Links from about the interwebs, fresh and time-seasoned. For 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.
Forsaken Garden launches the Haves & Have Nots RPG Blog Carnival
RPGFeed swears by this Super Simple Solo Oracle
Creative Wronging wrote Useful NPC, The Urbanite, Week 2: The Socialite
Of Gods and Gamemasters shared The Third Space
DIY & dragons gave us 5e - Alternatives to Darkvision
04 November 2024
02 November 2024
Notes on D&D Meetup Group Experiment
Meetup jacked up its subscription costs (174%!) so I cancelled my own sub, our game group as a whole sees no value in paying for one and the thing apparently drifted from my hands this past midnight. This seems like a good point to do a post-mortem - for all that it may stagger on another month as it auto-pings all the members looking for someone else willing to stump up to take the group over.
The group was conceived in a moment of seeking to get the word out and test whether we could pull of a significant expansion, sufficient to justify the running costs of the formal club structure here in Austria - bank accounts, chairfolk, book-keeping, all that jazz. We figured we needed to bump our regular attendees from ~25 to ~120 to bear the kinds of costs associated with having our own venue and all that. At that point we had not done anything, just had our forum and welcomed anyone who found us. This was an experiment in getting the word out to see what might happen.
We were blessed with two tailwinds, one foreseen, one not - the D&D movie and Baldurs Gate 3. We figured there would be a bunch of folk looking to try D&D following those so we initially set up the 'Night of the Rolling Dice' for after the movie - a ten table session for beginners - and created the meetup group. As you can see below, numbers went up like a rocket. We got 60 sign-ups, 45 of whom showed up, a good time was had. Then we did it twice more - once to capitalise on Baldurs Gate 3 and a last the following February to see if we had the process down to a low-friction playbook.
Each time we launched and event, typically ~ 60 days beforehand, we got a kick of new members into the Meetup group.
The folk who came to the Nights of the Rolling Dice occassionally showed up at our regular nights - 2-3 out of each batch of 45. Our open nights were what we were really trying to grow, getting those weekly Friday night open table games up. After the second one we started to slam the capacity of our venue and fished around a bit for another site. With two sites we could continue to grow and from there ramped up to... almost double our size. Almost.
I took over stewardship of the meetup group after the second event and started to block in our regular Friday night sessions into the Meetup group so people could see there would be a game a few weeks out rather than just ~4 days beforehand. We know people came in through these Meetups because we had regular deconfliction problems between both folk who signed up on the Meetup and no-showed and folk who rocked up to the events without mentioning on the sign-up thread that they were coming. Again, a fair few people said they found us through Meetup but only a handful on any given week.
Even once we restricted attendance, the 'out weeks' were not filling up with lots of folk - no indication that telegraphing that these were regular games that happened every Friday was making any difference to folk beyond an isolated case or two.
Overall the Meetup group probably funneled folk towards us but when I queried the webmaster of our forum, the actual core organising venue for our group, they said that it was mere tens of click-throughs from Meetup versus high hundreds coming off Google.
So all told, the group seemed to attract numbers and where we had big events we could fill them - neither of these converted into people turning up regularly for whatever reasons. Engagement was practically nil from folk who signed up to any mail shots or via the on-site tools beyond a few isolated requests for what was needed for a first timer.
You can probably barely see at the tail end of the top graph, the curve flattens out. This matches to when I stopped booking in events on the calendar, about a month ago when I decided to cancel the sub - having events on the calendar does bring people into the group, but having them in the group does not seem to do much for you.
All told, I am sure we got a few people into our group through Meetup because I have heard people say it - all of the metrics otherwise say it was a waste of time and certainly not worth ponying up extra cash. When I pulled the plug on it, the immediate response from Meetup was 'we have made it easier to charge your members dues!' which is just mean passing the corporate screw-over down the line. The main thing that changed that I can see between this year and last is they slapped on a bunch of AI tools for auto-generating events which is a completely unhelpful - you don't need randomly generated events, you need to just get the details right and up there. That and getting taken over by 'Bending Spoons' who also took over Evernote and also jacked up the prices there by a giant amount.
