Sharing Your World Enhances it

One of the great things about sharing a world that you're creating with others is that the way others interact with it, the characters they want to be in it, and the kind of things they suggest putting in (either directly or by way of asking questions,) it can really help energize your creative process.

The World I Am Currently Building

In my game Undeadwood the player characters start as people who have been transported on a mysterious Phantom train crewed by demonic entities to a pocket dimension called Wonkatonkwa.

The characters arrive in 1869 with no memory of anything that's happened since 1867. To them, the Civil War is over and the grudges were starting to smooth over, a new host of opportunities were opening, and Manifest Destiny is at its high point in American Consciousness.

During character generation, they can find themselves in possession of strange objects. One of the Pin my test group started the game with $16, and a photograph of a recently assassinated politician from the north with an X-drawn across it. 

Wonkatonkwa is a haunted country. Hoodoo magic, Santeria, Alchemy, and Pow-wow rites all work. At night, the spectral forms of people who have died in the desert rise up to drain the life out of the living so that they can once again experience the pleasures of being a living being themselves. The Devil himself hangs out had a crossroad in the eastern part of the county. And creatures from American folklore like hodags, the wampus, and the snallygaster plague the people who have no choice but to make a life there. 

World-Building: Transporting Yourself into Your Home-Made World

World-Building as a Hobby

World-Building is a fairly old hobby. There's a form of make believe that as we come formalized over the last two centuries, and dovetails with a number of other hobbies such as fantasy role-playing games, computer games, creative writing, and Wargames.

Despite it being formalized, it doesn't generally have a community of its own. There are no great historians purely of World-Building. Few World-Building forums with large numbers of members exist. Instead, it tends to be a secondary or tertiary focus of other hobby communities. For example, creative writers often talk about taking notes as they designed the world in which their stories take place, role playing game forums discuss designing campaign worlds that support their narratives, and the Kriegspiel community where it focuses on playing a historical games, discusses how to set up a scenario with internal logic to help run the Kriegspiel.

We do know for a fact that collaborative World -Building in particular has been around a lot longer than either role-playing games for the modern Free Kriegspiel Revolution. The Brontë sisters, for example, spoke several times about a shared imaginary world they built together. They would sit around talking about a new place in that world as a part of a game they played. Then they would tell stories about the people places and things within that world in a way that presaged role-playing games pretty well. 

World Building is a Complimentary but Separate Hobby to RPGs

My map of Wonkatonkwa County,
Created using Campaign Cartographer
Poster-sized version below.

I've been going all-out trying to get Undeadwood ready for my play testers this week.

I know it is not the most efficient way of going about it, but I have been arranging and laying out the manual as I work. It gives me a great sense of accomplishment when the rules and ideas that I am putting out there look good and are easy to read.

Hunting through old pulp art for illustrations has been an engaging way to keep me inspired. And has got me reading some great 1930s Western pulp for fun.The end result is that I now have a pretty good-looking 60-page manual that is growing rapidly as I hammer away at it whenever I have a free moment containing a game engine that is custom tailored to the exact campaign experience i want

• It is designed to be extremely fast and robust.
• it is entirely player-facing.
• The way rolls are played out feels at least a little like shooting craps at a casino table.
• It is saturated with cowboy slang and mechanics to evoke the conventions of the game.
• It puts a heavy emphasis on players making hard choices when 
• Mechanics to make the environment as deadly as combat is.
• It is a system where there is magic, but it is not complex, and does not rely on things like complicated spell lists.

I embraced the Free Kriegspiel Revolution philosophy that "we are playing the World and not the Game," by making every design decision in service to making sure my players were experiencing the Weird West setting in as high a resolution as I could manage.

It is very liberating making the game to suit the world rather than the world to suit the game. You stop wondering about how you can fit or modify magic-users in your setting, and instead wonder about how exactly magic works in your setting, and how you can represent that without creating snarled and unweildly rules.

I also found that once I had a map, it was much easier to figure out what content I needed. I made some random encounter tables for Olvidado flats, the central desert area east of the big river on the map, and suddenly I knew that I needed stats for Skinwalkers and poisonous snakes, because I knew that they are something I wanted PCs to have to worry about at different times of the day.

In the ghost town in the centre of the map, I decided that there would be a haunted well with a lesser Lovecraftian horror down at the bottom of it that had infested the aquifer for miles. One that whispers terrible secrets if you have the guts to be out in the town after dark. What and how Lovecraftian horrors work in my world is something entirely down to me.

Often, I didn't feel much need to work rules out at all. That is a bridge I can cross when I get to it. If I even need to.

World Building as Hobby

It has left me with some thoughts on World Building as a separate hobby from Table-Top Role Playing Games. And it is a hobby that I enjoy quite a bit. In many ways, I use role-playing games as a medium to help me know where to start in building the world. Which,is backwards from the original AD&D method:

 In Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st edition, it was recommended that you make a dungeon and a village, or borrowed one from a module, and then built the world outward from the starting point as needed, often using random generation, and only when your PCs are ready to explore outward.

This isn't news, of course. World building first and then exploring later was a passion of many of the fantasy and weird fiction authors that informs Dungeons & Dragons.

