Fine links from the depths of the interweb. For more, see the previous list found here or on the restored weekly blogroll on r/OSR or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.

Paper Cult Club launches a forum for TTRPG, board game, wargame, etc. developers and enthusiasts

@LeviKornelsen@dice.camp gives us Day in the life of a courtier:

Whose Measure God Could Not Take shares The Hydra Problem

Illusory Sensorium gives us Paint the (Un)scene

All Dead Generations writes Most Adventures are Bad - An Adventure Writing Process

Garamondia gives us A Beholder for your Setting - Lantern Heads

Dorkland! shared The Perrin Conventions

MurkMail gives us Mixing hexcrawl encounter tables

My home game got another boost of mobility over this most recent level up with Wind Walk and Teleport. This has lead to a chunky shift in gameplay which makes 'broad shallow' prep the name of the game from here out. I had talked about high-speed hex-crawling before; large distances were crossed with multiple things noted in passing but only a few key locations were interacted with - on par to a standard session - but even higher speeds enables new party approaches.

Previously we have been dealing with ~ 8 hours of flying time at ~ 30mph using the Spelljamming Saddle so 3 x 10mile hexes per hour - as fast as a galloping horse, sustained as long as the pilot can stay awake. Wind Walk gets that up to 60mph, doubling that. The red circle on the map was the previous 'one day' limit of their operations - the second arc is their new limit.

This past session the players were ~ 3 sessions deep into chasing down a particular quest goal - settling their immediate problems, getting their gear and themselves into position and staging to a plateau above their objective. And then they decided to spend the entire session flexing Wind Walk to scout for the location of an enemy stronghold associated with a different 'quest line' so to speak. Both are strands of a potential undead apocalypse, one divine, one arcane - divine had been solidly in focus until they decided to detour and scout the arcane thread.

I had prepped in detail for the divine thread before the session but did have enough of a sense of what the arcane thread was to be able to wing it; most importantly I had done some general region prep on who was likely to be seen during over flights which included foes tied to both strands and I was able to use those. Some previous thought on the timetable of the arcane foes also allowed me to pretty quickly extrapolate what must be found in their stronghold if they are at the point they were in the plan.

Mobility multipliers like teleport and wind walk are interesting to deal with because teleport is manageable - you have to know a place to safely go there so player interest is expressed and either it is a return to a known location or you, the DM, have a chance to ponder what the place is like while they figure out how to get a good enough read to risk teleporting there. High speed flyers are more of a challenge as discussed previously but still they are a somewhat manageable scale; the key is whether or not the location is known. Rapidly travelling to a known place with high level magic - sure - you lose the travel encounters but fine.

Pure speed multipliers like Wind Walk make high speed searching of an area for things known to be around somewhere *on a whim* into a new challenge; with magics like this in the back pocket there is no prep-time because the heroes can just decide, cast the spell and go.

This months blog carnival from Illusory Sensorium has the topic of Over the Garden Wall where they want to hear about what is are things usually held as outside the domain of fantastic medieval adventure games which you think actually fits in quite well? They elaborate on seeking ideas to mix into the OSR from outside the culture of play, outside tabletop gaming and outside of gaming entirely.

I had a couple of ideas mostly things that are present in tabletop gaming just not really main-line OSR -
1. Career based character generation / progression
2. Testing things other than hit-points to face down challenges
3. Contacts as a rewards

More links from across the internet. For more, see the previous list found here or on the restored weekly blogroll on r/OSR or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.

Old Men Running The World shares Where I Solve The Scheduling Problem In Dungeons & Dragons

A Knight at the Opera arrives at Urban Gameplay Part 6: Concrete Jungle Gyms

Joy of Hex Maps gives us Expanding communities from hubs to extents

HAEC ASTRA VERA asks What's The Deal With This Town?

Mazirian's Garden announces The Oneironaut Launches! Downtime in Zyan is back in print!

Darkplane gives us The Pillars of a Roleplaying Game

Patchwork Paladin writes Playtime: Dungeon Time, Wilderness Time, and Journey Time

One Man and his Dice gives us Using Attributes for Non-Combat Actions in OSR Games

Dazzling Prismatic Hemicycle asks Why Worlds Without Number?

