Ronan McNamee

The Quantum NPC

This works even better through the medium of TTRPGs than TV to be honest, because your imagination simply works around them, never focusing on their details.

Star Trek

I’ve been watching a lot of Star Trek the Next Generation lately. I hadn’t seen it in many years, although I watched the whole thing as it came out in the eighties and nineties. I have obviously been watching it with different eyes this time around. I have noticed things in it that I don’t think I could have seen before. I wonder, for instance, about Mr Data. Would he have been such a sympathetic character today, as an AI in humanoid form? I think about how many of the episodes had no action, how many were just talking heads and techno-babble and whether Sci-fi TV shows today could get away with that. I ponder the special effects and make-up and marvel at how well they stand up 35 years later. But I have also been looking at these episodes with TTRPGs in mind. Now, of course, Star Trek has been made into a number of role playing games. I have never played any of them and this post isn’t about them. This post is about the crew of the Enterprise. Not Picard and Riker and Troi and Worf, but the ones who you see occasionally pass the bridge crew on one of the ship’s many lushly carpeted corridors, the ones having their own conversations in the background in Ten Forward, even the ones who so consistently took the con after Wesley Crusher left. They would get names sometimes and every so often, they’d even get lines! There are a couple of those that are recurring characters, such as Ensign McKnight and Robin Lefler. The most iconic of these, Chief O’Brien, went on to enjoy a major role in two Star Trek shows. But when he first appeared on the Enterprise, he was an unnamed bridge officer. Total NPC. He only became someone when the show creators decided he had to be someone.

The Quantum NPC

So this is what I have started doing for crews in my Spelljammer campaign. I think it would work in any game where you have a lot of NPCs that hang around in close proximity to the PCs all the time. So it works particularly well for ship crews.

In the main campaign, the party lost their original crew in the best possible circumstances. The crew, a bunch of spirits who had lost their memories and were not initially aware they were dead at all, finally fulfilled their goals and were able to shuffle off to whichever outer plane would have them. So, the PCs were forced to hire a whole new crew to take care of rigging and swabbing and whatnot. Now, I did not want to spend an entire session where they press-ganged or interviewed eight or nine NPCs that I would then have to name, outline and give voices to. That kind of thing can be fun but I don’t want to spend two full hours at it. Instead I told them that they picked up eight new competent crew members and that we would come up with their characters as and when they were needed.

So this is how that works, you imagine the scene where the PCs are on deck, in the foreground talking about something like how to defeat the weird root creatures that have invaded the ship from some eldritch, otherworldly space. In the background, just like in Star Trek, you have a few crewmembers, maybe they are even in uniform, but they are ill-defined and unremarkable. This works even better through the medium of TTRPGs than TV to be honest, because your imagination simply works around them, never focusing on their details. But then! They need one of the NPCs to be good at something, a specialist, an expert. Or maybe they just need a buddy, someone to talk to, or someone to listen. That’s when the players get to stretch those imagination muscles!

Pulling the NPC Out of Their Quantum State

The NPC existed in theory but not in practice. They were always there as a number, but not as a person, not as a character. Until the players make them up. The GM asks a player who this NPC is, what their name is, their ancestry, their job, what their personality is like. The players generally end up working together to do this but I usually start by asking the player who decided they wanted one of the quantum NPCs to become real for some reason. I ask that particular player the type of character they want in this situation with the understanding that, once they have been defined, they will forever be part of the crew, taking up one of those eight spots. It’s just like Blades in the Dark items. You know how many slots you have to fill when your PC is out on a Score but you don’t define the items until you need them in the narrative. Once you have said you have “A Blade or Two,” though, those blades are filling one of those slots. Same-same but different.

In this manner we got these three NPCs:

Deckhand Dewey – kobold, he/him, spry and wiry and can fit in little places.

Cook – Barry Keoghan (this is the consequence of allowing the players to name NPCs) – orc, he/him, big guy with big arms, beer belly, loves food and loves cooking. His chef hat does not fit very well. Apron always slightly dirty. Has a space rat companion.

Mr Cannon – Halfling he/him – weapon-master.

