Only the most interesting links from about the web. For more, see last weeks collection or the weekly r/OSR blogroll or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Bloggie-nominated. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch, delinked by request.
This weeks r/OSR blogroll also marks my hand-off to Vance of Leicesters Ramble, their carrying forward the torch is greatly appreciated.
Daniel Sell gives us How To Stop Jumping Ship
Goblin Punch posts Divine Patronage: A Separate System for Party Advancement
Build Worlds writes World Orogen
Jared Sinclair Dot Bear Blog Dot Dev shares How To Make A Dungeon
I Cast Light! writes PONDER THY BLOG(GIES): Thoughts On The 2026 BLOGGIES
MurkMail shares Encounter sequence generation
Table 46 writes What Should Have Won the Bloggies
Golden Achiever posts CAVE JAM!
Luke Gearing shares Boasts
Prismatic Wasteland writes Rating Every Room in White Plume Mountain
09 March 2026
07 March 2026
Four encounters for a caravan mini-campaign
One of my original 90s gaming group graciously hosted a get together for that old table over a weekend and one of the things we did was a round-robin D&D mini-campaign.
The concept for all of this was caravan guards taking a wagon from one point to another. It proved pretty robust as a vehicle for random encounters - we had something we were supposed to be looking after. There were NPCs when we needed them for rescues. They did not interfere when we did not need them because they were just wagon drivers. It gave a rationale for why the scenery was changing and how come we were dealing with completely different things from one encounter to the next. It was a nice model for getting straight to the gaming with minimum preamble.
On Fast Party Coherency
The characters we cooked up in a hurry ended up gelling really, really well conceptually. There was an orc monk who was basically a WWE wrestler. I was an orc fighter, dump stat intelligence, just like hit things with my sword. We had a Goliath archer who was effectively the brains of the outfit, to his chagrin and horror, and a halfling sorcerer who was a very kinetic, act-on-sight fellow. For him the plan is do the next step and then see where we are and then do the next thing after that and see where we are, repeat until problem solved or enemy defeated. As a group, they meshed together ridiculously well. Group cohesion was almost instant because everyone was team "scream and charge" - even the halfling (especially the halfling). It worked unexpectedly well.
For short haul campaigns or con games, I think the phrase that sometimes kicked around is "drive it like you stole it" and this was a good example of that. For short haul stuff just stick in someone who is going to burn the candle at both ends and the middle for the duration of this game and then if they survive, bonus, if they do not they have entirely served their purpose.
The Encounters
The set of four encounters started with the first 5e that one of my pals had ever run (typically a WHFRP GM of late). He blended Tuckers Kobolds with a splash from MCDM's Flee Mortals. Very amusingly there was a setup bit where the kobolds were supposed to threaten us as we entered their territory which was supposed to be five minutes of dialogue that turned into a two-hour tower raid because we guessed they had some kind of signal flags on the roof. We attempted to get the drop on them and there was a whole bunch of gaming completely unanticipated and ahead of the actual planned encounter.
The intended encounter was a pop-in pop-out ambush in eight foot Pampas grass where velociraptor riding kobold lancers came at us out of the grass and then we lost sight of them again. There was also Kobold Trapsman from Flee Mortals - together they gave us a fairly serious run for our money. Very good value concept and time-wise - we got something like six hours gaming out of what was supposed to be a one or two hour thing.
The second encounter was a mystery where we found someone beat up on the road, then came to a cottage where it looked like grandma had been attacked by someone - allegedly a hunter. We found a bunch of grisly remains, the worlds most confusing murder scene. We followed tracks into the forest and came upon grandma, in very bad shape - when then turned into a werebear and pummelled us. Turned out that all the confusing remnants were reverted dead lycanthrope bits and the werebear had been assaulted in their home by werewolves. We did not figure this out until the werebear had roundly kicked our butts for a bit before we finally KO them and were able to get the story from them afterwards. Collectively, our PCs were thick as mince, the wrong team for any kind of investigations but that did not stop it being fun.
