I’m off to Cork for the weekend so I won’t have time to come up with anything new today. Instead I thought I would share a couple of posts from last year. I wrote these at a time when I was first experimenting with some homespun rules and borrowed mechanics for our D&D 5E campaign.
This first post is preparatory to introducing a Blades in the Dark style engagement roll to our Spelljammer game.
I’m considering an option that harks back to Dark Sun. In 2nd Edition Dark Sun, a player started, not with just one PC, but a whole stable of them, called a character tree.
Mid-season finale
The crew of the Cadabra were going home. After weeks of adventure across Scatterspace and all over the Rock of Bral, they have arrived back at First Home, the asteroid/inn/shipyard that was their first stop after leaving their world behind in the first place. They could justifiably expect a warm welcome since they freed the shipyard from a Neogi infestation last time. But they weren’t expecting to be confronted with a crew of kobolds from their home island to be there. Kobolds who probably thought the PCs had murdered their queen. They also weren’t expecting to find Becky Fullpockets’ personal spelljamming vessel there. They had been struggling against the machinations of the technomagical billionaire ever since they fled their planet. It looked like they were stuck between a rock and a hard place, with no escape!
No better place to end part of a season than on a cliffhanger. And that’s what we did right there. We have been on a break from our Spelljammer campaign for a couple of months now. It’s given me a break from 5E and allowed us to play some other great games in the meantime. But now, it’s time to come back, sort of.
Spin Off
A few months (IRL months, that is) before the crew of the Cadabra reached First Home for the second time, they said goodbye to one of their number. Giff Fighter-Paladin, Azimuth, who had to be rescued from two ship-wrecks in quick succession might have been labelled a Jonah by many crews, but the Cadabra was different. They welcomed him on board with open arms and he adventured with them for a while. But, eventually, he was always going to go back to look for the father who went missing from the first of those two ship-wrecks. Now, while his erstwhile comrades are heading back to their homeworld, Azimuth is armed with a little knowledge about the stretch of Wildspace Papa might be found in and a ship stolen from Becky Fullpockets. He’s preparing an expedition of his own to go find his real dad… Not that gnome who pretended to be his dad during that short period where he’d lost his memory (long story, dear reader.)
The rest of the players are coming back too, but they’ll be playing new characters for this spin-off. Azimuth needs a crew for his ship, after all. We are getting together tomorrow night for a session-0 type thing. I think everyone is looking forward to trying some different classes/backgrounds/species compared to the ones they have been playing for over two years in the main campaign. Although, Azimuth’s player, David, doesn’t get a new character, he does get to pursue his PC’s main drive and its a great welcome back to the group for him.
As for me; I’m looking forward to yet another shake-up in this game. I’m planning to use the progress-based travel rules that I mentioned in my Prep Part 2 post last week. And, as well as that, I have something very special up my sleeve for the meat of the adventure, which I can’t reveal here and now (my players read this blog sometimes.) I’m definitely going to write about it after the fact, though.
Change of Cast?
The introduction of new PCs into the campaign, even though its a spin-off, raises the question of what happens once Azimuth joins back up with the main crew again. I’m considering an option that harks back to Dark Sun. In 2nd Edition Dark Sun, a player started, not with just one PC, but a whole stable of them, called a character tree. I believe you were supposed to begin with four characters. This was to help counter the lethality of the setting, giving a player back-ups in the inevitable event of a PC death. This made a lot of sense, especially considering the amount of time it took to create characters. Go check out my Dark Sun character Creation series to witness exactly how long that took.
So, my thinking is that, once this spin-off is done, if they want, the players will be able to swap PCs in or out as they like. This should have the double benefit of providing the players with a bit of variety and allowing them to almost fully crew their ship with their own characters, rather than just NPCs. I’m currently thinking through how I’ll handle character advancement if I do allow this. In Dark Sun, if I remember correctly, the PC only gained experience when they were actually played. No vicarious levelling. I think this makes a lot of sense, but it might be more difficult to adjudicate with milestone levelling.
What do you think of these ideas, dear reader? Have you ever run a spin-off campaign like this? Would you be happy for your players to switch between active PCs like I’ve described?
I am an unapologetic shill for Huffa’s Between the Skies. It’s one of my most used and most valuable RPG books. I use it constantly in lots of contexts. But I love using it to prepare for sessions.
Still Prepping
This post is part of a blog bandwagon started on the Roll to Doubt blog.
Click on the link above to take in the blogpost that’s piloting this bandwagon. Wagon-jumpers abound. You can find a very nice read on the same topic and a handy list of related blogposts on the Among Cats and Books blog.
And here’s a link to the first post on this topic on the dice pool dot com.
Between the Sessions
I am an unapologetic shill for Huffa’s Between the Skies. It’s one of my most used and most valuable RPG books. I use it constantly in lots of contexts. But I love using it to prepare for sessions. Its approach to random encounters in particular is one I highly recommend. The encounters are built, not just to make your session interesting, but to introduce potential allies and enemies, recurring characters, locations, objects. In short, they help you to truly build your campaign without relying on GM-written plots that the players may or may not want to interact with.