As you can see some of them got more detailed description than others. Barry Keoghan was described thoroughly partly because of who I asked to describe him and partly because of the moment I asked for his description, i.e. a quiet moment aboard ship where they had some time to talk about provisions and joke about silly Disney movie references. Meanwhile, Mr Cannon was created in the literal heat of battle. But that was ok, because the idea was always to flesh these NPCs out as time went on. We did, for instance, in subsequent sessions, discover that Mr Cannon had a wife waiting for him at home and that Barry Keoghan had some sort of tragic love-affair in his past.

I think, in future I will bring Between the Skies to bear on the Quantum NPCs as they are being birthed by the players, giving them desires, bonuses, hindrances, quirks and all the rest. Time allowing, of course.

The Quantum NPC method has the added advantage of endearing the newly created NPCs to the players from the off. They are, after all, fully their own creations. From the players’ point of view, I believe it was also quite devastating when both Mr Cannon and Deckhand Dewey got breath weaponed into oblivion by a lunar dragon along with the rest of the NPC crew (apart for Barry Keoghan who was in the galley at the time of the attack.) Unforgettable.

Dad-quest

Dad-quest is getting under way tomorrow night. Our resident Giff Fighter-Paladin, Azimuth is rounding up a crew of misfits (the other players with their new characters that I discussed here) and a few more Quantum NPCs and spelljamming out to the Amos Expanse to find his Dad. Can’t wait to see what new crew-members the players come up with this time!

Obituaries

…Whalgravaak’s Warehouse is, by a long way, the most murderous I have ever run. Death truly waits around every turn. It’s really just as well Troika! characters are so easy and quick to create.

Bring out your dead!

In the last several months, since I published Death and Troika! the Tables and Tales RPG community has suffered the losses of many more PCs. Good and bad, greedy and selfless, sci-fi and fantasy. Most of these mortalities have been described or at least touched upon in the two DCC posts here and here. Sailors on the Starless Sea proved to be one of the most lethal modules I have ever run. But it’s a 0-level funnel so of course it was always going to have a high body count. If I am counting correctly, it took eighteen of the 23 PCs that sailed it. But, for a non-funnel adventure, Whalgravaak’s Warehouse is, by a long way, the most murderous I have ever run. Death truly waits around every turn. It’s really just as well Troika! characters are so easy and quick to create.

Nicksen aka Sticky Nicky

An impressionistic depiction of a Rhinoman with a tiny helmet on his head and a small spear in one hand. Red lines on yellow background. The illustration is from Troika! Numinous Edition. — Nothing in the world is Rhinoman-sized.

The character who replaced Tim the Gremlin Catcher lasted just three sessions. Here is his obituary:

The heroes continue to meet their ends in Whalgravaak’s Warehouse. Nicksen, known by his friends and casual acquaintances as Sticky Nicky, came to his end in the swirling maelstrom of Deep Storage. We had little enough time to get to know this intimidating Rhinoman but we did discover that he had been sent to the warehouse by one of Troika’s underworld bosses to track down a band of underlings. Instead he had been captured and almost exsanguinated by Paude, the vampiric red giant. When our other warehouse workers discovered and freed him, he joined them in their explorations and told them of a treasure they could seek out. Sticky Nicky used his formidable strength to help them break into the energy maelstrom of Deep Storage where they met a Gulf Man Roamer, a wraith-like creature. In his efforts to fight off the swirling menace, Sticky Nicky found himself trapped in a sack and whisked away to be eaten alive in the depths of the void by his captor. A moment of silence, please, for Sticky Nicky.

Socrates Honeysuckle

The black ink on white background drawing of an owl perched on a branch. The owl has a smadt, checkered cloak and a sporran-like satchel. The illustration is from the a supplement to the original edition of Troika! — His Excellency, the Prime Minister of Owls.

