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.