Tabletop Gaming Feeds

Original Video: https://youtu.be/a3TtkSYi_zY

Transcript is lightly edited. Expect typos and worse ;)

This one comes straight from a viewer suggestion, and I'm actually glad it did, because decision paralysis is one of those table problems that can quietly kill a good RPG session. If you've ever sat there with a party staring at three doors, an intersection, a staircase, and a weird statue and nobody wants to pick one, well, yeah, that's the thing, right? That's the indecision. 

And today I'm talking player to player. How to stop freezing, start moving and still play smart, especially in old school games where time is a resource and the whole we all just think about it is how you get jumped by wandering monsters and other assorted miscreants. So now being careful is good. I'm not saying it isn't. Caution keeps you alive, but decision paralysis. That indecision is where the table gets stuck in a loop. You find yourself asking for info you cannot realistically get. Maybe you keep inventing new plans instead of choosing one. Or you keep waiting for the DM to confirm that it's safe. I got news for you. It probably isn't going to. You're stuck trying to find a perfect option or solution that simply doesn't exist, and paralysis has a real cost. Torches. Burns. Spells tick away. Noise travels. Wandering monsters happen. The dungeon doesn't pause because the party is having a committee meeting.

I'm sorry. Here's why this happens. Most of the time, this indecision comes from one of a few places. Fear of consequences, right? Old school play has teeth. Some choices bite. That is literally part of the game. That's what you're in for. Then there's trying to solve it in your head instead of in the game world. People start playing mental chess or checkers instead of exploring. And then there's waiting for permission. Players want the DM to validate the plan. In old school play, Like I said before, you generally don't get that. Too many choices. Too many options. Every hallway becomes a debate, and debate becomes, it becomes the game. 

So how do you fix that from the players side? Here's what works at real tables. Default to action, not discussion. And what do I mean by that? If the party is stuck, somebody has to be willing to say, alright, we're making a move. And not recklessly not Leroy Jenkins. No. Deliberately. If you want a simple mental rule. Movement creates information. You don't get certainty by thinking harder. You get it by probing the situation. So ask yourself, what's the smallest safe action we can take right now? What can we do that's reversible if it starts going wrong? You don't need a perfect plan. You do need the next move. So stop trying to pick the best plan and instead pick. It's actually good enough because most of the time you're chasing perfect. If you've got two or three decent options, arguing for ten minutes doesn't make choosing easier. It does burn time. It raises your party's risk, but doesn't make the decision making any easier. So use the good enough test. Does the decision keep us alive or move us towards the goal? Is the cost one that you're willing to pay? If yes, Have at it. 

Make scouting a procedure, not an argument. A lot of paralysis is. We don't know what's behind that door. So don't debate the door. Scout the door. Old school tables live and die on cheap info. Listen at the door. Check for drafts, smells, sounds. Look for tracks. Examine the lock. Examine the hinges. Probe the floor with a pole. Use a mirror. Check the ceiling. Line the cure to what if it's trapped? It's not a debate, it's literally a procedure. 

And if you want to be the player who saves the session, be the one who says, um, you know what? Before we argue and the DM rolls for a random encounter, let's gather a little info first. Assigned roles. So decisions don't require a committee if someone is steering the ship. Sorry, if everyone is steering the ship, then no one is steering the ship. Old school groups used roles for a reason. They kept the game moving forward. Now, what are some common roles? Caller or leader? It's not a dictator. It's he is a tiebreaker or she mapper. We've discussed that before. Now, if you're using a vdt, maybe mapping isn't an issue, but mapper scout generally a thief, maybe a halfling, maybe your elf quartermaster in charge of making sure there's enough light, managing the party's encumbrance, distributing the treasure. Who's the rear guard? So this reduces friction immediately because when there's a split, the table doesn't need to relitigate leadership every five minutes. Use a simple sixty second rule. When the table bogs down, somebody says, all right, 60 seconds And then we pick. Not to be rude, not to rush things along, maybe a little bit, but to prevent the session from becoming a debate club. See, in the fiction of the world that you're playing in, it's simply honest. Time is passing. The dungeon is alive 

Decide by risk category, not exact outcomes, because you don't know what the exact outcome is going to be. Paralysis comes from trying to predict the exact result. if we open it, the gas. Or maybe it's ghouls or goblins or a pit trap you can't know, so don't play that game. Think in three general buckets low risk, medium risk and high risk and then act accordingly. Low risk. Do it medium risk. Take some precautions and then likely do it. High risk. Only if it's absolutely necessary or if you can shift the odds in your favor. 

Keep the full moves in your pocket. That's another one, right? If you personally freeze, give yourself a cheat code. What do I mean when you're stuck? Default to one of the following and keep the game moving. Uh, I don't know what to do. Alright, you know what? I'll scout the next ten feet or I'll listen at the door. I checked the floor in front of the doorway. I look for tracks and notice there's a pattern to these things. Right? They create information without committing you to. What a huge decision. Force the plan into one sentence. If you can't say the plan in one sentence, it's not a plan. It may be brainstorming, but it's not a plan. For example, we wedge the door, listen, and fall back if we hear movement or conversation. That's a plan. You can execute that also. You know what you need to do. You need to accept that sometimes you'll be wrong. Keep things moving anyway, because that's the real fix. 

Old school play isn't about never making a mistake. It's about adapting after the mistake. It's about buying information because information saves hit points and you don't buy information necessarily. With gold. Sometimes it's with time. And asking the GM questions. If you pick the wrong hallway, fine. Back out. Change tactics. Learn the party that never chooses anything gets punished harder than the party that chooses imperfectly. 

Now let's remember the little thing I refer to as the the dungeon clock, right? It's always ticking. It doesn't stop. Tick tock. The dungeon clock. So what about a quick example? I'll throw this at you. The party reaches a T intersection, right? You can go left. You can go right. And then everybody starts arguing. And here's the smart play. Move! Stop! We're burning! Torch time. What is torch time mean? It means that we're burning time down to another random encounter. Check. So quick, Scout, I listen left. You listen right. If one sounds active, we take the quiet one. If both are quiet, we pick the right corridor and move. That's not perfect. Okay, but that is forward motion. So again, I want to thank the viewer who suggested this topic because decision paralysis It's common. It's fixable, and it's mostly fixed by players taking ownership of momentum. 

Now this is also a collab with D'Angelo. Catch his channel linked below. We are experimenting with doing collabs on Mondays now. If you've got a table trick that breaks paralysis, whether it's caller rules or timers or marching order, discipline, whatever it is, anything. Drop it in the comments. I want to hear what actually works at your tables. Current tables. Real tables. And if you want more practical on how to play it at the table videos, you know what to do, right? Subscribe. I'll keep you focused on what helps you run and play better. Thank you and God bless.

