Other coins or other than coins (RPG Blog Carnival)

Campaign Mastery gives us this months prompt The Face of Money for the RPG Blog Carnival. This post covers my slightly meta-takes at two of the questions posed on the prompting post using my old original AD&D home campaign and its prep. Those questions are:
1. What’s depicted on your coinage and banknotes and what are the stories behind those depictions?
2. What makes the currency of your game world distinctive, and what impact does that have?

When I read the prompt I knew exactly what I wanted to talk about but the question was could I find the evidence now, some thirty-odd years later. Happily, my pack-rat instincts have served me well in this instance and lo, I have unearthed the original drawn up coinage for my first AD&D campaign, in a massively inefficient use of game prep time. This first is an orc who was among the first encounters my players ever ran into - guess what, you do not need to draw portraits of all the foes, nor sketch out the loot they hold.

I did however know exactly what those coins in the orcs pocket looked like because the *second page* of campaign prep I ever did was this - hashing out a map to have the campaign in and then working out the coinage for all those places. Praise be I had the instincts to just work out a core realm and the immediate neighbours and not try to build my own Faerun straight out of the blocks.

Coins similarly turned up in more sophisticated hoards.

Shiny TTRPG links #293

Fresh shiny links from the internet! For more, see last week found here or the weekly r/OSR blogroll or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Bloggie-nominated. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch, delinked by request.

Sage's Sanctum posts Resurrection in Pneumos

Elfmaids & Octopi shares Pacing a campaign

Advantage on Arcana posts Joesky Wants To Tax Me But This Is Boston And It's 1773

Valeria Loves shares How Deadly is the OSR, Actually?

Throne of Salt posts Cut-Up Timeline of the Future

Lonely Star writes Player Agency and Planning Autonomy

Beau Rancourt gives us Reflections: OSR

Big Mac shares TSR's lost Educational Adventure series

Towers of spider-haunted mystery posts Sneak peek: Work in progress rules for managing an adventuring guild’s headquarters

Setting up Imperium Maledictum adventures for #City26

I marshalled some players and got through a session zero and simple investigative scene using Imperium Maledictum and have been recently reading back through my old Dark Heresy and the new Imperium Maledictum adventure anthologies to get a sense of the structure of these things - not that I couldn't just do "5-room-dungeon-but-40k" but I wanted to try and get a sense of how 40kRPG games ought to be run officially.

The big difference is they seem to follow a three act structure; each of those then broken down into two bits. There is a thing to find out so go to a place and resolve the problem there to get the clue to lead onwards. Essentially solving minor mysteries to get clues to the meta-conspiracy behind it all. The first and third acts are the set up and resolution respectively and the second act is an accordion you can expand or shrink as much as the mood takes you. Essentially, the 'gather clues' second act can require finding as many clues as you see fit.

The big thing for Dark Heresy or Imperial Maledictum is the players are primarily investigators - even when levelled up and quite punchy, they are not the heavy firepower of the Adeptus Astartes. The thing they can do which the various big guns of the setting cannot is investigation and social pieces. You are not going to sneak your way through a masquerade ball with a Warlord Titan but then that is not its job. Combat in Imperium Maledictum is also pretty vicious with critical hit tables that will see you dead-dead on the first shot if you are unlucky. This is combined with the 'superiority' mechanics of granting chunky bonuses in combat if you have gained intelligence on the adversaries or the battle-site to make pre-confrontation gathering of information highly desirable.

The broad recipe seems to be
- pick three locations, connect them all by a thread
- have two things to do at each location, maybe have an extra clue that might be found
- have a further location where the big bad or revelation is
- front it all with a briefing scene

Shiny TTRPG links #292

Fresh shiny links from the internet! For more, see last week found here or the weekly r/OSR blogroll or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Bloggie-nominated. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch, delinked by request.

Sundered Shields and Silver Shillings launches Trying to fire up a bandwagon: names

On Unnamed Horizons gives us On Named Horizons (a post for the naming bandwagon)

Spiceomancy shares No Stupid Names

Musings on Monstrousness posts Naming Bandwagon

Garamondia writes Naming!

