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Eow Links 37 |
| 2021-09-11 |
Eow Links 37
"Eow" for End Of Week. TTRPG Links I gathered during the week. This is iteration 37.
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.
My favourite post is The Weird Economics of Deadly Dungeons followed by 10 questions to Gavriel Quiroga.
Ten Years of the Zenopus Archives
But I have kept at it, and now it's ten years later, which is almost three times as long as the original era of Holmes Basic, and I have no plans for stopping.
My idea with this was that this was going to create an intense level of trust in the game, more than we’re maybe consciously aware of. It creates this super addictive, tense loop of dangers, defeats, victories and triumphs.
It also shows a referee that is freed from mundane tasks and almost hundred percent dedicated to running the world and the game.
On High Concept Campaigns and Plot Immunity
Is there a lagrange point between old school play, which emphasises emergent narrative, sandboxes, and letting the dice lie where they fall, and the mainstream of the RPG hobby, which is all about pre-plotted story, pre-determined outcomes, character development, and fudging?
With an interesting system exercise proposed in the end.
Stripping Your Players of Plot Armour
And the reason it’s interesting (for me at least) is because this particular issue speaks to a bigger tension in RPGs: the tension between playing a game and telling a story.
There's no way the DM is going to kill us all. Or is it?
a different math for ladder tables
my friend ty (@eldritchmouse) wrote up a great blog post about a new way to introduce memory states into random tables, called ladder tables! i wanted to share my thoughts on how to accomplish the same thing with slightly different math
While hexflowers may lead us in six directions, a ladder table has two directions. It feels like a gauge. I like Marcia's d6 - d6 subtraction technique.
chainmail one-on-one combat stats for weapons & armor
how useful is that big table in chainmail that lets you find your kill chance by comparing weapons to armor?
There is even a postscript on reach weapons, essential to play the game "strategically". Once you're on the field it's tactical, issuing an ordonnance telling your peasants to equip and train with a halberd every sunday after church is strategical.
When the quality of releases is poor in content, production or information design…
We Do It Ourselves.
It reminds me of that joyful vertigo I felt when I understood that I could come up with my own scenario and that even running a published scenario required some creativity.
For consideration – Wolves of God
This is a land of god’s miracles and demon curses. The bestiary included is full of very cool creatures that feel somewhat familiar, but different enough to constantly surprise!
Wolves ep.1 – The Curse of Langmere
Everyone was going whole-hog into representing their characters and beliefs of the time – I especially loved the confused descriptions of “god” and the superstitious beliefs of the various people at this time when most of the locals were uneducated and only had a very cursory understanding of Christianity. Every character was earnestly trying to do good as they understood it, but “good” felt very different from any other rpg I’d experienced.
Two posts about Wolves of God. If you're not into session reports, simply read the second part of the second post. A modest game but not to be underestimated.
For as long as I have been running games I thought it was unfair to the players to have the opposition, who ever it was, just be randomly doing things. Without a driving motivation the players could figure out there was no way for them to outsmart the foe. If the goblins are scouting for food, bribe them to your side with rations.
An excellent post by Xaosseed, his view on evil in his campaigns.
10 questions to Gavriel Quiroga
Gavriel Quiroga is a game designer and self-publisher from Buenos Aires, Argentina.
He has written and published Neurocity and Warpland, and he’s currently crowdfunding Ascet on Kickstarter, not a RPG but a “minimalist playing card game with roleplaying overtones”.
That Ascet game looks gorgeous.
If you are open and pay attention you can find inspiration behind anything from a lame talk in a grocery store to an awfully bad B-movie. Stephen King said you can learn more from bad writers than from good ones, and that is the case for almost anything.
An excellent interview by Giuseppe Rotondo. He previously interviewed Diogo Nogueira, and that too looks worth a quiet and attentive read.
The Weird Economics of Deadly Dungeons
A new player once puppy-eyed me and asked if their elf could please have an heirloom +1 dagger, and I said yes. Nine character deaths later, when the party didn't have any original members left, I actually gave them experience points for that dagger.
"He won't need it now".
Someone suffering from the glass delusion might believe they had an otherwise-ordinary body that was nonetheless made of glass. They might live a fairly ordinary life, except for taking extraordinary precautions to keep from shattering. King Charles the Mad of France (1368-1422) famously had this belief.
So much learning and inspiration at Molten Sulfur.
Deep Carbon Observatory Review Reprise: Storytelling as Information Design
I asked Patrick about this and he felt while Scrap and him can sometimes be quite out there and imaginative, they are both keenly aware that what they are making is for a game. If one of them forgets, the other will remind them.
