Stuffed Crocodile
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A blog (mostly) about tabletop roleplaying games
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Stuffed Crocodile
A blog (mostly) about tabletop roleplaying games
Category Archives: Events
WIP: Yearly Campaign Events
Posted by on July 28, 2025
I have been thinking of making this table for a while, and right now am working on it for the Grenzland zine. The inspiration for this is of course the Campaign Event table in Oriental Adventures, which I have to say is one of the few parts of that book that can stand on it’s own. Nevertheless, while it is in general the most useful part of the book, it also is too long, too wordy, and slightly too focused on the “oriental” setting presented in that book. This is a table more geared towards a generic fantasy setting (yes, even though I added Kaiju). The table in the book also had a monthly chart, which I am still working on, and a Daily chart, which I found a bit superfluous. The results of the monthly table are nested in the yearly one, and both can interact with one another.
This table is meant to create a sort of background chatter for a campaign. No, in a lot of places player characters might not have to actually deal with what’s happening, but the rest of the region is dealing with it and talking about it.
As always, don’t see the results of this table as holy writ, but use it to flesh out the background of your campaign with events, stories, and rumors. In my experience you get the best results if you trust your dice, but if something just does not fit, don’t make it fit by force.
Procedure
1. Roll 2d6 to determine yearly event
2. Roll 1d12 (or an appropriate other die, depending on how many months are in your campaign to determine when in the year this takes place.
3. Some events take longer, roll how many months this event takes. This influences which table to roll on to determine monthly events.
2d6 Yearly Campaign Event Table
- Good Omen
- Birth
- Envoy
- Death
- Marriage
- Religion
- Disaster (roll Disaster Subtable)
- War
- Rebellion
- Political Plot
- Other (Roll Other Subtable)
1d8 Disaster Subtable
- Volcano
- Undead
- Inferno
- Famine
- Flood
- Earthquake
- Kaiju
1d6 Other Subtable
- Visitation
- Incursion
- Comet
- Miracle
- Strange Phenomenon
- Dungeon!
Explanations:
Birth: a high-ranking person in the region or beyond (in a larger realm) has a child, this is cause for public celebrations and feasting (1d6 days)
Comet: a comet apears in the sky, roll again. New yearly event will happen within 1d6 months.
Death: a high-ranking person in the region dies, either naturally (1-4/6) or by assassination (5-6/6). This involves kings, dukes, high-priests, and other personages of at least regional importance. This causes disorder in the court for 1d6 months, or with 20% likelhood a violent struggle due to an unclear inheritance situation (treat like result for War/Rebellion)
Dungeon!: The location of a heretofore unknown dungeon full of treasure, traps, and dangerous monsters becomes known.
Earthquake: takes only a few hours, but causes destruction in 50 mile radius. 70% causes Fire, Major. 40% causes plague. (compare Earthquake spell)
Envoy: an envoy is sent to another country (1-3/6) or received in the local country (4-6/6). This can be an ambassador or an important other figure that will stay in the host country for 1d10 months to talk about matters. There is a 1/10 chance the envoy is from a very exotic location and a 1/20 chance the envoy is in fact a conman.
Famine: Famine due to drought, war, or other reasons. Lasts 1d6+1 months, food prices double each passing month and will take the same amount to recover (Plague and Rebellion extend this). Marauders raid for food. 60% chance of Rebellion (see result Conflict, Internal), 20% chance of Plague following Famine. Every month of famine reduces population by 5%.
Flood: major flooding hits region, population reduced by 1-10%, 40% of famine at harvest season, 20% of plague
Good Omen: an omen generally seen as a good one appears, a new star in the sky, a dead tree lives again, etc. The harvest is bountiful. Population in the area grows by 5% over the next year.
Incursion: A large number of creatures enters the region from outside, driven to migrate either peacefully or aggressively.
Inferno: a major city is partially destroyed 2d4x10% by a huge fire. This can cause famine (20%) and plague (10%). Prices are doubled for a month, building material is 10x as expensive for 1d6 months.
Kaiju: a giant monster (e.g. the Tarrasque) or multiple ravage the land for 1d3 months. Effect like Earthquake, but repeat each month.
