Inspiration 5

The last couple of years have been tough with ongoing family health issues and while this hasn't stopped my gaming it has changed my current focus due to my time availability. You will have seen that the focus lately has been on RPGs and RPG Saturday. Committing to this meant I couldn't keep up with other aspects of my gaming (scenery making, wargaming, board games, etc.) as well as look after family members. A lot of this other stuff has been packed away in storage so as to not clutter up the place, so just dipping-in to something not role-playing is no easy task. All is not lost however as there is light at the end of the tunnel and given time I will be back at the other aspects of gaming and not just RPGS.

Inspiration comes in many forms and below are some things which has inspired me over the last few years.

Patreon

Monster on the Month Club - You might remember I mentioned Graeme Davis blog https://graemedavis.word press.com/ in a previous inspiration piece.  Monster of the Mo nth Club  is his new venture (on Patreon) producing system agnostic monsters for your game. The Monster of the Month Club is definitely worth a visit, and Graeme's blog is still a great resource.

Podcasts

Role-playing Public Radio - I have mentioned RPPR before but still a great resource. The website (podcast and now YouTube channel) are great, but there is also a Patreon page https://www.patreon.com/RPPR and although I joined the Patreon for the bonus podcasts (which are well worth it by the way) I stayed for all the extra content.

Ludonarrative Dissidents - I have mentioned Ludonarrative Dissidents before and not only is this a great resource, this has inspired me to buy new RPG material. Some of the games and supplements that have been reviewed in the last few seasons I have decided to purchase for myself.

Vintage RPG Podcast - Vintage RPG was something which was a 'recommended' channel on Instagram, and whilst I am not a hardcore Dungeons and Dragons fan which this is reportedly aimed at, it was intriguing enough for me to take a deeper look. The podcast, is well worth the listen as the hosts take a dive into a variety of RPGs and Board Games.

Reddit

Whilst I have a love/hate relationship with Reddit, Writing Prompts https://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/ is a great source for inspiration.

Other

Samuel Steele - I have mentioned Samuel Steele in the past and Samuel has been busy in the past few years creating several random-table zines and books for your RPGs. I have backed several of these and have used a couple in recent games.

DTRPG - I have mentioned DriveThruRPG (DTRPG) as one of my go-to places to buy RPGs. This hasn't changed and there are some great offers on so definitely worth keeping an eye on this. Many of the recommendations from the Ludonarrative Dissidents podcast were purchased through here.

Bundle of Holding - I have mentioned this before but Bundle of Holding does have some great deals on and it is a good idea to keep this in your eyeline.

You can see that as my focus has been more on RPGs lately my inspiration has also changed focus. I am still listening to podcasts such as The Infinite Monkey Cage and No Such Thing as a Fish, and still watching YouTube channels such as Black Magic Craft, Wyloch's Armory, and Dungeon Craft, but these have taken a bit of a back seat with regards my gaming resources.

J

Race to Dereliction - A one-shot for Deep Space RPG

Deep Space is a rules light sci-fi RPG by Jonathan Hicks. I wanted to play something sci-fi as a bit of a pallet cleanser as I have played in fantasy settings for quite some time now. I thought Deep Space was an easy, quick and fun game to run after picking up the core rules and a couple of the supplements. My initial thoughts were to run a one-shot for RPG Saturday, and if players liked it and wanted to do more I would then run a short campaign.

I put together a primer for my players covering the rules from the core rule book and supplements I wanted to include. This was very useful as no-one had played Deep Space before so I was able to walk everyone though the rules without me forgetting to inform the players something relevant.

An option is to allow players to take a specialist skill. As I was going to be initially running Deep Space a a one-shot I thought why not; if it went badly I could write it off and not worry about special skills in the future. I may have gone a bit overboard with my examples of a specialist skill when describing to my players – as you will find out later. The key for the specialist skills is that the players can use this particular skill when appropriate, e.g. cooking – when the player might want to taste food for poison, or check if a plant might be edible, or art – then a character might want to check for a forgery, or want to evaluate how much an art piece is worth.

I have decided to set all my Deep Space games about 200 years into the future. This is about 100 years after the official Deep Space background, but I believe gives me enough scope to mould things to my own liking whilst being able to pull in all the background material I need from what has already been published.

