Still kicking! I just ran 2 games this weekend. The online crew has some backup characters in the Level 1 Pipeline, they'll need them for what's coming up. They just boarded the Sea Ghost in U1. And my in-person group is about to go into outer space (so that'll be a bucket list gaming moment!!!).
I just wanted to point THIS out and say that everyone should click it, read it, love it, and believe it. Because I say so.
[UPDATE]
The conversation continues! Other OGs weigh in:
AD&D evangelist Zherbus had this HERE on his blog for a while, I just hadn't read it
JB, terror of comment sections everywhere, posts his thoughts HERE
forum legend Black Vulmea weighs in on his blog HERE
And EOTB follows up his original post with a helpful clarification: "No Roleplaying?!?"
More updates as the story develops!
Someone made this enormous 'connections map' of D&D blogs a while ago, with TRVE OLDSCHOOL bloggers in red and nuskool guys in green. For my sins, this page is in the teal section in between:
 |
| Click to enlarge. You are currently located just above dead center, west of Grognardia, north of the Land of Nod, south of Tenfootpole & Mazirian's Garden, slightly obscured by Trilemma. Not a bad place to be, really... |
Anyway that's not precisely relevant, but I thought it was interesting. Welcome back to the series on workflow (See Part I). Let's see what else we can figure out huh?
*** Watch for Distractions ***
Do any other folks deal with this, or is it just me? Is it ADHD or something? I don't know.
If only I could muster that kind of focus for what I actually wanted to work on! It's hard to get things done while constantly bouncing around on material that will never see play because I got distracted by a neat idea.
This is analogous to the musicians I know who play in a ton of different projects. How about instead of doing 5 fucking bands, you cut out the weakest ideas and do one band with all the best material? Maybe it will be tougher to instantly categorize, but isn't that better anyway?
This is also something we can lay at the feet of some OSR bloggers who made their reputations (and sometimes lucrative kickstarters) writing about their Extremely Distinctive Games. Nowadays, I suspect that's backwards for most people. A good D&D campaign should be big enough to fit almost anything - knights in shining armour & alcoholic gamblers, tomb robbing & cosmic adventures, deserts & glaciers, kingdom management & rat fights... you get the idea.
What I eventually found is that usually these 'weird ideas' are not so different as to be unworkable in one's regular game. What, you think a sci-fi game of power-armoured knights exploring the solar system would be awesome? (I have been thinking about one for a while) There's no reason you can't put a crashed spaceship in your D&D game - or a teleporter to another planet! They did it back in the day after all.
Don't obsess on these weirdo ideas at the expense of your regular game, and don't hold them back for some imagined future that may never come.
It does nobody any good to save cool ideas for later when game night is coming up this weekend! Put them in there. It doesn't have to be the focus. Start small. If the wild idea obsessing you is really that good, you will have more in the tank for later and if it isn't, at least you added some spice to your regular game instead of going in circles.
*** Reduce Production Values ***
Plenty of you are playing online as I do, and there are lots of VTTs to choose from nowadays. I don't know much about them, but I once spent an entire winter putting together a MASSIVE dungeon map in photoshop. It was a huge wizard's mansion surrounded by gardens, and I coloured and placed every single tree and shrub.
 |
| What was I thinking? |
Do you have any idea how much fucking work that was? My players delved in there 2 or 3 times, one PC was killed by a basidirond, they left and never came back. And this was meant to be the central dungeon of the campaign!! I should have just drawn some scribbly green lines and said "this is the edge of the shrubbery." Idiot.
Nowadays I will do a nice sharp job on lining up the grid, and then bang maps out fast in PS or Dungeon Scrawl.
 |
| Doesn't look like much, does it |
I drew this map by hand first in my notebook, and only scrawled it out on the computer during the game. As you can see it looks crooked as hell, but it works. If my hand were steadier, maybe I could achieve a nice medium between these two extremes, but whatever. The play's the thing, and this is a game of imagination, remember?