J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth certainly had an influence on D&D, even if it was only a integrated to increase the possible market audience for the game. Tolkein was forever building lore, languages, cultures and history for Middle Earth as a way of exploring a world where the best element of the Pagan ethos could stand side-by-side with Salvation and the Christian ideals of the Divine. It is clear that he spent a lot of time in his head just creating the nuances of the world, and then used fiction to invite others into it.His method of building maps, and then placing stories within them has remained a template for modern World-Building for good reason.

Jack Vance rightly awards for his incredibly rich world building with the Dying Earth. He set a new bar for creating a rich and immersive experience for his readers... and for leaving so many questions you always wish you could go into it and find out more for yourself.

Edgar Rice Burroughs' later Pellucidar and Barsoom books became less about a cowboy story of a hero settling a new and untamed land, and became about an adventurer experiencing a strange world with totally alien history and ways. The Chessman of Mars is a perfect example of this: John Carter takes advantage of the fact that he lives in a world of wonder and ancient advancements, seeks out some lost technology or knowledge that might repair Deja Thoris' broken spine, and along the way encounters strange and terrible beings who breed perfected slaves in order to steal their bodies when they have need of them (Probably the inspiration for Stargate's Goa'uld). This is definitely not the Western saga in SciFi drag that the first couple of John Carter novels were.

 Roger Zelazny's Amber has a rich cosmology of shifting planes in multiple worlds as characters move through. Often taking advantage of the differences in flow of time and availability of resources to make themselves rich and powerful on different worlds. And where the stakes of the game are the cosmos itself, with the enemies taking advantage of their own quirks of the laws of the magic of the setting.It is a compelling and challenging series to read, and deeply immersive precisely because Zelazny had spent so much time exploring the possibilities. 

As kid I developed a fascination with the world of Pern. I honestly didn't have much access to the novels. I lived way out in the country and the public library was a 50 minute drive from home. But, for Christmas when I was 11 my aunt gave me a copy of the Dragonlover's Guide to Pern, which is a beautifully illustrated text covering nuances of clothing, creature anatomy, early history, and the geography of Pern. I could look at that book for hours and wish that I had a chance to go and visit it.

At the time I lacked any knowledge of an existing Pern role-playing games, nor did I have the design skill necessary to build one for myself, but I certainly spent a lot of time there in my imagination thanks to the richness of details that that book could give me. 

Thanks to all that detail, I yearned to be able to explore it first-hand.

Role-Playing as Exploration Tool

Role-playing games offer a new way other than reading to enjoy the complex and nuanced worlds that these authors created. And I suspect the opportunity to go fighting Tharks in Barsoom or pitting your wits against the Courts of Chaos in Amber was a big driving force behind the development of role-playing games.

Ed Greenwood created The Forgotten Realms about ten years before Dungeons & Dragons really hit it stride. The original short stories created a view of Waterdeep and other places along the Sword Coast from the viewpoint of a canny merchant living in a fantasy world that once connected to Earth by magical portals, but those portals had become mostly closed, connected to realms of darkness, or were taken over by evil cabals. He saw the potential in Dungeons & Dragons to allow him to step into and explore his world and share it, and so adjusted the Realms to fit the D&D paradigm, and shared it through The Dragon. And his efforts eventually led to The Forgotten Realms going from his private World-Building creation to the default setting for D&D.

I think that is also why we saw the incredible success of Dragonlance. Not only did you have the Dungeons & Dragons modules, but you also had the deeply engaging novels by Weiss and Hickman that created a world that one would really want to go see and explore. Characters one would love to be able to meet. Then D&D offered you the portal to do exactly that.

I also think that you can safely say that Matthew Mercer's World building in Critical Role is a good portion of its success as well. There is not a session of the first campaign that I watched where he doesn't build up some details about the culture, people, and landscape of Tal'Dorei, and there were a lot of fans who enjoyed that part of the viewing experience, even if they weren't Dungeons & Dragons players. Prices back at the colossal sales of the Tal'Dorei world books for D&D were in part people who never had and never intended to play Dungeons & Dragons, but we're intrigued by his world building.

I have yet to have a chance to look at Daggerheart, but, I expect that the richness of the material that is being built out of helps build a game that has some interesting flourishes and nuances that will set it apart from its Pathfinder / 5e roots. 

Why Understanding That World-Building is a Separate Hobby is Valuable

When you understand that World building can be its own hobby, and that there's a rich tradition and a great number of examples and tools available for you that are not directly linked to role-playing games, you suddenly will find yourself with an incredible range of resources available to you

And when you embrace the idea that rules are, and ought to be hackable, or the FKR idea that you play the World first and let the rules be subordinate to its logic, it can allow you to create a far more tailored role-playing experience for your group.

And as a corollary to that, as they are separate hobbies, you needn't necessarily engage with World Building if you don't want to. It isn't required in order to run a fun, loose, beer and pretzels kind of game. So much DMing advice is actually rudimentary World building advice that doesn't need to be there..

It's one of the reasons why I recommend anyone who runs role-playing games check out the AD&D1e Dungeon Master's Guide. It had within it an endless supply of tools for building a game that didn't need the world to exist a priori. It allows the DM to explore and experience it as well at the same time. Chaos, after all, is one of the best sources of fun 

Back to Undeadwood

In Undeadwood, I started building the game in order to create a fast and easy system for building Cowboys who fit into a pulp Western as you might read and Lariat, 44 Western, or Spicy Western Stories. 

The game didn't start really developing the richness it now has until I had what I needed to offer that character generation mechanic to my friends then put the rules aside, and instead drew a map.

