Shiny TTRPG links #229

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

Roll to Doubt launches a well-received bandwagon on How I Prep

Responses so far are in from:
Gorgon Bones with How I prep my games
Eldritch Fields with How I prep
Ms. Quixotic Talks About Games with How I Prep (For Arden Vul), part 1: Spreadsheets
Evil Tables with How I Prep Tabletop Games
Playthings of Mad Gods with How I Prep; Or How I Lose My Mind Over Nothing
GLAIVE-GUISARME with How I Prep (Xyntillan Campaign)
The Foot of Blue Mountain with How I Prep
Hexed Press with How I Prep, Part One: Pre-Campaigning
LootLootLore with Prepping and my "Beach Trip" Campaigns
Mediums and Messages with How I Prep
Idraluna Archives with How I Prep
Macropterus with Prep for the Lazy Hack

GROGNARDIA writes So It Begins

Toasted Blogel writes The OSR is teaching me how to cook

zarchov Kowolski shares Everything you think about Game Mastering is probably wrong: Part XIX: Dungeons as a campaign concept

The Colours of Pentagrams gives us Naively simple downtime actions

naybasplacetoputrpgideas shares Expanding upon gift economy

Fight in the Shade gives us Campaign cheating #2: You've got a stew going!

Methods & Madness writes The sandbox railroad part 2 (plus ULTRA-LINEAR encounters)

Clear day sightlines (or, 6 mile hexes are large)

From a recent wander up a local high point, it was a clear day and I got a photo with a number of readily identifiable local landmarks. It serves as a nice illustration of how far one might see tall things and how long sight lines could be on a clear day.

The two grim things for DMs running hex-crawls - you can fit a hell of a lot of stuff into a single six mile hex and you can see the tall things in a lot of those hexes on a clear day.

Our start point is the star - the start of a walk down a trail which is in the city limits. The four easily identifiable things we can spot because of their tall bits are - the local train depot, the church in the graveyard, the smoke-stacks on the refinery and the control tower at the airport. Far beyond, I think that mountain is the next country over but that one is only 90% certain. The height of these things is the number in brackets.

The interesting thing here is we have a good lot of full grown trees for comparison - I figure most of those are ~60 ft trees, in proper fantasy game forests of a Europe-like place those could be twice as high in ideal old-growth conditions so site A and possibly B would be obscured in those conditions.

What magical items can be found to buy (RPG Blog Carnival)

Advantage on Arcana gives us this months prompt Magic Shops and Their Alternatives for the RPG Blog Carnival. For this I wrote up how it works in my campaigns.

For my menagerie world campaigns, magic items can come from a number of typical sources
- wizard "guilds" - craftsmasters, journeymen making them new as part of learning - what is available is whatever they are teaching/learning
- artificers crafting to order, incl. hedge wizards, shamen, deep forest witches, etc.
- vaults of noble families, temples, etc - incl. caches laid down by previous generations
- hoards/treasuries of monsters and men - 'owned' but not for sale
- battlefields or ruins of previous epochs and civilisations
- traders originating from the above - closest to archetypal magic shops

Shiny TTRPG links #228

The shiniest of TTRPG links from around the web - a day delayed by bank holiday driven loss of routine. For more, see the previous list found here or on the weekly r/OSR blogroll or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.

Advantage on Arcana launches Junes RPG Blog Carnival topic: Magic Shops and Their Alternatives

DIY & dragons proposes A Second Summer LEGO RPG Jam!

A Knight at the Opera gives us EVERY Initiative Method, Addendum

Rudus Writings writes Old-school, Left Coast Gaming

Blog of Forlorn Encystment declares Your High-Level NPCs Should Ride Dragons

Cavegirl's Game Stuff shares Deep Space & Derelicts: Basic/Xenotech version, an idea for a game

Vaults of the insectfolk - variant depth-crawl

This is my reworking my approach to dungeons and labyrinths - for fixed rooms with uncertain contents. This is an evolution of the approach I previously used which was more searching for things within a labyrinth; moving towards a depth-crawl.

Beetlescale Labyrinths

Great labyrinths of the insectfolk - not quite the trouser-legs of time as Pratchett or a full blown randomised depthcrawl as Library of Ynn but something similar.

The maps remain similar, fractal. You enter them in a non-euclidean manner as per Goblinpunch Non-Euclidean Geography - clockwise round the ring corridor - take a certain direction and you are in a different place and time.

The insect folk are embarking on the long march until all the rest of the sentients stop their nonsense and they can reemerge.

An approach could be adding another option - not just deeper but sideways - sideways explores the relatively euclidean time-space slice one is currently present in - deeper chooses to continue into the non-euclidean depths, venturing to new time-space points further from where the start point was.

Every room is a honey comb cell - a long hexagonally sided room with a door in each wall and each end.
Each door in a wall opens into another similar room.
Each door at the ends leads into a tunnel and then to another similar room.

In praise of the single page monster manual

In my ongoing quest to lighten my load, Monster Manuals have been a bane of my life with open table games - players can go anywhere, encounter all sorts of things - or at the same time run into nothing unusual and thus I hauled it around unnecessarily. Our place spaces often have patchy wifi and relying on that for calling up anything when most of the players are also running off D&D Beyond has proven foolhardy in the past.

So - the single page monster manual from Blog of Holding was a god-send - I have long been a fan of the single-page approach and 'Just Use Bears' - and this was right up my alley. Since it went in my DM-binder it has proven itself again and again, top marks - for the standard things.

To make sure I have all bases covered, I wanted to capture the 'specials' - the various effects that make things more than just a scaled up version of a goblin with a blade. I grabbed Dice Goblins "Just Use Bears or Wolves, or Spiders or Tigers." and found while it is good it does not quite fit what I need since it is written for Block, Dodge, Parry. The core concept is exactly what I want, I just need that refined for what I use at table - typically 5e.

I decided I needed two things
1. A single page reference version of "Just Use Bears or Wolves, etc."
2. A quick converter for 0e/1e content to 5e

Shiny TTRPG links #227

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

Tabletop Curiosity Cabinet gives us RPG blog carnival retrospective: Promises, oaths and vows

u/Guest_Redditor wrote A Grognard's Principles for Prepping and Running OSR Games

Attronarch's Athenaeum gives us Goodbye to Alarums & Excursions APA

Githyanki Diaspora shares Perspective Shift: From Lore Dump to Lore Confetti

A Knight at the Opera gives us The Shapeshifter's Duel

Monster Manual Sewn From Pants writes Give Me A Myconid And I Will Create A Substandard Version of That Joesph Manola Post About Snakemen

Sons of God gives us Job 17:2 (GLOG class: Legally Distinct Eye Ray Entity)

MurkMail asks You liked that map huh?

All Dead Generations shares Natural History of the Mantichora

u/0megaDungeon writes The OSR, the internet, and the Stan Lee style of DMing