Grave of a Thousand Heads (Onegeon Jam)

For the Onegeon jam in accordance with The Onegeon Manifesto by Cats Have No Lord

Guidelines for the ideal Onegeon:
Make it system neutral as much as possible
Make it small
Make it either bland or entirely unique.
Make it weird

This site is either a room in a forgotten corner of a dungeon or in a barrow in the middle of an icefield.

The Grave of a Thousand Heads

A frozen stone door, carved with dragonshead, with signs of panelling long pried away. Behind the door a large staircase descends 20' into a 180' diameter hexagonal chamber. The walls glimmer, light reflect from black marble, the floor has mounds and scattered detreitus.

To one side, a pile of frozen headless bodies, hundreds of them, battle-marked and frozen beneath a sheet of ice. Draw close and see someone tried to burn them once before.

Ahead, a cairn of skulls, the missing hundreds, topped with a sword standing to show its hilt. Behind it a tipped altar, a shattered icon.

All across the floor signs a packed camp was destroyed in fighting.

Stepping from the stairs starts the skulls clattering and chittering, pin-pricks of blue light their frozen sockets. The bodies beneath the ice begin to struggle free.

A few skeletons will work themselves free continuously while intruders remain and lurch to attack. Destroying the skulls quiets them all.

Touring the perimeter finds black marble slabs making the hexagonal room, smashed through in places to reveal an older cavern behind. The marble is carved with the tale of a great ritual, strongly featuring undead dragons. The walls behind the slabs are daubed with ancient lore. The altar oozes evil, the smashed icon that of a forgotten murder cult.

Time spent here to piece things together - a murder cult laired here, was raided and wiped out. A noble fell in the battle and was buried under the heads of his foes. The site itself was being studied by the cult but is of an older time, a previous dragon cult having built it, etching their most powerful ritual into the stones on the walls.

Paltry loot can be gleaned from the bodies of the skeletons. The sword has minor magics but is clearly an heirloom of the local ruling house. Beneath the cairn, buried with honors is a noble of that house, their body partially mummified in the cold. Armour long rusted, marred by the blows that killed them. A bright signet ring, the most significant prize here. Tens of gold to a nameless fence, hundreds returned to his family, the same for his sword.

Design notes

This is an 'activate the map' room - an information-trap where the damage just takes a long time coming. The remnants of the cult, the local nobles, dragon cultists, power-hungry arcanists - whisper a word that you were in this place and all of those will be after you.

Trade back the signet and sword to the nobles, they will reward you well. Give them any concern you are trying to unearth the murder cult and they will hunt you to the ends of the earth.

The true treasure here is information - the murder cult want to know where the last altar of their master is, any dragon cultists or arcanists would be very interested in the ritual carved on the walls. Most would be seek to kill rather than leaving someone else the chance to learn that knowledge.

Shiny TTRPG links #254

Only the shiniest links out across the blogosphere. For yet more, see last weeks collection or the weekly r/OSR blogroll or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.

Explorers Design announces The Bloggies 2026!

Quasiwizard gives us 12 Hexes

A shrike for my dreams shares Pruning 5e: A response to '5 Cuts To 5e That Make The Game More Interesting'

To Be Resolved asks Conservation of Game - How Resilient is your Prep?

The Ice Queen's Throne writes AD&D isn’t a burger, it’s a meatloaf

Says Who gives us METT-TC for Faction Play

Rise Up Comus shares [Early Worm Campaign] The Backstory of the Castle Automatic

Meticulous Mezzanine gives us Villages, resources, and gm facing tools

Coins and Scrolls writes OSR: Treasure for Dungeon / Room Stocking

TTRPG Insider gives us Pay-to-Play: The Business of the Professional Dungeon Master

Sunshine Blogger Award

This blog has been graciously awarded a Sunshine Blogging Award by Halfway Station - "peer recognition to bloggers who bring positivity, joy and creative content to the blogging world" - my first awareness of it but greatly appreciated nonetheless. Halfway Station specifically grants this "for the analyses of gaming data" - for which I am further gratified, those 'dungeons & data' posts can be a slog at times, glad to see people like them.

As part of this I need to answer questions from the nominator and then select some nominees myself.

Courtesy of The Wonderful World of Cinema we have a recap of the steps to accept the award:
1. Include the Sunshine Blogger Awards somewhere on your blog and/or in the article
2. Thank the person who nominated you
3. Share the link to this person’s blog (it goes without saying)
4. Answer the 11 questions asked by the blogger who nominated you. In my case, it will be 22 questions.
5. Nominate 11 bloggers yourself.
6. Ask 11 questions to these bloggers.
7. Notify the bloggers by commenting on their blogs.

So should you find yourself nominated below, and you would like to accept and pass it on, this is the process.

Many Faces of the OSR

tl;dr: "OSR" is a banner flown over many folk, often unalike, occasionally strongly opposed - generalisations do not come easily.

