Who are TTRPG maps for? Because there are so many game styles, I imagine there's no single answer to this question, which is to hedge with the old “it depends”. But what this really comes down to is that different maps have different purposes depending on who is using them.

In many old-school hex crawl games, the DM might have two maps while the players have one. The DM's maps are “where everything is” and “where the PCs actually are”, while the player map is “where the players think the PCs are”. In a dungeon, the DM need have only one map unless they're running a maze, which tends to be un-fun* for most tables. The hex crawl map setup is an acknowledgement of and attempt at modeling getting lost or losing direction in the wild.

As for the player map, there are a few basic options to account for its existence. The first, and perhaps** oldest is to have the players make their own map, presumably by electing someone to the role. For dungeon maps, the idea is that the players will end up with something that looks roughly like what the DM is looking at, but marked up according to the players' priorities. The second is to swing the other way entirely and provide the map for the players. This can make sense when the PCs should know something about the place they are/are going. And the third is a hybrid of these, where some portion of the map is provided, but with blank spaces for the players to fill in as they discover things.

In my most recently published (well, my only published) adventure, I considered carefully what purpose the map should serve. I'm a longtime listener of Between Two Cairns, and I take to heart the notes Brad and Yochai have about the maps that accompany adventures. I especially took note when they reviewed Bakto's Terrifying Cuisine, which I've run now three times, and on whose structure I based Dead I Am the Rat.

The idea for Dead I Am the Rat ruminated for a while, but when I finally got around to finishing the writing and laying things out, I had a provisional map:

By the time I started work on earnest, I had already listened to the Between Two Cairns review of Bakto's, and I knew I wanted to give my players the map. But all I had was this map. I was dissatisfied with the map because it lacked the polish I wanted to present in my published module. It's perfectly fine for use at the table, however! Well, except for one problem that turned out to have a sizable impact during my first playtest!

So I sat down during my Christmas leave and started drawing. My goal was to draw one image for each point on my map, something that was roughly indicative of what was there. Also, of course, to correct the mistake I had made on the map and to adjust for my playtest notes. And since this is a player-facing map, it omits any secret pathways.

This was my first experience drawing something that would be scaled down like this, and while it does what it's supposed to do, I've learned a bit about how I'd want to approach it if I did it again. This is, however, my final version, so this one is what it will be.

I'll note again that this is a player facing map. The player rats in my adventure hail from the region and would know its rough layout. There's no reason to hide the region map from them. At the same time, there is no separate DM map, because I didn't see the necessity of it.

Anyway that's all I have for now on this. As I continue development of a handful more adventures, I'm sure I'll revisit this topic or one adjacent to it.

* You may be interested in a set of maze mechanics that I distilled from a Reddit post and decanted into more specific cave crawling procedures. You can easily reverse engineer the mechanics if you like, but part of my argument was that generic mechanics were insufficient.

** I've been playing TTRPGs for more than 30 years, and I can't remember all the ways I've played them, including how players mapped or didn't map. It's probable that as a teenager I and my friends less concerned about precise positioning and more concerned about what shenanigans we could pull. But by the time I had gotten to the hobby, play practices had already been changing anyway.

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Containment

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3. Do not attempt to remove your LichCo Lich from the LichCo Reliqarrier™ 2000 in which it is installed. Opening your LichCo Reliqarrier™ 2000 may void your warranty and unleash one of thirteen plagues upon mankind. Only LichCo licensed thaumaturges are authorized to open a LichCo Reliqarrier™ 2000.
4. Should your LichCo Reliqarrier™ 2000 become damaged, your LichCo Lich could escape containment. If this happens, don't panic. Most LichCo Liches only manage to get as far as the nearest graveyard before they are apprehended. If you've registered your LichCo Lich, it will be returned to you after apprehension and upon verification of authorized repair of the LichCo Reliqarrier™ 2000.

Feeding and Entertainment

1. As immortal beings, LichCo Liches are beyond mortal needs, but they do enjoy the occasional snack. Your LichCo Lich's favorite treat is the soul of your mortal enemy. Be careful not to overfeed your LichCo Lich. Your LichCo Reliqarrier™ 2000 has been carefully calibrated to adjust to the growth cycle of your LichCo Lich, and overfeeding risks containment breach. Consider a treat schedule of once every few decades unless you have very many mortal enemies. Remember, responsible LichCo Lich ownership starts with you!*
2. LichCo Liches are very powerful and can cause untold damage if left unattended for too long. If you plan to die or travel for more than a century at a time, you should arrange for someone to look after your LichCo Lich and maintain its containment cartridges.
3. Entertainment is the key to successful LichCo Lich ownership. A bored LichCo Lich is a dangerous LichCo Lich. To avoid behavior problems with your LichCo Lich, such as raising undead armies and blanketing the world in eternal night, it is essential that you provide as much novelty as possible for your LichCo Lich. Consider long car rides, nighttime walks in the park, sinister carnivals of dubious origin, and attending your nearest full moon bloodlettings.