The methods and tables introduced in the book make for interesting, impactful characters and occurrences. And they have depth, too, enough to hook your players and keep them hooked. You know that old story that your players would die for the unnamed goblin you just made up on the spot but won’t give a shit about the NPC you spent two weeks crafting an elaborate back story for? I feel like the techniques in Between the Skies are almost designed to prevent that. Why? Well, firstly because, if used as your main way to drive the game forward, you are not going to be spending so long lovingly hand-crafting those NPCs, you are just going to roll them up on the tables provided and not worry about whether or not the PCs run into them, because whatever they run into will be interesting and fun enough to capture their imaginations. So, all the NPCs are more like the loveable nameless goblin and you don’t feel the need to make sure the PCs interact with any of them in particular. This has the effect of allowing the players to dictate the direction of the game to a large extent. This is a good thing!
Let’s Interact with the Mechanics
So, Huffa’s advice when it comes to travel is that, unless it is going to be interesting or important, skip it. I can get behind this approach. Recently, I have tended towards the idea of the journey being the game, but sometimes, when you know the next scene you need to play is across the city and its a relatively safe place, just skip to it, or montage it if there is something interesting to see along the way or if its a good opportunity for conversation between characters.
If and when you want to play the travel, though, Between the Skies presents you with two options, progress-based travel and route-based travel.
Route-based travel
Using this method, you use a map, just a basic one that includes routes and locations along them. You roll once on the Encounter die between locations and resolve that before arriving at the next place. Simple. The book includes several ways to generate route maps and destinations but I won’t concern myself with that here.
Your route map should have options, different ways of getting from A to B with more locations in between your starting point and the final destination depending on how long you want the journey to last.
This gives me the impression of beating the resistance of a delve in Heart. Before the journey starts, determine the journey length. There is a helpful table that indicates the amount of Progress points required to reach the destination depending on how long the journey is. You record progress through the resolution of Encounter Die rolls.
The Encounter die works as follows:
Encounter
Something Approaches
Environmental hazard
Complication
Hint as to what is nearby
Progress/breakthrough/boon
So you only get progress points on a 6.
What I did
As with everything in Between the Skies, you can take it or leave it. I have used a combination of the two methods, where I decided that a spelljammer ship journey from the Rock of Bral to the First Home asteroid would take three days and I would have them roll on an encounter table once per day. So this is the table I used:
Wildspace encounter table d6
1-2 No encounter 3 Environmental/Ship Hazard 4 Ship Problem 5-6 Encounter
When you only have three days and so, three possible rolls on the table, I felt it was better to increase the chances of actual encounters/problems/hazards occurring. If it was a more exploratory journey, I would use the progress-based method as described in the book.
Now, using the tables in this book, of which there are many, you should be able to create a fascinating encounter on the fly, but, if you can, I think its nice to prepare a few beforehand, at least one of each kind. So let’s do that here.
I thought it would be a good idea to roll up some options on the spark tables in the book and add them to a d4 table for each encounter type (environmental/ship hazard, ship problem and ship travel encounter.)
Environmental/Ship Hazard
We’ll start with the hazards. For each hazard you want to prepare, you roll 1d6 to determine the hazard type and then d66 to generate a hazard keyword on the Environmental Hazards during ship travel table in Between the Skies.
I shared this table in the last post so lets use the results I rolled up on that.
3 Ship Hazards
Roll 1d4
Hazard 1 – Storm, Flood
Hazard 2 – Disorientation, Sphere
Hazard 3 – Obstruction, Cold
Hazard 4 – Trap, Haunting
I then go ahead and prepare a few details of the hazards. Here’s the first one as an example.
Hazard 1
A solar storm rolls in from the direction of the sun.
The gusts of solar winds batter the ship
The deck is flooded in light and other solar radiation
All those on deck risk blindness
There is also a chance of taking radiant damage
All on deck must make a Dexterity save, DC 15 to avoid blindness
If they are afflicted with blindness it lasts 1d4-1 days. If you roll a 1, Roll 2d12-1 for the number of hours it lasts
Even if they saved against blindness they must make a Constitution save, DC 15, against radiant damage. If they fail they take 4d6 radiant damage. If they succeed they take none.
This goes for the ship too, if the damage roll beats the damage threshold
You can see that I took the hazard type fairly literally but moved it into a wildspace context. A solar storm seemed obvious but also pretty cool. The keyword, “flood,” took me a little while to work out but I thought flooding the deck with light seemed both like a cool, spacey event and something that could present a real problem for the PCs.
Obviously, you can prepare the details for each entry in the table. They don’t have to involve a lot of work but putting a little extra preparation in at this stage can remove the need for it at the table.
Ship Problem
Similar to the hazards, you simply roll up a problem type and a problem keyword on the Ship Problems tables in Between the Skies. I did this four times and created the d4 table below.
