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Eow Links 39 |
| 2021-09-25 |
Eow Links 39
"Eow" for End Of Week. TTRPG Links I gathered during the week. This is iteration 39.
For more weekly links, head to The Seed of Worlds Shiny TTRPG link collection.
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.
Less posts than last week. My favourite is an older post Money and Coinage in RPGs found via the more recent Three-Mile Tree Compaign: Update 1.
Did you catch that? Horror is fun if you know you are safe.
An excellent post, maybe it could be summarized as "when the tool is used, it's generally late, so..."
When we stand together and encourage each other, the terror of creating something truly dangerous becomes tolerable. Creating anything good comes with fear and uncertainty.
A follow up to D.I.O.
The things I need to track are: Current date, Location, Fuel, Supply units, Ship damage, Credit balance.
Review: Midgard Campaign Setting
The originality of the cultures is not what you came here for, it is the tightly coiled energies of conflict-in-waiting that make Midgard interesting. Throughout the book the rulers of realms and their people come across as driven and energetic whether through nature or necessity and there is a strong sense of no peaceful status quo, just today's balance of power.
That looks plentiful and intriguing. The cover is a take on Knight, Death and the Devil and that is appealing.
OSR: Baboons, Goblins, and Bicameral Kobolds
Most humans have an inner narrator. There's a voice inside your head that is, probably, you, or at least the end result of some high-level process that loops your thoughts back through your head for a second look. Kobolds don't have that.
The voice inside a Kobold's head is their Dragon's voice.
The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind of the kobold.
The idea of the PCs coming back from an adventure laden with rare puzzles, dolls, glass insects and a rare weapon and having to go in search of a buyer is a delightful one, not least because it opens up an underlying world of additional adventure hooks.
Gentilhommes cambrioleurs and art connoisseurs.
Included in the table are aspirational coins, foldable coins, dogs full of coins, coins that can be worn as armour, and several forms of currency that are not quite coins.
War, upheaval, and D&D go hand in hand. And PCs are an itinerant, untrustworthy bunch. So I suppose it's not unreasonable that a D&D economy is coin-based. Although coin availability in D&D is totally unbelievable.
So the adventurers have a tab at the relay station and need to find a way to shoulder the debt...
The Genealogy of Advantage and Disadvantage in RPG Mechanics
My main point is that we have to look beyond D&D to find the origins of this mechanic whereby one rolls more than one die against a target number set by the referee and takes the better (or worse) result with the extra die. I see the roots reaching back nearly to the beginning of the hobby.
I love those genealogy posts, uncovering those webs of inspiration.
The biggie is that this is no longer quite so obviously Powered by the Apocalypse. I find it quite challenging to not have an explicit measure of how difficult a task is in action genres, and that kept coming up for me.
The game itself is just a click away, it's easy to investigate it.
Why not? No translation needed, just interpretation, and we are creative.
Being a GM constantly threatens cognitive overload, and having to keep track of so many things is a sure-fire way to ensure that most of them get left by the wayside.
How we deal with stress affects everyone differently. You might be fine reading- in fact, it may be one of your pandemic coping mechanisms – but your focus at the table may be impaired. It could be that you are fine at the table but can’t focus between games. Or it may be that everything is somewhat degraded but nothing is impossible, just harder. Or it could be that you can’t get a game together.
Further into the Crucible of Burning Wheel
Burning Wheel Gold facilitates reflection, both of single sessions (e.g. Artha awards) and narrative arcs (e.g. the Trait Vote). These two points of reflection and discussion continue to help focus the players on what is the most important aspects of the game they are playing. These points of reflection are like the alchemy of removing what isn’t important or true to the game at hand.