It goes without saying that if only the DM is going to see the map, it can & should be ugly as fuck as long as it's readable.
*** Play Reports ***
Holy fucking shit these are a pain in the ass! When my current online campaign is done, I'll share the blog where I post all the play reports for the group. Christ they take forever.
I have not come up with any good way to speed these up except by writing more vague reports with less detail. This is another thing we can blame a couple OSR bloggers and forum-posters for: the Team Tsathoggua play reports on ATWC, or those legendary Fomalhaut play reports by Premier (seriously bro, read them) are so fucking good and pure fun to read. I tried to emulate these, foolishly, but I am not a short-story writer, prose stylist, nor a reporter! You can read back on this blog and see what my play reports are like if you really want...
With a group that rotates membership from session to session I thought it was essential to write reports in order to keep everyone up to speed. Now that my group is quite consistent from game to game, I can keep things simple the players can take notes themselves (of course half the clues they get will be missed/forgotten, but that's a topic for another post).
Anthony Huso writes minimal reports for his players, but they are still compelling reading. Check these out if you haven't already, his entire AD&D campaign is there.
I'll quote one in its entirety, this is a typical example:
***
Play Session 20: 01/04/1976
TPK
Group A's investigation of the vast dark hall into which they were pulled revealed bit by bit a nightmare world of terrors they were ill prepared for. Already tired and bleary from their battle with Tergomat, they now faced more lightning, a berserk, shuffling flesh golem and a pit trap.
Further on, a room of blue marble with a light at the top was found hidden behind a statue of Demmindain only after an offering was placed on the altar at the statue base. This blue marble room, shaped like a stylized cyclone had a ceiling composed of light through which a sent arrow did not return.
Though heroics and quick thinking met with miraculous early success (death was staved off and two of the group were stabilized) bickering and dysfunction began to take a toll as James One Eye met his end, tossed about in a black chamber of chaotic winds.
Finally a full scale argument broke out at the entry to an unexplored chamber and four gargoyles crept forth, taking the party by surprise. Most were immediately slain by the hideous beasts, but Yazan clung to life despite his grave injuries and bravely stood his ground over the unconscious body of Nicholas as the flurry of dark wings, talons and horns descended upon him and all light was extinguished.
With the main party's complete annihilation unknown to Thaylen and the men stationed outside, the paladin (and Vek) decide to camp one night and then return to the Great House. They take with them all remaining men and the rest of the gear.
After a few days dogged travel, Vek leaves off for Bablemum, weak and weary and mumbling something about retirement. Thaylen arrives at the Great House to find DIllow there, bedridden and drifting in and out of consciousness. He also finds the house has been taken over by Crowley Vandran.
Crowley has arrived with purpose and with men. A grim conversation begins.
It is now Kam 22. Roughly three days passed during the session.
***
This is a good benchmark to strive for, less than 350 words. My last play report for my online game is *checks notes* 835 words, with pictures and maps and good formatting, and that's after much effort to cut down from the longer writeups of the past! I guess I'm making some progress here, but they still take too long.
Anyone have suggestions?
*** Go With What You're Good At ***
This kind of ties in to Watch for Distractions, above. I like to take risks and try new things in my games, but this often leads to tremendous extra work.
For example, I am running a game in the City-State of the World Emperor. I had never run a city-oriented game before, so I wanted to give it a try - the City of Vultures from Echoes from Fomalhaut was calling my name! But even after reading several city supplements (some good, some worse than useless) and 40 sessions later, I don't think I have much chops with the format.
This was made clear to me today when I was flipping through Rob Conley's highly recommended Points of Light books. Just looking at the map of the Misty Isles and reading a few blurbs, the ideas were already flowing! "Oooh, Black Stone Island sounds cool, I wonder what's there?... I can think of a few modules I own that would fit around here... Seems like I need some Lizardman ruins here, and a pirate base there... Hmmm, I wonder what's off the edge of the map that way?..." and pretty soon the ideas are all bouncing off each other and I have enough material to run my players from 1st-10th after an hour's brainstorming.
I have never been able to get this kind of flow going for a city game! The ideas come damnably slow & painful. I assume this is because I've spent more time working on wilderness campaigns than anything else, but whatever the reason it has been an uphill battle.
It's useful to try new things, but you can save a lot of time by doing what you're good at!
*** Alternatively... ***
Hey I've got an idea, forget all this "writing up adventures" garbage!
I have Caverns of Thracia, Castle Xyntillian, every Anthony Huso module, every issue of Echoes from Fomalhaut, plenty of old TSR and Judges Guild hardcopies (thanks to my FLGS and Noble Knight), Demonspore, The Tomb of Abysthor, Tomb of the Iron God, almost every issue of Fight On!, most of the Advanced Adventures series in pdf, and I just got Stonehell in the mail.
How about for my next campaign I just use all of those? Any other essentials that I'm missing?
Have a good day blogland!!
Hello blogland! Gaming proceeds slowly, I hope to be done my after-work studying in a couple months (takes forever). I am still playing with one of my in-person groups. Last session they explored a dungeon which is actually a crashed spaceship... They might repair the transporter and take this 'gateway to the stars' next session! I'm looking forward to it - hope they don't chicken out!
Anyway, everyone's favourite reasonable guy and AI-hater Noisms had a bit on alignment on his blog a short while ago. Truly one of the great chestnuts of D&D! I struggled with alignment for a while. Get 10 gamers in a room, you'll have 11 opinions on it (it was a favourite 5 beers-deep topic for my old gaming group here in town).
My thoughts were clarified a little bit when I read this article and this one (Yes, part of a series of 3.5e homemade sourcebooks on a D&D wiki. I don't care, it's awesome. Read all of them by this same author). Basically the thrust is: D&D alignment is flexible enough that it can mean anything to anyone in the right circumstances. This is one reason for the game's enduring popularity. But trying to be all things to all people usually ends with - being nothing at all! So you have to decide what alignment means in your game and stick with that.
But this is not a philosophical blog post... This is a meme I made in 2 minutes in between the much more serious & highbrow works I am usually known for! Save it for later and use it in all your online arguments.
(I was going to mention this in my last post on gaming prep & workflow, but it really is its own topic)
I have spent hours hand-picking music for my in-person games and I consider that time well spent - everyone comments on the atmosphere during the game! This is the kind of work that continues to pay off, since the same playlists can be used multiple times (with periodic updates to keep them fresh). That kind of work is useful prep. Plenty of other things, aren't.
If you use Spotify, maybe that works for you, I don't know. I still use mp3s on my phone because I grew up with Napster. For my current in-person game I have a wilderness playlist and a dungeon playlist which have each grown from about 2 hours of music to -- checks notes -- over 6 and 7 hours respectively, more than enough to run a session and not hear any repeats.
It has taken me a LONG time to build these playlists because I have very stringent requirements for in-game music, which I will try to outline here for your edification and amusement:
Rule 1 - Minimal Dynamic Range
When you first decide to play music during your games, you might run for the music of your favourite films. The problem is that most film soundtracks are written & produced just like classical music with much broader dynamic range than modern popular music: from near-silence to huge crescendos. This works during a movie but is absolutely insufferable to listen to even at home alone, when I'm trying not to turn my stereo's volume knob every goddamn minute.
Most 'modern classical' compositions are simply way too over-the-top to work as background music anyway. Big orchestra hits, swells, violins attacking like swarms of bees, timpanis crashing... I'm trying to have a conversation here! Hans Zimmer is really bad for this. During a game this will amount to quiet sections being totally inaudible while everyone is talking, then conversation getting interrupted by a blast of sound. A non-starter.
What you want is a constant volume level so that you can set it and forget it. Your game music must be quiet enough that it doesn't impinge on everyone talking & nobody has to raise their voice, loud enough that it can actually be heard a little bit.
This is actually a very narrow band!
An additional oft-overlooked consideration with this rule is trying to find songs that are roughly volume matched to each other. I think Spotify or some other streaming services might do this for you? Just pay for premium because if I hear an ad during your game I'm strangling you.
Some examples of too much dynamics:
On the flip side, this track is consistent throughout. Howard shore is the GOAT but take care because not every song on this album is so cooperative.
Rule 2 - Not too 'song-like'
I used to play extreme metal or folk music during my games, I don't do that anymore. I avoid anything with drums and most guitars. This contributes to the background sense of the music - I don't want the players to really take notice except in rare instances. Strings, synthesizers, things like that are all fine. Even in ambient music there are percussive elements and these should be considered carefully, some can work as long as they don't sound like an actual drum kit.
Acoustic guitars can be OK, depending. Medieval instruments like a glockenspiel or something need to be chosen with care, as they can easily descend into terminal cheesiness. Anything with lyrics is right out, although some vocal chants or something might be okay.
Rule 3 - Not Easily Recognizable
The hardest one to do, depending on your gaming group. The first time a player says "Hey, isn't this from Lord of the Rings?!" you'll never make that mistake again. Everyone is now imagining the scene where Gollum finds the ring, instead of the damned hexcrawl you're trying to run. Pretty soon someone is doing a Gimli voice, someone else is telling the story of Viggo Mortensen breaking his toe and the game has gone completely off the rails.
Just don't do it! Skip Hollywood franchise films, blockbusters and things your players will know (I can't tell you what those will be, you have to know your players - a DM's work is never done).
Dig deeper and find stuff people haven't heard. This is where being into underground music really pays off (a rare circumstance indeed!). Call up your much cooler friends and ask them what they're listening to. Dig into anime from the '90s, foreign films, non-triple A videogames, or fire up Youtube and poke around for some new microgenre that hasn't been saturated to death yet.
Rule 4 - Not Too Much Variety
I stick to 3 or 4 artists for a particular themed playlist. This is not a hard rule. Since it's tough to find composers who have enough songs that fit my requirements, it ends up working out this way. I find creating strongly themed playlists works better - the players can feel the difference between different areas of the game world, different modes of play or even levels of danger!
Rule 5 - No Jazz!
No matter what Noisms says! (that article has some good stuff in it though)
Suggestions
Oh what, you want some songs that you should include, instead of a list of prohibitions? Okay, here are a few, you'd better thank me for bestowing my wealth of experience. I'm giving y'all the game here, so don't say I never did anything for you guys!
Remember, these are entire albums. You have to use the principles I just taught you to pick the appropriate songs from each!
There you go, no more excuses.
Now get back to your game, blogland!
I'm on the latest episode of Gus B's Classic Adventure Gaming Podcast, you can find the latest episode HERE. Go check it out, the latest episode is about the already legendary first Cauldron Con in Germany and has a star-studded cast of cool guys, scene VIPs, 10' pole forum goons and Discord chatterboxes from the deep end of the oldschool D&D pool!
I'm not an interview guest (nobody should be listening to my opinions, haha) but I did create the podcast's theme music! It took me a while but I'm quite proud of it, this is the first project I've finished since beating tendonitis and getting my playing back this year. Go follow them and listen to the back episodes, they're all great!
"No updates since January!!! Where you been at TS?"
I flatter myself that you are thinking this.
I've been short on posts for a few reasons this year. I have been playing and running A LOT of games in the last few years. I got on Discord, made new friends, played in some pickup games, joined some campaigns and had lots of fun (hails to all the cool and weird folks I've met on many different servers, too many to name).
Mainly though, I was running my own games for my own players. No matter how much I use modules and steal material from everywhere I can, inevitably either my players take a weird turn forcing me to write new material and/or I get a cool idea I have to write up for myself anyway. As I've said before it takes me forever to write even a small dungeon, so there was no energy left over for blogging.
 |
| It'd be a lot cooler. |
Several recent developments have hampered my gaming even further:
I am studying for a work exam on evenings/weekends (normally this would be 3 months of full-time schooling, so doing it in my spare time takes a while). This really cuts into anything else I might spend my time on. I have put my online game (running since October 2019!) on hold for several months to focus on school stuff, and my in-person games (both of them) have slowed down completely over the summer/fall.
More importantly: due to a relentless and constantly-evolving rehab & weightlifting routine, the tendonitis that plagued me for years is finally in retreat and I can use my hands again! It is impossible to overstate how positive this change has been. For the last 5-6 years I haven't been myself at all - being unable to play music has really been wretched. Only now that I am out of it can I see, by comparison, what a deep mental pit I was in for a long time. Like having my mouth sealed shut for half a decade - all of a sudden the duct-tape has been ripped off!
I only dived deeply into RPG gaming more intensely a few years ago because my hands hurt so much I couldn't play. Now that I'm back I am making up for lost time, spending hours in the studio, finishing up projects and taking on new ones, not to mention practising to regain my previous skills. Although my speed is nearly at peak levels I've noticed my endurance, accuracy and precision on my instruments are *not*. This will take time... time that I'm not prepping for games.
*****
"Okay TS, that's great (and verges on oversharing) but what's the point?"
I need to write more gaming material in less time than ever before. Running multiple original sandbox games (even using modules when possible) has placed a creative demand on me that I've never had to deal with before. Here are some of the ways I have kept the workflow going, and some mistakes I've made & lessons I've learned along the way.
Other People's Suggestions
First of all, I tried to find reading material on speeding up my prep time. I couldn't seem to find anything good. I asked plenty of other gamers and found that sometimes even communicating my problem was basically impossible - a baffling situation!
The Alexandrian has a lot to say on the subject. Many of you will find all of it old news, others will benefit. Start here. I read these articles a long time ago and they are helpful if you are currently a beginner or mired in counterproductive habits, but for me at this point they don't say anything new.
Sly Flourish's book The Lazy Dungeon Master just sucks, don't read it, fucking embarrassing.
If anyone else has suggestions for "smart prep" resources, I'm all ears, but strangely this is one area of gaming that I don't see too many people discussing. Am I an outlier? Am I just missing the conversation? Let me know in the comments.
A Short Tale
I was house-sitting for my brother a while ago, spending most of the time on the couch with the cats and watching all the streaming TV that I don't have at home. I eventually felt guilty I wasn't being productive so I brought over the gaming material I could fit in my laptop bag: the Sword & Magic rules, my campaign notes & maps and a 2 or 3 helpful booklets (more on that below).
I tell you, I created more dungeon rooms in my notebook on the couch with inane sitcoms droning in the background, than I do on my computer with a modern word-processor and access to a veritable mountain of gaming resources, tables, blogs, PDFs & books!
What can we learn from this?
Get The Fuck Off The Computer
The dangers of distraction are well-documented in the social media age. I have certainly killed a lot of time scrolling IG or hanging on Discord, but you know all about that stuff.
My point here is somewhat different.
When I'm writing on my computer I try to stay organized. I want my dungeons to make sense, to 'fit' together into a coherent whole. So to help with that I have my dungeon map open in photoshop, a project overview & to-do document, a doc for the particular dungeon level I'm working on, my treasure tables, a stack of books beside me, my favourite generator tools, etc. Having all of this at my fingertips can drain my ability to do anything. Alt-tabbing around between documents, maps and different books is really distracting and soon, work bogs down utterly. Attempting to hold all the existing dungeon information in my mind while creating something new is pretty much impossible.
To an untrained observer I am "focusing" on creating a dungeon (after all, I am engrossed in these dungeon documents & maps, I'm not browsing socials or looking at my phone) but I can easily spend hours doing nothing of substance. I might be tweaking the map, reordering the to-do list, adding some inspirational source material I should eventually read, or re-writing the room keys to be more terse and evocative...
But NONE of that help me decide what is in the next dungeon room - and that's what I need to figure out by game night!
Peter de Vries wrote "Write drunk, revise sober." Perhaps for me it should be "Write on paper, revise on the computer." Now on Saturday mornings I go down to a local hipster coffee shop with my notebook, get caffeinated and write down dungeon ideas. I just bang out cool rooms, monster lairs, dungeon dressing, 'specials' and anything else I can think of.
As it turns out my memory is fine for this purpose - I don't need all the keys and maps in front of me in order to write rooms that make sense in the context of the dungeon I'm working on. I can remember the basic organizing principles, and don't need to know exactly whether the pit trap is in room 10 or 11 in order to write something down the hall.
Use What You Have & What Works
The other factor in that house-sitting success story was my limited access to game materials. Instead of having access to my crammed gaming bookshelves (not to mention an unimaginable horde of PDFs on my computer) I was forced to make use of the books I brought along. Instead of browsing for that "one perfect table" I rolled on what I had, noted down the result and moved on. This kept me focused on generating ideas instead of "comparison shopping" indefinitely.
What many folks know already is that not all gaming materials are created equal. I have been running a city campaign for 4 years and never once have I used anything from Vornheim. Meanwhile The Nocturnal Table features in my game consistently. Coincidence? Um, just, like, my opinion, man? I think not! Good game materials deliver results when you need them. When you find powerful tables or useful reference works, use them all the time instead of indulging your inner magpie and looking for the next shiny object. I wasted years beating my head against substandard tools, trying to make them work because everyone else said they were great.
(This is where the dudes at old-school bastions like K&KA will steer you right. Ask them what kind of tables & reference books they use. I know they seem scary, just be cool and don't talk about B/X.)
Here is a short list of highly useful tables and reference works that I can recommend to everybody. It isn't anything earth-shattering, and most of these you probably know already. Some are hard to find but don't @ me. Get these in physical copy or download & print them, stack them beside your desk, turn off your computer and get more shit done than before:
- The 1st edition DMG
- OSRIC (get the Black Blade hardcover if you can)
- Hack & Slash - Treasure (the best thing Courtney ever wrote, fight me. PDF only but I printed it out for my gaming binder. Yes, it's that essential)
- Judges Guild - Ready Ref Sheets, Wilderness Hexplore Revised, Wilderlands of High Fantasy, City-State of the Invincible Overlord (and plenty more, but these are the best)
- Matt Finch - City Adventures, Tome of Adventure Design (Honestly I don't use the TOAD as much as some people, but certain sections of it are gold. There is a bit of a learning curve while you get familiar with what it can do and where to find things)
- Melan - The Fomalhaut Oracle from Fight On! Magazine #3, The Nocturnal Table
- Muddle's Wilderness Location Generator (the dungeon one isn't too bad either)
- New Big Dragon Games' d30 Companions (duplicates some DMG stuff but both have useful shit)
- Ktrey's Wilderness Hexes. Too bad this is not available in book form. (hint hint bro, my money is yours for all the use I've gotten from these over the years) Also you can browse his blog for even more material.
I'm sure I omitted your favourite book or table. There are lots more, but the point is that these are some of the basics. Start with a useful core of books that definitely work and expand one piece at a time as you find useful things. For further reading, some of these and more are mentioned in Melan's blog article Great Tables of D&D History.
*****
A lot of this advice comes down to working on what actually gets results.
This post got really long, so I cut out some for a future article to make things a bit more digestible. Maybe writing post was a distraction in itself... Oops, time to go! I hope this was useful or interesting. I'm still out here gamin' hard, and I hope you are too.
Have fun everyone!
To return to the reason for this post: here is one guitar player who wouldn't let a little setback - an industrial accident that cost him TWO FINGERS - prevent him playing some of the heaviest shit ever committed to tape:
