Carousing table for the ruin-filled swamplands

To encourage the squandering of gold for XP accrual I came up with the following carousing table for my Hexcrawl25 campaign. Given that most of the players are veterans of my Brancalonia 'Bay of Princes' campaign, I adapted the Brancalonia Revelry table - you go carousing and always roll; high is good.

To adapt a little towards encouraging the squandering of gold, I have players declare what gold they are squandering and then roll.

The entries were cooked up partly inspired by events so far in the campaign and partly by the local cultures and ruins. These were then combined with a spark list of possible effects and consequences - fights, good times, reputation changes, followers, hitpoints, contacts and romantic partners, allies, enemies, illness, rumours. Stirring them all together gives us the rough table below.

d20 Revelrous Incidents

Shiny TTRPG links #222

Links of interest from about the internet. For more, see the previous list found here or on the irregular r/OSR blogroll or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.

Traverse Fantasy compiled Keystones of the OSR. Catch this now, before it is gone.

Monster Manual Sewn From Pants makes the MALUSTRIOUS BROOD art book available

D101 Games gives us Beyond Dread Portals is out

The Rpg Gazette writes TTRPGs as Folk Art: Oral Storytelling in a Digital Age

Sam Sorensen shares Cataphracts Design Diary #1

Taskerland gives us ORIGINS: On Lost Cultures of Play

dailyadventureprompts gives us DM Tip: My Time, Threat, Tension Method

Wizards in Close Proximity (RPG Blog Carnival)

This months blog carnival from Codex Anathema has the topic of Magic in the City. For this I want to riff off Grumpy Wizards 'how many wizards' post to talk about how many I ended up calculating my wizards-per-city numbers - and what I did with that flock of wizards once I had them.

A second inspiration for this was the great blog-post on wizards as concentrators for everything by Polar Frosty - dragons just do treasure but wizards hoard traps, monsters, whatever, for their own reasons. (The original Kill The Wizard (AWAB) gone but All Wizards Are Bastards is the current version I believe.)

On Wizards as Concentrators

The hunt for DM Zero

Or: on spontaneously generating DMs.

tl:dr; trying to backtrack the 'origins of the scene' that I started playing in finds we were apparently a collective of spontaneously generated DMs who all figured it out from books.

This started with a call with an old pal from back when I first started gaming, and we got onto the topic of whoever taught us how to DM? We chased the rabbit's tail around and expanded it out to other friends of ours that we remember being among our first DMs, the answer we came back with was no one.

This was early 90s, hinterlands of Ireland. For those not from there, this was pre-Euro and the punt/pound exchange rate and postage was a mild-to-serious choke on getting your hands on any gaming material and we were the literal end of the line. Nonetheless there was a pretty decent TTRPG gaming scene that sprang up and I was curious as to how and where we all figured out how to DM.

Shiny TTRPG links #221

Fascinating links from about the depths of the internet. For more, see the previous list found here or on the irregular r/OSR blogroll or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.

Correspondence is about Diligence gives us Observations on GNS Simulationism

dailyadventureprompts gives us Hearthfire Health and Resting Overhaul

OSR Rocks! gives us Narrative Exploration Done Right: OSR Wisdom from Heart of Ice

Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque gives us Adventure Design Checklist

@LeviKornelsen@dice.camp shares Waking the Artefact workflow

False Machine gives us dErO - VotE: Re Development

BASTIONLAND writes Landmark Sites - Hazard

Coins and Scrolls gives us Tariffs, CanCon, and You

The Land Of Nod shared On Mines and Mining - Part Five

Kontent Punch gives us Monthly Calendar Order of Operations

State of the Blog - 6 year Anniversary (post #750)

Timing of this round-number blog and anniversary of this site getting activated coincide so let us take a look back at the mission statement; it was brief enough I can reproduce the whole thing here:

Mission Statement: dusting off the old, creating the new

The OSR blossoming has inspired me to participate in what ways I can. This blog will host two things - tidied up old material from the 90's/00's era 2E/3E games I ran and also serve as a notepad for work in progress.

Secondary aspect will be sharpening up publishing skills.

