d30 dwellings and sites

d30 dwellings and sites

Inspired by scrubbing through old newspapers while recycling.


1. Heritage - an ancient site, falling into ruin, maintained with grueling effort by descendants of the original builders. Inhabitants are a powder-keg of blame and recrimination about how it came to this
2. Tapestry workshop, light-soaking yarns for heat management, also rare magic and soul-absorbing threads made by experts - good for banishing the undead
3. Dwelling set on only high-tide rise above sand-banks; very hard to approach without being observed, unhinged weather mage with a solar obsession and their protective staff; very grand, chic, baking hot. Effort is exhausting
4. Dwelling of trellises, "rooms" are defined gardens, most of the structure is outdoors - lush, humid, full of pollen, scent, insects, lizards and toiling gardners. Very little privacy, cheerfully communal
5. Grand old country lodge being restored - busy work parties, with crafts folk, local laborers, experts.
6. Tower with the gardens surrounding it as a maze of pathways through shallow waterways clogged with lillies and fish - one could with difficulty jump a direct path or simply slog through the knee high water and spoil the plants. Stubby old fortified manor at the centre
7. Geometric tiles and carvings within and without with continual perspective tricks that make movement between rooms disturbing but staying within a room serene. Inhabitants can be observed moving about by memory.
8. Fortified manor with enthusiastic young lord raising new breed of burly cattle - locals are aggravated at the disturbance and interference, cattle are also smarter and keep escaping.
9. Survey team from local nobility attempting to refortify an old castle - have just discovered it is far worse than thought plus infested with monsters, noone wants to go back with the bad news, workers refusing to enter.
10. Half built wizards tower, caught fire, just extinguished, exhausted minions and injured watch-beasts scattered around in hasty triage. Multiple traps were left in unstable state.

Campaign Spin-Up IX - Dual-Mode Hex-Crawl (Continuous Campaign/Episodic)

I stood up a campaign to test and drive my #Hexcrawl25 challenge that had been intended to operate in two modes:
* Classic continuous campaign
* Episodic open table

The time and venue is the Friday night open table sessions I play at - historically I offered an open-table (Brancalonia, Spelljammer Academy) but I wanted to try and mix in something more persistent with returning players. The deliberate aspects of this campaign were:
- dual mode - A-team / open table on alternating weeks
- follow the players, drop hooks but no big plot
- toy deployment - use the shelves of books
- newbie friendly

I decided to run the campaign part on a biweekly basis and on the off-week run one-shots. Both will use the common starting villlage of the hexmap.

Shiny TTRPG links #219

A short set of links as I was travelling. 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.

1pagedungeons writes Monsters are Puzzles

WatcherDM gives us Here’s to the Gamemaster!

Carouse, Carouse! shares April 2025 - The Difficult Sophomore Album

Heroic Resources gives us Tools & Resources for Draw Steel

Luke Gearing shares Obligations

Symbolic City gives us Scheduling and design

Fail Forward writes On Casting

Patchwork Paladin shares Dolmenwood resources for you

Augury in Mud gives us d100 Social Contracts

Comparing Grognardia polls to other surveys (pt. 2)

Looking at the second block of polls that Grognardia ran - "when were you first introduced to roleplaying games?" and "how old were you when you first started playing tabletop RPGs?" which are discussed on by them here in part II. I did the same again, comparing them to what we see in other polls and this time around the results are *very* different to responses from elsewhere.

Staring with 'when you were first introduced to RPGs' - the Grognardia readership is *much* older than even other D&D bloggers, even other OSR blogs that I figured would be the old gang. Here be the ancients with half of them introduced back in the 80s and another quarter from the 70s. Compare that to even to the folk replying to Necropraxis OSR Gateway survey back in 2019 - the *next oldest* bunch - and they only had less than 100 folk from the 70s of 2700 respondents compared to 124 who replied here!

I was also heartily amused to see '2000+' as the last category - anyone this entire millenium gets stuffed in one box - which turned out to be the right call! There were only 60 respondents - less from these last 25 years than were introduced to the game in just 77-79! Grognardia obviously knows his audience but I am really fascinated to see this particular group not having some greater influx of post-millenium players given that every other indicators elsewhere says that there has been a big block of new gamers come in and even if only a fraction drifted off to check out the old ways, one might have thought it would be more significant than the three score who turn up. Fascinating.

The other question asked was about age when people first started playing - and we know from lots of other sources that pre-2010, people mostly started playing as teens and the earlier they found D&D, the younger that age range tended to be. And lo - the Grognardia response looks like the 70s/80s gamers the other poll says they are.

All the bars at left are from the OSR survey; the detailed data shared let us split these out to match the categories of the Grognardia survey and batch them by age and era of joining. The rapidly rising age of new joiners can be seen. Interestingly, as we have mentioned before, this means a 30 year old gamer in the year 2000 was likely a 20 year veteran gamer, a 30 year old now has maybe 5 years under their belt.

I wonder how much ones sense of 'what is D&D' is changed by it being something you played all through your pre-teen and teenage years versus when you come to it as an adult in college. It feels to me that the increase in complexity of D&D is probably stopping us from ever seeing that experiment run.

Returning to our initial point - because these two questions were posed as separate polls we have no way to properly correlate age and eras of the Grognardia respondents but using comparisons to other polls out there it certainly looks like it is a window into the ancestral gamers, who joined as pre-teens back in the 80s and have been merrily chucking dice these past 45 years.

Key Sources

D&D Gateway survey - survey by Necropraxis.

Kirith - replica of the 1985 Dragon Magazine Survey.

Facebook 5e group - some posts by the mods listed the membership numbers.

Reddit 2014 D&D Survey - data sheet at the bottom of the page.

Mia Gojaks Survey of D&D 5e Facebook group users.

Elderbrain 2020 survey.

Trygstad thesis.

Reddit ML survey.

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.