Auditing my home campaign city for urban game-playability

Reading Dwiz's magisterial 6-part series on running cities I was struck how I recognise a lot of as things I have arrived at over trial and error with the Ducal House campaign - but what have I missed, where can it be improved?

We have put in a lot of time in cities over the campaign; the color coding below is all the sessions that are non-Thenya - anything un-highlighted is Thenya. This is 76 of 130 sessions in Thenya, 372 of 593 hours of play - so we have spent nearly 2/3 of the campaign in the city.

I was grinning reading Dwiz's posts because it is based off a Watabous fantasy city generator map and I used the districts created from that map.

Shiny TTRPG links #218

Fine links from the depths of 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.

Paper Cult Club launches a forum for TTRPG, board game, wargame, etc. developers and enthusiasts

@LeviKornelsen@dice.camp gives us Day in the life of a courtier:

Whose Measure God Could Not Take shares The Hydra Problem

Illusory Sensorium gives us Paint the (Un)scene

All Dead Generations writes Most Adventures are Bad - An Adventure Writing Process

Garamondia gives us A Beholder for your Setting - Lantern Heads

Dorkland! shared The Perrin Conventions

MurkMail gives us Mixing hexcrawl encounter tables

Hex-maps and high-mobility magic

My home game got another boost of mobility over this most recent level up with Wind Walk and Teleport. This has lead to a chunky shift in gameplay which makes 'broad shallow' prep the name of the game from here out. I had talked about high-speed hex-crawling before; large distances were crossed with multiple things noted in passing but only a few key locations were interacted with - on par to a standard session - but even higher speeds enables new party approaches.

Previously we have been dealing with ~ 8 hours of flying time at ~ 30mph using the Spelljamming Saddle so 3 x 10mile hexes per hour - as fast as a galloping horse, sustained as long as the pilot can stay awake. Wind Walk gets that up to 60mph, doubling that. The red circle on the map was the previous 'one day' limit of their operations - the second arc is their new limit.

This past session the players were ~ 3 sessions deep into chasing down a particular quest goal - settling their immediate problems, getting their gear and themselves into position and staging to a plateau above their objective. And then they decided to spend the entire session flexing Wind Walk to scout for the location of an enemy stronghold associated with a different 'quest line' so to speak. Both are strands of a potential undead apocalypse, one divine, one arcane - divine had been solidly in focus until they decided to detour and scout the arcane thread.

I had prepped in detail for the divine thread before the session but did have enough of a sense of what the arcane thread was to be able to wing it; most importantly I had done some general region prep on who was likely to be seen during over flights which included foes tied to both strands and I was able to use those. Some previous thought on the timetable of the arcane foes also allowed me to pretty quickly extrapolate what must be found in their stronghold if they are at the point they were in the plan.

Mobility multipliers like teleport and wind walk are interesting to deal with because teleport is manageable - you have to know a place to safely go there so player interest is expressed and either it is a return to a known location or you, the DM, have a chance to ponder what the place is like while they figure out how to get a good enough read to risk teleporting there. High speed flyers are more of a challenge as discussed previously but still they are a somewhat manageable scale; the key is whether or not the location is known. Rapidly travelling to a known place with high level magic - sure - you lose the travel encounters but fine.

Pure speed multipliers like Wind Walk make high speed searching of an area for things known to be around somewhere *on a whim* into a new challenge; with magics like this in the back pocket there is no prep-time because the heroes can just decide, cast the spell and go.

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.