By Connor McCloskey
Black Gambeson
Knave
"12HD worth of characters"

TWO MONTHS AGO: The hedge-wizard Inatuy hired a troop of dwarven miners to excavate a sensitive area, beneath which he believes he has discovered the location of a potent magical artifact, The Key of the Condemned, rumored to allow a dying man to entrap his executioner at the moment of death, and live on. The dwarves made swift progress, and the hedge-wizard was impressed until two weeks ago when they failed to report their status. After a second failed report, he has hired a contingent of adventurers to investigate.

This eight page adventure presents about eighteen linear rooms in a dwarf mine. It’s Aliens, but with ankheg. Decent descriptions some nice horror elements. I am unfairly turned off by the directness of the appeal to Aliens rather than In The Spirit Of. 

I hate comedy adventures. Just to be clear, this isn’t one, I’m just saying that I LOATHE them. Some humor in an adventure is fine, but I don’t like joke adventures. D&D doesn’t have to be serious, but when humor comes in it works better than when it is forced in. But, let’s say I come across the greatest comedy adventure ever. It’s perfect in every single way. Except it’s a joke adventure. All Mordenkainen Movie Studios and shit. There is no reason for me to hate it. ID STILL FUCKING HATE IT. 

This is Aliens. Some wizard gets some dwarves to go find the key of blah blah blah and they excavate a mineshaft to do it. Wizzo doesn’t hear from them for two weeks so he sends you see what they are up to. You find the place looks deserted, somewhat wrecked, and signs/body horror slowly reveals itself. So far I’m down and loving this. A nice ‘inspired by’ idea, but this time with an ankheg next. I’m down with taking a monster from the game and trying to craft a slow burn/build up horror adventure out encountering it. 

“You arrived at the mouth of a broken dwarven mine lift shaft in a small natural cave, chains dangling down into darkness with no sign of the lift itself. Small natural rivulets of water leak from the surrounding cave, and the sound of clinking chains & dripping water echo somberly up from the dark.” Hey, so that’s not bad! Chains DANGLING downRivluts LEAKING from wall, The sound of CLINKING chains. Somberly is a little purple, but whatever, it’s a decent description. And, as the entrance to The Mythic Underworld it’s not bad either! In that hole adventure awaits! How you getting down? Or, how about “Smell of vomit near unbearable. Once a cozy set of stables, the straw and dirt here are slick with the pulpy remains of three emulsified mules. Two large puddles of some sort of caustic biological waste burn the nose and block the path ahead.” The room title here is “Grisley Stable”, so the “once a zo stable” portion might be redundant, but it’s also not droning on, so we’ll let it slide. Otherwise, smell of vomit, caustic puddles, burning the nose, PULPY remains? Sounds great! This is all a part of the build up. Getting the party on edge. Really earning that first ankheg warrior attack. That attack, mot likely coming as a wandering encounter, will be earned and SO much more than just an attack thanks to the build up these early rooms provide. Nicely done.

Th dwarves had a pet badger, Jonesey, who is happy to see you, and gets visibly nervous when there are hidden monsters near. Ok. Sure. Lizard the little dwarf girl is hiding in a hole, the last survivor. Uh. Ok. There’s a sensor crystal to track incoming hostiles. Come on man. This isn’t an homage anymore. There’s a clay colum called Wehlun, or whatever that name is, who is a little sketchy, or can be. Dwarf chick is trapped in wall, half live. Uh huh. And, of course, there’s: “DWARVEN BURROWER (RM. 15 / 12): Large walking dwarven mining machine mech suit” 

You lost me man.

I was pretty much down for a horror thing with ankheg, and taking some vibes from Alien/Aliens. But this is on the edge of farce territory, or at least a direct retheming. Sensor crystals. Recording crystals. Nah, I’m out.

Should you be out? Meh. It’s essentially a linear map. So you’re having “ an experience” rather than doing an osr rpg. Which maybe you’re cool with. The descriptions are fine, the build up is chill. The body horror has elements of The Thing without leaning too heavy there, The elements are all here. I just can’t run something this linear or something that is this close of a emulation of a movie. 

Perhaps, though, there’s something original by the same designer?

This is free at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/548230/ankheg?1892600

This post originally appeared in May of 2016. It became relevant in last night's session of our Land of Azurth 5e game, so it seemed a good time to repeat it. 
Paper Town (it is said) in some sense occupies space in the Uncanny Valley in the west of the Country of Yanth, but the most reliable way to gain entry to the town is via a map. Potentially any map will do, but it must be one noting a nonexistent settlement, street or island. These fictitious entries serve as gates to Paper Town.

As is common with magical places, gaining entrance is not as simple as finding a suitable map. Luckily, the legend regarding Paper Town's creation delineates the necessary procedure. Paper Town, as the story says, was a gift given to Princess Hyacinthia of Azurth on the occasion of her birthday by a mysterious stranger. He informed the Princess that she could not visit Paper Town in person, being compose of something other than paper and possessed of general lack of flatness as she was, but her shadow could—with the proper attire. The stranger traced the outline of the Princess’s shadow on a large sheet of paper and cut around its edge. The cutout was taken to a place where the stranger’s map showed a hamlet to be but was not. The cutout vanished, like a piece of paper slid under an unseen door into an equally unseen room.

The fact Hyacinthia never regain her shadow nor have many who have repeated this ritual might give some pause, but that detail is not frequently repeated.

In Paper Town, the cutouts become paper doll doppelgängers of the person that served as their model. These visitors find unfolding streets of pop-up trees and citizenry and flat facades that elaborate to Escher-architectured structures when entered. The city seems endless, but the clever observer will note that it recycles itself to appear so. As the preceding portion grows, the receding part folds up behind. This can happen in any direction: Tall towers erect themselves when an evil sorcerer flies up to his sanctum. Dungeons unfold like inverted houses of cards when heroes go delving. The ostensible ruler of Paper Town, Princess Seven, paper doll of the long dead Queen Hyacinthia, makes the final decision on how "permanent" a new structure is in her city.

One attractive trait of Paper Town is that it conforms to a visitor's imagination in certain ways. Anything one wishes for may be found there, though anything of value is likely to require a quest or be obtained in a way that makes one not want it after all. In other words, Paper Town adheres to laws of story.

The archons or godlings that truly rule Paper Town enforce this reality zealously. These Great Tall Tailors, or Scissor Men as they are sometime called, will catch paper doll visitors who are ill-fitted for the story the Tall Tailors wish told and snip, snap, snip, reshape them into a more pleasing arrangement. The Tall Tailors are paper themselves (Or perhaps they are the shapes left when slender, lank-limbed manshapes are cut of paper?) save for their gleaming, scissor hands. Their shadows are also Tailors but their shadow-scissors cut the spirit exclusively while their metallic doubles cut the physical.