Borrowick Grimpkin, Wizard Hunter, was replaced quickly by a most august personage who also lasted only three sessions. Here is his obituary:

All Socrates Honeysuckle, Prime Minister of the Owls, had ever wanted was to regain control of the Owl Nation from the Usurper Queen. Shamefully, however, politics is all about who has the biggest pockets these days, and Socrates had been thrown out of Owl Parliament on his ear, with barely a Silver to his rather ostentatious name. He was forced, as a consequence, to assume the unseemly roles of adventurer and treasure seeker in the hopes of striking it lucky with one big score. The Prime Minister had heard of the potential riches stored in the Warehouse of Whalgravaak, the city’s most notorious and dead wizard, so he flew there, heedless of the unknown dangers within. Inside he happened upon his soon to be fellows, Ba’Naana , Puddle and Sticky Nicky (RIP.) Together they succeeded in exploring the strange reaches of the Warehouse. Socrates Honeysuckle had a way with words that succeeded in getting the party out of trouble on several occasions but, in the end, his silver tongue proved useless when he was sucked into the void outside time and space at the bottom of the vortex known as Deep Storage. Despite being the only member of the crew with the ability to fly, his luck ran out and his slight, owlish frame disappeared forever into oblivion. Doff your caps, dear friends, for Socrates Honeysuckle, Prime Minister of Owls.

MHIEE

A red, yellow. and white illustration in a cubist style of a humanoid with oddly shaped limbs and an unbearded face. The illustration is from Troika! Numinous Edition. — There’s something off about this dwarf.

Sticky Nicky’s replacement was a poor lost soul. He survived only two sessions (being generous.) Here is his obituary:

Very little is know about MHIEE. To all intents and purposes, he seems to have popped into existence, whole cloth, in an infinite wardrobe dimension, where he, almost literally, ran into Ba’Naana, Socrates Honeysuckle and Puddle the narcoleptic Sorcerer of the Academy of Doors. They had been exploring the pocket dimensions of Deep Storage and experimenting with the wardrobe’s automatic garment dispensing properties. To their eyes, MHIEE was nothing more than a regular, if somewhat forgetful Dwarf. And he was happy to allow them to labour under that misapprehension throughout their short acquaintance. The fact was, though, that MHIEE was a Derivative Dwarf, carved from the ancient rock by a Dwarven mason. On completion, he was deemed imperfect, flawed, poorly made. So he was abandoned. Only a Dwarf could have seen the flaws, however. To all others, he was the very epitome of Dwarfishness. MHIEE and his new companions had adventures together and while Socrates Honeysuckle’s luck gave up on him in the vortex of Deep Storage, MHIEE’s positively carried him to the exit. Soon afterwards, they encountered the giant, Arbuthnot, warehouse employee and stickler for maintenance. He attacked them when Ba’Naana’s monkeys attempted to steal his master key. But he was soon tricked into falling through the unstable floor above the sunken lair of the Mother of the Worm-Headed Hounds that lived in the tunnels below the warehouse. MHIEE fought bravely, whacking the giant, over and over, but finally, all it took was a single mighty blow to connect. Arbuthnot crushed MHIEE with his enormous fist. Our thoughts and prayers are with his surviving companions, Ba’Naana and Ishmael D’Undifoy.

Warehouse closure

We are nearing the end of the PCs’ time in Whalgravaak’s Warehouse. I have warned them that the next session will be the last. I have also warned them that, like the last session, which claimed the lives of both Socrates Honeysuckle and MHIEE, I reckon there is the potential for at least two more PC deaths. Can Ba’Naana continue to be the only original player character to survive, or will he too succumb to the deadliness of the Warehouse?

Homebrew Heart Landmarks 5

It was the kind of party that took its toll on a number of different organs, the brain being not the least of them.

Two-day Wedding

Dear reader, I returned yesterday from a trip to Cork where I attended the wedding of a dear friend of mine. It involved a great deal of time spent with very old friends in the most convivial of circumstances, accompanied often by a pint of Murphy’s and a lot of reminiscing. I’m still recovering. It was the kind of party that took its toll on a number of different organs, the brain being not the least of them.

But, you know, inspiration is a fickle mistress.