So, for us, nothing useful was added to a service that was not core to our operations, I had taken a punt laying down a subscription in the first place to see if it unlocked some large untapped pool of potential players - so all the above and near double the price was not worth it. We already have our venue charge, small and reasonable. The idea of layering on charges to pay off some corporations random price hikes? Not happening, not rewarding corporate bad behaviour like that.
All told, we tested the potential for fast growth and managed to get to double on a good day - I think proving up there was some growth potential for us but not massive x6 amounts. I am intrigued as to whether we will continue to get new folk wandering in once the Meetup evaporates; I reckon yes but let us see.
The group was conceived in a moment of seeking to get the word out and test whether we could pull of a significant expansion, sufficient to justify the running costs of the formal club structure here in Austria - bank accounts, chairfolk, book-keeping, all that jazz. We figured we needed to bump our regular attendees from ~25 to ~120 to bear the kinds of costs associated with having our own venue and all that. At that point we had not done anything, just had our forum and welcomed anyone who found us. This was an experiment in getting the word out to see what might happen.
We were blessed with two tailwinds, one foreseen, one not - the D&D movie and Baldurs Gate 3. We figured there would be a bunch of folk looking to try D&D following those so we initially set up the 'Night of the Rolling Dice' for after the movie - a ten table session for beginners - and created the meetup group. As you can see below, numbers went up like a rocket. We got 60 sign-ups, 45 of whom showed up, a good time was had. Then we did it twice more - once to capitalise on Baldurs Gate 3 and a last the following February to see if we had the process down to a low-friction playbook.
Each time we launched and event, typically ~ 60 days beforehand, we got a kick of new members into the Meetup group.
The folk who came to the Nights of the Rolling Dice occassionally showed up at our regular nights - 2-3 out of each batch of 45. Our open nights were what we were really trying to grow, getting those weekly Friday night open table games up. After the second one we started to slam the capacity of our venue and fished around a bit for another site. With two sites we could continue to grow and from there ramped up to... almost double our size. Almost.
I took over stewardship of the meetup group after the second event and started to block in our regular Friday night sessions into the Meetup group so people could see there would be a game a few weeks out rather than just ~4 days beforehand. We know people came in through these Meetups because we had regular deconfliction problems between both folk who signed up on the Meetup and no-showed and folk who rocked up to the events without mentioning on the sign-up thread that they were coming. Again, a fair few people said they found us through Meetup but only a handful on any given week.
Even once we restricted attendance, the 'out weeks' were not filling up with lots of folk - no indication that telegraphing that these were regular games that happened every Friday was making any difference to folk beyond an isolated case or two.
Overall the Meetup group probably funneled folk towards us but when I queried the webmaster of our forum, the actual core organising venue for our group, they said that it was mere tens of click-throughs from Meetup versus high hundreds coming off Google.
So all told, the group seemed to attract numbers and where we had big events we could fill them - neither of these converted into people turning up regularly for whatever reasons. Engagement was practically nil from folk who signed up to any mail shots or via the on-site tools beyond a few isolated requests for what was needed for a first timer.
You can probably barely see at the tail end of the top graph, the curve flattens out. This matches to when I stopped booking in events on the calendar, about a month ago when I decided to cancel the sub - having events on the calendar does bring people into the group, but having them in the group does not seem to do much for you.
All told, I am sure we got a few people into our group through Meetup because I have heard people say it - all of the metrics otherwise say it was a waste of time and certainly not worth ponying up extra cash. When I pulled the plug on it, the immediate response from Meetup was 'we have made it easier to charge your members dues!' which is just mean passing the corporate screw-over down the line. The main thing that changed that I can see between this year and last is they slapped on a bunch of AI tools for auto-generating events which is a completely unhelpful - you don't need randomly generated events, you need to just get the details right and up there. That and getting taken over by 'Bending Spoons' who also took over Evernote and also jacked up the prices there by a giant amount.
So, for us, nothing useful was added to a service that was not core to our operations, I had taken a punt laying down a subscription in the first place to see if it unlocked some large untapped pool of potential players - so all the above and near double the price was not worth it. We already have our venue charge, small and reasonable. The idea of layering on charges to pay off some corporations random price hikes? Not happening, not rewarding corporate bad behaviour like that.
