Campaign Spin-Up X - Back of the Envelope Campaign Planning

I wrote about "rebooting a campaign with 2d20 Conan" - spinning up a new campaign in the Scaled Lands.

In the grand tradition of getting going by making promises and getting yourself deadlines I poked a list of players and then was committed to at least running something. Shortly after I had a flight for work so that was me stuck in a place with nothing else to do so I worked up the guts of what I needed on the back of an envelope.

Altogether this serves as a nice illustration of constraint breeding creativity. This world had been the campaign where I 'applied the OSR' after discovering all the blogs and wisdom, I had put a lot of thought into it pre-pandemic, including using it for NaNoWriMo, but I had none of that with me when I did this.

First I blocked out things I felt I needed to prep, to declutter my brain and help corral my thoughts into some kind of order. Up in a corner I stuck a to-do list of tasks as I thought of them, again to note and refocus.

Then I started properly thinking of the immediate recent history - the ramp-in to the start. I thought of the forces at play to give factions kicking around, recalled those that I remembered from before, gave names to some that had just existed as 'the infernal fire cult' before.

I thought through what stuff I wanted to see, what were the various secrets for the players to find and what kind of big interesting things could they get up to.

With Yaksha's hexfill method recently in mind, I wrote a d10/d4 encounter table - 10 factions likely to be found out and about and four examples for each.

One of the key reasons I wanted to return to the Scaled Lands is that I hand some wonderful art for the place commissioned from Evlyn Moreau and I never got to use even half of it before the old campaign collapsed. I had a think through how to use that art for best fun.

Assessing your local crystal sphere for campaign potential

tl;dr: roughing out your local crystal sphere can pay dividends in keeping campaigns consistent.

This is an extension of the 'high-mobility magic' discussion about handling your players rapid unlocking of access to huge new areas.

As part of early-days prep for my Home Campaign I rolled up the local crystal sphere, just to get a sense of what was out there and what kind of things would be visible when you looked at the stars at night. I was glad I did because a couple of odd local phenomena that would be obvious in the night sky revealed themselves. Lately the players have begun to contemplate travelling off-world after getting access to some higher level magics and so I have revisited that early prep to build it out some more.

Shiny TTRPG links #243

Shiny links from about the internet. For more, see last weeks collection 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.

Prismatic Weekly gathers dozens of respondents in Bandwagon Roundup: The Appendices Ns

Sealight Studios gives us Fun in the Stun: Alternatives to Paralysis Mechanics

Epic Empires asks Save vs Poison Or Die?

A Knight at the Opera gives us How Do You Handle the "Inside" of a Hex? (George Lucas Special Edition)

Fluorite Guillotine shares boss relative: telegraphs & radial positioning

Taskerland writes The Hollow Valley Method

Fail Forward shares The Hex Crawl as a Stamp Rally

Spiceomancy gives us Witchlance

Blog of Forlorn Encystment shares It Did Not End with a Mere Slaying of Ogres: Treasure as a Source of Challenge in D&D

Sea of Stars gives us Adding Many Faces to Fear in D&D 5E

Castle Grief writes Building A "Real" Fake World

Beetlescale Technical Band

"Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em, and little fleas have lesser fleas and so ad infinitum" - Augustus De Morgan (Siphonaptera)

Signature of the insectfolk, bane of those who cross them, a huge beetlefolk with multiple scales of its fellows aboard.

As a group they are well habituated to acting and fighting as a team; most typically consider them a work crew with their crane-truck - they go places; everyone dismounts and climb around the space to do what they need to.

Often this might look incongruous like the huge beetle perched on a wall or ceiling acting as the anchor to a pulley while the medium ones are pulling on a rope - like the largest guy is putting in the least effort - but they know their physics and are happy to do the seemingly impossible slowly.

With a little reconfiguration of the mounting straps, the huge beetle can also get its wings out and the whole lot can fly but it is exhausting for the huge beetle and not used directly into danger if at all possible.

Rare to be found outside of beetlescale vaults in this current age unless shoring up a breach or re-excavating access ways.

What makes these guys particularly dangerous is they all have spider-climb ability to traverse any surface and hang upside down from anything that is not perfectly slick

They trundle into battle while the smaller ones pelt the foe with projectiles until the mediums dismount to fight alongside it while the smalls continue to harass the foe from atop the huge one.

A medium insectfolk can carry along two of the small ones in a similar manner - like having large cats or small child riding your shoulders; transporting is doable, fighting can get tricky.

With mediums and smalls alone, typically the smalls dismount for high surfaces to support while the medium stalls the foe. Well habituated pairs can have a single small fight from their medium - also fighting melee, typically with a lance.

Stats
Huge Beetlefolk - as Ogre, less unpleasant, can in an hour prepare themselves for flight and get a fly speed equal to their normal movement
Medium Insectfolk - as human, bandit stats for workers, thug stats for soldiers
Small Insectfolk - as kobolds, plus natural ability to Haste themselves once daily

Adventuresome Times Getting Your Magic Rocks (RPG Blog Carnival)

Wobble Rocket gives us this months prompt Magic Rocks for the RPG Blog Carnival.

This is a build-out of an ideas-bouncing conversation with Robyn Proffer on a shared discord where they were looking for a "metal that gets mined that has terrible consequences and people wanna figure out how to use it" - where my immediate thought was 'steal and repaint warpstone' that staple of Warhammer techno-arcanic genius-geniuses the Skaven. Warpstone is mutagenic, magic-boosting and addictive, snort it to enhance your spells, forge it into armour-piercing bullets, grind it to make explosives, use it in flamethrowers, leave it in your beast pens to grow exciting new mutants - all for the low-low price of madness, mutation and death - either through affliction or explosive-mishap.

Another possible idea is 'earthblood' like liquid metal or crude-oil like substance that conveys similar magical properties.

Shiny TTRPG links #242

Fresh links from about the internet! For more, see last weeks deep-time trawl 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.

Cats Have No Lord hosts launches Onegeon Jam until Dec 31st

Grumpy Wizard shares Why and How I Connect Adventure Locations To Everything Else In a Sandbox Campaign

Ruckerworks gives us Best Dungeon Master’s Guide for Creating Adventures: AD&D to 2024 Compared

Meg Zone creates A mental inventory for occult horror campaigns: an HPless system

This Vorpal Coil gives us Party Geometry

PhD20 writes D&D's 4th Pillar

glorified notepad asks Wanna be a better DM? Try Practicing.

Connecting the Fictional Dots writes People Who Only Play D&D Have a Point

Crow’s Corner gives us Playing With Care: A Guide to RPG Safety Tools

Jay Dragon shares The Expressionist Games Manifesto

New Campaigns on Obsidian Portal (2025 Update)

tl;dr: continues the stable trend since 2023 - 5e still 2/3 of campaigns, very little sign of change anywhere. So on the one hand, this is a 'nothing to report' report - on the other, the stability is the point.

Another year with scarce data on what people are playing in general (come back Orr Reports, bring light to your people...) - we turn to another years data from Obsidian Portal to try and read the tea-leaves of what is going on in the general gaming sphere. I have been tracking these now for a few years and things seem to have hit a stable state relatively speaking.

This data was collected by loading the Campaigns page on Obsidian Portal and noting the campaigns per system for each year available (back to 2008) using the Wayback Machine. Happily the format never changed to greatly and it is possible to get a roughly mid-year capture for every year. I can only use the categorisation that Obsidian Portal uses, though some dispute where those lines are drawn, particularly for early D&D editions - so keep that in mind.

The raw numbers show overall Obsidian Portal having as many new campaigns in 2025 as 2024; no market conquering growth but let us say it has maintained its presence.

Things are broadly stable year on year but do show a bit of a lift in non-D&D games. Taking these figures at face value we see a ~3% shift towards non-D&D games, pretty interesting for they year of the big new-edition-that-wasn't-a-new-edition. That 3% came straight out of 5e, the fraction playing the other editions stayed flat year-on-year.

The bump in non-D&D can be mostly accounted for by an extra 1% going to each of Savage Worlds, GURPS and Starfinder RPG - old warhorses finding a new campaign. Given that neither Daggerheart nor Draw Steel appears and Shadowdark is present only in the most token sense (2 campaigns) this makes me sceptical of how representative this all is. Are we looking at a static community and its gaming habits? Even if it is just the same people, are none of them inclined to try the new hotness?

Checking in on our edition popularity evolution, the trends continue - 5e looks like it has definitely plateaued; 2/3 of the games played is what it can get to.

Looking at our top-14 non-D&D games things similarly trend in line with last year - flat or a slight fade down for most of these, Savage Worlds, GURPS and Starfinder RPG showing a kick since last year, Traveller, World of Darkness and Call of Cthulhu holding to their upward grind. Dataset is relatively small, take this with a grain of salt but overall it looks like the next tier behind D&D is not changing rapidly either.

Looking into what games did appear and get played in 2025 we have Otherscape and Shadow of the Weird Wizard (4 campaigns each) and Legacy: Life Among the Ruins, Lyonesse, Shadowdark RPG, Shadowrun 2E, Sigil & Shadow, Subversion, Tricube Tales & Tactics, Warhammer: the Old World with 2 campaigns each.

Digging into this I also noticed some games who did appear in 2024 but had no campaigns now getting played in 2025 - Pirate Borg (6 campaigns) and Swords of the Serpentine (4 campaigns) being the big ones followed by 2 campaigns each for City of Mist, Dishonored Roleplaying Game, Truth & Justice and Vast Grimm.

All told that makes ~ 40 odd campaigns on new systems in 2025 out of ~6500 total played; hardly a vast rush for novelty.

All in all it says that 2025 has thus far not been a year to seismically alter peoples playing tastes - people found their games and continue to play them. Perhaps all the folk playing the new stuff are on the VTTs or using Obsidian or something else for their campaign management - certainly a possibility. But in this particular corner of the TTRPG online sphere, things sail along with very little sign of change.