Once I had a map broke it into 10 sections, I made promise to myself that would make it last four pages of each area, complete with two settlements for each, several points of interest, and some terrifying supernatural threat lingering at each location. Once I staterd on that project, the game really started to come into its own, and I really started getting excited about making it.

And it made the rest of the project flow so much more quickly, I no longer need to ask what the game needs in it. Now I just need to get the time to get these ideas out of my head and onto paper.

Over the next couple of them articles, talking a little bit about the World Building separate from role-playing games, then the complexities of role playing games using role-playing games to explore them, then discuss how to play a role-playing game without the burden some task of building a world in the first place.

In the meantime, check out this awesome map!! I am very proud of how it turned out. Created with a mix of Photshop, GIMP and Campaign Cartographer.

Enlarge it to see more!

Summer of Game Development

 Summer has come and gone. And like many others, I'd hoped I create more content than I did. Especially here on Welcome to the Deathtrap,

Over the Summer I ran a campaign set on Hot Springs Island that I specifically structured for more casual play. I framed every game session as a foray onto the island from a neighbouring colony. If players didn't get off the island in time, the boat would leave without them.

I used dynamic rumour tables to give them several some things they could choose to do except would only necessitate one or two city encounters or possibly a small five room dungeon. As it was the summer and many of my players are parents, it was quite hard to wrangle enough people and a few sessions ended up being nothing more than a cat between them myself and one or two players.

Overall it was fun and my players came out of it with a few excellent stories, which I consider the mark of a game well dungeon mastered.

Pitching New Games

Now that the summer is over, I don't particularly care too continue with Hot Springs Island, however. I've had an itch to do some World building and some rules hacking. And, as it stands, life is a little hectic for some of my players and have not been able to show up for many of my Silver Gull campaign sessions. Creating a game with that same ability to just drop in and out is critical if I want to keep playing games with players aged 34 to 60 on weeknights.

So, I prepared for game pitches in the last week of my Summer travels that would both meet my desire to try and create something new, and continue to enable players to drop in and out, while taking advantage of the fact that they will be available a little more often than they are over the summer.

The pitches were as follows:

• The Temple of Elemental Evil played in Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, eventually fused with the giant saga, and the underdark saga, possibly going all the way down to the demonweb pots.

• A Norse themed campaign running in Low Fantasy Gaming where the player characters would play new arrivals to a colony at the edge of the world we are humans work with the easier to drive the frost Giants from midgard.

• "Undeadwood," A pulpy Weird West game where the characters find themselves in an extra planer realm parallel to Texas where creatures from American folklore like hodags and jackalopes and thunderbirds are real, the hungry dead walk the desert at night, and the Devil himself will gamble for souls.

• And finally, a two-fisted post Noir set on a 1950s science fiction Space Station. Essentially a fusion of Babylon 5 and LA confidential. With a twist of 70s SciFi Sleaze, which I tentatively called "Two-Fisted Tales of Omikron Station"
  

For those last two prompts I decided that system would be to be determined. Whenever I was going to settle on, I would need some heavy customization to make it work the way I want it to.

Jumping the Raygun

I got excited enough about that last prompt that I put some serious thought into it and started creating a game for it using the Drakken engine, with liberal borrowing from Star Adventurer and Alpha Blue.

I was, after 4 or 5 days of tinkering in my free time to the point where everything that needed to be overhauled for Drakken had been, and I'm to the point where I'm adding new content and tables to make a complete game. 

I figured that it was the most likely pick for my players, and even if it wasn't, it's a setting I will pitch again in the future, and something that my readers might enjoy playing.

Hold on There a Minute, Pardner...

Of course, they surprised me and went for my Undeadwood pitch. Quite frankly, the only game I have that even remotely if it's a weird West setting in my collection is Cowpunchers by the Basic Expert. 

Now, I suppose I could have tacked hey magic system is a monsters onto Cowpunchers and done just fine. It's a cool system that I bought ages ago and haven't had a chance to play. But, I wanted something just a little bit lighter on the rules, because I play in a very limited time window, and want to keep the burden of character generation down to an absolute minimum.

And so I have started writing not one but two games and already made significant progress on both.

I will be posting a lot of thoughts about the development process as I go, as it has really got me thinking about Word-Building in particular.

The Appendix -N Rap

I use the AI music generator Suno a occasionally to set my poetry to music and create things like faux commercial jingles for my podcasts 

Lately I've been using it to make up silly songs to entertain my kids... And to engage in the odd rap battle over D&D theory with BrOSR guys.

It occurred to me that while I was tinkering away with writing a little D&D related music, it might be a fun one-off to do an article in the form of a rap piece. And so I did.

The Appendix -N Rap is a quick discussion of some of the ways the writers listed as most influential on D&D have left a mark on the game. Namely Abraham Merritt, Fritz Leiber, Michael Moorcock, Jack Vance, Roger Zelazny, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, and H.P. Lovecraft.

The lyrics here are mine, and I managed to get the Suno AI to arrange vocals and music to my taste after about 30 iterations.

Sourcebook Review: Hogwater: Village of Secrets

 

Author: Travis Miller

Publisher: Self-published

System: Swords & Wizardry

Marketplace: Lulu, Square

I'm going to start this review with full disclosure. I consider Travis Miller to be an internet friend. When I was trying to start an OSR actual play podcast a few years ago, he volunteered to play, and played three sessions of Lamentations of The Flame Princess with myself and Stephen Smith. I've also written guest articles on Grumpy Wizard, and featured guest articles from him on Welcome to the Deathtrap. Travis gave me a complimentary copy of Hogwater: VIllage of Secrets hoping that I would review it, and in the process give him the kind of feedback that people like about my articles.