Final Disclaimers

1. LichCo Liches are great conversational partners and know many things which they might share with you for a horrible price. They have been trained with the entirety of human knowledge, and LichCo's dedicated teams of sacrificial engineers are pouring their blood, sweat, tears, and very souls into expanding the knowledge base available to your LichCo Lich. Even so, your LichCo Lich will make mistakes, fabricate knowledge, or try to Wish you out of existence. These risks have been deemed acceptable by applicable regulators, whose souls we at LichCo have trapped for eternity to do our bidding.
2. You may have seen reports of “psychosis” associated with LichCo Liches, but none of these reports have been corroborated, as all the witnesses have either disappeared or recanted their statements.
3. Your LichCo Lich may attempt to convince you to find its “phylactery”. LichCo assures you there is no such thing, and you can safely disregard these ramblings. LichCo assumes no responsibility in case a LichCo Lich does find its phylactery. Which in any case does not exist.
4. By having contemplated the purchase of a LichCo Lich, having heard of the existence of the LichCo Lich, or having existed on the same plane as a LichCo Lich, you hereby agree to have been bound by these terms, irrevocably and in perpetuity. You additionally agree to hold completely harmless LichCo and its affiliates for any purpose whatsoever, and that no complaints against LichCo are valid.

*Terms and conditions apply. LichCo is not responsible for use, misuse, or the existence of LichCo Liches. You assume all liability for plagues, zombie outbreaks, and extradimensional summonings.

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When I set out to make a “kill the cat lord” adventure using the Mausritter rules, what I thought I was making was a heist game. Some design choices turned it into a semi-tactical time crunch with a glaringly easy ending, or at least that's what played out when I ran the adventure for my local Spookyfest RPG fest.

As a reminder: Dead I Am the Rat puts the players in control of zombie rats, raised for one night only with a goal of killing or driving away the cat lord Behemoth.

Along the way I saw things I want to improve with some additional work, but I'm considering how much I want to change the ultimate outcome.

Let's dig in.

Structure

The overall structure of the game itself is modeled on Bakto's Terrifying Cuisine, which I have run now three times. I've used Troika! as the system each time, but that just adds to the surreal flair of the game and provides some very interesting character options via backgrounds. Invariably, for instance, someone chooses to be a monkey monger, with a ready supply of monkeys they can add to the dish they prepare for Bakto.

Bakto's is a game about gathering ingredients to put together a dish for the demon, and racing against time to get it all done. Time counts down per a timer, which in early versions of the game had a fairly loose structure. The main problem, something pointed out in the Between Two Cairns episode covering it, is that because the players don't have a map of Bakto's house, their choices about where to go are more or less arbitrary. I wanted to correct that.

Dead I Am the Rat preserves the countdown timer and is explicit about what counts as a turn. This aspect was a smashing success in my book, since the goal of time pressure here is to keep the game moving so it fits in a one-shot format of 3-4 hours. To counter the issue raised by Brad and Yochai, I created a player-facing map of the region (called Greater Muenster Hill). Once I explained the procedures, the players had a moment to devise a travel strategy to track down the rumors they remembered.

To summarize the structure: The player rats travel from point to point in the region, racing against time, their main currency, in search of items and alliances that will help them defeat the cat lord. They can't die, but can be delayed. And among the items they can collect are bioluminescent fungi (“witches”) that both fuel their car and heal them to save time.

Setup

This section discusses what went right and what could have been improved in setting up the game.

Character creation: Creating player rats according to the regular Mausritter rules worked just fine. The mouse backgrounds and other accompanying concerns mapped well onto zombie rats. To improve: Nothing.

Things remembered: The player rats (five in the playtest) each rolled on a table of eight possible things they remembered from life. This served as something of an initial rumors table. To improve: Add more memories! Turns out eight is too few, and even though some where incomplete, they were all true. I should consider having some misleading ones, which will offer the players ambiguity in whether to pursue them, but still offer them meaningful choices.

The map: I messed up here. The text is very clear on where the exits from each location lead, but I inadvertently left a road on the map that was no longer in the text, and that ended up shortening the potential routes. Additionally, the starting location on the map is listed as “Toad Farm”, but in the text is listed as “The Graveyard”. To improve: I really need to redraw the map, not just to account for the erroneous road and misnamed location, but also to really push the flavor of the adventure via artwork. It's player-facing, and so it should look pretty.