I needed some inspiration and remembered a story about a strange radio signal being found.

In the spring of 2017, Arecibo astronomers detected strange radio signals thought to originate from Ross 128 that were unlike any they had seen before. SETI's Allen Telescope Array was used for follow-up observations and was unable to detect the signal but did detect man made interference, making it seem clear that the Arecibo detections were due to transmissions from Earth satellites in geosynchronous orbit. Ross 128 has a declination (a coordinate which can be likened to latitude) of close to 0 degrees, which places it in the thick of a phalanx of these satellites. Therefore, it can be concluded that the signal was a result of man-made interference.

Race to Dereliction

A transponder has begun sending out a signal from the uninhabited planet of Gill-GS5. Many of the major corporations and Earth Nations have put together their own missions to find out what is going on. Your job is to make planet-fall, find the transponder and work out what has happened before any other factions arrive.

The transponder would belong to an emergency beacon from failing cryopods; which would be different to a distress beacon, or an emergency crash beacon as I might want to use these specifics in later scenarios. These pods would be in a crashed colony ship, The Odyssey, one of the first colony ships to be sent out from the European Superstate (ESS). The planet would be inhabited by strange creatures, like mindless human sized starfish monsters, which caused initial rescue missions to do a quick search and rescue of the crashed ship, find nothing of interest then quarantine the planet due to the alien lifeforms there.

Now the cryopod signal has been sent out meaning that something is still alive on The Odyssey, the ESS want something or someone onboard that ship to be brought back, but as the emergency beacon broadcast the signal far and wide, several other factions and corporations have added themselves to the plan. You job is to get there first, find out what has happened and get back with whatever information and objects you can.

I decided to do a bit of free-form role-play at the start after character creation to dial in several key points to set-up and round out the characters.

• What is your name?
• Who do you work for and what do you do as a job / career?
• What connection do you have with (some of) the others in the group?
• What role will you take aboard the spaceship (pilot, navigator, security, gunner, medic, engineer, etc.)?

This got the players talking to each other, and bouncing ideas off each other right from the start which I think made the game overall better. I will definitely try and do more of this in future games.

The Cast

• Lucretia – A charismatic charity organiser who runs a charity for cybernetic penguins – specialist skill Disassociation – Pilot
• Pam – A bright young star who is a crack shot with a rifle, fresh from cadet school and waiting for enrolment into ESS military – specialist skill Rubik's Cube – Gunner
• Carlos – contracted mechanic for Tri-Optimum Corp. who specialise in Space Station repairs – specialist skill Poker – Engineer
• Gill – ex-ESS-mil who has been working for Jupiter Mining Corp. as their medic – specialist skill Innate Orientation – Medic
• Dirk – space station security 'space ranger' for space station Alpha55 and owner of the Barry van Dyke fan club – specialist knowledge Extensive Knowledge of the TV career of Barry van Dyke – Security
• Burt – contracted mechanic for Tri-Optimum Corp. who specialise in Space Station repairs – specialist Skill Indecisiveness – Engineer
• Spike – a bounty hunter working with the ESS in private contracts – specialist skill Deduction – Communications (although described more as a Face-man or Negotiator) [at the end of the game Spike's player wanted to change his character from a Bounty Hunter to a Mafioso (of some underworld gang from ESS) without changing any other skills or stats, so Spike / Bounty Hunter was an alias and he is actually Vincenzo / Mafioso]

As you can see we had some pretty wild specialist skills, and although I could have made the players take something different, why should I have limited their fun when my players can quite easily limit the characters themselves. I decided, for better or worse to roll with it, and by the end of the session there were only two skills which hadn't been used or used to their full extent – so I am going to call that a win for the random specialist skills.