It is said that the Book of Doors, a book where every page is a portal to another place, originated in Paper Town, but how it came to be in the wider Land of Aurth is unknown.

Original Video: https://youtu.be/QaU9IJMJ-ig

Transcript is lightly edited. Expect typos and worse ;)

A viewer recently asked if you can steal dungeon procedures and use them for a hex crawl. Simple answer is yes. And once you do, wilderness travel stops being that blurry. We walk for a while montage and starts producing real decisions. 
Again, because dungeon procedure isn't about doors and corridors, it's about pressure, time passing, right? Risks showing up, resources draining, and the world reacting while the party debates what to do next. So here's the translation. In the dungeon, you've got turns. In the wilderness, you've got watches. That's it. That's the move. That's the swap. That's the switch. Pick a watch length that fits your table. If you want a gritty and granular, make it two hours. If you want. The classic pays for travel still matters, but doesn't eat up the whole session. Make it four hours if you want it loose and fast, go I guess a half day. I tend to stick to four hours because it gives you a rhythm without turning travel into homework. But what matters most is having a loop you can run without thinking. 
Same way with dungeon turns, right? They run smooth once everyone knows the routine, so every watch you do the same handful of things first, get the party to commit to a direction and a pace. Where are you heading? Are you moving normal, cautious, or fast? And that second question matters more than than people think, because it's how you turn, turn, travel into choices instead of simple movement. And then keep the roles Simple. One person is navigating. One person is scouting. You don't need a job fair. You don't need to debate it. You don't need to stress the whole crap out. If nobody wants to do it. Fine. Then the wilderness gets its own vote. 
Next, you pay the cost of the watch. See, the wilderness has a torch timer, too. But it doesn't look like torches. Don't look like torches at all. It's food and water. It's light. If you're traveling at night, fatigue if you're pushing it, wet gear, cold heat, whatever you actually care about in your game. And if your table has bookkeeping, don't get fancy. Make it blunt. Make it consistent. Mark it off and move on. The goal isn't realism. The goal is that time has teeth. 
And after that, handle navigation. Do you actually stay on course? See, in a dungeon, the walls do a lot of work for you. Outdoors navigation is well, it's the wall when it matters. Bad weather, no landmarks, unfamiliar terrain, night travel, moving fast in pursuit or being pursued. Make the navigation, checking if they fail. You don't need to play. Gotcha. Just add. Just add friction, right? Maybe. Maybe they drift into the wrong hex. Maybe they burn an extra watch getting their bearings. Maybe they hit a feature that slows them down a bar, a cliff. Deadfall washed out trail. Getting lost should feel like the wilderness pushing back. Not like the referee. Not like the DM trying to get a win. 
And then to your encounter. Check. One check per watch is usually enough. If it's a nasty region, a war zone, the cursed woods. I don't know. The dangerous swamps. Monster country sure bump up the, uh, the amount of checks. 
But here's the big thing. Wilderness encounters don't always have to be surprised. Wolves. No, no, that's not a lot of the time. The parties should get signs first. Smoke on the horizon. Vultures circling. Fresh tracks down the trail. Dense. Disenchanting. I don't know why. I have trouble saying that. A broken arrow in a tree. A corn that wasn't there last time. You see, that's what makes the wilderness feel Alive. It gives the players a choice. We always want the players to have a choice, right? Engage, avoid detours, set an ambush or slow down and scout. See? That's the actual play. 
Now, I suggest you give them one notable feature for the watch. Think of it like a dungeon room. Okay, not every room is a fight, but every room is still something. A hex crawl needs the same idea, just spaced out. So most watches should include at least one distinct thing. A creek crossing a ridge line with a view. An old road half swallowed by weeds. A ruined khan. A fork in the trail. Signs of people who shouldn't be here. Something of that sort. You don't need a paragraph. Okay, don't do that to yourself. You need one clear thing that makes this stretch of travel different from the last one. 
If your hexes are keyed like you're using Rob Conley's excellent works, um, pull it from the key. If they aren't, use a quick table and keep moving and then advance time and do it again. Update time of day updates applies. Update fatigue update what has changed? Once your table gets the rhythm, this runs just like dungeon turns. It stops feeling like I don't know, wilderness rules and starts feeling like the game. The game of D&D.  
Now let's talk about those three travel modes, because this is where the hex crawl stops being, well, that board game, Wilderness Survival. Yeah. No, we don't want to play that. Okay. 
Normal travel is the baseline. You cover standard distance, you make standard noise. Make take standard risk. 
Cautious travel means you're moving slower, but you're harder to surprise. You're less likely to wander off course. This is the choice for. We're in dangerous territory, and we don't want to blunder into something much more dangerous than we can deal with. Fast travel is the opposite. You cover more distance, but you're more likely to get lost, more likely to w
ear yourself down, and more likely to stumble into trouble before you see it coming. Generally speaking, you only use that in very safe areas. 
So now the wilderness is doing what dungeons do, right? It forces a trade off between speed and safety. And here's where many people miss a trick. What can you do in a wash besides just moving? See, in the dungeon you can spend turns listening, right? Searching, mapping, spiking doors, poking the statue, whatever those actions cost time and time invites and counter checks. Same thing outdoors. A watch can be spent foraging or hunting. Scouting ahead. Searching a feature. Mapping carefully. Traveling stealthily. Hiding your trail. Setting an ambush. Building shelter early because the weather is turning. And the important part is this those choices cost time. Time triggers Checks. Checks create pressure. That's why it works. Sounds familiar right? 
Camping works the same way. Don't treat camping as a free reset when nothing can touch them. Treat it like we bar the door in a dungeon, ask, are you camping safe, hidden or exposed? Who's on watch? What's the watchword? Is the fire visible? And then make a night and count the check. And again, you don't need it to be an instant attack. Every time signs are your friend, a guard hears something in a brush, sees torchlight far off, finds fresh tracks around camp in the morning. Now camping feels like a choice. It's not just a hey, he'll reset. 
Now let me give you a quick example so you can hear how this sounds at the table. The party is moving north through dense forest trying to reach a ruin. All right, next watch. What's the direction? North. Your pace. Normal. All right, Mark off food. Make a navigation check its day. They've got landmarks. They stay on course and count the check. Oh, okay. Yes, but it's not an ambush. They find fresh bootprints crossing the trail. Too organized to be hunters. What's the feature? To hit a creek. There's a rope bridge. Old and frayed. And now you've got decisions. Follow the tracks or avoid them. Cross here or look for a Ford. Spend the watch scouting the far bank. Push on and risk whatever comes next. That's dungeon. Making decisions just happening in the outdoors. 
See, most hex crawls fall apart because travel becomes a loading screen. And for those that are my age, you remember how long those loading screens were on your computer? RPGs. You travel, you travel, you travel. Okay. You arrive. Oh my God. I'm thinking of EverQuest and getting on the boat in any case. 
If you want wilderness to matter, you need a time unit, a risk role, navigation, consequences, resource pressure, and one distinct feature per chunk of travel. Same pressure system as the dungeon, just scaled up to hexes. So here's the quick takeaway. Pick a watch length, run the loop and don't handwave the boring parts. As tempting as it may be, because those boring parts are where the meaningful choices lie. Try it for one session and watch how fast your players start moving with purpose. Now, if you want, I can do a follow up. 
And if I do the follow up, I'll try to get a printable watch card and a the wilderness encounter table that's heavy on signs, omens, NPCs, weather the hazards. You know, the normal stuff that isn't just monsters and creatures, but stuff that makes a region feel like it has a pulse. Let me know in the comments. Also, let me know in the comments if you have topics you want me to cover. I'm trying to go through the videos to find out what people want me to cover. And yes, I am working on the one sheets. It's a bit time consuming when you're trying to dig your car out of about, I don't know, three, three and a half feet of, uh, snow plow ice that has packed it in. But for now. For now, uh, watch his navigation encounters features and repeat. That's how you make a hex crawl feel like an Aussie game instead of fast-forwarding to the next dungeon. Thank you for watching. God bless. I'll catch you tomorrow.