Elmcat did a thing - Mapping the Blogosphere - pulled in a lot of blog feeds, looked at who linked to who, over a good long block of time. Threw them into some network-detecting software and out pops a neat hex of communities.

Noting the caveats of link-rot, blog-deletion, loss of G+, etc. that mean this is not the complete picture of all online effort around the thing known as the OSR, we can still discern a couple of true-enough to be useful facts.

First, this lets us put some kind of shape to the unsurprising intuition that there are a number of separate communities that travel under the banner of the OSR - some overlap more or less with others.

Second, there have been pulses of activity, some of these groups within the wider blogosphere are differentiated in time more than any approach to gaming.

Adapted from original logo by Matt Jackson

I hacked together the mashup above to reflect the truth, that whatever other facts there are, there are at least six meanings someone could have when they say OSR, one for each of those communities. From that persons point of view they are correct, that was a reflection of their experience of the OSR, thought it might have been a time and a community that is no longer extant. Another person going looking for just that OSR will not find it today, only its shadow, but that does not make the first person wrong.

We have a multitude beneath the OSR umbrella - and Elmcat's work gives us a sense of which bits were/are at the foreground and when.

We can assume that brickbats will continue to be thrown at the OSR based on the behaviours of the meanest, most unwelcoming fraction of assholes and while it is true that those folk are in there, they are not a majority and to abandon the OSR to them is to hand a great victory to a puny force. Similarly, those claims made by outsiders can now be countered with something more than vibes - they are demonstrably a small bunch of bad actors, just ignore them and soak up the rest of the good stuff in here.

Shiny TTRPG links #253

More shiny links from around the web. For yet more, see last weeks collection or the weekly r/OSR blogroll or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.

d4 Caltrops gives us d100 - Brainfood for Burgeoning Blogs

Trick's Tales writes Seven Part Pact: An Extremely Complicated Game about Extremely Complicated Men

Connecting the Fictional Dots shares Character Death and Play Cultures

Fluorite Guillotine gives us quantum ogre reborn

Zedeck Siew Writing Hours shares TO DRINK UP THE SEA

Tree Climber gives us Alignment as Rock Paper Scissors

Messages From The Far Havens writes Being a Good Gamemaster at RPG Conventions

Wayspell gives us [HMtW] Encounters Upon the Astral Sea

Dungeon Bison shares The Map as a Tool for Conversation

monkeyX's games blog writes Gothic Feelings, Urban Nightmares: Playing in the Shadows of Buffy, Liminal & Vampire

To Be Resolved gives us Bee-Sized Anchors of Wilderness Play

I Cast Light! shares LAW, ORDER, DUNGEONS & DRAGONS: Gameable Suggestions from English Medieval Law

Review: Chapter Serf

tl;dr: delightful game to play the lowliest of servants of the grimdarks mightiest warriors.

This dropped on tumblr and I snatched it up, both expecting great things but also in fear that the scouring eye of Games Workshop might not be far behind.

This is a system light game of being one of the myriad servants who toil in the background, that the Space Marines might fight for the Emperor. After all, someone must ensure all the candles we see in every piece of art stay lit.

Zedeck wrote their thoughts in a neat blog on the genesis of the game, well worth the read. The game itself is 75 landscape pages, bright text on dark background, very much in keeping with what we have seen for in-universe technical read-outs.

Opening cinematic of the Space Marine game by Relic Entertainment

So what is all this stuff you get in the book?
4 pages of lead in - where, who, why - in general
5 pages of 'system' - split around the roles
31 pages making a d66 table of roles
14 pages of major NPCs
37 pages of setting - the Warmask of Gloriana
2 pages of thanks and 'why play this'

So what is in here chunk by chunk?

Your Sector, Your Problem - wheres my motivation?

Thinking on "Your Sector, Your Problem" (SHIELD/Stargate Command but responsible for a sector of inhabited alien worlds) in particular in the light of Uncanny Spheres MEGACORP: The Evil Mothership Campaign - why not just use that?

Uncanny Spheres portrays the dark mirror version of Mothership, scheming executives within the iconic megacorporations of that setting - and there is a ton of material there that I think I could wrangle but the 'close, but not quite' sense I get is really helpful to clarify what I am trying to get at with Your Sector, Your Problem.

The high-level pitch in 'DIO - Cosmic Defense Brigade' was "you are responsible for holding down a sector your corporation has newly acquired protectorship of and have a scarce amount of Sector Defense Assets of varying levels of effectiveness and you have to deal with all the problems that come across your desk with those."

The key difference with MEGACORP as I think about it is that even though you are representing a very large entity, an interstellar megacorp, the problems you are dealing with are greater still, so your margin for the kind of back-stabbing and internal politics that MEGACORP foregrounds is less. Not zero, but less. YSYP is like domain management on a dangerous frontier, with potentially hostile residents and unknown buried problems within your realm.

My vision for the setting is a Banksian one or "portal fantasy in spaaaace" - lots of aliens out there, not necessarily all hostile but certainly humans are only small fish in what has turned out to be a very, very big, very inhabited pond.