I ran a short vignette to get them to meet with a contact from ESS officially hiring them for the mission, providing them with a spaceship, the ESSS-Amelia, and allowed them to ask questions (Charisma check) or do some research on the Holonet (Science check). This was essentially a bit of role-playing as I gave them a data-stick which they could plug into the ship which would not only give them coordinates to head to but provide them all the relevant information as follows:

• The transponder signal corresponds to one of the first European colonial ships that left Earth, The Odyssey. It was never heard from again after leaving the Solar system,
• The transponder signal is an older type used around the time of the first space missions beyond the Solar system and is typically only sent under extreme circumstances for search and rescue missions, typically such signals indicate the ships cryopods are failing.
• Prominent citizens were on board The Odyssey.
• The planet Gill-GS5 is listed as uninhabited with rocky terrain and minimum vegetation (shrubs and grasses), no known resources.
• The Odyssey crashed on planet Gill-GS5. This was verified by other missions to the Gill star system after the expansion into Deep Space. It was reported no survivors.
• Gill system is listed as being owned by MBMC.
• MBMC have their main mining operations around the outer gas giants GS6 and GS7 as well smaller operations on the inner barren planets GS2 and GS3
• Gill-GS5 is listed as having alien life, listed in those early reports as monsters.
• Gill-GS5 has little to no resources, and with the alien life present has not been mined.
• Early Earth military classified Gill-GS5 as quarantined due to the monsters.

For the layout of the crashed ship and the landing sites I envisaged a plateau of some sort for the players and other factions to land on, with some level of vegetation, depending on how well they passed their skill check. A shallow valley for the crew to traverse thick with vegetation but where a path could be selected, and where they would encounter the monsters and other factions; a small hill at a height above the plateau, with the crashed ship embedded in the ground somewhere near the top, the hill having sparse vegetation.

I had no plans for the ship itself, except there would be an entrance near the cockpit at the front of the ship, the crew would have to then traverse to mid-ships and head down a couple of levels to get to the cryopods.

I didn't have much detail beyond what was above, and anything else was either made up on the fly, or was one of the story points of the overall plot outlined below. In this way I was able to let the players decide what to do, providing prompts and describing outcomes depending on how well or poor their skill checks went.

I wanted to the players to feel some jeopardy and informed them that several other ships have arrived in orbit around the planet. It would only be a matter of time before they came across another faction. To open the scene on the planet I let the designated 'pilot' make a Pilot Starship check to navigate to the correct side of the planet and land the ship as near the crash site as possible, interpreting the results from below:

• Excellent roll – The crew lands first, about 20 min walk to crash site, little to no vegetation to hamper them. They will see a spaceship from a random faction land just as they make it to the crashed ship.
• Good (Pass) roll – The crew lands first, MBMC will land second and further back (once the crew have cleared their landing site and are en route to the crashed ship), about 45 min walk to crash site, some vegetation to hamper them. Just before they make the crashed ship a third random faction will be seen to land.
• Poor (Fail) roll – MBMC land first, and the crew will land second and further back , about 45 min walk to crash site, will pass MBMC ship, some vegetation to hamper them, gunfight or negotiation might happen. A third random faction will land just as the crew pass the MBMC ship.
• Terrible roll – MBMC and another random faction will land before the crew, the crew will land over a 60 min walk to the crash site, will pass the other ships, heavy vegetation to hamper them, gunfight will definitely happen, the crew might be able to negotiate with one of the other factions but not both. Once the crew make it to outside the crashed spaceship they will note a fourth random faction land. There will definitely be a gunfight.

Depending on what the players decide to do, I would offer up the following:

• Subterfuge check to avoid the monsters on the way to the crash site. The denser the vegetation the higher the difficulty to avoid the monsters.
• Science check to find their way through the vegetation and not get lost (which will either make them cross paths with other factions, or add time to allow other factions to reach the crash site first). The denser the vegetation the higher the difficulty to not get lost.
• Science / Mechanical / Strength check to power up systems and get through doors to explore the crashed ship. Pass they have a straight forward path and find some key information about the ship, the crash, the monsters, etc.; Fail they have to double back to find a different way to mid-ships or try a different entrance, whilst getting ambushed by monsters or other factions.
• There is a monster / droid / mutated-human in the cryopod deck (I never figured this out before hand but in the end I had some sort of monster in a mechanical suit) either breaking cryo-pods or pulling out the power-cells to kill those inside – The crew must eliminate this threat before being allowed to continue to defrost and free the humans in the cryopods.
• Science or Mechanical check to free the people in the cryopods. Pass they have a straight forward defrost cycle, Fail something goes wrong and they get ambushed by monsters or other factions.
• Subterfuge check to head back to their ship and avoid monsters and other factions. Pass they are back without a scratch, fail they encounter monsters or other factions.
• Pilot Starship check to navigate to the rendezvous point without being detected. If they are detected, they will have to fight or escape and rendezvous later.

