This post is inspired by David McGrogan's post about elves and elf sex, which is both a worldbuilding issue and a game mechanics issue that derives directly from the problem of longevity, up to and including immortality. Read on if you're similarly interested in the worldbuilding consequences and how I'm trying to think of such longevity in my games.
From early 2017 to late 2019, I ran a 5e D&D game using a homebrew campaign setting called Yer Shar, which was a pastiche/fix-up of some extant settings I had sitting around in Google Drive. Most of them had never been anywhere close to an actual D&D table, being incomplete and all. In the years since the end of that campaign, I've returned to it in part for inspiration, but also to build out new ideas in it.
The idea for Hollowkin was “what if Warforged but my own thing?”, and while I basically just imported Warforged as-is for the original campaign, I wanted to tweak them somewhat for the more recent sub-setting, Underscourge. Now, Underscourge is my answer for “how about cyberpunk but mostly fantasy and also in a subterranean volcano city?”, along with some excuse to do cave exploration mechanics. There's a part of me that wants to make this a full-fledged TTRPG setting, though, and in the spirit of that pursuit, I'm offering up this rudimentary OSRified race/kindred that is inspired by the Warforged but hopefully is its own thing. The setting has been in some form of development since 2021.
This is incomplete, but feedback on the initial design is welcome!
At the beginning of the year, I made a goal of publishing and selling an adventure. I have a handful I'm writing, but like so many other projects I have, I work on them when time and inspiration permit. Since I have the comparative luxury not to need income from them, there's no real time pressure for me, except whatever I invent for myself. But deadlines are good for my creativity, so I thought I'd try my hand at actually publishing and selling something. Enter “Dead I Am the Rat”.
You can buy it at the link below, but if you want to know more about what went into it, read on.
I've been tinkering around with this system for a while, with little publicly to show for it. But now I want to give a glimpse of the schematic for a character class in Weardcynn. The aim here is to show how I'm thinking about classes, and how I want them to function. I owe some of this schema to Pathfinder 2e, even though it is mechanically quite different. Whether this ends up being a final product or not, I can't say.
One thing to note about classes in Weardcynn is that they are fonts of specific expertise. Like characters in many other OSR and NSR systems, Weardcynn characters have a base set of adventuring competencies: they can fight, they can camp, they can walk long distances, they can climb stuff, they can use ropes, and they know a bit about assessing treasure, plants, animals, other peoples, and typical structures. They only need an appropriate Action to deal with these if the situation requires it. But character classes take those adventuring competencies and dial up the expertise. Anyone can fight, but a Fighter is an expert at it, trained to help his companions focus their attacks on a foe's weaknesses, or bring a fight to more favorable terrain, etc. Likewise anyone can hunt game, but a Hunter can doggedly track down even the most elusive prey, including other people if necessary.
Hopefully what I've written below captures the essence of a character class so that you can tell quickly what its expertise is, and how you might play it at the table. Don't worry too much about the mechanics for the one Action that's detailed here. The Action is included to help convey that expertise, and while the mechanics do matter, they aren't the focus here. That said, I am interested in what impressions people have of how the Action works.
“What should I prep for my session?” you ask, mere hours before the session starts. This is something that happens regularly in the DM Academy Discord. We field questions routinely about how much of anything a DM should prep.
Understanding, of course, that different games have different preparation demands, there are nevertheless some principles one can apply broadly. The five room dungeon is one example, and my go-to scale for hexcrawls is 7 or 19 hexes (a hex flower). But when sketching out preparation from the largest to the smallest scales (worldbuilding all the way down to individual encounters), I keep circling around one number: three.
A “rule of three” for TTRPG prep goes like this: Focus on three things. Zoom in or out and focus on three more things. In this way, you can build complexity without overtaxing yourself. But don't forget that most of this prep is just window dressing if it's not immediately gameable by your player characters!
Let's look at this more closely with some particular examples.
At the scale of the world, your main concerns are the shape of the world, its major historical arcs, and the people who shaped it or were shaped by it. So think of:
Then zoom in or out and repeat until you have a sketch of what your world looks like. One of the benefits of doing things this way is that you also get some hints on what might be interesting factions, situations, and even points of interest/adventure sites.
Campaigns often have a beginning, a middle, and an end, unless they are open-ended sandboxes like my current Dolmenwood campaign. But if you were following along above, you might already have some ideas on when and where to set them, as well as who might be involved. Campaigns usually zoom in considerably. For the start of a campaign, you need any of the following:
Can we build encounters with a rule of three? Why not? I'd focus on these three things when setting up an encounter:
These are nothing more than “reaction”, “morale”, and a sense of motivation, which can also speak to tactics (if you know why they fight, you'll know how they're likely to fight). Use your favorite tables to determine these during play.
Okay, what about the composition of enemies in a more tactical setup? In this situation, you can think of a defense (or offense) in depth scenario. You need:
Which of course means thinking about what groupings go well together and create good battlefield synergies.