The next encounter was an ambush in a trapped canyon with an ogre mage and harpies. Our wagons were levitated, everything was topsy turvy and the harpies were literally in their airy element. We had a lot of trouble trying to get footing to fight properly and intercept harpies as they snatched away wagoneers and generally fend off the tootling ogre mage who was causing all this chaos. We lost two wagons, three wagoneers and most of our cargo in that first ambush so we resolved to track them down to their lair. There we had part two, a raid on the camp of the harpies and rescue of our fellows. This time we had tactical initiative and could make use of terrain and surprise on our side - things like cutting tent ropes, setting things on fire and generally steamrolling the foe in a satisfyingly vengeful way.
I ran the closeout which was recycled from a hex from Hexcrawl25 which was bog mummies and crawling claws where the bog mummy flings his hands at you and then closes. I used a peat mummy which just had a slightly different variation of Mummy Rot and difficult terrain (the bog) around the wagons. The minor threat of the crawling claws were great because they distracted and also served to put flanking on PCs for the Bog Mummies to then hit like trucks.
The caravan set up worked really well for just a knock-about game which was just a string of unconnected encounters. It was a good little lesson for why caravan guarding campaigns are great because you can just nail in absolutely anything and there you go, a campaign. It also worked pretty well for the roster switching as we rotated GMs because we can say whoever was not there at the moment was scouting, foraging, down with food poisoning or whatever and it is still perfectly reasonable they turn back up for the next encounter.
The concept for all of this was caravan guards taking a wagon from one point to another. It proved pretty robust as a vehicle for random encounters - we had something we were supposed to be looking after. There were NPCs when we needed them for rescues. They did not interfere when we did not need them because they were just wagon drivers. It gave a rationale for why the scenery was changing and how come we were dealing with completely different things from one encounter to the next. It was a nice model for getting straight to the gaming with minimum preamble.
On Fast Party Coherency
The characters we cooked up in a hurry ended up gelling really, really well conceptually. There was an orc monk who was basically a WWE wrestler. I was an orc fighter, dump stat intelligence, just like hit things with my sword. We had a Goliath archer who was effectively the brains of the outfit, to his chagrin and horror, and a halfling sorcerer who was a very kinetic, act-on-sight fellow. For him the plan is do the next step and then see where we are and then do the next thing after that and see where we are, repeat until problem solved or enemy defeated. As a group, they meshed together ridiculously well. Group cohesion was almost instant because everyone was team "scream and charge" - even the halfling (especially the halfling). It worked unexpectedly well.
For short haul campaigns or con games, I think the phrase that sometimes kicked around is "drive it like you stole it" and this was a good example of that. For short haul stuff just stick in someone who is going to burn the candle at both ends and the middle for the duration of this game and then if they survive, bonus, if they do not they have entirely served their purpose.
The Encounters
The set of four encounters started with the first 5e that one of my pals had ever run (typically a WHFRP GM of late). He blended Tuckers Kobolds with a splash from MCDM's Flee Mortals. Very amusingly there was a setup bit where the kobolds were supposed to threaten us as we entered their territory which was supposed to be five minutes of dialogue that turned into a two-hour tower raid because we guessed they had some kind of signal flags on the roof. We attempted to get the drop on them and there was a whole bunch of gaming completely unanticipated and ahead of the actual planned encounter.
The intended encounter was a pop-in pop-out ambush in eight foot Pampas grass where velociraptor riding kobold lancers came at us out of the grass and then we lost sight of them again. There was also Kobold Trapsman from Flee Mortals - together they gave us a fairly serious run for our money. Very good value concept and time-wise - we got something like six hours gaming out of what was supposed to be a one or two hour thing.
The second encounter was a mystery where we found someone beat up on the road, then came to a cottage where it looked like grandma had been attacked by someone - allegedly a hunter. We found a bunch of grisly remains, the worlds most confusing murder scene. We followed tracks into the forest and came upon grandma, in very bad shape - when then turned into a werebear and pummelled us. Turned out that all the confusing remnants were reverted dead lycanthrope bits and the werebear had been assaulted in their home by werewolves. We did not figure this out until the werebear had roundly kicked our butts for a bit before we finally KO them and were able to get the story from them afterwards. Collectively, our PCs were thick as mince, the wrong team for any kind of investigations but that did not stop it being fun.
