Actual Play - Hexcrawl25 - The Swooping Lizard Affair

Inspired by a discussion elsewhere I ran session #20 of my hexcrawl recently and it provided a nice illustration of pure map based play over an in-game day and a bit. Written up to follow Jenx first best practice: "Record your hobby experience" while continuing the DM commentary addition to the session notes.

The short version; with a few days to kill until the party needs to pick up something and eager to test out a magical item that was alleged to make their draught-lizard faster, they set out to hike back up to a landmark they had seen. They sensibly navigate around hazards then spot something interesting, "Squirrel!" off the plan and end up wrestling with a wild-magic surged flying reptile mount in a session heavily driven by the wild-magic surge table.

Characters

Herb - Firbolg "Alchemist" (artificer)
Eggie - Goliath "Wizard" (wild-magic sorcerer)
Cortez - Dwarven Fighter

Plus minions
Clarabelle - tabaxi, small, servant
Fabricator Technician #207 - insectfolk, small, observer
Cedric - big lizard beast of burden

Session Recap

Shiny TTRPG links #249

Shiny links from around the web. 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 last days of the HELLO//GOODBYE Charity Bundle for Legal Aid.

Of Dice and Dragons launches this months RPG Blog Carnival with Feasts and Festivals in Your TTRPG Campaign

Of Dice and Dragons also shares Wanted: Hosts for the 2026 RPG Blog Carnival!

LootLootLore gives us Diagetic Bingo

Congas.blog writes Finding my community

Chronicled Scribblings of the Itinerant Overlord gives us AD&D Training Costs: A Common DM Unforced Error

Sage's Sanctum shares A Calamitous Random Encounter Alternative

Old Men Running The World asks What Makes Me Want To Run A Game?

Grumpy Wizard shares Five Lessons About the TTRPG Business From Mike Mearls

Fluorite Guillotine gives us minimalist jam post-mortem

Blog of Forlorn Encystment writes Strangers in a Strange Land

forestsofcernutis gives us Proto-D&D

Bruce Heard shares D&D Castles: Operating Costs

Crow’s Corner gives us Halloween One-Shots: Read, Played, Reviewed

Review: Beyond Dread Portals

tl:dr; self-contained RPG of world-hopping fantasy, old-school system, great, concise setting.

My 'support your local gaming houses' campaign - this is from d101 games in the UK; I saw this pop up as a kickstarter, pitching a "tabletop roleplaying game of multidimensional world-travelling fantasy" which speaks to my plane-hopping interests and the pitch also noted that the "easy-to-learn rules are built from a core loosely based on the world's first fantasy roleplaying game, tailored to fit the setting" so I was interested in something that was setting-forward, with less focus on classes and sub-classes, more on the portal-hopping.

Cover art by Jon Hodgson

First impression was of a nice self contained book, fatter than I was expecting at ~320 A5 pages and with a nice ribbon. Within we have clean lay-out, no columns, black-and-white art by Dan Barker, Jeshields and Paul Tomes. The vibe is very much a cleaned-up old-school book, self-contained with everything needed in here.


So what is all this stuff you get in the book?

Core Gameplay Loop for Sector Defense Game

Pondering on how to run "Your Sector, Your Problem" - "SHIELD or Stargate Command but you are responsible for a sector of inhabited alien worlds" - it lurks in my mind like a splinter.

Questions I have been having are 'what exactly is the fun here', 'why is this not a board game',and then 'what is the minimum viable game to get going'. I have written about this before in 'DIO - Cosmic Defense Brigade' and d20 Sector Defense Assets - the high concept is that you are responsible for holding down a sector your corporation has newly acquired protectorship of and have a scarce amount of assets of varying levels of effectiveness and you have to deal with all the problems that come across your desk with those.

Looking at the first of the questions - 'what exactly is the fun here?' - the core gameplay loop I have in mind is:
- "spot the problems" - gather info, figure out what is going on across your sector
- deploy your resources - typically not enough for easy answers
- resolve incidents
- recover/maintain your resources

Shiny TTRPG links #248

Fresh links from around the web. 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 last days of the HELLO//GOODBYE Charity Bundle for Legal Aid.

DirectSun Games hosts the Puzzle Dungeon Jam

Sam Sorensen launched Mothership Month 2025 Wargame: OVER/UNDER which is where all the noise about that has come from.

Blog of Forlorn Encystment gives us Alignment Languages are Socially Repulsive

Fight in the Shade shares Minimal D&D Stats

Crow’s Corner writes A Taste of Tabletop Roleplaying Games about Vampires

New School Revolution proposes Let's Make a Forest

Viridian Void Productions writes In Praise of Idle Prep

Play Material gives us The Ancient Game of Riddles

Rise Up Comus shares A Camping Procedure

Leicester's Ramble gives us Yet Another Mass Combat Hack - Using "Field Combat Rules for Shadowdark" in OSE

Improved Initiative writes Dungeon Design Tips: You Need To Make Social Skills Viable If You Want Players To Use Them

four letters at random gives us One-shot Good Society: Changes

The Robgoblin wonders Why adventure? Ask the CIA!