I will also confess that the article I did on factions with examples from Temple of Elemental Evil last week was to set this review up.

Hogwater is a slightly different way of setting up a home base for the first phases of a campaign.

Rather than provide a map of the village off the bat, and then go place by place describing the people who live in it, Travis Miller describes the village in terms of the NPCs and factions within it. Every NPC of note is given clear motivations, preferences, quirks, and goals with the first few steps described.

What he describes is a small, unfinished keep surrounded by a young borderlands town situated on a new highway that serves as a midway point for some relatively new trading routes. It's a place where merchants pass through to resupply on their way to other places.

The hero that established hog water a generation ago has recently been usurped by the current lord of the keep, who enforces his law through a dangerously skilled marshal, and an incredibly corrupt Reeve.

The Adventure Game Part of D&D Directs the Faction-Driven Wargame Part

I want to amplify a topic recently posted in Bradford C. Walker's substack  entitled Clubhouse Row (Part One: A Proper D&D Club):

The dungeon delving is the side show to the real game, which is the contention between factions vying for dominance over the land. It is a wargame first and an adventure game second.

Specifically, it is a faction-based wargame where Player-vs-Player conflict is core to the game. AD&D1e handles this without needing supplements. The actions of the factions shape the setting, and smaller adventuring bands can take advantage of the liminal spaces between them (literal and metaphorical alike) to seek out their own objectives (often as not found in a dungeon somewhere). [ibid.]

I'm not sure I see D&D as a wargame first, but I definitely see that the adventure game is informing a very different wargame going on behind the DM's screen: One of the most interesting ways in which Dungeons & Dragons retains its war game structure is in the way factions are played especially in old school games. 

A well set-up community has several different factions vying for control and influence over the community. This can be the villains, but it can also be various peaceful groups within the town. 

Steal This Map!

 Whether or not you are listening to my semi-actual-play podcast Swords Against Madness or not, you might find the map and encounter tables I created for the podcast worth stealing (1 hex = 6 miles).

Nar is the island where the campaign is currently set. A tropical island colonized long ago by a culture of explorers, the Aldi Guilds (inspired by Mystara's Minrothad Guilds), and then abandoned when the motherland suffered an economic collapse.

My Go-to Pantheon to Plagarize for Fantasy Religions (Majesty)

I am addicted to the process of world-building. Creating new places with interesting cultures, unusual people, and compelling disasters is something I never get tired of. I have home-brewed dozens of worlds.

In fact, if I have a weakness, it is that I have a hard time staying happy with a world for very long. It is a rare thing if I keep a world running across multiple campaigns. There have been only two of my home-brewed worlds that have seen more than one campaign.

Building worlds and hacking a game to make it fit that world give me incredible pleasure... except for one pain in my rear end: gods. I have had a terrible time in the past coming up with gods. I don't generally like using real-world pantheons for a number of reasons. I have used the Greyhawk, Eberron, or Golarion pantheons from time to time... but they have some pretty significant limitations to them:

Tailoring a Campaign: My Player Resource for Running Hot Springs Island

I am in the process of setting up for my Summer game of Hot Springs Island. One of the first things I wanted to do aside from sending out the pitch document that I shared with you last week, was to write a guide for the players. This guide had to tackle some basic tasks:

1. Cover how to make a character
2. Reiterate at least some of the house rules in the pitch document.
3. Expand on the information in the pitch for players who have bought in.
4. Add in any new content relevant to the players.

So I started by reiterating my character generation process. I added in firearm rules cribbed from Lamentations of the Flame Princess, and a gear list that brings the characters into the 17th century, including some era-appropriate armour and equipment.

Trans-Real News is Complete at 41 (Gamable) Episodes

I wanted to point my readers once more to my podcast Trans-Real News. It is one of the main reasons why this blog is being so scant lately. And I hope that you will find that it was a worthy diversion. It is now complete with 41 episodes averaging about 8 minutes in length.

Trans-Real news is my surreal science fantasy comedy audio drama. It follows the lives of the cast of a daily news show as they attempt to report on a world where time, space, and reality has malfunctioned. Please to things like rampaging hordes of barbarians coming back through time too eliminate people they think made humanity weaker, much of the Monterey Bay area of Northern California turning into a swamp full of Carboniferous life forms, Los Angeles turning into a shining 1950 science fiction-style Utopia, and a hive mind of talking insects taking over hollywood. 

If I were to try to describe it, I might do so as a Murphy Brown and meats Bill & Ted, while a selection of comics from Heavy Metal play out in the background. 

Throughout the series, I make a lot of references to Dungeons & Dragons. There are even a couple of scenes of the characters playing it. And one of the things I have tried to do with it is make sure that it is gamable.:

I tried to create a podcast where every episode might give a dungeon master six or seven new ideas for adventure hooks or strange events in their campaign world. 

Throughout it, I also  did a lot of World-Building, and there is definitely a setting all its own there where modern people are facing fantasy and science fiction dangers while trying to learn to navigate time travel, alternate dimensions, and the world where magic is coming into its own. 

