Mapwork in campaigns (Maps Blogwagon)

tl;dr: get a broad coarse view of your world; there are easy tools to use & you will not regret it when your players head for the horizons.

This is for the Maps Blogwagon from Prismatic Wasteland. This is a paean to leveraging randomly generated or procedurally generated maps to get a rough but broad picture of everything. Dice this up, roll them up with various tools - or create them with intentionality - to get yourself a rough a broad rough cut of everything but only detail what you need. For that broad, shallow view Azgaar's Fantasy Map Generator is great - it randomly blocks out a map with a couple of useful layers; cultures, biomes, national boundaries, and religions which interplay to give interesting results. Zoom down to cities and do the same with Watabou City Generator. This is to have a DM side tool to help you be coherent and consistent in your responses to questions from players. In particular when the player's geographic reach massively expands through access to high-level magics. When players start heading for the horizons, having a coarse, broad assessment of what is going on keeps you calm, helps you stay consistent and keeps the players immersed.

Ducal House Example

i wanted to talk about handling maps for the Ducal house game this is one just shy of 150 sessions. There are two big files - "Stats" the giant Excel with all of my world-building rules of thumb and math and demographic math and everything, and a giant PowerPoint called Maps, currently running at 96 slides. Here is where I stuffed all my map work. The original map for the game was done with Azgaar's fantasy maps and after that I took screenshots of various locales using different features to focus in on what was the actual play space.

This file has grown organically through the campaign, initially because there was a strong virtual component to play during the pandemic lock-down but now simply as it is the central reference for (complex) geography. I use this to figure things out then extract the relevant snippets I need for a session - either resketching the hexmap section or just working up a quick sites-and-connectors point-crawl-like schematic for travel.

Going back over it for writing this I am amused that the eras of the campaign are visible, like rings in a tree, as things were added as they became relevant.

Below I run through
1. Content of the maps file
2. Early game: city scale
3. Expanding to regional travel
4. Realms beyond
5. Sum up

Shiny TTRPG links #272

Links of great interest from the breadth of the interweb. Not sated? Try last weeks collection or the weekly r/OSR blogroll or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Bloggie-nominated. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch, delinked by request.

Dungeons & Possums posts A Commenting Campaign

Backwards Tabletop writes Essay: The GM Is Dead

A Knight at the Opera posts How to Talk About Difficulty

Prismatic Wasteland gives us Play Is Canon

The Play Reports posts Fleurons, Mother of all Bullets

SandroAD shares What the Heck is a TTRPG?

Lonely Star writes De-Abstraction rocks, yo - or "I Finally Get Cottonmouth"

Patchwork Paladin posts Let’s Talk About Player Skill and Equipment

New School Revolution posts Module Writing Tips

I Cast Light! gives us JUST THE FACTS MA'AM: Using Sean McCoy's Investigation Sheet in CoC

sarene! blog writes Quick & Cheap Perfect Binding

Actual Play: converting work colleagues to the cause

I was geas'ed to run D&D for one of my colleagues. They ambushed me at the office Christmas party and asked could I do it. This was a fair bit into the party so I filed it away as 'reconfirm later' - and when I was heading back to London I did check and lo, they were actually interested. I rounded up a few of the folk I *had* actually previously discussed D&D with, the geas-er roping in one of their pals too for a table of four.

I was honestly shocked at this level of interest among... ordinary folk? I mean, never mind the fact that I cosplay high corporate every day, I am still surprised that people have heard of it and are interested enough to try. These are folk who had not played Baldurs Gate 3, not seen the D&D movie, nor Stranger Things. The closest they had as a reference was some episode of Community (which I had never seen).

So with a certain sense of responsibility, I decided to book the Arcanists Tavern for some initial wow factor. Billed as "London's first immersive tabletop gaming cafe" near Hoxton, I have been in and run games there before but this was the first time I went full hog, booked a booth etc.

Facilities in general were great, booth big enough for the table, benches for the players and a seat for me all closed off with a curtain. We could tell the other tables were there but noise levels were better than a busy night at my usual Friday night venue. The tables were cool with baize pits in the center for all the dice rolling which kept things from getting lost. We got food and drink there, tasty toasties and a few beers - fairly abstemious compared to a typical work night out truth be told, practically a visit to the gym. Cost is value for what you get, I will be using it again.

Setup for the session

I generated a set of character from Fast Character - mostly because it is quick and easy button mashing and gets you most of what you need. Very good for martials or partial casters, not great for casters because it just names the spells, no info or stats, but it was good enough to get started.

I decided I was going to run a 'Splinters of Hope' session - planar scavenger hunt for wood from a now-dead world to save dying elves - and start in medias-re to really get things going.

