d30 Entertainingly Weird Guests

Inspired by @prokopetz making the point that "hospitality was a major part of a wealthy household’s basic social obligations" and "at any given time, a large household might be playing host to a bewildering assortment of friends, relatives, friends of relatives, relatives of friends, celebrities both far-ranging and local, dignitaries, con artists, miscellaneous weirdos, and that one guy who nobody can quite place" so that "you’re missing an opportunity if you never talk about the Guests" here are some entertainingly weird guests that can be hanging around your nobles court or castle - or wizards tower, if they are hospitable, roadside inns while they are travelling or the hostelries of a city in a pinch.

d30 Entertainingly Weird Guests
1. Latest playwright, needing inspiration. Slightly desperate to repeat crushing success of recent efforts.
2. Cultural tastemaker hiding from supplicants.
3. Clique of artists.
4. Poets come to attend on the host, their muse. Swing between wild revels and sighing melancholy.
5. Host leading a cultural moment of artists, writers, poets and designers. Other guests liable to be sketched, painted and rendered in prose, verse and song.
6. Illusionist, playful. Noone is clear anymore on exactly how many people are here.
7. Conjurer, practicing. Strange things appear and vanish with flashes and bangs at mysterious times.
8. Planar scholar. Has travelled far to peruse the hosts library and study the details in the background of the family paintings.
9. Visitors from beyond. Almost entirely hidden within high-collared clothes and elaborate wigs. Fascinated by everything, talks to the pot-plants, tastes the fire-irons.
10. Young noble on wandering year. Significant power and responsibility waiting at home, does not want to think about it.

Home campaign Bard plus pal during her wandering years, by The Bard

Shiny TTRPG links #245

Things I found interesting over this last week online. 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.

Swan and Raven Studio hosts the HELLO//GOODBYE Charity Bundle for Legal Aid

@molomoot gives us Crossword Dungeons

Sly Flourish shares Go Easy On Yourself

Blog of Forlorn Encystment writes Warring Guilds and Rogue Assassins Plague the Streets of AD&D

Dungeons & Possums shares Things to Support With Your #$%* Disney Money

d4 Caltrops gives us d100 - “Bottle Episodes" - Seafaring Scenes & Situations

What a Horrible Night to Have a Curse... asks Are You Missing the Forest for the Trees? Plant an Orchard.

The Wondering Monster writes How to Help Your Players Investigate Rumors in an OSR Campaign

Arcane Mutterings gives us The Gap in TTRPG Culture

Smoldering Wizard shares Musings on the OSR Blogosphere and Forums

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.