It is my intention to start working on a setting book for it based on an in-world book a couple of the recurring characters wrote. I would love feedback from my readers as to whether or not this is something they would be interested in. 

I will post the trailer here. You can find it on most of your podcatchers, such as spotify, youtube, Podcast Addict, and itunes. 

If you have a few hours to spare, I would love to have a chance to entertain you!

Example of Tailoring A Campaign: My Summer Vacation Game

I've recently experienced a severe stall in my Silver Gull campaign.. a couple of my players suffer from chronic illnesses that have been bad lately, and they haven't been able to make it. While my campaign is normally run in one to one time, my players aren't really interested in playing unless they have the full group available. Another of my players has a psychological block when it comes to trying to run multiple characters at once. He simply isn't able to do it, and so it doesn't want to start anything on the side. 

The end result is that my players have needed to move to a pause time model of play, and then we have been unable to play simply because some of my players are being too sick.

I'm not willing to give up on the Silver Gull. This campaign has been one of the most enjoyable I've ever run. And, in spite of stalls and brakes, the player characters are now sitting between 7th and 10th level depending on class. They have intrigues, long term goals, romances, sworn enemies, holy missions, and are building towards a dominion now. 

But I get the feeling that things are not going to work themselves out for another few months.

And so, I've decided that for the Summer I'm going to be running something a little different. And this is where tailoring your game to the campaign is absolutely vital.

Game Review: Hero Quest (2021)

Creator: Stephen Baker

Publisher: Avalon Hill

System: Hero Quest

Marketplace: Amazon

I received a copy of Hero Quest (1989) for my birthday when I was 11. A product of Milton Bradley in conjunction with Games Workshop, it was designed as a tool for introducing young people to the concepts of role-playing games, but with minimal amounts of the play-acting and dramatic storytelling.
Hero Quest consisted of a board, and a collection of minis and frogs, along with cardboard tiles and specialized diced resolve combat. The combat system was loosely based on Warhammer Fantasy Battles, with various icons on the dice representing one and six, two and six, and three and six chances of success on a d6 roll.

The symbols were variously a skull to represent a wound (3 in 6), a shield to represent a hero deflecting an attack (2 in 6), or a skull to represent a non-heroic unit deflecting an attack (1 in 6). 

Original 1989 box

Making Best Use of Downtime

Many of my players don't like downtime. They want a fast-paced adventure where they know danger is around every corner. They prefer the kind of pacing that you see in modern Dungeons & Dragons play. Downtime for them is like a montage. And for many years, because I know my audience, that was how I played. Downtime only existed between acts or when the PCs decided to- and the unfolding events allowed them to- take a break.

The Evolution of Timekeeping Advice in D&D

As a kid, I missed reading the 1st edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master's Guide, I missed out on its advice for keeping time and running the game (I went from playing with the Mentzer "red box" Basic Dungeons & Dragons to using Mentzer Dungeon Master's Rulebook and the AD&D Player's Handbook, to using AD&D2nd edition. Thus, I missed the best resource ever written on running a D&D campaign. The AD&D2e Dungeon Master's Guide buried its advice a somewhat in favour of optional rules and setting design, and skipped some of the best options. Bu the time they decided to expand it in DMGR1: The Campaign Sourcebook and Catacombs Guide, the developers at TSR had very much moved away from Gygax. Here is the meat of their description of how to manage pacing of a campaign in DMGR1:

How We Lost Faction Play, and Why it is Valuable

 When I was a kid, I taught myself to play Dungeons & Dragons from the Red Box. I have a lot of praise for the design of the Mentzer Basic set: It was the first version of Dungeons & Dragons with a really clear how-to play guide, as well as two introductory adventures played solo in a way that was pretty familiar to a Choose Your Own Adventure addict like me. Castle Mistemere was a pretty clever design as well, giving you the first floor of the dungeon, a map of the second, and mostly a question mark for the third, it eased the Dungeon Master into learning how to play their role; perhaps not as well as Keep on the Borderland, had but it gave you a more methodical approach. 

There was one way adventure with Aleena at the beginning of the book was deeply flawed, however. As a tutorial it was great, even as a piece of fiction it was pretty good. You got attached to Aleena, and then her death broke your heart, especially if you were 6 year old boy at the time...

...But, it also set up the idea that you were going to be playing the hero in a high fantasy narrative. You had an evil sorcerer, on the run, and, if you carried on with the PC you started with, were hunting them. You had a friend to avenge. Castle Mistemere reinforced that by suggesting that Bargle will be placed somewhere in the lower levels of the dungeon as a mastermind. 

This is great Dungeons & Dragons; don't get me wrong. But, unlike Keep in the Borderland, you don't start as a mercenary looking for a quick score. Nor do you start as an escaped prisoner, or a castaway. From the beginning, the introductory adventure and castle Mistemere create the kind of plot are that we now associate with the kind of ""trad" play that was soon thereafter refined by Tracy Hickman in Ravenloft and the Dragonlance saga. In other words, it was a heroic journey,  not a sandbox adventure,

Detectives in Space, Desperate Cowboys, Freezing Barbarians, Mystic Pilgrims... Or all of the Above!

Looking to start a game? I have some campaign ideas that might inspire you.

How I Pitch my Campaigns

When I am ready to start a new campaign, I put together a handful of "pitch documents" that give the players a taste of what they might expect with the game. The style of my pitch documents varies a lot by mood and inclination.