Ladino's Rogue Thoughts gives us Adjudicating Social Requests: a tool, and how I use it

AMONG CATS AND BOOKS shares Death of a Hobby

Taskerland shares GAS-lit

Two Smoking Boots posts On to Better Gods

Widdershins Wanderings writes Rethinking Religion in RPG Settings

AMONG CATS AND BOOKS shares It ain't blorb

Press The Beast shares blorb sucks and Nathe Principles

Ward Against Evil gives us OSR, the OSR, The OSR, the OSR Community, FKR, NSR, BrOSR, and OSR-Style Play

Pilgrims of the Painted Idol (GLOG Class: Small God) (GLÅUGUST 2026 #6)

Taking on The Nothic's Eye GLÅUGUST 2026, challenge #6 is from a list by Locheil themselves - "A short class which is absolutely not a fighter, not a wizard, not a cleric and not a thief.".

This class is a swarm of miscellaneous pilgrims in the style of Many Goblins or The Extras or the treacherous wizards of The Plurality.

The Painted Idol follows the basic Many X rules. This is in fact a statue, icon or reliquary that is carried around by an ever-shifting group of pilgrims that changes periodically as some join, some leave, all of whom are devoted to this particularly obscure little god as it progresses about the place. Exactly what this is the god of is part of character creation.

Hit Dice: 1d10. The Pilgrims have the grit of downtrodden peasantry who have walked a long bloody way to be here.

To-hit, Weapons and Armour, Saves, experience: As per Cleric.

Safety In Numbers: The pilgrims always go around as a crowd bearing the Painted Idol shoulder high, moving as a single mass filling a 20' square and can attack or be attacked by anything within 5' of the crowd. If relevant there are 4d4+2 pilgrims present, with departures and new arrivals on a more or less continuous basis.

Righting the Idol: During any times of stress - combat, risky endeavours - most of the pilgrims are focussed on keeping the idol upright and safe - leaving few to deal with the rest of the world. Collectively they get one action a turn but if they can set the idol down securely and turn their efforts to some unskilled labor, they can spare enough folk from prayers and attending the idol to achieve the work of ten people in an hour of activity.

They have a single collective HP total - for every HP damage, a pilgrim dies dramatically protecting the idol. Area of effect damages them just once. They must obtain ten copies of any equipment to benefit from it.

You can wear light armor and shields, and can wield staves, slings, clubs and knives - as long as you have at least ten sets.

Starting Equipment: survival gear (battered), lots and lots of ropes, large pots with sufficient poor gruel for everyone.

Perk: Turn undead with advantage through being an actual minor divine.

Drawback: it cannot enter a temple dedicated to another god. It is a small god, it cannot trespass. Well, it can, but mayhem swiftly follows.

Advances:
A: A pilgrim here myself
B: Eternal Progress
C: Manifest Miracle
D: Behold this Small God

The joy of time-skips (RPG Blog Carnival )

Of Dice and Dragons themselves give us this months prompt Time, both in world and above the table, for the RPG Blog Carnival.

I have gotten a fair few strategies to make the real-world clock run - from 'run with 3' roster games, regular time slots, and a lot of practice with the same Friday-night open table time slot. That much I feel I have an approach, even if life still curb-stomps it from time to time.

In game time though. That still challenges me - specifically downtime and the prying loose players white-knuckled grip on the hour-glass.

I had one great experience recently where in the Hexcrawl 25 campaign the players wandered into a wizards tower held in temporal stasis and decided to thermite the widge that was making time pass very slowly inside. This effectively tossed them four and a bit years into the future which was just great as a DM.

One player of the roster was still out and active for that four years and they, coincidentally, moonlighted as the local postman so they have four whole years of beefing up their local reputation and putting about whatever legends they wanted. That very, very extended downtime activity for them basically set the backdrop for the rest of the campaign.

The rest of the players got to come out and find how things had changed, see the consequences of their actions on the map and have that sense of making a difference. Cannot recommend enough, wish I could pull such big time jumps off more.