4 Ship Problems
Roll 1d4
Problem 1 – Armament, Separation
Problem 2 – Quarters, Shrinkage
Problem 3 – Cargo, Disappearance
Problem 4 – Bridge (spelljammer helm), Error
Here’s the detail on one of these entries:
Problem 2
One of the crew has stowed something large and awkward in the crew quarters. It is limiting the amount of space available to sling hammocks and the rest of the NPC crew is unhappy about it. This crew member refuses to be parted from their huge steamer chest as it contains something of extreme personal significance. The PCs will need to resolve the interpersonal issue.
You can see that the details here are left deliberately vague. You Ould ask the players to decide which member of the crew is the problem, what’s in the chest that’s so important and, most importantly, how the resolve the issue.
Encounters
And finally we have encounters. There are a lot of different encounter tables in the book. You can choose the one that best describes the surroundings of the PCs at the time. There are two space encounter tables, one for known space and one for wildspace. They are d66 tables. Once you have done rolled on them, you can get some more inspiration by rolling on the encounter keyword, detail and related entities tables. Once you have rolled on the Encounter distance and awareness tables in Between the Skies to determine how far away the encounter is and how much attention they are paying to the PCs you can roll on the d4 table below.
You’ll note that the results on the table below are not all similar. For instance, encounter 2 doesn’t have a related entity. In general, such entities, as generated by the tables in Between the Skies, are sentient NPCs so I didn’t think it necessary for the parasite I rolled up. But mostly each of them includes an encounter keyword, a related entity, and two encounter details.
5-6 Encounters
Isolationists – Confusion, Related Entity – Unknown NPC, Glittering, Prayers
Ship Parasite – Loss, Scales, Experiments
Ruins, Ancient – Mourning, Related Entity – Petty God, Knots, Miscommunications
Stowaway – Battle, Related Entity – Creature, Eggs, Blindspots
Stowaway
Size, substance and form table: Very small biota, piecemeal. Weakness: True name Needs: Brains Characteristics and details: Pacifist, stalks Behaviour: Social: Family: 5 appearing Demeanor and current behaviour: Protective, healing Attacks: Blast – teleporting
For the final example, I’m using the creature generation tables in the Entities chapter of Between the Skies. You can see all the details and keywords that I rolled up above.
Along with the keywords, battle, eggs and blindspots, that came from the original encounter detail rolls, these will make for a fascinating encounter with some sort of very small fungal entity that has escaped a battle to find refuge aboard the PCs’ ship. The mushroom creature has a desperate need for brains to help heal its young but will not take them by force. Perhaps they only consume the brains of dead beings. Perhaps they have a blindspot that means they cannot sense constructs. And maybe, also, they have crawled into the ship’s stores to try to feed on the eggs, mistaking them for heads containing brains. I like the idea of them lashing out with a teleporting blast to deposit attackers some way off the deck of the ship, leaving them to perish in wildspace. If the PCs can figure out the creatures’ true names, they’ll be able to get them off the ship, but how?
Conclusion
I think you can see the fun you can have preparing encounters and encounter tables using Between the Skies. Once again, dear reader, I can only urge you to go and purchase it. It’s so useful and you won’t regret it!
This post is part of a blog bandwagon started on the Roll to Doubt blog.
Click on the link above to take in the blogpost that’s piloting this bandwagon. Wagon-jumpers abound. You can find a very nice read on the same topic and a handy list of related blogposts on the Among Cats and Books blog.
What’s clear from even a cursory glance at the other blogs is that no two people are prepping in precisely the same way, so advice and recommendations come with the notice that your way is probably the best way. The thing is, in my experience, you find your way only through trial and error. Here’s my effort to tell you about my trials and my errors.
Preponderance of prep
I used to spend hours and hours preparing my games when I was a kid. To be clear, I loved doing it. I would happily get lost in the world-building, the map-drawing, the character creation and the encounter balancing for hours when I should have been studying. I still often think that I gained more from the time I spent on RPG preparation than I did from learning off -by-heart lists of dates and events or theorems and proofs. But I digress.
My prep used to be pages upon pages of tightly packed hand-writing explaining the background of an adventure, the major NPCs involved, the probable goals of the PCs and far more history about the setting than the PCs would ever be able to interact with. I drew maps by hand as well, when I had to. I didn’t run a lot of published adventures but I did make liberal use of soucebooks. I would select the people, places and things I wanted from those books and elaboate on them wildly, writing more pages on how they would connect with our campaign and adding a lot of extra details.
I sometimes wish I had the time to do preparation like this these days. But, when I do find myself with the time, and I sit at the computer to start working on it, I find I would rather shortcut it. I’ve asked myself why this is on many occasions. I’m not sure I have the answer, or else there are several. It could be to do with the process of writing in a notebook and drawing by hand on grid-paper. I don’t want to prep like that these days because having all of my work backed up digitally is invaluable. Time is still a factor. Even when I feel like I have some extra time on a particular day, I can’t guarantee that I’ll continually have that as the campaign progresses. But I think the main difference for me now is the feeling I get from making the world, its people, the major events, the game, at the table with my players. When you are all on the same page, when everyone comes together to create something greater than I ever could on my own, that’s one of the real joys of this hobby.
So, I don’t really do that anymore.