The next encounter was an ambush in a trapped canyon with an ogre mage and harpies. Our wagons were levitated, everything was topsy turvy and the harpies were literally in their airy element. We had a lot of trouble trying to get footing to fight properly and intercept harpies as they snatched away wagoneers and generally fend off the tootling ogre mage who was causing all this chaos. We lost two wagons, three wagoneers and most of our cargo in that first ambush so we resolved to track them down to their lair. There we had part two, a raid on the camp of the harpies and rescue of our fellows. This time we had tactical initiative and could make use of terrain and surprise on our side - things like cutting tent ropes, setting things on fire and generally steamrolling the foe in a satisfyingly vengeful way.
I ran the closeout which was recycled from a hex from Hexcrawl25 which was bog mummies and crawling claws where the bog mummy flings his hands at you and then closes. I used a peat mummy which just had a slightly different variation of Mummy Rot and difficult terrain (the bog) around the wagons. The minor threat of the crawling claws were great because they distracted and also served to put flanking on PCs for the Bog Mummies to then hit like trucks.
The caravan set up worked really well for just a knock-about game which was just a string of unconnected encounters. It was a good little lesson for why caravan guarding campaigns are great because you can just nail in absolutely anything and there you go, a campaign. It also worked pretty well for the roster switching as we rotated GMs because we can say whoever was not there at the moment was scouting, foraging, down with food poisoning or whatever and it is still perfectly reasonable they turn back up for the next encounter.
04 March 2026
Review: The Long Road Home
tl;dr: card-draw based storyteller, potential for great pre-campaign party cohesion or post-campaign epilogues.
I cannot recall where/when I first heard of this - probably the kickstarter in 2024 - but when I spotted this in London (the mighty Orc's Nest or maybe The Arcanists Tavern?) I decided I had to go for it. I clawed the time to scuttle over there from the City on a long lunch and have a good rummage - this and Minions were two that particularly caught my eye. It felt like a good 'support your local games creators' opportunity so I did.
What you get is a card-based story telling game that all told reminded me of For The Queen with hints of Microscope, moderated by the card-draw. I slightly misunderstood what I was getting here in the 'what happens when the quest is over?' tagline - that made me think it was wholly focussed on the consequences side of things and not infact the telling the whole tale of the journey/quest.
Nicely laid out with clean, spare art. I ripped through reading this in a single-seating (admittedly on an airplane but still end-to-end in a go).
So what do you get in here?
8 pages covering 'how to operate the book'
22 pages on creating your story including genre and setting creation
20 pages on creating all the things in the setting - locations to threats and PCs
20 pages on running the scenes of the game including worked examples
14 pages of support material - references, character and story sheets and inspirational maps
Expanding on all that; what you have in here is the neat idea a campaign in retrospect. You start off with deciding genre and creating things to be encountered along the six-act journey. These can be locations, treasures and threats, and maybe you have some supporting characters that come with you.
There are lots of scene setting tables that you use to set up the locations and hazard, treasures and threats, NPC and atmosphere. These are great quick campaign generation tools and would be useful for lots of games or in a DM's toolkit in general. Each set of tables is split out by the different campaign flavours (grim, heroic, kids, horror) - though I imagine one could substitute in some other sparklist (such as from Worlds Without Number) to get sci-fi, western, etc.
To actually run the tale players get dealt a card per chapter plus three and then assign a card per chapter as they play. Each card suit dictates the tone of the players contribution which they start with "do you remember when..." and then tell a physically or emotionally enriching or disturbing/detrimental happening for that place. The overall tone for the chapter is determined by the majority suit played.
It is a more prescriptive, structured game to focus story-telling and shape the action into the set forms of the chapters. There is advice to chop out the second and fifth chapters for a short session, or loop through additional third-to-fifth chapters to extend the session.
What is in here is a cool potential game played within ~ 2-3 hour slot with a nice balance of rules & freeform to bridge out of classic TTRPGs and intro people to storygame type things. It follows a six act structure that could be customised or free form as well.
It could also be great for a shared backstory generator ~ session 0.5. Run a session of The Long Road Home and you've got a party with a true shared history to start a big campaign with.
You could also adapt it to be a post-finale tool for a standard campaign by doing a sweep up of campaign major events and running multiple "homecoming" scenes to see how things play out in the end.
I cannot recall where/when I first heard of this - probably the kickstarter in 2024 - but when I spotted this in London (the mighty Orc's Nest or maybe The Arcanists Tavern?) I decided I had to go for it. I clawed the time to scuttle over there from the City on a long lunch and have a good rummage - this and Minions were two that particularly caught my eye. It felt like a good 'support your local games creators' opportunity so I did.
What you get is a card-based story telling game that all told reminded me of For The Queen with hints of Microscope, moderated by the card-draw. I slightly misunderstood what I was getting here in the 'what happens when the quest is over?' tagline - that made me think it was wholly focussed on the consequences side of things and not infact the telling the whole tale of the journey/quest.
Nicely laid out with clean, spare art. I ripped through reading this in a single-seating (admittedly on an airplane but still end-to-end in a go).
So what do you get in here?
8 pages covering 'how to operate the book'
22 pages on creating your story including genre and setting creation
20 pages on creating all the things in the setting - locations to threats and PCs
20 pages on running the scenes of the game including worked examples
14 pages of support material - references, character and story sheets and inspirational maps
Expanding on all that; what you have in here is the neat idea a campaign in retrospect. You start off with deciding genre and creating things to be encountered along the six-act journey. These can be locations, treasures and threats, and maybe you have some supporting characters that come with you.
There are lots of scene setting tables that you use to set up the locations and hazard, treasures and threats, NPC and atmosphere. These are great quick campaign generation tools and would be useful for lots of games or in a DM's toolkit in general. Each set of tables is split out by the different campaign flavours (grim, heroic, kids, horror) - though I imagine one could substitute in some other sparklist (such as from Worlds Without Number) to get sci-fi, western, etc.
To actually run the tale players get dealt a card per chapter plus three and then assign a card per chapter as they play. Each card suit dictates the tone of the players contribution which they start with "do you remember when..." and then tell a physically or emotionally enriching or disturbing/detrimental happening for that place. The overall tone for the chapter is determined by the majority suit played.
It is a more prescriptive, structured game to focus story-telling and shape the action into the set forms of the chapters. There is advice to chop out the second and fifth chapters for a short session, or loop through additional third-to-fifth chapters to extend the session.
What is in here is a cool potential game played within ~ 2-3 hour slot with a nice balance of rules & freeform to bridge out of classic TTRPGs and intro people to storygame type things. It follows a six act structure that could be customised or free form as well.
It could also be great for a shared backstory generator ~ session 0.5. Run a session of The Long Road Home and you've got a party with a true shared history to start a big campaign with.
You could also adapt it to be a post-finale tool for a standard campaign by doing a sweep up of campaign major events and running multiple "homecoming" scenes to see how things play out in the end.
02 March 2026
Shiny TTRPG links #266
Only the most interesting links from about the web. For more, see last weeks collection or the weekly r/OSR blogroll or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Bloggie-nominated. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch, delinked by request.
Blogs on Tape Announcement: New Podcast! “We Read the Bloggies”
Mindstorm gives us Settlement-Oriented Sandboxes
Dice Goblin shares Creating Randomized Mission Areas
Notes from The Labyrinth gives us Bloggies losers that won my heart
E.S.’s Substack shares Saying Goodbye to Dungeons & Dragons
Very late to the table I spotted Barking Alien's RPG CAMPAIGN TOUR CHALLENGE!
Prismatic Wasteland writes Pokémon Is OSR
Throne of Salt counters Pokemon isn’t OSR (but I wish it was)
Whose Measure God Could Not Take gives us Slang Checklist
@dailyadventureprompts posts DM Tip: Getting Stealth Right
Rise Up Comus gives us Unblocking Yourself: Dungeonize your Home
Magnolia Keep continues Prepping Plots, Part 3: Enter the Players
Crow’s Corner gives us “Saltfish & Almanacs” and more: Table-Tested Reviews of all Littleboxes
Revivify Games shares Detail is Debt: Making Your Favorite Settlement
The Usual Tongues gives us d20 Gameable Ideas from a 12th-Century Travelogue
Blogs on Tape Announcement: New Podcast! “We Read the Bloggies”
Mindstorm gives us Settlement-Oriented Sandboxes
Dice Goblin shares Creating Randomized Mission Areas
Notes from The Labyrinth gives us Bloggies losers that won my heart
E.S.’s Substack shares Saying Goodbye to Dungeons & Dragons
Very late to the table I spotted Barking Alien's RPG CAMPAIGN TOUR CHALLENGE!
Prismatic Wasteland writes Pokémon Is OSR
Throne of Salt counters Pokemon isn’t OSR (but I wish it was)
Whose Measure God Could Not Take gives us Slang Checklist
@dailyadventureprompts posts DM Tip: Getting Stealth Right
Rise Up Comus gives us Unblocking Yourself: Dungeonize your Home
Magnolia Keep continues Prepping Plots, Part 3: Enter the Players
Crow’s Corner gives us “Saltfish & Almanacs” and more: Table-Tested Reviews of all Littleboxes
Revivify Games shares Detail is Debt: Making Your Favorite Settlement
The Usual Tongues gives us d20 Gameable Ideas from a 12th-Century Travelogue
28 February 2026
Evolving city surroundings (City26)
I have been hammering away at the City '26 challenge; running it faster and shallower than originally envisaged I would imagine. I have about ~37% of the wards done with ~16% of the year gone so am comfortably ahead of schedule. Concept is "a hiveworld from 40k as seen in the original Rogue Trader '87" including elements such as the Knight Worlds with their dinosaur herding, more abhumans, more Imperial Robots and a general stronger alignment to the aesthetic in Rogue Trader '87.
I find I have chipped away at lots of the more fascinating wards and blown off much of the initial spurt of inspiration but that has laid down lots of solid foundations and crystallised the core character of the place. 52 wards is *a lot* for a city; with just the ones done so far there is ample good gameable content. I am quite satisfied with the choice to make it a 40k hivecity because it is turning into a suitably complex behemoth.
As I have been filling out the various places I have ended up with one place where there is scarcity - ground level exterior access. Quite a few of the various wards should sensibly have external access - waste dumps, promethium vat fields, stock yards, maglev access, etc. Blocking those in has rapidly created a picture of the surroundings in a neat emergent manner.
We end up with the city surrounded by a number of military grounds - marshalling yards for the planetary guard regiments and the training fields for the Knight-candidates with their cyborged-carnotaurs. Stockyards for dinosaurs and bone heaps from their processing also need room. It became apparent that the hivecity was once a port but that the seas have long receded necessitating a 'ship-rail' to haul ships in over the saltmires.
One thing this has made me realise is that this means certain regions should have 'associated with' adventure hooks out in the linked spaces beyond the hive - be that a trip down into the dinosaur pens, riding out with the coldone cavalry on a wasteland patrol, stopping a raid on a ship being hauled up on the ship-rail, intercepting smugglers coming in on the maglev or some other thematically appropriate out-of-hive escapade. These could be very different to the 'in ward' encounters which may be dominated by just the groups that have presence there.
I find I have chipped away at lots of the more fascinating wards and blown off much of the initial spurt of inspiration but that has laid down lots of solid foundations and crystallised the core character of the place. 52 wards is *a lot* for a city; with just the ones done so far there is ample good gameable content. I am quite satisfied with the choice to make it a 40k hivecity because it is turning into a suitably complex behemoth.
As I have been filling out the various places I have ended up with one place where there is scarcity - ground level exterior access. Quite a few of the various wards should sensibly have external access - waste dumps, promethium vat fields, stock yards, maglev access, etc. Blocking those in has rapidly created a picture of the surroundings in a neat emergent manner.
We end up with the city surrounded by a number of military grounds - marshalling yards for the planetary guard regiments and the training fields for the Knight-candidates with their cyborged-carnotaurs. Stockyards for dinosaurs and bone heaps from their processing also need room. It became apparent that the hivecity was once a port but that the seas have long receded necessitating a 'ship-rail' to haul ships in over the saltmires.
One thing this has made me realise is that this means certain regions should have 'associated with' adventure hooks out in the linked spaces beyond the hive - be that a trip down into the dinosaur pens, riding out with the coldone cavalry on a wasteland patrol, stopping a raid on a ship being hauled up on the ship-rail, intercepting smugglers coming in on the maglev or some other thematically appropriate out-of-hive escapade. These could be very different to the 'in ward' encounters which may be dominated by just the groups that have presence there.
25 February 2026
Wrapping a campaign on time
With an upcoming campaign end in sight, I am looking at how to wrap things up for my Hexcrawl25 campaign. The fact that it is still going into 2026 is a nice fillip but with a small householder on the way, better to tie things off than have it hanging over me.
I had a rummage around for wisdom on the web and DungeonFruit has some good ideas - but in a 'you should have started way back there' too-late-now sense. Dungeonfruit talks about "setting up your end condition" in Beginning Of The End (How To Finish A Campaign). Alas I am going almost perfectly against their advice and going with a real-world time limit - there is not an ticking clock hanging over the campaign, it was always about the party chasing after their own goals; a pure sandbox.
Beginning the wrap up
This means we are looking to align the end of campaign with players accomplishing their goals, not any particular big plot of mine. I told them the time they had left two sessions back and to think what they wanted to get achieved in that time. This is throwing the responsibility to manage their time on the players, which is fully in line with how the campaign has been running so far - they set the tempo, they go where they like, I run the world they are poking about in.
Throughout the campaign we have periodically been using the Ultimate RPG Campfire Card Deck and that has revealed or crystallised quite a few player chosen goals. I have catalogued them as they had come up - some have resolved, others are beyond the scope of the campaign but still some remain that could be achieved. Thus in the absence of an over-arching plot I will aim to let the PC's threads come to a resolution.
Personal quests folk had picked (and succeeded)
- found the Kingdom of Ashley, rescue and install the 'king' (collective)
- get a giant spider mount (the dwarf warrior)
- become reknowned (the 'wizard')
- create their own herbarium (the 'herbalist')
Open plots at time of trying to set up the finale
- meet their destined true love, as foreseen by a seer they met in a deep mine (the tundra barbarian)
- finish clearing out the local cult lair (collective)
Plan to the end
At this point this means that I am going to budget my time as getting one big quest done per session - maybe we will achieve more but going by prior rate of questing, probably not. So with a session filled by them finishing out the dungeon delve/cult clearance they are currently embarked upon that leaves three for resolving the 'destined true love' hook - which should be fine. The in-house testing team helped me figure out how to time it all, I know what elements I need to have to hand, the rest just runs off the hexmap.
Note, in between writing the first draft of this and now completing it, the party continued to clear out the cult lair they had been camped at - and are now easily a half session remaining before they are done and have taken some fairly heavy blows along the way. I am going to have to adjust my timeline from here - there may be a rest period, or reluctance to get stuck into further heroics? We shall see.
I think what I need to do is to set up multiple smaller elements - resolvable within a half session or so - and then keep/drop some as the time runs down, so the final session can be a reasonable declaration of victory, wherever they get to. Assuming they do not TPK along the way, which remains a possibility.
The one big thing I am taking from Dungeonfruit is to leave time for 'wrap up' and/or epilogue - I will give each of the players some running room to say how things turn out in the aftermath of all their deed - but I need to remember to leave that time and bring things to a close a little early on that last night.
I had a rummage around for wisdom on the web and DungeonFruit has some good ideas - but in a 'you should have started way back there' too-late-now sense. Dungeonfruit talks about "setting up your end condition" in Beginning Of The End (How To Finish A Campaign). Alas I am going almost perfectly against their advice and going with a real-world time limit - there is not an ticking clock hanging over the campaign, it was always about the party chasing after their own goals; a pure sandbox.
Beginning the wrap up
This means we are looking to align the end of campaign with players accomplishing their goals, not any particular big plot of mine. I told them the time they had left two sessions back and to think what they wanted to get achieved in that time. This is throwing the responsibility to manage their time on the players, which is fully in line with how the campaign has been running so far - they set the tempo, they go where they like, I run the world they are poking about in.
Throughout the campaign we have periodically been using the Ultimate RPG Campfire Card Deck and that has revealed or crystallised quite a few player chosen goals. I have catalogued them as they had come up - some have resolved, others are beyond the scope of the campaign but still some remain that could be achieved. Thus in the absence of an over-arching plot I will aim to let the PC's threads come to a resolution.
Personal quests folk had picked (and succeeded)
- found the Kingdom of Ashley, rescue and install the 'king' (collective)
- get a giant spider mount (the dwarf warrior)
- become reknowned (the 'wizard')
- create their own herbarium (the 'herbalist')
Open plots at time of trying to set up the finale
- meet their destined true love, as foreseen by a seer they met in a deep mine (the tundra barbarian)
- finish clearing out the local cult lair (collective)
Plan to the end
At this point this means that I am going to budget my time as getting one big quest done per session - maybe we will achieve more but going by prior rate of questing, probably not. So with a session filled by them finishing out the dungeon delve/cult clearance they are currently embarked upon that leaves three for resolving the 'destined true love' hook - which should be fine. The in-house testing team helped me figure out how to time it all, I know what elements I need to have to hand, the rest just runs off the hexmap.
Note, in between writing the first draft of this and now completing it, the party continued to clear out the cult lair they had been camped at - and are now easily a half session remaining before they are done and have taken some fairly heavy blows along the way. I am going to have to adjust my timeline from here - there may be a rest period, or reluctance to get stuck into further heroics? We shall see.
I think what I need to do is to set up multiple smaller elements - resolvable within a half session or so - and then keep/drop some as the time runs down, so the final session can be a reasonable declaration of victory, wherever they get to. Assuming they do not TPK along the way, which remains a possibility.
The one big thing I am taking from Dungeonfruit is to leave time for 'wrap up' and/or epilogue - I will give each of the players some running room to say how things turn out in the aftermath of all their deed - but I need to remember to leave that time and bring things to a close a little early on that last night.
23 February 2026
Shiny TTRPG links #265
Further links from about the interwebs! For more, see last weeks collection or the weekly r/OSR blogroll or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Bloggie-nominated. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch, delinked by request.
Joe B. writes dungeon ecology makes no sense
To Distant Lands gives us ...Or, They Live Here
Was It Likely? shares how jo games are
Arrowed is Gaming gives us How I Daggerheart
a garden from the libraries writes Aragorn’s tax policy and other weird shibboleths
Blog of Forlorn Encystment gives us The Player-Drawn Dungeon Map is a Fast Travel Hack
The Katt Kirsch Blogsperience shares Running it Back: The Case for Replaying Modules
Magnolia Keep gives us An Objective Draw Steel Vs. Daggerheart Review
Joe B. writes dungeon ecology makes no sense
To Distant Lands gives us ...Or, They Live Here
Was It Likely? shares how jo games are
Arrowed is Gaming gives us How I Daggerheart
a garden from the libraries writes Aragorn’s tax policy and other weird shibboleths
Blog of Forlorn Encystment gives us The Player-Drawn Dungeon Map is a Fast Travel Hack
The Katt Kirsch Blogsperience shares Running it Back: The Case for Replaying Modules
Magnolia Keep gives us An Objective Draw Steel Vs. Daggerheart Review
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)