TSR Module A2: Secret of the Slavers' Stockade

Harold Johnson with Tom Moldvay

At a couple of climactic points in module A1, Slave Pits, the adventurers can find documents that will lead them to the next adventure in the series. Moving away from the chaotic half-ruined town, you find a self-contained fortress in the wilderness, a staging point for the slavers' operations. This stockade is bounded by four intact walls, less of a ruin than the Highport temple. But inside, it's a fixer-upper, with ungoverned areas that continue the theme of the unruly stronghold. The troops are mainly goblins and hobgoblins, not orcs and half-orcs. Two independent bosses with powerful assistants run the place, one in the fort above ground, and two in the dungeons. 

Like A1, A2 was originally run as two parallel tournament adventures, with the above- and below-ground levels as the respective settings. The module's maps shade in the paths of each tournament version. It''s not hard to see how the requirements of each one-track, twisty gauntlet got in the way of realistic defensive architecture. However, even in the limited tournament mode, the fort level threatens the kind of barracks-clearing pitched battle I mentioned in the opening essay as a catastrophic failure for a fort infiltration. As always, full spoilers ensue.

Sure, go ahead, spoil one new monster on the front cover ...

FORT LEVEL: MOATHOUSE

The tournament starts with an easy if improbable way in. Just like in A1, an escaped slave, "Lady Morwin Elissar," shows you the route of her escape - an open window in the outer wall of the moathouse, with a convenient rope left dangling. This device is more interesting because the slave is an NPC who might go with you but is kind of unreliable. Still, it is only the first instance of a repetitive tendency that crops up throughout the module.

This moathouse is one of three buildings on the flat hill where the stockade sits, all held together with outside walls. It's also, you guessed it, an unruly stronghold. Garrisoned by a couple of hobgoblin squads, half of one floor is home to a haunt - more of a Victorian-story ghost than an undead monster. It's the haunting that keeps the troops scared of this area, justifying the lack of attention paid by the garrison. The challenge with this entity must have felt fresh at the time. But by now, dealing with a ghost's past-life obsession and present-day possession is part of 5th edition, and quite a few supplements have extended the Gothic notion into an adventure genre (link, link, link).

In this unruly zone, we are introduced to an unfortunate theme: the defender love silly traps. Here, they have acquired some fancy glassware and alchemy to blind intruders and trip them up with hundreds of glass marbles underfoot. Arguably, these traps sit at the outer limit of plausibility, but worse is to come.

One good point of the writing throughout this module shows up here. As in Albie Fiore's early White Dwarf adventure "The Lichway," each bivouac of troops throughout the fort has some kind of action ongoing, be it eating, gambling, or less wholesome sport. I've described this approach before as the "diorama encounter," but it seems to be a priority of the Johnson/Moldvay authorial team that gives welcome flavor. 

FORT LEVEL: GATEHOUSE

The next building along the railroad is a gatehouse on the far side of a courtyard where a wild anhkheg will pop out pf a patch of mud and attack. Why do the defenders allow a powerful monster to sit athwart the only line of communication from moathouse to gatehouse (the walls connecting them have no walkway)? Here's the greed for variety, any fight that's not with hobgoblins, at the expense of naturalism. Other hard-to-believe premises: the fight can go on without the guards on the walls noticing, until the monster lets out a dying screech; and in fighting, the party will become so caked with mud that they suffer a -2 to hit until they can wash it off in a fountain some way down the railroad.

The gatehouse itself was only developed for campaign play. Its inner buildings are more hobgoblin guardposts and barracks, again with diorama activities going on. Beyond the gate that the anhkheg guards, there is another courtyard, which the players can gauntlet-run or sneak across, while guards patrol the walls above. A couple of patrols come with another new monster, an oil-sweating Gollum-like wretch known as a boggle, whom we see on the front cover, Here there's little opportunity to use the boggles' weird abilities. They are just being led around as sniffer dogs, bringing to mind another Tolkien character, the orc tracker Snaga of Isengard. Then on to the keep's courtyard garden where carnivorous apes and hobgoblin archers jump the party. A dead end -- unless they can open the locked door that leads into the keep proper.

FORT LEVEL: MAIN KEEP

The position of this building in the hill fort is beyond absurd. The ramparts have no connection to its interior, even though that's where many of the troops and leaders make their home. What's more, the ramparts loom over the keep - the better to shoot at the roof, allegedly -- but vision to the outside world is blocked by tall palisades cut through with infrequent arrow slits. It's as if the fort is prepared for an infiltration, more so than an attack; but even that goal is bungled in the execution, so that a dungeon-crawling party can take on one group of enemies at a time. For example, if the players make it to the courtyard, there's no line of sight to the fight there from archers on the walls, only to the roof.

The interior layout is also absurd and not remedied in the campaign version. A single path spirals around, kinking up a few times, before ending up in the central room where the main leaders and troops are found. Cut a single door to break the spiral, and the leaders would have easy access to the entrance and be able to reinforce the defense. But where's the fun in that, compared to dungeon crawling?

Worse yet, the dungeon crawl is fixed up with tricks and traps worthy of a Scooby Doo haunted house. You have the stuffed bear rolling down a ramp to frighten you backwards into a pit. Then the hobgoblin ambush where some of the troops dress as mummies and run at an angled mirror so you'll waste spells and missiles on their reflections. Not just silly, these traps make no sense placed across the only route of reinforcement in an active stronghold.