Rise Up Comus shares Scars

Thought Punks gives us Rebuttals to Criticisms of Rules-Heavy TTRPGs

Since Grognardia, cornerstone of OSR blogging, did a bunch of how many, how often and when did/do you play polls (see Musings on Poll Results (Part I)) I thought it might be interesting to compare those results against what other sources I have pulled together over time. These were three seperate polls with 320-470 respondents each, no guarantee they were the same people each time so pinch of salt in that it is likely not the same people in all of them. We can compare each one individually to see how the trends stack up against other polls. One could very cautiously suppose that this is a comparison between OSR players (readers of Grognardia) and the general 5e audience (D&D 5e Facebook group, Reddit D&D groups) but very cautiously indeed.

First question was How many people – players + referee(s) – were there in your gaming group at the time you first started roleplaying?. Lots of the other gaming table size polls out there exclude the DM so I trimmed one off the Grognardia ranges. The batching is fairly rough, just the three buckets, but enough for us to work with. The Grognardia question is 'who did you start with' and has a good quarter of folk starting with just one or two initial players. That maps to my own experiences - my short run initial campaign had two players.
None of the other polls ask about initial group size so we are comparing these initial groups to others contemporary groups and they definitely do look smaller.

I was given this over the holiday season by family - a nice gift in the sense of it was never something I was going to buy myself but has found its place at table. As per the front of the box "150 cards for sparking in-game conversation" in a chunky box, with an X-card and a pamphlet with guidance.

The instructions are maybe ~A5 equivalent on a fold out card; the back is title, legalese and a bit about the author so all the actual guidance is 1//3 'how to play' and 2/3 describing the categories of cards and the process flow. The cards themselves are in six categories - Past, Present, Companions, Dreams, World and Hypotheticals - each a 25 card block. You are supposed to check in with the table about which categories to include then shuffle them all up and draw randomly.

The strict pattern from the guidance is to draw two, one to answer yourself and one to ask another person at the table. We ended up having everyone present draw a card and lay them face up in the centre then going around the table with everyone picking which of the face-up topics they wanted to answer.

At 150 cards the deck is huge, you wil be cycling through it for a long time before it gets to feel repetitive.

I tried it out with my hexcrawl campaign and it has gone down surprisingly well - people were fine to give it a first shot and then were happy to come back again in later sessions which was the real test to me.

It works well with this campaign that has journeys and a travel focus to it - other campaigns I have run have tended towards travel being less of a focus and 'downtime' feel like a waste of time rather than something to devote time to. Whether or not this deck fits with your table is going to depend on which of those is true for you.

It is a nice tool for what it does, particularly for 'warming up' new groups who might not know each other so well. For very old and established groups I could see it either being helpful to jog folk out of their rut or being an impediment by forcing a direction of conversation when the group/campaign organically discusses things anyway. Again; judge where your table is at - if they already make their own campfire or tavern conversation, wedging this in may not be for your table.

So I see this being useful for campaigns which are not time-pressure - I would be wary of using this when you were trying to get an adventurers league one-shot game done or when you have a table that already plots, plans and RPs given time to do it. For everyone else, which I think will be many tables, if you are looking to encourage more

It is a bit heavy; I definitely notice it thrown in on top of my slimmed down gaming bag - but the table seems to like it so it continues to earn its space.

A fine haul of links from about the interweb. For more, see the previous list found here or on the restored weekly blogroll on r/OSR or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.

Blogstones shares Thoughts on Folk Gaming

Necrotic Gnome gives us Dolmenwood Online Rules Reference

Merry Mushmen shares Black Sword Hack SRD

Mediums and Messages writes Schematic Dungeons from Everyday Objects

Behind the Helm gives us Trope, Flaw, Skill: 3-Layered NPCs

Explorers Design shares Why Combat Is a Fail State

Vaults of Zin gives us GM's Glossary Part 3: Everything you can do with Movement

Weird & Wonderful Worlds writes Existential Evolution (Weird & Wonderful Ecology Generator)

Roll to Doubt gives us Proposals for Player Conduct

AMONG CATS AND BOOKS shares Sandbox Settlements: Prep, Run, and Thrive

A while back we ran a DM clinic - for a more experienced DM to coach newer ones - I wrote up much of the 'on table' prep and tricks of the trade side of things before but the conversation also ranged around the 'above table' social aspects of the hobby as a whole. As per Gorgon Bones first best practice: "Record your hobby experience" this is a pretty solid reflection of the active questions of 'working DMs' within a pretty busy gaming group.