So - running bottom to top;

Broadbrush Hex-filling for Hexcrawl25

With the players having wandered around a bit and the 'shape' of the play space having come a little more into focus I cycled back around to the greater hex map because their focus now is a little off center for the initial "super-hex". The red splotch is the broad area of operations for the part to date - threatening to head off out of the super-hex to the west or north west.

Most recently for this Hexcrawl25 I have been populating sub-sub-hexes based on the factions present in sub-hexes and neighbouring sub-hexes which is a zoomed-in approach that works well for generating more detail from coarse understanding of hexes. It is failing me when I come to the edge of the hexes and am missing any detail on the neighbour to interact with. I need to zoom back out to come up with broad-brushstrokes and then delve down to details again.

I followed three principles here:
1. Zooming out to look at and honour the terrain of the greater region
2. Conservation of NPCs/factions towards what he players had encountered to date
3. Go to the good stuff first.

Shiny TTRPG links #220

More fine links from the depths of the interwebs. For more, see the previous list found here or on the irregular r/OSR blogroll or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.

This months Blog Carnival comes via Codex Anathema on Magic in the City - Magia en la Ciudad

Gorgon Bones gives us Adventure Design - Location, Scenario, Plot

The Furtive Goblin's Burrow shares Earning XP Through Community Investment

Blog of Forlorn Encystment gives us Using Reaction Rolls to Determine Faction Relationships in the Sandbox

Dice Goblin writes Just Use Bears… Or Wolves, Dragons or Spiders

lumpley games gives us Revisiting GNS

Blog of Holding shared d&d is anti-medieval

Osse Rota's Weblog gives us Anti-Treasure

Fail Forward writes Sandro's Print-and-Play Manifesto

notetakers-blog-of-holding wrote Adding Texture Into Your Campaign

d30 dwellings and sites

d30 dwellings and sites

Inspired by scrubbing through old newspapers while recycling.


1. Heritage - an ancient site, falling into ruin, maintained with grueling effort by descendants of the original builders. Inhabitants are a powder-keg of blame and recrimination about how it came to this
2. Tapestry workshop, light-soaking yarns for heat management, also rare magic and soul-absorbing threads made by experts - good for banishing the undead
3. Dwelling set on only high-tide rise above sand-banks; very hard to approach without being observed, unhinged weather mage with a solar obsession and their protective staff; very grand, chic, baking hot. Effort is exhausting
4. Dwelling of trellises, "rooms" are defined gardens, most of the structure is outdoors - lush, humid, full of pollen, scent, insects, lizards and toiling gardners. Very little privacy, cheerfully communal
5. Grand old country lodge being restored - busy work parties, with crafts folk, local laborers, experts.
6. Tower with the gardens surrounding it as a maze of pathways through shallow waterways clogged with lillies and fish - one could with difficulty jump a direct path or simply slog through the knee high water and spoil the plants. Stubby old fortified manor at the centre
7. Geometric tiles and carvings within and without with continual perspective tricks that make movement between rooms disturbing but staying within a room serene. Inhabitants can be observed moving about by memory.
8. Fortified manor with enthusiastic young lord raising new breed of burly cattle - locals are aggravated at the disturbance and interference, cattle are also smarter and keep escaping.
9. Survey team from local nobility attempting to refortify an old castle - have just discovered it is far worse than thought plus infested with monsters, noone wants to go back with the bad news, workers refusing to enter.
10. Half built wizards tower, caught fire, just extinguished, exhausted minions and injured watch-beasts scattered around in hasty triage. Multiple traps were left in unstable state.

Campaign Spin-Up IX - Dual-Mode Hex-Crawl (Continuous Campaign/Episodic)

I stood up a campaign to test and drive my #Hexcrawl25 challenge that had been intended to operate in two modes:
* Classic continuous campaign
* Episodic open table

The time and venue is the Friday night open table sessions I play at - historically I offered an open-table (Brancalonia, Spelljammer Academy) but I wanted to try and mix in something more persistent with returning players. The deliberate aspects of this campaign were:
- dual mode - A-team / open table on alternating weeks
- follow the players, drop hooks but no big plot
- toy deployment - use the shelves of books
- newbie friendly

I decided to run the campaign part on a biweekly basis and on the off-week run one-shots. Both will use the common starting villlage of the hexmap.