I ran a little vignette afterwards as they hand over the humans from the cryopods along with what material and information they uncovered from the crashed ship.

Conclusion

In the end the players had some exceptional rolls landing first and avoiding other factions until the return journey. They only encountered one monster on the way to the crash site which scarred them enough they were overly cautious from that point onward. They found a science lab with genetic modification and terraforming equipment and surmised that the monsters likely came from an escaped experiment after the crash. They collected as much data and samples as they could to being back to the ESS. The players managed to lure and trap the monster in the cryopod deck into an elevator shaft allowing them an easier time in at the cryopods. The humans they found on board were two prominent ESS personnel and a scientist (who was doing all the crazy genetic modification and terraforming).

All in all the players had a good time, and I enjoyed running Deep Space and look forward to running more in the future.

J

Yarr - Danish Gold - A one-shot for Talk Like a Pirate Day 2024

If you want to know more about Talk Like A Pirate Day you'll find that here.

I like pirates and pirate stuff; so it was natural that I would be into a Pirate role-playing game, such as Yarr!, and also natural to want to do something 'piratey' for Talk Like A Pirate Day.

I am, as of writing this, in a play-test group for an as-yet-undisclosed-RPG-designer and I wanted to try out some of the material they were working on to gauge how it worked in a real live RPG session to give better feedback. The fact Talk Like A Pirate Day was coming up was the prefect excuse. I came up with the following:

Danish Gold

Captain Morgan has put the word out he is looking for a crew to head out into the Wild Atlantic in search of treasure.
Rumours of a burial site filled with gold thought to belong to Old Scandinavian explorers await for those sea dogs willing to put their backs into it.
If you are interested there is a pint o'grog at the Lame Dog for you.
Slackers need not apply.

• The plan for the players was simple. Meet with Captain Morgan and negotiate passage as crew and work detail. Sail out to the island and dig for treasure. Return home with gold aplenty.
• The trouble for the players was Captain Morgan is a distasteful man and will not take no for an answer lightly. The main (and quickest) way on and off the island is with Captain Morgan. The gold is cursed.

As this scenario was for a one-shot in order to use some play-test material, I decided to put a bit more effort into the background of the island should I want to use this for future games and I really enjoyed the research and work I put into this.

After my last attempt at map making, here, I thought it would be another great idea to make maps and handouts for this scenario.

I wanted an island to house everything on and after a bit of internet research came across redblobgames.com which allowed you to generate island maps. Playing about with the settings I got a map I liked, downloaded it and began my magic - grey-scaling the map, placing town locations and adding detail like town names, etc. Most of the annotation work was done by hand for the purposes of this map, but if I was to use this again in the future, I might decide to annotate this digitally so I could change or add things to the map more easily.

For the grave-site, I cropped the area of the peninsula I wanted to use, then enlarged that to A4 as I planned to hand annotate this also. Again, if I decide to use this going forward, I will probably annotate this digitally as well so as to make changes more easily.

I also put together a simple collage of images of the burial sites for the players to give them an idea of looks of the place.

The players would meet on and island elsewhere (I use an island called Hope Island as my go to generic Caribbean Island of choice and as a base for my pirate games) to gather rumours and negotiate with Captain Morgan before sailing out on adventure.

Holmsa Island

An outlying island to the north-east of the main Caribbean Islands, about 80miles into the Atlantic. This island is approximately 18 miles across and was previously settled by Viking explorers many years ago. There are some small settlements where the descendants of those original explorers still reside (~100 people in total).

• The largest and main village on the island is Olafsvellir, located to the south-west. Low fences surround the village and sheep can be seen grazing in small paddocks, as well as roaming free in the hills outside the village.

• The second largest village on the island is Holmr, located to the north. A ring of pine trees surrounds the village.

• The third largest village on the island is Mork, located to the north-east.

• The smallest village on the island is Bildsfell, located to the south.

• The island is quite insular and few foreigners live on the island.

• The island trades goods and services with the other Caribbean islands.

• Each settlement has a few ships which travel between Holmsa and the Caribbean.

• The island is owned by the Danish, and Danish is the primary language spoken there. Secondary language is English. Some of the islanders still know Old Scandinavian and Runic.

• The north-east corner of the island is used as a burial site for the whole island. Everyone on Holmsa gets buried here.

Aki Gettson (NPC)

Guide and Shaman of Holmsa Island.

Weather beaten and grey flecked bushy beard wild hair, this burly older man wears layered furs and leathers. Carrying a wooden staff with several runes carved along it's length, he wears several carved wooden pieces as medallions.

The Burial Grounds

In the north-east corner of the island is a peninsula which is used as burial grounds for the island. At the end of the road just before the burial grounds there is a stone lodge house and stable used for shelter by funeral attendees, and beyond this is a stone bridge leading to the peninsula and the burial grounds proper.

There are three stages of burials on the peninsula. Furthest away from the bridge are old burial mounds surrounded by stone circles, typical of those used in traditional Viking burials. This general area also includes large marker stones (menhir) at the front and back entrance. Coming closer to the bridge is a section of early Christian Viking burial mounds, typically a medium depth grave with a single rune-covered marker stone at one end. Closest to the bridge are the modern Christian graves.

The One-Shot

The game went well and we all had fun, although it ran over two sessions rather than the planned one. Some of that was my fault, some of that was contributed to two of the players having to leave early. Also Captain Morgan, whilst being a distasteful NPC, was outright vilified by the party where they did everything in their power to kill the Captain during the game. Not what I had planned and I did have to improvise quite a bit, especially after they managed to kill Captain Morgan and his personal Bodyguard and First Mate!

I was happy with the play-test material, and more than happy with the Island of Holmsa. I hope that what I have presented here is useful, and if I can think of another scenario I will use this again next year.

J

Labyrinth Lord

Labyrinth Lord is a fantasy role-playing game and a Dungeons & Dragons retro-clone by Daniel Proctor and Goblinoid Games, and one of the first such retro-clones of Dungeons & Dragons when Wizards of the Coast released the OGL (Open Gaming Licence) way back in 2007. As of writing this, October 2024, Daniel Proctor has teamed up with Pauli Kidd to rewrite Labyrinth Lord into a second edition which is out for public consultation.

I first played Labyrinth Lord somewhere between 2015 and 2016. Not wanting to buy new books at the time for something I might not be into I purchased the cheaper digital copy of the main rulebook from Drive-Thru RPG and printed the material I needed to play. I enjoyed playing Labyrinth Lord back then and when the games stopped I put my stuff away hoping someone would run another game soon.

Fast forward to 2023 and 2024 and with RPG Saturday running (quite successfully by now) I decided to run a game of Labyrinth Lord myself. If it was successful I can always run something more.

As I had only printed those pages relevant to my character back in 2015, I had to print the remainder of the book and now read the rules more carefully as I was going to be in the driving seat. Once I had that sorted I decided to put together a primer for my players so that could have the relevant information to them at the table without having to flick through the rulebook.

Now all I had to do was think of a scenario - I had been reading an Isekai story on Royal Road where one of the main antagonists to the main character was creatures wielding Void Magic (something akin to the descriptive effects of the Sphere of Annihilation in D&D). I took this as my inspiration and considered a crazy mage doing some research in his tower, and through his own hubris or through some error, has connected to the Void and summoned Void wielding creatures to this reality. I then envisioned the characters would be sent to the wizards tower to help fix the problem.

I needed a tower for this crazy wizard so I set about outlining on graph paper something which I could use and thus Hrogroth's Tower was born. The scenario itself was quite straight forward - guards and adventurers from the realm have been sent to the tower but no-one has returned and passers by report the tower looking deserted. You are tasked to finding out what happened and report back, and if you can fix whatever has occurred then so be it. It would be very much a dungeon crawl in reverse and apt for Labyrinth Lord.

I had envisioned this running for three sessions – but through various factors, this didn't go to plan and it ran for four sessions with a massive break in the middle! Whilst this was a bit of a bummer, good fortune smiled on me as one of my players gifted me the Labyrinth Lord rulebook, companion and reference screen as they said there was more chance of me running Labyrinth Lord games than them if the future – Thanks Tony!

My hand-drawn maps worked well for the first session, but I thought it would be nice to have something better to hand to the players. So I turned to the internet to look for a 'quicker' way to compile all the maps I needed for tower. I narrowed my options down to two browser based programs, Dungeon Map Doodler (DMD) and Dungeon Scrawl (DS).