Preplanned not prepared
It’s taken me a long time to make this change, though. Even looking back at the work I did in preparing for our current Spelljammer game, I had thousands of words written on setting, backgrounds, NPCs, over-arching plot etc. And I would write thousands of words of session preparation while going along too. What I have discovered during the last couple of years of trying to prepare this way, however, is that that sort of prep is close to unusable at the table. Even if I am the one who wrote that dense paragraph of text, I can’t find what I’m looking for in it in the couple of seconds I have to react to something at the table, or to answer a player’s question without delay to keep the flow of the game going. Now, it’s not always a waste of time, I will admit. Sometimes, the very act of writing something will help to embed it in my memory and imagination, so obviating the need to check it at all. But, then again, there is the other effect of writing something down. It has the effect of making something true.
Truth at the table should only come from play. The only real things in the game world are what the PCs experience. Everything else, even things the characters have learned or heard about, is pure conjecture. Until it’s not.
This doesn’t mean I don’t prepare anything of course. I make plans for events I would like to occur or NPCs I want the PCs to interact with. But in those cases, I will write down something about the event, just a few details about what happens, who might be involved, what effects it might have. Or I will give the NPC some quirks, desires, flaws and interesting characterisations to bring them to life. But I will keep them to be used when and where they seem to fit.
Otherwise, I revel in the joys of random tables. I use rumour tables and encounter tables quite judiciously these days. In a game like Ultraviolet Grasslands, I am spoiled with wonderful encounter tables, trade goods tables, carousing tables, and almost any other type of table I could desire. But when it comes to 5E, I am generally disdainful of the encounter tables provided. So I make my own. Made right and used right, these not only make for some interesting sessions, but also act to drive the game forward, introducing NPCs that become important to the plot, enemies that might defeat the PCs or might lead to vengeful associates pursuing them later. Importantly, I feel, they maintain an element of randomness and ensure that the players know their rolls have led them to the encounter, or not. It’s great if you can engineer it so that the players are rolling on random encounter tables at the end of a session. That allows you to take the result of their roll and make preparations for the specific encounter they rolled up for the next session. Usually, these days, I refer to Between the Skies for more tables and for inspiration to make the encounter really interesting.
Between the Skies does not limit encounters in space to just running into creatures, but also gives options for hazards the ship might run up against and problems that stem from the ship itself.
Here are the simple d6 and d4 tables I made to determine if the crew run into anything, and, if so, what it might be:
Wildspace encounter table d6
1-2 No encounter 3 Ship Hazard 4 Ship Problem 5-6 Encounter
3 Ship Hazards
Roll 1d4
Hazard 1 – Storm, Flood
Hazard 2 – Disorientation, Sphere
Hazard 3 – Obstruction, Cold
Hazard 4 – Trap, Haunting
4 Ship Problems
Roll 1d4
Problem 1 – Armament, Separation
Problem 2 – Quarters, Shrinkage
Problem 3 – Cargo, Disappearance
Problem 4 – Bridge (spelljammer helm), Error
5-6 Encounters
Isolationists – Confusion, Related Entity – Unknown NPC, Glittering, Prayers
Ship Parasite – Loss, Scales, Experiments
Ruins, Ancient – Mourning, Related Entity – Petty God, Knots, Miscommunications
Stowaway – Battle, Related Entity – Creature, Eggs, Blindspots
The descriptive words I listed beside each entry come from the spark tables in Between the Skies. These are invaluable resources that give you the inspiration to come up with truly unique situations, problems and obstructions. You should go and buy this book at the link above.
When I get the players to roll on these tables, I either make up the encounter/hazard/ship problem on the spot using the sparks of inspiration or I use the time between sessions to come up with something memorable.
A while ago, I realised the plot I came up with for the Spelljammer campaign was much less interesting to the players or their characters than the shenanigans that they got up to each session. They were more wrapped up in their own shit. And that was very cool. It made me want to make a sandbox for them to play around in instead of expecting them to interact with a plot they had little or no investment in. This goes back to the time I introduced a hex grid to the underside of the Rock of Bral. I did this to allow one of the PCs to drag the whole party with them to rescue their mother who was trapped in the prison down under. It did not serve the overall plot, really, but I had to have fun things for them to do while traversing this area so I made it a hex map and created some random encounter tables for each of the different types of terrain on the underside of the asteroid.
You know, it took me a long time to cop on to this though. The signs were all there. Dear reader, if your players never remember what is happening in the plot of your meticulously crafted campaign from one session to the next, you might be overloading them with plot. Maybe they just want to play their cool character and have fun moments between them and the other PCs and significant NPCs. Or maybe they are only interested in hitting things really hard. Or maybe all they have ever dreamed of is building their very own tower of necromancy built on the bones of their enemies. Or perhaps they just want to find their dad? Ever think of that? Maybe your plot is not that important to them. If you take nothing else away from this post, please take that.
I have drifted a little way away from the central theme of the post but I insist that, in actuality, you should be prepping for the sessions you want to have, and, more importantly, the sessions your players want to have.
Prepaid prep
Most of what I have been talking about is prep for D&D/OSR style games. Games that you can play as sandboxes without upsetting anyone. But, what, you might ask, dear reader, do I do to prepare for other types of RPGs?