So that's it! A rule of three you can use for any kind of preparation. Is it comprehensive? I doubt it. There is undoubtedly more to say. Is it simplistic? A little. But layer these things on and jam them next to each other, and you get a lot of interactivity and apparent depth without too much work.
++++ Like what you just read? You can subscribe to new posts on this blog via any ActivityPub platform (Mastodon, Pleroma, etc.) at @aaron@blog.hilltown.studio or via RSS at https://blog.hilltown.studio/feed
I'm well below the heady heights of 2022, when, in my own words offered as a humorous threat, I played more D&D than I ever have before. And by D&D, I mean D&D and a whole lot of other things. Even so, I've continued to churn along with a narrowed set of games across both campaigns and one-shots.
First, the one-shots.
My greater neighborhood Discord server organizes and runs up to three RPG Fests each year. We've been doing this for several years now, having kicked off the idea in 2021 as an outdoor get-together in one guy's back yard. In the years since we started this, the Discord has grown organically, and has spilled out to include people in other parts of NYC, mostly in Queens.
2024 was no exception here. We regularly manage somewhere around 25 tables, and looking at the statistics for our last fest of 2024 (Spookyfest), I can see that we had 19 systems represented (and 19 DMs..) for our 25 games, attracting 82 people to 138 seats. Not bad! I have participated in every fest since the inception, at times running multiple games, though I've backed off of that commitment.
In 2024, I ran Old-School Essentials for two fests, one in March and one in August, and I ran Cairn 2e for Spookyfest in late October (I think my game was actually in early November). For the OSE games, I attempted to run The Black Wyrm of Brandonsford, vastly underestimating the adventure time, alas, but I have other uses for it, and The Sunbathers, which I will 100% reprise for other groups; solid module. For my Cairn game, I ran the as yet pre-published adventure Dread Hospitality, also a solid module I'd like to drop in somewhere else. (And imagine my surprise at just happening to see the author, Amanda P., pop into and out of our neighborhood Discord because the public listing for the event showed up among very few search results for “Dread Hospitality”.)
I was happy to introduce some folks to new systems and look forward to more of the same in 2025.
From a campaigns perspective, I had 3 things going on. I started 2024 with one ongoing campaign and one in need of revitalization. The ongoing campaign was Secret of the Black Crag, which I ran on Saturday evenings. It took longer than I had anticipated, and I think my players had fun with it. I reviewed it mostly favorably. I decided to make my Saturday evening game a seasonal thing, so I took the summer off to develop the next campaign, which takes place in Dolmenwood. This will continue into late Spring 2025, after which I will retool and see what comes next. There are many options!
The campaign to revitalize came about because my 8 year old Sunday group has had considerable inconsistency in meeting of late. My move out of the neighborhood impacted only choice of hosting locations, but ultimately hasn't been the deciding factor. In any case, the inconsistent meeting schedule worked against our DM for the group, and he called it quits on the game he was running for us. So I offered at the end of 2023 to run some one-shots of other things to see what stuck. OSE and Dragonbane were on the table, but ultimately they ... asked for 5e again. So I dusted off my notes for a campaign sub-setting I had introduced them to via one-shots in the past, a setting I call Underscourge, and we made a campaign out of it. In the meantime, I have transitioned them to a dungeon crawl via Quests from the Infinite Staircase, which I have loosely connected to my sub-setting by Frankensteining the super-setting (called Yer Shar), the sub-setting (Underscourge), Trilemma Adventures, other modules as appropriate, Veins of the Earth, and Quests from the Infinite Staircase into a glorious mess of who knows what! It occurs to me I should write this up more fully at some point.
This revitalized campaign structure is intended to persist into 2025. I'm also aiming for a multi-DM approach, though the structure of this beyond “run the Quests from the Infinite Staircase modules in order, one per DM” is yet to be determined. We're hoping this is a good way forward, but only the days ahead can really tell us.
2024 was a decent year for me and TTRPGs, and it's looking like 2025 will be as well.
++++ Like what you just read? You can subscribe to new posts on this blog via any ActivityPub platform (Mastodon, Pleroma, etc.) at @aaron@blog.hilltown.studio or via RSS at https://blog.hilltown.studio/feed
By way of wrapping up the previous post series, I am releasing my Dolmenwood Book of Hours as a provisionally finished product, with its own place on the web. Will I revisit it later? Probably. For now, what it contains is my own interpretation of the major saints' feast day observances around the Wood, as well as some syncretic folk observances for things that are traditionally observed, like solstices and equinoxes. I had originally written some text establishing one of the solstices as the “old new year”, but that hasn't made it into this version. Perhaps it will.
Anyway, it's all unofficial and unsanctioned, of course. Have fun with it if you're running Dolmenwood and that's your kind of thing. And if you do use it, I'd be happy to hear about it, especially if you have feedback.
Dolmenwood Book of Hours: https://www.hilltown.studio/gdw/hours.html
++++ Like what you just read? You can subscribe to new posts on this blog via any ActivityPub platform (Mastodon, Pleroma, etc.) at @aaron@blog.hilltown.studio or via RSS at https://blog.hilltown.studio/feed
| 5 | Frisk | The Feast of St. Clister. |
| 6 | Eggfast | The Feast of St. Ponch. Pluritine Observances: Release of stick, bark, and leaf boats down local waterways and making food offerings to feed the lost in hopes of guiding them home. |
| 11 | Moot | The Feast of St. Flatius. |
| 12 | Frisk | The Feast of St. Quister. Pluritine Observances: It is customary to bring your to the local priest at mass for a blessing of the animals. Clergy make rounds among the farmers bestowing such blessings on livestock. |
| 13 | Eggfast | The Feast of St. Aeynid. |
| 18 | Moot | The Feast of St. Visyg. |
| 22 | Colly | The Feast of St. Pannard. |
| 23 | Chime | The Feast of St. Simone. |
| 25 | Moot | The Feast of St. Sortia. |
| 27 | Eggfast | The Feast of St. Pastery. Pluritine Observances: Priests and clergy visit local wells and bestow blessings on them. People makes a feast from a winter calf. The largest such observances are in and around Lankshorn. |
| 28 | Sunning | The Feast of St. Bethany. |
| 29 | Yarl's Day | The Feast of St. Tumbel. |
| 30 | The Day of Virgins | The Feast of St. Lillibeth. Pluritine Observances: Folk fashion or buy folded paper doves on which they write their afflictions. These are offered in supplication in hope that St. Lillibeth will intervene to cure them. In Meagre's Reach, people construct a bonfire in the village square in which to offer their doves. |
++++ Like what you just read? You can subscribe to new posts on this blog via any ActivityPub platform (Mastodon, Pleroma, etc.) at @aaron@blog.hilltown.studio or via RSS at https://blog.hilltown.studio/feed
Continuing from the last post, here's the Lymewald entry, with detail for the major saints' days. This is the target styling for the entire Book.
| 2 | Chime | The Feast of St. Waylord. |
| 3 | Hayme | The Feast of St. Gondyw. Pluritine Observances: Blackeswell hosts the largest observance, where the people put on a pageant showing the old kings converting to the Pluritine faith and driving out the "snakes" of the old religions. Smaller pageants occur elsewhere. |
| 9 | Chime | The Feast of St. Calafredus. |
| 15 | Colly | The Feast of St. Wynne. |
| 19 | Frisk | The Feast of St. Albrith. |
| 23 | Chime | The Feast of St. Fredulus. |
| 28 | Sunning | The Feast of St. Eggort. Pluritine Observances: It is custom to keep a simple beeswax candle lit through the night, from sundown on the 28th of Lymewald to sunup on the 1st of Haggryme. This is said to help guide lingering souls to the afterlife. |
++++ Like what you just read? You can subscribe to new posts on this blog via any ActivityPub platform (Mastodon, Pleroma, etc.) at @aaron@blog.hilltown.studio or via RSS at https://blog.hilltown.studio/feed
I started playing around with the Dolmenwood calendar recently, as I was gearing up for my upcoming campaign. Initially, I was just going to write down in an Obsidian page my own collection of folk and religious observances for the major feast days and pre-Pluritine holidays, but when I re-encountered Grisly Eye's vellum-doc project again, I decided to give that a whirl.
I started with House Rules but then decided to import some of my calendar entries to see how those looked in the same setup. I had already committed to using medieval illustrated manuscripts as imagery, and it wasn't long before I came across historical examples of Books of Hours, which, as luck would have it, usually include calendars of feast and saints' days. And thus was born the Dolmenwood Book of Hours.
Now, I have considerable work left to do on it, so what I will do in a series of posts here is detail each month's major feast days and whatever folk holidays I plan to include myself. Once the major saints and holidays are accounted for, I will go back and create smaller, less grandiose observances for the saints who merited only a mention in one table in the Dolmenwood Campaign Book.
The methodology for creating these observances for major saints is as follows:
Since there are 34 major saints, plus a smattering of other holidays (mostly folk stuff), the work is approachable if time consuming. There are 100 saints in all, however, and since the remaining saints may have only epithets attached to them, I'll have to basically invent lore for most of them. I will take the lack of lore for these as an invitation to brew my own, knowing full well that a later supplement may obviate this effort. In the meantime, the Book of Hours
In any case, here is the list for Grimvold, The Onset of Winter, 1st Month of the Year.
++++ Like what you just read? You can subscribe to new posts on this blog via any ActivityPub platform (Mastodon, Pleroma, etc.) at @aaron@blog.hilltown.studio or via RSS at https://blog.hilltown.studio/feed