Off the tournament track, there is another haunted area shunned by the soldiers. But this ghost is just a set of gimmicky manifestations engineered by the escaped slave who lives in the rafters. All these hijinks aside, the final encounter area has a memorable leader in Icar. He's a fire-loving blind warrior who fights with super-senses, taking after Daredevil or Zatoichi. Some of the diorama encounters in the central area are likewise good, and there's a new monster, the cloaker, whose hypnotic droning works as an opiate of the masses for the enslaved. In the boss area, whose defense the module illustrates with an innovative (at the time) tactical map, are a couple of ways down to the dungeons.

.. and on the back cover, let's have a spoiler for this guy

Can we fix the fort? Maybe, but extensive changes to the map would have to be made. And then the module becomes something different. Raising the alarm no longer causes a temporary pressure situation before the party can scoot on to the next isolated area. It activates the whole beehive of the garrison, acting all together in a mass of close to 100 hobgoblins and powerful leaders, and certain to overpower the mid-level party it is rated for.

Next: The dungeon level

 It’s a fascinating combination! The short answer is yes, they can certainly be played together, but they require a bit of "mechanical bridge-building" because they approach the Victorian era from very different angles.Here is how you can blend Troll Lord Games’ Victorious (a superhero/steampunk RPG based on the Castles & Crusades system) with The Red Room’s Bella Époque (a darker, more Needleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243274667834930867noreply@blogger.com0

By Christopher Letzelter
Anachronistes Press
1e
Levels 3-7

Player characters are called upon to remove invaders taking up residence in the land recently granted to a local nobleman. After his surveyors and retainers were killed or driven out, it’s obvious that this problem is bigger than just a band of upstart humanoids – does your adventuring party have the brains, brawn and grit to secure the place?

This 48 page adventure presents a ruined abbey and grounds with around ninety rooms on several levels. It’s gt a great realism vibe and the 1e crowd will be thrilled. It’s also more than a little wordy with the DM text, with all that entails for usability.

Sir Useless has a new land grant and sends in his surveyors. They make it to the site of an old abandoned abbey that everyone knows about. One dude returns, everyone else slaughtered. Sire Useless sends in his men to clean up the humanoid problem. Only two return, everyone else slaughtered, so he gets some specialists. The abbey has some grounds, also detailed, and is mostly ruined, so you get a couple of old parts of the abbey, ruins, an upper floor and a couple of dungeon levels which represents their basement area and some catacombs. This is supported by some nicely clean and gone maps. It gives the impressions of realism while the ruined walls, collapsed areas and the like provide ample opportunity to adventure. Nice CC maps, I think, without going overboard, exactly the right mix of legibility and art. Or, would be if it had reacting monsters on it. Cause I’m gonna print out the map and mark reacting monsters on it so I can run the adventure. WHich means that the designer should do something like that for me.

I want to call out this encounter description on the abbey grounds, which I think exemplifies the spirit of the adventure. The read-aloud is “Copses of hardwoods grow at the long ends of a stagnant rainwater pond. Algae and pond scum float on its surface among reeds and cattails.” and then the first line of the DM notes: “The water surface is about five feet below level land, exposing roughly twenty feet of muck and mud all around its perimeter.” It goes on a bit more for the DM notes but that’s a decent little description both for the players and then a little more to help the DM bring the encounter location to life with the ring of muck. Pretty nice. Oh, hey, yeah, the reason I’m calling this out is because the GREEN SLIME in the water!! Dude told you it was there! Stagnant. Algae and pond scum floating. And you stuck your fucking hand in it?! After wading through the fucking mud?! This is a perfect example of verisimilitude working in an adventure. The creature chosen fits in to the environment perfectly. Abandoned abbey grounds, so we get the stagnant pool, and then the perfect monster choice for the stagnant pool, placed in a way that is obvious in retrospect. That’s good. And while not every encounter reached these heights there are enough of them trying to do this that this kind of “fantasy realism” comes through. Enough to have fun but not enough to be boring.

The village description, where Sir useless has his manor, gets the following description: “traveler-friendly amenities include the tavern, an inn/ procurement house/brewery, a temple (aligned with NG or LN deities), and Sir Feris’ estate (there is a modest guest cottage on the grounds of his walled estate);” That’s fine. This isn’t a village adventure. It hits pretty much what the DM needs. I could quibble about inserting a fun name or fact, but it’s good enough. What the adventure does do, though, is go through a little description of the seven or eight strangers that have passed through this off-the-beaten-track village in the last couple of months. Perfect! If you ask around about strangers, as one might, then this is what you’re going to learn. That IS where most of the effort in the village should lie. Or, at least IN THIS CASE. We provide what the DM needs in the situation they need it in, not as a rote exercise in all cases. 

The abbey grounds are fine, as I mentioned before. A little fighting, a few things to puzzle out. Undead in the catacombs, unaligned necromancer in the upper floors with with retinue of hired NPC’s and gnolls, with a few natural creatures/monsters tossed in. Decent little en vironmental things. Treasure feels a little light on coins in a gold=xp game, but a decent number of magic items also. It all kind of channels that spirit of the sample dungeon in the 1 DMG, from the secret door to the scroll in the stream. 

But, it’s not for me. Maybe for you. But not for me. And you know why. Mucho Texto, along with some very basic formatting that does little to alleviate the text overflow. There’s bold for the read-aloud, and super-duper bold for more emphasis, with italics. It’s all pretty basic and a little overwhelming to the eye, making it seem like EVERYTHING is important. But, meh, not my fav but I could I guess get over that.

The degree of text present here is quite large. And I don’t mean “relevant text.” There is a substantial amount of backstory present just about everywhere in this adventure. Most of the abbey is a ruin because local villagers took the stones, but left most of the main abbey intact because of superstitious fear. Ok. Does this matter expect to explain WHY the abbey is partially ruined? I don’t think so. And there is almost never a reason in a D&D adventure to explain and/or justify something. Yet we see that over and over again in this. In addition there this is kind of appeal to the historical abbey and its usage. “These fields were used for combat practice – the north for equestrian use, the south for melee training. The path was built of tightly-fitted slate flagstones; most of them have been removed, the rest carpeted by a century of dirt and grass overgrowth.” None of that text matters. The flagstone doesn’t exist or can’t be seen. This is straight out of the Dungeon Magazine trophy room nonsense description, the worst room description of all time, or at least in this aspect. 

I can appreciate that this is a pretty damn good historical abbey ground. (And, again, nice map!) And I DO find the stone removal for houses appealing at some level. Yeah, this is the way things work. But it, and so much more here, has no impact on the adventure beyond really leaning in to that historically accurate thing. But you have to balance that with usability. And making the DM dig through a lot of not-pertinent information that is interesting trivia in order to get to and/or not emphasize the important parts of the rooms shows a lack of understanding of how a room entry is used and, in fact, what its purpose is. Some of the rooms approach wall of text territory, and no matter how much the “well _I_ like that stuff” crowd want to crow, wall of text territory is not good. 