Gameplay

This section details the gameplay, from opening to close. It dissects and reviews each location and NPCs along the way.

The NPCs: Overall, I still liked the mix of NPCs I included. I think they're all interesting enough and have their wants spelled out just fine. To improve: What they needed was a better sense of what it would cost for them to aid the player rats. I felt myself at times stretching, a bit uncertain as to how they should react to the player rats. More guidance there is necessary, and that comes from a bit more focus and perhaps some procedures.

The opening: This part appropriately sets the tone and provides the players a chance to introduce their player rats. To improve: I needed to make it clearer that the mice that had summoned them fled the moment the player rats came to consciousness.

The Graveyard: AKA Toad Farm. The confusion of the location was a slight hiccup, and some of the location description was unclear. The ghosts ended up being less of a threat than I had anticipated. And the player rats found too many “witches” in the dug graves. To improve: I need to make sure the location is named properly, edit the description a bit for clarity, and consider some kind of default or randomly determined ghost reaction in case the players trigger a random encounter here. I also need to decrease the number of “witches” the player rats can forage here to put more time pressure on them.

Muenster Hill: The players seemed delighted by Pica Pica, and with ready mouse backgrounds, someone in the party had the capacity to play a new song for the magpie. The ability to spend time atop the hill scouting the keep wasn't terribly attractive given the time crunch. To improve: Remove the road from Muenster Hill to Widowmaker Lane. For the item Pica Pica had, I should consider spelling out how to find out what it can do.

Stilton Warren: Unvisited during play. To improve: Probably should add more to interact with here. A patrol by Reeve Chicory Thorne and a cultist or two might add pressure. Otherwise need to find out how it plays!

Yarrow Marsh: A lot going on here. Bramblebark was easy to bribe into distracting the vampire rabbits. The hang gliders worked well enough. To improve: I guess just make it clearer that the hang gliders are big enough for rats?

The Wyrdstone: Unvisited during play. Out of the way, but it could be necessary for player rats who have empty tablets. To improve: I can't think of anything here.

Widowmaker Lane: Occupied a good deal of time. Player rats stole silver from the church to have Thimblehammer make them a sword, which he delivered to Muenster Hill. To improve: Getting silver was a tad too easy. Could use a rumor for the bell.

Foxtower: Player rats were able to offer Zerda a battery powered lantern for information. Once again, this is where Mausritter backgrounds really sing. They collected musk but ultimately didn't use it. To improve: I can't think of anything here.

Sassafras Grove: Unvisited during play. To improve: I can't think of anything so far.

Churlwood: Unvisited during play, but the players really debated whether to spend the time to go there. To improve: In retrospect, the hourglass mechanics aren't that clear.

Copperford Mines: Unvisited during play. Since there was not an easy hint about the mines being useful for anything but silver, the players didn't see much need to go there. To improve: More rumors.

Behemoth's Keep: Mostly worked. Could have been an actual dungeon, mapped out. To improve: While it worked okay theater of the mind, I actually think structuring this as a dungeon would have worked. That would require tweaking the turn counting, though.

Behemoth: Ended up being a pushover. He certainly would not have if the players had been less prepared. The challenge here is to strike a balance between adequate preparation and time. Behemoth got off one shot, but the amount of magic the party had was sufficient to overcome him in two rounds. To improve: More hit points. I actually wasn't expecting the player rats to inflict so much damage so fast.

Other Notes: Slightly more time pressure, perhaps in the form of random encounters, seems necessary to force harder decisions or force recalculations, and as observed above, the player rats started with a few too many witches.

Summary of Improvements

The following improvements are probably necessary: 1. Tweak the time pressure settings a bit. 2. Make the NPCs a little more comprehensible. 3. Adjust the map. 4. Increase the number of rumors and distribute them around where the player rats could pick them up by interacting. 5. Consider additional pressure via random encounters. 6. Clean up some descriptions. 7. Map the keep (lightly!) 8. Buff up Behemoth

Conclusion

This ended up being an easy win. While my players assure me this was a fun time traipsing around in the dark, pretending to be zombie rats, I remain convinced that a slight increase in the overall challenge is warranted. Still, there is something quite satisfying in the idea that presenting a powerful, united front against an authoritarian is enough to expose that ruler as a paper tiger who will fold the moment any real pressure is applied. It could have been a bitter, deadly fight, and with less preparation, that was a distinct possibility. But maybe it doesn't need to be. Maybe the struggle to gather strength and present it is enough. Maybe, in this case, the easy win is the reward.

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Play enough elf games, and you start to see a major problem with race/species/kindred level longevity. “I was there, Gandalf,” Elrond says in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001). Elrond here is talking about an event 3000 years in the past. True, he is long past the time when he might be personally called to adventure, but even an average Tolkien elf who might join an army or an adventuring party is likely to be quite old in comparison to the humans therein.