Marriage: the ruler of the land or his children are married in a political alliance. This is cause for public celebrations and feasting (1d6 days)
Miracle: if a disaster was ongoing it is either completely undone (1/6) or significantly reduced in results. If completetly undone treat results like Visitation
Political intrigue (5-6/6) causes tumult for 1d6 months, or assassionation (5-6/6), see entry for Death. There is a 20% chance an intrigue will develop into a rebellion per month which adds to the time it takes.
Rebellion: A rebellion (1-4/6) or political intrigue (5-6/6) causes tumult for 1d6 months. There is a 20% chance an intrigue will develop into a rebellion per month which adds to the time it takes. There is a 5% chance per month it causes a Civil War. Treat like Conflict (external) except without foreign enemy.
Religion: A new religion appears, or a notably different sect of an established one shows itself. There is a 75% chance this causes strife with established cults/religions. Establishment of the new faith takes 1d6 months. 50% chance they convert the local ruler.
Plague: a deadly disease scours the land for 2d6 months. Population of region decreases by 5% each month of plague. Prices of goods quadruple.
Strange Phenomenon: Something very notable but otherwise hard to categorize happens
Undead: The dead rise again, either by the hand of necromancy or just due to ill fate (50% chance of each)
Visitation: A god, angel, demon, or other being of considerable power is encountered at a location in the region. If seen as positive this causes a new place of worship to come in existence (20% of new religion/sect), if seen as negative this causes everyone to move away and the whole surrounding hex becomes a place of bad reputation.
Volcano: dormant (1-3/4) or new (4/4) volcano erupts, destroying everything in 5 mile radius. Volcano stays active for 1d12 months. Every month 10% chance of new eruption.
War!: War erupts for reasons to be determined. Either local country against other country/tribe/polity, or the other way around (50% chance). If affected causes famine in 1/3rd of cases. The war lasts 1d8 months. A war that lasts more than 4 months will not end this year, but will flame up again during the next spring.
Cauldron 2024: Manor on the Borderlands
Posted by on October 28, 2024
Cauldron 2024: Manor on the Borderlands
…of Hessia and Thuringia that is. But that means in living memory the Iron Wall ran merely a few hundred meters away from the location.
And I swear I wanted to go there and make a proper picture but there was simply no time. I managed to play more during the last weekend than I did during some of the last few years.
So last weekend was Cauldron 2024, the “OSR-Euro-Con”, organized by the PESA Nexus.
I saw it happened last year and was miffed I completely missed it until pictures showed up online. So I made sure to plan for it early on this year.
The convention took place in a small manor house in eastern Hessia (Schloss Hohenroda), which makes for really central Germany. It ran from Thursday the 17th to Sunday the 20th.
I managed to get there by Thursday evening, much too late and tired to actually do much but talk a bit with people and watch them play a Braunstein game where I lacked context. This was an issue I will have to deal with next year when the convention is planned even further west: either I get someone else to drive with me, or I have to travel by other means. I am not used to driving this long alone.
The next few days were filled with lots of gaming, as games started right after breakfast and were only interrupted by meals (and sometimes ran into the mealtimes as well).
It was fun, it was nice having people around that actually were talking the same things I was interested in, and which understood what I was talking about. Even with other RPG conventions that’s not necessarily a given. It was also fun doing some really nice creative gaming that did not involve following some sort of railroad for the sake of it.
On the other hand it also showed the audience of the hobby definitely trending towards the bearded old guy demographic (and considering how early I went to bed I definitely feel like I’m part of it).
Games I played
2 games in Wanderer Bill‘s Grenzland campaign (ODnD White Box+Chainmail). Different characters though, because the one from the first game was time-locked (and the one I played previously in his campaign safely back home…).
The campaign is running in real time, and when the game moves ahead the characters are out of commission for further games until it catches up. Which meant when we started venturing out in the second adventure the big fight of the first scenario still was in the future.
Our first adventure we were supposed to explore south of the campaign base Blaufahr to find new people for the depopulated settlement. The last few months in the campaign seem to have been quite rough. So we were given money to find new people and opportunities.
Instead we decided to go to the dungeon to loot. We rescued a few goblins from bandits and tried to establish friendly relations with the goblin king. Unfortunately the goblins at the local goblin settlement were wary of us, and when one of our MUs decided to steal an ancestral artifact the whole situation went sideways. Our fighters heroically managed to behead the goblin king and show off his head to his people. Then they were slaughtered by his enraged citizens.