All told, we tested the potential for fast growth and managed to get to double on a good day - I think proving up there was some growth potential for us but not massive x6 amounts. I am intrigued as to whether we will continue to get new folk wandering in once the Meetup evaporates; I reckon yes but let us see.
30 October 2024
Invasion of the Land of the Dead - Hexcrawloween Jam 2024
The rules or Hexcrawloween - create a system-agnostic hexcrawl that has:
20 keyed hexes
Settlement w/ NPCs
Dungeon A (6-room)
Dungeon B (6-room)
Dungeon C (6-room)
Dungeon D (24-room)
Dungeon E (12-room)
Bestiary 9 original monsters (3 uniques)
An encounter list with at least 1d20 entries
Hand-drawn maps
Best effort before I ran out of time below; first our Hexes.
This whole region are the foothills of mountains where a wicked god was slain; the veil between planes warped and wounded, souls trapped one place, things from beyond easily entering another. Across all this, conflict rages - the clerics of Kirianshalee driven back by invading dragon-blooded orcs. Once vassal fey-folk now rise in insurrection and simultaneously ancient horrors bottled up by the church of Kirianshalee seize their moment to break out.
20 keyed hexes
Settlement w/ NPCs
Dungeon A (6-room)
Dungeon B (6-room)
Dungeon C (6-room)
Dungeon D (24-room)
Dungeon E (12-room)
Bestiary 9 original monsters (3 uniques)
An encounter list with at least 1d20 entries
Hand-drawn maps
Best effort before I ran out of time below; first our Hexes.
This whole region are the foothills of mountains where a wicked god was slain; the veil between planes warped and wounded, souls trapped one place, things from beyond easily entering another. Across all this, conflict rages - the clerics of Kirianshalee driven back by invading dragon-blooded orcs. Once vassal fey-folk now rise in insurrection and simultaneously ancient horrors bottled up by the church of Kirianshalee seize their moment to break out.
28 October 2024
Shiny TTRPG links #196
Links from about the interwebs, fresh and time-seasoned. For 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.
Elfmaids & Octopi gives us Dungeons in Decline, seige conditions and desertion
Alone in the Labyrinth shares THEMATIC SAVING THROWS
Playful Void writes Juicy Worms, Local Knowledge and Player Engagement
Kontent Punch gives us Obstacles are the Fun
What a Horrible Night to Have a Curse... shares Hirelings: Making the Players Care
A Knight at the Opera gave us How to Make Problems for Your Players
Setting First wrote The Jumbo Shrimp Rule
INHERENT DICE gives us Why Aren't More People Playing TTRPGs? (Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Move On From D&D) - Perspectives From a Beginner
Elfmaids & Octopi gives us Dungeons in Decline, seige conditions and desertion
Alone in the Labyrinth shares THEMATIC SAVING THROWS
Playful Void writes Juicy Worms, Local Knowledge and Player Engagement
Kontent Punch gives us Obstacles are the Fun
What a Horrible Night to Have a Curse... shares Hirelings: Making the Players Care
A Knight at the Opera gave us How to Make Problems for Your Players
Setting First wrote The Jumbo Shrimp Rule
INHERENT DICE gives us Why Aren't More People Playing TTRPGs? (Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Move On From D&D) - Perspectives From a Beginner
26 October 2024
Meeples for the Win (GLoGtober 7 '24)
Taking on Glass Candles GLoGtober '24, challenge #2 is from a list by TheFirstGokun - "Physical Game Pieces."
I do quite a lot of cafe gaming and my big space saver has been using meeples for combats - does not quite give the square-by-square tactical detail of standard grid combat but 4/5 times it does everything you need - where are the clusters of bad guys, who is on what bit of terrain, who is near who.
I got these four bags from the In-House Testing Team one winter and they have proved remarkably useful. I have settled in on the stars and little circular things (right side) as the usual NPCs/monsters, the middle-right bag of meeples and houses as PCs and allies, and the mid-left bag tended to be the ships for Spelljammer combat.