I had a pretty coherent faction map when the time skip happened so it was relatively straight forward to run through how the dominos fell for all the various bits of the map, but should it happen to you unexpectedly then you can roll up some change to each place you come to below.

d20 Things changed after a significant time-skip
1. New realm splintered from old one, same archetype
2. Expansion of realms / shifting borders
3. Border reivers domains moved
4. Unsealed horrors
5. Splinter faction of invaders
6. Domino conflicts
7. Conflicts no longer restrained
8. Revolutionary realms
9. Reenergised rebellions
10. Replacement of activities (undead > laborers)
11. New gods shrines
12. Rejuvenation of conqueror realms
13. 'Golden road' of loot caravans
14. Populations altered in known locations
15. New settlements
16. Ruined / converted fortifications
17. New catspaws for old villains
18. Cultural mores changed in known places
19. Orphaned faction finding new motivations
20. Old foes made peace

YSYP Cottonmouth Ashcan (GLÅUGUST 2026 #5)

Taking on The Nothic's Eye GLÅUGUST 2026, challenge #5 is from a list by Doc - "Cottonmouth your pet system so it is synonymous with one of your settings. Here is what Cottonmouth is and here is one way you could do that"

For this I am attempting to crank over the entire system for Your Sector, Your Problem. It gnaws at me but I think the attempt to Cottonmouth it might force it to a useful place. You could probably retool the guts of this to be a minion-running mechanic for any domain level game. The 'cottonmouth' aspect of it is that the gears and gubbins are all just set up for the 'telling of the tale' debriefing which is happening in world (assuming you survive).

Four things happen during a cycle of play
1. You learn what problems you have in your sector, as per the name
2. You throw your assets at the threat, hopefully suitable ones against your various threats
3. Resolve the problems (or fail to)
4. Recover and maintain your assets - and then debrief on how the whole mission cycle played out.

Phase 1 - for this ashcan your problem is going to be selected with three rolls d12+8 off this d20 sector defense assets table to get three problems.

Phase 2 - you have your starter set of assets - three d20 rolls on the table and assign them against whichever problem you like. Each of your players draws two standard playing cards.
Ace, 2 = Exhaustion
3, 4 = Panic & miscommunication
5+ Hearts = Xeno-shock
5+ Diamonds = Inexplicable Physics
5+ Clubs = Bureaucracy & Bad Planning
5+ Spades = Gear Failure

Phase 3 - Decide whether or not to get involved, add a d6 if a player deploys with an asset and risks death. Roll off between problem and asset.
+4 success, no upkeep
+0 success, upkeep (draw 1)
-4 success, high upkeep (draw 2)
-5 or lower, failure, high upkeep (draw 2)

At this point draw cards from a standard deck for each asset as required by the rolls.

Phase 4 - upkeep - each character can get involved with an asset and play one of their cards. Multiple characters can go after one asset. If the total value of their cards (Jack = 11, Queen = 12, King = 13) is greater than card on the asset, take that card of the asset. Then tell the story of how it all played out, framed as your debriefing to the rest of the characters after everything has been resolved. That debrief has to include
What the asset is
The problem (card on the asset being targetted)
What caused the problem (the threat that put the cards there)
The character(s) involved in fixing the problem.

Do this for all assets. With luck, you have cards in hand that total more than the cards on your assets - just tell the tale of how you fixed it.

If the total of the characters cards do not exceed the value of the problems, characters can roll a save for that category (e.g. Inexplicable Physics) modified by the gap between the cards you have and the problem. Fail and take d6 points distributed across your Grit, Guile and Charm stats.Make the save with disadvantage if you play a card of a different type as the problem.

However that plays out, you still must tell the tale as a debriefing as above with the added element of:
How the character got beaten up doing it
Any remaining problems on the asset

Any assets that go into the next round with cards on them, they lose a dice from what they roll per card remaining.

Characters in this conceptualisation have 3d6 stats (Grit, Guile, Charm) and saves that base of those stats, modified by their 'career' tied either to humans, aliens or terrain, affecting people or stuff. Players could eat a few 'I have no cards, I get stuck in' at d6 damage a pop but not over the long haul.

Design notes

Key revelation, thanks to the in-house testing team, is not to frame this as 'grading roleplaying' but more as assembling the elements that have to be incorporated into an 'upkeep vignette' somewhat like a small round of 'Once Upon a Time'. I think it captures the fun of 'minion running' and the chaos involved in explaining why this xenoarchaeologist (holder of the right cards) was able to fix the BOGEYMAN cybertanks Gear Failure problem caused by their scrap with the Dubious Alien Mercenaries.

I like this better as a 'just tell the tale' rather than 'you must 'win' a roleplaying encounter'. Is this properly Cottonmouthed? Barely - I think in making it a 'talk through how you fixed it' it adheres to the in-world concept of your are troubleshooters dealing with wild things and debriefing your fellows at a particularly bizarre set of .