krakendm

[krakendm]

I want to recommend a story I just finished reading. Specifically I want to highlight its worldbuilding (as this blog more d&d focused), but the whole damn thing is great! Ilhen's Seventh Deathtrap (link below) is a masterpiece of modern sword and sorcery, and while it’s big strength is it’s characters, the glimpses of the wider world are tantalizing.

It has fairly classic sword and sorcery magic, which if you’re not familiar- basically magic has some cost, which can be fatal. Magic is also rare, highly valued, but the cost dissuades most people. This is a stark difference from traditional D&D wizardry, or Vancian magic (from Jack Vance’s Dying Earth series), but can help us as world designers to give additional magic to NPCs. Ilhen's Seventh Deathtrap has a lot of different disciplines, some of which we see and are familiar, like illusion magic or divination, and some that we don’t see like glaciomancy and lithomancy. Magic itself is gained from going to a spire and talking to a god (I’m summarizing a bunch but it gets discussed in depth in the novel. RAFO). This magic is strong but specialized- which is perfect for an enemy or npc.

It gives us as worldbuilders a connection from “angry ice mage, wants to kill party” to a spire where this magic is taught. We can go from a generic npc wizard to where they were taught, why they only cast x or y element spells, and why the party’s wizard (or other magic user) can or cannot learn this method of casting. It also helps us give a unique “class” that players can’t access but could have exotic spells that they can learn. To continue with the example of the angry ice mage- maybe they’re a high challenge enemy but we lack good spells that really fit “ice mage”. Well a high level glaciomancer would be able to control ice, or summon a glacier, or speak a word of power and freeze their foes. While we don’t have spells written out, we can adapt the classic spells from d&d and either reflavor them or adjust their power. Power Word Stun, an 8th level enchantment could become Power Word Freeze, a 7th level spell that does pretty much the same thing but freezes them for 1d4 rounds (or something, I’m not trying to balance a spell that will only be used by enemies, I am trying to run combat not write a book).

Additionally most spires are known, but there are some hidden ones that may be protected by death traps, or dungeons as we would call them. While I’m not going to go as in depth about dungeons as I went about magic, I will say that Ilhen's Seventh Deathtrap is about dungeons and has a good explanation of why people build dungeons, and how they go about it. It’s not the first book to feature the idea of dungeon makers, but it does talk about what kinds of death traps are made and has a bunch of examples of puzzles that you can steal.

Anyway to sum up this post- you should read Ilhen's Seventh Deathtrap. It’s FREE, about 260 pages long, has good worldbuilding, and amazing characters.

Also it’s not a litRPG which is nice cause a ton of modern fantasy (that I find at least) is plagued by numbers and stats.

[krakendm]

I already left some thoughts I had as a comment to the OP but I figured I’d put some more thoughts in depth here.

Holidays for TTRPG settings are hard, and I can’t think of too many “official” settings actually mention holidays. Sure you have the easy ones- First of the year, winter solstice, summer solstice, autumnal or vernal equinoxes (if you’re setting has the right astronomical setup for these) but outside of that, it’s tough to think of additional ones. My long term setting has plenty of different cultures, even if I don’t know what they are yet, but they all have their own religions, history, culture, and (probably) calendar. This makes it even harder to come up with holidays, especially shared ones. For example if there’s a dwarf civilization and an elf civilization bordering each other, they’re not going to have a ton of shared holidays, especially in their capitols. Even more so if there isn’t a powerful entity forcing what I’m gonna call “temporal unity”. Take the USA before time zones were established. At the time, different towns would have different times. It might be 10:00 in Cityville, but 11:45 in Townton. These places might only be 20 miles by rail away, but there’s an hour forty-five difference between these places. Now take that and put it in a fantasy setting, and you may come up with different civilizations having different hours, days, months etc.

That’s not to say that all hope is lost. I bring up calendars because they’re a good way to keep track of things. It’s very likely that multiple civilizations will look at the stars and come up with roughly the same day and year length, and if your setting is relatively earth like, there will also be recognizable seasons that can roughly match up from civilization to civilization. Those astronomical events are perfect for creating holidays! Everyone will plant their crops at similar times, and will probably harvest them at similar times. Boom- there’s 2 holidays that can both be unique and shared across cultures. You can expand from there- everyone will come to similar conclusions about equinoxes and solstices, and different people will look at different events and celebrate or fear them accordingly. Once you cross off the easy holidays related to astronomy, then you can get into the harder stuff. Maybe your civilization has a powerful religious organization, and they “mandate” celebrations of the gods. We have an IRL example in the Catholic Church which organizes celebrations for different saints. Steal those holidays for your setting! Steal every IRL holiday for your setting! Mix and match different events that cultures celebrate IRL and fit them where you want them. If the civilization has a strong military tradition but also believes that a god(ess) influences the year that you were born in, you could mix the idea of the Zodiac (or astrology?) in with the USA’s modern idea of veterans day or Memorial Day.

To sum up my thoughts-

- Make a calendar on something like Donjon or just with a pen and paper and track the movements of the heavens (in your setting).

- Understand that different civilizations will celebrate stuff differently- and when they meet in either war or trade those different celebrations may combine.

- Steal from real world holidays.

- Mix different cultural and religious celebrations IRL and make that the traditional holiday celebration.

Seeing a bunch of stuff about today's holiday which is a holiday in only one country reminds me that I really should come up with more national holidays for my setting, have way too few of those so far

[krakendm]

I have two modes: beach holiday and eldritch horror

[krakendm]

Ah I see you’re trying to play with clusterfuck initiative. It only lasted about 3 sessions in my game.

To simulate the pace of real combat, there's no initiative, everyone takes their turn simultaneously. Whoever says what they want to do first has that happen first. This includes the GM. Have fun with everyone talking over eachother.

[krakendm]

Me in the middle of class, busy thinking about my homebrew campaign and not paying attention to lecture at all:

[krakendm]

Experience Points are dumb, gimme some of that Milestone leveling, so I can be arbitrary and make my players powerful.

Sleep, Travel time, and walking speed is great for random encounters, so you can keep players on their toes.

Tactical combat is a must for me though, I can't picture pure theater of the mind, so a grid is helpful.

reblog if you’re a DM and:

- don’t care about rations

- don’t care about encumbrance

- don’t care about walking speed

- rarely care about combat distance

- don’t care about sleep

- don’t care about travel time

- don’t care about spell components

i wanna know how many other lazy nerds are out there.

[krakendm]

The present tabletop RPG resurgence is great, but I can’t help but feel that a lot of the received wisdom that’s developing about how to run tabletop games is leading new GMs to make things harder for themselves than they needs to be.

Stuff like “I ignore 80% of the rulebook and constantly fudge dice rolls, that means I’m a strong independent GM with a clear vision for my game” – like, yes, that may well be true, but that you’re having to do all that is a pretty clear sign that you’re using a wildly inappropriate system for the kind of game you want to run.

Basically, game rules are not unopinionated. Any game that claims to be universal is lying to you; yes, it’s true that a given set of rules can be reasonably setting neutral, but even the simplest rules bake in a huge number of very specific assumptions about how the game ought to be played. They have to, because that’s what rules do.

Of course, whenever the rules and the GM disagree about how the game ought to be played, the GM is going to win, but that’s not necessarily an argument you need to be having. To draw a parallel, it’s totally possible to start with the rules of soccer and gradually rewrite and pare away bits and pieces of it until you have miniature golf, but you’d have saved yourself a lot of headaches if you’d just started with miniature golf in the first place!

And the thing is, I don’t think most novice GMs are getting themselves into this position on purpose. A lot of folks seem to be getting misled – sometimes by overzealous advocates of this or that popular system, and sometimes just by their own inexperience – that there’s basically only one kind of tabletop RPG, and if the the game they want to play is anything other than that very specific game, it’s on them to figure it out from first principles.

Which just plain ain’t the case. Tabletop RPGs are a hugely diverse hobby, and whatever your perfect game is, there’s probably something very close to it out there already, no matter what it is you’re dissatisfied with. There are tabletop RPGs without dice, tabletop RPGs without GMs, and even tabletop RPGs without player characters – and all of those are totally separate considerations from how complex the rules are. If your ideal game is a highly structured three-hundred-page tome about Regency era comedies of manners in the mode of Bronte and Austen?  That game actually exists – as do countless others.

(Plus, even if you prefer to hack your own systems, you can benefit from expanding your horizons and seeing how other people have approached the subjects you want to take on. As a game author myself, I’ve frequently found myself in the position of having spent weeks or months bashing my head against a particular piece of game design, only later to discover that some game I didn’t know existed had solved that problem thirty years ago!)

And just so nobody can say I’m being a grump without offering any constructive alternatives, there’s an annotated rec list of forty-odd free or pay-what-you-want tabletop RPGs under the cut. If you want to take my advice but have no budget for expanding your library, check any of these out!

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