Installing Rulers

Of campaigns I have run these past few years, two were open sandboxes and in both of them, after a little poking around dungeons, the partys decided to lock in on some currently non-descript local dweller and get them elevated to a position of power. As the meme says, odd that it happened twice.

Is there something in here about the domain game of D&D being emergent in a convergent-evolution style? Left to their own devices, a party of PCs naturally seeks to instil order, even if it is not to put a crown on their own heads?

Is this just a reaction against whatever the DM is throwing against them - if what they get is a structure plot or obvious hooks, then they will focus on hijinks and chaos creation along the way. If what they get is a pure open sandbox and they can do anything at all, is the reaction to try and impose order and dominion?

These were two completely unrelated groups of players - the first campaign was Southern Reaches where a mix of UK, Ireland and Austria based players playing remotely eventually decided that their goal was going to be getting one of their number elected as mayor of the local big city. The player of that PC had needed to quit so they were effectively a known NPC at that point - no power would have accrued to an active player.

The second time was for my current sandbox, which as running under the name of Realm of the Reluctant King since this effort to crowbar a kingdom in under an NPC is now the main focus. The NPC in question has even told them not to, disavowed any will to be responsible for the locality and fled the region. The current main effort of the campaign is to pry him out of the hands of slavers and bring him back to install at the head of the realm they have hammered together.

Wells and Un-wells (GLÅUGUST 2025 #2)

Taking on The Nothic's Eye GLÅUGUST 2025, challenge #2 is from a list by deus ex parabola - "Selection of interesting wells, wishing or non-wishing". In the finest of tradition, these were drafted on the back of an envelope on a train with an odd guy staring at me.

Unusual water sources.

1. drawing on a cracked open insectfolk ruin - occassionally contaminated with honey-like nectars
2. runoff from an ice-elemental cooling system at the arcane university, inexplicable ice-chunks that look like melting scales
3. distillery condensate from a dwarven subterranean facility; mildly alcoholic
4. tapping a great root; faint taste of sap
5. well created by a giants blow - shattering the rocks below; brought water from tight rocks but now draw is exceeding inflow as people congregate
6. a bizarre system of a belt made of bear pelt running down into a filthy well with the rising, soaked pelt having water squeezed out with wringers. Tastes bad - both pelt and filth leaving trace tastes - but safe enough to drink
7. dwarven venturi jet pump - on a high wind day this dwarven windmill pumps water back down to a cunning venturi nozzle at the bottom of the well and lifts more water back out. Originally designed to combine with a now-missing wind-powered set of trip hammers and forge bellows, it is now a booster-pumped well that is dry (jammed with machinery) on a still day or a torrent on a windy day
8. furious air elemental imprisoned down-well throws off bubbles that reduce the density of the water column and allow the well to lift.
9. a pump operated by skeletons turning a windlass - incredibly squeaky, skeletons hiss and snarl at any who come close but only attack if the pump is interfered with
10. collosal archimedes screw descends huge distance down a 30 degree bore. Distant snarls and roars echoe up the bore and the screw occassionally shakes from impacts.
11. well is an opening into the top of a cavern containing under-sea. Buckets are lowered a very, very long way, sometimes come up with a fish
12. something lives down the well and trades water for things like feathers and leaves. Can be heard chirping happily when buckets with offerings are lowered.
13. beetle shell continuously sheened with condensate that drips into a pan beneath
14. well stands alone within a fetid swamp with a complex curved roof - a seethingly hot gem within the well sets steam rising that runs down the roof to a ring trough that surrounds the well. Gruesome smell of burning marsh mud surrounds it
15. shattered remnant of a wizards tower; twisted apparatus surround a borehole, blue flames leap continuously from the blackened stones of the tower but beneath the water is clear
16. partially buried giant ice-block, frozen around a trapped ice elemental. Hack off some ice.
17. well is a bowl where a salt-crystal thread is being constantly spun by invisible fingers; once all the salt is spun out, invisible hands toss the water and refill the bowl from the nearby sea - snatch the bowl before it is thrown to get the fresh water
18. barnacle encrusted artificers tower, the grumbling machine within sifting tiny grains of gold from huge volumes of seawater - sifts out everything in fact - with fresh water being dumped out by a pipe into what is now an anomalous garden
19. badly resealed portal to the elemental plane of water has flooded the basement of a wizards tower. Only slightly tastes of mold and reagents.
20. shattered tower of a once-mighty aboleth jitters between this reality and other times, occassionally passing through when this place was/is/will be a lake complete with thunderclap of displaced air/water and great splosh as the towers volume of water is displaced to here.

Shiny TTRPG links #236

Yet more deep-time blog-trawlings while I am travelling. 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.

games with others created Monsterparts (attribute-less D&D)

Aboleth Overlords gave us Ye Olde Fantasy: Social Status

Last Gasp shared The House of Rules

BASTIONLAND gave us Expose your Prep

Canmom asked Can we make RPG money more interesting?

Sheep and Sorcery wrote The Science of Friend (Social Mechanics)

The Blue Bard asked Must It Always Be Violence?

Hill Cantons gave us The Unbearable Dullness of DnD Wilderness

Monster Manual Sewn From Pants gave us Weapooning

Actual Play - Yaksha's Hexfill Method (Part 2)

Closing out a table test a Brian Yaksha's Hexfill method on a 'fill as you go' basis on a previously un-explored part of the map. Written up to follow Jenx first best practice: "Record your hobby experience" while continuing the DM commentary addition to the session notes.

