Evolving city surroundings (City26)

I have been hammering away at the City '26 challenge; running it faster and shallower than originally envisaged I would imagine. I have about ~37% of the wards done with ~16% of the year gone so am comfortably ahead of schedule. Concept is "a hiveworld from 40k as seen in the original Rogue Trader '87" including elements such as the Knight Worlds with their dinosaur herding, more abhumans, more Imperial Robots and a general stronger alignment to the aesthetic in Rogue Trader '87.

I find I have chipped away at lots of the more fascinating wards and blown off much of the initial spurt of inspiration but that has laid down lots of solid foundations and crystallised the core character of the place. 52 wards is *a lot* for a city; with just the ones done so far there is ample good gameable content. I am quite satisfied with the choice to make it a 40k hivecity because it is turning into a suitably complex behemoth.

As I have been filling out the various places I have ended up with one place where there is scarcity - ground level exterior access. Quite a few of the various wards should sensibly have external access - waste dumps, promethium vat fields, stock yards, maglev access, etc. Blocking those in has rapidly created a picture of the surroundings in a neat emergent manner.

We end up with the city surrounded by a number of military grounds - marshalling yards for the planetary guard regiments and the training fields for the Knight-candidates with their cyborged-carnotaurs. Stockyards for dinosaurs and bone heaps from their processing also need room. It became apparent that the hivecity was once a port but that the seas have long receded necessitating a 'ship-rail' to haul ships in over the saltmires.

One thing this has made me realise is that this means certain regions should have 'associated with' adventure hooks out in the linked spaces beyond the hive - be that a trip down into the dinosaur pens, riding out with the coldone cavalry on a wasteland patrol, stopping a raid on a ship being hauled up on the ship-rail, intercepting smugglers coming in on the maglev or some other thematically appropriate out-of-hive escapade. These could be very different to the 'in ward' encounters which may be dominated by just the groups that have presence there.

Wrapping a campaign on time

With an upcoming campaign end in sight, I am looking at how to wrap things up for my Hexcrawl25 campaign. The fact that it is still going into 2026 is a nice fillip but with a small householder on the way, better to tie things off than have it hanging over me.

I had a rummage around for wisdom on the web and DungeonFruit has some good ideas - but in a 'you should have started way back there' too-late-now sense. Dungeonfruit talks about "setting up your end condition" in Beginning Of The End (How To Finish A Campaign). Alas I am going almost perfectly against their advice and going with a real-world time limit - there is not an ticking clock hanging over the campaign, it was always about the party chasing after their own goals; a pure sandbox.

Beginning the wrap up

This means we are looking to align the end of campaign with players accomplishing their goals, not any particular big plot of mine. I told them the time they had left two sessions back and to think what they wanted to get achieved in that time. This is throwing the responsibility to manage their time on the players, which is fully in line with how the campaign has been running so far - they set the tempo, they go where they like, I run the world they are poking about in.

Throughout the campaign we have periodically been using the Ultimate RPG Campfire Card Deck and that has revealed or crystallised quite a few player chosen goals. I have catalogued them as they had come up - some have resolved, others are beyond the scope of the campaign but still some remain that could be achieved. Thus in the absence of an over-arching plot I will aim to let the PC's threads come to a resolution.

Personal quests folk had picked (and succeeded)
- found the Kingdom of Ashley, rescue and install the 'king' (collective)
- get a giant spider mount (the dwarf warrior)
- become reknowned (the 'wizard')
- create their own herbarium (the 'herbalist')

Open plots at time of trying to set up the finale
- meet their destined true love, as foreseen by a seer they met in a deep mine (the tundra barbarian)
- finish clearing out the local cult lair (collective)

Plan to the end

At this point this means that I am going to budget my time as getting one big quest done per session - maybe we will achieve more but going by prior rate of questing, probably not. So with a session filled by them finishing out the dungeon delve/cult clearance they are currently embarked upon that leaves three for resolving the 'destined true love' hook - which should be fine. The in-house testing team helped me figure out how to time it all, I know what elements I need to have to hand, the rest just runs off the hexmap.

Note, in between writing the first draft of this and now completing it, the party continued to clear out the cult lair they had been camped at - and are now easily a half session remaining before they are done and have taken some fairly heavy blows along the way. I am going to have to adjust my timeline from here - there may be a rest period, or reluctance to get stuck into further heroics? We shall see.

I think what I need to do is to set up multiple smaller elements - resolvable within a half session or so - and then keep/drop some as the time runs down, so the final session can be a reasonable declaration of victory, wherever they get to. Assuming they do not TPK along the way, which remains a possibility.

The one big thing I am taking from Dungeonfruit is to leave time for 'wrap up' and/or epilogue - I will give each of the players some running room to say how things turn out in the aftermath of all their deed - but I need to remember to leave that time and bring things to a close a little early on that last night.

