
I made a list of 3 GM advice subreddits called RefAdvice.



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I made a list of 3 GM advice subreddits called RefAdvice.
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I like keeping track of wealth in some games but don’t like bean-counting. Here’s my compromise.
The Into the Odd-ish game that began with Into the Borgenwold has become our Sunday night B-game on the Actual Play twitch channel. As always, I wanted a way to keep track of a small fortune the players have amassed without counting thousands or even hundreds of coins – a few dozen tops.
I’ve done this before:
This time I added a few examples, including some that are well outside of their price range. The bigger things still require time and expertise as well as money. I put this as the background on a jamboard page and mark off coins as players spend.
It is an easy port over to Into the Odd’s Enterprises system. One thing I might add to that is one has to invest the amount of the next die type. So if your enterprise is going from d4 to d6, you have to set aside 6 coin before the enterprise goes up.
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I made a list of 3 GM advice subreddits called RefAdvice.
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This morning I saw the following video:
And if you like that video, he has a patreon worth checking out.
Inspired, I jumped onto Affinity Designer and got started with the word GNOME, all jumbled up.
I had an old blog post about Underground Cities and always liked the Gnome city built around a university, Svinifrilijihirim.
Time to name the districts.
It is beginning to take shape. 5 Towers is an homage to a wizard-ruled city I had in a high fantasy game I attempted to run with Ars Magica as an undergrad.
I wanted to flesh out the districts.
I’d want to write up some questions about the setting.
What civil strife occurs when revolutionaries in Prenticetown put up their own tower?
When will the Little Anvil mercs attempt to take over the city?
Who in Wizardtown is going to get the next permit to erect their tower?
What will break the peace between the Devil-folk clans?
That is a fun bunch of color but I’m not sure I have the tools to play just yet. If I was going to run a game in this setting, I’d make a few d6 tables so I could roll 3d6 and make a quick 3 word inspiration tables for a quick student, quick apprentice, quick wizard, quick locals, quick refugees, quick Devil-folk. I’d write up the Pentadi and think about what they are studying.
But considering I watched a video about making a fast city on Sunday morning, this is a fine, fast way to flesh out a city that has been rattling around in my head for years.
Memories of how you got down there are hazy because the Psi-Tiger that rampaged through the party damaged memories as it died. Players are the torchbearers and hirelings.
Into the Odd-like: Into the Megadungeon
We are in the process of ending the Sigil 6 campaign and figuring out what to play next in this Thursday night slot. But only 3 of 6 players could get to the digital table tonight, so I proposed a few games and we elected to play hirelings whose adventuring party has been decimated by a psychic tiger, leaving everyone’s memories hazy.
Character creation from this blog post made interesting characters. I liked what we ended up with. We used jamboard to store the character sheets. A thief’s follower, Jeb the Footpad, was chosen by a Thief Deity. Tabouli the Acolyte knows the Cthonic written world and can see/hear ghosts.
I grabbed the DNGN zine, the gold standard in layout and at-the-table-use. I stuck them X levels down, in an area that I thought was interesting and got to playing.
I rolled randomly to see which of the party members was still alive and it was Conrad the Thief. He’s got a compound fracture in his sword-arm and he’s concussed, so they are on their own. The random rolls for the surviving gear from the adventuring party worked out well. Having a character who can see ghosts meant I had to make some fast decisions about the fate of souls in this dungeon, which was fun.
The players were concerned about light, thinking about their lantern oil. When I mentioned that some rooms were lit by flasks of burning oil, they quickly began stealing oil from the flasks for more lantern-light time. They skinned and de-toothed and de-eyed the psychic tiger.
Had a really interesting moment late in the game when they realized they could count the used flasks of oil that had already been used to see how long they’ve been in this dungeon. I could’ve said the flasks were broken in the fight with the psychic tiger but loved the ingenuity. They realized that they had been in the dungeon for around 5 hours or so.
The vibe was a little goofy but everyone at the table was taking the premise seriously and doing plenty of careful exploring and creative problem solving.
I really liked the result and would use this set-up again when gaming friends were visiting or when everyone can’t show up to the main game.
Anthony dubbed the party’s name: Psychic Tiger Fodder.
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I made a list of 3 GM advice subreddits called RefAdvice.
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Put together a slideshow for the Thursday night group as we transition from the Sigil 6 to something else…
I put slides and my notes below each picture.
I love gaming with you all. If none of these ideas work, we can run some one-shots or play a board game until we figure it out.
We will need to talk about the Sigil 6 and finding a satisfying ending. That said, we could circle back some day. But let’s leave at a place where we are satisfied in case we do not.
No pressure!
Touchstones: Stephen King, Strange Things, ???
Some assembly required but I think it’ll be fun
Too real? Too much? Horror/Modern Fantasy…
How about an earth that isn’t a corporate neo-capitalist wasteland?
I’ve got weird ideas about cloning and dropping to the planet’s surface and the odd AI that runs the satellite…
Fuck Harry Potter
Touchstones: Wizard of Earthsea, Cold Iron
I’ve got weird ideas, some assembly required
Science Fantasy, New Weird meets Marco Polo
Probably will take us a few months…
Weird prehistoric/ahistoric dinosaur stone and sandal fantasy?
Wild West fantasy (swords instead of guns) with weird crystal magic and shit…
Is there an option I have not considered? Does someone else want to GM? What else?
After a discussion last night we’ve narrowed it down to 3.
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I was thinking that it would be interesting to start play in UVG as an outlander, so that the player can learn about the setting’s strangeness on the long journey between the Violet City and the Black City along with the character.
You have arrived at the Violet City from a distant, colorless land. Roll or choose the reason the palate of your homeland is so muted.
You have one item that is rich with color, a treasured belonging w/ colors as vibrant as a rainboviathan’s oil.
What is it? What color or colors does it show to your eye?
What do each of these colors make you feel?
How did you acquire it?
If you need to put a touch of flesh on the bones of these backgrounds, here’s a question or two for each result.
What superstitions do you bring with you after living in lands haunted by sentient leeches that eat color?
What do you always have with you in case a color leech attacks?
***
Did you pray to the Bone Saints or rebel against them undead pantheon?
What bone weapon, tool or utensil did you bring with you from home?
***
What broken war machines littered the places you played as a child?
What piece of that ancient war did you bring with you?
***
What do you do every day to show that you are grateful to see the sun, moon and stars in a land without arcane constant cloud cover?
What memento from the Sunless Immortals do you carry with you still?
***
What do you do every full moon to celebrate your life outside the Sorcerer-King’s influence?
What piece of moontech did you steal from a servant of the Sorcerer-Kings that you carry with you?
***
What color were the robes, banners and weapons of the wizard who did the most damage to your community?
What piece of the Chromatic War do you carry with you?
***
If folks need more than that then I recommend Haiku Character History.
I was flipping through UVG and thinking about how I’d make chargen different for this setting. I had this vague ideas that weren’t coming together because they weren’t very good.
I think I’d just use Into the Odd right as it is (XP too). I’d add some spells with magitech/Dying Earth vibes. Learning about how spells work as they roil around in your brain, your skull brimming with arcane power, is part of the learning curve involved in the strangeness of the setting.
I have an idea rattling around in my head about running this game as a 1-on-1 game with my dad, putting his character in charge of security for a merchant caravan. The concept is that this merchant house once lived somewhere between the Violet City and the Black City until their matriarch divided the clan into two, sending one violet-ward and the other black-ward. The mercantile clan’s believes that the only material things they will have with them in the next world is what their merchant caravans sell or trade on the route between these two cities.
Next up, the Caravan Sheet and thinking about how I want to make Cash a stat and abstract some of the math without getting rid of the experience of trading strange goods in weird places to alien folk. I reckon I’ll find the answers I’m looking for somewhere in the triangle between the points of Apocalypse World: Burned Over’s Barter, Burning Wheel’s Resources and UVG’s 1 Sack = 10 Stones = 100 Soaps = 2,500 Cash.
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Pre-game Pitch: Along the Holy Road, people are going missing, both in the lowlands and in the High Moors.
I read over 2 monsters from A Folklore Bestiary and we took two and a half hours getting through the resolution of the cursed People of the Holy City.
I didn’t have to use both monsters but in blending the two together and deciding that they were in the same world and same stretch of haunted highway to a ruined Holy City, both monsters grew more interesting. As mentioned in the post-game Stars & Wishes video below, I did my damnedest to get enough information into the players’ laps so they could make interesting decisions.
Marcus, Iain’s character, is in his third session of this (open table, east marches, whatever) campaign-shaped thing. I love prompting him to describe the previous adventures to hear what the character has taken away from them. Marcus had a scar/mark from his oath with the Dusk-Elves. Going out into the Odd makes you Odd.
Jay and Sam were both playing Into the Odd with us for the first time and it was great seeing them fish out details about their characters, Arnhem & Zachary, from the sparse but evocative info chargen provides. Zachary’s urn with ashes became a centerpiece of the character.
Arnhem was a second generation adventurer/treasure hunter who was in the family business to clear his parents’ debt.
Zachary had been a holder of a few odd jobs, including rat killer and bill collector. When a bill collection went bad, he was prompted to take this job with the Adventurers’ Guild Cooperative to get out of town for a while. Sam’s details about Zachary’s gear-related religion were amazing.
Clearly, bills and debts are on our minds.
There was one fight with a young zealot with a knife and it was harrowing. Two characters very nearly got dropped. They found a notebook and a charcoal pencil in his pockets; 13 names were written and crossed out. This young man had killed more than a dozen people before his 20th birthday.
There was one fight with a zealot with a knife and it was harrowing. Two characters very nearly got dropped. They found a notebook and a charcoal pencil in his pockets; 13 names were written and crossed out. This young man had killed more than a dozen people before his 20th birthday.
The character’s interactions with locals, from Farmer Beth to the Widow Kemp to the People of the Holy City’s elder woman with two notebooks.
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