Eow Links 47
2021-11-21

Eow Links 47

"Eow" for End Of Week. TTRPG Links I gathered during the week. This is iteration 47.

For more weekly links, head to The Seed of Worlds Shiny TTRPG link collection. There's also The Indie RPG Newsletter, and The Glatisant with its monthly links.

Most of the links below are found via the RPG Planet that Alex Schroeder built and maintains. If you have an RPG blog, please consider joining the conversation.

← last week links

Quarantine over. My favourite post is the "Random tables" one just below.


Random tables… I don’t really need them

My imagination is a closed system, has its own language. Yours, as well. That’s also the reason why it’s generally good advice to re-write or edit tables you borrowed from someone else. Their world is not yours, their reality tunnel is different from yours.

Favourite.


Attacks for the system behind the character sheet

Rejoiced is a crux of it, the beauty, the divinity, the dirt, the dance, the gore, the chaos, the clockwork, the joy. Combat is everything and everything is combat.

Intriguing.


Dungeon Dioramas - Root Quickstart & Pellenicky Glade

Playbooks I consider a bit of a mixed blessing. They're great for getting started quickly, and for having all your abilities already written out with no need to hand-copy anything. Just make a few decisions, check a few boxes, and you can begin the game. But there's hardly any room to write on these things, and as you go, your character should acquire equipment and abilities that aren't pre-printed on the original playbook.


What is this Magic Sword for?

Each sword has many stories embedded in its making. The story of where the iron came from. The stories of the people who were involved in its making.

Consider that a magic sword will require special material components, weeks or months of incantations and effort of a skilled wizard with a lab and ritual space. A magic sword should be something very special indeed.


The Rest of All Possible Worlds: The Anti-Grimoirean Thesis

But what if spellbooks were unnecessary? What if mages could cast freely? This is the line of thought followed by the Anti-Grimoireans.


A comparative exploration of OSR RPG Systems - White Box: Fantastic Medieval Adventure Game

There's monsters too! They are of the variety you'd expect such as Bugbears, Dragons, Giant Centipedes and Ogres. Each has an ascending and descending AC offered and all hit die is in d6 as with Original D&D and differing to the d8 found in Moldvay Basic.


Review: Lorefinder

especially on fixing the risk in standard D&D scenarios of 'everyone fails their rolls, you all miss the clue' which runs the scenario aground and requires the big railroading stick to be produced by the DM to get things moving again.

Campaign Concept - Great Planar Scavenger Hunt

I want a campaign skeleton that lets me delve into all the varied corners of the planes. I need a universal socket to support whatever planar one-shots I could come up with and after thinking for a bit what I arrived at this.


Looking All The Way Back...

My brother owned the Dungeon Master's Guide, (...) I would eventually acquire it from him, but until that happened, I copied page after page after page for my own records, Spell Costs, Poisons, Traits, To-Hit Tables, Saving Throws, Treasure Tables, Magic Items...


Practical Magic: Or what to do now that your 1st level Magic-User has cast their one spell

Just because you don't have an immediately useful spell or any spell to cast doesn't mean you are out of the game or can provide nothing.

Water-carrier.


Grenadier: The Fine Art of Ugly...

At first glance, the Grenadier miniatures were just awful. Really. I wondered how they got the job in the same universe where Ral Partha existed. (...) Grenadier, with its fat, pipe-cleaner arms and Mister Potato Head aesthetic seemed a strange choice for the world's leading RPG, but here we were, reading the ads in Dragon Magazine and drooling over colorful displays at the local hobby shop.

And here is a pointer to one 25mm "oldschool" fig a week, it's in french, but you don't need to "get it" to look at old school figs.


Carved in Stone brings Scotland’s Picts to your RPG, and they’re not what you might have expected

The book is a look at Scotland’s multicultural and diverse history. In the 7th century, the Roman empire was nothing but remnants; seven different tussling Kingdoms in Scotland and five different languages were left behind.


Demographics Quick Rule-of-Thumb

So in response, I came with a very rough rule-of-thumb based on units in powers of 10 that I could mentally juggle, and is roughly on the right order with what we know of medieval European societies.


The 5e Dungeon Master as Pennywise

A more covert version of this I am going to call authorial idealism, where the game world is constructed into a reflection of the character’s personality traits. Unlike the former version, this is not a result of the characters actively affecting the world “in game”. Instead the dungeon master (DM) is adapting the world to the characters behind the scenes.


Streamlining bookkeeping for coins: Coin Bags

We can take inspiration from Macchiato Monster's Coin Bags system, eliminating the usage dice.


Cursed! Horror roleplaying made with Knave is available

I wanted a horror rolepalying game as simple as Knave to run my favorite horror adventures.


[FR] Essentialisme et "xiūliàn"

Cela contredit certains préjugés qu'on pourrait avoir sur notre vision d'un Occident individualiste contre une Chine holiste. Dans la fantasy, l'Occident garderait des fantasmes aristocratiques et hiérarchiques alors que la Chine avait une tradition d'ascension sociale qui n'existe pas tellement dans nos mythes.


an ill-kept orchard on the side of the road

My grandmother lived in the village that stood here long ago