I have some very specific examples here.
Free Leagues/Year Zero Engine Games
I have a few of these under my belt at this point. I can say that the type of prep I do for these is significantly different to what I have described above. The ones I can refer to are Tales from the Loop, Blade Runner and Alien. For me, the thing that holds these adventures together is the Countdown. This is something that’s rather integral to most Year Zero engine games. Below you can see the countdown from the Tales from the Loop adventure published in the core rule book, Summer Break and Killer Birds.
Once you get the timeline of events in place for one of these adventures everything can be positioned around it. Tales from the Loop adventures, in particular, I find, can be written with ease in the very specific format that Free League has presented to you in the book. They provide really valuable advice in all of their books for creating your own adventures. Blade Runner also provides lots of useful random tables to help you create your own case files for that game. When in comes to prep for this style of game, just make sure you know the countdown well, and you keep track of the shifts/days of activity for the PCs. After that, the published adventure or the one you have written in the provided format, will do the work for you. The rest is improv.
Resistance System, Spire/Heart
Resist the temptation to do anything other than read up on the specific areas the PCs are likely to interact with the next session and maybe jot down some NPC details/desires/stats. Resistance system games really thrive on improvising at the table and having the PCs drive the narrative forward with their actions and their fallouts. This is particularly true of Spire where most of the game occurs in NPC to PC interactions in my experience. In Heart, I think it’s a good idea to have some idea of the landmarks your PCs might end up in. In the last game of Heart I GMed, I made it specifically Vermissian themed so that I knew they would be visiting a lot of Vermissian stations on the way down to Tier 4.
Prewritten trad scenarios
I am thinking of the Dragon Age game I’m running right now but I think this is advice you can apply to most adventures that are presented in dozens/hundreds of pages in long dense paragraphs. Read the full adventure, then, read it again, but this time, take all the relevant information from each room description, encounter text or whatever and transcribe it into something more easily digestible and more useful at the table. I use bullet points as that’s what I’m used to. I also usually take the more relevant enemy stats like Health, Defence and Armour Rating and note them too. This is me applying the lessons I learned from the mistakes I made as a kid and applying them to the published adventures written by professionals, I realise that. And maybe that’s presumptuous of me, but, hey, it works. The second time you read it, you shouldn’t do it all at once. Just make those notes between sessions.
Conclusion
Prep can take many guises. It will be different for every GM. A lot of people use all sorts of apps and other technical solutions. All valid, but all I ever use is a wod processing app and a few dice. Whichever methods you use are probably going to be right for you, even if it takes you a while to figure out how you should do it.
“The Discourse (TM)” has been focusing on running published adventures/modules/campaigns as opposed to custom/homebrew/sandbox games for the last little while. First Quinns reviewed Impossible Landscapes, an epic and almost legendary campaign for the modern Cthulhu-ish game, Delta Green. This is the first time Quinns has reviewed a campaign/published adventure on his RPG review channel, Quinns’ Quest, so it was unusual enough to spark a significant amount of discussion all on its own. And then Thomas Manuel of the Indie RPG Newsletter and Rascal reviewed the same campaign. I believe this was purely coincidental, especially as Impossible Landscapes came out about five years ago now. Both are great reviews in their own right and are based on full play-throughs of the campaign so you know they’re of real value. You should check them both out.
I have opinions on the conversation, of course. I have shared a lot of them in other posts from the last year or so, actually. If you want the summary, though, I had a lot of bad experiences running D&D scenarios in the past, especially from the AD&D 2nd edition era. I found they were difficult or impossible to just pick up and run. In fact, they required maybe more preparation time than adventures and campaigns I wrote myself. The one published 5E campaign that I ran, Storm King’s Thunder suffered from the same issues, actually. This made me feel like it was a “me” thing. But, it turns out, a lot of GMs feel the same way, according to Bluesky, at least.
However, I have had my mind changed somewhat by running pre-written adventures for some other games, particularly Free League’s Blade Runner, Dungeon Crawl Classics and, to a lesser extent, the Dragon Age RPG from Green Ronin.
This is a link to my first post on Electric Dreams, the introductory Case File for Blade Runner:
I will say that, despite my generally favourable outlook on most of these modules, I still find I have to to do a lot of prep for them. The main fear I have is messing things up so bad that I essentially spoil the rest of the adventure. Although, I should really have more faith in my abilities as a GM at this stage. I feel like I can probably improv my way out of any hole, to be honest. But it does not change the fact that I spend hours rewriting long paragraphs presented in module texts into digestible bite-sized bullet-points. I am running another Dragon Age scenario right now. Amber Rage is from Blood in Ferelden, an anthology of scenarios for the game that came out in 2010. It suffers from verboseness and unnecessary detail and makes for a lot of work from the GM. I’m enjoying the contents of the scenario but its presentation is horrendously dated and needs a sprinkle of OSR magic to tighten it up, in my opinion.