There was a lot of table management questions but some themes
- player engagement (dealing with stuns and deaths)
- DMs having fun (and not having to do the not fun bits)
- telling people what they are signing up for (content disclaimers)
- avoiding anti-social characters when you do not know the other players well

Since a mini-campaign actually finished, let us do a retrospective Against the Wicked City style particularly since I pulled the plug on this one earlier than I thought I might.

Spelljammer Academy: Starlight Arcana, 8 Sessions (Sep-Dec 2024)
What it was:
An open table follow-on to my Spelljammer Academy mini-campaign. It was supposed to be run spelljammer-esque 3rd party content at the regular friday open tables
A vehicle to play through kick-started planar content - Path of the Planebreaker, Starlight Arcana, 5e Planescape and Planestriders Journal for LevelUp5e all came through the door around the time this was running.
The first of these open table runs I feel I fumbled.

What worked:
Pretty combat heavy stuff compared to what I usually did since this was more orthodox D&D; bad guys just drawing down and going straight to combat, straight-up murderous goblins as opposed to the ones that talk I usually run.
Adapting a big written adventure into episodic chunks worked better than I might have thought.
Retrofitting the campaign to Realmspace worked well; I dropped the ground location into the Dales, stuck some of the others on Coliar and then used Karpri in Realmspace for the ocean world
Pre-gen characters - I abandoned building characters with people who came without one - instead of having the table sit around while I worked with one person, I gave them a half dozen pre-gens to choose from and got things rolling.

What didn't:
It took too damn long to get the party onboarded with the continuing quest at the start of sessions. I tried having NPCs ask for help, tell them what was going on, etc - it all seemed to take too long while I watch the lights of interest gutter in their eyes.
Trying to maintain progress with different crews over multiple open tables - often the player who knew what was going on was playing a character who was just useless as a conduit of information from one session to the next - leaning too hard into their characters incapabilities through low intelligence or drunkeness. Characterful but sapped momentum.
(NPC) cast of thousands - even though practically it was three NPCs - but they were two different groups the Spelljammer Academy and the Starlight Arcana NPCs and it made the whole thing drag
Did not vibe with as many of the players that settled in as regulars compared to other campaigns. Not to say individuals were bad or did anything wrong but the table vibe was just not one that energised me.
Spelljammer does not work as a welcome wagon game - it is a 'twist' too far for beginning D&D folk and I was still often getting first-timers at the open tables.

Lessons learned:
For episodic one-shots, get things rolling quickly to a place where players are making decisions.
You can trust players to self-start where the setting is relatively vanilla but drop folk into a new or unusual setting and they will stall poking at the scenary to get a grip on where they are. Brancalonia is a relatively familiar setting, the uniqueness is the vibe and the non-lethal mechanics; Starlight Arcana/Spelljammer with the sky-sailing ships and the planar-influences plot was harder for people to grasp.
People far too often bring 'quirky' characters who are severely compromised as functional heroes - either unmotivated, unintelligent, unable to communicate, not actually an adventurer, etc. Getting them to do actual heroing was friction that needed to be overcome at the start of sessions.

Lots of links for our shared enlightenment. For more, see the previous list found here or on the restored weekly blogroll on r/OSR or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.

All Dead Generations gives us Fear in a Handful of Dust

Alex Schroeder shares Dungeons and Wilderness and Politics

Grumpy Wizard asks What is the Essential Experience of Dungeons & Dragons?

Play Material writes The best fantasy world-building game I've ever played just dropped

Roll to Doubt asks Why Blogging?