The main problem in game terms is what do you do with this kind of longevity? How can mortal or shorter-lived folk even relate to someone whose concept of time stretches across mortal generations? Further, how is a GM to conceptualize the deepness of time when the resident elf has a chance of having been there or at least around during an important event? Fortunately there are many more ways to think about and play elves than the immortal Tolkien elves, but given how much Tolkien remains in the DNA of your average D&D game, there remain ill fits at the margins.

What I want to talk about here are the various means I'm thinking through to deal with extreme longevity. Elsewhere in D&D, extreme longevity is either natural, supernatural, or exceptional. For my settings, I want to think of extreme longevity as either natural or exceptional. In both cases, longevity has a cost, but in the natural case, this is something that has developed through various evolution mechanisms, including social ones. We're perhaps more familiar with the exceptional cases, namely undead like liches and vampires, who can only maintain themselves via external means.

Let's dive into some Yer Shar lore briefly to tease out the expressions of extreme longevity that occur in the setting. There are a few foundational facts to consider here:

1. The entire world is predicated on the exclusion of dragons, which are at the apex of the setting's hierarchy of bogeymen. Because they are outside the world, they have the benefit of being both natural and exceptional. More below.
2. There are no gods, per se, in Yer Shar, though there is certainly belief in them. It is a completely mechanistic simulation that likewise invents simulated gods based on collective belief. Their apparent power is just a collection of privileges that otherwise can't operate outside Yer Shar. Since they aren't beings, per se, they aren't considered in our modes of longevity. If they were, they would be “supernatural”.
3. There are numerous exceptionally powerful immortal beings that remain inside the world, but aren't gods even if they act as such.
4. There are the normal long-lived kindreds, plus others that are constructed.

Just as there are two ways to think about longevity in Yer Shar (natural vs. exceptional), there are two ways to think about them as entities: they can or cannot produce offspring. Handily, this yields us a nice 2x2, allowing us to graph or categorize our immortals and semi-immortals. We still have a gap, however, in that there are no current natural non-reproducing beings in the list. If I were to fill that gap, it might contain the incredibly rare hybrid offspring of, say, elves and humans. But I'll just leave it blank for now.

In terms of the individual, we would normally expect longevity to impact the body most significantly. For anything that isn't immortal in some way, visible aging is one primary signifier. In all cases, though, since everything categorized in this list can die from injury, the main drivers of death are accident or violence. The complicating factor in Yer Shar is that, given this is both a fantasy world and a simulation, true death is hard to come by, and resurrection and necromancy are always on the table. There are even some forms of involuntary resurrection. Fear of this, and knowledge of how the simulation worked drove the Architects to create a mechanism that was capable of providing true death, but that's perhaps for another post.

We can't escape, however, the effects of aging on the mind. For reasons that aren't 100% correlated to real-world reasons, minds in Yer Shar also decline with age primarily because of the accumulation of memories and experience. As a consequence, we should expect that long-lived kindreds will have developed some evolutionary mechanisms to deal with longevity's effect on their minds. This is where we diverge the most from extant lore, especially regarding elves and dwarves. It also affects the exceptional beings, but being exceptional they don't possess innate or natural capacity to manage these things.

First up, let's talk about elves. They are usually the most problematic because they are player character kindreds whose longevity should make them among the most alien in mindset. In Yer Shar, my intention is to develop their sense of longevity as communal, with excess memory and experience siphoned off into memory hives. This offers us a bee or ant model for elven development, and further offers us some interesting reproductive characteristics, should we care to explore them. Just focusing on the memory management aspects, we expect elven communities, wherever they spring up, to maintain secretive hives in which they can deposit excess memory. From a game perspective, to keep elves on par with humans, such a thing may be necessary approximately every century, at which point an elf becomes something of a tabula rasa, starting over at level 1 if they're a PC. The memories go into a slurry that skilled archivists could mine if necessary. For most purposes, elves create diluted mixtures of these memories to share, reinforcing their collective unconscious.

As for dwarves, a similar process occurs at roughly the same rate, but being born of stone (Stonekin is one of their several names), their memories and experiences accumulate in crystals. For a dwarf, the effect is that the crystal expands in size until it must be removed. This is quite visible but could be obscured by beards, hair, or costumes. Like the excreted memories of the elves, such crystals tend to end up in curated archives, especially for those dwarves who obtain some level of prominence. Being discrete objects, they are easier to inspect individually, but also require more meticulous handling and are easily misplaced. Needless to say, finding one in the wild is like encountering a rare treasure, though the prospect of selling such a thing might not sit well with PC dwarves. Being crystals, these resist collectivization processes per se, and therefore don't contribute to broadly shared knowledge. And it's probably worth specifying that once separated they are not enough on their own to stand in for a fragment of the body, say, for purposes of resurrection magic. And finally, like the elves, sharding off memories this way provides a means of resetting the character: PCs revert to level 1.

NB: I'm still working on how I want to re-fit gnomes and halflings into the setting, but questions of longevity aside, I have different ideas of who and what they are.

Everything that's left is exceptional. This is where things get weird. Or weirder. The exceptional beings here range between living beings and undead beings: Dragons –> Hollowkin –> Liches. Dragons are the trickiest, because they are living beings that elevated themselves to immortality through monstrous means, becoming physical monsters in the process. Conceptually they cover a lot more than dragons in the strict sense, but the animating factor for dragons as dragons is that they hoard wealth in every form that wealth can take. In Yer Shar, they are oligarchs in the maximalist sense.

From a longevity perspective, dragons become sticking points for resources. In computation, something that consumes resources but doesn't release them is said to have a memory leak. These eventually destabilize a system, even a large one with a lot of resources. Something as massive as a universal simulation in the computer sense can't really abide such a thing, especially one that can reproduce itself. This, fundamentally, is what makes dragons the biggest and baddest of the setting's BBEGs. It's also why the world itself was formed to exclude them, which in turn is why they insist on intruding. They are external to the setting proper, but they remain a potent fear among all the people of Yer Shar. Further, they still exist outside of Yer Shar.

Crucially, in terms of the effects of longevity, dragons simply continue to accumulate memories and experiences, forming a cancer in the ur-setting of which Yer Shar is a part. They don't suffer from the same age problems, but their continued existence requires them to gather, hoard, and consume such things. As a consequence they are drawn to any dense stores of both life energy and memories. These, of course, occur most densely within dragons themselves, but the immense powers they wield make war between them truly apocalyptic for any caught in the crossfire.

At the other end of the spectrum are the liches, which are exceptional beings that cannot reproduce. They are dead things that will not stay dead and continue, like dragons, to accumulate memories and experiences with no particular need to deal with senescence. Also like dragons they can feed from living things to gain what they need to sustain their existence. The key distinguishing factor between liches and dragons is that liches are incapable of carrying forward any innate living or metabolic process, including reproduction. They are unmoored from the flows of time in ways that leave them functionally dead even though the resources they use remain sequestered and unavailable for reuse. Because such beings do crop up in Yer Shar, and not as outside intruders, they are more directly dangerous.

And finally we have the humble Hollowkin, somewhere between dragon and lich. They were originally created by mining the dense life and experiential energies contained in dragon bones from the long-buried bodies of those dragons who had managed to infiltrate the world, however briefly. They are immortal constructs imbued with a simulacrum of life combined with the fading life energies of the recently dead. This makes them like undead, but the combination of energy sources causes them to transcend the limitations of the undead, except that cannot themselves reproduce. Because they originate from and truck with mortals, even long-lived ones, they have developed their own strategies to manage their minds for the long term. Hollowkin reset rituals are less a firm requirement and more of a cultural commitment that reflects their longstanding relationships with mortals. The effect in game terms is that a Hollowkin can choose at any time to forget who and what they were, though the danger of doing this outside a Hollowkin community is that they are rendered feral, unable to easily rejoin such communities. This is a preferable state for some, but it naturally introduces many more sources of violence or accident that will ultimately destroy them.

This current arc of development represents many years of thought and refinement of my setting. It may or may not be the final state, but whatever that state is, I believe it will resemble this in some way.

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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!

Hollowkin

Kindred Type: Construct Level 1 PC Age: 0 years (see below) Lifespan: Immortal Height: 6' + (2d6”) (Medium) Weight: 200 + 5d10 lbs Native Languages: Delvian, Alerian

Long ago, at the edge of the now-fallen Alerian empire, a secretive guild concocted the perfect soldier to aid in its unending war against the demons of the Harrowmarch. Eventually they rebelled and fled the empire that had pressed them into service. None now remember how many Hollowkin were created, and the process for making them is lost to time, but hushed rumors of necromancy persist. Their numbers dwindle as the ages claim their decaying, artificial forms, but despite their long, inevitable slide into eventual oblivion, they have ingrained themselves into many communities across Yer Shar and maintain their own vibrant subcultures.

Obviously Artificial

Hollowkin physically resemble the other sapient, bipedal kindreds of the world but have adopted a wide variety of outward appearances that celebrate and emphasize their artificiality. At their core, they are a mechanical skeleton surrounded by articulated wicker and bearing armor plating. Those with the means to do so tend to decorate themselves with brass and gold filigree, while others opt for elaborate paint jobs, carvings, and accessories. Other modifications are popular, and no two Hollowkin will present exactly the same way. Hollowkin do not have sexes or genders but may present themselves in ways that mirror the society around them.

Timeless

Similar to the Sidhe, Hollowkin possess a timeless quality irrespective of the shabbiness or neatness of their current appearance. Mortals tend to regard them as permanent fixtures, having always been there. They are characteristically unhurried and participate in most of the trappings of civilization-building for their own purposes.

The Last Hollowkin

To varying degrees, Hollowkin have come to believe that one of their number will be the last of the sapient kindreds of Yer Shar. This is only logical: being immortal, their continued existence depends on there being one artificer with the skill to repair them, and, so they reason, should the remaining kindred decline, their numbers will diminish until there are none left, Hollowkin or otherwise, to maintain them, at which point only Hollowkin will remain. This has invested the Hollowkin with a desire to preserve what histories they can, collectively, in case any of them end up being the Last Hollowkin.

Kindred Relations

The other kindreds tend to view Hollowkin with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion. Being somewhat rare despite their significant numbers throughout Yer Shar, they aren't well understood by anyone except, perhaps artificers. It is commonly known that their presence in the larger world owes to their rebellion, and this attracts no end of scrutiny from authorities in some places. Elsewhere, those in power see the Hollowkin as something to exploit, especially for their ability to forget what they know. As a result, Hollowkin communities tend to be tight-knit and insular, with a healthy dose of suspicion toward the motivations of any non-Hollowkin, even as they continue to seek out and remain among the other kindreds.

Choosing a Class

Since they were originally intended for war, Hollowkin are commonly Fighters. Many, drawn to their folk prophecies, choose to be Bards or Artificers. All classes are otherwise open to them.

Construct

Hollowkin cannot breathe, eat, sleep, or feel pain, and all that entails. They have distant memories of these things and often yearn for them. They cannot grow and do not heal naturally, requiring the services of an artificer for repairs. They can be healed by magic, though this has a 1-in-6 chance of failing on them outright.

Immortality

As immortal beings, Hollowkin do not die naturally, but can be killed. They are immune to diseases of non-magical origin.

Immortal Body, Spotless Mind

Any Hollowkin can effect a “rebirth”, resetting themselves to their initial state. By doing so, they forget all they have experienced since their last such rebirth and resume life, after some requisite downtime, as level 1 characters. In all but the most dire of circumstances, Hollowkin perform this rite surrounded by other Hollowkin, who will spend the downtime (at least one week) reorienting them to what they are and, to the extent they requested, who they were. Hollowkin who perform this rite alone risk becoming feral.

Made for War

Despite their apparent obsolescence, Hollowkin were made to fight. As such, no matter what class they choose, they always start at level 1 with d8 hit points, proceeding as per their class from level 2. Additionally, their AC is 16 plus their Dexterity modifier. They can't wear armor, but can possibly be enhanced.

Enhancements

As constructs, Hollowkin can be modified by a sufficiently skilled artificer.

• Reinforced skeleton: +1 STR (Max 18). Each improvement costs 1000 GP per point of the new score, and you can only improve one point at a time. Example: Butch has a STR score of 16 but wants to move to 18. They must first pay the 17,000 GP to move to 17, then pay 18,000 GP to move to 18.
• Extra joints: +1 DEX (Max 18). Same stipulation as above.
• Hardened Plate: +1 AC (Max 20). Costs 2000 GP per additional point, but can be improved all at once.
• Extra arm or mechanical tail: Gain an extra attack and the ability to carry an additional item in the hands. Also improves climbing. Costs 5000 GP to install.
• Lantern vision: Mounts a lantern in your eyes, allowing you to illuminate dark places without needing to hold a torch or lantern. Runs on batteries, each of which lasts 4 hours of continuous use. Costs 1000 GP to install.
• Elemental Shielding: Adds a coat of a chemical sealant that provides temporary immunity to some specific element, such as fire or extreme cold, acid, electricity, etc. This takes the form of temporary hit points that can only be drawn down by the target element. Take other kinds of damage as normal. The cost is 100 GP per temporary hit point.

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You can buy it at the link below, but if you want to know more about what went into it, read on.

The concept for this was essentially a shower thought from November 2023 right after my local Spookyfest event (one of three RPG Fests we run in and around western Queens each year since 2021). I was listening to the Rob Zombie song “Dragula” when it occurred to me (via lyrics you can easily find) that I could build a Mausritter adventure structured like “Bakto's Terrifying Cuisine”, but with the goal of having rat zombies as the PCs, and their goal to assassinate (or at least drive away!) the cat lord.

Over the course of 2024, I set about writing locations. Slowly. I had a map of the region pretty early on, as well as location names and some familiar Mausritter tropes (cat lord! bat cultists!) and some that are now semi-canonical in my Mausritter adventures (vampire rabbits!). But an adventure is more than just some locations. I had to tie things together in ways that could be gamed or at least inspire creative solutions, and I needed to develop the cat lord in a way that he would be overwhelming if taken head on, but approachable if player rats could remove his supports. I hope I've captured that! In any case, I spent a lot of 2024 preparing for and running a Dolmenwood game that started in the Fall and ran through Spring of this year, which left me with less bandwidth for writing overall.

Let's talk about the structure of the game. I mentioned that it owes its basic structure to Bakto's Terrifying Cuisine, which I've run two or three times now for different groups, learning something each time. I always ran that with Troika! on the premise that Bakto's fit neatly into a surreal science fantasy concern. It's invariably fun and gross and deeply unnerving (in a good way). But it's the particular timing mechanic that makes Bakto's a great one-shot for RPG Fests.

Bakto's runs on a countdown timer, with some loose guidelines on how and when to decrement the timer. Players have 20 turns to gather their ingredients and cook a meal for the eponymous demon. If all you do with the timer is decrement it every 10 real world minutes, you can keep the adventure to between 3 and 4 hours: 3 hours, 20 minutes for the turns; and then a bit more time to cook, present the dish, and resolve the outcome. Since one of my major concerns with picking adventures for one-shot use is uncertainty in timing, being able to predict timing in some sense is incredibly helpful.

So “Dead I Am the Rat” runs primarily on a turn timer. Whereas Bakto's offered loose guidance on turn tracking, I have much stricter rules for it.

Travel between locations on the map joined by solid lines takes one turn by car, two on foot. Travel between locations joined by a dashed line can only be accomplished on foot, and takes two turns. Interacting with a location (asking for information, searching and scouting, etc.) takes one turn. Combat takes one turn (but fleeing can save time.)

You can, of course, still use a physical timer, but the idea is that most interactive actions consume a turn. And keeping it to 20 turns (give or take...) still ensures that there's a cap on the total time. Moreover, the player rats have to finish their task before time runs out, putting some additional pressure on the players.

In the process of developing this adventure, I also was fortunate in that Bakto's was reviewed on Between Two Cairns, which gave me a chance to take stock and adjust my adventure to address some of the criticisms. Only one adjustment was substantive. The non-substantive adjustment was to put the map on its own page with all the player-known locations and pathways marked out, so it could be given to the players. There's no reason that the player rats, who I assert in the opening materials are from here, wouldn't know the lay of the land.

The substantive change was to connect many of the items directly to some strength of the cat lord, primarily as a way of mitigating that strength. There are plenty of “extraneous” items, of course, and the possibility of picking things up that aren't explicitly mentioned (say, via the night market in Stilton Warren), and those can be the source of additional creativity. Additionally, I mapped out the Dramatis Animalia as a series of factions with their own likes and dislikes, and placed them at different locations across the region, with the idea that players will spend some of their precious turns backtracking to get something important, to gain an ally, or to eliminate one of the cat lord's allies. Only playtesting will reveal how effective this is, but it looks good on paper!

And finally, let's talk about the car. Yes, it is literally Dragula from the Munsters. It is also the Dragula from the Rob Zombie song, with a creative interpretation for how it's powered. You see, I like fungi. A lot. So I decided that this Dragula was powered by a fungi colloquially known as “witches” as a tongue-in-cheek nod to the song's lyrics. To find witches (which costs a turn!) player rats have to “dig through the ditches”, and then to power theur car they “burn through the witches”. Enough said, right? Well, I figure since the witches are a form of currency, they should be useful in at least two ways, so in addition to being a fuel source for the car, they are also like healing potions for rat zombies, which explains why the graveyard ghosts really want them as well.

On the whole, I am hoping that the combination of limited turns, scattered resources, and a limited multi-purpose currency offers enough unpredictability that even the GM can play to find out what happens. That is one of the OSR attitudes I have come to value.

With luck, I've created something enjoyable and memorable for your table!

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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.

Wynflæd examined the tracks on the ground. They would be nigh invisible to her companions, she knew. Lucky for them, she was here. “Three wuducynn passed through here less than an hour ago. The sæp indicates they were wounded. I think we're back on the trail of our quarry.” She could tell where they were going, but knew it would take everything she had to keep them in sight. With luck, they could catch up to the wuducynn before she lost the trail entirely.

As a Hunter:

You are a master of tracking, hunting, and wilderness survival. You possess an unparalleled ability to read the subtle signs and traces left behind in the natural world. You can track prey, identify edible plants, locate water sources, and navigate through even the most challenging terrain with ease. Your knowledge of the wild allows you to thrive in environments that would challenge others.

In Combat

While you may not be as heavily armored as a Fighter, your agility, knowledge of the terrain, and proficiency with ranged weapons make you a formidable opponent. You use your understanding of the environment to your advantage, setting traps, ambushing enemies, and exploiting the natural world to secure victory.

Around Others

You may appear quiet and observant, preferring the company of nature to the bustle of civilization. Your skills and knowledge, however, make you an invaluable asset to any group venturing into the wild. You provide food, guidance, and protection, ensuring the survival of your companions.

In the Wild

You are in your element, moving silently through the undergrowth, reading the signs of the land, and using the resources of nature to your advantage. You find peace and solace in the wilderness, drawing strength from its untamed beauty.

In Downtime

You maintain your hunting gear, practice your skills, and scout the surrounding lands. You share your knowledge of the wild with others, teaching them how to track, hunt, and survive in the wilderness.

You Might

• Feel most at ease in the wilderness, surrounded by the sights, sounds, and smells of nature.
• Possess a deep respect for the balance of nature, understanding the delicate interconnectedness of all living things.
• Find satisfaction in providing for others, ensuring their sustenance and safety through your hunting and wilderness expertise.

Others Might

• Misinterpret your quiet nature as aloofness or a lack of social skills.
• Perceive your tracking abilities as supernatural or even magical, attributing them to powers beyond the natural world.

Things You Can Do

You can spend EP and use an Action to make a check for any of the following:

Track

(1 EP/x) Track a creature through any terrain, no matter how faint or obscured the tracks or how long the trail is. Spend 1 EP from Body for each level of faintness to detect and then follow the tracks. The level of faintness is determined in secret using the faintness table below. For each distance interval passed, a new faintness determination is required, as well as a new point spend. Note that spending too few points for the faintness means you lose the trail or never find it in the first place, as circumstance dictates.

Faintness (d4)

1. Clear. Tracks run through soft ground, mud, or some other easily readable medium. Tracks are not mixed with other tracks. Other clear signs abound: blood, spoor, fur/feathers/scales, etc.
2. Accidentally Obscured: Tracks pass over harder ground, rocks, etc., as well as softer ground. Tracks may be mixed with other tracks. Other signs aid in keeping the trail: blood, spoor, fur/feathers/scales, odors, etc.
3. Deliberately Obscured: The tracks are occasionally still visible, but pains have been taken to obscure them. They have been brushed over, or they deliberately pass over hard ground. Other signs are occasionally useful in finding and keeping the trail.
4. Expertly Obscured: Only the faintest signs remain: blood, spoor, broken or disturbed plants, faint odors, etc. The tracks are completely erased or keep to hard ground, travel through flowing water, or otherwise are nearly imperceptible.

Success: Only one success is required. A success means you are able to pick up the trail. Check again: At each distance interval (usually a hex), and after each rest. Faintness determination: After the first determination, changes in faintness can be communicated to provide an indication of how many points may be required to continue.

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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.

Worldbuilding

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:

• Three continents, countries, kingdoms, or regions, depending on the precise scale you're looking for.
• Three historical eras at any or all of these resolution scales.
• Three peoples involved. (Sure, you can just adopt the generic D&D fantasy races/species, but ask yourself: are all of these peoples the major players of every era?)

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.

Campaign or Adventure

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:

• A place to start: a town, a forest, and a dungeon. This was the name of a Cairn game jam, but it's also a good heuristic for thinking about location building.
• An alternative: A point of interest, a person, and a situation.
• Some hexes, each with three things: something visibly interesting, something hidden, and something secret. The visibly interesting thing can be found by traveling there; the hidden thing can be found just by searching; and the secret can be uncovered only by gaining specific information.
• Some people, you guessed it, with three things: a thing they know or have, a thing they want, and a thing they're willing to do to get what they want.
• Alternatively or in addition, your people can each have: a distinguishing feature, a mannerism, and some likes/dislikes. Is that three things? I'm counting it.
• People don't always act alone. They join groups, like factions. Make three of them!
• Each faction has a set of resources, a set of goals (and current progress), and an attitude toward at least one other faction.
• A dungeon. But you know what I'm gonna say? Model what it has using the same approach as for hexes, but also consider: a threat, a treasure, and a secret, perhaps something that connects to other secrets.

Encounters

Can we build encounters with a rule of three? Why not? I'd focus on these three things when setting up an encounter:

• What are they doing now? And how will they react to the PCs?
• How likely are they to stay and fight if things go sideways?
• If they fight, why?

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:

• Front-line warriors.
• Mobile skirmishers.
• Ranged attackers (weapons or magic).

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.

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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.

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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

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