RPGaDay 2025 #7 Journey

What makes a good set of travel rules? There should be something to engage with and some reason for the players to do so. "To make things not boring" is a terrible reason. Sometimes, the characters just need to go from one place to another and that's that. Fast forward past the boring stuff.

In Old School D&D, overland travel was a test of resource management, much like dungeoneering. Did you bring enough horses and wagons to carry all of the inventory? Did you bring enough rations to feed everyone? Are you prepared in case bandits or other threats arrive? And if you didn't prepare, you paid the price.

Likewise, navigation is only important if the chance of getting lost makes things more interesting. If the characters are invested in making sure they get to the capitol in time to stop the coronation, there should be no chance that they get lost, but lots of chances for them to be stopped by the vizier's forces. If the characters are wandering from village to village, then getting lost simply means that they arrive at a village that isn't the one they wanted to go to. And in the resource management mode, a detour means that their resources get stretched in a way that they may or may not have planned for.
 

RPGaDay 2025 #6 Motive

 What drives a character to adventure?

I think that we've sanitized the idea of "adventure" in gaming. Historically speaking, "adventurers" have been troublemakers. Mercenaries and pirates. Very often they left their homes to go to war and then never returned once the war was over. The biker culture that got its start in the US after WWII is another example.

The idea of "wandering adventurers" as a sort of "hero for hire" is a modern invention presumably to accommodate gaming. While early gamers were rather mercenary, as encouraged by the amounts of XP offered for treasure recovery, with the rightness of their actions perhaps a secondary concern.

It's also possibly a matter of destiny, though the character is certainly allowed to have an opinion of what they're destined to do.

RPGaDay 2025 #5 Ancient

Adventures involving the Ancients are rather common. It seems like the Ancients always knew better than modern people.

It's a trope that crosses genres. Many fantasy settings have some sort of Golden Age in their past. Science fiction is full of xeno-archaeology, digging up ancient galactic empires. Some people even go so far as to presume that something similar applies to the real world. There are people who believed that the ancient Greeks, Romans, Egyptians or some other ancient culture had things all figured out. Then there are those who believe that there are truly ancient civilizations like Atlantis, or Lemuria that knew cosmic or magical secrets that have since been lost.

RPGaDay 2025 #4 Message

 As a Xennial, one of the biggest jumps in technology that I've experience is in communications technology. Seeing younger generations that have grown up around the idea of having a device in your pocket that connects you to any person or data and allows you to broadcast the mundane details of your life to any potentially interested parties and if you become popular enough that can be your job is just a wild thing.

And we see that ease of communication in our media. All of our favorite superheroes have the ability to communicate instantly with their team mates as well as a home base to provide them with additional information and support. In D&D, magic items like sending stones can be used similarly. 

But what if the party had to communicate with the technology I had as a kid (or equivalent)? There are a lot of Stranger Things/Kids on Bikes-style games these days, so maybe it's exactly the technology they're using. Landline phones, so you had to hope the person you wanted to reach was near the phone you were dialing. If some else answers, you had to take the time to have a polite if perfunctory conversation and maybe ask them to take a message for when the person you were trying to reach gets back. Long distance calls were expensive, so it had to be important for you to make one. If you had to get in touch with someone a long distance from you, mail was typically cheaper, but took more time.

RPGaDay 2025 #3 Tavern

I remember a time in my gaming career when I kept trying to redeem the old "You all meet in a tavern" gaming trope. The easiest way to do that is to place the campaign's inciting incident in the tavern. In one case, this inciting incident was the tavern blowing up, with the campaign proceeding from there.

One thing I haven't really done is used the tavern as a home base. In my CivCrawl "blank map" campaign that I ran for a few sessions during COVID, I did make an attempt at this. There was a tavern at the center of the world that was a home base and provided essential services, but the campaign fell apart and I was dissatisfied with a number of things in the setup. I might go back to the concept, but I might try to simply learn the lessons from that game and apply them to the next OSR campaign that I run.

I don't think using the tavern as a home base was one of the problems, so it's definitely something that I can come back to.

RPGaDay 2025 #2 Prompt

 I love random generators for just about everything. I struggle with inspiration, but they let me skip that step and go right into fleshing out a concept. My #Dungeon24 project was entirely procedurally generated. But I think my favorite random generator is the Instant Story Generator from Pandemonium: Adventures in Tabloid World. 

Part of it is that it helps me create tabloid-style adventures for D20 Modern. I could probably use the system from the Pandemonium book to run adventures, but I also think that D20 Modern is really suited to a tabloid world approach as well, especially if you want to escape the D&D-isms that it tries to import into the modern day (2003 AD!).

The other part is simply that it's at my sweet spot where it gives me just enough of the right details to build from there. Everyone has their own sweet spot and this is mine.

RPGaDay 2025 #1 Patron

This is year is going to be a tough one. I easily have 31 RPGs on my shelf that I can discuss. I have close to 31 anecdotes and gaming stories. But ideas have always been hard for me, so I don't know if I'm going to be able to come up with 31 ideas.

The idea of a patron NPC isn't something that I've worked with. Most of my campaigns have been either player-driven, murderhobo or both. Each individual scenario might have a "questgiver" character, but they are only of nominal authority i.e. the village elder who wants you to clear out the nearby goblin hovels. Which might count.

When I hear about patrons in a gaming context, I imagine a developed NPC that assigns the PCs missions. The closest I came would have been the GURPS Prime Directive game I ran, though then only by implication. The characters got missions from their chain of command, but I don't remember if went into any depth on that.

Developing a patron NPC might be helpful for a couple of campaigns that I would like to run. My #Dungeon24 megadungeon might benefit from a patron or factions outside the dungeon to plant hooks for things to do other than dungeoneering. I've been struggling for a hook for a potential Stars Without Number campaign that I've wanted to do for ages, and a patron might be just the thing to help that coalesce.