Ideas to patch into OSR play (RPG Blog Carnival)

This months blog carnival from Illusory Sensorium has the topic of Over the Garden Wall where they want to hear about what is are things usually held as outside the domain of fantastic medieval adventure games which you think actually fits in quite well? They elaborate on seeking ideas to mix into the OSR from outside the culture of play, outside tabletop gaming and outside of gaming entirely.

I had a couple of ideas mostly things that are present in tabletop gaming just not really main-line OSR -
1. Career based character generation / progression
2. Testing things other than hit-points to face down challenges
3. Contacts as a rewards

Shiny TTRPG links #217

More links from across the internet. For more, see the previous list found here or on the restored weekly blogroll on r/OSR or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.

Old Men Running The World shares Where I Solve The Scheduling Problem In Dungeons & Dragons

A Knight at the Opera arrives at Urban Gameplay Part 6: Concrete Jungle Gyms

Joy of Hex Maps gives us Expanding communities from hubs to extents

HAEC ASTRA VERA asks What's The Deal With This Town?

Mazirian's Garden announces The Oneironaut Launches! Downtime in Zyan is back in print!

Darkplane gives us The Pillars of a Roleplaying Game

Patchwork Paladin writes Playtime: Dungeon Time, Wilderness Time, and Journey Time

One Man and his Dice gives us Using Attributes for Non-Combat Actions in OSR Games

Dazzling Prismatic Hemicycle asks Why Worlds Without Number?

Rise Up Comus shares Scars

Thought Punks gives us Rebuttals to Criticisms of Rules-Heavy TTRPGs

Comparing Grognardia polls to other surveys (pt. 1)

Since Grognardia, cornerstone of OSR blogging, did a bunch of how many, how often and when did/do you play polls (see Musings on Poll Results (Part I)) I thought it might be interesting to compare those results against what other sources I have pulled together over time. These were three seperate polls with 320-470 respondents each, no guarantee they were the same people each time so pinch of salt in that it is likely not the same people in all of them. We can compare each one individually to see how the trends stack up against other polls. One could very cautiously suppose that this is a comparison between OSR players (readers of Grognardia) and the general 5e audience (D&D 5e Facebook group, Reddit D&D groups) but very cautiously indeed.

First question was How many people – players + referee(s) – were there in your gaming group at the time you first started roleplaying?. Lots of the other gaming table size polls out there exclude the DM so I trimmed one off the Grognardia ranges. The batching is fairly rough, just the three buckets, but enough for us to work with. The Grognardia question is 'who did you start with' and has a good quarter of folk starting with just one or two initial players. That maps to my own experiences - my short run initial campaign had two players.

None of the other polls ask about initial group size so we are comparing these initial groups to others contemporary groups and they definitely do look smaller.

Review: Ultimate RPG Campfire Card Deck

I was given this over the holiday season by family - a nice gift in the sense of it was never something I was going to buy myself but has found its place at table.

As per the front of the box "150 cards for sparking in-game conversation" in a chunky box, with an X-card and a pamphlet with guidance.

The instructions are maybe ~A5 equivalent on a fold out card; the back is title, legalese and a bit about the author so all the actual guidance is 1//3 'how to play' and 2/3 describing the categories of cards and the process flow.

The cards themselves are in six categories - Past, Present, Companions, Dreams, World and Hypotheticals - each a 25 card block. You are supposed to check in with the table about which categories to include then shuffle them all up and draw randomly.

The strict pattern from the guidance is to draw two, one to answer yourself and one to ask another person at the table. We ended up having everyone present draw a card and lay them face up in the centre then going around the table with everyone picking which of the face-up topics they wanted to answer.

At 150 cards the deck is huge, you wil be cycling through it for a long time before it gets to feel repetitive.

I tried it out with my hexcrawl campaign and it has gone down surprisingly well - people were fine to give it a first shot and then were happy to come back again in later sessions which was the real test to me.

It works well with this campaign that has journeys and a travel focus to it - other campaigns I have run have tended towards travel being less of a focus and 'downtime' feel like a waste of time rather than something to devote time to. Whether or not this deck fits with your table is going to depend on which of those is true for you.

It is a nice tool for what it does, particularly for 'warming up' new groups who might not know each other so well. For very old and established groups I could see it either being helpful to jog folk out of their rut or being an impediment by forcing a direction of conversation when the group/campaign organically discusses things anyway. Again; judge where your table is at - if they already make their own campfire or tavern conversation, wedging this in may not be for your table.