Pub Crawler

Name: Pub Crawler
Domains: Wild, Haven
Tier: 3
Default Stress: d6
Haunts: The Pub Crawler (d12 Mind)

Description:
Vansant Depwy, former Knight of the Lower Docks and Minister of Our Hidden Mistress fled the City Above many years before. Burned by the Ministry and broken by his former companions in the knighthood, he found himself wandering the arteries of the Heart, lamenting his lost companionship and honestly, just gagging for a pint. As always, the Heart provided.

The millipede of enormous proportions that is Pub Crawler came to Vansant when he was most desperate and dribbled ever so delicately into his open mouth as he lay directly in its path. It roused him immediately. The finest ice wines of the High Elves the flowing ichor seemed to him. The next moment a fine brandy from the Home Nations. He could not get enough, despite the dubious origins of the divine liquid. His head swam and he rejoiced. Immediately he hopped aboard the cyclopean insect and continued to ride it forevermore. Along the way he collected what salvage he could to hook the creatures glands up to rubber pipes to facilitate easier imbibing. He built a small structure and started filling casks while welcoming visitors to his little ramshackle hostelry. As time went on, he and the beast attracted the attention of more less-than-discerning travellers desperate for a decent drink so deep as they were in the Heart. Some of the visitors became residents and then publicans in their own right. The pubs stretch now from the great insectile head to its earwiggy tail. Vansant’s, of course, has pride of place between the two many-faceted, ale-gold eyes. Its name is synonymous with the creature itself these days, the Pub Crawler.

Special Rules
They say it’s a mile from one end of the Pub Crawler to the other. A visitor who wants to partake of the healing effects of the Haunt must work their way up from the tail, taking a drink in every pub on the way. In other words, it’s a pub crawl. The booze is not particularly strong at the tail end as the further they get from the mouth, the more they are forced to water it down. So each visitor is forced to make and Endure/Wild roll or take a d6 Mind stress as they begin to commune directly with the Pub Crawler itself. The first roll is Normal difficulty, the second at Risky and the third at Dangerous.

Fallout Tipsy (Minor, Mind) One more? One more. Doing anything but getting another drink is now Risky.

Fallout Well on it (Major, Mind) There is a constant clicking and clacking in your mind. You must now either try to kill the source of it (the Pub Crawler) or try to understand it.

Fallout Pallatic (Critical, Mind) You understand the Pub Crawler and its reason for being. You know why it secretes such delicious and delirious juices. And now that you know, you have no choice but to stay and set up shop yourself. Spread the booze and spread the word.

If you do manage to make it all the way to the magelight illuminated superpub known as the Pub Crawler, Vansant himself will come and serve you the most potent brew of all, purging you of all Mind stress and Fallout and bestowing on the lucky patron an honorary knighthood.

Corkers

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.

Forged in the Dungeon

And this one is an update about how it went!

Forged in the Dungeon, Part 2

I’ll be back next week with some new posts. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy these re-posts!

Revenge of the Giff

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?

Prep Part 2

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 has the feeling of the caravan travel methods used in Ultraviolet Grasslands.

Progress-based travel

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!

Prep

Preposition

This post is part of a blog bandwagon started on the Roll to Doubt 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.

Modular Gaming

Improbable hot-takes

“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.

Anyway, on Bluesky, Thomas Manuel went looking for recommendations of other modules to run and this spawned a lot of interesting answers and quote-bleets from RPG luminaries, such as this one, which I found interesting.

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:

Blade Runner

And this one compares the same module to a 5E murder mystery adventure I played in around the the same time:

Case Closed

Here’s my post about Sailor’s on the Starless Sea for DCC:

Dungeon Crawls are Classic

And this is my post on running Duty Unto Death, a short intro adventure for the Dragon Age RPG:

Dragon Age: Duty Unto Death

And finally, this post, although ostensibly an excuse to discuss DCC adventures, also includes my opinions on the one 5E campaign I ran:

Dungeon Crawl Classics – Individual Modules

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:

Dagger in the Heart

OK, I’m off to discuss the discourse on Discord of course!

Paint the Scene

Painting the Ultraviolet Grasslands

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.

Throwback Sunday?

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!

The GM Jukebox