Returning to RT-87, our hivecity to peek at a roster of its NPCs and also do the "TTRPG Character Creation Challenge Jam".


1. Morer Baranyx - Carnotaur Arena Knight-Pledge - recently granted their augmented-carnotaur, already a decorated cavalry officer, now they fight in the great arena to prove their worthiness to maybe, one-day pilot a Knight. Deep down they know Knights will not be available in their lifetime.
2. Grak the Crummy - Tallow-works Foreman (abhuman) - fur perpetually slick from the grease-fumes of the tallow-works, they drive their crew hard in their holy duty, rendering down the worthy Ogryn who survived pilgrims way into sacred candles.
3. Yellow Cew - Megasaurherder crew-boss (ogryn) - forest-smart, grizzled and megasaur scarred, they might be found wrestling their team out of the drinking-dens that will have them before departing for another run down to pick up a herd. Speeders would make the journey in hours but the cavernous megasaur carrier ships will take long weeks.
4. Ologus-77 - Augmetic-weapon-lens crafter - senior sacristan tech-magos, so filthy it is hard to tell their affiliation. Obsessed with creating ever more powerful lasing lenses from the favourable native clays. Personal crusade to construct a planetary defense las so mighty his peers will have to accept the replacement of the dark age of technology infernal cannons. Multiple cybernetic adaptations for the making and testing of las-lenses.
5. Venric the Impermeable - Munitorum tithe assessor (lasers, soldiers) - grizzled, dispeptic official in fine but worn uniform, continuously reviewing data slates and hardcopy, shouting observations at a trailing auto-scribe servitor. Certain that everyone is trying to swindle the Imperium from its rightful tithe through wickedness or incompetence and but for their diligent prying it would succeed.
6. Sepia Dismas - Abbess of Hospitaller-sisters - gentle voice and floating choir of servitor-skulls bring an aura of calm, useful for triage of the mutant, industrially-wounded or broken-minded. Equally willing to deploy their medikit or bolt-pistol depending on their assessment of your remaining utility to the Emperor.
7. Astraea the Staunch - Chief of megasaur & abhuman medicine - loud, enthusiastic, brutally scarred from an insufficiently sedated patient. A familiar face to all from popular 'how it works' autopsy videos found on most public pict-displays.
8. Billhoook Pluto - Bone-grading inspector - megasaur-scale apron and elaborate auspex headset complement flak-armour and a fast-draw autopistol holster. Feline-like tendency to turn up unexpectedly, lives for the hunt of stopping bone-smugglers
9. Turquoise-lure Lorell - Tanners-guild head - a burly, elaborately head-dressed micromanager, interrupted by shrilling vox-link of order confirmations. To their great annoyance, megasaur skins refuse to come in standard sizes.
10. Calibre Zaddion - Munitorum strategos-savant - dressed like last seasons fashionista, eyes glittering from dataveil links. Rumoured to have the entire 'big picture' of the planetary tithe in their head, they are frequently found around travel-hubs talking logistics.
11. Milliasaur Balfrymownde - Coordinator of visitors (offworlders) - stoically polite, with perfect etiquette and an encyclopedic knowledge of the off-world customs. Lays ground work for visits by dignitaries which involves telling the locals exactly what they are going to do or face the wrath of the Lord-Castellan.
12. Okheus-44 - Magos Robotica - but for the Sacristan robes this one is the archetypal tech-priest. No sign of flesh remains, often found accompanying robots on field trials, muttering "the flesh is weak".
13. Omion-39 - Servitor-wright - hurried, impatient, trailing a small retinue of servitors with equipment, constantly bemoans the difficulties of pairing augmetics with the varied abhuman bodyforms, blames the servitor-candidates for not being more uniform
14 Displacer Dyademe - Maglev-guild trainboss - canny, greedy, with obvious high quality augmetics, rich garments and prominent exotic shields. Surrounded by vox-chatter from transcontinental maglev crews and traders and emissaries looking for favours and better prices on chunks of salvage from the dead hives
15 Helene the Hexed - Maglev-cleansing inspector - handflamer, sooty armour and a perpetual smell of burnt promethium. Thorough and cunning, expert at finding hidden contraband and stowaway monsters on the hive-city chunks hauled in for recycling from the wastes
16 Lucerus Elusyx - Administorum salvage assessor - sleek and glossy, clad in a regulation uniform made from the finest materials. Delights in ferreting out attempts to avoid import tax and claiming the finders bounty.
17 Typhon the Mighty - Butchers guild line-leader (minotaur) - brawny and focussed, views their work in the slaughterhouses as a sacred duty, matching their Emperor-given strenghth and masterwork chainaxe against the tough hides and titanic carcasses of the megasaurs
18. Timon the Silver-lure - Freelance protein procurer - a greasy, wheeling-dealing spiv, able to grade megasaur offcuts, corpse starch and anything else that could be grist for the protein-mills. Laughs to much at his own jokes about "you'd make good sausages yourself"
19. Cilice Gyn Barik - Offworlder abhuman - swathed in venturing robes, even when far too hot to hide their distinctive offworld horn structure. Scrapes out a living trading on their knowledge of far away places and things
20. Garak the Jolterhead - Abhuman redemptionist preacher - festooned in holy-seals, clanking with devotional-icons, bleeding from self-flagellation they will be found braying reprentance to crowds. Fiery eyed in their zealotry and harshest to judge their fellow abhumans
21. Omax-98 - Macro-augmeticist magos - can conceive no greater privilege than what the Omnissiah requires of him in this life, to render megasaurs into the mega-servitors. Massive with exoskeletal augmentation to work on the huge beasts.
22. Lrix the Jackanape - Auspex-whisperer & wreck-surveyor - jittery, shrapnel-scarred, bundled in piecemeal armour, hunched under the weight of the potent auspex-array of uknown provenance they haul around. In demand by the hive-salvage breakers for sniffing out hazards and treasures, good at finding both but not very light on their feet.
23. Stimm Quintos - Breakers guild stimm-dispenser - overly jolly with belts full of sanctioned labor-enhancers and a ready patter of approved encouraging slogans. Dressed like the stereotypical heroic labourer but coughs blood after more than one or two big heaves at a time.
24. Valelan Renard - Houseguard patrol commander (cold one cavalry) - thin-lipped, calculating, spit-shined uniform. Brutal disciplinarian to his men, meaner again to the abhumans among them, irritates the regimental commisar by leaving them little to do. Loves the megaraptor mounts of the patrol, feeds them best prisoner bits.
25. Horgruss Imzel - stevedores guild cold-trader - purposefully fades into the crowd, wary eyes above their guild-jacket collar. Sharp blade, hold-out laspistol and flak armour hidden beneath. Master of the art of casually walking off with contraband from arriving maglevs and innocently stumbling upon interested buyers.
26. Hazael the Antler-wrangler - Maglev network snakehead - duelling scars and prominently cross-strapped pistols. Works to foil screening of arrivals from the wastes habitually. Sometimes it is for a cargo of abhumans from the failed megasaur ranches, sometimes for weirder things, they never ask.
27. Moraner Kasen - Weapon-testing duellist - abrasive and pushy, mercenary for hire. Quick to demand their duelling rights. Paid for field-testing new laslenses.
28. Horrendous Praetus - Dead-ranch ganger - garishly dressed in patched megasaur-skin hand-me-downs, faked wasteland rad-burn, backed up with knife and stubgun. Asserts their rights as a ranch-ganger, though the ranch has long been consumed by the wastelands. Talks a big game about how they will bring a new herd out there are be back in business any month now.
29. Spook Ishkur - Megasaur-runner - genuinely radburned with the scales to prove it hidden beneath their dusty megasaur-skin jacket. Likely found deeply inebriated or foul-temperedly nursing a hangover as they grimly complain about going back out for more megasaurs.
30. Morar Maryan - Houseguard incident sanitiser - disease-gnarled, flamer-toting tabarded agent of the lowest sort for the ruling house. Asks no questions, nonchalantly thorough in their work. Good memory but cares little about whys and wherefores.
31. Smokestack Orl - Deep hive scrap-picker - lethargic elder, grey-skinned where not covered in bandages. Completely divorced from standard day-night cycle, has encyclopedic knowledge of the lower hives. Watched over protectively by most of the locals as their own strange canary - "things cannot be so bad if Smokestack is still trudging about".

With thanks to Dread Quill and Fat Dwarf for their respective random name generators.

Stat everyone as a civilian except:
- The Sacristans (Ologus-77, Okheus-44, Omion-39, Omax-98) who stat as tech-priests
- Typhon the Mighty and Yellow Cew who stat as ogryns

Give +10 in the relevant skill of any mentioned equipment.

Anyway, in my 'keep me honest' progress tracker stats:
Progress: 26/56 wards completed
Completion vs target: 50% vs 41% target
Population covered: 58%

Slowed down a lot, been busy but have a couple more good ideas for wards in the can - half way done, a month ahead of schedule.

tl;dr: old school hex crawl on the dream-like moon, lots to dip into for inspiration.

Fly Me To The Moon by Kabuki Kaiser - a lunar hex crawl that I grabbed because it looked like a combo of old school gaming and space antics. Broadly pitched as what you find if the vision of the moon from the early 1900s had it right - a steampunky, fin-de-siecle vibe - but I found it much broader (and perhaps more useful) than that. The vibes I was getting was 'fairy tales of that time' - the kind of thing Rackham would have illustrated or Wilde would have written about. It also feels like a different tree grown in the same soil that got us Barsoom, so fine fodder for sword-and-planet escapades too.

Very much wearing its OSR-allegiance with pride, I initially thought this was an older book given its back-to-basics clean set up and introductory approach - it has been a while since I have come to something with quite this flavour of 'let me briefly explain the concept' approach, calling back to the OSR vernacular of "BX or use whatever system suits" in contrast to declaring for one of the many retroclones - OSE, OSRIC, etc. Reminded me of some of the grand old group projects like Petty Gods.

I got a print-on-demand version from DriveThruRPG and received 166 pages worth of neat little soft cover with a sort of black, blues and white scheme throughout. General format is two columns per page with some singe- and double-page art spreads mixed in. All the writing and design credits are at the back - this had been done up pre-AI OSR style with a bunch of artist credits, public domain art and photography. It gives a nice somewhat Art-Nouveau-in-blue look to the whole thing.

So what's actually in here?
A page of an intro section
A page with the hexmap
Four pages of rule mods, denizens and system use comments
A page Lists of linked locations
131 pages of hexes from the hexmap
18 pages worth of spells
A page discussing lycanthropy on the moon
A page of notes on the Lunar wars
Four pages on cats of the moon
Four pages on the moon-bound balloon the Phalene Celestial
A page of an appendix
A page of credits

Going through this in chunks:

A choice set of fascinating links from about the internet. If you want 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.

Cults of Uod posts Uod: A New Campaign in 25 Phrases

Whose Measure God Could Not Take writes Who is the GLOGosphere? 2026 Edition

Roll to Doubt shares By the Sea

Congas.blog writes What is OSR? What is NSR? Survey analysis

The Garden Below gives us Conditional encounter tables

Missile Attack Bonus posts How Do You Want to Do This?

Scipio202 on Patchwork Paladin writes Kickstarter Whales – Guest Post

Routes and Routs shares Rules Fragment - Roll Up to 12d20 for Mass Combat

Garamondia posts A palazzo of some fantastic proportion...

From the Sorcerer's Skull writes Bringing it Into Focus

Vulcan Stev's Database gives us this months prompt Inspiration! Where Does Yours Come From? for the RPG Blog Carnival. This post is mostly about turning the inspiration you will surely have into whatever you actually want at the end or as Edison put it "Genius is 1% Inspiration, 99% Perspiration".

My suggestions to anyone trying to reliably 'create on demand':
1. Have your tools ready to catch the sparks
2. Get from zero to something, because you can work with something.
3. Stand on something
4. Sketch out your structure if you risk interruption
5. Save all your ideas

I lay this out for blogging but so too for adventures.


First - have your tools ready

I follow the Egan doctrine, a kind of 'hair-trigger pomodoro' - which is being ready to seize any free 20 mins to just push something along. Small progress, made often, adds to a sizeable movement in the end. To get specific, I put together this list of d20 small viable blogging tasks to illustrate what I mean.

Practically this means being ready to fill in the blanks around the spark of inspiration you have had elsewhere - hitting your slush-list, finding that quote, linking to the survey, jam or challenge that is relevant. You can hack out the *tasks* around putting a post together in chunks once you have the core idea in place.

When I am completely dry, I set up reviews - the block-and-tackle numbers work like counting the section sizes, or block-out weekly link posts. Something from the pile of background tasks I continuously run on the blog that allow me to make progress when I'm not having a moment of inspiration.

Second - getting from zero to something

This blog has always been an advocate of "don't get it right, get it written". Of late, one of my handier tools has been voice transcription - used as for this post while doing laundry. My key learning is that this voice log will be trash. Far more hassle to try and whip it into shape than to just re-read, steal the ideas and re-write. For getting from nothing to something, perfectly adequate.

On getting stuff written, I can point back to one of my ancient blogposts on lessons learned from NaNoWriMo - back before it collapsed in disgrace, I participated often and there were a couple of useful tricks for getting drafts done I learned. Key from the point of view of inspiration was to try and stop in the middle of a thought, so when you came back to the work, you could reread your last bit, finish out that thought and presto, you had a bit of momentum already.

Third - stand on something - use jams and challenges

Question sets, prompt lists and blogwagons help to jump start a post. Just writing down whatever you are participating in or joining gets you that first start. The more structured the challenge, the easier it is to get something done. Working down a question list is usually easier than answering an unstructured, wide-open question.

Campaign retrospectives, session reports and other "factual" write ups can help - one might say those sidestep the idea of "inspiration" entirely since you are documenting what actually happened. However one feels on that question I think those reporting type posts are good for building the muscles of drafting posts and talking about your gaming to make that part easier when you are trying to capture some fickle spark of an idea.

Fourth - sketch out your structure to guard against interruption.

I have of late started this, blocking out my section headers where once I would have just got cracking, Ian Fleming style. Having the key ideas noted down - make your points without justification, enough to remind you what you planned to say. This gets you off zero and gives you a structure you can then build out when time presents itself. It also prevents and untimely interruption causing some chunk of your great idea to be lost before you could commit it to ink.

At this point do no research, do not tab away from the page or change focus until you have the whole outline down. This is not so much about inducing inspiration but about capturing the sparks you do get. Inspiration strikes at the most unlikely places, but then you walk through a doorway or get out of the shower and it is gone. Here my point is to jot down the outline of your whole idea before someone interrupts you and it is all gone like the back three quarters of Kubla Khan. Once you have that view from 50,000ft then you can weather fate trying to mess with you a touch more robustly.

Fifth - Save all your ideas

Then where does inspiration come in and of itself? This can be the hardest - d4 caltrops wrote a good piece on this worth reading. I find frequently rereading the prompt and going away and focussing on something else is helpful, If an idea does not immediately come, nor arrive after a few minutes pondering, then put it down. Tab away to something else and let your subconscious chew on it.

There is a difference between "I have no idea" and "I am not sure how to articulate my point" that warrants slightly different treatment. Above is for "no idea" but if you can feel something nagging you, the classic splinter-in-the-mind, then blocking out the points you do have, leaving a gap for what you are missing can help. I feel this as clearing out mental capacity of the stuff that is solved to give more room for the things remaining unclear. The content of the blank bits sometimes becomes apparent once you have formed the shape of them by putting down what goes around them.

For "no idea" instances - you are going to capture many ideas while out walking around - so have means to capture them. Write yourself a WhatsApp, leave a voicenote, email something to yourself, whatever, just capture the idea, get it down. Once down, it gets soaked into your workflow and feeds into step one.

I have a giant slush pile of blog article headers. One cell in Excel, maybe with a comment and the inspirational link or thought. Typical would be somebodys blog plus my thoughts on a comment or response.

And if you are still stuck try d4 Caltrops great "brainfood for burgeoning blogs" d100 list.

Putting it all together

Moments of inspiration rarely happen when you are sitting down at your desk ready to go - they can, but are typically not so convenient. For me time at desk is processing the ideas list into something useful. Taking those three words on a post-it note and expanding that up to the skeleton sketch, the headers. Then when there is time, fill in each of those headers. Then go back over the whole thing, make sure it's coherent. Then up it goes.

Those are my general tips for inspiration. As you will have no doubt noticed, very little of that is actually about inspiration. Inspiration will happen to you. The key thing is making sure to capture that inspiration, nail it down and turn it into something useful.

do As for blogging, so for adventures

All of the above can replace blog post with D&D adventures and the principles still stand. Capture your ideas when you are out and about. Hack out the outline of the adventure when you get a chance, but skip detail like monster stats or rule lookup or anything like that. Then once you are happy you have the whole idea, go back around and put in the detail to make it table-ready.

Whenever I trawl through RPG-tumblr I am struck that there is this persistent Spelljammer vibe, a sense that that setting thrives there in campaigns, fan-art, home-brew and general chatter more than anywhere else. I have no explanation but I am fascinated and I think it is great to see.

To contrast, the Planescape tag is channel-jammed by the old computer RPG Planescape: Torment and then what remains is mostly all Sigil - not bad if you like those sort of things but once you go past those two the rest of everything you get is so much more diffuse. There are flashes of brilliance in there for any given thing you might be interested in but with so much involved in the Planescape setting as a whole, you don't get much for any single thing.

I was pondering why I like what I see in the Spelljammer tag and I think it is because you can pretty much grab any good idea you see there and drop it into your own campaign as a wandering encounter, an NPC you run into or a site you find because you could come across anything in Wildspace, anything at all, whereas most other settings, require a touch more filtering for terrain-appropriate ideas (Planescape included, though swap in 'plane-appropriate').

I do not know why Spelljammer strikes a nerve - perhaps 'D&D in Spaaaace' falls closer to peoples hearts than it did, perhaps the kaleidoscopic-skies aesthetic aligns, who knows - but for whatever reason it is, if you are at all interested in Spelljammer, browsing the tag on tumblr is a good place for inspiration. Afterwards Reddit will give you crunch and answer questions once you have specific ones or you can delve into the vast wells of knowledge on forums like The Piazza.

Some of my favourite things I found:

@dailyadventureprompts gives us Drafting an Adventure: Setting Sail in the Astral Sea - good content for the Astral.

@dailyadventureprompts gives us Drafting the Adventure: Spelljamming - significant thought on running Spelljammer right.

@leavingautumn13 gives us Reimagining the Neogi

@madlabgames writes Spelljamming, Reimagined: The Flow, The Void, and The Hull - delving back into AD&D lore and doing a complete rework of the whole concept. A solid alternate concept.

@spyglassrealms shares a More interesting Realmspace

@honourablejester throws out a bunch of Spelljammer Concepts for characters.

@dnd-5e-homebrew compiles some hombrew rules for Sailing the Astral Flow

@flailsnails gives us A Spelljammer Buyer's Guide - your grand list of capsule reviews for all the old AD&D products.

@nothingrpgzone gives us Spelljammer Advanced Sphere Generator - a nice revamp of the old AD&D sphere generator way, way more cleanly put together.

@thatboomerkid collates their SpellJammer: Shadow of the Spider Moon (Special Rules) from their campaign - for Pathfinder, but ideas useable whatever your system.

@madlabgames gives us 🦗 The Orthopterans: Threat Assessment & Cosmic Order ⚙️

@dailyadventureprompts gives us Monsters Reimagined: Mindflayers

@elbiotipo has Some thoughts for a D&D Spelljammer setting and gives us another trove of 'take as you please' ideas to tweak your own tables version.

@amarynceus compiles Old Spelljammer Artwork from their high-school game - great notes from someone who used the setting in anger.

@d20-dimwit worked up alternate 5e versions of the Spelljammer Races.

@kor-artificer works up Skyship Weatherlight as a vehicle so needs a touch more conversion work but a good start for a Spelljammer.

@dmsden gives us Shiver Me Timbers - Notes on running a pirate-themed campaign

@madlabgames shares 🔮⚓ Arcane Engines: Three Unique Spelljamming Helms for Your Crew! ⚙️💫

A short set this week due to computer hardware failure. If you want 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.

ATMOSPHERIC UNDERWORLD posts Investigation as Exploration - Designing an OSR Style Scenario for Call of Cthulhu

Dark Pupil shares Zone Crawls

A shrike for my dreams gives us The OSR is not dead, it’s sleeping

3×5 Arcana shares The Bonkers Loop

In My Campaign posts My New Campaign: Geography

Against the Cult of the Commodity posts 1 Weekend, 7 Sessions, 18 players, 15 modules, 115 Rooms - The Tower of Collage (Super Adventure 4)

Modified with the approval of creator Evlyn Moreau

Exeunt Omnes posts How I'd change my next game design workshop

Jay Dragon writes The Three Secrets of Making Games

Trick's Tales writes Lore and Factions of the Endless Plains (For a Game About the Mongolian Empire)

I was fascinated by Troy Press recent piece "D&D Rules, According to Past Players" based on a general survey they did which found the D&D players among a broad sample of the population but also asked when and which edition they had last played - with the fascinating insight in that article that where 20% of the respondents had played in 2026 (the past four months), only 7% of respondents had played 5.5e as their last game.

This prompted me to mention this to the author on Mastodon who further revealed "The sample size for those who played in the last three months is small: n=40. Of those: 10% played 5.5, 66% played 5e, 14% played 4e, and no other edition was in the double digits."

This is fascinating - my first question was then "how does this look for an adoption trend for the new edition?" - how does the share of games being played with 5.5e compare to how many folk were playing 4e or 5e this many years after the launch of those editions?

To get an idea, we turn to the Obsidian Portal campaigns launched - taking annual slices we can get a sense of popularity of editions back to 2008.

To recap - this was done by loading the Campaigns page on Obsidian Portal and noting the campaigns per system for each year available (back to 2008) using the Wayback Machine so we capture from 4e dropping through to now.

Originally inspired by Troy Press writing in 2019 on RPG campaigns played by system and I have been tracking this and updating annually for a few years now (2022, 2023, 2024, 2025)

We also have the now-discontinued Orr Reports which gave us the same insight for Roll20. With that and the Obsidian Portal data we can pull three continuous trends and then chuck on whatever single points we have for 5.5e from various sources for comparison.

Looking at what we get we see a pretty clear rapid-switch over to 5e from 4e when it launched. We see an initial high take-up of 4e that started to fade off pretty rapidly (competition from Pathfinder at that point). Pathfinder 1e had a pretty good start to a solid 60% of new campaigns launched on Obsidian Portal the year before 5e dropped.

Comparing those to what we see for 5.5e - the few dots we can scrape together - we do not appear to be seeing the unambiguous take-off that was obvious at this stage for 5e. One could have maybe told a story last year about how 5.5e was having a 5e-equivalent take off as seen on Roll20 but it is hard to continue that. While fully acknowledging that these points are a grab-bag of sources, they are clustering between 10-45% - this is not the ~66-80% range one might expect to see if most folk were playing 5.5e these days.

So returning to our initial seed - that Troy Press finding of only 10% playing 5.5e - it seems on the low side but maybe a real marker for 5.5e being significantly less adopted than 5e was.

Notes

The Roll20 track above was checked against surveys from each end of that time span and matched up with what else I could find online.

The Obsidian Portal data is no longer useful for this because they do not distinguish between 5e and 5.5e - apparently taking WotC at their word that it was not a new edition but not helpful for this exercise.

Sources:

2026 Survey by Researchscape (N = 1253)

Campaigns page on Obsidian Portal

D&DBeyond poll (Feb 2025)

Facebook Hombrewers poll (Dec 2025)

Reddit r/LFG analysis (2024)

I poked one of the mainstay DM's of our local game society for their top tips on how to stitch scattered adventures together to make a campaign:
- Conservation of NPCs
- Tweak the adventures to fit the theme
- Work in meaningful player choices with meaningful consequences to the ongoing story

You can also consider these for any campaign you may be writing yourself or elements to watch for in written campaigns too.

Why think about stitching adventures together?

In short, to give yourself more options than the two dozen or so famous campaigns.

After the dozen or so 5e campaigns from WotC, the hivemind of the web recommends about another dozen 3rd party campaigns. You can delve into the past for yet more but sometimes even then you cannot find quite the thing you are looking for. There are also loosely tied anthology adventures, Adventurers Guild seasons, old Dungeon magazines and other sources that you might find that fit the campaign you want to run. There is a mass of creativity out there - fit to every flavour and preference of table - but assembling them all into something coherent can be a challenge.

Making the various sessions of your campaign feel coherent is also a base requirement to make it feel like more than just random events happening one after another.

Players like their knowledge to count, so repeatedly encountering the same NPCs allows what they have learned about those NPCs to be relevant and useful. "The Baron hates cats? How about for that distraction we need, let us set a half dozen cats lose at his coronation."

Working in meaningful choices with consequences actualises player agency - their decisions mattered and continued to matter over multiple sessions.

All these things are basic elements of making a good campaign but they are particularly important at the connecting edges of different escapades. Assuming that a given adventure is decent in and of itself, the trick is to make it feel like part of a coherent whole.

Stitching campaigns together from multiple adventures

The trick of campaign threading has been well deployed locally in our gaming group - both 'pre-threaded' connected Adventurers League adventures and through connecting independent adventures.

One comrade at RPGVienna ran a very nifty campaign based on the Storm Kings Thunder adventurers league season - the low-level cycle around Parnast. Over a bunch of Friday nights we got to Parnast, ran a bunch of quests around it then successfully defended the village from siege with the help of allies gathered in the previous adventures. It was perhaps eight sessions or so but it was a great, highly thematic campaign.

There was also a Ravnica mini-campaign built around the 'Secrets of the Triseklion' adventures bulked out with other appropriate adventures. Both of these were proper campaigns in my eye for having consequences to an over-arching sequence of events carrying over sessions - compared to my own Brancalonia games which had consequences but were otherwise fairly episodic, not really a coherent campaign.

The Storm Kings Thunder series were pre-threaded; written with recurring NPCs and as part of an over-arching sequence of events - but the Ravnica campaign was bulked out beyond the core adventures and needed to be reworked to be coherent. As mentioned above this meant:
- Conservation of NPCs
- Tweaking the adventures to fit the theme
- Having player choices with meaningful consequences

- Conservation of NPCs

We have mention conservation of NPCs before - just make similar NPCs be the same person. This can be expanded to have similar 'table function' NPCs be the same person - traders, quest-givers, etc. - where they have the same interaction with the characters, even if quite different as written.

I retained this in the Brancalonia campaign - but the impact was significantly lessened because the rotating cast of players meant that a given NPC appeared much less frequently to any one player so they did not reach the same level of 'that guy' recognisability.

- Tweaking the adventures to fit the theme

Here we have the work of identifying what fits within a campaign style - what can be easily repainted to lie seamlessly with other parts - and how to bulk out a set of adventures with others that were not immediately coherent or that provide options you need.

The first trick here is recognising that while any adventure can be made to fit into a campaign with enough elbow-grease, some are a lot easier to meld together than others. Terrain is a typical common factor to take but an adversary or location could also be used depending on the theme of the campaign - what is the key part of your campaign. If a common adversary, then that same foe on different terrains could be potentially useful. If a type of play - mountain traversal, ship voyages, urban investigations - then those are the factors you want to seek out.

Often this can be a thing that takes some work - an adventure might be set on a ship but make essentially no reference to that beyond the floorplan shape - so identifying whether an adventure truly contains the factors you want can be somewhat tiresome.

The other side of this coin is figuring out where you have a gap to be filled among the adventures you already have - typically done by using level progression for a first estimate but it can also be linked to state of the campaign - you might need some artic wilderness adventure to serve for if the party decides to trek to a given location rather than taking some other route.

If you can get your hands on a good review archive that helps you determine a) what is good and b) what adventures have what elements within them those are great tools for identifying good starting points to start finishing things.

- Having player choices with meaningful consequences

With pre-threaded adventures this is already done by the writers (one hopes) but in assembling disparate adventures the achievements and consequences of one ought to knock on to subsequent adventures beyond just levelling up.

Note, one or two isolated adventures can be fine as a change of pace or palate cleanser but, to make it feel like the adventures are part of a coherent whole, there ought to be decisions to make and consequences that come from those.

This one is hard to generalise because the decisions to be made are heavily dependent on the individual adventures. How the consequences of those decisions ripple through the rest of the campaign will be reliant on the nature of that campaign. The main lens I can suggest is to note what factions and foes make gains or suffer losses during an adventure and how, then consider how those will affect other things later - even if only through rumours and tales in taverns later on. Other elements like destruction of sites or establishment of new ones can also be big markers of consequence.

Plan to test

I will be trying these principles out with the old Dungeon Magazine Spelljammer adventures and will write up how those go. I had the great good fortune to find a copy of 'Under the Dark Fist' being sold by someone apparently divesting themselves of their whole D&D collection (!) and so I may even try and work in some of the official materials too.

Interesting links from about the interweb. For yet 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.

Heltung Storytelling hosts gives us Table Jam 26

The Rpg Gazette writes The Five Boxes: BECMI and the High-Level Problem That D&D Never Solved

False Machine gives us I Read Generators of Underground Worlds

MOMMY'S BIG GLASS OF WINE ALONE TIME BLOG MOST FOUL shares Searching for the free games ecosystem (and designing for desire paths)

Aggregate Cognizance posts An Analysis of Blades in the Dark Criticism

Kreggar Wandering writes Downtime as an Emergent Emotional Hook

Whose Measure God Could Not Take gives us Ten Years of GLOG (and! the Tomb of the Khan)

The Dolent Chronicle shares On Railroading

𝕲𝖗𝖊𝖓𝖉𝖊𝖑'𝖘 𝕾𝖙𝖊𝖕𝖉𝖆𝖉 posts XP and Advancement in Crow’s DCC Keep

Xeno & Kraft writes A colour wheel model of RPG systems

The Black Citadel gives us THE ALIEN/MYSTIC/MYTHIC FANTASY MANIFESTO: On the Tone of Fantasy I Enjoy

Sly Flourish shares Quantum Ogres and the Eight Steps

Was It Likely? shares the wood where the moon will be born

Denes Szanto Blog shares Stop using TTRPG Taxonomies Wrong!

@talien on EnWorld posts RPG Evolution: The Mook, the Bad, and the Ugly

ATMOSPHERIC UNDERWORLD writes Into the OSR, or, How I Learned to Stop Signposting and Love Cthulhu Heltung Storytelling hosts gives us Table Jam 26

Ars Ludi writes Making Peace with Microscope

Fantasy-Con is the annual convention of Fantasy-Schmiede (Fantasy Forge) another Vienna based hobby organisation - this one with a more general focus that includes a lot of authors and artists as well as LARPs and TTRPGs. The 2026 con was on the last weekend of April and I trotted over to have a look.

Arriving and getting a ticket on the door was easy - I threw in a neat sticker for myself. It was already pretty active when I got there in the morning and got busier as time went on, never getting overcrowded, just nicely busy.

First Impressions

I think the venue is a dedicated exhibition space - there was a main atrium with a bar, a hall with a stage to one side that had all the artists and authors, and two rooms to the other side that had the various games groups - the usual suspects of Paradice and Athenaes Siegel and some others I had not seen before - the striking new one for me was PopCircle Austria - who are running "D & Dinner" evenings at a restaurant.

The poster itself speaks to the priorities - Books & Authors first, Collecting and Culture second and then Boardgames, Roleplaying Games & LARPs - which broadly maps to the space assigned - the big hall for the artists and authors, the entry atrium for the 'people' clubs and the two side rooms for the gaming groups who need space to spread out. Noone was cramped, everyone had plenty of table space. This was not a con with scheduled game sessions - you found those out from the individual booths and groups and pieced together your own schedule.

There were also a good few streamers and podcasters - both talking shops and actual plays - and a schedule of talks and workshops, including a kids corner with magic shows and the like.

For me, after cruising the whole location to see what was going on, I had a good chat with the Paradice gang, poked about the artists alley, noted all the books, bought some stickers. I was a little surprised again at the lack of anyone to sell me some RPG books - plenty of opportunity to commission character art or get various player-side merch but noone (I saw) selling books. A copy of Imperium Maledictum appearing in front of me would have been a very easy sell but never mind.

I ended up spending a good chunk of my time over coffee and cupcakes with another of the DM Supergroup, mostly talking video games in this instance and turn-based ones suitable for frequently interrupted play sessions. Come to think of it the catering was a little microcosm of the whole - one kind of really good cupcake.

Closing Thoughts

What I find interesting about Fantasy-Con is the cross-section of people pulled together by it - what the priorities of the local community are, I guess. I come from a TTRPG convention culture (back in Ireland) built around university games societies with many smaller ones which are focussed on the trinity of CCGs, Wargames and TTRPG/LARP. Those were specialised and the audience was niche. Here in Austria, the organisations that hold cons seem to be a much broader church with TTRPGs appearing at the side of more mainstream events - books and artists having a much greater presence.

Apparently all this was sponsored by Chaosium which was neat but also odd that there did not seem to be stuff on sale.

I was pretty time constrained this year but for next I might try to get more organised and try and get in on some of the games Paradice or others might be running. Certainly the whole place was buzzy, lots of folk, costumes, people in good cheer, things going on. I might not travel to Vienna for it if I was not nearby but I would certainly say it is worth stopping by if you were in town the weekend it is on.

Troy Press published a piece "D&D Rules, According to Past Players" based on a survey they did - and I am fascinated by the 'mentioned in passing' implication of a huge amount of non-active D&D players in the USA - something like 1 in 6 USA folk have played D&D at some point, apparently. Does this make sense?

We poked at this before in "Comparing TTRPG player surveys in US and Germany" where we looked at the previous surveys from the same outfit - Researchscape 2022 Survey and 2019 Survey which also look at who among the general US population has played TTRPGs.

Here they pulled in 1,253 US adults and found 16% - 204 people - had played D&D at some point. They mention "the data was weighted to the U.S. population by 9 demographic questions. The credibility interval for closed-end questions answered by all respondents is ±4 percentage points" so we could conservatively say 12% or 1-in-8 is more representative of general population. If you want to go wild, you could say 20%, 1-in-5 have played D&D at some point but that just seems implausible.

If we stick with the 1-in-6 estimate and take the Census.gov estimate of 342.5 million in the USA, this implies about 55 million folk in the USA with D&D experience?

This is *fascinating* to me - because the perception is that the TTRPG industry is niche - in my lived experience, folk have never heard of a dice that is not six-sided, never mind thrown a d20 in anger. WotC themselves made an estimate of "over 40 million fans around the world" in 2020 - M.T. Black tried to sweep up this and other estimates of how many D&D players there are back in 2021 and ended up with 48 million from taking WotC at their word on growth rates.

One possible way to reconcile the 'feel' of this is the point that this '1-in-6' group are folk that ever played D&D in their lives - if we tease out when they last played things change a touch. Of those surveyed:
20% played this year
23% in 24/25
15% in 2020-2023
41% have not played this side of the pandemic

So roughly half of that are active, half are folk who have played a but no longer do. These are still chunky numbers - 23 million folk who played back in the day, 32.5 who played since the pandemic - 11 million who are playing this year. This survey was taken in April and we know that there is a good chunk of folk who do play on an annual basis so some slice of the 24/25 players are probably still active, just have not gotten their games in this year yet.

There are a couple of other stats they pull out that chime with numbers we have seen elsewhere - 20% of male respondants have played D&D, 13% of female respondents - there is the 60/40 male-to-female ratio we have seen before.

So where is everyone?

We get one additional clue in the editions breakdown at the end - 7% of the respondants had last played the new 5.5e, while 35% had last played 5e. That says, assuming everyone who ever tried 5.5e back in 2024 is still playing today, there are nearly double the amount of folk who are playing today, who have not made the jump to the new system. At the most generous, those folk are all playing 5e - so they were buying new books of WotC up to two years ago. I am sure a bunch of folk are still playing previous editions so that number is lower.

I am going to posit here that D&D's general cultural footprint suffers from the fact that for a lot of folk, they just need to buy the tools once, then they're set up. I can throw no rocks, sitting with multiple editions racked up around me, but even I balked at 4e and 5.5e. People can buy the gamebooks once, whatever edition, and never surface again - merrily playing away with their own game table, invisible to the outside.

Apart from 5.5e it is not clear who could be playing which editions - if we can take a hint from what we see on Obsidian Portal I suspect of the older editions we would find 3e/3.5e, BX and AD&D most likely to still be played.

There was a Techraptor report in Jan 2025 that said 3.6 million characters had been created on D&DBeyond for 5.5e after its first year which aligns quite neatly with the 3.9 million 5.5e players suggested by that 7% of respondants. There is almost certainly some fuzz around that - folk making multiple characters, folk trying 5.5e and reverting to an older edition - but it is coming to the same order of magnitude at least.

We see 58% of folk who ever played D&D have done so since the pandemic - and at least a quarter of them are playing older editions because a max of 42% have last played 5e/5.5e - what are the other 16% playing? Those folk are also not on D&DBeyond because older editions are not supported.

At a minimum it says there are a third again of players out there playing offline for whatever number of players are appearing online through use of D&DBeyond. I think that figure is probably far higher since folk on D&DBeyond create multiple characters, so that online footprint represents less actual people and thus the offline ratio is much larger.

All told a fascinating glimpse into that 'silent majority' of offline players out there, playing away and not interacting with the online nexi of RPG discourse, never counted in any of the 'community polls'.

Additionally, it suggests that there are likely a bunch of ex-D&D-players around in the US that no longer game. All our surveys and the like suggest that most of that is driven by lack of group and lack of time, not lack of appetite for the game itself. Perhaps there is an angle to be worked there for drop-in pick-up games?

Sources:

2026 Survey by Researchscape (N = 1253)

2022 Survey by Researchscape (N = 1074)

2019 Survey by Researchscape (N = 942)

More links from about the internet. For yet 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.

Vulcan Stev's Database launches the May RPGBlog Carnival topic of Inspiration! Where Does Yours Come From?

A shrike for my dreams shares Don’t prep hexcrawls, prep hexframes

Levi Kornelsen posts The Praxic Compendium

Courtney 🌻 The Sunflower Court writes TTRPG Character Creation Challenge Jam

Modified with the approval of creator Evlyn Moreau

@thydungeongal shares manifold issues with the secondary industry around D&D

AMONG CATS AND BOOKS posts Against Maps

Rise Up Comus writes Tolkien-Style Maps

Valeria Loves writes A Sicko’s Guide to Prepping D&D

Backwards Tabletop gives us Essay: The Problem with Production Value

ZOtRPG ! shares From mechanics to topographics: when the map becomes the medium of the conversation

derekb posts On Pointcrawls

I have been using Knock #1 as my go-to resource for the Hexcrawl25 campaign - the dungeons in the "Extraordinary Excursions" section were my source for complex sites and I got three of them to table. These dungeons were The citadel of Evil by Stuart Robertson, Praise the Fallen by Graphite Prime and Zaratzarats Manse by Nabok the Censored. I used these for two cultist lairs and a random wizards manse stumbled upon. This still leaves one last dungeon for use if needed - all told great value for the size of the book.

I used all of these dungeons as "I need a dungeon in a hurry because the players went off on a side quest" and they worked pretty well. Even the Citadel of Evil, which I initially thought seemed small, turned out to be very worthwhile. All of them got serious use - at least two sessions apiece from each of them with Praise the Fallen needing one big initial session that was a prisoner break-out then a later three-session return to clear it out completely.

Running through them in order encountered by the players:

Praise the Fallen has 15 A5 pages with lots of interesting bits and pieces within. They got to do a bunch of creeping around some of the nice old school spooky things like statues of angels and so on. Some proper old-school traps like compulsions to fling yourself on a blade were good and unsettling even where saves were made.

On the initial excursion the party missed most of the really nasty stuff - they probed the front bit, got into a big fight with a gathering of cultists and prevailed by bottling them up in a room and liberally using flaming oil. Solid tactics and good use of terrain. They did a bit of further creeping around, decided the spookier, deeper rooms were way over their heads and withdrew with the prisoners they had rescued.

The dungeon lurked in the background, oft mentioned, for much of the rest of the campaign until the party finally decided to go in and neutralise the threat. This return was supposed to be a quick raid (according to players plans) plunging deep into the temple to root out the cult leadership. The first session of this 'final' raid went well for the party as they ambushed cultists, sneaked about and bluffed their way past scattered lowly cultists with stolen robes and their acquired lore. The second session, as they ventured deeper they managed to pass many of the set piece wards and guardians using 'pass-pendants' before rousing a very large cave monster and having to fight them on treacherous terrain which left them low on resources and hit points to end the session. They staggered from that into a next set of guardians for the third session, fighting their way through and then getting into another big fight to stop a summoning. This brought out the dungeons arch villain who was invisibly nibbling them to death with summoned minions before they finally managed to reveal them and land the killing blow, just above the initiative tick where the villain was about to flee and become a recurring pest.

The dungeon itself is really nicely done. You get an intro on one page, some notes on rules applicable for the whole dungeon then a random encounter table and the main villainess. A small, total map is then followed by section-zooms with room-by-room detail. There are nice touches like the numbers of the rooms on the margins - a one two three up in the top corner so as you are leafing through you can quickly see where your where your room is. Stat blocks appear on the page where where you should be using them, descriptions are pretty terse, BX-style. The map is doing a lot of work with proper detailing of stairs up, stairs down secret doors and the likes. Good information density overall. I ran it pretty much straight out of the book.

My only advice is to be enthusiastic about rolling encounter chances - you will not always get them and even when you do, not all of them are going to be serious challenges, so roll often to keep the pressure up.

The Citadel of Evil was an identified location that the party knew they were going to go to so went relatively prepared and this ran over three sessions - one getting to the site and scouting from outside, one session of full-on dungeon-bashing and the last spent scouring the now-pacified wreckage for lurking remnants and/or loot.

They worked their way in through the base, up through the mysterious rooms in the middle, focussed on rescuing prisoners of the inhabitants so less on prying up flagstones and loot to start. The whole thing was a nice combination of slightly mysterious design requiring some careful scouting, non-traps that still needed navigating and then lurking cultists for active danger.

My party spent a session working their way up to the core then got in a fight with the main villain and managed to set a serious fire in the staircase that leads up to the citadel above. They did accelerate that fire but effectively they got into the basements and set the whole thing on fire above while they rescued people and fled. This bypassed some fighting in the upper structure but those foes were mostly guards/not the most interesting thing going on.

Then they did another entire session of poking through the ruins, interacting with traps and dangers and the hazards involved with the burnt out husk and the things rising from the dead and so on.

The dungeon is written to cover two pages so this was incredible bang for buck. Very good stuff, got two solid sessions, ten hours of play out of one side of A4.

The last one was the one on the dust cover, Zaratazarat's Manse, where a wizard was wizarding and cooked up a hazardous artefact that has gotten out of control. On this occassion the artefact is he's made "Ragga Gyxy’s Random Encounter Table", basically a monster summoning slab. This was a place the party was pointed at when they asked a settlement 'what kind of problems have you got' and then decided to poke into it.

I did not use the external village as written because I dropped it into an existing campaign but apart from that, I used everything over two sessions. One was an initial reconnaisance by a semi-open table group and the other was by the rest of the party to clear it out.

In both cases I used the mechanics provided - the big random-encounter table, the per-room encounter ladders, the 'find-the-wizard' rolls, the reaction rolls - which were fun. All of this on the inside of the dust-cover for the magazine so quite small text but still functional.

The first session, the party got there, poked around, ran into some random-encounter generated monsters and met some with negotiation, some with swords drawn. They managed to stumble their way past a bunch of things directly to the wizards bedroom and got in a big fight with the mimic-door there, then spent a block of time dealing with the sketchy magic mirror before leaving with some rescuees.

The second time around a slightly different team went in and went room by room trying to figure out what the problem was. They eventually made their way downstairs, took out the artifact that was malfunctioning to spawn all the monsters and installed the wizards apprentice as the new master of the place before leaving with armfuls of loot.

This is the most complex of the dungeons because there are lots of moving parts - more punchy random monsters, large uncertainty over if/where the wizard is found - and the fact that many of the monsters are sentient and randomly summoned from all sorts of places means they may not be hostile or from this world. I had fun having a dwarf be a warhammer old world dwarf, a white ape be a Barsoomian, etc.

From the inside and outside of a dust cover, let's say two and a half pages of A4, I got two solid sessions, great gaming.

I got great use out of those dungeons - while one could make arguments about room for improvements in any of them which other reviews have done, I think the combination of having a bunch of them in a compact format was very useful indeed when running that open format hexcrawl. The players could roam where they willed and I had kick-ass dungeons at my finger-tips whenever I needed them.

In full transparency I must admit this was not the *most* weight efficient way possible to carry those around since Knock #1 is a chunky book but given the minimal effort involved in pulling it off the shelf and slinging it in my go-bag, I could commit the calories to lug it around.