Shiny TTRPG links #265

Further links from about the interwebs! For 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.

Joe B. writes dungeon ecology makes no sense

To Distant Lands gives us ...Or, They Live Here

Was It Likely? shares how jo games are

Arrowed is Gaming gives us How I Daggerheart

a garden from the libraries writes Aragorn’s tax policy and other weird shibboleths

Blog of Forlorn Encystment gives us The Player-Drawn Dungeon Map is a Fast Travel Hack

The Katt Kirsch Blogsperience shares Running it Back: The Case for Replaying Modules

Magnolia Keep gives us An Objective Draw Steel Vs. Daggerheart Review

What xaosseed's games look like

Following up on Grace of Choir of Fire's idea of laying out how elf-games are played at specific tables so people can see the multitudes that throng beneath the umbrella of 'D&D' or even any sub-division below that.

This is broadly the set-up I came up with, with a fair chunk of 'host/hospitality' mixed in on top. My gaming set up has always had 'home' and 'away' set ups based on how much junk I was willing to haul around. Minis, battlemats and other bits of big hardware were never my thing even when I was home because I ran free-wheeling 'do what you please' games so I was not putting up with the constraints of not having the right minis - we just did theater of the mind and tokens/meeples as needed.

Home Campaign Rig

Ducal House (home campaign) is like a coelecanth; this is me running a 'perpetual campaign' in the grand old AD&D tradition I first learned.
- system is 3.5e
- three players, only play with all three; trying for twice a month, life oft gets in the way but we tend to overbook slots and accept some attrition.
- gather at my place (also shared with one of the players (in-house testing team)).
- three standard modes - morning start (1030), afternoon start (1300) or night slot (2130) which differ in that morning start will include a break for takeout and probably a stop for someone to go to their evening shift or a party. Afternoon slot has no big break, runs to exhaustion or child pickup time. Nightslot runs to exhaustion.
- set up is players on the couch; table stacked with snacks - grapes, dates, crisps, biscuits - plus a carafe of coffee (morning/afternoon) or herbal tea (night). I have my DM screen at the end of the table, set up behind that.
- We typically get in, chat for a bit - any news since last seen; usually just a week or fortnights worth.
- Sessions launch with the bard doing a recap from their notes then I do 'time, place, immediate activities' and then the players decide what they are doing.

Using dragons, fiends & other powerful beings (RPG Blog Carnival)

Sea of Stars proposes Dragons, Gods and other Powerful Beings for this months prompt for the RPG Blog Carnival. Inspiration for one big idea did not strike so I am going to do quick-answers to three of the prompts:
* "From the perspective of games mastering the world: how involved do you want these beings to be? They can easily overwhelm the player characters, so what level of involvement works for both you and the players?"
* "How involved do you want the players to be in creating religions, legends, rituals?"
* "Should characters be able to affect these powerful beings? Meet them? Or should they just be background elements in the setting?"

"From the perspective of games mastering the world: how involved do you want these beings to be? They can easily overwhelm the player characters, so what level of involvement works for both you and the players?"

Having extremely powerful beings active in the world can be a useful lever for a certain style of DM'ing. I have always liked worlds where there are some forces that clearly mightier than the PCs in play. For most of my early campaigns those were dragons to the point that players told me later their rule of thumb was "if we don't know where the dragon is, we just have not spotted it yet."

I realise I got a strong stylistic steer on how dragons should from the Wyrms of the Realms series in Dragon magazine which had the 'meddling shapeshifting high-powered dragon' as a staple. I had a stalking shadow dragon as one of the semi-antagonistic patrons if I recall correctly in the Katharsis campaign. Kraken Mesa had a very large old wyrm that lived in the treasure vault of the citadel they inherited.

There were also a number of high-power fiends kicking around in the Kraken Mesa campaign, also counting as that 'involved, near-overwhelmingly powerful being' category. I tended to use those entities as scenary who could talk - there was no point trying to defeat them, you avoided them or you figured out a way to navigate them - and you tended to be way smaller than their concerns so could slip beneath their notice.

I liked dragons, fiends and the like for that position in my campaigns and I was happy for the players to interact with them as puzzles because they were beyond being a combat challenge. Their presence set the tone of not every fight being balanced or one that players could win from the get-go.

"How involved do you want the players to be in creating religions, legends, rituals?"

I like players being involved - of late I greatly enjoyed the use I have gotten in-game from the Small Gods of the animalings - originating from a GLoGtober '22 prompt - and then getting reinforced by the notion of 'Who Hears Your Oath' variant of divine intervention mechanics.

This little framework has given players reasons to pray or seek blessings at sacred or fitting places and gives a chance for things to be listening or respond. So far one of the players in the Hexcrawl25 campaign has been busily developing ritual practice for They Who Hide From Sight, including invisible sacrifices, carving their sigil in hidden places and other such practices.