Capsule Reviews #9: HELLO//GOODBYE Charity Bundle

Friends of the blog Swan and Raven Studio are hosting the HELLO//GOODBYE Charity Bundle for Legal Aid - I grabbed my copy and am facing the same challenge as with every itch.io bundle - how to even get your arms around the treasures within? By my count 203 items from 114 creators - it is a lot for $15.

I already looked at the Hello/Goodbye zine itself - you can read that review here. Trying to get my arms around 'what is even here' I come back to my classic approach to all these bundles - are there at least a few things in here to justify picking it up and then everything else is bonus, gems to be slowly revealed over time.

I draw on the wisdom of crowds somewhat here - the thinks I have seen others rave about as reasons to pick this up are Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast, Paris Gondo - The Life-Saving Magic of Inventorying, Rosewood Abbey, Arkyvr and DNGN + DRGN. If you want back up for those recommendations you can see the reviews of others here:
Playful Void reads Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast
LunarShadow Designs gives a quick review of Paris Gondo - The Life-Saving Magic of Inventorying
Burn After Running reviews Rosewood Abbey
Rob Wieland reviews Arkyvr on Enworld
Deathtrap Dungeon reviews DNGN

Ones that I have experience with - mostly from the local crowd here in Vienna -

Worldbreaker by CrowberryCake - the serpent Jörmungandr grows, waters rise, villages vanish and the players are those who remain. A one-page of mechanics plus bonus second page bestiary and third page of character sheets. Characters have eleven stats split into two groups (pillars and virtues) with dice assigned to them - combine two for your roll to resolve challenges. Failures in a roll advance the 13-step 'clock' of serpent growth until the world is wholly taken over - complete your goals before that. A whole system with plenty of flexibility to run different things, lots packed into three pages.

GREEN CORRIDOR - MixUpPixels - players are agents of REWIND, a group of survivors of the climate catastrophe and corporatism that has ravaged the world. Agents seek out pockets of The Green, habitable regions where people and wildlife can flourish, aimiung to rebuild the world one ecolocial pathway at a time. A punchy tri-fold pamphlet game, agents have three stats, challenges are resolved by roll under system. Designed to be played with a hex-map where the players travel, face down challenges and to create 'green corridors' across it. Pithy and stripped down, a good seed that lends itself to inspiring a GM to pick up and run with it.

M is for Muscle - Wasbart - a 4-page game where a group of enormously bulky giants must drop their adopted 5-year old off at day-care in a world was made for puny weak people. Grapple the world with your squeeze, think or feel muscles with d6, d8 or d12 assigned. Take on challenges with a roll-over system and chance inflating your muscles to bump your die to a d20 or fail and deflate to d4. A page of tables at the back provides sample challenges for the gang to encounter on the way to kindergarten drop-off. Looks good for quick one-shots, a great beer-and-pretzels game.

Rockpool by Jubal Barca - is a "tiny RPG about tiny Rockpool creatures" with their own aims in the bounded, busy world of a rockpool. Twelve pages gives you a page to set your aims, two to build your character with their three stats of Tidefast, Shelltwirled and Spinethrown, two pages of 'occurences', five pages of bestiary, a half page of things to find in the rockpool and some flavour text to close. Self-contained and a distinct vibe of striving to achieve small goals in a world in flux.

Also throwing in Just Make Shit - Diogo Nogueira - a 13-point manifesto and guind on getting things done and making the things you want to make. Useful.

Honorable mention to:
Songbirds an eldritch fantasy game.
The Lyric Game Manifesto-Essay on "Why you should make a lyric game"
The Obligatory Fishing Minigame is a system agnostic Tabletop RPG about going fishing!
Begin Transmission - A planet exploration letter-writing game for 1-2 players
Galaxy Black - Space Fantasy Adventure in the collapsing universe
Sprouts is a family-friendly game of hand-drawn creatures traveling across real-life terrain.
Tea & Toadstools: a solo GM-less journaling game in which you play as a hedgehog in a twill vest who just wants to be left in peace!

All of which just scratch the surface of this bundle but I hope provides confidence that there is enough in here to justify the price - and lots more to provide future pleasant surprises.

Setting up coherent other worlds for Scale-and-Planet campaign (RPG Blog Carnival )

In My Campaign gives us this months prompt Other Worlds for the RPG Blog Carnival.

Portraying Other Worlds

Considering how to make worlds that are different but feel coherent within the same campaign - what are the dials you twiddle and what stays the same?

This is an idea I am road testing with my 2d20 Lizard Kings campaign; the core theme of it all is that the scalyfolk are in a post-imperial expansion - but have just retrenched not gone away. There are tons of things littered around from different eras of their imperium, representing different ideas they had - including their push to their nearby worlds.