Given that these are smaller than most dice they work really well by letting you have a whole battle-space on a single sheet of A4 - which in turn means you can use a piece of stiff card in a plastic-pocket plus dry-erase markers as an easily portable reusable battlemat.
All of which then fits neatly into a bag.
This does not support people bringing their Heroforge 28mm minis to table and I fully recognise that there is a chunky wow-factor to being able to haul out your custom 3D-printed bad guys and have your players squinting trying to figure out is that a standard beholder or some sort of other tentacly horror. The wear and tear on my shoulder and pocket book implied by aquiring and hauling around such a collection is a sufficiently high threshold that I am going to stick with my faithful meeples.
Hardbitten veterans, every one of those little blocks, earned their place in Valhalla multiple times over by now.
I do quite a lot of cafe gaming and my big space saver has been using meeples for combats - does not quite give the square-by-square tactical detail of standard grid combat but 4/5 times it does everything you need - where are the clusters of bad guys, who is on what bit of terrain, who is near who.
I got these four bags from the In-House Testing Team one winter and they have proved remarkably useful. I have settled in on the stars and little circular things (right side) as the usual NPCs/monsters, the middle-right bag of meeples and houses as PCs and allies, and the mid-left bag tended to be the ships for Spelljammer combat.
Given that these are smaller than most dice they work really well by letting you have a whole battle-space on a single sheet of A4 - which in turn means you can use a piece of stiff card in a plastic-pocket plus dry-erase markers as an easily portable reusable battlemat.
All of which then fits neatly into a bag.
This does not support people bringing their Heroforge 28mm minis to table and I fully recognise that there is a chunky wow-factor to being able to haul out your custom 3D-printed bad guys and have your players squinting trying to figure out is that a standard beholder or some sort of other tentacly horror. The wear and tear on my shoulder and pocket book implied by aquiring and hauling around such a collection is a sufficiently high threshold that I am going to stick with my faithful meeples.
Hardbitten veterans, every one of those little blocks, earned their place in Valhalla multiple times over by now.
23 October 2024
Strange Stones from Weird Aeons (GLoGtober 6 '24)
Taking on Glass Candles GLoGtober '24, challenge #6 is from my own list - "Secrets of the Stones."
Inspired by Onion Souls idea of Magical accretion and the multiple OSR weird time epochs collected on Coins and Scrolls I was thinking about what kind of strange geology is lying around in the gameworld.
Things are plenty strange already in the real world - I have seen this burning earth with my own eyes.
So these strange deep time periods are all well and good but what actual remnants and extrusions from those times can be stumbled upon?
d10 strange rock formations from weird aeons
1. Shock planes - remnants of particularly outrageous continental drifting during the Turbozoic era, these incredibly hard, thin sheets rise high above the landscape and are extremely damage resistant
2. Fossil supercomputer - intricate circuitry from sublimbed organic supercomputers of the Svahbavan Glaciation - carefully transmutation spellwork might get you a tiny fragment of a once-godlike entity
3. Compacted stars - remnants of sloppy creationeering, discarded stars look like big geodes until they crack and suddenly you have a sun at your feet with all the problems that implies
4. Cathedral channels - remnants of holy mounds, allowing wind to blow through them will randomly cast a divine spell on a random valid target near by
5. Purging Sprite soot - a thin layer, scraped up can be blown or pasted onto things to shatter magical effects
6. Astrogenocene coal - coal-analogue from high energy biosphere - igniting, striking or otherwise disturbing in this lower-energy world causes it to chill, rust, rot and otherwise soak the energy from surrounds
7. World-eater seacucumber - looks like a fossil, is just biding its time, do not get it wet.
8. Serpentis Iradium layer - traces of the sorcerous war that made the God Serpent never have been. Exposure sickens lizard folk or other scaly-kind.
9. First necro-layer - limestone-like crushed bones of the first total victory by necromancers. Anyone foolish enough to carve or cast this into some mobile form will find they are still active
10. Rogue colours - a trapped pocket of colors from the early Great Funkadelican era, releasing long-gone hues on the world once more
Inspired by Onion Souls idea of Magical accretion and the multiple OSR weird time epochs collected on Coins and Scrolls I was thinking about what kind of strange geology is lying around in the gameworld.