This is an ok adventure and it has that kind of lower-fantasy vibe that I find appealing. Maybe a little too staid, with the appeals to THE FANTASTIC coming mostly through churchy shit. But, I can see people wanting that. What I’m having a hard time with is that there are NUMEROUS other adventure that one could select that DONT have the wordiness/usability issues this has. I would almost always pick up one of those and select it rather than this one. I could quibble about monster reactions, coinage, level fives, and so on, but, in a world in which every adventure ever written is available, why torment yourself?

This is $8.50 at DriveThru. There’s no previews. You gotta put in a preview man! At least showing a few encounters so a prospective buyer can get a sense of your writing and formatting style so they can make an informed decision.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/551514/tagma-angelikon-ap009?1892600

 In the world of Castles & Crusades, the Calygreyhound is a creature drawn directly from medieval heraldry. While many fantasy monsters strive for a shred of biological realism, the Calygreyhound is proudly "impossible"—a chimeric beast that symbolizes absolute speed and supernatural swiftness.Physical DescriptionThe Calygreyhound is a bizarre amalgamation of several creatures. In the Needleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243274667834930867noreply@blogger.com0

 In the 1943 issue of Feature Comics #66, The Corpse (secretly Slick Murdock) is a classic Golden Age "undead" villain who serves as a perfect foil for a Victorious RPG campaign—especially for street-level heroes or those dealing with supernatural threats. This entry picks right up from MJL's The Shield aka The Iron Clad Shield NPC For For The Victorious Rpg & The Belle Ãpoque Role Needleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243274667834930867noreply@blogger.com0

Don Maitz
In the Latter Ages of Earth, people do not die completely, at least not quickly. As these things are understood by the Instrumentality an imprint, an after-image, of a person remains in the Ancients' datasphere. When a Mind is informed by that record, a simulacrum, at least in part, of the deceased is made. This is a shade, though not in the way the superstitious common folk imagine. 

At its base, necromancy is the magical art of summoning and controlling shades. It's practice is watched closely by local authorities and the Instrumentality (in those areas where it holds sway). Being able to interact with the shades of the recently deceased is undeniably useful, not the least in forensic necromancy. Where necromancers primarily run afoul of the Instrumentality and temporal authorities is when they use their arts to create undead.

The criminal necromancer creates undead for two primary reasons. The first is for manual labor. These workers don't require a shade in the semblance of any particular person, so necromancers can pluck from the either degraded or partial shades; rudimentary data on physical movements is their primary concern. With a corpse as a substrate and sufficient art applied to their animation, a necromancer can turn out laborers for difficult conditions or troops whose shock value may compensate for their lack of intelligence and skill at arms.

The second application is more lucrative but requires more skill and time. That is the provision of immortality, or as close as their arts may come to it. This requires the creation of a specially made shade, imaged with precision from the current mental vector of the aspiring immortal. In the fallen Latter Age, this generally means destructive mapping of the individual's brain and its functioning. The intellect is then housed in a suitable, durable platform and placed within their old body. The body will inevitably decay, but the necromancer's arts can delay that decay, preserving function perhaps for millennia.  The culmination of these techniques is the lich, though botched jobs, and cost- or material-saving techniques have created many other variations, which are more common.

 In the tradition of Howard, Leiber, and Smith, undead in a Sword & Sorcery setting shouldn't just be "stat blocks"—they should be atmospheric, grotesque, and often tied to ancient, forgotten sins.Here is a D100 Random Encounter Table designed for grim, low-fantasy grit.D100 Sword & Sorcery Undead EncountersRollEncounter Description01-05The Salt-Caked Rowers: 2d6 skeletons of galley Needleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243274667834930867noreply@blogger.com0

 In the world of Sword & Sorcery, treasure isn't just about "gold pieces." It’s about history, weight, and the lingering scent of ancient sorcery. Gold is heavy, cursed, or minted by kings long dead.Here is a D100 table designed for the grit of a monolithic ruin.The D100 Table of Ruins & RelicsRoll (D100)Item CategoryDescription01–20Currencies of the DeadStained silver dirhams, heavyNeedleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243274667834930867noreply@blogger.com0

Though I've mentioned it before, I haven't talked about DC's Warlord by Mike Grell Omnibus Vol. 1 since it came out, which is kind of a lapse given how many years I spent blogging about Warlord here. This volume collects the character's debut in 1st Issue Special #8, issues #1-50 of the series, and material from Amazing World of DC Comics #12. Hopefully we'll get the rest of Grell's run and his follow-up series in a second volume.

The first thing one notices about this omnibus is how much lighter it feels than most. Opening it, you can see why: it's on a different type of paper than most omnis. When it came out, there was a lot of discussion of it being "on newsprint" with some fans angry it wasn't on the glossy paper they were expecting, and others appreciating it being closer in appearance to the original issues. Well, it isn't on newsprint, but it is on a slightly off-white paper with a matte finish. I'm sure I've seen some trade paperbacks from DC on this sort of paper before.
Here's some images I snagged from reddit:

And here's a comparison with the interiors of an old issue. The omni is on the right:

By Edwin Nagy
Parallel Dimension Gaming
OSE
Level 1

Construction camps along a new mountain pass are being destroyed, and danger awaits along every twist and turn. Can your heroes uncover the source of these deadly attacks?

This 33 page adventure details a little wilderness journey and a small thirteen room mine full of murderous dwarf miners. It’s fucking weird; it’s got the underpinnings of something decent, but never goes all in on it and pads everything out terribly. Lost potential, I guess.

Getting trade goods from Town A to Town C means taking the river through Town B, which is run by a tough, and probably corrupt, business family who controls a portage. So Prince Dipshit builds a road through the mountains directly to Town C, bypassing Town B. Groovy. Except the road construction camps got attacked. Since this is an important project he hires a bunch of no-names to go figure it out rather than sending the army. Well, to be fair, the party is supposed to present each of the towns guilds, which does seem chiller. Playing up the guild angle would have been nice, but as is you don’t get anything more than “they represent each of the towns major guilds.”

And that IS the major problem with this adventure; it hints at things but never goes there. The “evil town” doesn’t get much more than the fact they are shrewd and a maybe a little shady. The freedom fighters get that “they meet in the basement of the local pub and are all talk.” Clearly these things, covered in the thirteen page intro, are meant to provide some play opportunities, false paths, other various sorts of entanglements and fun. But they don’t show up again. 