So I see this being useful for campaigns which are not time-pressure - I would be wary of using this when you were trying to get an adventurers league one-shot game done or when you have a table that already plots, plans and RPs given time to do it. For everyone else, which I think will be many tables, if you are looking to encourage more

It is a bit heavy; I definitely notice it thrown in on top of my slimmed down gaming bag - but the table seems to like it so it continues to earn its space.

Shiny TTRPG links #216

A fine haul of links from about the interweb. For more, see the previous list found here or on the restored weekly blogroll on r/OSR or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.

Blogstones shares Thoughts on Folk Gaming

Necrotic Gnome gives us Dolmenwood Online Rules Reference

Merry Mushmen shares Black Sword Hack SRD

Mediums and Messages writes Schematic Dungeons from Everyday Objects

Behind the Helm gives us Trope, Flaw, Skill: 3-Layered NPCs

Explorers Design shares Why Combat Is a Fail State

Vaults of Zin gives us GM's Glossary Part 3: Everything you can do with Movement

Weird & Wonderful Worlds writes Existential Evolution (Weird & Wonderful Ecology Generator)

Roll to Doubt gives us Proposals for Player Conduct

AMONG CATS AND BOOKS shares Sandbox Settlements: Prep, Run, and Thrive

Grow your own DMs - Above-the-table social aspects

A while back we ran a DM clinic - for a more experienced DM to coach newer ones - I wrote up much of the 'on table' prep and tricks of the trade side of things before but the conversation also ranged around the 'above table' social aspects of the hobby as a whole. As per Gorgon Bones first best practice: "Record your hobby experience" this is a pretty solid reflection of the active questions of 'working DMs' within a pretty busy gaming group.

There was a lot of table management questions but some themes
- player engagement (dealing with stuns and deaths)
- DMs having fun (and not having to do the not fun bits)
- telling people what they are signing up for (content disclaimers)
- avoiding anti-social characters when you do not know the other players well

Campaign Retrospective: Spelljammer Academy III: Starlight Arcana

Since a mini-campaign actually finished, let us do a retrospective Against the Wicked City style particularly since I pulled the plug on this one earlier than I thought I might.

Spelljammer Academy: Starlight Arcana, 8 Sessions (Sep-Dec 2024)
What it was:
An open table follow-on to my Spelljammer Academy mini-campaign. It was supposed to be run spelljammer-esque 3rd party content at the regular friday open tables
A vehicle to play through kick-started planar content - Path of the Planebreaker, Starlight Arcana, 5e Planescape and Planestriders Journal for LevelUp5e all came through the door around the time this was running.
The first of these open table runs I feel I fumbled.

What worked:
Pretty combat heavy stuff compared to what I usually did since this was more orthodox D&D; bad guys just drawing down and going straight to combat, straight-up murderous goblins as opposed to the ones that talk I usually run.
Adapting a big written adventure into episodic chunks worked better than I might have thought.
Retrofitting the campaign to Realmspace worked well; I dropped the ground location into the Dales, stuck some of the others on Coliar and then used Karpri in Realmspace for the ocean world
Pre-gen characters - I abandoned building characters with people who came without one - instead of having the table sit around while I worked with one person, I gave them a half dozen pre-gens to choose from and got things rolling.

What didn't:
It took too damn long to get the party onboarded with the continuing quest at the start of sessions. I tried having NPCs ask for help, tell them what was going on, etc - it all seemed to take too long while I watch the lights of interest gutter in their eyes.
Trying to maintain progress with different crews over multiple open tables - often the player who knew what was going on was playing a character who was just useless as a conduit of information from one session to the next - leaning too hard into their characters incapabilities through low intelligence or drunkeness. Characterful but sapped momentum.
(NPC) cast of thousands - even though practically it was three NPCs - but they were two different groups the Spelljammer Academy and the Starlight Arcana NPCs and it made the whole thing drag
Did not vibe with as many of the players that settled in as regulars compared to other campaigns. Not to say individuals were bad or did anything wrong but the table vibe was just not one that energised me.
Spelljammer does not work as a welcome wagon game - it is a 'twist' too far for beginning D&D folk and I was still often getting first-timers at the open tables.

Lessons learned:
For episodic one-shots, get things rolling quickly to a place where players are making decisions.
You can trust players to self-start where the setting is relatively vanilla but drop folk into a new or unusual setting and they will stall poking at the scenary to get a grip on where they are. Brancalonia is a relatively familiar setting, the uniqueness is the vibe and the non-lethal mechanics; Starlight Arcana/Spelljammer with the sky-sailing ships and the planar-influences plot was harder for people to grasp.
People far too often bring 'quirky' characters who are severely compromised as functional heroes - either unmotivated, unintelligent, unable to communicate, not actually an adventurer, etc. Getting them to do actual heroing was friction that needed to be overcome at the start of sessions.