Shiny TTRPG links #219

A short set of links as I was travelling. For more, see the previous list found here or on the restored weekly blogroll on r/OSR or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.

1pagedungeons writes Monsters are Puzzles

WatcherDM gives us Here’s to the Gamemaster!

Carouse, Carouse! shares April 2025 - The Difficult Sophomore Album

Heroic Resources gives us Tools & Resources for Draw Steel

Luke Gearing shares Obligations

Symbolic City gives us Scheduling and design

Fail Forward writes On Casting

Patchwork Paladin shares Dolmenwood resources for you

Augury in Mud gives us d100 Social Contracts

Comparing Grognardia polls to other surveys (pt. 2)

Looking at the second block of polls that Grognardia ran - "when were you first introduced to roleplaying games?" and "how old were you when you first started playing tabletop RPGs?" which are discussed on by them here in part II. I did the same again, comparing them to what we see in other polls and this time around the results are *very* different to responses from elsewhere.

Staring with 'when you were first introduced to RPGs' - the Grognardia readership is *much* older than even other D&D bloggers, even other OSR blogs that I figured would be the old gang. Here be the ancients with half of them introduced back in the 80s and another quarter from the 70s. Compare that to even to the folk replying to Necropraxis OSR Gateway survey back in 2019 - the *next oldest* bunch - and they only had less than 100 folk from the 70s of 2700 respondents compared to 124 who replied here!

I was also heartily amused to see '2000+' as the last category - anyone this entire millenium gets stuffed in one box - which turned out to be the right call! There were only 60 respondents - less from these last 25 years than were introduced to the game in just 77-79! Grognardia obviously knows his audience but I am really fascinated to see this particular group not having some greater influx of post-millenium players given that every other indicators elsewhere says that there has been a big block of new gamers come in and even if only a fraction drifted off to check out the old ways, one might have thought it would be more significant than the three score who turn up. Fascinating.

The other question asked was about age when people first started playing - and we know from lots of other sources that pre-2010, people mostly started playing as teens and the earlier they found D&D, the younger that age range tended to be. And lo - the Grognardia response looks like the 70s/80s gamers the other poll says they are.

All the bars at left are from the OSR survey; the detailed data shared let us split these out to match the categories of the Grognardia survey and batch them by age and era of joining. The rapidly rising age of new joiners can be seen. Interestingly, as we have mentioned before, this means a 30 year old gamer in the year 2000 was likely a 20 year veteran gamer, a 30 year old now has maybe 5 years under their belt.

I wonder how much ones sense of 'what is D&D' is changed by it being something you played all through your pre-teen and teenage years versus when you come to it as an adult in college. It feels to me that the increase in complexity of D&D is probably stopping us from ever seeing that experiment run.

Returning to our initial point - because these two questions were posed as separate polls we have no way to properly correlate age and eras of the Grognardia respondents but using comparisons to other polls out there it certainly looks like it is a window into the ancestral gamers, who joined as pre-teens back in the 80s and have been merrily chucking dice these past 45 years.

Key Sources

D&D Gateway survey - survey by Necropraxis.

Kirith - replica of the 1985 Dragon Magazine Survey.

Facebook 5e group - some posts by the mods listed the membership numbers.

Reddit 2014 D&D Survey - data sheet at the bottom of the page.

Mia Gojaks Survey of D&D 5e Facebook group users.

Elderbrain 2020 survey.

Trygstad thesis.

Reddit ML survey.

Auditing my home campaign city for urban game-playability

Reading Dwiz's magisterial 6-part series on running cities I was struck how I recognise a lot of as things I have arrived at over trial and error with the Ducal House campaign - but what have I missed, where can it be improved?

We have put in a lot of time in cities over the campaign; the color coding below is all the sessions that are non-Thenya - anything un-highlighted is Thenya. This is 76 of 130 sessions in Thenya, 372 of 593 hours of play - so we have spent nearly 2/3 of the campaign in the city.

I was grinning reading Dwiz's posts because it is based off a Watabous fantasy city generator map and I used the districts created from that map.