This second session had things work more smoothly, I was happy with how it played out. As before, I was working off a single page print-off of all the tables, double column, minimal borders and using that with an overloaded encounter die.

I used an overloaded encounter die so there were both 'encounter, positive' and 'encounter, negative' possibilities plus 'locality' and 'percept' options. Fatigue and expiry results did not require anything from these tables.
1. Setback
2. Fatigue/delay
3. Expiration
4. Locality
5. Percept
6. Advantage

Setup

The party was continuing to try and evacuate a large column of freed prisoners through a swamp. Play picked up with the party catching up with the column of refugees they had let be escorted on ahead by some other adventurers they hired. Approx 175 people in the column, rested but with no food, with four hours left until sundown.

Hexcrawl '25 Mid-Year Status

As we pass the mid-point of the year, taking a look at how this Hexcrawl25 challenge is coming along. On a pure stats, it is not bad - 57% of total hex-count for the year achieved with 50% of the time gone. The campaign I have been running as a test-bed and motivator just hit summer hiatus after 17 sessions, 13 within the campaign, 4 open-table stand-alones. So far, so good.

The Hexmap

I started off from a cookie-cut chunk out of my existing Azgaars Fantasy Map Generator world map.

Initial progress followed a bit of a corkscrew workflow -
* I cookie cut the game region from the existing gameworld
* I built a spreadsheet to list off all the sub hexes and then filled in the biome, culture, religion and political data
* I stared at the first hex
* Rolled up some locations with the d30 Sandbox Companion - incl some settlements, lairs, ruins and cults
* Built a little worksheet, accidentally printed off more than I needed, actually useful mistake
* Read the sites in Knock #1, decided where they went
* Stared at the first hex-region some more, wondered why this had felt easier for Southern Reaches
* Looked for my southern reaches notes, took a while to find them
* Looked for the blogpost about what the hell I did back then
* Saw I had worked up the regions with Deck of Worlds, realised I did not feel like hauling that off the shelf
* Poked through my new copy of Tome of Adventure Design, got a few ideas from that, put it back
* Got a post it, listed out a few ideas to then stick wherever I found a home
* Cracked open the southern reaches spreadsheet - stole the NPC trait generator, list of gods, list of regions (same world), bayou encounter table and ancestry table
* Reworked the random ancestry table to make it closer to D&D baseline
* Looked back over my list of locations and assigned inhabitants to the settlements by order of commonality
* I cracked the Deck of Worlds, even threw in the bridging deck for Lore Masters Deck and roughed out the 19 regional super-hexes
* Realised I had gotten my scale wrong, and drilled down into a sub-hexes in a panic the night before running the first session
* Plundered bits of my Southern Reaches campaign that did not get used to populate the 'starting zone'

All that to get me ~ 19 sub-hexes of the starting hex and thematic ideas for the surrounding super-hexes. I eventually settled on 40 mile super-hexes, 10 mile hexes and 2.5 mile sub-hexes.

As of end of June the hexmap stood like this:

Shiny TTRPG links #235

Continuing the deep-time trawls while I am travelling. 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.

Last Gasp gave us Welcome to Scenic Whereverthefuck, if you lived here, you’d be caught up in drama by now.

Jeffs Gameblog shared The FLAILSNAILS Conventions

Occultronics wrote Stocking Hexes with the B/X Dungeon-Stocking Procedure

Unsound Methods gave us Twenty OSR Systems Reviewed

I Cast Light! shared INVESTIGATING SARAH CONNOR: My Ideal CoC Game & The Terminator

Revenant's Quill gave us How I prep for games

Rise Up Comus wrote In Search of Better Travel Rules

Gorgon Bones gave us Magical Corruption

Review: Hello // Goodbye

tl:dr; an arty zine with a range of articles, likely something inspirational for any gamer.

The founder of the local DM Supergroup, also founder of Swan and Raven Studio, a pal, set this up as a fund-raiser for legal aid in Virginia. Folk getting snatched off the streets and disappeared is some bullshit. I have been detained by unaccountable national security forces on a fair few occasions so I am perfectly happy to support someone who shines a light and fishes for people who get vanished in the hope that noone cares enough to see due process done.

The zine itself - Hello/Goodbye is 'An Ekphrastic Collage Tabletop Roleplaying Anthology Zine' - and to answer the immediate question I have gotten by folk I have shown it to - "Ekphrasis is a Greek term meaning "description", and ekphrastic writing is a vivid, creative, written description and response to a work of visual art" to quote the introduction.

This zine is an interesting beast because it has a different 'recruiting angle' that what I typically see out there - the closest I guess would be an itch.io charity jam aligned to disaster relief or the like where you get a grab bag of absolutely all sorts. Typically when things get bound within covers there is a tighter systems restriction - all old school D&D or Mork Borg or Troika! or what have you. The common thread here are the art pieces provided by the organiser and that personal connection - which gives a much broader range of contributions within than you might otherwise typically find.

descriptor, artist

First impression - hot pink and yellow makes it stand out on your shelf! The art within is mostly collage work by the author and as per the concept of the zine, the various articles are responses to or inspired by those pieces.

So what is all this stuff you get in this zine?