I cooked up the session up as a classic 'quest' - sneak into a place, get a thing. Recycled setting by having the objective be set on the edge of my Hexcrawl25 map, so I knew all the factions, background activity and just used that. Decided to drop in 'thinky' challenges more than raw combat crunch. Threw in some good old Goblinpunch non-Euclidean weirdness. Decide it would be full of skeletons on 'automated rotas' so they could potentially sneak through them all if they figured that out.

Talked through all this to a transcription app while doing laundry then grabbed an envelope and blocked out the session linearly which became my session sheet.

Session Report: The Templars Villa

Review: Kala Mandala Playbook

tl;dr: a draft system with a setting soaked into its bones; PC's as "meddlers". Light-weight and stuffed with gorgeous art.

I saw Centaur Games launched their webstore so I bought one of everything including this playtest version of the Kala Mandala playbook; a system to go with their flavour-forward, south-east Asian inspired setting. The base premise of Kala Mandala is that you belong to a meddling association. You are meddlers. Just wandering around sticking your nose in because, to quote it, "You are a professional meddler. You are an adventurer with a legitimate career path. You have monetized your irrepressible nosiness by joining a meddlers guild" - I love it, just fantastic stuff.

Cover art by Munkao

This is a full first draft - it has gorgeous illustrations throughout already. The artifact of the playbook is fully baked but it acknowledges that the system is not necessarily fully there. Notes in the back on what has been omitted from focus (balance, economy) also provide email addresses to send in your feedback. I think it is still certainly good enough to get going - I am far happier to have it in my hands in the state it is now than to wait another chunk of time to get those aspects ironed out when they will only sometimes affect your game at all.

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

Shiny TTRPG links #271

Shiny links for this Easter Monday - a free day I forgot I had off! Still need more? See last weeks collection or the weekly r/OSR blogroll or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Bloggie-nominated. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch, delinked by request.

Oldskolgmr's Blog writes Notes on a game that failed...(system don't matter it's the fun)

Murkmail shares Adventure design is about negative space

Mindstorm posts Energy Coin Adventure Design

Rise Up Comus gives us Stats as hammer, stats as nails

Because Of Dragons shares Stillmania: Playing With What You Have & Enjoying The Spirit Of Wargaming

Idiomdrottning posted Secret-keeping is the DM’s most important job

Sly Flourish writes What Separates Adventure Types?

WobbuPalooza wrote Early Collaborative Games of Fantasy and Imagination

Afraid of Encounters posts Afraid of Communities - Indonesian Tabletop RPG scene and The Quest for Generic "Authentic" Slop

Astral Frontier gives us Gearshifting in Games

estival press posts The Problem with Fun

Space-Biff shared Anti-Fun

Deeper in the Game wrote The Same Page Tool

Eldritch Exarch Press shares On Strongholds

State of the Blog (post #900)

The blog rattles along, last such milestone in the 3-digit posts. I hit a tough patch in the immediate post-Xmas lull; finding it hard to get things back up and running which may have been associated with finishing out a Rogue Trader (CRPG) run that ate sleep. I find myself now with a whole bunch of post drafts based on transcribed notes and a forward-log of two weeks so in a better place. Which is good because a new small householder is now causing new sleep disruption.

Between this and the last State of the Blog there has been quite a bit of recognition for the Shiny Weekly Links (including a Bloggie nomination) which is validating.

There has been quite a chunk of discussion on how blogging is not gaming which is also useful to put things in perspective; for me, I have found help for my games on other peoples blogs - an apt random table, a useful how-to, an inspirational site or monster or class - and this blog is my attempt to both log my own experiences to try and avoid forgetting the lessons I learn and to put my ideas and experiences out there like seed in a bird-feeder, hopefully that the games of others might benefit as mine have from theirs.

On traffic

The stats are bananas, I have no doubt these are utterly poisoned by bots, scrapers and AI training but I put them up to give a sense of what I am seeing. Lines goes up, but are any humans in there?

I have handed off stewardship of the r/OSR blogroll to stalwart comrade Leicester's Ramble and the stats for that look relatively healthy. They have significantly higher reddit karma than I, I hope this helps bring the blogroll to more eyes. With rumblings about Discord becoming non-viable and the general rolling background of social media enshittifying in various ways, maintaining more channels is a good idea, I feel.

To that end, I have joined the New Old Gaming blogring and rootr.ing for the same reasons - I see rootr.ing already seems to be leading to a bunch of folk stopping by which is neat.

Field Report: Vienna Fantasy Gaming & Roleplay Con 2026

I was recently at the Vienna Fantasy Gaming & Roleplay Con - spritual successor to what used to be known as 'Harry-con'. I did not have vast amounts of time alas so wandered over mostly to check it out and as a flag-flying exercise.

