Actual Test: Campaign Pitch Document

Some friends gave me a hard nudge when Spelljammer Confirmed to run a game for them once it landed. Now that it is out, that time has come and I have confirmed that indeed it was not just chatter. To get the ball rolling I decided to pitch a bunch of variations to see what kind of campaign people wanted.

I sent around a mail with the following pitches and the request to rank them from favourite to least to see what was popular. The pitches format was adapted from Matt Colville's Pitching Your Campaign with some pretty short, sharp overviews to narrow down on what people sought.
- I noted that all of them would have a roughly equal base-level of puzzles and PC-scale combat.
- I added Scale to indicate on-planet (single world), in-system (multi-world), or intersystem (multi-sphere)
- Politics options : how much NPC interaction is there likely to be
- Tactics options: how much ship-to-ship is likely

I particularly liked the 'player buy-in' note; it helps align everyone for character creation and is helpful to have right up front.

"Intersystem whaling" - destination exploration. There is an ocean world, a place known to locals as the Deep - a place where things long dead elsewhere still thrive. It is a long way out but the value of the haul will be worth it! There are some locals to avoid and of course the beasts themselves to be hunted but gold must be bought with sweat after all...
Scale: In-system
Politics: Medium
Tactics: Medium
Player Buy-in: signed up for a long mission for a big payday.

"The Rescue" - longhaul mission. An elven retreat world is cut off and needs a cruiser to go out there, make contact and bring them components they might need. It is probably nothing, a quiet run, easy in, easy out. Captain's going to retire after this one so he wants this done by the numbers.
Scale: Intersphere
Politics: Low
Tactics: High
Player Buy-in: Crew of an Elven Imperial Navy Man-O-War on a detached mission.

"The King Beyond the Clouds" - interplanetary meddling. A system slipped from the grip of the elves and their rumoured return is nigh. Which side will you take? Can the disparate worlds of the systems be marshalled to keep their independence or persuaded to return to the fold?
Scale: In-system
Politics: High
Tactics: Medium
Player Buy-in: Interfering in the groundling and spacer courts to prepare for an intersphere incursion

"Sky-pirates" - sandbox - bringing a flying ship to a groundling campaign. The captain died, you senior officers have borrowed the ship and are off to pursue your own goals.
Scale: On-planet
Politics: Medium
Tactics: Medium
Player Buy-in: Self-directed, you start with a ship and you decide what hooks and actions to follow.

"Splinters of Hope: Homeworld" - search for artefacts in a "dead sphere." An elven world was eaten by Witchlight Marauders during the Unhuman wars but someone has to go there and find any pieces of wood that were taken off world before the disaster.
Scale: In-system
Politics: Low
Tactics: Medium
Player Buy-in: Your ship and crew have agreed to take this raid mission for the elves.

When I got back everyones rankings I stacked the different campaigns, eliminated those with any 'least favourites' and landed on Intersystem Whaling as the favoured pitch.

King Beyond The Clouds had more favourites but also a least-fave.
The Rescue got ok votes from most, lower rated than Whaling
Splinters & Sky-Pirates both 2 least-faves

Going to use the Gygax 75 generated system and put all that world-building to the test.

Shiny TTRPG links #83

Fine links from about the internet, the shiniest things that caught my magpie eye. More can be found on the previous list found here. The original inspiration for all of this - weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links. You can find even more links on the weekly blogroll on r/OSR or a roundup of non-blog news on Third Kingdom Games roundup.

Rise Up Comus has some thoughts on Rest Interrupted

The Alexandrian writes Random Worldbuilding: Fast & Furious Homebrewing

Dungeons & Possums handily collates all the Competing Swordtembers?

Archons March On gives us D6x7 Gith Sects Besides The Githyanki & Githzerai

Matrixhammer Scenario! A Night in the Forest! on The Lizardman Diaries

Grand Commodore writes up a coffee-and-a-biscuit read in City-State RPG Retrospective & Stories from their recent the five-turn, 20-day City-State RPG

Gygax 75: wrap-up & suggestions

Looking back on this challenge as a whole - the intention was to see if it worked as a set up for a Spelljamming campaign, short answer, yes if a little inefficiently. It was interesting to use a workflow that is not my habitual one to try something different. I am a big fan of 'learn the rule so you know when to break them'.

One thing I found about the challenge is the 'straight through, expand outwards' approach is not my usual one and works less well for me. I typically build a world in broad strokes, then zoom in, see what the implications are, elaborate, zoom in again, etc. Things like - what is in the Dungeon, why do we care (week 3) only became clear after the city was created (week 4) and the big hook for the whole campaign (week 1) seemed weak until well into week 4. I found myself iterating back around on the whys and what must therefore be in any given place. Not a dreadful burden but definitely, this is not the way I normally like to work.

Weeks 2, 4 and 5 were fine, the broader world work was stable for me. Week 1 - the theme of the campaign and how to pitch it and week 3 - what is in the dungeon changed somewhat.

Most Popular non-D&D Systems Revisited

Comparing the most popular non-D&D systems on VTTs to see what the trends are.

A while back we looked at the latest (end 2020) Fantasy Grounds vs Roll20 data and saw a difference in the big non-D&D systems - namely that Pathfinder (1e and 2e) has a much bigger following propotionally on Fantasy Grounds. Friends at the Adventuring Party podcast who are Pathfinder players inform me that Fantasy Grounds has great Pathfinder integration and that this makes sense. The next most popular systems outside D&D/Pathfinder were Savage Worlds, Starfinder, Call of Cthulu, MoreCore, Traveller, Rolemaster, WoD, GURPS and Star Wars.