Things are plenty strange already in the real world - I have seen this burning earth with my own eyes.
So these strange deep time periods are all well and good but what actual remnants and extrusions from those times can be stumbled upon?
d10 strange rock formations from weird aeons
1. Shock planes - remnants of particularly outrageous continental drifting during the Turbozoic era, these incredibly hard, thin sheets rise high above the landscape and are extremely damage resistant
2. Fossil supercomputer - intricate circuitry from sublimbed organic supercomputers of the Svahbavan Glaciation - carefully transmutation spellwork might get you a tiny fragment of a once-godlike entity
3. Compacted stars - remnants of sloppy creationeering, discarded stars look like big geodes until they crack and suddenly you have a sun at your feet with all the problems that implies
4. Cathedral channels - remnants of holy mounds, allowing wind to blow through them will randomly cast a divine spell on a random valid target near by
5. Purging Sprite soot - a thin layer, scraped up can be blown or pasted onto things to shatter magical effects
6. Astrogenocene coal - coal-analogue from high energy biosphere - igniting, striking or otherwise disturbing in this lower-energy world causes it to chill, rust, rot and otherwise soak the energy from surrounds
7. World-eater seacucumber - looks like a fossil, is just biding its time, do not get it wet.
8. Serpentis Iradium layer - traces of the sorcerous war that made the God Serpent never have been. Exposure sickens lizard folk or other scaly-kind.
9. First necro-layer - limestone-like crushed bones of the first total victory by necromancers. Anyone foolish enough to carve or cast this into some mobile form will find they are still active
10. Rogue colours - a trapped pocket of colors from the early Great Funkadelican era, releasing long-gone hues on the world once more
21 October 2024
Shiny TTRPG links #195
Due to travel, mostly a deep dredge of 'OSR classics'. For 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.
Yak-Hack gave us Table-Centric Design
The Retired Adventurer wrote Six Cultures of Play
GROGNARDIA shared The Ages of D&D
Trollsmyth wrote Shields Shall be Splintered!
Jeffs Gameblog shared Party like it's 999
Hereticwerks wrote Roofcrawling: Intro (and Links)
Rotten Pulp shared The Underworld
Delta's D&D Hotspot gave us Basic D&D: On Archery
Scantabulous! wrote Petrifying!
Mazirian's Garden wrote The Hidden Metamorphoses
Rise Up Comus shared 1937 Hobbit as a Setting
DIY & dragons wrote Landmark, Hidden, Secret
TableTobRPG gives us Building a City with His Majesty the Worm
Wombat's Gaming Den of Iniquity gave us [Got Loot?] The 3 Types of Loot
AMONG CATS AND BOOKS shared How to Set Up and Use Faction Turns: Addendum
Widdershins Wanderings asked What Makes A Good Player-Facing Pointcrawl?
From the Sorcerer's Skull wrote The Titan and the City
False Machine gives us Echoing Stars - 12 Forms of Posthuman Corporations
Middenmurk gave us On Fantasy
Yak-Hack gave us Table-Centric Design
The Retired Adventurer wrote Six Cultures of Play
GROGNARDIA shared The Ages of D&D
Trollsmyth wrote Shields Shall be Splintered!
Jeffs Gameblog shared Party like it's 999
Hereticwerks wrote Roofcrawling: Intro (and Links)
Rotten Pulp shared The Underworld
Delta's D&D Hotspot gave us Basic D&D: On Archery
Scantabulous! wrote Petrifying!
Mazirian's Garden wrote The Hidden Metamorphoses
Rise Up Comus shared 1937 Hobbit as a Setting
DIY & dragons wrote Landmark, Hidden, Secret
TableTobRPG gives us Building a City with His Majesty the Worm
Wombat's Gaming Den of Iniquity gave us [Got Loot?] The 3 Types of Loot
AMONG CATS AND BOOKS shared How to Set Up and Use Faction Turns: Addendum
Widdershins Wanderings asked What Makes A Good Player-Facing Pointcrawl?
From the Sorcerer's Skull wrote The Titan and the City
False Machine gives us Echoing Stars - 12 Forms of Posthuman Corporations
Middenmurk gave us On Fantasy
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