In brief; got my ticket, went in, took a walk around, nearly walked into a mirror, came back out, talked to the Paradice crew, had a chat with some of the DM Supergroup, did a bit more of a circuit, realized there wasn't anything I wanted to buy, propped up the bar for a bit, chatted to the Supergroup folk again, more people collected and then had a good long chat before I took my leave and headed home.

For background, Harry-con was the long-running annual convention pulled together by the now-retired owner of a very popular and lamented games store in Vienna that seemed to be mostly built around 'Harry summons everyone he knows, which is everyone in any way connected to the gaming space locally'. You used to get your ticket by buying one of these dice to show at the door:

This new iteration of the convention is the continuity con, the torch having been passed on amicably and taken up by others of the local gaming community - officially InCharacter Rollenspielverein Österreich and Ariochs Erben - both 'vereins' which are Austrian hobby-societies - and with sponsorship by Thalia (big local book chain) and Siren Games (Friendly Local Game Store).

On theme with the tradition of odd tickets for this event we got the above laser cut balsa tickets which they snapped on the door to put your stub into a draw.

First impressions

It was a pretty well run, well crewed con with the air of a long-running thing that seemed to be operating in a too-small venue. The actual venue was a dance school where the big wall mirror made me think it was twice as big - and it could easily have been so. I remember the last Harry-con being significantly larger with a lot more vendors and stuff and I think they could easily size up again for next year. I saw a lot of crew, on door and marshalling folk through a packed roster of events - it all seemed to be running smoothly so probably the right amount of folk.

There were a ton of things going on - lots of games on the upstairs mezzanine, a bar with snacks, a corner with talks, a display stand on 3D printing from the local technical museum, a stand, mostly boardgames from the big sponsoring bookstore chain and a bunch of stalls covering all sorts of things in the boardgaming, wargaming, LARPing and TTRPGs space - as well as an artists alley type section.

I personally came to eyeball the place and hopefully snaffle some odd old RPG books but those vendors were not here this time; there seemed to be a lot for you if you were into boardgames, some stuff for wargames and LARPs and then the TTRPG presence were stands for local games societies (Paradice, Athenaes Siegel) rather than vendors. I think better for the local community that we were talking connection and how to find games rather than flogging stuff but certainly potential to do both where space allows.

Activities

The con program was absolutely packed - multiple concurrent things which left me with the impression of lots crammed into the space. There were talks running from a beach-blanket sized stage in the corner, continuously through the day on topics from costume making to aging props to storytelling.

There were two rounds of five tables upstairs - three run by the Paradice crew, two by Athenaes Siegel. The slots were 1100-1300 and 1300-1600/1700 - two 5e tables for each slot run by Athenaes Siegel and a mix of things run by Paradice - For the Queen, Lady Blackbird and 5e in the morning, Root RPG, Blades in the Dark and 5.5e in the afternoon. Not huge amounts of capacity but a good variety.

On just being present at conventions

I had a bit of a moment of personal enlightment too - having zipped around on a first pass, and run out of concrete ideas since I did not have time to get stuck into games nor were there mysterious books stacks to browse, I might ordinarily have just kept moving and trotted on out and home again - things to do, right?

Instead I decided to just park myself at the cafe-bar, have a coffee and crowd-watch to see was I missing anything. That proved to be a great idea - rather than me running around trying to find folk, where I stood still I became a marker for others. First one of the Supergroup who was running coffees and refreshments to the DMs upstairs, then others who saw us, then Paradice folk who knew them but not me - it was a good daisy-chain effect that got me talking to a few folk I had not met before. Got a very interesting run down of a long Worlds Without Number campaign which was fascinating as I always like to hear how these systems change under dozens of sessions of play.

In short, in the absence of a better idea, lurk visibly, see who comes to you. Let yourself be the person other people find.

Looking forward to 2027

I had a brief chat with some of the sponsors much later and they did acknowledge that the venue was smaller than they had ideally wanted. I think a great problem to have - the handover has been successful, the continuity concept proven and they can confidently expand next year.

I feel they could easily fit in more vendors, a chunk more artists alley and throw in some more tables for people to play the games they buy. There were not even any card games or wargames presence either. I would be interested to know if the big technical museum showcase earned its place - it was pretty nifty but ate a lot of scarce floorspace.

For those of you outside of Vienna, there are a couple of other chunky cons that happen every year which have some TTRPG presence, the most relevent of which is 'Spielefest' which is a colossus mostly built around boardgames that typically has ~ two dozen rpg tables running in a niche at one side. We know the demand is present in the city.

All told, I'm glad I went and that it is looking lively. I am glad Harry seems to have passed off the torch and I hope it all prospers. Looking forward to 2027.