Ward Against Evil gives us Treat Illusions As You Would Any Other Lie: No Rolls

Der PigDog's PigBlog shares Questing

tl:dr; all you need for evocative, self-contained Klingon adventures using the 2d20 system

I have long, long thought to myself what a fantastic show it would be to track the crew of a Klingon ship taking on the kinds of problems that crop up in the Star Trek universe - I was not aware that this book had been created when I saw it on a shelf in my FLGS so I grabbed it up gleefully.

descriptor, artist

The 2d20 system was one I had heard of - seen that it had Conan, Star Trek, John Carter and a few other well known settings released - but I had not read into it or figured it out. Another member of my local game group raves about 2d20 Star Trek so I figued there was something to it. The 2d20 system takes a little getting used to with its to-and-fro trading of the threat/momentum meta-currency but it is a good vehicle for facilitating games that strongly resemble Star Trek episodes.

Setting wise, this was a slam dunk, I'm a 'Next Generation' kid, Picard is my captain, and we got some great Klingon episodes from that and DS9 - I knew enough going in that I was coming to this with 'tell me how to run the setting' not looking for much on the setting itself.

First impression of the look and feel, it is a chunky book, good cover, nice colour-scheme through-out, two ribbons which makes it feel really ritzy. Inside front cover is a Klingon language map of the Empire, inside the back cover is a map with readable names and a zoom out to include the Romulans and Federation. Reading through it a bit more and it is pretty good - I have some quibbles with how things are ogranised, I had some confused flipping about trying to figure some stuff out, but pretty darn good for all the stuff packed in here.

I managed to even get this to table as part of my 'forever DM support group' and it was a good time even with it being my first time running the system and the first time many of them were encountering the setting and system.

I launched a short-run (six session) hex-crawl campaign to test-drive some old-school play styles and in parallel #hexcrawl25 crested the horizon - one stone, two birds!

With a session 0.5 and a first proper session under our belts ~ 8 hours play at table - the crew has poked about and found a couple of locations so I thought I would dump those up here.

Locations visited in session one:
The picturesque village of Ashley - mostly humans, all buttoned up by nightfall
The sky-burial grounds, sticking up from the forests. Has a tiny keepers cottage, who also has been found to keep the shrine of She Who Hides From Sight
The farm fields of Ashley
The great climb up to the Uruk high land
The panorama rock, claimed as territory by a cross naga
The standing stone (one large and eight smaller) where a message was left
The old lady of the swamps cottage - herb hung and filled with jarred things. Recently hosted the goblin market in the cave beneath
Dark pools - opaque waters, sticky mud and hard going generally. Used by the tree-whisperers as an ambush site for sacrificial victims
Lily ponds - pools with decent fishing, covered by giant lilies, home to territorial giant otters
The sacrificial rock - with burnt remnants of a tabernacle about it. Trees carved with strange symbols are found nearby

Locations seen
Fungal forest - seen but avoided so far
Dragonborn hamlet
Golian hamlet
Cult lair
Ruined tower

For session two they rounded up some henchlings for help and went back to the cult lair, spending the session dungeon diving.

In the interim between these campaign sessions I ran a pair of stand alone open tables - one doing the Waking of Willoughby Hall and the other doing Winters Daughter, both of which I located on the map. The party doing 'Winters Daughter' murdered some locals and chucked them off a cliff en route to their goal, significantly disturbing the local status quo for the campaign party when they restarted.

Session three they did another big wander - setting off on the journey documented in 'crawling with no notes' - wandering up to one settlement, interacting with the locals and bunking there then treking back down to investigate a missing person then turning around and trekking back again to another settlement and bunking there for the night. This was our most significant to-ing and fro-ing session so far - of course it happened when I did not have my notes in hand.

Locations visited in session three:
tall reed beds where they found a snakefolk patrol
deep marsh pools with a big crocodile
a mosquito filled wetland was one
boggy hills full of territorial but non-dangerous small lizards
ruins being excavated by snakefolk
dragonfolk hamlet in a vale with a shrine to a small god
snakefolk village in the exposed part of insectfolk ruins
barren tor that was found to be part of those same buried ruins but further away

Session four they delved into the depths of a giant ruin beneath that settlement; classic dungeoneering.

