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Eow Links 19 |
| 2021-05-08 |
Eow Links 19
"Eow" for End Of Week. Links I gathered during the week. This is iteration 19.
For more weekly links, head to The Seed of Worlds Shiny TTRPG link collection or Alex's Blogosphere posts.
Most of the links below are found via the RPG Planet that Alex Schroeder built and maintains. If you have a RPG blog, please consider joining the conversation.
A quiet week.
Yora’s Law of getting 1s in a dice pool
My random encounter system rolls a single die four times per day, with a result of 1 indicating an encounter. To get different odds for areas with high or low population densities, you switch to different types of dice
But we have authentic contemporary depictions of it in art?
Art is art. Not documentation.
one of my players asked me if it would be possible to make combat more crunchy, while keeping the smoothness and simplicity of OSR combat
I have to re-read that one: it is intriguing how it goes hip throw and chokehold and ends with Jimmy Pedro sweeping two feet in the final picture.
Watch Games Workshop’s founders introduce D&D to 1984 UK TV
They come in and tell you about their game. It's like having someone talking about a movie you're not interested in, so you just nod
Thanks to @Finngarh for picking that line.
They seem to play with cardboard tiles and nice figurines, the gamemaster has no screen.
The scene in the shop, again, is excellent. "Do you have severed heads?" "Humans or Goblins?"
I thus found this podcast episode where Tim Olsen, the Games Workshop manager shown in the TV show, is featured.
Dungeon 10 minutes turn tracker and calendar day tracker (28 days a month, 12 months). A fine PDF for us GMs.
Yesterday, my son ran his first AD&D game for his friends (also aged 10) via a Zoom meeting.
I was 12 or 13 when I got my Dungeon Master Guide. I wonder what the youngsters think of the AD&D art, it must have some kind of appeal to them, like it had for us.
Five changes you should make to your D&D 5e magic system right now
I like when D&D's magical system is challenged. When I look at the spell list, I sometimes feel like contemplating a failed brainstorming session whiteboard dump.
Review: Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar
A friend got me Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar for Christmas and it dropped onto my doormat like an iron ingot. This is a packed box, full of goodness and after going through it all you both have an authentic Lankhmar sword-and-sorcery box but also a great toolkit for urban play of any style.
(...)
The tone is well set with notes like "the sea of outstretched hands" that drain the partys gold and drive them back to adventure.
So, after having pretty strenuously avoided paying much attention to D&D 5th Edition for the last ~7 years, I got bored a few days ago (especially by the way old-edition fans continue to debate and re-debate the same issues over and over and over) and decided to take a deeper dive into what the kids today are playing to see what it's actually like, how different it really is from the versions I know and love.
A set of house rules, always fun to dissect.
Monster statblocks - how good is AD&D?
If you want to get the best D&D monster book you can find, the Monstrous Manual is very hard to beat. It might be nostalgia, who knows - but this is still my favorite monster manual ever (despite having few demons and devils, using instead names such as Tanar’ri and Baatezu).
The nostalgy hit me immediately upon seeing the AD&D stat blocks. What trip it was to open this book.
More 5e Rogue weirdness: bonus actions and movement
What do experts do? Anything else. And how do they do it? With bonus actions.
A continuation of the post about the three meta-classes, Fighter, Expert, Spellcaster.
The elves of the Perilous Land are unsurprisingly much more akin to the diminutive creatures found in British folklore than traditional fantasy elves or even those found in Scandinavian mythology. That said, they're not entirely different - they're innately magical and live in forests and meadows, but that's pretty much where the similarities end.
Elves are not playable, they're part of the fairy world and they play you.