Instead you get to plod along a half-built road, with a work camp about a day apart, four in total. Here’s a sacked one. Here’s an abandoned one. Here’s one with three dudes in it. Focusing in on that last one, you have three guys patrolling camp. Nothing else. There’s a mention that they are charmed and that the party can roll to detect that they are. That’s it. Stats? No. Direction, like they attack, or challenge the party or something else? No. What do they know if they wake up? Nothing. In spite of this being about a column … of large type. What’s a boy in love supposed to do? “The horses are anxious to eat and drink not having been fed in a few days.” Ok. And the dudes? What about them. NOTHING. Absolutely Nothing. It absolutely boggles the mind how one could leave out something so trivial. And, there are lots of editors and producers and the like attached to this. 

No one cares. Remember. No one cares. Your publisher does not care. If something decent pops out then thats great, but they do not gie a SHIT. Someone, somewhere, has to care about the adventure that’s about to get published. Sometimes we pay an editor to care. Rarely a small press publisher cares. And seldom does anyone else. If you pay them then they care. If they pay you then they do not care. Usually. Blech. I hate it when I’m not optimistic. 

Somewhere along the road you’re gonna be the victim of a rockslide. Caused by a dude who triggers it. I guess the party sees him do it? The entire layout isn’t clear, there’s the road being constructed and a ravine and a dead-end and a mine entrance and none of it makes sense. In my own head I don’t know who you see the dude who triggers the rockslide (and then retreats in to the hidden mine entrance.) And, therefore, I don’t see how the party finds the hidden mine entrance. And this is important because this is where the actual adventure is. I’m open to being wrong here (Page 14 of the document/page 15 of the PDF) in that I’ve missed something or an not understanding something. But I don’t think so. So, good luck finding the actual adventure.

Inside the mine you’ll get a bunch of boring rooms that described in a boring way. “Crossroads This is the first area of worked stone, with passages leading in each cardinal direction.” Exciting! And then six lines of text telling us where each corridor goes. Joy. That’s the fucking map. That’s the purpose of the fucking map. I know some of you fuckwits like it when the text explicitly describes the room exits and where they lead, but I think we can all agree that when it SUBSTANTIALLY outnumbers the room description/text then we’ve lost site of the goal. Don’t do things by rote. Do them because they make sense in the situation you currently find yourself. Yes, there are guidelines, but don’t follow them off of a cliff. 

Anyway, inside you find some dwarf miners. I guess this is a kind of illegal mining operation and they feel threatened by the road being constructed. I don’t think there’s really any way to tell this. You can see where a barge might come up one of the mine entrances and infer, I guess. But, also, the miners always come screaming out of the darkness and attack the party. That’s it. No playing dice or whatnot. They just come charging out of a hallway and attack. All … eight of them? In two encounters? Plus Lareth, of course, in charge of everything, with no foreshadowing or hint. Wasted potential everywhere, Lareth. Mom always knew you were gonna grow up to be a failure.

Not mentioned: the single encounter on the wandering table that only occurs once. About a messenger found dead on the road. Roll twice on the random message table to determine the contents of his message. Don’t fucking do this. That’s not how randomness is used in an adventure. 

This is $5 at DriveThru. There is no preview. Joy. That seems to be a trend these days. We need a preview, a substantive preview that shows us some encounters, so we can make an informed decision on if to buy or not.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/548592/arden-s-adventures-vol-2-highway-over-the-mountain?1892600

Adapting Steve Miller's The Ghost of Hong Kong (Mae Ling Chen) into the New Flesh RPG (the Red Room's Burroughsian/Cronenbergian biopunk setting) creates a perfect synthesis of noir-assassin tropes and body-horror mechanics. This session picks right up from here on the blog. In this conversion, Mae Ling Chen—the "Ghost"—becomes more than just a stealthy assassin. She is a master of Needleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243274667834930867noreply@blogger.com0

 Fusing the 1960s suave "cat-burglar-turned-bodyguard" aesthetic of Thomas Hewitt Edward Cat with the visceral, biotech-heavy world of New Flesh is a brilliant move. You're taking a classic "gentleman rogue" and dropping him into a setting where "breaking and entering" might mean infiltrating a living, breathing databank.So I've been slowly adapting the suave and sophisticated cultclassic TVNeedleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243274667834930867noreply@blogger.com0

 Plunging into the depths of a Stygian vault or a sunless underworld requires loot that feels heavy with history, a bit dangerous, and distinctly "other." This blog post picks right up from D100 Random Dragon from Conan's era Hoard & Treasure Table, The Lair: The Maw of Ben Morgh, For An OSR Sword & Sorcery Campaign Especially Castles & Crusades RpgHere is a D100 Stygian Needleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243274667834930867noreply@blogger.com0

As I wrap up Into the Majestic Fantasy Realms, the Northern Marches, I am thinking ahead to my next major project, the full version of the Majestic Fantasy RPG.

While I still need to write the final manuscript, the rules themselves are written and have been playtested extensively. I started out with Swords & Wizardry by Matt Finch back in 2008 and adapted it to my Majestic Wilderlands setting. This involved adding a light skill system so players could have their characters be better at things other than combat and spellcasting, adding viz and other tweaks to the magic system to reflect how magic worked in my setting, tweaking the cleric class to reflect the diversity of religions, and so on.

The design process I used was iteration. Starting with Swords & Wizardry, informed by ongoing research into the origins of D&D, I added, tweaked, and modified the system until it took its current form. The final proof was always how it played at the table, measured against how I described the Majestic Wilderlands and what people actually did as their characters in past campaigns using other systems like GURPS or AD&D 1e.

However, the point of the campaign was never just to play these rules. How I used these rules mattered. I have discussed sandbox campaigns many times, along with my own specific variant, which I call a Living World Sandbox. My living world sandbox approach started out as me finding it fun to let my players trash my setting back in the late 70s and early 80s. Over time, it developed as I tried to make trashing the setting both fun and an interesting challenge.

In time, I realized that what I was doing to make this happen was bringing the setting to life in a way that left the players feeling as if they had opened a door, stepped into my world, and pursued some interesting adventures of their choice. The setting endured, reacted, and changed as a result of what they did.

Again, my design process here involved iterating across many different groups and using many different systems. I also applied my Living World Sandbox techniques to other settings in other genres, including Middle-earth, the Third Imperium, the four-color world of superheroes, and so on. In each case, I weighed what happened at the table against whether it left the players feeling as if they were in the campaign's setting and had the freedom to pursue the adventures that interested them.

While doing this, I experienced other RPGs like Fate and Blades in the Dark that played very differently from my own campaigns and those of my friends. As I learned more about RPG history and encountered various ideas and theories about RPG design, I noticed that all RPGs shared certain practices, regardless of how they were implemented or the rules they used.