Recently my wife and I concluded a one-to-one Fabula Ultima campaign, and have been, after a couple of false starts and a few weekends where life just got in the way, looking to start something new. I recently prepared a document with four campaign pitches for a one-to-one game based on our current leanings, taste, and media intake.

As this could be a useful tool for assembling a group, I thought I would share a (slightly tidied up) PDF version of the document.

Pitches May 2024

Generally speaking, I give a fictional preview either written like a movie trailer, or a summary of precipitating events written like the back of a book cover.

Then I create a couple of paragraphs explaining the game of choice, the role the PCs might start with, and what kind of overarching experience I hope to provide.

I used to add in some evocative art hunted down on Pinterest. These days, I try generating something custom using an AI. It seems like a good, non-commercial use for the tool.

The Pitches

In this case I have a Scifi Detective Noir that is drawing a lot on Philip K. Dick, as well as an old favourite podcast, Black Jack Justice; a natural fantasy story based on a fusion of Babylon 5: Crusade, The Slayers: Try, Legend of Mana, and Sorcerer Hunters; A cowboy story that is intended to be a massive and dark expansion of my Vulture Rock wargame scenario played in Cowpunchers; and there is an AD&D scenario there inspired by the copious amount of Manowar that has been on my CD player in the last week (I'm also on my 15th play-through of Skyrim).

Feel free to steal and use these, and I am happy to answer questions, if you want more information about how I intended to use them.

But these particular campaign pitches just didn't sing. They weren't quite what we were looking for.

Trying Again

I sat for awhile trying to think of what I might try differently, and started taking the most appealing elements of each into a totally different beast.

I am currently enjoying the novel Hyperion by Dan Simmons as well. If you're not familiar, it is a dark and surreal (and much more serious) science fiction take on The Canterbury Tales which involves a group of pilgrims being sent to their deaths on an alien world, telling about their experiences on a previous voyage there. Hyperion is a pretty influential book in science fiction media, but is not itself very well known. If you have played Borderlands, Bio-Shock, Mass Effect, or Amnesia games, you have probably heard a lot of references to it.

I decided to blend my four campaigns together: a dark western story, but with a mystery focus, set in my own science fiction world, to which I would add in some heavy metal notes. And while I was at it, I decided to toss in some elements of Mass Effect and Borderlands (a fantastic Sci-Fi Western setting)

 What I ended up with is a frontier space colony world full of ancient hyper-tech ruins that can create miracles, where runaways, psychics, criminals, and cultists are rampant. I called it Adaro. 

I've written a lot about realizing a science fiction setting in the past. One thing that I find to be axiomatic is that if you are not using an established setting, you need to work a lot harder to tell your players about it. When I write science fiction pitches, I add a lot more detail to it before I pitch it.

Adaro is written as a series of three monologues from very different perspectives, and two dossiers written for a government agent, plus a couple of definitions, and I feel it does a great job of doing heavy lifting.

Steal This Planet!

Tragically, it just didn't sell to my wife as a home game setting. However, i feel like Adaro might be just the thing someone else is looking for, so I am going to toss the pitch document up here, and see if any of my readers want to steal it and make it their own.

Download it as a PDF here:

Adaro: A Mythic Space Western

Game Review: Death in Space

Author: Christian Plogfors, Carl Nibeaus

Publisher: Stockholm Kartel, Fria Lagan

Engine: Mörk-Borg Compatible (OSR)

Marketplace: Fria Lagan, Amazon, DTRPG

Death in Space is a sci-fi horror game set in a distant future where the Universe is beginning the process of heat death, and humankind, after aeons of expansion across Space, are now in steep decline.

The game's setting, which is heavily baked into the structure, is the Tenebris System, a star system that had been at the heart of humanity's final war; many powerful mega corporations and space empires fought for centuries over gems found on moon in Tenebris which were so flawless and possessed such fantastic properties that they would revolutionize the manufacturing of spacecraft, computers, and hyperspace gates 

By the time the war was over, humanity was so beggared and in such steep decline that it didn't matter anymore: no one had the means left to use the gems.

Now humanity is clinging on to an existence where they make nothing new: everything has been repurposed and recycled over and over again. An alien force, the void, is creeping in, infecting, tainting, and mutating everything it touches, and that can be heard in strange whispers on radio waves across the Universe.

 Humans live in poverty in the wreckage of their once great empires. In Tenebris, most of the population lives in The Iron Ring: a hoop of fused hulks of space stations and starships in orbit around the moon where the gems were once discovered.

Swords Against Madness

 Swords Against Madness, my new gonzo OSR solo TTRPG podcast launched today, and I have to start by saying that I have never felt a more warm welcome for anything I have ever done. Abel from The Iron Realm, Simon from Legend of the Bones, John from Tale of the Manticore, and T15 from Legends from the Fireside all dropped by and said hello, and asked me how they can help and promote me. I am blown away by how awesome a crowd this is already.

Swords Against Madness is played using Swords & Wizardry Complete and a bevy of tools from tables stolen from ICRPG to the Pendulum World-Building Assistant, to the Dungeon Dozen. I am turning the gonzo weirdness is going to be turned up to the max.

If you are interested in Swords Against Madness, you can learn more here! Or listen to it through YouTube here:

Welcome to the Deathtrap: Year 4 in Review

I have been writing Welcome to the Deathtrap for four years! I can hardly believe it has been so long!

