Villainous friends: using Red Teams in your game

tl;dr: How-to notes on using red teams for campaign set up to create day zero motion in your world.

What are red teams and why bother? From a recent campaign start-up I enlisted some friends to take charge of some larger factions and power-players within the start region to create a sense of the world around them being in motion. These notes are expanded with advice from recent discussion on the discord of The Adventuring Party (thanks to Mr. E, evilrobotshane).

Three reasons to do this
- it gives an instant sense of the guiding intelligence behind the different factions: knowing the sea-devils currently eating coastal shipping are being run by Mary lets me rapidly guess how they are likely to react to intrusions from others - in this case with massive, immediate retaliation. If Charles had been in charge, the response would have been observation and later assassination to remove the nuisance.
- some of the factions offered to the pool of Red Team players were not picked up so in the game those factions had minor or disorganized leadership and were incapable of projecting power and influence beyond their own home turf.
- Red Team factions will be hard-nosed and play to win where you as a DM may be inclined to pull your punches or go easy on your players; this adds to the realism of the world.

In motion it resembles a slow play-by-email world building game.

D12 full party mounts

Building out from some ideas in response to a reddit question on what would be awesome mounts for a party.

All of these are therefore 'full party mounts' - big enough that everyone can ride along on top.
1. A dinosaur mount, a small-to-medium sauropod; the bones are fossils and it is an animated object. Sitting on its vertebrae is a comfortable ride.

Roleplay options for the party with no internal conflict

tl;dr: if you feel the players are missing opportunities to talk and role-play, you can give them either NPCs to talk to, choices to discuss or problems to solve with in-world clues.

Following up on some thoughts I had in response to a reddit post a while ago: "if the whole party is lawful good and they agree on the 'right thing', how to create situations that will result in more conversations and RP" because "they're always in agreement and this reduces RP especially for the quieter players".

Reading this as "how to create RP/conversational opportunities when there is no in-group conflict" my answer at the time was "give them puzzles and poor information and leave them to struggle against the world. No need for conflict within the party" but I would like to revisit and expand on this.

In my view there are three channels to bring conversation/RP opportunities to such a group:
- interactions with external parties
- internal character-to-character interactions
- collective discussions

Shiny TTRPG links collection #5

Fifth weekly round up of interesting things this week to catalog interesting finds from each week. Last one found here. Inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.

Masterlist of ttrpg insider jokes - great round up of ancient lore, some of these were news even to me...

From friends of the house - old AURA gamers have More Kobolds!

Actual Play - Social Depth Crawl

Actual play of how the 'party depth crawl' worked. Each paragraph after the second reflects a new roll on the table.

The players arrive in a swirl through the snow in the third best carriage; turning in front of the hosts manor - a set of houses that have been knocked together. Fire pans flare before the doors of the centre house and a canopy to keep the snow off welcomes the cousins. Other fine carriages are lined up ahead and behind them and bundled up servants scuttle out into the snows to welcome them.

Within the entry hall the servants take their cloaks, inform them that tonights revel will be a masquerade and direct them to one of a series of partitions made across the hall. Arrays of masks are available for the choosing and our party picks a half-moon, a domino and a tragedy mask. On the far side of the partitions they look around the great house. Here they see the clan has expanded by acquiring and knocking through the row of houses into one large dwelling that takes up the street. The wall in front of them bears wide paintings of boats on raging seas.

A Fistful of Setting Questions - from the Nothics Eye

Responding to A fistful of setting questions post - as another idea spinner for my next session.

Which specific NPC do I want to piss off the least?

There is a bunch of delicate noble family politics going on that the players are in the middle of that they care deeply about but for Peter the Rabbitling in the streets, its probably their grandfather, the Duke of Thenya.

In the eyes of the commoners, the Duke has recently started a major crack-down that has driven raids, demolitions, dissappearances and rumours are rife in the city of some sort of shrieking horror in the dungeons beneath the palace. The Duke is famed for driving the Cult of Assassins out of the city as a young man a century ago. He put the current King on the throne. His hospitality is grand - the great tourney held for his grandsons wedding was a great public spectacle and the feasts for the common folk on the day of the wedding were lavish - but his ire is swift and merciless - the last commoner who protested their treatment in public saw their home partially demolished that night.

Review: Wagadu Chronicles - The Child and the Oath

tl:dr; a great Afrofantasy setting and starter adventure for 5e, super-accessible, definitely check it out.

"Wagadu Chronicles: The Child & The Oath" - is a 5e compatible setting book and adventure created by Twindrums. Released as part of their push to create an MMORPG based on African lore, I like it a lot - I think the focus on the setting with the minimum necessary extra mechanical things is a good way to go about it. The version I am looking at here is a work-in-progress that is currently being used for the alpha of the MMO and for play on the TwinDrums discord - by the time this gets to your hands some of the details may change but you can get a copy by signing up for their mailing list.

Image from launch page

What is Wagadu? The setting "can be described as some sort of purgatory, a strange and wild place where people from the Upper Realms, the prosperous and more peaceful place where everyone hails from, “fall” and are stuck for good. [...] the only thing that the Fallen can do is band together to survive the beautiful and harsh world of Wagadu. Powerful spirits, fickle ancestors, angry beasts and magical weathers are only some of the challenges that the Fallen face but on the other hand, fertile soils, powerful magic and powerful traditions to be revived are there to reward the hardiest survivors."