• At some point, the campaign's circumstances were described, including the characters involved.
• The characters' actions were described.
• Those actions were adjudicated.
• The outcomes of those actions were determined, and the campaign's setting was altered as a result.
• The session and the campaign involved repeating the above over and over again, in various orders and at various levels of detail.

What makes individual RPGs distinct from one another is how these shared practices are implemented, including the order in which they occur, not just what the rules say. The rules are only part of the equation. To understand how a campaign or system actually operates, you have to look at how the rules are used, how they are practiced, and what the group does at the table. This includes the order in which situations are described, actions are declared, and outcomes are resolved, as well as how adjudication is handled and who is responsible for making those decisions.

As I discuss RPGs, campaigns, and design going forward. I will start with practice and work outward from there.

Wrapping up this post, I want to give a shout-out to my friend Greg, known as the Chubby Funster, who also made a good video on this topic. In the video, he tackles the same issue from the angle of individual referees' "spheres of practice".

 In the Hyborian Age of Conan, a dragon's hoard is not just a pile of gold; it is a graveyard of lost civilizations, the plunder of fallen empires, and the grim trophies of a beast that may have lived since the days of Atlantis.Treasures in this era are heavy on ivory, jade, bronze, and blood-stained silk, rather than the high-magic items found in standard high fantasy. This blog post picks Needleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243274667834930867noreply@blogger.com0

By Graeme Davis
Mondiversi
OSE
Levels 1-5

Rudgen’s Square is a small open space in one of the more modest parts of a city. You can place it in any city or large town in your campaign. Named after a long-forgotten hero whose cracked and weathered statue – now headless – sits on a plinth atop a fountain at its center, the square sees a modest but constant stream of foot traffic, and a few small-time merchants have set up stalls around the edge selling all manner of goods

This 22 page adventure details about four hours in a street market as things happen around the party. It’s two pages of content, padded out, in a museum tour of an adventure. At least it ends with people shitting and puling their guts up in public while zombies attack. It just needed more of that.

Dude claims to be the inventor of the “multi-plot” adventure, for Warhammer, back in 87. I don’t know, it’s just a lot of things going on at once. Maybe. I take it for granted now, but, also, the concept of Romantic Love, right? In any event, our definitions of “a lot of plots going on at once” are a little different.

You are sent to the marketplace to find The Maltese Falcon, or whatever. Slimy junk merchant has it and he wanted like a bajillion million dollars for it. This is the first place the adventure breaks down, and maybe the most critical. Do they just stab the dude and leave? Do they steal it and leave? Or do they hang around for a minute? The entire adventure hinges on the party hanging around for a bit. If they do not hang around the marketplace then the adventure is not going to work. For it relies on, about every fifteen minutes, some kind of event happening in and around the party. There are a number of plotlines, seven or so I believe, and they unfold over the next four hours at about one event every fifteen minutes, related to one of the subplots. A dude smuggling himself out of the city as a poly’d horde. Food poisoning. A Romeo & Juliet lovers tryst. The dude that has the Maltese Falcon has sold a crime lords kid a love potion that actually turns him green. Maybe the answer to DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?! Should be Yes if its the crime lords son and you’re a shady merchant? 

Anyway, every fifteen minutes or so some observant person in the party, asking questions about whats going down, is going to be asked to make an intelligence check to get some kind of extra knowledge. I hope they succeed on the roll. A lot. Or else everyone is going to be quite bored tonight during the game.  

The inherent concept here, of having a lot going on, is in fact correct. That should be the default for just about any adventure, and a town and/or social adventure adventure especially. There SHOULD be a lot going on at once. That gives the world a lived in feeling and creates a sense of urgency; you can’t deal with everyone at the same time, right? Faction play in a dungeon. The outdated mind map relationships I like for villages/social encounters. But the problem, gere, is one of passivity. 

In a perfect world, for the party at least, you steal the Jade Skull and/or kill the slimy stallkeeper. And then leave the square. So don’t stick around. So nothing happens after you get the skull. That means that the action must take place between the initial bargaining dialog (“ONE BILLION DOLLARS!”) and the party putting in to motion their inevitable wacky scheme. And during that time they must succeed in a number of intelligence checks to see other trivia going on. And there scheme must take more than four hours to implement, all while they stand in the fucking square, so they can the rest of the plotlines develop. Oh, chick sitting by a statue alone. Dude comes up to her, her obvious lover. They approach the horse merchants. They go off together. Noblemen come in to the square looking for her. They leave. Couple comes back to hide ta the horse merchants. Etc. And this sort of thing unfolds for each of the plots. 

So the entire concept here is for the party to NOT take action. You must be in the square to see whats going on. You must be there at the end for the shit/puke/zombie fest. You must succeed on your rolls to get the context of what is going on. There are these competing passive things going on. It is, obviously, putting interesting things behind skill checks. Don’t do that. Share interesting things. Don’t make the party beg and plead over the course of four hours in order to be able to get the hook from the king. You WANT the party on the adventure and them invested in it. Watching what happens with the check, understanding a bit of the situation and missing other parts, is what is going to make this a fun and zany side-quest that the party is invested in. And then they must stand around, taking four hours to implement their plan, in order to see any of it at all. You want the party invested, so don’t put that shit behind skill checks. And rework the adventure such that the timeline is greatly advanced or something else, in order to handle the “stab and grab”, or some derivation therein, of the party. 

You know the deal, other than that how was the play? Meh. Some decent chaos at the end when people start shitting themselves and vomiting and a bomb goes off killing a bunch of people and then they reanimate and start Brains!’ing. That, alone, as the climax, perhaps deserves some set piece treatment instead of just another paragraph. The rest of the adventure is full of long timeline events that lean toward the prescriptive end of the spectrum as well as long descriptions of “The Stall of Martha Johnson.” And the bombing is pretty random. Some old woman drops off a bomb at the junk dealers, leaving her shopping bag, and then sprinkles poison on food at several food stalls. Which is weird. I thought it was just some kind of rando deus-ex thing, but there is another thread, one event in which a protection racket causes a mess at a food stall. So maybe its a protection thing? But blowing up a stall and killing a bunch of randos? I get that the bandits want revenge for a fake love potion, but, mass murder? That seems a tad excessive, even for an RPG?

Dude might be a fine DM. And he might have invented the “multi-plot adventure.” But this is not a good implementation, either in its form or function. Long backgrounds and trivia. Detailed events to dig through, a set piece end that is not a set piece. And an overall assumption about the length of the time in the market that is almost certainly not accurate. Yeah, we want to play the game tonight, but too much of that, or too blatant, breaks the illusion of agency.

This is $10 at DriveThru. There is no preview. Bad Publisher! No cookie for you! We need a substantive preview to determine if we want to buy it.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/548756/mayhem-in-the-market?1892600