In the last year I've put out a couple of light games, like Drakken and Dragonette, I've nearly completed my complete edition of Deathtrap Lite, and have a couple of other rules light games in the works in my spare time. I haven't spent nearly as much time as I would have liked on reviews. I have a backlog of books I've read, or have almost finished readings, but haven't had much of an opportunity to review.

The ebb and flow of the 'blog has definitely reflected the good and bad times in my life. In the past year and a bit, I have partially lost use of my hands, feet, and lips, and developed chronic fatigue due to a brain injury, I've been forced to move once, and nearly had to do so a second time. I've lost 28 lbs. I've tried to go back to work, and found myself too ill to do so effectively. I've learned a new skillset, and I'm starting a business.

Podcasting Your Campaign Notes

I am, generally speaking, awful about keeping notes as a DM. When I run  a game, I am so deep in the flow moat times that writing things down doesn't occur to me. Three days later, I can usually tell you exactly what happened without referring to my scant in-game notes. But by the time a week has gone by, I am stuck in the position of sometimes having to ask, "What was that NPC's name again?"

It really isn't the best way to do things and has been the source of a few jarring moments in otherwise great game flow. I've started making quick audio notes after sessions so that I can have a quick refresher before the session begins.

For the sake of building some enthusiasm,  honing my craft, and having a little fun with my friends, it occurred to me that I could turn these into a podcast with a tiny and very specific audience. Although, once it is in full swing it might be interesting to other players who want to see how those older 1970s style rules and 1:1 time play out in an actual game.

Once the 5-10 minutes of audio notes are recorded, I also realized that I could also record some of the lore about the campaign setting in a fun delivery package that helps me avoid lore dumps in the game. "Here's 5 minutes of stuff you might want to know and might be interesting, but isn't game critical - and you can skip!" seems like a winning formula. Especially as it is as much about me as them.

If you are curious, here are my first to proper session versions of the micro-podcast:

Silver Gull - Episode 2

Silver Gull - Episode 3

Silver Gull - Episode 4

Day Tripper, Analysis and Thoughts

This is part two of my discussion of my experience with the AI game master and role-playing game Day Tripper. See my previous article for a transcript of the actual play 

When I played Day Tripper, one of the first things I noticed was a slightly wonky pacing. While the game doesn't have a limited number of interactions, the AI game master is designed to really hurry things along: up to and including taking agency away from the player to desc

My A.I. Gm Experience: "Day Tripper" pt.1

 It is no secret that I love playing around with machine-learning models to create images, songs, and the like. "Generative A.I." is entertaining, even if its products are usually dull and uninspired. And you can get some damned good results with ethically sourced tools.But the moment you try to create anything too complex with it you end up witnessing otherworldly horrors beyond human comprehension.

(Believe me, if my hand's weren't fucked up, I would be doing my own illustrating! It would be less traumatic.)

I seriously doubt that an A.I., especially one trained by a large corporation, could do a great job running a game. But could one carefully trained by an indie developer do a halfway decent job? Recently I tried out the Scifi LLM "A.I." role-playing experience "Day Tripper" by Tod Foley, designer of Core Micro and Uniquicity, (and generally fun interlocutor.)

I am still processing my experience with "Day Tripper" and I am going to present a transcript of my first adventure here. And then I will pick Tod's brain to clarify my thoughts, and share my analysis of the experience with you in my next post.

The Trans-Real News

 

I just realized that I wasn't sharing my podcast here with the people who might appreciate it the most!

Trans-Real News is my weird fiction audio-drama podcast framed as a newscast from the Astral Plane as time, space, and reality is collapsing.

Over the course of the 40 episodes I have planned (10 are already recorded and edited.) The newscasters will slowly go from unscrupulous hacks and shills to heroes in a war against supernatural authoritarians.

It isn't TTRPG material (yet), but I hope it will inspire people looking for gonzo setting ideas to steal from it.

Here are my first three episodes:

Returning to Xen

This is another article to file under "I don't know who this will interest":

I am returning to the Silver Gull Campaign after a hiatus. I find coming up with material for it so much easier than the CHV Natani game.

It has been awhile, and my players  were asking for a reminder of the events of the game so far. Moreover, I am looking to onboard a new player. So every was asking for a summary, if I could put something together.

Because I am trying to get into the podcast production and editing biz, I decided to take this as an opportunity to practice my podcast design and mastering. It is about half an hour, covers an overview of the campaign, and a summary that covers around 70 sessions, that is pretty condensed.

 Listen to it here

If you are interested... or want to see what I can do, check it out above.

Scrap: Remind me Why I'm Doing This Again?!

 Two articles ago, I mentioned my project Scrap. I have been itching to create a campaign set in a dreary Sci-Fi crapsack world where space colonists sent through wormholes in the 1980s have been cut off from Earth and met a series of disasters that have forced them to abandon all but a few of their colonies and break into six dystopian factions. PCs are young people who have never known Earth, and are now serving their faction by plundering old planetary outposts for food, water, air, and technology in hopes of holding on long enough to rebuild.

The major inspirations being Duskers, Lethal Company, We Fix Space Junk, Kakos Industries, and Dining in the Void. 

Shadow Over Sojenka Relfections

 I have been playing various OSR games with Stephen Smith, a true gaming mad scientist for three years now, and as we are coming up on a close to his second campaign, which ran for over 100 sessions, I wanted to describe the mad experiment he ended up running in the campaign he called Shadow Over Sojenka.