I realise that none of the modules I have mentioned here are anywhere close to having the size and epic scope of something like Impossible Landscapes, but it doesn’t change the fact that they have largely changed my mind about running anything pre-published. The one I have my eye on right now is Dagger in the Heart for Heart: The City Beneath. Actually, I have a post about that right here too:
I’m still feeling unwell, dear reader. It’s a feeling that returns me, quite unwanted, to the bad old years of the pandemic. So, I would rather think and write about something more recent and more delightful. Even if my current malady will not allow me to produce anything terribly beautiful or very long, I can rely on my players to help me out.
In our most recent session of Ultraviolet Grasslands, our caravan, Isosceles Inc., made it as far as their first proper destination, the Steppe of the Lime Nomads. I knew they were going to reach this place a week in advance so I had time to prepare for it. But what I ended up focusing my preparations on was not that destination but a couple of discoveries that they had rolled for the previous session. I had only the vaguest idea of what they might encounter at the watering hole I assigned as the current gathering place of the Lime Nomads. I knew they would have somewhere to trade, some way to perform market research and that was about it. The descriptions, I left to the three players, using a method called “paint the scene.”
Now anyone who has ever listened to a Jason Cordova podcast or read one of his games, knows this term. It’s a method he developed for use as a GM but is something he has since incorporated beautifully into several games. Go check out the current run of the Between on the Ain’t Slayed Nobody podcast for some truly wonderful examples of it.
Paint the scene serves several purposes at the table. The most important of these are allowing the GM to share the load of world building and description with the rest of the table and, related to that, allowing the other players into the fun and responsibility of bringing the world to life. Why should the GM have all the fun/work?
It’s a simple technique. You ask the players something about a person place or thing that helps bring them to life. It is important to craft the questions you ask to reinforce the theme you are trying to bring to the fore, though. It’s not enough to simply ask them, “what do you see in the village square?” Rather you should ask, “what about the village square shows us that this place was recently abandoned?”
Here are a few of the answers I got from my paint the scene questions when the caravan approached the great camp of the Lime Nomads last weekend:
What about this place shows us that the nomads return here year after year? This one was answered by Stebra, the Lime Nomad character. She was able to tell us a lot about her people and homeland: A river flows down from the mountains at this time of year, though it is often dried up – the nomads settle at the river for a while. They construct their temporary accommodations on stilts for safety. They transport these buildings around with them by folding them up into flatpack. There are larger towers that they use as shelter and to gather around. these towers are relics of ancient times and they stand tall, much higher than anything else in the region. The nomads migrate east to west take advantage of seasonal grazing and foraging. They use water wheels for power and they fish for particular little river fish while they can, cooking them on a spit. A seasonal speciality.
What evidence of the the misty time known by the Saffron City Opiate Priests as the Best Forgotten Ages can be seen in this land? Imssi, the tactician and puppet actor answered this one: Out of the ground the only occasional rock formations in this otherwise grassy plain, are the tips of fingers and toes of colossal statues or calcified giants. In the oasis, when the waters are low and the day is clear, you can see the great nose poking up from the azure depths.
How do you know the nomads welcome traders here? Phaedred Ping-noun, our Acolyte of the Business answered this one, as seemed appropriate: Such a gathering of the Lime Nomads is a moment for traders from all over to get in there and sell. There is a marketplace that is bustling and busy. There are lots of colourful wagons and colourful people gathered. Travellers, not just from the Lime Nomads clans, but from all over the Ultraviolet Grasslands have come to attend the markets.
Conclusion
I am trying to make more liberal use of the technique at the table these days. I find it really gets everyone more involved and engaged in the world. They feel an ownership of their little parts of it and I feel a deep gratitude for them adding the sort of little details and flair that I would never have thought of. If you haven’t given it a go, dear reader, I encourage you to!
Check out this blog post from 2018 on the Gauntlet for an explanation of the techniques from the man himself.
I’m feeling dreadful today, dear reader. I don’t know what I’ve got but it’s kicking my arse. Anyway, I thought I would use my malady as an excuse to return to one of my very first blog posts, instead of trying to write a new one. Here it is, The GM Jukebox from last July, where I discuss the use of music at the RPG table, whether real or virtual. Hope you enjoy it!
At the end of the last post I wrote about my current Ultraviolet Grasslands campaign, I noted that the caravaners were on the cusp of an encounter with some Armadilloids. The section of the book describing the Steppe of the Lime Nomads has a list of random encounters just like all the other sections do. And, just like the other ones, the detail you get about an encounter is minimal, to say the very least. You might get a level for the creatures or NPCs encountered, and maybe a word or two of description. This leaves quite a lot in the hands of the GM and, potentially, the other players at the table. Perhaps the characteristics of the encountered entity would emerge organically in play. Maybe the GM will have prepared specifics for each potential encounter, with regards to physical descriptions, motivations, weaknesses and strengths for instance. In the case of this encounter. I knew I did not want it to be an automatically violent one. I wanted the Armadilloids to be sentient but different enough as to be inscrutable. I could probably have just written a description, but I have Between the Skies, so why should I?
I took to the Entities chapter of the book and started rolling. I started with a roll on the Size, substance and form table. I rolled a 7 for size. That gave me Very large (giant-size.) I liked this. It immediately brought to mind the Armadillo super villain first encountered way back in Marvel Secret Wars II some time in the 80s. So I had a picture in my mind.
Next, I rolled a 6 on the Substance table, meaning they were Animal. That corresponded with my general idea so far, which was cool. On the Form table, I got a 13 on the d66 roll. That made them Bipedal (which is a word, that, when you say it out loud, sounds weird, we discovered.) It was still matching the picture I had in my head at this stage, except for the fact that these bipeds also had wings. For my purposes I thought it best that they be stubby vestigial wings. It’s the Grasslands, it’s not safe to fly there.
This next bit was so good. On the Weaknesses and Needs tables, I started to see the situation emerge. I rolled a 34 on the Weakness table, which meant they were Confined. Now in the previous session the players had rolled on the encounter tables in UVG and we had established already that there were ten or so of them and they were merely silhouettes on the horizon. They could see the Armadilloids so they were not obscured by any sort of physical trap. But a pretty cool phenomenon in UVG is “stuck-force.” These are invisible barriers and shapes and containers of nothing but force. They litter mainly the skies of the UVG, left over from a time long gone, when fantascience and magic dominated and their practitioners left these eternal artefacts dotted all over, making flying an incredibly dangerous prospect (as I hinted at above.) So, I came up with the situation where the Armadilloids had been trapped in a sphere of this stuck-force and had been unable to free themselves. The next table was Needs. I rolled a 62 on that, which gave me Directions. But I didn’t like this one so I opted for 26 instead, Escape. Perfect.
Next was Characteristics and details. These tables round out the looks and important idiosynchacies of these creatures. First I rolled a 21 on the Notable characteristics table. You know those big ol’ Armadilloids are rolling around like Sonic (I know Sonic is a hedgehog, ok? Just roll with it.) On the detail table, I got a 34, Tatooed. Adding a little more to this, we see that they are tattooed all over with the pictographic stories of their lives. I love this detail.
Next come a pair of Behaviour tables. I rolled on the Social behaviour table, which indicates their numbers, even though I already knew how many there were from our roll on the UVG tables. Why? Well, it also suggests the type of groups they habitually congregate in: Couple, Family, Herd, etc. I rolled a 6 and got Pack. This fit perfectly as well. I actually skipped the behaviour and current demeanour tables because I already had a good idea that they would be eager to be freed, some of them going stir crazy, rolling around inside the sphere, some simply sitting in the grass, and one of them standing with his hands raised against the stuck-force sphere trying to will his way out.
This next one was fun: Attacks! I rolled a 6 on the Mechanism of attack table, making it a Blast. The Attack keyword I rolled up was 33, Draining. So, from these words, I decided they would have a Charisma Draining Psychic Blast power. It never came up in play, thankfully. Why? Because the PCs figured out how to free them and then were invited back to their mushroom growing burros where they were rewarded with three sacks of Regular Mushrooms.
They also spent the night there around the Armadilloids fire, despite the fact the big orange guys could only speak in some brand of “meep meep” language. They all consumed copious amounts of magic mushrooms and got high as fuck using the wonderful tables in the appendix of Fungi of the Far Realms.
Since I rarely get much time to prep sessions these days, this method was really valuable. It allowed me to do what I needed to do on the train on the way to work, using the pdf of Between the Skies, an online dice roller and the word processor on my phone. I have been using Between the Skies for some other games too in the last few months, most notably our Spelljammer campaign. It has made for enormously memorable and unique encounters in that case. I can’t recommend it highly enough. Go get it on itchio or on Exalted Funeral!
Final Plug: Shadows Return
I backed a project from Ian Hickey of Gravity Realms last year, The Price of Apocrypha. It was a really successful Kickstarter, especially for a small, indie, Irish creator, and it was fulfilled and delivered incredibly promptly.
Well, Ian has another great project in the works on Kickstarter right now, Shadows Return: House of the Wraith Queen. Its a mega dungeon style adventure for use with Ad&D 2nd Edition, D&D 5E and OSR games. It’s fully funded but there are only a couple of days left of the campaign and you could still help it reach some stretch goals! Go back it!
As a final note, I have recommended a lot of books and products recently and I like to think I always do here on the dice pool dot com. I do this purely because I believe in the books, the products, the creators, not for monetary or other rewards!
I came home from work on Friday to discover a wonderful surprise in my porch. I wrote about the Kickstarter campaign for Swedish Machines, Simon Stålenhag’s new art book way back in September of last year and ‘lo it has arrived! This was particularly pleasant because I didn’t realise they were shipping already (I have backed a lot of projects and, honestly, I can’t keep up with the updates for all of them, dear reader.) Just feast your hungry little eyeballs on this:
Digital Surprise(s)!
Fifth Season RPG
Another major surprise came yesterday when I checked my inbox and found a link to the PDF Preview of the Fifth Season Roleplaying Game. This one has been in development by Green Ronin for more than two years and has been hit with delay after delay so to finally have a version of it stored away in my overstuffed RPG documents folder was a pleasure unlooked for. It was literally the first project I ever backed on Backerkit so I forgot it was there entirely.
