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Eow Links 49 |
| 2021-12-05 |
Eow Links 49
"Eow" for End Of Week. TTRPG Links I gathered during the week. This is iteration 49.
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.
My favourite post for this week is Orcs and XP through the Ages.
In the Heart of Oz | Hex Flower based system-neutral procedural sandbox setting
A Hex Flower is a bit like a random table, but with an inbuilt ‘memory’ (because the last turn affects the next outcome). Each time you enter a new HEX, you procedurally determine what is going on.
Actually Making a Dungeon: The First Rat Bank
So when I thought of rats, I didn't think first of disease-ridden warrens and plague pits. My first image was of a statue of a rat holding a coin. That first image turned into the basic premise; a bank, whose icon is a rat, (...)
Gender in Terra Ignota (Queership Repost)
I want to talk about the larger world building before I go more deeply into Mycroft’s pronoun use. We learn early in Too Like the Lightning that the gender neutral language of this 25th century is not the result of society’s efforts toward inclusiveness finally succeeding, but the result of global trauma and severe censorship.
Game Review: Viking Death Squad
Viking Death Squad takes the heavy metal aesthetic and cranks it up to 11.
The main simple distillation of what I found can be seen in the ratio of the number of orcs a party must kill/defeat before rising from 0 XP at 1st level to 2nd level.
This is not because metal is especially scarce or because the technology isn't up to it, but because you need one of a dwindling number of specialists to make it, or because it belongs or belonged to someone important. Except for maybe the military during an actual war, there aren't workshops churning out suits of mail and plate.
How Do Stories Emerge from Game Play?
When you create things, you are creating stories…sort of. You can’t help but create stories when you create a setting and NPCs. Even if the entire adventure comes from a series of random tables, you are creating what will be perceived by players as a story.
On DMs and Players as two communities
we spun up games without having been shown how it works. The only info we got being Dragon Magazine, White Dwarf and very rarely actual products snaffled during trips to the big city. Everything I got before I hit college was either a gift, mail order or picked up on holiday. I guessed the shape these games should be from Fighting Fantasy and Choose Your Own Adventure books, salted it with Monstrous Compendium and the artwork from Dragon and White Dwarf and off we went.
Hexcrawl x Pointcrawl - when to use them
Well, I'm convinced that pointcrawls are more useful and hexcrawls are only good for a specific (but very popular) type of campaign: one in which the PCs go exploring the unknown wilderness beyond civilization.
The Core and Penumbra of Meaning
Rule A is mostly core - there is little to disagree about. Rule B is mostly penumbra. What is "reasonable"? It depends.
Very basic 5th edition: All You Need To Know To Get Playing, Plus A Few Tricks
So I decided to create a ~10 slide deck in PowerPoint outlining how to play 5e D&D with some old-school tricks and advice thrown in to help cover what I think are gaps in the Essentials rules.
On Knave and Old-School Rulebooks
Knave is my favorite of this period of old-school-inspired rulebooks for how it simplifies the annoying parts of the game tradition it comes from. However, like the other rulebooks, it doesn't really tell you how to play.
How Into the Odd is like Chainmail
ItO, as I’ve covered in my review, falls squarely on the Chainmail side of the fence. It is objects in the game world that determine both a character’s combat and magical capabilities, rather than an abstract feature of your class.
Custom Character Sheet V1.2 (B/X--OSE)
Upgraded sheet for my homebrew b/x game