Unlike a few of the other articles you might read, mine is no "postmortem"; I am still playing in Sojenka. I have an ancient evil to stop, and a town to build. I hope to be playing in Sojenka for another year, or preferably, many more.

First off, compliments to the chef: Stephen doesn't do traditional Western Fantasy. He starts with a setting that takes you further afield. The first setting we ran was a mix of post-apocalyptic and late Byzantine Empire with a zombie apocalypse going on in the background. This latest campaign was set in a culture built heavily on Slavic myth and culture in the Early Modern period. In both cases he creates rich, weird elements such as unique monsters, magic items, and spells that make certain you are always meeting something unexpected.

Second, each campaign has been a science lab. Stephen is trying to hack his way into experiencing a version of D&D that is closer to its wargame origins... and a rich campaign that requires a little front-loading, but otherwise took very little effort on the GM's part once play commenced. Some of his experiments have been absolutely fascinating to take part in.

With Shadow Over Sojenka, Stephen was inspired by The Lost Dungeons of Tonisborg to try to capture the essence of what Dungeons & Dragons must have been like when it was being run as a series of experiments by the war gaming societies in Wisconsin around 1973. Including trying to reverse-engineer some elements of play that disappeared as TTRPG culture evolved to become its own thing separate from wargaming in the early '80s.

In Search of the Best Crapsack Future

 

So I have had two (video-) gaming obsessions and three podcast obsessions that have managed to collide in a perfect storm of inspiration

And that has had me grinding away like mad at my google docs for about a week now.

Deathtrap Lite: the Keep on the Borderlands Principle

When I set out to build Deathtrap Lite, one of the core ideas I had in designing the game was that I wanted it to be compatible with most TSR-era D&D modules and OSR adventures on the market, while still being mechanically distinct.

Inspired by a video from Questing Beast, I made one of my rubrics "Can I still play The Keep on the Borderlands with this?" If the answer became"No." I adjusted until it could.

The whole point of the exercise was to make a game that was built on a particular mechanic, just to see if I could: a player-facing one based on an evolution of the Taps & Tankards simple skill system and Stephen Smith's World of Weirth adjustments to it, but what would be the point if my readers, who are mostly an OSR crowd couldn't use it, after all?

I also was curious to see if there is a market for OSR-comaptibke non-D&D games.

How I Designed SKills in Deathtrap Lite

 I'm going to spend the next few articles talking about Deathtrap Lite. This little OSR game was my personal passion project in 2021. 

When we started the World of Weirth campaign, Stephen Smith was looking for a scalable skill system that would allow him to determine the outcome of events without relying on the somewhat "pro-PC" skewed skill system of Low Fantasy Gaming. He adopted a fairly straightforward system from the old blog Taps and Tankard. He adjusted the difficulty levels inherent to that system and added a system for skills to grow as the PCS use them, rather than as they levelled up.

 In practice, however, we found that the players were avoiding tasks that would require rolling using the system if they could. My fellow players found that there was some lack of clarity in the rules. Stephen invited me to write a proposal as how I would rewrite and rejig the system so that the players would be more comfortable using it, which I did in a matter of a few hours. But that got me thinking about how I could build a whole role-playing game system out of it...

This is where Deathtrap Lite came from, tweaking an existing skill system into something new and flexible. I'm going to go over the basics of the system with you here.

What Gives them Hope? (Musings in the Hour of the Wolf)

 

I can't sleep tonight, readers.

Life has handed me a problem where none of the outcomes are good or happy. And one that has made me so frustrated and angry I just don't know how to vent it so that I can relax enough to get to sleep. Housing crisis, living in a city that has become unlivable, skyrocketing cost of living, vaccine-induced brain damage, bad timing, children with special care needs... yadda, yadda, yadda... I wrote a version of this article with all the details, and it was boring. Suffice it to say, I have a lot of compromises to make, and years before any of it gets better. And that brain damage part never will.

And so I fired up blogger to do two things. And hopefully, in the process, keep serving you all. This blog, for what it is worth, is almost as great an escape for me as the games itself. 

The first is to put a thought in your ear, as it is one that makes a campaign all the much richer. Which is the question, where do people find hope? In a fantasy world as dark as Dungeons & Dragons when it is played by us oldsters, where do people find the charge to keep building those keeps on the borderlands, praying alongside those clerics, and going through life knowing they are one goblin raid away from ruin?

Feycatchers Update

Palworld Promotional Image 
©️2023 Pocket Pair

 I have been working on my Feycatchers game setting for Basic Fantasy RPG, updating the formatting to be consistent with Basic Fantasy RPG. Along with some general edits.

While I am not yet fully compliant with BFRPG style,  I'm getting there. 

It is a take on a setting like Pokémon or Palworld, with a Celtic twist, made for my son who is a Pokémon fanatic.  Tragically I submitted it to the BFRPG forum simultaneously to the OGL scandal breaking and the "all hands on deck" to release a 4th edition,  so it went entirely unnoticed.  I am hoping to resubmit when it is properly adjusted to meet their standards. 

I have run a campaign in the setting from levels 1-7, and while I am too old to have been a Pokémon kid, myself, I had a lot of fun with it. In retrospect adding Pokémon to D&D definitely feels more like Palworld  than Pokémon.  At least the way I played it.

Download  version 1.2.1 Here