Now comparing this to Obsidian Portal - between 20-40% of new campaigns are not D&D in a year. The below excludes the many editions of D&D and Pathfinder to zoom in on everything else. Here 5e and Pathfinder (1e and 2e) being the significant contributors to the 'D&D' segment.

This highlights the share of top-15 non-D&D campaigns added each year on Obsidian Portal. This aggregates the different editions of those games together - Star Wars includes Edge of Empire, Saga Edition, Age of Rebellion, Force and Destiny, d20 and d6 editions for example. The first point of interest to me is the collective high-tide of non-D&D games in 2014, immediately before 5e came out. This peak of non-D&D gaming in 2014 was not a single game having a great year, it was a general trend over 2009-2014 with FATE, Star Wars and Numenera having good years but not wildly off trend years.

Shiny TTRPG links #82

Survived a local heatwave, gathered more links! More can be found on the previous list found here. The original inspiration for all of this - weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links. You can find even more links on the weekly blogroll on r/OSR or a roundup of non-blog news on Third Kingdom Games roundup.

Late Night Zen presents Magic item: Wizard in a bottle

Dead Tree, No Shelter gives us dungeon dressing in All the Doors Round Here

Signs in the Wilderness gives us Goblins, the Tree People

Spider Queen Gaming teases out some thoughts on Authentic Play and the Undiscovered

A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry gives us Logistics, How Did They Do It, Part III: On the Move

A Knight at the Opera gives us a coffee-and-biscuit read on Computer Hacking in RPGs

Dungeons and Possums writes ZineQuest 2022 At The Halfway Mark

Grumpy Wizard writes on The Way Gary Intended…

Some interesting stuff on Kickstarter at the moment: Bandit Camp is running Wicked Ones and Undead Awakening and KostiRPG is The Average Trooper: Skeleton Mayhem

Gygax 75: The Wider World (Week 5)

The brief for this final week of campaign-building is to pick at least three of many prompts to flesh out the wider world beyond the hex-map of Week 2. Of the multiple potential tasks to be picked we went with three:
- Other worlds and planes accessible from the setting
- Expanded locations around the hex-map
- rival adventuring party

First task we filled out some more on the other worlds of the system; see these links for background on the system and its inhabitants.

First Forge, the mercury sized discworld right up by the sun - here we have Fire Giants who we figured are a strange evolutionary offshoot - like Tasmania but for Fire Giants. They live almost entirely on minerals compared to most Fire Giants that can eat minerals but mostly eat meat. Hence they are scalier and tougher, creak as they move except at their primary joints - shoulder for a smith, etc. Their dialect is strange and their ettiquette is bizarre and insular after so much time on their own on a relatively small world.

Next, on Pond, the tiny water world that is the elven playground, this is a frivolous place, with a portal to the feywild, and the whole world is treated as a combination of resort and theme-park ride. If the inhabitants got more serious, they could aspire to dissolute. A deeply unhappy Elven Imperial Navy station occupies the moon in orbit. It is a place you get sent if you have deeply angered your superiors but not *actually* committed an offense sufficient to be imprisoned or tossed out of the Navy. A handful of bitter officers and resentful sailors crew the base and its ships.

We will go into Skyforest, our airworld in more detail later.

The Deep, our giant primeval ocean world keeps its secrets so tightly we shall not mention them here. People will not speak of this place to outsiders, either to protect it from hunters or to starve rival hunters of information.

The dragons of Smoulder also have been outlined in the world creation - between warlordism among the reds and a merchant republic among the golds they keep themselves occupied apart from attacking anything that comes into their atmosphere.

Lastly we have our enormous frozen water discworld of Ice-disc, where the kuo-toa dwell. We focus some more on their wizards who dominate society. They have a philosophy of magic of making unexpectedly powerful but specific magic items; such as a ring of invisibility that makes your image appear on the other side of your most dangerous foe. They have deeply esoteric tastes and values meaning it can be hard to establish a price if you can open trade with them. They can also be found cruising the sphere conducting weird experiments for their own inscrutable reasons - much more widely spread than previously thought.

Comparing TTRPG player surveys in US and Germany

tl;dr: ~1/4 to 1/6 of the population is currently playing TTRPGs and they are not talking about it online.

Some intriguing indications of how many TTRPG players there are in a handful of surveys that cover the general population:
- Researchscape 2022 Survey and 2019 Survey looking at who among the general US population has played TTRPGs
- Front part of "Die große Pen-&-Paper-Rollenspiel-Umfrage 2022" doing similar for Germany

Two interesting points pop out:
- what fraction of respondants have ever played TTRPGs and/or play them now
- frequency of play among those who do play TTRPGs

For the recent Researchscape US survey - 36% of general population respondants have played TTRPGs at some point, 25% are playing at least once a year. The 2019 survey found 23% had played TTRPGs at some point; suggesting a more than 50% increase in the share of population who had played TTRPGs in the past 3 years.

Comparing this to the German survey where the first half of the "Pen-&-Paper-Rollenspielbefragung 2022" has responses from a 500 person "census representative" online panel. Here 38% have played a TTRPG at some point, 15% play TTRPGs currently. A further 11% knows what TTRPGs are but have not played them.

Here we see two points suggesting a quarter to a third of the general population has at some point chucked a d20 or other dice about while role-playing. I find that a surprisingly high number, I could have been convinced it was half that or less. Certainly, it looks like maybe a quarter to a sixth are current players which suggests there are a lot of folk out there who played once and do not anymore.

Digging into how frequently respondents say they play - in the US survey of those who play at least once a year we read that 28% play weekly (or more often), 28% get in a monthly game, 44% play once a year. In the German sample, 25% play weekly or more frequently, 36% play monthly and 39% play less than once a month. These look similar in both cases - with a over half of those who play getting in at least a monthly game but a significant chunk playing a few times a year only.