(There was in fact a chance they’d crown one of them the new king)
We spellcasters instead headed to the exit when it started to go wrong and managed to survive largely unscathed.
The second adventure was a scouting mission northwards, to figure out where a group of orcs that had attacked recently had their settlement. Through some smart play and good die rolls we befriended some scouting elves, hitched a ride on their ship, found the settlement, mowed down a patrol, then took their leader prisoner. All without casualties.
Then a random encounter with cockatrices hit us hard and turned the adventure into fantasy-vietnam, as our decimated party tried to hurry through unknown territory, getting the prisoner back to Blaufahr.
The four petrified elvish men-at-arms we left behind are now a permanent fixture in the ongoing campaign, at least until someone with a stone-to-flesh scroll comes by…
And that’s all exactly the weird off the wall gaming experience I love when playing ODnD.
baexta had a session of Albie Fiore’s The Lichway (from White Dwarf #9) on offer, run in ADnD/OSRIC, and I decided to take part. Especially as I realized I had forgotten everything about the scenario from running it… 12 years ago? Well, not everything. I remembered the central conceit. But the GM telegraphed that early on and the others figured it out and I didn’t have to feel bad about it. He also offered The Halls of Tizun Thane, and while I would have loved that one as well I just prepped that recently.
This was also the first time I actually properly played ADnD 1st ed. by the book, and I realized my view of it was correct: it’s a good resource to take parts from, but I do not care about the complexity itself. And ADnD is not actually all that complex, just more so than I like for this kind of game. I think there’s other games that do the complexity better.
It also was the first time I played Old School Essentials proper, as in another game we went down to The Jeweler’s Sanctum from the OSE Adventure Anthology I. Despite OSE being basically just a restatement of B/X with clearer design it also oozes some dark fairy tale vibe that seems quite different from standard B/X DnD. The game bore that out, even though it was quite the standard dungeon crawl: we were to explore an improbably large dungeon under a jeweler’s workshop. The scenario whittled away our resources with smaller encounters (giant centipedes and rats) before hitting us with a near TPK in the form of grey oozes. Our GM daeman managed to present this all quite well (he has a knack for using minis and terrain… and printing them out), but I can’t help but think that the scenario itself has issues. On the other hand we clearly didn’t figure out some of the stuff in the dungeon, so I might just be missing the point.
The last one I took part in was The Veiled Vaults of the Onyx Queen, a DCC funnel presented by le moule intello as a basic DnD scenario. It seems he wanted to run it as a DCC scenario as well but received some negative feedback about that before, so decided to switch it to DnD on the fly. Which… I don’t know. I signed up for the game when it was advertised as a DCC game, and so did daeman (see above), and I think we both wouldn’t have minded to play DCC instead. And I think it would have worked oh so slightly better because the magic system of DCC seems more geared towards this. That said, it still worked the way he ran it.
A funnel is a scenario concept where you start with multiple 0-level characters and develop them during the game for use in a later campaign, or you lose and replace them. Your characters might come out with some useful skills or magic items, and a proper backstory.
That said this scenario was more linear and basic than I might have liked, and seemed very specifically intended to introduce people to the hobby. And for that it might be very useful. It just also drops the players into a very specific Heavy Metal-style setting where nobody questions a queen living for 300 years and regularly sacrificing her least liked subjects to some eldritch being from beyond.
Other things…
- Blackrazor wrote a tournament module for the convention (“Children of the Sea”), and I originally wanted to GM it, but didn’t find the time to look into it before. And when I signed up for it I either mistook the time slot or the game disappeared, so in the end I didn’t even play in it. It seems to have been quite fun though.
- There was unlimited coffee. Unlimited coffee!
- Also a free candy bar for brain food.
- I received a Nibelung Saga game and the new issue of Grenzland on the Convention, but I will have a look at those in separate posts
Some other people’s posts about it:
Ghoultunnel: Cauldron 2024 – The OSR Euro Con
Die Ogerhöhle: Rückblick Cauldron Con 24 (in German)
Vorpal Mace: Cauldron Con, Thursday and Friday
Zpátky do dungeonu: Do ciziny, a přece domů – reportáž z Cauldron Conu 2024 (Czech)
Bestia Ex Machina: Another blog entry about Cauldron 2024!
GoldDiggers’ Adventures: Days I, II, III+IV
Edit: Now with ALT text for the pictures
[Blog Carnival] V Donnut Valley: Let’s Party! Festivals and ceremonies!
Posted by on November 2, 2023
(Trying out that wordpress reblog function…)
I know everyone is tired because of various Xtobers so this month’s topic is about party and chill. Let’s Party! Festivals and ceremonies! If you want to join the carnival ( https://ofdiceanddragons.com/rpg-blog-carnival/ ), write up your own entry and post it in a comment below or send me a link to any of my accounts […]
Let’s Party! Festivals and ceremonies!
Last month’s was at The Other Side with the topic Horrors, Gods, and Monsters.
I think it’s great this still is running. I mean, are there any other blog carnivals still active?
This was a THING when blogs had their heyday.
30. International Festival of Comics and Games in Lodz
Posted by on October 11, 2019
Because we went there on the last weekend of September. And with we, I mean me, my wife, and our two kids. So that was an adventure.
Last time we were there was just before the birth of our older son, so he technically was there before. The difference was that now he could see what was happening around him. He seemed to like it. He told me he wanted to come back next year.
I was less impressed. They moved the venue from Atlas Arena to the International Conference center, and I am not sure if that didn’t cut down on the room that was available for people and shops. On the other hand it was about as crowded as before, so that didn’t seem to change. There also seemed to be a lack of actually interesting content there. Maybe it was because I was just too jaded, but I found it amusing that after desperately looking for something to spend money on I left having bought a cup of beer, a few snacks, and some Pad Thai, while my nominally non-comic reading wife left with two bags full of loot (half of which were books for our kids, but she did buy The Death of Stalin and some other hardcover about a French revolutionary).
I think the main issue was that I didn’t like the crowd. As in, the sheer amount of people. I didn’t feel like I could properly browse, first carrying my son, and afterwards on my own, and to be fair, the offers they had were kind of meagre as well. What I didn’t see much off where 2nd hand sellers with interesting offers. Even the ones that were there sold most interesting books at prices that were like new.
The boardgame stuff was just there, but not very large. There were a few stands with roleplaying stuff, but that too was overpriced and not in my ballpark. I briefly was thinking of finally buying the 5e books and then shrugged, yet again. Somehow I don’t have the will to get into this system. In hindsight I think I should have bought a few miniatures, but I had to carry around my son and he didn’t want to stare at this boring stuff with me.
I guess I am getting old. I remember the times when I just was visiting Lodz and the Festival was still in the Dom Kultury. There seemed so much interesting stuff there back then. This one felt kind of boring.
I think it might be a problem with what this con really was though. It started as a way for geeks from this city to meet and do something interesting, but by now geek has gone mainstream. It tries to be a con for comics, and games, and anything remotely geeky, but that just means there’s not much space to focus on specifics.
Interesting things to note:
- they got some brewery to make specific festival beer. A rather nice APA, although I was terribly thirsty at that point and most likely would have drunk anything that looked drinkable.
- there was at least one vendor that sold Famicom cartridges. Not even NES, but actually Famicom. There also were multiple stands that sold basically nothing but Japanese snacks. I remember them from last time as well, so they seem to make money peddling mochi.
- there’s a Call of Cthulhu Con (CarcosaCon) in English, taking place in Poland. I was briefly thinking of maybe attending when I found the leaflet, but then realized that I might not be the target audience. The whole thing looked a bit too expensive and too produced for me. They even offered an airport shuttle from Berlin airport.
- we parked just across the street, at Sukcesja. Sukcesja is the most stupid mall there is in this town, a completely misplaced and half-dead shopping area that tries to ape the look of the much more sensible Manufaktura. We again got struck how badly designed this place really is. When we tried to leave the building with the pram we had to get through the night exit in the back, because there was no other way to get out of the building with a pram. When we tried to get back later it turned out this exit only opened to the outside, and to even get to the elevators we had to manually carry the pram up two flights of stairs at the main entrance. Because all the escalators, even those clearly made for wheelchair use, had signs banning prams. I hate this place.
Stuffed Crocodile