As many of you will be aware, I have an ongoing Dragon Age RPG campaign going right now (we recently picked up again for Act II of the campaign, using a published adventure, which will get a post of its own when we are done.) The Fifth Season RPG uses essentially the same rules engine, Green Ronin’s own AGE (Adventure Game Engine) system originally developed for their generic Fantasy AGE game.
The game is, of course, based on the incredibly successful series of novels by modern master of the SFF craft, NK Jemisin. The Broken Earth trilogy tells the story of a dark fantasy world where a feared and reviled underclass of people with the power to manipulate the earth itself are employed/enslaved in the interests of everyone else. The earth itself, on the continent known as the Stillness, is a constant danger to its populace and the orogenes use their powers to calm it and make it safe. But every so often, the earth rebels so strongly against its inhabitants that it becomes uncontrollable, unleashing terrifying earthquakes, erupting volcanoes and tsunamis of dreadful power, seemingly in an effort to end all life. This is known as a Season, the Fifth Season of the title. The story follows the trials of a small number of these orogenes and the people closest to them as they attempt to survive a Season and discover some hidden truths of this harsh world.
The books have won a lot of awards and deservedly so. They are some of my favourite SFF books of the last ten years. If you haven’t read, them, dear reader, do yourself a favour. You can easily find them in your local secondhand bookshop these days but the audio-books are also a pleasure to listen to.
Anyway, when the RPG was announced I didn’t hesitate to back it. But, despite Green Ronin’s long experience of producing licensed games like Dragon Age, and the Expanse (I have also backed the new version of this game, The Transport Union Edition, which I’m eagerly awaiting) this one seems to have suffered a few setbacks and delays. They have tried their best to alleviate the issues by keeping in touch with the backers and offering a 10% discount on their webstore, and I think a lot of the problems were out of their hands, to be fair, so I am giving them the benefit of the doubt. Also, I’m loving what I have seen of the preview PDF so far. The artwork is gorgeous and it makes liberal use of the source material. As its a preview, I won’t share much, but here are a few shots of the illustrations:
The Vastlands Guidebook and Our Golden Age
I’ve been writing a lot about Ultraviolet Grasslands recently. We’ve just completed the third session of our campaign and we’re all loving it so far. Rarely have I run a game that has so sparked the imaginations of the players, both at the table and in between sessions. My wife, who plays forager-surgeon and Lime Nomad, Stebra Osta, explained to me today so much about the character’s people, how their nomadic encampments are set up, the importance of water in their culture, their dress and food, the way they braid their llamas’ hair… The breadth of the unknown in UVG is truly its greatest strength. Its staunchly anti-canon stance has given the players explicit permission to make the world the way they want it to be. So, do we really need more source-books for it? If they are written the way UVG was written? Absolutely. I mean, the random spark tables, the loosely described peoples, the maps with gaps, the mysterious origins of everything: they all come together to make a wonderful frame for you to fill up with your fellow players. I have no reason to believe Mr Rejec wouldn’t produce more work with the same structure and content. Well, this week, I am getting to see the beta of one of the two books in this crowd-funder and a whole section of the other.
The Vastlands Guidebook is the full set of Synthetic Dream Machine rules to play a campaign of UVG. It is very similar to the UVG Player Guide Book that I mentioned in my UVG Character Creation post but with far more detail and some very tasty art. It has full character creation rules, including a whole bunch of new Paths, eg. Barbarian, Purplelander, Tourist and Skeleton. There are mechanics for everything you could want to do in your game. It’s got powers, random NPC creation tables, corruptions, more vehicles and mounts etc. etc. I’m already thinking of ways I can get some of this new stuff to our table.
Our Golden Age is a setting book for the Circle Sea area of the Vastlands, the part of the world your average caravan in UVG is leaving behind at the start of their adventure. Luka Rejec released a teaser for the Yellow Land section of the book and it looks just as sumptuous and bonkers as you would expect from the creator of the Ultraviolet Grasslands. After a brief overview of the geography, climate, government, economy etc. you get some very fun tables. Events tables, travel tables, very unusual merchant tables, fashion tables. Then we have some interesting factions with eminently usable NPC members, a page about the Géants, enormous and unstoppable biomechanical soil farmers left over from another era, and into a section about the cities and places of interest in the region. These include Safranj, the Saffron City, with its key control of the drug/spice, saffron and vibrant opera scene. The Refining Plain: “Autorefineries of livingstone linked by arteries of basalt and tentacles of shipmetal, sinews of standardstone and great mushroom vent-mounds stud the plain below the voidtouching mountain Vulkana.”
The Yellow Land very much gives me Nausicäa vibes. It has an environmental disaster theme and even has Orms (like the Ohmu in Miyazaki’s masterpiece) dangerous animals that tear up the land.
A warning for the unwary traveler:
The Automatic Tourist Entity (A.T.E.) has compiled a list of must-see places in the Yellow Land for centuries. Recently, many warn it keeps suggesting destinations with a terrifying preponderance of surprisingly cannibalistic local practices.
I cannot wait to see the finished product and get it in my grubby little mitts.
The Dice Pool 