Review: Hyena Child

tl:dr; a city sandbox with a grounded feel, packed full of hooks, sites and factions to sustain a good chunk of play.

I grabbed this in the last days of Planet Harry's, spotting that it was by Gazerpress, a local RPG shop here in Vienna that I had been on the lookout for. It got brought home and admired but not brought to table until I met the writer at the recent Indie RPG Con which prompted me to pick it up again with a focus on bring it to play - and reading at the level of detail a review requires. I liked it on first impression and after reading it in detail, that has changed to I like it a lot.

Looks wise this is a gorgeous chunky A5 hardback, distinctive black-and-orange, two ribbons, black and white watercolour art by Marianne Musek throughout plus maps by Markus Schauta. Within the text is all double column per page, overall the layout and artwork are great, giving us a clean, clear, uncluttered book. Statted up for Lamentations of the Flame Princess, relatively light mechanical ties throughout mean you can easily adjust to whatever your system of choice is.

So what is do you get in the book?
Introduction 33 pages on Alexandria circa 1632
The Adventures 62 pages with five adventures
The Dungeon 81 pages on the catacombs beneath Alexandria
Appendices 23 pages of factions, rumours, encounters and items

So what is in here chunk by chunk?

Actual Test: Murkmail Mixed Hexes Technique

Murkmail had a cool idea for hex/sub-hex encounter tables - Mixing hexcrawl encounter tables and I gave it a spin as part of Hexcrawl25.

I used it in a case where I had three influences in play - a chaos cult of shaven-headed snatchers who had been kidnapping locals and travellers, the local raccoon population and the beasts of the forest.

There was some adjustment required because the Hexcrawl25 set-up I am using is pointy side up and Murkmail uses flat side up but I was able to muscle through that and fit the cultists (yellow), raccoons (blue) and forest beasts (pink) into the format.

Splitting down the 19 sub-hexes into 7/7/5 was helpful as a concentrator - I was able to use my 'five things a faction is doing' for both the raccoons and the cult - then throw in a few points of mutual interference. After that the forest beasts and provided opportunity to showcase terrain hazards and then throw in some monsters too. I had an existing general monsters encounters list that was usually getting superseded by hex-specific encounters, this provided a good opportunity to refocus on that.

Re-written into Murkmails format

Shiny TTRPG links #244

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.

I Cast Light! asks WHY MEGADUNGEONS? A Campaign Structure for Modern Lives

Patchwork Paladin gives us How to Read Blogs

Elven Enchantress writes Folkloristics of Playing RPGs

Grinning Rat shares 100 Ways to Improve Your GMing

Verdant Core provides a design for a Lectern Book

Sly Flourish proposes Use Agnostic Tools

Crow’s Corner shares Table-Tested Review of "Cyberpunk Red"

Son of Sun Tzu blog gives us Lessons From Running a Hybrid Megagame

5th Dimensional Tavern writes Warlock and the allure of complexity

Trick's Tales gives us I published a game (and have cool friends)

Dozens and Dragons shares Diplomacy in FKR and open-strategy matrix games

Hill Cantons gives us Oiorpata and Battle Barge Contest

Patchwork Paladin writes Stop with all the rolling already

Hobloglin gives us Sunday School DM

ars ludi shares The Star-Pattern: a Pitfall of GMing

dungeon doll gives us A Small Combat Matrix

Blog of Forlorn Encystment shares Advanced Diseases and Diagnoses

Leicester's Ramble gives us Create

Bundle of Holding offers discounted Weird Wizard

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