The spreading of legends in general is something that I like to encourage - in the Ducal House campaign, the Bard leans hard into that - seeding songs throughout the realm and using their rapid-travel capabilities to propagate the sagas they want known far and wide. In the Hexcrawl25 campaign, there was a time-shift and one of the few things they had done before dropping off the timeline for four years was set a bunch of rumours running about one of the party being a mighty wizard - four years has been plenty of time to percolate and now they are often recognised by name when they turn up places.

Similarly as a good anti-blorb doctrinaire, I am happy for players to tell me what rituals and legends might be out there where it is something that could reasonably be known by them - even better when it is something they can base off some other in-world facts or suppositions. Wild whole cloth additions to the world get a bit more of a flavour-check but it is rare that I cannot work an idea in.

"Should characters be able to affect these powerful beings? Meet them? Or should they just be background elements in the setting?"

As mentioned above I think of these powerful beings more or less like terrain - but a sea can be drained or a mountain torn down with enough effort and the right plan. Everything is affectable with enough effort. Meeting powerful beings or especially gods has always been a staple of my games - hiking up Mount Olympus to meet Mars, patron of two of the party, was one of the earliest divine encounters I ran I believe.

There is a fine old tradition in D&D of displacing gods and powerful beings which I can get behind in some circumstances but it is not a thing to treat trivially or else it makes the achievement hollow. To defeat a gods plans, to drive off its servitors - these are the things of epic deed already. To usurp a god and cast them down should be a huge deal, hard won - and creating and seeing that campaign that does such a thing justice through would be a hell of a lot of work.

Shiny TTRPG links #264

Your Bloggie-nominated collation of links from about the interwebs! For more, see last weeks collection or the weekly r/OSR blogroll or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch, delinked by request.

A shrike for my dreams gives us Landscapes of Fear; or, How to keep PCs afraid: Part 2

Tangent Joy shares Against Intent

Failure Tolerated gives us Talking to the Dungeon

400 independent bathrooms asks What do my games look like?

Whose Measure God Could Not Take gives us How Phlox Does It

Garamondia shares How I Run Games

Infernal Pact gives us What Dom's Games Look Like

A Knight at the Opera writes Navigation Games

Goblin Punch gives us Be of Good Cheer

Story Seed Library shares A library of Solarpunk art and story seeds

Blog of Forlorn Encystment gives us On Identification

Dungeon Merlin shares Exploding a Blog Post

Magnolia Keep gives us Basic Terrain for Pointcrawls

Can It Katchem? writes us Oh Fyora, We're Really In It Now

The Welsh Piper gives us The Implied Setting

Throne of Salt shares The Keep on Candcor Hill

Actual Play: Old Man Katan and the Incredible Edible Dancing Mushroom Band

tl;dr: tried out a top-recommended Dungeon magazine adventure; good times with some interesting stylistic change revealed.

An adventure to "provide comic relief in an otherwise serious campaign" it is a nice little swamp sandbox. As an experiment, I had a go at running it straight from the book but the players went off track fairly rapidly leading to some reshuffling on the fly. I think best used as a source of good ideas and then rewire what happens when into some manner that fits with how your table likes to do things.

Art by Terry Dykstra

We get 13 pages, some very nice art and the text in triple columns. These are blocked out by 'encounter' organised around the ramp in to getting the players exploring the swamp essentially with a pair of big boxes that are then 'Glitchegumee Swamp Encounters' (ten of them) and 'Exploring the Glitchegumee Swamp' which is five locations. All the components of a neat little hexcrawl are here, just a bit scrambled.

The intro as written is you come upon a recluse, Old Man Katan, being pestered by tiny mushroom folk and decide to investigate what has gone wrong in the swamp around them. There are quite a few 'off ramps' where players could just not pick up the thread of the adventure without a very heavy hand on the steering wheel if you just leave it as is. The 'something is wrong in the swamp' set up is perfectly adequate as a hook to have brought them there to stumble over Old Man Katan - and if you take the time to set that up then people are already somewhat motivated to go onward by the time they meet Old Man Katan and you can just lean into him being him with his troubles and concerns and it will emphasise your existing hook.

There are a fair few parts in here - a good lot of useable things - but worth you working through how you use them - either retune their sequence or make them encounters, as you think most coherent to you. There are a couple of the encounters that are overpowered for the envisaged low level adventurers but I like that 'not everything is here to be fought' ethos.

I ran this for a table of strangers recently, running 1st level 5e characters. We had:
Elf Fighter
Dragonborn Ranger
Elf Rogue
Triton Paladin
Goliath Cleric

It went pretty well, a good time was had, with a bit of a lull at a point where they were unclear on how to progress but on balance I think it was better to have the freedom to act and some brief confusion than be railroaded all the way.

Session Report - beyond here, spoilers abound.