Ashes Part 1

 As I expected, I wasn't able to get it together to get ideas for all 31 prompts for RPGaDay. What I didn't expect is that a whole new set of ideas did jump out at me.

 I've been a fan of Kevin Crawford and Sine Nomine Publishing for quite some time. I found Stars Without Number in a Bundle of Holding and was very excited by it. I've since backed Kickstarters for other games in the line, most recently Ashes Without Number, the post apocalyptic game.

 Once that Kickstarter fulfilled and I got that book in my hot little hands, which happened just a few weeks ago, my brain has been burning with the idea of building an AWN post apocalyptic sandbox setting based on my hometown, Eureka, California.

The first thing to do was assemble the map. I was able to put together a nice map of the area at https://www.map.army/ complete with 5 km hexes. The suggested map dimensions wound up covering all of Humboldt and Del Norte counties.

The second step was placing my Eclaves (communities) and Ruins (adventure locations). For the suggested map area, AWN recommends 4-6 Enclaves and 10 Ruins. This gave me some trouble. That area is distinctly rural, so there's just not enough "there" there for all that to fit into. I could make some stuff up, make some places more important than they really warrant, but I ultimately gave myself permission to do less. I cut those suggested values in half. 3 Enclaves and 5 Ruins. Much more doable.

 My Enclaves were:

1) Old Town Eureka (The city center, the oldest part of the city and home of one of the most photographed buildings in North America, the Carson Mansion) 

2) Ferndale (A farming community that felt very likely to continue into whatever apocalypse there might be.) 

3) Squatch-ville (This is the Pacific Northwest, which is Bigfoot Country. Are they atomic mutants, or did the apocalypse force them to reveal themselves? Who knows! This is located in Del Norte County, not far from Gasquet, just so there would be some bit of civilization.)

My Ruins were

1) The rest of Eureka (my map split the city between two hexes, so this felt very natural)

2) Arcata (home of Cal Poly Humboldt, pioneer in marine biology, eco-friendly technology and marijuana.)

3) McKinleyville (home of the Eureka-Arcata Airport)

4) Crescent City (As much as I was chagrined with how little there is to Humboldt County, Del Norte County has even less. This is the only city they have and it's right on the coast and it's easy to imagine it getting swept by a tsunami in just about any apocalypse.)

5) Hoopa (This was a stretch. Everyplace else of any note was already an Enclave or a Ruin. Also, everything else is very close to the coast, so putting something inland felt right.)

 More to come!

RPGaDay 2025 #14 Mystery

Another genre that I haven't delved too deeply into. Mostly because of one of my rules of gaming: "Never roll the dice unless you're willing to abide by the results." Whether or not characters get the clues they need to resolve the plot should not be a question. I have been interested in the GUMSHOE system because it has the same interest as I do in that regard. Characters always get the clues they need to proceed, so to make the game interesting, that means that you put the clues in front of the players and the game is about them actually solving it.

Some people might have an issue with players being expected to solve the mystery, rather than the characters. They probably also don't care for riddles or puzzles in their dungeons. They are also not me.

My GUMSHOE books are in storage, so I'd have to run it off of a PDF assuming I can get myself together. 

RPGaDay 2025 #13 Darkness

Darkness is not an element I've really dealt with. I've never wanted to run a game or be a character that was necessarily one of the bad guys.

I would like to try out Vampire: The Masquerade, or one of the other World/Chronicles of Darkness games. I've heard some interesting ideas about how you can play the game as a person who is nominally good, but the setting and system put them into compromises, which is probably how I would prefer to approach the material.

RPGaDay 2025 #12 Path

Where is the person I am grateful to for putting me on the Path?

I think I've spent a lot of blog space writing about the people who I have gamed with who have influenced my journey as a player and as a GM. But I will admit that a rather significant influence is a person I have never met. That would be Joe Bloch, designer of the Castle of the Mad Archmage megadungeon. I had sort of drifted from system to system and was kinda over D&D by that time, but found OSRIC for sale for the cost of printing and I do love a bargain. Coupled with the free version of Castle of the Mad Archmage, before it got a lot of the polish that it has since received, it made the prospect of running an Old School game somewhat appealing.

What started as an experiment in a period where I might expect to try a new system for a few months before moving on to the next turned into 5 years of fun memories and at least one new gamer. It also led to an interest in the OSR as a whole and a number of my own attempts to create an Old School setting or dungeon (still trying!).

RPGaDay 2025 #10 Origin

The origin story of a favorite accessory.

The Great Salt Flats. Steve Jackson Games had a series of maps of various locales, such as floorplans of a haunted house and similar, but the only one I bought was the set called The Great Salt Flats. Partly because I enjoyed the joke (it was a set of blank maps sheets with square grid on one side and hex grid on the other) and partly because buying the haunted house would obligate me to run a haunted house adventure at some point, but blank maps were useful for anything.

Though there wouldn't be much of a story if it was just a matter of buying a cleverly named product. In order to make sure that I was fully confident marking them up, I took them to Kinko's to have the sheets laminated. This is, of course, back when it was still called Kinko's, so I know I'm dating myself.

I don't remember how much it cost, but I don't think I had a lot of money and had to do the lamination in stages, one or two at a time as I could afford it, until all 6 sheets were laminated and from there on infinitely reusable.

But those 6 blank map sheets were what got me through a lot of gaming. It was definitely part of my megadungeon campaign, with sheets sliding in as the party's exploration took them off the edge of the old sheet. They were also a good size for placing on a coffee table to aid in visualizing a set piece battle from campaigns even before that time.

I still have them around somewhere, though it has been a while since I've taken them out for a game.

RPGaDay 2025 #9 Inspire

Inspiration is always very difficult for me. In spite of the fact that I do things for fun that are considered very imaginative, I don't have the same experiences that other people seem to. I've often heard that people enjoy reading because they get to imagine the story in their heads. I love reading and stories, but I don't imagine the stories. I simply read and enjoy them. I enjoy science fiction and mysteries because the narratives offer logic and challenge. From what I've read, it's something called "aphantasia" that seems to describe some of my experience.

When I get an idea, it often starts as a piece of logic. "If NORAD really were able to track Santa, what would happen if Santa was prevented from completing his annual rounds?" I recently backed Sine Nomine's Ashes Without Number Kickstarter, so as I've been spitballing a setting for it, my logic has come from "What would a post-apocalyptic version of my hometown look like?" That's been an interesting exercise.

It's another reason that random generators are great for me. Without inspiration of my own, a random generator gives me a starting point and interesting juxtapositions to try to make sense of.

It may not be anyone else's idea of creativity, but it works for me.

RPGaDay 2025 #8 Explore

Even though it's one of the pillars of D&D according to 5e, it's also one of the hardest to define. We often think of exploration as being about going somewhere new and finding something there that no one else has. But exploration can be quite small, as well. Looking at the early game, many monsters were intended to be explored as well. Many of them incorporated an odd trick or exploitable quirk that would have to be discovered by someone. It's old hat now, but someone had to be the first to learn that the only way to permanently defeat a troll is with fire, for example.

When thinking about encounters, it's easy to identify Combat encounters, or Interaction encounters, but what is an Exploration encounter? In a dungeon, Exploration encounters are traps, puzzles and secrets. Things that have something to manipulate and discover.

I also thing it's useful to think about encounters using different pillars as a manageable way to think of how PCs might interact with them. So what does it mean when the players try to Explore a Combat encounter? Typically, I think that means using the environment to overcome the encounter. So the party might try to evade the squad of orcs rather than face them directly. Or maybe using the environment to kill them, like causing a nearby boulder to crash on top of them. Then there's the possibility of exploiting a trap elsewhere in the dungeon, like luring the orcs to follow them into a pit trap or spear trap.

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.

How I Prep

 I'd been seeing some RPG bloggers responding to this Roll to Doubt post and discussing their prep process. I decided I would give it a shot. My gaming has been erratic, but I have been able to muster some one-shots, so this is focused mostly on that sort of prep. I have been dong some playing, but I do feel like I have a GM brain.

How do I prep?

An interesting question that I haven't really thought about. I don't know that I have a good answer because I don't know that I have a really refined process. And I admit that I spent a fairly long period as a terrible GM. Enthusiastic, perhaps, but terrible.

The first thing I do is get an idea. This typically comes from random tables, but sometimes an actual idea will occur to me.

Then I engage in a little something I call "Backwards <-> Forwards." This means that I think about the backstory of the scenario and what happened previously to set up the scenario and project into the play experience of the scenario itself. And then I think about the play experience that I want to create and work out how the backstory and logic of the scenario need to work in order to support that. Repeat as needed.

Not really after that, but somewhat apart from it, I build the structure for the adventure. This is not necessarily consistent from adventure to adventure. Sometimes, I'll use the Beat Chart method that appeared in a couple of R. Talsorian games. I do that for D20 Modern, predominantly. For my apocalyptic zombie scenario, I built a series of escalating zombie encounters and a separate progress tracker for the *actual* conflict of the scenario. For my "Expendables save Christmas" adventure, I devised it as a series of "layers," flexible objectives that the players had to move through to save Christmas.

And as part of all of this, the mechanics need to be considered. For D20 Modern, I needed to make sure that the obstacles all had Challenge Ratings and XP values worked out. My zombie game was in Fate, so I statted the opposition and the progress bar in those rules and put some thought into Aspects and other elements that could be used. All Outta Bubblegum was the hardest. The mechanics are so loose that you can't have a lot of structure. No method to really set difficulty levels or stat opposition. So that scenario had to be particularly loose and flexible.

This is also the point where I consider my Laws of Gaming. Specifically, 3 and 4. "Respect player agency" and "Never roll the dice unless you are willing to abide by the results."

Where do I need to make sure that there's room for players to make decisions and take action? Where do I need to trim options that don't lead where I want to go? If I'm running a campaign, this should be fairly open. In a one-shot, which is more common for me, I will generally try to have more control. A simple version of this is to think of the 3 "pillars of D&D" from the current rulebooks (Exploration, Combat, and Interaction) as verbs that are applied to each encounter. For example, if the party encounters a squad of orcs, our expectation is that it's a Combat encounter. But what if they try to Explore the orcs? What if they Interact with the orcs? This doesn't mean that those approaches are viable, but making the effort to have an answer for what happens if they try will make your scenario stronger.

Also, be looking for die rolls. If there is something that the players can do without as they move through the adventure, it's okay if there's a die roll to determine if they have it or not. If there is something that they need in order to resolve the scenario, they don't need to roll for it. Again, this is something that is more relevant in one-shots than campaigns, but still something to think about.

Another Year Gone

 Hello 2025!

I'm a little disappointed, since I did not achieve my New Year's Resolutions for 2024.

My main resolution was to run a campaign. Specifically, 2 sessions with continuity between them. That's not to say that I didn't do any gaming. I ran a number of one-shots and Fiasco's, which are GM-less. I just didn't get anything with continuity. I also played in a campaign of Blades in the Dark, which was a lot of fun. The campaign is technically on hiatus, as the GM is a busy student and hasn't had time to do the proper prep. I look forward to getting back to that once he's free.

Secondarily, I took on #dungeon24, an attempt at creating my own megadungeon.  I decided to use random tools to generate a room for every day of the year 2024, with each month comprising a level.

It didn't always go smoothly. I actually lost the material I had originally created for March. And then the RPGaDay blogfest in August took up the writing time and energy I had for that month. I almost took another hiatus for my annual Apothecaria sessions for November, but I was sufficiently far behind on my megadungeon that I didn't want to risk getting even further behind.

As it stands, I still have most of my December level to complete. Well, the encounters for the level, anyway. I still need to draw the map and devise the random encounter tables for each level. One of the things I've been doing to keep encounters manageable has been to redirect some of the monsters to wandering.

It's my intention to finish it, even if it does take me a little over a year to do it.

Running it would also be nice. It might wind up being my campaign if I can make at least two sessions of it happen.

I do also want to explore other games when I can. I've had a Stars Without Number sector waiting to be campaigned in for some time. Or maybe some classic Traveller. I'm really getting a sci-fi itch that needs to get scratched.