So far, half the sessions are spent actively 'hex crawling' exploring new parts of the map - we shall see how / if this pattern holds.

It has served its purpose of getting me way ahead of my #hexcrawl25 tempo with 105 hexes sketched in 61 days. Way ahead but still with the players champing at my heels.

A smorgasbord of chunky links this week. For more, see the previous list found here or on the restored weekly blogroll on r/OSR or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.

Attronarch's Athenaeum gives us Fight On! issue 16 now available

Illusory Sensorium launches the March RPG Blog Carnival with Over the Garden Wall

New School Revolution gives us Pointcrawls & Emergent Play

Sersa Victory gives us Cyclic Dungeon Generation

All Dead Generations gives us AN INTRODUCTION TO DUNGEON CRAWLING

Ten Foot Polemic gives us Another Underclock

Beneath Foreign Planets gives us PREDATORY ENCOUNTERS - IMPROVING THE RANDOM ENCOUNTER

Explorers Design asks How do we design a gaming community?

Prismatic Weekly launches a blogging bandwagon with Blogging Rabbit Hole

Mythic Mountain Musings asks What is Folk Tabletop?

Blog of Forlorn Encystment writes On Settlements

An Abominable Fancy gives us Campaign Preambles

Methods & Madness shares Yam-Shaped Campaigns

Running a hexcrawl campaign and I ended up having to improvise somewhat at the last session because (of course) the players headed off in a completely different direction to what I had thought (and prepped). This is partially inspired by I Cast Light writing on Building An Encounter On The Fly.

It was not a totally blank map, I had put some thought into where they were going but I just had none of those notes with me nor had I the book I had been using as a support otherwise (Knock #1).

I did have some partial scrawls from a previous session prep where I was even less sure what they were going to do and I winged it off those.

Thinking I had done off table (vaguely remembered)
- who the local factions were and what they were up to (6 sub-hex sites mentioned before)
- bleed over from neighbouring hexes
- overall campaign 'what is lurking beneath' premise
- interactions players had had with the faction elsewhere in previous sessions

What I had with me at table
- encounter table
- general terrain properties from Azgaar maps
- some pre-rolled terrain possibilities (d100 terrains from Frog Factory)
- overloaded encounter dice table

So when the players wandered onto less filled out parts of the hexmap I had a couple of irons in the fire to use.

First and most useful was the Landmark/Hidden/Secret framework which let me go 'whatever I roll up that they encounter now, that is not the definitive only thing in this hex' which might seem incredibly obvious to some of you but it stopped me getting paralysed in trying to reconcile whatever might have been 'supposed' to be there and whatever the part encountered now.

Second was the overloaded dice - I use Hexploring by Meandering Banter - because the table is getting used to it now with the 'high good, low bad' general feeling though I do not think they have reverse calculated the exact structure of it. This gave a good 'on ramp' to whatever hex as the first thing done was roll that encounter dice on entry to the hex. This set the 'mood' of either eager anticipation (high) or concern (low) to frame whatever came next.

For low rolls, I had my encounter tables which gave the 'who' was being encountered; that combined with a bit of terrain gave enough to work on, particularly since the players usually tried to talk their way out of any trouble first. We ended up with one patrol encounter in tall reeds that they talked their way past and a big crocodile by a deep pool who tried to grab and drag someone under.

For mid rolls, exhaustion, expiration of rations, I tapped my scant terrain notes for things they ran into - two fatigue rolls led to non-lethal but delaying critters - a mosquito filled wetland was one, a region full of territorial but non-dangerous small lizards was another - an expiration roll revealed that the small lizards had savaged their rations during all the chaos.

The higher rolls - perception boons and advantages - were the trickiest to hammer together on the fly - one percept roll was finding an easy way through a hex that had previously been established as difficult to traverse. Another was spotting a local shrine/gathering spot to discretely talk to some locals, another was arriving on a location. These in theory should have been the rolls where the deeper secrets of a hex would have been revealed - the Hidden/Secret elements but I just did not have them to hand.

Things I missed that I will now be printing for my binder
- terrain table - what bits i had from it saved my bacon
- some more boons and minor treasures to be found scattered about the place
- one-page monster manual