tall. You all used to work for a wizard, it was good times, then the wizard got into politics and you are pretty sure they're dead now. You woke up one morning to find wanted posters with your names on them and crimes you may or may not have committed. You all fled south, winding up here, at the Golden Cockerel, the southern node of the wizards old network. Rougher runs the place, begrudgingly taking you in. The wine and the stew have been getting more watery every day for the past week and now, after a night drinking, you have all just woken up feeling nothing but hydrated and hungry."

Filling the tables

Basic stats -
27 games from August 2023 to August 2024
Average session length, 4h 40m
Total hours played - 126
5.3 players per table on average (smallest group 4, biggest 9)
Total of 202 players DM'ed for (butts on seats, some repeat folk)
72 different people threw dice at those games

Shiny TTRPG links #189

Busy week, lots of links! For even more, 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.

Goblin Punch writes Lessons from Elden Ring

Zzarchov Kowolski responds The forgotten element of adapting Dark Souls

Roll to Doubt gives us “Against” On-Boarding

Kontent Punch shares My Best Mistakes

How to Start a Revolution in 21 Days or Less gave us On Randomness In Character Generation, and Why Old School D&D Is Awesome For New Players

d4 Caltrops gives us B/X Procedural Flow Charts

Smithsonian Magazine gives us How Dungeons & Dragons Sparked a Revolution in How We Play Just About Everything

Actual Test: Scarlet Heroes Adventure Generator

Scarlet Heroes has the adventure generators I was looking for in Worlds Without Number, huh. I decided to test run it for my open table games. Out of the urban/wilderness/dungeon options I liked that the urban options had 'mission' structures so I went with those as most appropriate for a one shot. Written up to follow Gorgon Bones first best practice: "Record your hobby experience" while continuing the DM commentary addition to the session notes.

I rolled up some 'tags' - Foul Sorcery and Holy Site - and a plot - "An Antagonist seeks to steal something precious to a target."

The plot workflow had a few bits:

Draw or choose either the Antagonist or the Target, whichever your hero is most likely to care about.
Draw an unknown actor to be foundy after a successful Investigation scene spent discovering their identity.
Be waylaid by a hostile Actor with a Clue.
The object being stolen is the Target’s most precious possession or something important to the Antagonist that the Target possesses.
Scenes revolve around finding the thieves, guarding the object, and snatching it back if it is stolen.
- Infiltrate a Location where the activities relate to a Clue
- Trick an Actor into revealing a Clue.
- Convince an Actor ally of the foe to betray them

I rolled up a skilled sorcerer and a paid guardsman as actors and some locations - a Public well and a Fighting pit. Combining those with the tags and thinking through how it ties to dangling threads from previous adventures I rewrote all this as:
- Skilled Sorcerer [quest-giver] turns up looking for help
- Antagonist is seeking quest-gives most precious posession - a Tome of forbidden lore
- Figures they are in the city, this is where their networks are, degraded as they maybe
- seen by public well - start there
- get waylaid by bribed guards [catspaws of Maganza], tickets to local fighting pit in their pockets
- Infiltrate a Location where the activities relate to a Clue (fighting pit, predator)
- investigate there, ancient shrine to predator queen - terror bird
- spot servants of antagonist - need an approach angle
- Trick an Actor into revealing a Clue.
- Convince an Actor ally of the foe to betray them
- Plan revealed need to extract and get word back

I then localised it by combing back through old sessions to refresh my memory on locations and players at large to conserve my NPCs, and came up with: