Feature: Death and Re-entry: Keeping Momentum When PCs Die

If you run games in the OSR style games, you know that lethality is a part of the system. Combat is dangerous, traps can be save or die, and characters have smaller HP pools relative to their modern counterparts.

When a character dies, it creates interesting narrative stakes. But it also creates a practical problem for the Game Master that is running the game:

How do you re-introduce the player back into the session with a new character without breaking the immersion of gameplay?

I don’t want a player sitting on the sideline for a lengthy period of time while the rest of the group is doing some cautious exploration of the dungeon. On the other hand, having a new Level 1 character suddenly appear deep inside a megadungeon can be a bit immersion breaking.

To handle this, here are a few different methods you can use to get players back in the action after a lethal event within your campaign.

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Character Retainers & Rosters

The best way to handle PC death is to prepare for it before it happens. In a lethal sandbox, player agency relies on having a backup plan or two.

• Hirelings and Retainers: Encourage players to hire men-at-arms, torchbearers, or other specialists in town. If a primary character dies, the player can immediately step into the shoes of one of the retainers. The retainer is promoted to a full PC, inherits the party’s immediate goals, and the action continues without any slowing in the pace of play.

• Character Rosters: In a sandbox campaign, you can allow your players to have more than a single character. In other words, they should manage a roster. If each player has a secondary character hanging around at the base camp, replacing a dead PC becomes cleaner with an elegant solution for why they are engaged with the party in the first place.

Dropping New PCs into the Dungeon

When a replacement character has to be introduced mid-dungeon, you need quick, and efficient excuse for why they’d be in the dungeon. In these instances, its important to focus on why they are in the dungeon right now. The table below offers a couple of example tropes that you could use to introduce new PCs quickly.

The key to all of these tropes is instant utility. The new characters bring immediate value to the party, offering the group an in-game reason to accept them right away into their ranks.

Pacing over Plausibility

As game masters, we tend to care more about internal consistency than our players do. Its easy to overthink how a level 1 thief managed to wander into room 14 of the Sunken Citadel completely unharmed. But I’d argue that pacing in your game is much more important than airtight logic almost every time.

Your player wants to play the game. The rest of the party wants their friend back at the table far more than they care about a perfect explanation for how they got there. It is completely fine to use some hand-waving to introduce the character back into the action quickly:

“You hear a groaning behind the wooden door. You break it down and find a dungeon crawler who got separated from their group two days ago.”

Don’t overthink it. State the premise, hand the player their character sheet, and keep moving.

Final Thoughts

In OSR sandbox design, death is what gives life to the world. It proves that choices have real consequences and that victory is earned. To me, stakes are what matter when running these types of games. But death should never feel like a punishment that excludes a player from the game night.

Utilize retainers as next-up PCs, encourage your players to have a roster of characters they can rely on, keep a few quick introduction hooks and focus on getting the players back in the action quickly. If you can incorporate one or more of those elements into your game mastering, you’ll turn lethal events into a memorable event and momentary blip rather than a disappointing night for a sidelined player.

Articles

• Robert Conley discusses The Living World Sandbox Campaign

• d4 Caltrops published the latest d100 list: How do Those Wizards Know Each Other?

• Monsters and Manuals: On the Hidden Creative Power of Monster Organization Manipulation

Sales

DriveThruRPG is having their Christmas in July Sale. These last couple of days are your chance to get some great deals! Browse the OSR Sale Section Here or Check out some of my favorites below:

Game Systems

• Pirate Borg is 75% Off

• Old School Essentials Player’s Tome and Referee’s Tome

• World’s Without Number Deluxe Version

• Dolmenwood Books: Campaign Book, Monster Book, Player’s Book

Knave 2e

Adventure Modules

• Winter’s Daughter

• Hole in the Oak

• The Incandescent Grottoes

• The Waking of Willowby Hall

• The Halls of Arden Vul

• The Black Wyrm of Brandonsford

• The Evils of Illmire

GM Toolkits

• Mythic Game Master Emulator

• Tome of Worldbuilding

• Tome of Adventure Design

• The Nomicon

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Videos

Ben At Questing Beast reviews the latest addition to The Dark of Hot Springs Island setting: Shipwrecked in The Swordfish Islands.

BECMI Berserker discusses how Strongholds are handled in BECMI D&D:

I talk about how to make compelling Player Characters for Sandbox style Campaigns:

Beyond the dice: Artifacts and Tactility at the Gaming Table

When we think about TTRPG gameplay, our minds usually fly to the standard polyhedral dice. The clickety-clack of a d20 rolling for a high-stakes saving throw check, or a handful of d6s determining fireball damage. Dice are great for raw mathematical probability and they are undoubtedly a staple of the vast majority of TTRPGs. But as Game Masters, we sometimes limit ourselves by relying solely on the math rocks to drive our sessions.

If you want to change things up at your gaming table, it’s time to look beyond the dice bag. I recommend bringing other gaming supplies to the table, things like: playing cards, Tarot decks, poker chips, and even other board games. These all can fundamentally change how both you and your players interact with the game.

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The GM’s Sandbox: Dynamic Tracking and Narrative Weight

From behind the screen, switching a standard rolling table (with dice) for a deck of cards introduces mechanics that dice simply cannot replicate: memory and depletion.

When you roll a d20 on a rumor table, you can roll the same result twice. But when you draw the Jack of Spades from a deck, that rumor is gone from the world. The deck remembers (until you reshuffle of course). If you integrate the use of a deck of cards across multiple different avenues (random encounter rolls, reaction rolls, random NPC generation, weather tables, etc.) then you can really start to turn through your card deck in a single gaming session. That helps increase the importance of that memory and depletion aspect of using a tool like a deck of cards vs. standard dice.

In my first publication Fated (see announcement below!) I used a Tarot Card deck to design a series of tables that help a game master create interesting NPCs and dynamic situations for Random Encounters. By utilizing the aspects of memory and depletion this lets the game master come up with interesting and unique characters and encounters each time. Beyond that, I utilize the meanings behind the different tarot cards (as if they were being used for an actual Tarot card reading) to help stylize the different entries on the different tables.

The Player’s Screen: Tactility and Agency

For players, physical artifacts shift the psychological energy at the table. In RPGs, resources are scarce and choices can be lethal. Giving players something physical to hold makes those choices feel heavier. Yes, the tactility does readily rely on an in-person gaming table where the physical assets could be shared. But you can encourage your online players to find some poker chips or have a deck of cards at the ready so they can draw too.

Consider trading paper tracking for physical tokens:

• Poker Chips: Use them to track abstract, shifting resources. Give players a red chip for “Torches” or gold chips for “Slots of Light Equipment.” Handing a physical chip back to the GM when a torch burns out makes the resource drain visceral.

• Tokens: You can offer tokens to players that may grant some determined boon. This could represent a re-roll or a tactical asset. Seeing that token sitting on their character sheet is a constant, tactile reminder of their options when an encounter goes completely sideways. This is similar to 5e’s idea of inspiration, but your boon needing be a roll with advantage, it could be whatever you desire.

• Card Decks: Similar to the use for a game master, the players could have a deck of cards to draw from too. There is something fun about having the party draw cards that will determine their own fate. The suspense that hangs in the air when they don’t know if a certain result is advantageous or disastrous.

A Game within a Game

For a truly distinct shift in gameplay, consider integrating entire standalone board games to resolve high-stakes in-game events. Instead of relying on a series of abstract skill checks, you might challenge a player to a real-time game of Chess to simulate a tense battle of wits with a calculating vampire lord. Similarly, a quick session of a streamlined war game can organically determine the outcome of a massive military conflict.

However, this approach comes with a caveat: it is usually best reserved for smaller, tight-knit groups (possibly even 1-on-1 gameplay). These sub games can take some time to resolve, so your players may not enjoy sitting around for it if they are not actively involved in the resolution. Alternatively, you can play the sub-game outside standard session time so people aren’t bored waiting for it to be over (but generally this means ending your gaming session at that point).

Additionally, introducing board games fundamentally shifts the mechanics from character skill to player skill. Your level 1 wizard is no longer rolling a d20 to outsmart the enemy; you are the one who needs to find the checkmate. For groups who love games and tactical agency, stepping out of the standard rules to play a secondary game within a game creates an unforgettable centerpiece for a campaign.

Designing Your Own Artifacts

You don’t need to overcomplicate this to start. Pick one element of your current sandbox: weather, monster reaction checks, or local rumors and tie it to a standard 52-card deck or a bag of colored tokens. Notice how the physical interaction changes the focus around the table.

Dice are perfect for determining success or failure, but other gaming artifacts can be great at building atmosphere, tracking tension, and sparking immediate narrative creativity.

Earthmote Announcement:

I’m excited to announce the arrival of Earthmote’s first publication! Fated, A Tarot Deck Generator for NPC & Encounter Design is a game master toolkit designed to help you make interesting NPCs and unique random encounter scenarios for your fantasy tabletop role-playing games by using a tarot card deck instead of traditional dice. The product also works with the Zocchi Dice.

This supplement includes 6 random tables for designing NPC characters and 6 random tables to establish dynamic scenarios for random encounters. The tables entries are designed to approximate the meanings behind the actual tarot cards.

NPC Tables:

• Roles

• Wants & Desires

• Character Flaws

• Disposition

• Secrets

Encounter Designing Tables:

• Relationships

• Hooks

• Actions

• Subjects

• Inverted Actions

• Inverted Subjects

Fated, is a system neutral toolkit compatible with all Fantasy Tabletop Role-playing Games.

Check out Fated on DriveThruRPG!

For a deep dive on the product, check out the walkthrough video:

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Videos

Daniel at Bandit’s Keep: What the Heck is a Sandbox Anyway:

BECMI Berserker discusses Exploration in D&D and how its done in BECMI:

I continue my video series on building out a Minimum Viable Setting, in this video I discuss how to establish content zones for your Dungeon:

The Value of Nothing: Why Your Dungeon Needs Empty Rooms

For a long time, I looked at a dungeon map like it was something to be filled to the brim with action and adventure. I wanted my dungeons to be dense, like how I try to populate most of my hexes with one or more points of interest for the party to check out. But it took my a while to realize that was an oversight in my dungeon design. I felt that if a room didn’t contain a dangerous trap, an enigma to solve or a ravenous monster then I wasn’t being efficient in my dungeon design.

I thought that empty space was wasted space. I was wrong.

Over time, through running hex-crawls and megadungeons, I’ve realized that a dungeon where every door hides a “feature” isn’t a lived-in space; it’s a theme park ride. To create a truly immersive, living world, you need the negative space. You need the empty rooms.

The Tactical Respite

In the OSR tradition, resource management is the heart of the game. Torchlight is fading, the fighter is down to 4 HP, and the spells are spent. In a “high-octane” modern dungeon where every room is an encounter, the party has nowhere to breathe.

Empty rooms provide a place of brief respite. They are the staging grounds where players can finally spike a door shut, consult their map, and argue about whether to press on or retreat back to the nearby village for rest and recovery.

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Pacing in the Dungeon

If every room in your dungeon is a high on the intensity scale, then it tends to lose its effect quickly. The players eventually go numb because they are used to the chaos. Constant combat or high-stakes social interaction leads to burnout. By incorporating empty spaces, you create a change of pace.

These rooms act as the connective tissue of your dungeon. They allow the high danger points such as an intricate trap or a monster’s lair to stand out. Without the silence of an empty corridor, the roar of a dragon doesn’t sound nearly as loud. It provides the players with a cadence in the dungeon, not unlike how the waves of the ocean ebb and flow.

Architecture of Mystery

There is nothing more unsettling than a quiet room in a dangerous place. When a party spends three rooms fighting for their lives and then opens a door to find... nothing but dust and a cracked stone bench... the suspense increases.

• Why is this room empty?

• Did something clean it out?

• Are we being watched?

Empty rooms allow the thematic elements of the dungeon to speak. You can describe the peeling frescoes, the smell of damp earth, or the way the wind whistles through a masonry crack. These details build an atmosphere of mystery and exploration that combat often obscures.

How Much Vacancy is Right?

So, how do we balance the action and the intrigue with the “empty”? We don’t have to guess. We can look to D&D and OSR game designers for benchmarks. Looking at Worlds Without Number, we see Kevin Crawford recommends 2 in 8 (25%) of your rooms be empty. Where as Basic/Expert Dungeons and Dragons suggests 2 in 6 (33%) be empty.

So, roughly 25-33% of your rooms. This might feel high if you are coming from a modern design background, but in a 30-room dungeon level, having 10 empty rooms provides the necessary “lung capacity” for the dungeon to function as a strategic environment rather than just a gauntlet of challenges.

Expanding the Definition of “Empty”

An empty room shouldn’t be a “dead” room. To make these spaces work for your dungeon design, consider these three types of “Active Emptiness”:

1. Environmental Storytelling: A room with no monsters but a shattered shield and a trail of dried blood tells a story.

2. Strategic Terrain: A room with a deep pit or a crumbling balcony is “empty,” but it changes how a later combat in that room might play out if the party is chased back into it or tries to lure a monster here.

3. Dungeon Dressing Room: A room that contains a mundane object: a heavy rug, an old desk, a pile of bones. This isn’t a treasure or a monster, but prompts the players to interact with the world. (Raging Swan Press has tons of resources on to offer Dungeon Dressing)

Articles

• Knight at the Opera discusses How to Talk About Difficulty

• d4Caltrops shares d100 Magic Bracers & Bracelets

• WF Smith at Prismatic Wasteland: Play is Canon and Chain Stocking the Hex Map

• Over on the Alexandrian, Justin discusses Small Hexcrawls

• Some of my favorite maps from Dyson Logos this month are:

  • The Caves of Still Grotto makes for a fun sea cave adventure.

  • And of course, an earthmote map(s) gets a stamp of approval from Earthmote! (Doran’s Skyrealm, Doran’s Skyrealm - Keep, Doran’s Skyrealm - Understructures)

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Videos

Daniel at Bandit’s Keep discusses alignment:

Ben at Questing Beast hosts a discussion on how Old-School D&D is changing modern campaigns:

BECMI Berserker discusses the Undead in BECMI D&D:

Over on the Earthmote, I’ve continued my series where I am working on a Minimum Viable Setting, such as this episode where I work on NPC design:

Feature: Iterative Design in Sandboxes

In my latest videos I have been discussing the idea of the minimum viable sandbox. It is essentially a baseline set up that can help you get up-and-running on a new sandbox game as quickly as possible (you can check out my video on it if you haven’t already seen it). In this particular instance, I’ve decided to go beyond the theory talk and actually design a working example and upload the progress onto my YouTube channel. Its been a pretty interesting experiment and its a fun creative process.

One thing that I’d like to discuss today is something that probably doesn’t come across as cleanly in the video where I layout the minimum viable sandbox: the actual design process. It is easy enough for me to say do A then B then C. But in reality, creative design doesn’t usually work in a linear fashion. And it definitely doesn’t work that way if you want to have a cohesive and integrated sandbox for your players to interact with.

In my case, I started working on the hex map. The geography was pretty easy to place as that didn’t require to much external input into the process. But then came the primary points of interest. I got a general sense down on what they might be, but at some point I realized I couldn’t complete them until I had an idea on who my factions are and what my factions might be up to. So I outlined my factions before I could go back an work on my points of interest. But then you realize if you want to connect one location to another you’ll probably need to stop working on that location and start building out the other. So its a process of back and forth.

If your new to designing your own campaign that can feel daunting, if you don’t have some sort of system in place to help guide you and to inform you on when you need to jump from one point in your design process to another (and then back again in an iterative fashion). So, with the rest of this article, I’d like to provide some tips that I use in my own campaign design process.

1. The “Placeholder” Protocol

When you first start designing the details of your world, you will need to use a lot of placeholders. Placeholders essentially are giving you the permission to say “Something belongs here, but I’m just not certain yet what that might be”. Or you don’t have the energy to stop your current design to start that new design just to finish that thought. I’ve found that if I try to jump from one idea to the next just to complete that one sentence/note in my design its going to lead to burnout, writers block or confusion (possibly more than one). It’s not worth it to disrupt your flow just for the sake of completion. You’ll need to iterate your design anyways, so let the placeholder just be your first draft and go from there. Placeholders also give you the nice added bonus of a clear “to do” list to make sure your prep is table-ready.

2. The 20% Rule (The “Good Enough” Threshold)

Tip #2 is closely related to tip #1. Iterative design works best when you don’t over-bake any single element in the first pass. I recommend getting an outline of your components (Hexes, Locations, Factions, Rumors, etc.) before you go too deep into anyone single component. This “shallow-wide” approach ensures that when you do go deep on a dungeon, it’s already supported by the surrounding rumors and factions you built in the first pass.

First order of depth: Conflict

Once you are ready to build out deep, I recommend filling out your central conflict between your factions first. The conflict will really help inform you where your factions might be. Why they are at those locations? How are those locations central to the conflict? What rumors are swirling around the conflict? Conflict is key for running a game, and its just as key for designing a compelling one.

3. Cross-Pollinate via Hooks

Every time you create a Location or Point of Interest (POI), force yourself to create one “hook” that leads to a different POI or Faction. This is going to help you build an integrated world, not just a place of stand alone vignettes that feel “random” to the party.

Its okay to have some of your connections be small or obscure. The players feel smart when they pick up on those, probably more so than the connections that are a big red warning sign indicating that the king’s vizier is actually the leader of the demon cult.

4. Use “Bottom-Up” logic for “Top-Down” Geography

Geography is often static and its probably the easiest portion of your campaign to design first with very minimal input from an iterative standpoint. But geography’s relevance is iterative in designing a great sandbox game.

Don’t just place a mountain range because it looks cool. Once you’ve established your mountain range, jump to your Faction list and ask, “Who wants to control the pass through these mountains?” If the answer is “The Goblin King,” jump back to the map and place his lair. Designing the “Who” often informs the “Where” much better than a blank hex map.

Here is a brief, non-exhaustive list of elements that your geography can inform for your campaign: demographics, resources, food, faction strategy, military strategy, economics, architecture and infrastructure.

5. Procedural Prompts as “Connective Tissue”

Sometimes the “back and forth” feels daunting because you don’t know where to jump next. If I’m feeling stuck, this is when I like to use a prompt system. Random tables from many different books offer great resources to help you form these connections (locations, factions, etc.). I’ll include some resources I enjoy below.

But the true value in random tables comes from the fact that you’ll draw connections you otherwise would have never made on your own. We all have our own cognitive processes that are biased to our own views and ways of thinking. This isn’t inherently bad. But when it comes to design work, it can lead us to do a lot of the “same” in our design process, where variety can be the spice of life.

Procedural Resources I like:

Worlds Without Number FREE PDF
Worlds Without Number Deluxe PDF/Print
Tome of Adventure Design
Tome of Worldbuilding
Mythic GM Emulator 2nd Edition
The Nomicon
The Monster Overhaul

Articles

• d4 Caltrops shares some more d100 lists: Some More Specific Concealed or Secret Doors and Variegated Vocabularies for Limited Languages

• Arnold Kemp at Goblin Punch discusses Divine Patronage: A separate system for party advancement

• Monsters and Manuals discusses why D&D is a fantasy western.

• W.F. Smith at Prismatic Wasteland rates every room in White Plume Mountain.

• The Alexandrian give some advice for macro and micro campaign design.

Videos

Daniel at Bandit’s Keep discusses Rulings, Rolls and Common Sense:

Chris McDowall reads through Intergalatic Bastionland Playtest (lengthy video):

Over on the Earthmote, I’ve been discussing the Minimum Viable Setting and The Starter Dungeon:

This month’s newsletter has a blog on Running a Living Map. A round-up of latest OSR-style news, blogs articles and videos from other creators.

Feature: How to Run a Living Map

Turning geography into a dynamic engine for sandbox play.

A sandbox campaign isn’t defined by an established narrative plot by the game master. It’s defined by space. The map is the backbone of the experience: a network of locations, dangers, clues, factions, routes, and unknowns that the players can freely move through. But to make a map feel alive, it needs to be more than an illustration. It needs to be a system that changes and evolves as the campaign unfolds.

A living map gives players meaningful choices. Which road is safer but slower? Which region is heating up with tension? What areas have they neglected long enough that trouble has begun to boil over unchecked? When the map is active, exploration becomes strategic. Because opportunities await in all directions. The party’s travel becomes meaningful, and the world gains depth that no scripted storyline could match up against.

Here are three practical ways to turn your campaign map into a living structure that enhances every session.

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1. Treat Each Hex or Region as a Developing Situation

In a living map, locations aren’t static icons. Each one represents an evolving situation. Think of your locations as having something that is happening whether the players are present or not.

That forest hex isn’t just “a forest.” It’s where a druid circle conducts seasonal rites. It’s where loggers are clearing too aggressively, causing tension with local spirits or treants.

It can be helpful to think about giving each region one or more of the following:

• A current status (What is happening right now?)

• A rising pressure (What might happen soon?)

• A point of change (What shifts if no one intervenes?)

This doesn’t require complex notes. A single sentence per region is often enough. What matters is momentum.

When players return to an area after weeks of in-game time, let things be different. Maybe the loggers have gone missing. Maybe the druid circle has called for aid after the theft of a sacred relic.

If your map never changes, players stop caring about where they go. They interact with it less, because its just the space between Point A and Point B. But if it does change, then exploration becomes a dialogue between the party and the world.

2. Use Travel to Reveal Shifts in the World

Travel is where a living map becomes visible. Every journey is an opportunity to show players that time is passing, choices matter, and forces are at work.

As players move across the wilderness, show them signs of change:

• New roads under construction

• Patrols from an expanding faction

• Abandoned camps

• Migrating monsters

• Weather damage or seasonal transformations

I think its useful to note that these details don’t derail the journey (in most cases). But they provide the players with information that they can use to their advantage. They’re reminders that the world isn’t static wallpaper. Players should feel like scouts or wanderers, piecing together the state of things by what they observe.

You can also use travel to foreshadow future dangers or opportunities. If they see smoke rising in the mountains, that’s not an encounter. But it is a clue about something that lies out there. If caravans avoid a particular trail, there’s a reason. If locals speak of rumors tied to another region, the map itself is inviting exploration.

If you focus your party’s travel as an opportunity for discovery. Then that discovery becomes agency for the player to take further actions in your world.

3. Let Player Actions Redraw the Map (Literally or Figuratively)

A living map doesn’t just change on its own. It changes because of the players and other key factions in the world.

If the party clears a bandit camp, that hex becomes safer. If they disrupt a cult, a region’s tension eases. If they anger a faction, the area becomes more dangerous. Clearing a ruin may reopen an ancient road. Failing to stop a necromancer might plunge a valley into undead hauntings.

Some changes are visible on the map itself:

• A bridge is repaired

• A fortress falls

• A flood alters the river

Others are political rather than geographic:

• Borders shift

• Trade routes change

• Factions gain or lose influence

• Settlements grow or decline

When the players see the map responding to them, they feel ownership of the world. Their choices, victories, and mistakes leave marks — literally reshaping the campaign’s geography.

Importantly, the map should change at different speeds. Some shifts happen fast (a monster moves in). Others slow (a new village forms). This variety creates a world that feels organic rather than scripted.

Closing Thoughts

A living map is the heart of a sandbox campaign. It turns geography and travel into a part of the organic story that is so potent in sandbox gameplay. When regions evolve, journeys reveal change, and the party’s actions reshape the land. The world becomes more than a setting. It becomes a dynamic and mutable component of your game.

You don’t need complex systems. You just need forward motion, visible consequences, and the willingness to let space matter. Build a map players can learn, revisit, and influence, and your campaign will grow richer with every session.

Articles

• Sean McCoy: Talking To The Dungeon

• Monsters and Manuals: On Notekeeping and Three Principles for the Post-Apocalypse

• The Alexandrian: Is Node-Based Design Prepping a Plot?

• Dyson shared some fun maps this month: Grey Maw Cave would work well as a quick cave delve and Sparrow’s Tower is a small yet multi-level ruin to explore.

News

• Chris McDowall announced the public playtest of Intergalactic Bastionland! Check it out today.

Subscribe now

Videos

Daniel at Bandit’s Keep gives advice on how to Make the Journey the Adventure:

BECMI Berserker discusses the Golden Age of Dungeons and Dragons:

Ben at Questing Beast reviews Mythic Bastionland by Chris McDowall

I discuss Telegraphing Danger in your Game:

Feature: Factions and Timelines

I like my sandbox campaigns to have dynamic movement to them. Its true that your players are acting and changing the world. But you should also have motion in your sandbox from the other key players. The slow churn of ambitions, agendas and rivalries that are happening elsewhere and in the background (when the players are not actively engaging with them). Factions are what help give you setting that direction and life. The dynamic movement. In order to generate that for our games, we need to give our factions timelines to set up their momentum in the sandbox.

In a linear game, the world feels like it waits for the players to interact with it. A well designed sandbox is the opposite. When factions are operating on their own schedules and their plans advance forward the sandbox gains a weight to it. It starts to feel like a place where the player’s choices matter, the stakes are real, and the player’s actions reverberate through the setting.

So how do we build this into our own games? We need to make sure we are giving our factions these timelines. That will keep things on track until outside forces intervene (the party, or other opposing factions). Let’s go ahead and discuss three approaches for using factions and timelines to keep your campaign in dynamic motion.

1. Give Every Faction a Goal, a Method, and a Clock

A faction doesn’t need a detailed manifesto to feel real. It just needs three things:

1. A clear goal.

   What do they ultimately want? Expand territory? Recover a relic? Manipulate a ruler? Even a monster faction can have simple, animalistic goals: find food, protect territory, multiply.

   The goal sets the direction for your faction. It gives them their purpose and it helps you as the game master get a sense of how that faction will behave in gameplay. This is useful, because you can rely on their purpose and behavior to run your game in a consistent and interesting manner.

2. A recognizable method.

   How do they pursue their aim? Assassinations? Ritual magic? Diplomacy? Bribery? Organized raids? This helps you improvise consistent behavior when the players cross paths with them.

   As mentioned above, their behavior will be informed by their goal and how they operate as a faction. Two factions can have very similar goals, but their methods on how they would go about achieve that goal can vary greatly. The variety in method and the conflict between factions goals will inform a lot about how those factions playout through your sandbox timeline.

3. A clock.

   If no one interferes with the Faction’s plans, they will end up achieve their goal at some point. Setting the clock is what helps you determine when those plans and events move forward within your game. The clock doesn’t have to be rigid or mechanical. You could think of it more like a pressure gauge. As time passes, the faction moves closer to its objective and the sandbox is altered accordingly.

This simple three part structure keeps factions from feeling static while giving the game master a natural set of guidelines to follow for emergent storytelling with the respective factions and the passage of time.

2. Let Factions React to Player Choices

While its important to build out your faction’s timelines, its important to remember they are not immutable. They are more like a living document. When the party takes actions (or fails to) your factions should respond in ways that feel logical and grounded. This is were you can refer back to their goals and their methods of achieving them if you need a reference.

If the party disrupts a cult’s ritual, the cult may accelerate their timeline out of desperation. If the players steal a relic from a bandit gang, the gang might divert resources toward revenge instead of expansion. Destroy one faction, and two others may fight over the resulting power vacuum.

The important this is that your factions behave with their own priorities in mind. They aren’t a set piece waiting for adventures to arrive. They are actively pursuing goals. And should their plans be disrupted, they will try and find ways to adapt around those obstacles they have encountered. Just like the party would when they face their own challenges.

3. Use Timelines to Create Consequences

The timelines we set for our factions are not a railroad. There is no true linear way for them to achieve their goals. The timeline faces changing conditions, threats shift as things develop and new opportunities evolve from the actions of all involved agents.

When factions advance their agendas over time, the players will begin to feel the organic consequences. A faction secures a valuable resource. A rival collapses under internal pressure. A minor noble becomes a major tyrannical threat because no one stopped him early on. These changes to the world are not punishments. They are natural outcomes of the letting the sandbox world develop overtime.

Timelines also create urgency without you having to force it. If the players hear that the Crimson Star Mercenary Company is planning marching on the old fortress within the month, they suddenly have a reason to move quickly. If they learn that a a diplomatic summit will be held in six weeks, they naturally begin planning around it.

Sometimes the players set the pace and the world responds. Other times the world plays out events and its the players that need to respond. Either way, if you are playing events out to their natural consequences and are conveying that information to the party, they will have a sense of urgency to act, before your timelines expire.

Closing Thoughts

Factions are a key element of a sandbox campaign. But without timelines to achieve their agendas, the world will still feel static. Timelines give shape to the world. They propel events forward and ensure that even when the players are busy elsewhere, things keep happening around them. When factions act with purpose (and on timelines) the setting becomes more than a backdrop. It becomes the engine of a living story.

Introduce some factions with goals and clear clocks, and you’ll discover that most of your “plot” emerges naturally. The players will move through the world with curiosity and caution, knowing that time matters and the world remembers.

Articles

• Ktrey at d4 Caltrops shared more d100 lists: Lair Locations, Heavenly Hallmarks, Magical Belts, and Absent Adventurers.

• Skerples at Coins and Scrolls discusses Room Stocking and Treasure for Dungeons.

• David McGrogan shares the State of the Yoonian for 2025 and his Best Books for 2025.

• Murkdice share 12 NPC archetypes you can use to craft your own NPCs.

• Robert Conley discusses Practice First: An Approach to Campaign and RPG Design.

• Ben Lawrence shares his methods for writing up wander monsters: Monster Presentation.

• W.F. Smith discusses tracking time with The Clocktower over at Prismatic Wasteland.

• Joel Hines discusses the virtues of the d12 for encounters (and other rolls).

• Chance Dudinack shares some Questions about Wizards.

• Justin Alexander talks about how to share Headlines at an Open Table Campaign.

Videos

Daniel at Bandit’s Keep discusses improvising adventure locations:

And Procedural Adventure Design:

Ben at Questing Beast reviews the masterpiece that is Dolmenwood:

BECMI Berserker discusses the importance (and loss) of Common People in Modern Worldbuilding:

I discuss how to Improvise in Sandbox campaigns:

And designing Power Vacuums as a sandbox campaign set up:

Feature: Embracing Downtime and Player-Driven Pacing

How to make time and consequences feel real in open-world campaigns.

When running a sandbox campaign, time is one of your most valuable tools. Linear adventures tend to have things lined (heh) up nicely for the players to run into them at the correct time. That doesn’t happen in a sandbox. The sandbox world should move whether the players are engaging with a particular space or not. But for a part to grow, downtime, travel, rest, research, crafting and carousing in taverns are all activities that take time but pay dividends for the party. Some people believe these elements are a bit unglamorous. A bit boring. But I think they are a space where a sandbox campaign’s sense of reality can take root and have time the time required to develop.

Many GMs fear downtime because it feels “slow,” or because they worry players won’t know what to do with open-ended time. But in old-school and sandbox-style campaigns, downtime is the engine of player agency. It lets players choose their priorities, shape the pace of the campaign, and feel the consequences of their actions. To “let the world breathe” is to allow time to pass meaningfully, with all the rippling consequences that follow.

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1. The Campaign Calendar

A visible, consistent campaign calendar grounds your world. As a game master I think its important to track time openly. Know the number of travel days. Track the weeks of rest. Note when the seasons changing, and festivals come and go. The more concrete time feels, the more invested players become.

If the magic-user wants to copy a spell, tell them it takes a week. If the fighter is recovering from poison, that might be several days of bed rest. Travel in sandbox games (mainly hexcrawls, but the pointcrawls too) is not a cutscene montage. I think it’s part of the world’s cadence, and it requires thoughtful decisions by the party as they navigate the map.

A calendar also enforces that natural pacing. While the players spend a month training or recuperating, factions move forward with their plans. The southern tribes unite. A noble house declares a feud. A forgotten dungeon is cleared by rival adventurers. These changes don’t take place to punish your party. But they are there to remind them that the sandbox has flow and movement to it that operates like a current at sea.

Downtime becomes meaningful when it comes with both opportunity and cost. Choosing how to spend time is choosing what matters to your party’s gameplay.

2. Player-Initiated Time Jumps

Player-driven pacing means the party decides when to push forward and when to pull back. Encourage players to declare goals for downtime: researching a legend, training hirelings, seeking rumors, crafting items, establishing a domain and so on.

As a game master I’m not there to assign tasks. But its important to know what the party’s plans are: “Tell me how your character spends the next week.” This turns downtime from filler into an engine that provides output and rewards for the active party. It can also help inform their own character goals for the campaign. Maybe the fighter is training recruits to build up a mercenary force. Or the cleric is establishing a temple and services for the commoner to make in-roads for their faith in the area.

When players control the pace, they begin thinking strategically about time as a resource. Do they delve deeper into the megadungeon now, risking exhaustion, or retreat to town and let other adventurers/factions advance? Do they take three weeks to scribe magic scrolls as the perfect tool for their next expedition, knowing that the world won’t sit still while they prepare? These are choices the party has. Letting them decide when to “pause” the action to pursue some of these different goals lets them take ownership of the campaign’s flow and the consequences from the passage of time.

3. Organic Consequences

In a sandbox, most of your events are not going to “trigger” when the players show up. They should have their own pacing and time required associated with them. These are things that take time and resources by the necessary groups (factions) trying to undertake them. If the party shows up and interacts with their plans, they will need to adapt and evolve (assuming anyone is left in the party’s wake to do so).

Downtime and time passage give you room to develop these changes and trigger these events. If the players abandon a dungeon for two months, new monsters might move in. If they leave a warlord unchecked, his influence grows. And If they remove a threat, the resulting power vacuum might cause chaos and turmoil in the region as factions scramble to seize the opportunity and fill the void. Not every change must be dramatic and have such a large effect on the game world. Some can be more subtle if you’d like: new trade routes, price inflation on certain goods, the inn undergoes renovations and repairs for the party’s brawl.

The point isn’t to punish party for inaction, but to show that doing nothing still counts as a choice. I’d argue its not really inaction anyway, since they are making alternative choices with their downtime. Ultimately, this leaves the players with a world that feels reactive, not static. They will quickly learn that their decisions matter.

Holiday Sales

Rule Sets

• Necrotic Gnome has a big OSE Sale:

  • Advanced Fantasy Player’s Tome

  • Advanced Fantasy Referee’s Tome

  • Carcass Crawler:

    • Issue 1

    • Issue 2

    • Issue 3

    • Issue 4

    • Issue 5

• And a big Dolmenwood Sale:

  • Campaign Book

  • Player’s Book

  • Monster Book

  • Maps Book

• Kevin Crawford’s invaluable games and resource toolkits:

  • Worlds Without Number

  • The Atlas of the Latter Earth

  • Ashes Without Number

  • Cities Without Number

• Knave 2e

• Tales of Argosa

• Into the Odd

Toolkits

• Checkout Mythmere Game’s toolkits:

  • Tome of Adventure Design

  • Tome of Worldbuilding

  • The Nomicon

• The Sandbox Generator

  • Sandbox Generator expansions bundle

Settings

• The Halls of Arden Vul Complete

• Gods of the Forbidden North: Vol 1

• Gods of the Forbidden North: Vol 2

• The Valley of Flowers

• The Evils of Illmire

• The Shrike

Modules

• Wyvern Songs

• The Black Wyrm of Brandonsford

• The Waking of Willowby Hall

• Old School Essentials:

  • Adventure Anthology 1

  • Adventure Anthology 2

• Dolmenwood:

  • The Ruined Abbey of St. Clewyd

  • Winter’s Daughter

  • Emelda’s Song

  • The Fungus That Came to Blackeswell

• Gelatinous Cubism Modules:

  • In the Shadow of Tower Silveraxe

  • Through the Valley of the Manticore

  • The Scourge of the Northland

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Articles

• Chris McDowall at Bationland discusses his creative process in designing games.

• Skerples shares their thoughts on running OD&D and the Appendix N-1 inspiration for it.

• Dyson Logos shared some fun Hex Maps: The Serpent Lands (Map 1, Map 2), and the Font of Violet Flames and the Mycocrypt Museum make for fun short Point of Interest maps.

• David McGrogan at Monsters and Manuals trawls Wikipedia for Campaign Ideas.

Videos

Daniel at Bandit’s Keep discusses Choice and Linearity in running games:

Check out my video on the psychology of the dungeon!

Ben at Questing Beast reviews the 2nd edition of Yoon-Suin’s setting book.

Using ancient sites to convey tone, mystery, and consequences.

Ruins are some of the most evocative locations a Game Master can place in their world. They are of course, they adventure sites where a lot of your game will take place. But they are also physical scars: reminders of what came before, what was lost, and what might still linger. Whether it’s the shattered walls of a once-mighty fortress, or the moss covered steps of a forgotten temple, ruins give your setting a sense of age, consequence, and mystery.

But in sandbox campaigns your ruins aren’t just places for treasure and monsters. They’re storytelling engines. They tell players that the world has a past and the ruins invite them to interact with that history in the present.

1. The Weight of the Past

A good ruin should make the players feel time. The eroded murals, the collapsed corridors all of it harkens to something that once was. When designing my ruins, I like to think of what the site was before it became a ruin.

Was it a holy temple where sacrifices were made to a forgotten god? A border fortress that fell in a single night? These details don’t need full exposition. A few physical clues can do the heavy lifting. A cracked statue clutching a rusted sword or a mural depicting kneeling figures.

Let the players discover the past through exploration and deduction. Give them fragments: inscriptions, graffiti, relics, and even the ways creatures have repurposed the place. The more they piece together on their own, the more invested they will become.

The key is tone. A ruin is rarely just “an old building.” It’s an emotional space: melancholy, haunted, sacred, or even defiant.

2. Echoes and Consequences

Ruins work best when they connect past events to the present. Ask yourself: Who cares about this place now?

Maybe a cult wants to reclaim the old temple for dark rituals. Perhaps a nearby village depends on scavenging materials from the ruin, unaware they’re disturbing ancient wards. Maybe an old warlord’s ghost still guards his tomb, not out of malice but duty.

In a sandbox game, these connections create living consequences. The ruin isn’t static. It’s still influencing people, factions, and the environment around it. A flooded ruin might be poisoning the river downstream. A collapsed dungeon could hide tunnels that smugglers now use. Even the discovery of the ruin by the players might set new events in motion: rival explorers, local superstitions, or divine attention.

By tying a ruin’s history to current tensions, you make it part of an ongoing story rather than a relic of a finished one.

3. The Mystery that Remains

A ruin should never give up all its secrets. Even if the players explore every room and decipher every clue, I think there should be something left unknown. Maybe its a missing piece, an unanswered question, or a shadow of something bigger.

Mystery sustains wonder. It’s what makes players debate what really happened here, and whether they should come back later when they’re stronger or wiser. It can help to leave hints of deeper strata: hidden catacombs, or symbols that predate known history. Maybe the ruin is only one layer of a much older civilization. Maybe something still lies beneath it.

A good ruin doesn’t just reward the players’ curiosity. It feeds it. If you can tie your ruins together across your sandbox, it will help them be interesting in taking their expeditions across your sandbox.

Final Thoughts

Ruins embody one of the most powerful themes in fantasy gaming: that the world is bigger, older, and stranger than the characters can ever fully know. They’re proof that history has weight, that choices have consequences, and that even broken stones can still tell stories.

When you treat ruins not just as backdrops, but as living history, you give your world texture. You remind your players that every victory and every downfall leaves marks that outlast those who made them.

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Sales

Over at DriveThruRPG they have a Halloween Sale going on. Some of my favorites are:

• Ashes Without Number

• Halls of the Blood King

• Hyperborea 3e (Players Manual, Referee’s Manual)

• The Stygian Library

• The Shrike

• Wind Wraith

Articles

• Joel Hines over at Silverarm Press discusses how to Engage Players by Having Them Build Your Setting.

• Justin Alexander talks about Running Background Adventures and Keeping Track of an Open Table.

• Robert Conley answers the question: What is the Point of the OSR?

• As Skerples continues to work on the Treasure Overhaul, he’s shared: Testing Treasure Tables and Treasure Values, and Gem and Jewellery Generation.

• Ktrey at d4Caltrops shares some more d100 tables: Treasure Transformations or Trusty Trade Goods, and Why is This Treasure so Valuable?

Videos

Justin Alexander talks about running a shared campaign world:

Daniel at Bandit’s Keep questions What Rules do we Really Need?

I discuss using a “standstill” scenario to set up conflict and tension for Sandbox Games:

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This month’s newsletter has a blog on designing problems not solutions. A round-up of latest OSR-style news, blogs articles and videos from other creators. And lastly the continuation of my recent reads & listens!

Feature: Problems, Not Solutions

When game masters attempt to devise complex problems/puzzles for their games (adventures, dungeons, and so on) I notice that two things tend to happen. Either the GM is proud of the elaborate set up they have created that is usually accompanied by an exact solution. Or the GM feels hopelessly lost like their puzzles aren’t interesting or they don’t have any good ideas; this is usually because they can’t come up with a corresponding solution.

I think in both cases, this effort is a bit misguided. I’ve read too many stories of frustrating GMs that feel dejected when the party can’t solve their elaborate set up. The solution is so obvious to the creator. To the outside world? Not so much. And on the other side, feeling like you have no good ideas will lead to GM burnout. Which is a shame in its own right.

That is why the philosophy of: design problems, not solutions is such an important one. As a game master, its your job to present the challenges to the players. Its the player’s job to solve them. By keeping that in mind you will free yourself from that burden. It will speed up your prep time and allow you to be more flexible in running your game at the table. All wins in my book.

I’m not the originator of that philosophy, many OSR bloggers and GMs have talked about the idea in the past. But I want to lend my own words to why I think it is important.

Problem Oriented-Mindset

Think of it it this way. Instead of a “locked door problem” with a correct solution, what if we present a “locked door problem” without one?

• Problem + Solution: The players encounter a massive stone door with strange runes on it. To open it, they must arrange a series of three elemental gems in a specific order that you've hidden elsewhere in the dungeon.

• Problem: The players encounter a massive stone door that blocks their path.

The first setup is restrictive. The players need to find your pre-planned solution or they will get nowhere. The second is more of an invitation for creativity. How are they going to deal with the door? Maybe they have a spell (knock, passwall, etc.), maybe they can find a hidden lever, or maybe they can parlay with the ogre in the dungeon to smash it open for them.

Now, this example is not to say don’t ever use keys (or puzzle keys) to locked doors. But rather, its a reminding of how we can set up our challenges to our players. Maybe you want to keep the elemental gem idea, that would be okay to do. But perhaps you also want that hidden lever somewhere nearby? It would be awfully inconvenient for the original dungeon makers to always carry a set of elemental gems just to open a door they constructed.

Liberating your Players (and Yourself)

When you present a problem, you empower your players to be a part of the solution. Their creativity is the engine of the game. Instead of trying to guess what you, the GM, are thinking, they are free to try any plausible idea. To me, this is a really exciting proposition about the game: the world feels real because the solutions aren't handed to you. They are earned through creativity and risk.

Here are a few ways to embrace this mindset as GM:

• Don't pre-plan solutions: When you're designing your dungeon or adventure, just create the problems. There's a chasm, a hungry beast, a powerful curse, a corrupt baron, or a city on the brink of revolt. Stop there. Don't write down "the players must find the Rope of Climbing to cross the chasm" or "the only way to defeat the beast is with the Sword of Slaying." Instead, let your players to surprise you with their own solutions.

• Embrace plausibility: If a player presents a solution that seems even remotely possible within the world's logic, let it work. Does the wizard want to use an illusion to distract the guard? Yes, that makes sense. Do the thieves want to create a diversion by setting fire to a trash heap? Absolutely. Your willingness to say "yes" makes the world feel alive and responsive.

• Obstacles, not outcomes: As a GM, your job is to describe the obstacle vividly. Describe the sheer drop of the chasm, the stench of the beast's lair, or the palpable fear in the city. The more detail you provide about the problem, the more tools your players have to craft a solution.

By focusing on those few ideas, you are able to free your game up. You are no longer responsible for coming up with the challenge and the solution. That can be a really great feeling. It keeps your own creativity flowing and your dungeon/adventure designs will be better for it.

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Articles

• Dwiz over at Knight at the Opera discusses How Do You Handle the “Inside” of a Hex?

• Chris McDowall writes a retrospective on his career (so far).

• Robert Conley discusses his thoughts on Game Balance.

• Luke Gearing shares some simple rules on running Contacts and Favors the party might have.

• W.F. Smith at Prismatic Wasteland discusses how to take two inspirations and combine them to come up with some new ideas for your game.

Recent Reads & Listens

Fiction:

• **CODA (#1 - #12) - Simon Spurrier and Matias Bergara**

  • CODA is a comic that takes place in a fantasy setting, but in a post apocalyptic age. It has a bit of that borderlands video game humor (and post apocalyptic vibes) but set in a wasteland world with elves and orcs.

  • Magic has largely been wiped out. Those that possess it are envied and the targets of bandits and raiders. The story follows a bard and his warrior wife as they try to find their place and their peace in the new world.

  • Rating: 8.5/10

• **CODA: False Dawns (#1 - #5) - Simon Spurrier and Matias Bergara**

  • A sequel to the short run comic CODA. This story follows Hum and his wife Serka as they try to maintain their piece when a cult emerges promising the return of magic to the world.

  • Its a worth follow up to the original comic run maintaining a similar charm and humor set in the weird wastelands of a fantasy setting.

  • Rating: 8/10

Videos

The guys at 3d6 Down the Line are starting a Dolmenwood Campaign. Episode 0 and 1 are available, but future episodes will require a Patreon subscription to watch.

BECMI Berserker does an in depth review of the classic module: B4 The Lost City:

I started my Thematic Terrain series describing some of the common themes that we see show up in different literature, media and history. I focus on terrains that are most commonly used to describe hexes:

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This month’s newsletter has a blog on ideas for conflict generation within your sandbox. A round-up of latest OSR-style news, blogs articles and videos from other creators. And lastly the continuation of my recent reads & listens!

Active Conflict Generators: Turning Seeds into Sparks

In the last rendition of this article series, we talked about the different conflict archetypes that are useful for developing the initial “seeds of strife” within your sandbox. Conflict is what makes the game compelling. And while as a sandbox GM, you are not developing story arcs, I do believe you should be fostering conflict. That shows the party that the world around them is living and reacting to other NPCs and the party’s actions.

Once the groundwork is laid, you need ways to actively generate and escalate conflicts during play. In the remainder of this article I layout a few different ways you can rachet up the tension. This isn’t meant to be an exhaustive list, but just a few that I find useful to turn to and reference when I’m thinking about the next twist or turn my sandbox might take.

Shifting Alliances

Nothing shows development in a sandbox quite like the fact that two forces are working or no longer working together. In both cases, it can spell trouble for the party. As developments unfold in your sandbox think about how they affect the different factions at play. If two factions would have a similar response to a new development, then they might become allies. Likewise if they have opposite reactions, allies could become distant or enemies. Sometimes these are temporary alliances of convenience. These alliances are inherently fragile and can break down, leading to new conflicts.

Information Asymmetry

Not all factions know everything. One faction might believe another is hoarding a resource, even if they aren't. This could lead to preemptive strikes or misunderstandings that escalate. The best way to play this out is to let the party learn the information that one faction lacks. Then demonstrate that faction’s lack of knowledge. What the PCs decide to do from there is up to them.

The PCs as Catalysts

The PCs themselves are often the biggest drivers of conflict. While its good to have forces operating in the background. Its even more important to have forces reacting to what the PCs are doing. That’s going to be the most confrontational problems that the party will have to deal with. And that’s a good thing.

• Unintended Consequences: Every action the PCs take should have ripple effects on the NPC world. If they help one faction, they might inadvertently anger another.

• Rumors and Misinformation: NPCs react to what they hear. If the PCs spread rumors (intentionally or not), or if their actions are misinterpreted, it can spark conflict.

• Resource Depletion: If the PCs clear out a monster lair, what happens to the monsters who relied on that lair for food or shelter? Do they now raid a nearby village, drawing the attention of a local lord?

Random Events & External Pressures

Don't be afraid to introduce unexpected elements. A natural disaster, a new monster emerging from the wilderness, or a plague can put pressure on resources and force factions to make difficult choices, potentially leading to conflict. I personally like to have the event tables and roll for a chance of a random event every so often (1-2 months game calendar time). Essentially like a random encounter check, but on a much grander scale.

Internal Strife

Conflict isn't just between factions; it can be within them. A subordinate might challenge a leader, or different ideologies within a faction might clash, leading to schisms or civil war. I like employing internal strife because it disrupts the player’s expectations of that faction. What they knew about that group may no longer hold true. And of course, infighting leaves opportunity for others while a group is weakened (whether that be the PCs or an NPC faction).

Escalation Timers

I think its important to give conflicts a sense of urgency. If the goblinoids aren't stopped, they'll inevitably launch a larger raids on the countryside. If the guild doesn't get the rare component, their magical ritual will fail, and a rival guild will gain an advantage. These timers push the world forward even without PC intervention. A lot of this ties into the idea of having “fronts” (agendas) for your factions and trying to progress them forward. At set intervals of game time you can make dice rolls to see if the faction progress, stalls or suffers a setback in moving towards obtaining their goal. These timers turn those initial whispers into full scale conflicts if the PCs do nothing about it.

Articles

• Arnold K. at Goblin Punch discusses why you should design A Dungeon of Your Own.

• Over at The Alexandrian, Justin Alexander shares some thoughts on Managing your Prep Load as a GM.

• Ktrey at d4 Caltrops shared a new list: d100 - Side Effects from Bargain Basement Potions.

• Robert Conley at Bat in the Attic discusses Rulings, Not Rules: A Foundation, Not an Oversight.

• Dyson Logos always produces great maps that he shares for free. My favorites this month are The Forgotten Hermitage, would fit in nicely as a point of interest on a hex map. And the Vault of Echoes, a fun little mini dungeon that plays up the element of sound.

Recent Reads & Listens

Fiction:

• Dark Age - Pierce Brown

  • Book five of the Red Rising series takes place after the events of Book Four. I enjoyed this one, it follows several different characters with interesting and overlapping stories. It felt like the conflict was a little more visceral. Like it had been brewing for quite some time. Some major twists and struggles for protagonists as is usually the case in the middle book of a story arc.

  • Rating: 8/10

• The Shadow of the Gods - John Gwynne

  • I needed to scratch my fantasy itch after so many sci-fi books over the last couple of months. The Shadow of the Gods is the first book in a trilogy. Follows three characters that have (mostly) separate paths for the entirety of the first book. Takes place in a dark age of sorts after the gods warred and died off. Some people have a bloodline relation to the different (dead) gods which give them notable powers. These people are feared and hunted, or harnessed and utilized for ambitious purposes.

  • The book is human-centric, but there are several different fantasy monsters (vaesen) that make appearances throughout the story. I found it to be a good story filled with lots of intriguing mystery yet to be explained in the first book.

  • Rating: 9/10

Videos

The guys over at 3d6 Down the Line have started a new campaign in Mothership. They are one of the only actual plays I watch these days. I think they are worth watching if you are interesting in seeing the OSR playstyle (or Mothership gameplay). They also have a completed campaign using OSE on their channel to watch:

Daniel at Bandit’s Keep discusses how to handle travel on the fly:

Ben at Questing Beast shares a nice breakdown of the OSR playstyle:

Aboard the Earthmote, I discuss how to use Hooks and Rumor tables to improve your sandbox game:

This month’s newsletter has a blog on using different conflict archetypes for designing your sandbox games. A round-up of latest OSR-style news, blogs articles and videos from other creators. And lastly the continuation of my recent reads & listens!

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A quick word from our sponsor:

Coming soon to Kickstarter: Mr. Unpronounceable Omnibus! Over 600 pages of surrealistic comics following the downward spiral of an itinerant necromancer. The campaign also includes an all-new OSR adventure, horrifying trading cards, interdimensional band t-shirt, and a signed art print. Published by Agamemnon Press, the creators behind ENnie-nominated The Painted Wastelands.

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Laying the Groundwork: Seeds of Strife

I think one of most critical components of a strong sandbox game is designing interesting characters and factions. Because you aren’t setting any pre-determined path for your party, the factions and NPCs really need to grab their attention. The party needs to wonder what is going on in your sandbox and they’ll want to understand who these key players are.

In order to make compelling factions and NPCs, we need conflict. Underlying discontent and conflict between groups is the game master’s way of stacking kegs of gunpowder next to each other. Then, once you start playing, you hope your players will become the spark that sets it all off (more on this next month). Conflict is key. If you are lacking compelling reasons why groups do what they do, and oppose who they oppose then your game will be left feeling a bit shallow. So, in this article I hope to highlight a few conflict archetypes on how you can lay those seeds of strife within your own sandbox.

Opposing Goals

The simplest is the idea of opposing goals. Two or more groups contest with one another because they want the same thing for their own purposes. But its something that can’t be shared between them. Could be something physical (like valuable farmland) or something intangible (rulership over a kingdom). Either way, its something important enough that it will cause these forces to clash with one another.

The easiest way to implement this in your sandbox is to give each major NPC and faction a clear, understandable goal. Then make sure at least some of those goals are inherently opposed with one another. The Logging Company wants to clear the forest for the valuable wood resources. The tree huggers believe the forest has great religious purpose and consider it sacred grounds. Their goals are slightly different, but both are in contest over the forest.

Scarce Resources

Identify the limited resources in your world. It could be mundane such as land, trade routes, precious stones, or fish. Or it could be magical like a rare flower petal used in potion crafting or the last remaining dragon eggs. Whatever resources are scare will have factions naturally compete for them. Because who ever controls that resource has the ability to exert significant influence on the rest of the world around them. Particularly from those groups that have demand for that controlled resource.

Historical Grudges

You can give factions and NPCs a history of animosity. Maybe there was a betrayal that occurred generations ago. Or perhaps there is a long-standing territorial dispute that has never been resolved. It is entirely possible that the grudging factions no longer remember the original offense.

Grudges tend to be an emotional affair. When it comes to competing for scare resources, there is some practicality to it. If you control X, you are able to wield significant power. But when it comes to grudges, usually the end game is destruction of the other party. It may cost the victor significantly, but they are usually willing to pay that price, even if it doesn’t make any rational sense to do so.

Ideological Differences

Factions might have fundamentally different beliefs about how things should be run. Ideology is usually grounded in some practical view points, at least to start with. But too often, passion and emotions are whipped into a fervor which results in ugly conflict. All sides involved believe they are right. That “right-ness” is often all the justification they need to take drastic measures against their opposition. Ultimately, they are willing to risk significant conflict in order to be the prevailing ideology.

Power Vacuums

If a powerful entity (a king, a dragon, etc.) is removed from the playing field, we are left with a power vacuum. A void that is begging for someone to fill its place. Suddenly, multiple groups will vie for the control once held by the now-gone party. Power vacuums are often used as the starting point in many fantasy novels (see: Game of Thrones, The Blade Itself, Tigana, The Poppy War, The Black Company). But I think they make for excellent beginnings to new sandbox games. The party arrives on the scene just in time for things to start to get intense. As a result they are able to make their own choices how they want to navigate the factions they now vie for control in the void’s wake.

The five archetypes showcase a lot of ways to introduce conflict into your sandbox. You can (and should) use from all of these different conflict archetypes in your own sandbox. Some conflicts will be small. Maybe your sandbox features two warring hermits in the woods with a grudge against one another. Whereas some will be great: the death of a queen resulting in a succession war. But as long as your players can find conflict wherever they go, they’ll always have interesting decisions to make and fun adventures to partake in.

Articles

• Ktrey at d4caltrops put together some more d100 tables: Vignettes for Faeries & Other Unseen Lands, and Alliterative Alehouses & Tavern Traits.

• David at Monsters and Manuals shares his thoughts on real world dungeoneering.

• Murkdice shares a ‘soft’ collaborative worldbuilding method in A Myth of Many Scribes.

• Dyson Logos makes tons of amazing maps and publishes them for free on his blog. My favorites this month: Hexatomb is a nice small tomb site to use for a quick adventuring location. And Depths of the Ashen Throne is a bit larger dungeon that could be used for a couple of dungeon crawling sessions.

News

• While there have been delays in physical release of Dolmenwood, the team decided to release the digital versions. So you can enter the strange world fairy-woods today!

  • Main resources: Player’s Book, Campaign Book, Monster Book, or Bundle them to save some cash.

  • Adventure Modules: Winter’s Daughter, Emelda’s Song, The Fungus that came to Blackeswell, and The Ruined Abbey of St. Clewyd.

  • Other resources: Dolmenwood Maps, Dolmenwood Calendar

• Necrotic Gnome also released the latest issue of Carcass Crawler: Issue #5.

Recent Reads & Listens

• Morning Star - Pierce Brown

  • Book three of the Red Rising series is the final story in the first arc of the series. Darrow tries to recover from the major setbacks in book two and rises to face his main adversary: the Sovereign, the leader of all golds and key architect in preserving the oppressive caste system that keeps golds on top.

  • This book doesn’t have as many twists and turns as the previous two. But there is one major one that I’ll admit I didn’t see coming. Its keeps up the action and pacing that is present in the first two books. I found it to be a satisfying conclusion to the first arc in the Red Rising series.

  • Rating: 7/10

• Iron Gold - Pierce Brown

  • Book four of the Red Rising series takes place 10 years after the events of book 3. I like time jumps in my series because it makes it feel more “believable” to me that universe shattering conflicts don’t unfold in the course of days (or months).

  • Iron gold is the first book that features the point of view of other characters rather than just Darrow. In total, there are four stories going on (that intersect and overlap). I enjoyed that change in perspective and it was interesting to see how the different threads would unwind, even if I felt that some were better than others.

  • Book four bears a similar lack of twists that were forthcoming in Morning Star. Additionally, I felt the pacing was slower than the previous three. It wasn’t boring. Just less action than the first three.

  • Rating: 7/10

Videos

Ben at Questing Beast talks about choice over chance:

Daniel at Bandit’s Keep discusses Large-Scale Consequences in D&D:

Mr. Welch questions Why WoTC has lost the ability to create quality adventures:

Over on the Earthmote, I discuss designing morally ambiguous factions:

Feature: Morale & the Manifestation of Fear

One thing I really enjoy about old-school games is the monster morale score. Its a system that has largely been eschewed in modern systems which generally prefer to be hack-and-slash fests until the last hit point is erased. But you can certainly use them in modern systems without any issue (and I think you should).

When the morale breaks, the monsters decide that the fight is over for them. It is at this point that they go into self preservation mode and try any tactic to live to fight another day. While the most obvious answer is to simply run away, I think its worthwhile to give some consideration to other ways the monsters might try to save themselves.

Begging for Mercy:

If the monsters feel overwhelmed by the party’s might, they might simply chose to grovel. They will throw down their arms and hope the PCs will spare their lives. I like this one because it gives the party a decision: do they show mercy, take a prisoner, or execute the surrendering foe? That choice can have a real impact on the adventuring session (and possibly campaign if the NPC becomes significant enough). Obviously, this is a tactic reserved for creatures with the sentience and ability to ask for forgiveness.

Panic and Self-Preservation:

Instead of a coordinated retreat, a group of creatures might decide to turn on each other. Maybe they blame their leader for the botched ambush. They could break ranks and scatter in different directions (which way to the party pursue?) Or they could even start fighting among themselves creating a whole new set of chaos and unpredictable situation for the PCs. This tactic would be used by individualistic type creatures (bandits, or other cut throats).

Distractions:

When trying to flee, the creature might seek to make a distraction to divert the party’s attention and make their escape easier. In this case, you can think of the carrot and the stick. Under the carrot method, the creature is using an enticing distraction. Maybe the ogre throws down its sack of gold to reduce its encumbrance and increase its odds of escape. While you might think that the party would just chose to pursue and return later for the gold, think about what dangers could lurk for the party if they chose that pursuit.

Under the stick method, the creature might spring a more dastardly distraction on the players. Perhaps they spring a trap on their way out, or maybe they uncage a ravenous beast. Either way, think about an immediate threat that the party has to deal with that affords the creature an escape route.

Obstacles:

Creatures in dire straights are likely to take some risky or ruthless maneuvers to try and save themselves. Maybe the monster knocks over a cart creating an obstacle, or perhaps they partially collapse the tunnel behind them. The are good methods to slow down the party’s pursuit. Lastly, some creatures might even decide to sacrifice one of their own to buy time for their own escape.

Final Thoughts

When thinking about failed creature morale, think about how you can make the current situation more interesting for the game fiction. Some monsters will use different tactics based on their personalities, intelligence, and other innate characteristics. All of these differences make for an interesting game and for some interesting choices for the party in the heat of the moment.

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Articles, Blogs & News

• Dwiz over at A Knight at the Opera reviews initiative methods for your game.

• Chris McDowall talks about running one-shots using the Mythic Bastionland RPG.

• Ktrey at d4 caltrops put out two d100 lists: Hireling Hobbies or PC Pastimes, and Pecuniary Problems, Awful Arrears, & Delinquent Debts

• Dyson Logos makes tons of amazing maps and publishes them for free on his blog. My favorites this month: Shrine on the Mosswater and Tower Ruins both make for great quick points of interests in a hex.

• Over at Monsters and Manuals David discusses DMing Styles.

• W.F. Smith discusses how your D&D languages imply a specific setting.

Recent Reads & Listens

• River of Stars - Guy Gavriel Kay

  • A sequel to Under Heaven, a book we reviewed last time, we jump ahead in time a couple of hundred of years. Milit

    ary might and skill has fallen out of favor in the imperial court and has been replaced by endless bureaucrats. When the empire is thrust into a struggle for its existence, they look to the son of a low-ranking bureaucrat who dreamed of being a military hero.

  • Like all GGK books the story is beautifully written. Its a story about honor, and dealing with loss. The tension between the a beloved military leader and the danger that poses to a sitting emperor. Great plot with a frustratingly logical ending. Definitely one of my favorite books from GGK’s writings in the 00’s-10’s.

  • Rating: 8/10

• Golden Son - Pierce Brown

  • Book two of the Red Rising series follows are protagonist as he gets deeply entrenched with his enemies amongst “gold” society. Tensions ratchet up between Darrow’s patron and the sovereign of the whole society.

  • Like the first book, Golden Sun is filled with betrayals, twists and turns. Not the most elegant novel I’ve read, but its hard to deny the action and the hooks that induce page turning.

  • Rating: 7/10

Videos

Daniel at Bandit’s Keep discussing the importance of procedures in your D&D game:

Ben at Questing Beast reviews The Perilous Void, a galaxy building sourcebook for RPGs (worth mentioning because we see so few good Sci-Fi resources):

Chris McDowall live streamed a two part series deep-diving into his Mythic Bastionland RPG:

Feel like you are missing a sense mystery and wonder in your sandbox game? I talk about it:

This month’s newsletter has a blog on targeting party resources. A round-up of latest OSR-style news, blogs articles and videos from other creators. And lastly the continuation of my recent reads & listens!

Feature: Targeting Resources

I recently did a video talking about how I think resource management is an interesting part of the game that can really help emphasize choices and trade-offs that the party has to make in the course of play and exploration. I’m not going to rehash the details here, so if you want to check it out you can find it here or in the video section below.

Some of the comments from the video got me thinking a bit further about the topic. The comments essentially described the fact that the GM would track these elements in their games, but the party would be able to bring enough of the supplies anyways and ultimately it didn’t change the risk-reward profile of their decision making. It was just something they had to track, but had no effect on the game outcomes.

First off, I’ll start by saying that not all game systems are great for a resource-tracking style play. I mostly talk and write about OSR style games where these things do tend to matter. But if you are running a game where its just not a point of emphasis (like official D&D from the last decade) then maybe feels fruitless. They might be able to carry enough supplies on their characters that it doesn’t present any risks. But maybe not.

As a game master, you can still have influence on resource depletion that goes beyond the standard expectations of the party. And this can happen through the course of exploration and game play. Think about traps, random encounters, magics and other elements that could target party resources beyond hit points.

Maybe you have monsters that are ravenous for the parties rations and try to attack their food stores rather than the party themselves. Or maybe entering into the mummy king’s resting chambers causes your food to desiccate and water evaporate. You can have rust monsters be interested in the party’s crowbars, grappling hooks and other bits of metal (or yes, you can target their armor and weaponry too). You can have weird magical spatial zones that warp wood (like the Advanced OSE druid spell) rendering arrows, bolts and other wooden objects worthless.

All of these ideas are ways to “change” the party’s stable state of having resources available to them. Of course, I would include some telegraphing information that these things have a chance of occurrence. The party finds flakes of rust on the ground near a rust monsters’ lair. Or strangely warped wooden doors guard the portal to the odd magic zone.

Like all things, be cautious about how often you are targeting these alternative resources of the party. But I do think they are worth including in your repertoire to change things up and present interesting situations for the party when it comes to managing resources.

Articles

• Dwiz offers some advice on spotlight management for a GM in his article: Look Before You Leap.

• Chris McDowall shares some fun tables for the passage of time (tailored for his game Mythic Bastionland, but could be usable for any passage of time you want to implement in a game): Between the Seasons, Between the Ages, and How Did they Die?

• Ktrey is base with another d100 table: Wilderness Woes & Hinterland Hazards.

• W.F. Smith gives his take on Divine Magic in D&D.

• MurkDice shares some ideas on event tables for Easy Sandbox Evolution.

• Odinson shares some themes that make small towns worth exploring.

Recent Reads & Listens

Fiction:

• Red Rising - Pierce Brown

  • Mars is inhabited by advanced humans that fall under a color-coded caste system with the Golds on top. All others are inferior and strive to build a world of luxury and power for the Golds. Tragedy besets our our protagonist “Red” that ultimately sets him on a path of revenge.

  • Hunger Games on Mars is the best way I’d describe book one of the Red Rising series. There is a bit more to it and some significant stuff that happens in the first part of the book before it. But it all leads up to the to a cut-throat “school”.

  • It feels like it pays a passing tribute to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom and the different color-based Martians. But the colors and systems are significantly different, and I don’t have any evidence that Brown was inspired by Burroughs in any real way.

  • Rating: 7.5/10

• Under Heaven - Guy Gavriel Kay

  • GGK makes his attempt at a fictional world roughly based on the Tang Dynasty of China with some light fantastical elements added in. The story follows our protagonist who gets caught in the middle of a dangerous political game after he receives the incredible gift of 250 Horses from the princess.

  • Our protagonist must also navigate the issues of a growing discontentment between the traditional imperial bureaucracy and a powerful placated military general as threats of rebellion begin to brew.

  • While I enjoyed the departure from Euro-centric fantasy that GGK normally writes, I found the story to be a bit too detached from the action. It felt slow at times and then suddenly we had these sweeping resolutions without much details or description in between. If you are a fan of GGK, you know that he does write in this style fairly often. But this time just felt a bit too sudden for my liking.

  • Rating: 6.5/10

Videos

I talked about why tracking resources should matter in your games:

Daniel over at Bandit’s Keep talks about how making your player want to come back:

Mr. Welch is back at it again with a massive compilation video where YouTubers talk about their favorite published adventure modules. I may make a humble appearance in the video.

This month’s newsletter has a blog on trap design. A round-up of latest OSR-style news, blogs articles and videos from other creators. And lastly the continuation of my recent reads & listens!

Feature: 3-Step Trap Design

Traps occupy an interesting design space in our tabletop RPGs. They provide interactivity, and danger for the players. Traps are an active defense that (generally) does not require a physically present defender. In other words, traps can defend the space long after it’s original designer has left. Traps are ultimately there to protect the space (or the contents within) from unauthorized personnel.

So, when I’m working on designing a trap, I like to focus on three main elements to make sure that I have an interesting and logically consistent device:

1) Trap Purpose

You need to understand the purpose of the trap. This is important to help you design and implement the trap into the existing space. A trap meant to kill at all costs is a lot different than a trap designed to capture and contain. A good way to frame this is to think about the trap’s original designer. What was their purpose for putting that trap in the space? Traps are kind of this emotional element within your dungeon. The owner was concerned about something. Knowing what the purpose of the trap is will help you come up with steps 2 and 3.

2) Activation Trigger

Every trap has some sort of triggering mechanism that causes it to go off on the players. As a game master, you need to know what that trigger is, so when the players trip it, then you know the trap is sprung and its time to unwind the effects. Likewise, if the players discover the trap, then knowing the trigger mechanism will let you adjudicate if their attempts to dismantle it will work or not.

3) Trap Effect

Finally, If a trap is activated the effect will happen. You as the game master need to understand what that effect is, and how you resolve that at the table. It could be as simple as a saving throw and some damage dice being rolled. Or it could be a multi-layered effect: first oil sprays into the room, second the flamethrower activates from the statue’s mouth, etc.

By understanding these three steps you should have a nice and quick framework for adding traps into your dungeons and points of interest. While its nothing revolutionary, I find that simple lists like this help me keep my focus on the trap I’m designing and keeping it simple enough to run at the table.

Articles

• Justin Alexander shares his essential RPG reading list.

• Prismatic Wasteland shares the idea of Playing Card Initiative.

• d4 Caltrops put together another great list of d100 Magic Tools.

• Murkdice shares his Dungeon Stocking Overhaul

• Chris at Bastionland shares his idea of putting a pointcrawl inside a hex(crawl).

News

• Sadly, the creators of The Planar Compass have called it quits. But as a small gift to the community they have made the zines now free in PDF on DriveThruRPG.

Recent Reads & Listens

Fiction:

• Swords and Deviltry - Fritz Leiber

  • The story of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser begins! It was my first time experiencing the book and I can see what it was influential on the designs of D&D. There are a couple of dated elements, but overall its a good read for anyone wishing to undertake elements of Appendix N.

  • Rating: 7.5/10

• Swords Against Death - Fritz Leiber

  • The stories of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser continue. We see them on some proper quests and they begin to work with their mysterious archmage patrons. There were some slow parts, but overall a good experience.

  • Rating: 8/10

• All the Seas of the World - Guy Gavriel Kay

  • A continuation of GGK’s renaissance period of his established world. This story follows the tale of two characters and their fortunes after they successfully complete an assassination and come into some unexpected riches along the way. The story has some recurring characters from A Brightness Long Ago, which is a welcome addition, since most of GGK’s novels are standalones (or jump far enough along the timeline of the established world that the other characters are no longer relevant).

  • Rating: 8.5/10

Videos

Ben at Questing Beast Reviewed Black Sword Hack:

Daniel at Bandit’s Keep talks about Vancian Magic in Sandboxes:

I talked about how to add fast travel into your sandbox campaign:

I also discussed three different styles of sandbox campaigns:

This month’s newsletter has a blog on using starter domains in your game. A round-up of latest OSR-style news, blogs articles and videos from other creators. And lastly the continuation of my recent reads & listens!

Feature: Starter Domains

In last month’s issue I wrote about designing your campaign with domain play in mind. In this month’s issue I want to talk about one way we can do that: creating one or more locations that can serve as starter domains for the party. I think it is important we focus on introducing the idea of domain play early. By offering a few different avenues on how the party could succeed in that aspect of play they will be more likely to engage with it early and buy in. My discussion will be centered around B/X D&D mechanics, but if your game of choice deviates then obviously adhere to those guidelines and adjust accordingly.

Start ‘Em Early

Now, if we want to introduce the idea of a stronghold early then the party probably has a fighter or halfling in the group. If you are not familiar with Old School D&D, a fighter or halfling can build a stronghold at any level. Other classes are held to a 9+ level requirement, which is a significant difference. Since, fighter is kind of considered the standard for early-access to domain play, that’s the assumption we’ll use going forward. Now, its worth mentioning that while the fighter and halfling lack the level requirement, there is still a prohibitive restriction in their ability to start a domain: gold pieces.

It takes a lot of gold to build a stronghold from scratch. Something that the player’s will probably be lacking for several levels. If we want to circumvent this requirement, then we can introduce the idea of the starter domain. A starter domain is a rundown stronghold that the party can occupy if they are able to defeat the current occupants. To make this interesting to the party we need to set the hook. We need to flow information to them that indicates this is a real possibility for them, if they are willing to spend their time and effort in claiming it.

Setting the Stage

The standard methods of information flow works well. Share hooks that a nearby derelict castle is being occupied by brigands/monsters/etc and that the local lord would like it cleared out. Maybe there is a nearby hamlet that needs rescuing from a tyrannical warlord. If the party are successful in clearing it out, they could chose to take up the stronghold as their residence on their own. Or perhaps if they were acting as agents of the local lord they might offer the location to the party if they were willing in invest in improving it and acting as guardians in the surrounding area.

If you are taking a decently wide approach (e.g. not just a few hexes at a time) in designing your campaign setting, I would add in a couple of these opportunities throughout the map. We can differentiate them in several ways: faction control, geographic location (obviously), type of structure, unique beneficial aspects (holy shrine vs. a magical well). This offers some choices for the party and extra opportunities to take up adventure in case they miss one or more elsewhere on the map.

I would focus the placement of these opportunities on the borders and frontiers of your kingdoms and map. These locations are most likely to have been ravaged by the wild forces nearby. Being located on the fringe, they are also less likely to be appointed to an existing nobleman from the realm which they reside in. It would make sense for a local lord to give an adventurer a chance at holding a frontier stronghold than it would to put them in the middle of a major population center with well established commerce. There are also fewer repercussions on the borderlands should an adventurer die trying to hold the first lines of defense than there would be for another nobleman to.

Upscaling

You can apply these same principles for classes that don’t get access to domains until later levels. A forgotten monastery, or an old Tower are suitable options for adventuring and domain play should they be captured. The only difference in this case is upscaling the difficulty of capturing the location. This isn’t 100% necessary if you want to still present these opportunities earlier on. But most clerics or magic users probably wouldn’t consider it a high priority to secure a stronghold 3-5 levels earlier than they could otherwise use it.

Still an Investment

When introducing these starter domains it is still important to require investment into the domain. They might be able to save on (large) portions of the cost of building a domain from scratch. But in order to make it a respectable bastion of civilization, they’ll need to make improvements and upgrades to attract followers, farmers and other villagers to build up the quality of their domain.

Articles

• Ben Lawrence shared his latest zine project: The Oneironaut! It covers some details and ideas that contribute to his greater setting Through Ultan’s Door. Definitely worth checking out if your a fan of Ben’s setting! As best I can tell, the Oneironaut is available to those who back Ben’s $10 Patreon Tier. Limited quantity are available!

• Kelsey Dionne creator of Shadowdark is running an active Kickstarter for a Sandbox Setting: The Western Reaches.

• At Monsters and Manuals, David shares his thoughts on Crossing the Threshold for Adventure and his opinions on The Most Difficult Single Class Campaign.

• W.F. Smith proposes a Game to Generate the World History for your Campaign using a board game (he proposes Risk or Monopoly).

• Dwiz over at Knight at the Opera put together a 6-part series on Urban Gameplay. Part 1 is here.

• Robert Conley shares progress on his upcoming project a campaign setting titled Majestic Fantasy Realms.

• Chris McDowall discusses Non-Empty Rooms.

Recent Reads & Listens

Fiction:

• An Echo of Things to Come - James Islington

  • Book 3 in the Licanius Trilogy, the protagonists are set in the final act of stopping their enemies. While the heroes preserved their magical boundary at the end of book 2. Their foes all around them are coalescing their strength and amassing their armies to try and strike a final blow. The heroes are left scrambling to make their final defenses and ultimately form a counterattack of their own.

  • Book 3 is the conclusion of the Licanius Trilogy, but it felt like a winding journey to get there. The book spends a lot of time on stuff that feels sort of tangential. Its hard to explain, but it just didn’t quite feel like the urgency of the final act of this story being present at times. Ultimately, they do make the final confrontations with their enemies, but I was just kind of left wondering at points. I don’t want to give away spoilers, but I did ask myself “Why? Why does it feel like the main character shouldn’t be here?” In the end, I didn’t have good answers for that. That combined with the the complexity of the plot requiring many flashbacks just kind of left me shrugging at the book and the series as a whole body of work.

  • It was a fine enough series if you are looking for some “chosen one” style plotting. The ratings elsewhere indicate that a lot of people are fans, but it just wasn’t quite for me.

  • Rating: 6/10

  • Series Rating: 6/10

Videos

I continue my look at the central elements of different types of dungeons, this last month we looked at Mines and Fortresses:

Daniel at Bandit’s Keep talks about Randomness and Sandboxes:

Ben at Questing Beast breaks down Andrew Kolb’s Latest creation: Wonderland (PDF Link):

This month’s newsletter has a feature (or musing) on campaign designing with domain play in mind. A round-up of latest OSR-style news, blogs articles and videos from other creators and my recent reads & listens!

Feature: Building with Domains

I was reading through Kevin Crawford’s An Echo Resounding this past month (see my Recent Reads section of this newsletter for further discussion on the book). It was recommended as a good resource for domain play and mass combat rules. I respect Kevin Crawford’s works a great deal, so I was happy to pick it up and give it a read.

One thing that really stuck with me from Echo was the idea of designing your sandbox setting from the ground up with domain play in mind. In retrospect, this seems like such an obvious idea, but it isn’t one I had heavily considered before I started giving domain play a bit more thought.

Domain play gets neglected for a couple of reasons. Most commonly, because most campaigns just don’t survive long enough for domain play to become relevant. I concede that this is not an easy obstacle to overcome. Some campaigns make it, most don’t. I don’t have any magical advice to get your campaigns to last longer. If I did, I suspect I could sell it a many a game master for a tidy little profit.

But what about the groups that do make it long enough for domain play? Even the campaigns that make it that far, not all of them engage in domain play. The most common answer I’ve seen in this case is that the party “isn’t interested” in domain play. Again, I’ll concede that some groups truly aren’t interest in domain play. But it did get me wondering if domain play has a bit of a chicken and egg problem.

Is domain play not interesting because it is just not interesting? Or is it not interesting because we neglected domain play design in our sandbox from the get go? I think if we take the time to plot out different domains, factions, rivals, conflicts and resources ahead of time we can start to integrate them into our campaign from the beginning. That way the players can see these factions, what they are doing, and the powers they wield via their domains. As the players continue their adventuring careers in your sandbox, they can come to see the value of managing their own domain, especially if they hope to compete with the rivals they have made along the way to their “naming” levels.

I think this natural encouragement and progression is a nice way to promote domain play. And if you institute the basic groundwork in your sandbox from the get go, you are going to have a lot easier time setting up the domains when the time comes for the party to be invested in that aspect of your game.

Articles

• Ktrey shared the following tables: Why Are they Friendly?, Faction Features, Dungeon Meanwhiles, and Religious Relics.

• Sean McCoy talks about how to key rooms in pairs.

• Ben Lawrence shares some details on making androids more human through downtime in his Mothership campaign.

• David McGrogan shares his favorite comfort reads, lessons learned from running a Kickstarter, and thoughts on Resurrection in D&D.

• Joel over at Silverarm Press shares his thoughts on using 10th Century Asia for a Mothership Hack campaign.

• W.F. Smith shares his thoughts on the Control Weather spell.

• Justin shares some advice on when to Tip your Hand as a Game Master in running your games.

Recent Reads & Listens

Fiction:

• An Echo of Things to Come - James Islington

  • Book 2 in the Licanius Trilogy, the protagonists are left dealing with the fall out from Book 1. Most of the story centers around a magical barrier that holds off the bad guys. That barrier is weakening and the heroes need to do something about it.

  • Book 2 features a lot of flashbacks. One of the heroes has memory loss issues and they are slowly coming back in book two. While it does fit into the background of the story, it feels a bit ham-fisted to require so much backstory exposition to explain what’s happening in the present. Overall, the storytelling in the flashbacks is good, it just feels like a bit much at times.

  • At this point, I’m invested, so you’ll get my thoughts on Book 3 next month.

  • Rating: 6/10

• A Darkness Long Ago - Guy Gavriel Kay

  • Continuing to make my way through GGK’s world spanning books and stories set in the same world. This story is told from the perspective of the main character recounting the stories and people that helped shape his life. The book is a part of a trilogy that takes place in a Renaissance-like time period of GGK’s fictional world (the first of which I reviewed last issue: Children of Earth and Sky). The story follows the political machinations of two renowned Mercenary Captains and their long-standing feud with one another.

  • I think GGK did a really nice job on character development in this book. There was just something about the different characters that drew you in. Even though they were often in conflict with one another, I didn’t feel like one was the “good” or “bad” guy. It reminded me a bit of GGK’s more famous work: The Lions of Al-Rassan in that regard.

  • I think my biggest issue with the book was that the resolution between the characters felt a bit anti-climactic. I know that GGK likes to subvert expectations like that, choosing to go for a realistic resolution rather than one that builds up the drama. While the real world can work like that, I guess it feels like a bit of a let down in a story (which is certainly not the real world).

  • Rating: 7.5/10

RPG Materials:

• An Echo Resounding - Kevin Crawford

  • An Echo Resounding is one of Kevin Crawford’s earlier works, before he put together his successful product line of “[Placeholder] Without Number” books. Echo is a book focused on domain management and mass combat. Its something I have been a bit more interested in because its often neglected in OSR play despite being something that is baked into the game.

  • The four main sections of interest are:

    • Setting up the Region - Provides information on setting up different locations in your campaign map (Cities, ruins, and lairs). Locations are assigned a military, wealth and social stats that signify how strong the domain is. Locations can also have: traits, resources and obstacles. Traits make the location unique, resources add value to the location and obstacles are things that need to be overcome in order to receive a benefit from the location within your domain.

    • Domain Management - Describes the domain turn, and provides information on the various actions the domain can take during a turn. The domain can build assets that improve the power and ability of a domain.

    • Mass Combat - Provides rules for running mass combat, provides stats on different military and support units, and finally provides information on their different unit abilities.

    • Heroes (in Mass Combat) - Provides rules for running PCs in the mass-combat scenarios, information on leveling up as a “champion” and the abilities the PC can gain for mass-combat situations.

  • Overall, the rules are fairly well thought out. He structures the rules around the idea of a “Domain Turn” this is quite similar to the idea we see later developed in Worlds Without Number the “Faction Turn”. I would not describe the rules as “rules-lite” but they also aren’t super crunch or heavy either. If you like that mid-range then it might be worth picking up.

  • My biggest issue with An Echo Resounding is the formatting. The rules are scattered across the chapters and the blocks of text in the book. There is little bullet pointing, and no summary sections, or end papers that help cleanly summarize the rules. If I were to use the rules in campaign play, I would first create a cheat sheet of the rules. I don’t want to reference the book during the course of play (plus trying to do so would be a real pain). Its annoying that you have to do that work to make the rules more readily usable, but it is a “one-time” preparation deal, so its not a deal breaker to me.

  • Rating: 7/10

Videos

Daniel at Bandit’s Keep talks about better Spark Tables:

Seth Skorkowsky talks about how to run travel in RPGS:

I’ve started a new video series on my channel looking at the different aspects and elements of different dungeon designs. I start with the natural cavern and then discuss the tomb. More to come!

This month’s newsletter has a blog on Divine Aliases. A round-up of latest OSR-style news, blogs articles and videos from other creators. And lastly the continuation of my recent reads & listens!

Feature: Divine Aliases

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about setting design lately. I’ve started to work on the early stirrings of a new sandbox (or two). While deep worldbuilding is not a necessity for building a fun sandbox or D&D game, it is something that I do find enjoyment in as a solo endeavor. Early in my worldbuilding I like to think about how gods and religion will play a role in the sandbox. One (or more) of the core classes in D&D-like games are often centered around them. So its a good idea to have some interesting aspects that can come into play.

In my worldbuilding, I like to use the idea of divine aliases. Essentially, rather than making 2-5 War Gods, I just have one War God. This god is referred to in different ways by different societies and cultures. Even if we as humans (or demi-humans) worship the gods in our own unique ways, it can be all the same to these inscrutable beings that reside beyond the comprehension of mortal kind.

Besides, looking at our own Earth as an example, minor differences in interpretations of the same faith are reason enough for decrying heresies and heading to war. So it should make no difference in your game world if your societies pay respects to different aliases of the same god, they can still find conflict in those situations.

From a practical standpoint, this makes your worldbuilding a lot simpler and cleaner. You don’t have to come up with lore for all these separate gods that may have overlapping domains with one another. Instead, you just need to track their aliases. You don’t even really need to spell out the differences in the societal worships of these separate aliases. Because as I mentioned earlier, a small minor difference here or there is reason enough to rile up the masses into a murderous fervor.

For obvious reasons, this probably works best if your deities are the “mysterious and aloof” type. Rather than “gods walk among us” style of play. But even in campaigns that utilize the latter, a god could certainly take different forms/shapes at will. And in their own alien way, they may enjoy that different cultures are at odds in worshipping different aliases of themself.

Articles

• Dwiz over at Knight at the Opera talks about implementing more elements of defeat instead of death as consequences of a fail state for the party.

• Chris over at Bastionland discusses the idea of Infinite Counterplay in TTRPGs.

• Ktrey has been busy with lots of d100 tables, including: Arcane Avocations, From Whence Did This Monster Spawn?, and Sacred Shrines & Alien Altars.

• David talks about Distance and Vastness in Hexmaps and the idea of classifying campaigns by Mode rather than Genre or Type.

Recent Reads & Listens

Fiction:

• The Shadow of What Was Lost (Licanius Trilogy) - James Islington

  • An ancient evil one lies behind a magically sealed barrier with his hoard of minions. The barrier is weakening and the heroes of this time must be gathered to understand and deal with the threat. This is complicated by the fact that humanity has turned its back on the gifted (name for the magically skilled) and has place strict tenants on their abilities. Can the nations overcome their recent hatred of the gifted in order to utilize them for the coming storm?

  • The story is interesting if not somewhat cliche. Ancient evil sealed behind a border? Check. Social tensions between the common man and the wizard? Check. Young adults prophesized to save the realms? Check. Despite all that, the story was interesting enough that I want to continue reading the series even if its mostly a twist of rehashed fantasy tropes.

  • Rating: 7/10

• The Children of Earth and Sky - Guy Gavriel Kay

  • Continuing to make my way through GGK’s world spanning books and stories set in the same world. This one follows a group of different characters as they reconcile with the fact that the great city of Sarantium was lost to the infidels of another faith.

  • Their lives intersect and bounce off one another as they all find their own paths in this changed world. It has some fun easter eggs to books set in the same world that came before it. Some times the story felt like it was a bit unfocused with no greater plot. It felt more like a bunch of smaller stories that have common characters, but are all lumped into a single book and presented as one story.

  • Rating: 7/10

Videos

Daniel at Bandit’s Keep talks about the Original D&D XP System:

BECMI Bersker gives a rundown of dragons in BECMI D&D:

I talk about recycling content for your sandbox:

This month’s newsletter has a small d6 inspiration table for giving out hooks and rumors. The continuation of my recent reads & listens, and finally a round-up of videos from other creators (and myself).

Feature: D6 Odd Ways to Give Hooks and Rumors

I apologize that this month’s feature is a short one. I have been busy with hosting family for the holidays, and I have hadn’t a lot of time to work on a deeper article.

But enjoy this d6 table on odd ways to give hooks, rumors or information to the party! I use it to get some inspiration for generating some interesting hook/rumor givers. I provide some basic examples, but you can take it in a variety of different ways.

1. Sentient objects - Intelligent swords, soul trapping gems, a living spell worked into a grimoire, etc.

2. Tragic Tales - a star crossed lover’s diary, treasure map found on a lone skeleton in the wilds

3. Puzzles - Wizard’s puzzle vault reveals secret library. Mix ingredients to break a barrier protecting information. Solving the sliding tile puzzle reveals a picture showing ____.

4. Vision Quests - Arcane messages in your dreams, divine omens after consuming blessed substances (water, incense, etc.)

5. Flora & Fauna - Talking animals, plantation forming symbols and directions

6. Oaths, Geas, Curses and Vendettas - Binding magics impart knowledge, or set the party on an adventure. Magically learn some information at the cost of a dreaded curse.

Recent Reads & Listens

Fiction:

• Lord of Emperors by Guy Gavriel Kay (Audiobook)

  • Lord of Emperors is the second book in a duology (In issue #8, I highly book one). The story's setting is based on the 6th-century Mediterranean world, and the looming conflict between the Eastern Roman Empire and the Ostrogothic kingdom of Italy.

  • Crispin is a mosaicist commissioned with rendering a mosaic worthy of the Sun God grace in the greatest city in the world: Sarantium. But the beauty and solitude of Crispin's work cannot protect him from the dangerous intrigues of court and city, swirling with rumors of war and conspiracy. The emperor is plotting a conquest of Crispin’s homeland to regain an empire.

  • Lord of Emperors is a satisfying conclusion to Gavriel Kay’s duology. The world building, the depictions of royal courts and the integration of religion into the story were all well done. The climactic twist in the book felt a bit contrived. It does make sense given the story background. But it was just something that didn’t have too much foreshadowing. So it felt a bit sprung on the reader.

  • Rating: 8/10

• Last Light of the Sun by Guy Gavriel Kay (Audiobook)

  • Inspired by Anglo-Saxon, Celtic and Norse cultures of the real world, this story tells the tale of intrigue and revenge. The story actually takes place in the same fantasy world as GGK’s Sailing to Sarantium and Lord of Emperors albeit in a later time period.

  • The story follows a series of characters that ultimately are trying to outlive the shadows of their parents. Some characters like Bern Thorkellson, are punished for his father’s sins, and he commits an act of desperation to make a name for himself. Ultimately, this brings him to face the past he’s been trying to leave behind. A tale of viking-esqe sea raiders that come looking for plunder only to learn they’ve been lied to. Realizing they can’t leave empty handed, they make a desperate gambit that sends the central characters in a head on collision with one another.

  • There are some interesting fantasy aspects of the story: Strange witches, Cursed woods, and Faeries. But largely this is a low-fantasy story.

  • Rating: 6.5/10

• Tress of the Emerald Sea by Brandon Sanderson

  • Tress of the Emerald Sea is a story inspired by the Princess Bride, if the Princess actually did something in that story. Tress is a commoner that falls in love with the Duke’s son Charlie on a tiny island. When the Duke leaves with his family in hopes of marrying Charlie off, he returns with a different heir: his nephew.

  • Tress learns that Charlie was sent to an evil sorceress that trouble’s the kindgom. Tress embarks on a journey to save Charlie from the sorceress. She gets tangled up with an odd crew of pirates as she navigates the deadly seas of her world. The seas are not water like we’d find on a traditional sea/ocean, but rather are fluidized spores. And the spores react violently to liquid causing disastrous effects.

  • Its a fun story, with some swashbuckling adventure. Sanderson has a particularly writing style that some readers may not enjoy. If you’ve read his works before, then you probably know if you like him or not. If you haven’t, well its worth reading some of his works to find out. He is quite prolific in the modern fantasy fiction space.

  • Rating: 7/10

Videos

Daniel at Bandit’s Keep discusses Exploration:

Ben at Questing Beast talks about the Tunic Principle:

I talk about reputation mechanics for your D&D game:

In honor of 1 year adrift on the Earthmote, I hosted a Q&A:

This month’s newsletter has a blog on Warrior Titles. A round-up of latest OSR-style news, blogs articles and videos from other creators. And lastly the continuation of my recent reads & listens!

Feature: Warrior Titles

When it comes to OSR style systems, fighters are on the simpler side of character complexity. But, they are good at their namesake: fighting. When it comes to figures (both historical and literary) nothing evokes renown and fear like the reputation of a fierce warrior. Richard the Lionheart. The Mountain. Vlad the Impaler. The Bloody Nine. Those are all names that stir emotion because of their martial prowess.

I wanted to capture that essence in my games for my fighter player characters. How can we make it so they gain reputation as they become more skilled within our campaign worlds? I am experimenting in tackling this problem through two main avenues: reputation and mechanics.

Reputation

Reputation is ultimately something the GM will control. This isn’t something that is written down on a character sheet, at least not directly. But when your fighters defeat difficult foes then its time to have their exploits be heard around the land.

The “benefits” of this reputation come in the form of social contacts. The fighter will meet nearby patrons that could use the strong sword arm for their own cause. Or they hear of dangerous monsters that lair nearby with possible treasures. This is a way for your PC that is “just a fighter” to get involved in the social machinations of the campaign world around them.

Now, you may wonder how that information would be distributed to the wider world. How would the village know the party killed a pair of Frost Giants? How would Harald become known as Harald the Giantsbane? Well, again we have options. First, you can explicitly tell your player about the renown benefits, in which case they might be eager to speak of their exploits in the local taverns. You could also encourage your party by using a carousing rules system.

But if your party isn’t keen on directly speaking of their exploits, then you can have NPCs spread the word. If the party employs retainers or hirelings, they might be eager to share their party’s exploits for free drinks at the local tavern. If its a hostage situation, any rescue survivors will probably share the story they witnessed. Or maybe the party was traveling with allies. You get the idea.

Mechanics

When it comes to mechanical benefits of being a fierce warrior, you have lots of options. If the fighter gains renown for defeating a type of foe (such as Harald the Giantsbane) then perhaps they become more proficient at defeating similarly typed for in the future (+1 attack & damage vs. Giants). For these, I’ve only been rewarding titles under certain conditions:

• Fighter must be of a certain level (3rd, 5th, etc.)

• Monster is >= X HD (X can be 6 HD, 7+ HD, etc.)

• Must defeat a certain number of the monster type (2 dragons, 3 giants, etc.) OR defeat a named monster (Glarg, the Ogre Chieftain).

The second option we have is to mechanically apply the fighter’s reputation through ‘social rolls’. This is done through two ways: reaction rolls and morale rolls. Skilled fighters might gain a bonus to reaction rolls. If the other side recognizes a skilled fighter, they might be less eager to get into combat with them. Or they could get a penalty; being known as the Giantsbane is unlikely to gain you favors with giant folk.

Secondly, being a fearsome warrior should strike fear in the hearts of foes that dare cross blades with you. When the fighter is engaged in combat you could apply a penalty to enemy morale rolls. Likewise, allies of the fighter might feel better about having the badass fighter on their side offering a bonus to retainer morale rolls. I would keep the bonus/penalty to a +1, maybe +2 for something extraordinary. But those are pretty strong modifiers to a 2d6 dice roll (assuming B/X style rules).

Wrap-Up

So that is a system I’m tinkering with to better integrate fighter-types into my campaign worlds. Being a fearsome warrior should have some benefits beyond just being good at one aspect of gameplay (combat). I like having ways to integrate the party’s past exploits into shaping the future. It also helps create that sense of verisimilitude when their adventures become known to the wider world. Some things we can codify as mechanics and others we cannot. But I think both are worth exploring to make a richer game experience based on the already established narrative by the party.

Articles

• W.F. Smith talks about using democracies in your medieval fantasy.

• Over at d4 Caltrops ktrey shared d100 Magical Bludgeons and d100 Mercenary Minutiae.

• Arnold K. over at Goblin Punch is working on a bestiary titled The Monstrome.

• David McGrogan shares the method of “Small Worldism” for inspiration in campaign building.

Holiday Sales

The holidays are here and that means some strong sales! If you’ve saved any RPG budget, now is the time to pick up the goods.

• Lulu.com is running 30% off their Print Products with the code: 2024LULUVIP30

  • DISCOUNT NOTE: Make sure you click through “Continue to Shipping” before entering the code. If you try to apply the code before hitting that button, it will say the code is invalid for some reason.

  • I’m a fan of the D30 products. (D30 Sandbox Companion, D30 DM Companion)

  • Stonehell is a great megadungeon. (Part 1, Part 2)

  • Anthony Huso makes great AD&D adventure products.

  • Yochai Gal has a nice list of Lulu recommended products on his website. It might be missing some newer materials.

• DriveThruRPG is having a massive sale:

  • 30% off the Sandbox Generator

  • The massive megadungeon Halls of Arden Vul (PDF)

  • 30% off the deluxe version of Worlds Without Number, Atlas of Latter Earth, An Echo Resounding and more from Kevin Crawford as Sine Nomine Publishing

  • Mythic Game Master Emulator by Word Mill Games is on sale for all your solo rpg needs.

  • The majority of Necrotic Gnome’s Old School Essentials line is on sale.

    • Advanced Players Tome, Advanced Referees Tome, The Incandescent Grottos, Halls of the Blood King, All issues of Carcass Crawler and more!

  • Gods of the Forbidden North Vol 2 by Pulp Hammock Press

  • Raging Swan Press’s Dungeon Dressing and Wilderness Dressing

• Exalted Funeral is have sales:

  • 30% OFF Storewide

  • 50% OFF Exalted Funeral Published Zines,

  • 40% OFF Exalted Funeral Published Books

• Over on Amazon you can get Andrew Kolb’s setting books: Neverland, Oz and the new Wonderland.

Recent Reads & Listens

Fiction:

• Bloody Rose by Nicholas Eames (Audiobook)

  • Bloody Rose is the sequel to Eames’ The Kings of the Wyld book (I had a review in issue #7 on that one). This story follows a second generation adventuring party. Bloody Rose, the daughter of Gabriel tries to step outside her father’s shadow. In doing so, the party gets caught up dangerous battles, and threats looming to civilized lands.

  • Like its predecessor, the book is filled with tons of references to D&D monsters (Owlbears, Grimlocks, Orcs, Goblins, Manticores, Dragons and so on).

  • Its action-packed. It has its funny moments. The story was a bit “more of the same” from the first book. I recommend.

  • Audiobook note: I felt the audiobook narrator wasn’t as good as the one that did Kings of the Wyld, but that is probably more a nod to how good that narration was, rather than this one being bad.

  • Rating: 8/10

• Sailing to Sarantium by Guy Gavriel Kay (Audiobook)

  • Crispin, is a mosaicist headed east by imperial summons to the great city of Sarantium. He goes, bearing with him a Queen’s secret mission and a strange artifice bird from an alchemist. While his voyage is fraught with some danger, the true troubles start when he realizes he is caught up in a much larger political game in the world’s greatest empire.

  • I only learned about Guy Gavriel Kay a little more than a year ago, and I must say, I absolutely love the world building he does in all the books he writes. Often modeled after real world examples his “historical fantasy” is still fresh and unique. The story's setting is based on the 6th-century Mediterranean world, and the looming conflict between the Eastern Roman Empire and the Ostrogothic kingdom of Italy.

  • Sailing to Sarantium is book 1 of 2 in the series.

  • Rating: 9/10

• Jirel of Joiry by C. L. Moore (Audiobook)

  • Jirel of Joiry is one of the first Heroine’s of Sword and Sorcery. While C.L. Moore is not mentioned in the famous Appendix N, in my opinion her work stands along side those that are included.

  • Jirel, the famed red-haired warrior of medieval France finds herself pitched against strange magics and supernatural beings. Using her wits and her strength she does what she can to survive.

  • The book is a collection of short stories (about 45-2 hours listening time per story) covering C.L. Moore’s work with the character. It does have some of the dated aspects that befall a lot of the sword and sorcery stories of old. But I think its a good read if you are trying to understand influential works from that time period.

  • Rating: 7/10

Videos

Daniel at Bandit’s Keep discusses ‘Save or Die’:

Seth Skorkowsky talks about running urban campaigns:

On the Earthmote, I walk through the procedures of running a hexcrawl:

And I share some thoughts on the original alignment system in D&D:

This month’s newsletter has a blog on Treasure Signatures. A call-for-questions to celebrate Earthmote being 1 year old. A round-up of latest OSR-style news, blogs articles and videos from other creators. And lastly the continuation of my recent reads & listens!

Q&A Request

Earthmote turns one year old at the end of November! In celebration of the milestone, I am planning to do a Q&A video and release it around the 1 year anniversary. So, if you have any questions (RPG related or personal) for me, now is your chance to ask them! I can’t guarantee all will make the cut, but I’ll see what I can do. If there are lots of good ones, I could save some for a future video.

If you have any questions please leave them in a comment on this post. Or, watch out for my community post on YouTube (as of Enchanted Nimbus #7 publication, not yet posted).

Feature: Treasure Signatures

I enjoy worlds that have depth. Like most worldbuilders, I think its cool to have history in your setting. Now when I say history, your mind may jump to paragraphs of texts documenting thousands of years that no one cares about (except the creator). And that is a fair assessment. It is often why history gets a bad rap in campaign setting design. But that’s not what I focus on when I’m talking about history.

I like using history to add supplemental bits and pieces of flavor to the world. This sword belonged to the last captain of the Dragon Riders of Karath. Who are the Dragon Riders of Karath? Does it matter? I’d guess probably not. Not until a dragon acts favorably the wielder of that blade. Flavor-based history have the effect of making your game feel lived in. Someone else important wielded this blade. That’s cool, and the players may try to learn more about its story. **It can also add “depth” to your world. By stating that the Dragon Riders of Karath were a thing, you are showing your players an element of the setting.

Now, how many words/paragraphs you have behind supporting that element can be surprisingly thin. One to three sentences probably does the job until the players show interest in that historical element. Then you can flesh out the details a bit more as they engage with it. This just-in-time preparation saves the Game Master a lot of time. And it keeps your focus on the game elements that your players are currently engaged with.

One of my favorite ways to share these flavor bits is through treasure signatures.

What are Signatures?

Signatures are ways that you can identify treasure. They add flavor to the treasure by providing some sort of theme that helps unify them with other-like treasures. This helps in two ways. First, it simplifies your design work as a GM.

Lets say you choose to divide your magic weapons into categories. Taking a look at Dolmenwood for inspiration, we see that they divide magic into: Arcane, Fairy, and Holy. Each of these weapon themes have different abilities that are associated with them. As a GM doing your design work, if you have similar tools you can easily make an Arcane Spear that’s going to have some thematic elements that align closely with other arcane weaponry. That saves you a lot of prep time if you decide to templatize a bit.

Secondly, it helps your players make connections between items (treasure) they are finding. If all dwarven magic weapons have runes, then when the players find a weapon with a dwarven rune on it, they know something about the item’s theme. This is great because you are providing information to your players about the setting. And your players will engage with your world more when they start to pick up on these flavor-bits that are interconnected with one another.

Signature Types

When I am using treasure signature games in my world, I like to focus on two types: stylistic themes and artisan signatures.

Stylistic Themes

Stylistic themes are like what we see with the Dolmenwood example. These are templates that we can use to make treasures easily and have them be related to other treasures populated in the world around them. Stylistic themes work great for cultures and/or time periods. This lets you layer in treasures that were developed through the ages. They might be found in ruins from that specific time period/culture. Or a hoard may have collected treasures from a multitude of stylistic themes. This provides a sense of how long that hoard has been accumulating. Or at least a sense of the breadth of its accumulation.

Stylistic themes can be mechanical in nature: divine weapons do holy damage. Or they can be artistic: sylvan statues are graceful and implement flowy natural elements into the design. You can implement one or both choices into your treasure design.

Artisan Signatures

Artisan signatures are for specific historical figures in your campaign setting. It could be a master weaponsmith that crafted a series of swords. Or a brilliant artist that created series of highly sought-after paintings. Rather than making sweeping generalizations of your treasure (a dwarven shield) you are making a very granular specific type of treasure (a Morgantha shield).

This implements a “collectible” side quest into your setting. Can the players find more of Harkoon the Wise’s works or not? I find that players engage with this sort of stuff. If items are collectible that means they are well known. So when your players start carrying around some of these signature items, people will remark about it. They may react in certain ways in its presence, they may offer to buy it, or they may resort to unscrupulous means to gain it.

I also like theming artisan’s works too. Maybe the rune smith only made swords. Or the Harkoon the Wise’s items all have to do with teleportation. These are highly specialized and skilled craftsmen. In most cases they probably have a particular area of focus similar to sages’ specializations from the Advanced D&D’s Dungeon Master’s Guide. Of course you could have jack-of-all-trades that are sought after Artisans too, like a Leonardo Da Vinci types.

Signatures of History

The possibilities with signatures are endless, but I’ve found they add a bit of history to your world without being a lore dump on your players. Having the treasure tell the story is one of my favorite ways to get players to engage with the setting. When players find treasure, you have a few moments of undivided attention as they listen in on “what they got” from their treasure haul. Providing them with cool descriptions and unique elements that help build on your campaign setting by showing rather than telling is a big win.

Articles

• Joel at Silverarm Press discusses Engaging Players by Having Them Build Your Setting and he shares his collaborative worldbuilding process.

• Over at d4 Caltrops ktrey shared **d100 - Monster Special Defenses/Other Abilities** and d100 - Magical Axes.

• The Alexandrian breaks down what a Role Playing Game is.

• W.F. Smith shares some taverns from his latest Barkeep Jam for use in your own game.

News and Sales

• Castle Grief, fellow Substacker has released their game Kal-Arath a 2d6 OSR system designed for solo, co-op, and group play. Castle Grief has also put out two expansions for Kal-Arath at the same time: Valley of the Black Ziggurat and Lords of the Pit.

• DriveThruRPG has a Halloween Sale going on:

  • The Sandbox Generator

  • Hull Breach Vol. 1

  • Desert Moon of Karth

  • Tide World of Mani

  • Nirvana on Fire

  • Ker Nethalas

  • The Tomb of Black Sand

  • Halls of the Blood King

  • And many more!

• Gourdin Konbo Club has released The Illustrated Bestiary, a collection of monsters for Cairn. The monsters were written by the author of Cairn, Yochai Gal and illustrated by Oozejar! The Illustrated is PWYW and also available in print on Lulu.

• The Painted Wastelands by Agamemnon Press, a psychedelic hexcrawl is now available on DTRPG! Dive headfirst into a strange hexcrawl set in a bizarre world teeming with desert weirdos, ravenous ghouls, and teeth-stealing dream-beasts. The land is a vibrant kaleidoscope of rainbow-colored sand and crumbling ruins. Only the PDF is currently available while the physical product is still fulfilling on Kickstarter.

• Necrotic Gnome is launching an Old School Essentials Playtest aimed at making some ‘minor tweaks’ to the Assassin, Barbarian, Knight and Ranger classes in future printings of Old School Essentials.

Recent Reads & Listens

Fiction:

• Kings of the Wyld by Nicholas Eames (Audiobook)

  • The Kings of the Wyld is a D&D story at its heart. Literally. Its about an adventuring band that gets back together for “one last job”. The band “Saga” is a bit past their prime, but they are out to show why they were the most famous adventuring band of their time.

  • The book is filled with tons of references to D&D monsters (Owlbears, Grimlocks, Orcs, Goblins, Manticores, Dragons and so on).

  • Its action-packed. Its hilarious. And the story had me gripped from beginning to end. Definitely recommend.

  • Rating: 10/10

• The King of Elfland’s Daughter by Lord Dunsany (Audiobook)

  • Lord Dunsany appears on the the famous Appendix N. The King of Elfland’s Daughter (KODE) is one of his most famous fantasy works.

  • The magic and enchantment that pervades the KODE is unique and nothing like we see in modern works. The veil between the fairy world and the mortal world is thin. When the people of Erl demand a magic lord to rule Erl, the lord sends his son into Elfland to find a bride. Alveric ventures forth in his quest for the King of Elfland’s Daughter and deals with the ramifications of his plan for the rest of the book.

  • I also had interest in the book because Gavin Norman lists it as one of his greatest influences for the creation of the Dolmenwood setting. I can see a lot of choices that that directly play out in Dolmenwood that come from KODE:

    • Fairy rune magic (and the enchanter class)

    • The hunter class

    • The emphasis on hounds as companion animals

    • Much of Winter’s Daughter adventure was clearly inspired by KODE.

  • Rating: 9.5/10

• The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories by Lord Dunsany (Audiobook)

  • Enjoying KODE, I decided to give Lord Dunsany’s short stories a listen. They are relatively quick listens on audiobook (30-40 mins per story max).

  • There were several stories that were quite evocative and full of fun adventure potential: The Sword of Welleran, The Kith of the Elf-Folk, The Fortress Unvaquishable were all fun reads (listens).

  • There we many very short stories (5-10 mins in listening length) that were a mixed bag.

  • Rating: 9/10 for the short stories I called out, 6/10 for the rest

Videos

Daniel at Bandit’s Keep talks about Downtime in D&D:

Harmony Ginger discusses the entrance to Stonehell Megadungeon:

Ben at Questing Beast shares adventures made by his viewers:

Seth reviews Pirate Borg:

Aboard the Earthmote, I discussed D&D’s implied setting and ways to change up your random encounters: