How To Improve Workflow - Part II

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 ***

I can get distracted easily by cool ideas. Often they're not original to me but once I come across them, they get lodged in my mind and refuse to leave until I do something. This means developing them until I get enough on paper that I am no longer obsessing, which usually takes a few weeks.

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!!

About Alignment (not really)

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.

Choosing Gaming Music

(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!

Never Say Die! or, How to Improve Workflow - Part I

"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:

Just got Lynched

Bryce Lynched that is. 

My adventure Gilded Dream of the Incandescent Queen just got reviewed at tenfootpole and received a coveted "The Best" rating!

Some carefully selected quotes from the review:

"It's doing everything right ..."

"So, surprise surprise surprise, Terribly Sorcery gets it."

"Again, if I really think about this then it seems pretty nifty. And it is ABSOLUTELY better than most of the garbage I run across. (This is what praise from me looks like. Its not the best food ive ever eaten in my life. Why is that the case?)"

"The ability to create, and communicate, the truly MYTHIC in quite well done. The designer understands the need to do this in an adventure and has the ability to do it."

He didn't quite like my minimal prose stylings, but you can't have everything in life. Anyway, as usual you can get the adventure for FREE in Footprints magazine #25.

New OGL Contro

Well, various people have jumped in with their opinions on this latest nonsense from WotC about a new 1.1 version of the OGL. Some say it invalidates the old version, others say it can't. (A great deal of talk is happening on Reddit, but that language I will not utter here) 

[DOUBLE EDIT - I'm going to add more good links as I find them (or you can also just go on youtube and search 'OGL 1.1' to find a million videos)]

Here's Rob Conley breaking it down.
A bit from Ryan Dancey himself.
This guy 'My Lawyer Friend', who seems pretty lucid.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation weighs in.
Cory Doctorow with an essay on Pluralistic, including lots of links.
The Alexandrian wrote a brief history of the OGL.
AD&D legend Grodog posts up a collection of resources.

Alexander Macris, the ACKS guy, shoots across the bow on his Substack.
Mythmere himself, Matt Finch did a video.
Frog God/Necromancer games make a statement (link to an image).
Goodman Games makes a statement.
News about Paizo creating their own open license for everyone to use (paizo.com is down, everyone is obviously stoked on this, here is an archive of the original post).
Penny Arcade steps on up to the plate, thanks Tycho (includes some links too).

This shit even made it into VICE and The Guardian (I ain't linkin it)!

I find the debate mildly amusing but it really doesn't change a damn thing. The OGL isn't even necessary for what we do! Although I do hope this latest round of blood-from-a-stone tactics will convince a few people dumb enough to still play Corpo-D&D to throw away their expensive 5e books and come over to play with the cool kids.

Either way my message to Hasbro & WotC is, was and always will be the same. I hope you will all join me, dear readers, raising your voices as one in a righteous chorus to say:

License this dick, suits.

That's all for today, but here is an old video that may shed some light on the subject. Watch and at least try to pay attention:

10 Year Anniversary of Terrible Sorcery!

September 19, 2011 was my first post on blogspot. A big round number like that is cause for reflection, not that I have the spare time to be doing it right now.

Ten years of blogging! Where do I begin? It feels like this whole thing was started in another lifetime, by a different man. Let's look back and see how the blog developed over the years.

2011-2012

I had quit the band I was playing in (a really great one BTW), quit my job, and was on the outs with my girlfriend for a while. Perfect time to think about D&D again after a five-year break from gaming! I bought the Pathfinder core rules (little did I know...) and started playing with my roommates. This was the original Land's End game, which ended sometime in 2012 after a few arguments with one of the players. 

I was reading all kinds of OSR blogs at the time, starting with Grognardia. I decided to get in on the action. At this time, blog content was mostly me trying to figure out how to write and what to write about. A fair number of articles were rambling nonsense, or based on some dumb notion that crossed my mind. A few bits and pieces of actual gaming content, like the Secret Santicore contest which was great fun.

2013-2015

Of course, almost immediately I got a new job with more hours/week, patched things up with my girl and started a new band. Free time commensurately dwindled and you can see the posting frequency drop off until I actually go two and a half years without posting, between Feb. 2013 and Sept 2015! I was recording and producing my band's first record all by myself, and that was a lot of fucking work. 

Blog content - the beginning of my "Nameless Cults" series, some of which are fairly good. My favourite opinion piece I've written, which of course is about the best video game ever, Dark Souls.

2016-2017

At this point I think I was between jobs a lot and didn't have much money. These years were pretty lousy as I recall. I could have spent more time thinking about gaming, but I didn't have a group to play with around this time. I started dating a new girl who would ruin my life a few years later (referenced obliquely in The Saints Have Turned to Crime).

Blog content - In an effort to get my friend Manscorpion to publish more stuff (he writes a lot, but hardly ever releases anything) I gave him a spotlight on the blog to talk about the dungeon he was running at the time, The Crater of Termination. These posts were fun, I wish he did more of them but I can only whip a giant sized scorpion-abomination so much. I started working in earnest on one of my grandest & least workable ideas yet: a campaign of Arthur's Knights vs. Chthulhu Cults. Somehow it never gelled together, despite me spending years thinking about it. Failed experiments actually seem to comprise 75% of my gaming ideas!

2018-2019

While my personal life was still fucked up at this point, I was gaming lots more. I got to be a player for a while in a 2nd edition game, which was great until it wasn't (Why the OSR?). I restarted Land's End with most of the original players when my brother moved to town (The Return!). I ran some Labyrinth Lord games for some brand-new players, and we had great fun. I got on Google+ just in time for it to collapse, but managed to participate in one or two communal things (the Henry Justice Ford MM). Somewhere in there I discovered Judges Guild and the Wilderlands of High Fantasy, and they blew my fucking mind. I started playing in some online games with G+ people that have been tremendous fun and really mind-expanding. I think it was sometime in the winter of '18-'19 that I became obsessed with WFRP 1st edition, and managed to find a copy of Realm of Chaos: Slaves to Darkness on eBay for a reasonable price. Still looking for the second book, though.

Blog Content - Finally after six or seven years, I was actually producing decent content. A good mixture of play reports, some gameable material and opinion pieces. My first reviews appeared around this time. This will never be a review-focused blog but I do like writing them and will continue to review things that I find fun, useful or annoying. The Random Monster Generator Shootout began here, and that's probably my favourite part of this blog. Fun on the Velvet Horizon was also a great series, if intermittent. I commissioned that bad-ass banner artwork up top from Mr. Penny Melgarejo, who you should contact if you want some metal-as-fuck artwork at a great price.

2020-2021

A mixed bag. My personal life has vastly improved. Work is steady. The newbie-friendly Wilderlands game I started in 2019 has moved online and now has players from across North America including a few of my old gaming pals from back home. That's a great feeling. I released my first sizeable project: a 20-page dungeon for Footprints magazine #25 which included my own hand-drawn maps & artwork, something I never thought I would ever do.

Blog Content - Still doing well. I put up a small dungeon used in my home game (The Black Pyramid). Many series continued. The Historical Weapon & Armour Lists were published with the help of my good pal (& player in my Wilderlands game) Steve. Now that you've been granted this platform, I don't want to hear any more comments about 'realism' during a game, OK??

Today and Tomorrow

I am so busy trying to prep for all the games I'm running, I don't have time to come up with ideas for the blog! I have three campaigns going right now that play at varying frequencies:

1 - The revived Land's End campaign is still going (three years later) although play is currently intermittent. Honestly that's fine, the next dungeon is proving extremely complex and difficult to write up. I don't want to spoil anything about it yet - but it's going to be a RAGER.

2 - The Labyrinth Lord game set in the Wilderlands in and around the City-State of the World Emperor. This is the newbie game mentioned above, began in 2019 in person and moved online in 2020. I have a rotating pool of 7 or 8 players who show up at various times.

3 - A brand new Land's End Part II campaign, set some distance away from the neighbourhood of the original. This is a small game (just my brother and his wife). I am using Melan's Sword & Magic ruleset, which is proving flexible and easy to use. I am planning on using several great modules in this one including Sision Tower, the JG classic Caverns of Thracia and more. More updates as this one develops...

My roommates bought me a drawing tablet for my computer. I am getting better at using it with photoshop to screen-share maps and drawings during online games. This is a lot of fun and is opening up new vistas in terms of skills to develop. My digital maps are getting much better after some mistakes and lots of practise. Now I just need a better computer!

This year I have been studying after work which has really cut into my free time. Juggling gaming, musical projects, education, exercise and (on occasion) a social call to one of a dwindling circle of friends has been tough to manage. I have always been one for hyper-focus on a single topic and multitasking is kind of a time-sink. Sometimes game sessions get missed or I have to learn to improvise (another thing I've never been good at). I am using modules more than I ever have before, but I'm getting better at using my limited prep time usefully, focusing on game-relevant detail. I feel like my DMing is better than it's ever been.

As for the State of the OSR...

Just kidding! I don't give a fuck! What kind of blog do you think this is? 

Things with me will continue in the same general vein. When my latest course is done, some updates will be forthcoming from Land's End II. Reviews for some new (or at least... vaguely recent) products that I really love. Maybe some play reports from the City-State game, a few Nameless Cults that I have in draft form, more Fun on the Velvet Horizon... you get the idea!

*****

Now c'mon everyone, get out there and Fight On!

Keying my Hexcrawl

In a comment on the last Land's End play report, GFC wrote:

[... I'd love to read more about these factions, and your process for prepping these richly detailed hexmaps. Looking forward to reading more play reports!]


*****

Thanks for the commentary, GFC!

My hex-stocking procedure is painfully slow and perhaps not worth emulating. After playing music for 20 years and D&D for closer to 25 (wow!), I have learned a little bit about my creative process. The best bloggers that I read seem to be able to create their own settings top-to-bottom (or nearly so), while I will always be using a lot of existing material, and perhaps stitching it together in an interesting way if I'm lucky.

When I do dream up something creative & interesting, it tends to come damnably slow. Nevertheless, I have fumbled along despite these handicaps and built Land's End in the following way. I hope it may provide some help in your own games.

My basic ideas are not too far from Blair's classic How I key a Hex Map.
There are tons of other guides on the basics of hexmapping out there for those who are new to it, so I'll just leave this starting point here for those who might be interested: Hexcrawl Resources at Ars Phantasia

Almost two years of exploration

Starting Out

I began with a mental picture of the campaign setting: a "lost world" cut off from civilization. The adventurers leaving known territory and mapping brand-new lands, scattered with the remains of former empires. I wanted an aesthetic of cavemen, lizardfolk, swamps and jungle ruins. That suggested locations, terrain & possible encounters to start with.

In two years of play, my group has travelled halfway across my 8.5"x11" paper map of six-mile hexes on the long axis, and three quarters of the way on the short axis. They have by no means seen everything within that area, either (as you can see on the map above). I usually only have 20-ish hexes stocked that they haven't been to yet. Just enough that I have my bases covered if they take a wrong turn. I come up with new locations quite slowly.

What helps is that travel in jungles & swamps is slow - the players can't get far in a day even at light encumbrance (they take pains to never get weighed down with too much stuff) so I only need a few extra hexes stocked in any direction. They often revisit the same adventure locations multiple times for various reasons (strategic chokepoints, stocking up on resources, landmarks and paths through the jungle, to say nothing of repeat dungeon delves). The region is small but has become dense with connections and history.

See: Shallow & Deep Wilderness Sandboxes


Grab From Everywhere

I have praised d4 Caltrops before on this blog. A huge number of my hex locations are from his "100 Wilderness Hexes" document. This thing is fantastic, so check it out. Many of the hexes interconnect with each other (especially the swamp hexes), which adds further layers of adventure possibility. I have taken many of these and spun them into a whole game session, or connected them to something across the map for my players to go check out.

See: 100 Wilderness Hexes

You might have a few modules gathering dust on your shelf that you'd like to include on your map. So far I have added the The Tomb of Abysthor, The Spire of Quetzel and a few two-pagers from the excellent Trilemma Adventures compendium.

Modules aren't just useful for saving time. Each one added to your setting can be spun off into new elements if you put a little effort in. Using The Tomb of Abysthor for example, I reworked the included wilderness locations into larger, more detailed locales. I created more NPCs for the cult of Orcus and the Tsathar, spread them around the hexmap, added them to the region's encounter tables and gave them new lairs, dungeons, motivations, things to do, equipment & treasure, etc. All of a sudden, a single dungeon module has added a new layer of texture & meaning to the world. Even if they never set foot inside, the players will get involved with the dungeon's factions and NPCs one way or another. Do this for three or four modules and you should have a whole campaign's worth of material in no time.


Random Generation

Sometimes you get stuck, and that's OK. Judges Guild is here to help: go get the Wilderness Hexplore Document. Compiled based on material from the Ready Ref Sheets and elsewhere, it amounts to a complete random wilderness stocking system. I don't use it that way exactly - I roll on it for ideas when I can't think of anything. It gives just enough detail to jog the mind into doing something new. You might also try the Tome of Adventure Design, some of the tables at the back of the DMG, or another of your favourites.


Example

I was stocking the Drowned Lands (the great swamp at the centre of the hexmap, where the lizardmen live) and after 20 or so hexes, I felt a bit gassed. I opened up the tables and this is what happened:

Rolling on the feature table on pg. 8 gives a result of 7 - Temples & Shrines. I roll for the temple's size & shape (an obelisk of metal), age, number of followers, type and number of leadership, treasury (very important for PCs), the type of shrine (a holy statue), defensive measures and traps, effects of defiling the shrine, the deity's sphere of influence and plenty of other things. Occasionally results need to be tweaked to fit the system (there are no 11th level clerics in Land's End!).

Rolling for the deity's appearance resulted in these traits: goddess; elf; alien; wasp wings. That sounded familiar, so I dug through the Book of the Damned (one of the few Pathfinder books I actually like). I found the Oni Daimyo pictured below, whose divine portfolio matched some of the random table results and gave me more useful details. Jumping back & forth between various books like this really works for me.

Putting it all together I get this basic hex info:


Hex 0612 -TEMPLE OF INMA - Obelisk of unknown metal, surrounded by 40’ walls adorned with tallow candles & reed torches. 23 chthonian elf worshippers inside, led by triumvirate of priests (Cle 2nd, 4th, 4th). Statue of goddess Inma, "The Empress of the World" has three eyes, four arms, alien features and wasp wings. An obscure demoness of blood who bestows wealth on worshippers when appropriate sacrifices are made. The temple is rich and fanatical.

Ceremonies: Regularly at dusk (all - public, lizardman blood), midnight (high priests - public, platinum) and dawn (high priests only, copper). Special ones - a month of fasting and prayer, the longest day of the year, goddess’ “day of death,” death of a high priest. 


This only leads to more questions. Who built this place? What is the obelisk actually made of? What do Inma's worshippers want with treasure, anyway? Where do they get the coinage for their sacrifices? Why risk death at the hands of lizardfolk? Are the clergy isolationist hermits, or will they deal with the outside world? How are relations with the lizardfolk who (at least nominally) control the whole swamp? Are they apostates from chthonic elf society, or does Inma have a place in their larger pantheon? How will they react to the PCs: as allies, enemies, potential sacrifices or something else?

Answering these might result in a dumb adventure location or something fun & memorable. The effects might spiral outwards and change any number of things in your game world. I don't have it all figured out yet. The important thing is that I now have something I wouldn't have made up myself, and I can flesh it out and see where things lead. The setting just got slightly more complex, more textured.

The Wilderness Hexplore Document is quite wide-ranging. It could just as easily have given me a ruined bridge; a sunken canoe guarded by giant frogs; or a castle with a samurai and his djinn servant (I have rolled all these before). Adapting & reskinning the results to my game world is always an enjoyable exercise that expands my thinking about the setting and fills in details that I otherwise would never have included.

Putting it All Together

This is where two DMs with the same raw material might run completely different games. Remember that aesthetic I mentioned earlier? I think of it as a filter. Everything I use from a module or blog, everything I roll on a random table - it all gets filtered through my own view of the setting, tweaked a little bit until it gels, and then set down.

There is no strict hierarchy or step-by-step procedure to follow. I like to bounce around between all these options as the mood strikes me. When I get stuck, I change my approach and continue. At a certain point you have to trust yourself to make the connections, to adjust elements to fit into a larger structure that only you can see.

See: The Dirt Cheap Sandbox

I hope these examples are useful. Read the links, because those guys usually say it better than I can. If I missed something, let me have it in the comments!


*****

It's funny to be writing about my wilderness hexcrawl while I'm neck-deep in keying a gigantic city sandbox for a different game with some new people. It's proving to be quite the unfamiliar challenge!

And now for a bit of classic '90s gaming music.

Why the OSR? / YOU RECOGNIZE NOTHING

Another wave of blathering was stirred up on G+ a few weeks ago (and another? and another? and another???) regarding the OSR and what it's all about. Here is a story that illustrates a few things I've learned about OSRism that I find really important.

So. I've been playing on and off in a 2nd edition game for about two years, with a few old friends (two of my Land's End players) and some of *their* friends. It's always the same guy DMing - we will call him "D." He and I are the only players with significant experience (he a lifer like I am). Two players are rank beginners and the ones who play in my Land's End game have no experience other than that.

Our party ranges from levels 8-12. My character is an 8th-level psionicist (I'll cover this in a future post) so sometimes I'm almost completely useless. We're playing some high-level adventures. Many of them are D's own concoction, with some published material. Of late we're playing through Temple, Tower & Tomb, a series of three pretty tough dungeons.

Things finally reached a pass last weekend, and I know I said IN MY LAST POST I wasn't going to blog while angry, but fuck it. I thought if I waited a week I'd have a more objective look back at what happened, but today I write this missive to you still feeling slapped in the face and I gotta get this out of my system.

I missed one of the sessions in the Temple, but it was cool except for one incident that set my spidey-sense tingling: while sifting through a huge pit of bones for magic items, we uncovered an odd NPC: a sentient flying skull. Turns out some dude was killed by the evil clerics of the temple and just woke up that way. Fine, I can work with this, but...

My suspicions began to grow when the floating skull, named Ollie, did not say "Thanks for rescuing me, goodbye!" but followed us around the dungeon making comments. Flying into rooms to grab treasures. Even offering suggestions on dealing with the various traps in the temple.

You guessed it. The dreaded "DMPC" had reared its ugly head. I thought I had left those behind when I graduated high school. But it gets worse:


The Tower

The delve last weekend really irritated the shit out of me. We were grinding through this dungeon slowly, and I was doing my best to keep my mouth shut. The kind of place where checking for traps and casting Detect Magic on every single door is mandatory, but the walls are made of wood. I honestly considered setting the whole place on fire and sifting through the ruins in a few days later for the stupid MacGuffin we needed.

I was basically going along to get along, letting the newer dudes set the pace. Previous game sessions had already given me deep suspicions that we were playing on "easy mode." I wondered what the fuck would be necessary for the party to fail for once.

Finally we reached the lich's hidden throne room.

The fight began in a normal enough way. Lich with Stoneskin dropped Unholy Word and Reverse Gravity, got whaled on by our fighters and went down. The magical punishments continued from an unknown source, and one of the prisoners in his sanctum was revealed as a fire elemental covered by an illusion. Makes sense so far. We began attacking the other "innocent prisoners," assuming one was the lich in disguise.

I should point out that all these irritating things so far were in the module, AFAIK. D can be blamed only for deciding to run it. But what happened next really ripped my dick off:

My psionicist was standing back, shooting arrows since I was all out of PSPs, when Ollie the fucking floating skull appeared seemingly out of nowhere (another immersion-breaking device that will probably cause me $2000 in dental reconstruction just for thinking about it). He said "The Emerald. The Emerald!"

Of course. There was a large green gem sitting on a throne in the middle of the room. Why wouldn't the lich leave his fucking phylactery out in the open? Makes perfect sense right? The DM was telling me how to defeat the boss, so my character dutifully smashed it and with a puff of smoke the lich was destroyed. My eyes rolled so far back in my skull, I'm currently typing this while hanging from the fucking ceiling.


What I'm Trying To Say

"The ultimate object of education can scarcely be knowledge anymore: it is, rather, the will born of such knowledge."  - Max Stirner

Some folks have complained about the OSR approach. The latest is from Chimeric Reservations in particular. For example, here are the Artpunk D&D "commandments" which I also subscribe to. (note the fucking quotation marks okay?)

Reading about Jacquaying the Dungeon, the Quantum Ogre, the Dirt-Cheap Sandbox or 1000 other awesome, educational, informative and fun-as-hell blog posts in the OSR world is worthwhile not just for ideas and rules but because taken together they inculcate a certain perspective. A perspective that includes freedom, choice and consequence for the players and fairness from the DM. Things that I found frustratingly lacking in last weekend's game. It doesn't matter if you're an OG from '74 or you play Pathfinder like I do. Absorbing these ideas will raise your consciousness. You'll understand why a "gimme" like this is in fact robbing your players of the fun they otherwise could've had.

"You are privy to a great becoming..." 

I don't know if anyone thinks or claims that OSR-ing is a fully general solution to every problem in roleplaying games. This session exemplifies just one frustrating and totally avoidable ending to a session that OSR-style thinking would have prevented. You can accuse me of "one-true-wayism" all you want, but I would never in a million years have pulled that fucking move with my players. What I'm saying is that at least in my case THE OSR IMPROVED MY GAMES, SAVED MY SOUL AND KICKS ASS. It has real effects on people, and a little reading on D's part might have saved me from this lingering taste of piss in my mouth.

Why even bother playing if we already know what's going to happen? I'm trying to think and solve problems and play my character to the hilt and survive. Too bad it's all a bunch of wasted effort. Why keep track of anything? Why roll the dice?

What To Do Next?

A great number of pursuits compete for my time. Too many to list. Why spend any of my limited hours getting this pissed off? At the very least I'll be contacting D in private to discuss my misgivings, although I strongly doubt it will make a difference. I believe he is just pandering to the newbies, and since there are four of them and one of me, the best option may be to quietly reduce my attendance. I mean, they keep coming back - who am I to tell them how to have fun?