This is a live, relevant question because I am returning to Corrus, the world of the Lizard Kings, where one of the core setting ideas was the concept of Near Mars and Far Venus - a thinly atmosphered world nearer the sun and a thickly atmosphered one further out would cancel out to be roughly habitable - making three worlds in this system operating on a John Carter-esque sword-and-planet paradigm. Inter-planetary escapades were always intended as part of the mix - but now I have the wisdom to front-load the good stuff and thus I ought to be figuring out that world-striding aspect of things.

Original system sketch from ~ 2019

It may be smudged and barely legible but those notes read "Near Mars, Ancient civilizations, canals" and "Distant Venus, Jungle world w/ Saur Cavalry [crocodile worshippers?]" and I have some more notes that tag distant venus with giants and dinosaurs, near mars with Dune-esque deserts, gnolls, crystal forging, miners and alchemists with great tree.

So how to make these three worlds - tentatively named Nemas, Corrus and Favens - feel coherent, yet different?

I've had some thoughts before on distinguishing mirror worlds with house-rules and modified rules for those worlds feels like a good idea but one tool in the box but it does not go far enough. Mirror worlds should be very similar, with a twist, these other worlds should feel distinctly different within a shared milieu.

I want the 'Still Here' motifs of the lizardfolk across all worlds:
- lizardy deep time nonsense
- a multiplicity of heat cults
- nature-bending
- same general pantheon

Traffic between them has been complex but achievable for a good long period of time - so like very distant continents, semi-legendary lands that few have actually been to and many disbelieve exist.

Common across them all will be relics and ruins of the 'high tide' of the lizard imperium - portals within those ruins will be the easiest means for the unofficial travel of adventurers.

Rapidly filling out worlds

With whole other worlds to play with, I think batching some off-the-shelf ideas by theme might be good to start.

Nemas - all of the desert tropes, harsh, high entropy system of sandstorms burying and uncovering the past - al Qadim, John Carter, Ultraviolet Grasslands, Painted Wastelands, Nagash-type undead, Skorne of Iron Kingdoms.

Favens - giants and bigger dinosaurs - stranger jungles, fungal, seas and swamps - highly contested, previous inhabitants have not gone quietly - Lustria, Thousand Thousand Islands, Yoon Suin, Moonsoon. The core world already has deep, hot jungles in the abyssal dry sea - some dinosaurs already live there. Perhaps dinosaurs are an invasive clade here that has thrived?

Binding worlds together

To pull all this together I need some coherent overlays to allow them to form a connected scale-and-planet setting. Thematically this is how an empire falls apart in three bits:
- on Nemas, the fading remnants of the old ways persist amid the shifting sands and along with the remnants of others
- on Corrus, the rump empire continues, retrenched to the deep abyss - here mammals contest them
- on Favens, invigorated but chaotic - the lizardfolk thrive but have slipped the yoke of empire and all sorts of polities are active

The driver for all lizardfolk is heat - such as the sun; Favens was the original homeworld of the lizardfolk, the thick atmosphere retaining the dimmer sunlight; Corrus is where they found a balance of heat and space, Nemas borders too hot, but the solar cults thrive here. Nemas has more weird arcano-tech, Favens has mutants and war-beasts plus the original homelands of the lizards.

Culturally Nemas is a split between true believer solar cultists who are willing to suffer for proximity to the sun, the remnants of the colonial lords and their holdings and a strong culture of xeno-arcanists who pore over the magical secrets of the ruins and ancient cultures here. The other antique cultures also persist - insects, trilobites, liches of all sorts.

Favens is dominated by strong and highly splintered culture - many subspecies of lizardfolk, serpentfolk, grippli - it is as Africa to humans, the font of diversity, many languages and peoples, along with scalykind analogs of giants, dwarves, etc. With dinosaurs and giants thriving, settlements are clustered in defensible positions with large parts of the world 'wild'.

We also have multiple spiritual poles - on Nemas, closest to the heat of the sun, it is the promised land. On Corrus, there are the most diverse of all the cults with many of the non-solar heat-worshippers present as well as the largest realm with the old orthodox solar religion as state religion. On Favens there are the sacred origin sites and a plethora of traditionalist sects and non-solar cults as well as the current reformed heat-cult.

Wrap-up

Falling back on my 'Azgaars' factors of culture, nation, biome and religion we have more or less dinged all of these giving us a decent enough framework to work within. The same generic encounter table combined with the planet-appropriate filters would allow different-but-coherent encounters to be generated for those other worlds. With more time, tailored encounter tables would be good to have but until it is clear that planet-hopping is imminent I am going to focus prep elsewhere.

For locations, I will do the sweep up of sources mentioned above, note a dozen or so interesting ones for each worlds and then use that as the structure to build around.

Together those would give locations and encounters specific to the worlds and then I can drop the players into some sort of coherent sandbox should they manage to find an old interplanetary portal. Which can also be phrased as "I now have license to drop functional interplanetary portals into the campaign" because I can catch them on the other side should they choose to step through.