I first used Dungeon Map Doodler. It's not a bad programme and quite straightforward to use. I produced a set of maps within a few days which included various dungeon furniture which I thought would be relevant for players to fight around. Happy with the result I went to print two copies, one for me to use as a reference, and one for the players to scribble over. When I went to print these I realised I had black background for the most part and it nearly killed my printer. Only having printed out one set of maps I decided to revisit these for the future, but as luck would have it, the next session was upon me so I used my single printed copy as reference material only, describing what the players saw. It was during this session I realised I didn't need to have all the furniture listed on the players map, although it would be convenient for me. I want back to DMD to edit the maps and ran into my first problem, editing. Editing maps in DMD isn't as easy as creating from scratch and after a day of so of not being happy, I looked elsewhere.

I moved over to Dungeon Scrawl, which has a slightly higher learning curve (hence my initial reluctance to use this at the start) but after another day of messing about, and having not only all the hand-drawn maps, but the maps from DMD at hand, I was able to get to grips with the DS software. Not having to put the furniture in made an easier time of it, and having learned my mistakes from my first map run I decided to use a grey background to make my life easier when printing. It was when I was printing these maps out a thought occurred to me – I could use these maps as an in-world document, a map of Hrogroth's Tower by the City Guard or whatnot. I annotated the maps as though previous adventuring parties had used them and left them on the second floor for the party to find.

I was really pleased with both Dungeon Map Doodler and Dungeon Scrawl and knowing their limitations now would definitely use them again.

I enjoyed Labyrinth Lord and the game went well. The players all seemed to enjoy it too and through the discussions post sessions I had asked if there was interest in more. There was a resounding yes so I picked up Stonehell Dungeon a mega-dungeon adventure to throw at the players for my next game. I look forward to more Labyrinth Lord in the future.

J

Free RPG Day 2024

You might remember last years post on Free RPG Day. This year Free RPG Day was on 22^nd June 2024, and you can find out more about Free RPG Day  here .

I had such a great time last year, I was the again asking if my local gaming store,  OnTableTop , was going to host games this year... and to my delight they said yes!

The plan this year was to do something similar to previous, with two tables for RPGs, with three two hour slots across the day. I was doing the organising in the background and made a few calls to various GMs I knew to see if they would run a game for me. I myself was going to run The Witch is Dead by Grant Howitt, Deep Space by Jonathan Hicks, and Mesopotamians by Nick Wedig.

Sadly, through a lack of communication from the gaming store, I was chasing them without luck and they left it too late to order all the goodies for Free RPG Day. Whilst this was not the best situation, I decided to go ahead with the games and somewhere around the beginning of June confirmed that two tables would be available for RPGs. The response I got was not heartening, as the gaming store was undergoing refurbishment that particular weekend which meant the store was unavailable for Free RPG Day.

I reported this bombshell news through the social media channels and a kind community member asked a local café for the use of the back half of their shop. Gladly they said yes, although whatever was to be planned would be a very stripped down version of Free RPG Day as there was definitely not the same space available.
With this in mind I cancelled all previous (grand) plans for Free RPG Day and set about organising for two games (or three if I could manage the time and squeeze another one in) for that Saturday in the café

In the end I ran two games, Mesopotamians and The Quiet Year, and many thanks to Infuse Tea Bar for letting me use their facility.

Although this was not the Free RPG Day I had envisioned, I enjoyed myself (although by backside hurt from sitting on a small hard stool for about 6 hours!) and gaming in a café (for a few hours) would be something I would consider again.

Although disheartened and the outcome of events, I am not discouraged and am looking forward to Free RPG Day 2025.

J

Mesopotamians

Mesopotamians - a little game about undead warrior kings making it big as a rock and roll band

The game Mesopotamians by Nick Wedig is a game inspired by the song Mesopotamians by They Might Be Giants, and from the tag line above you can see why I was interested in this game.

You might remember I wrote about Runeblade a small narrative game with interesting dice mechanics. As I have stated before, I like simple games and I like narrative games, and although I don't mind more complex or mechanics intensive games I like having something I can put onto the table quickly when the need arises.

I had come across Mesopotamians recently when I picked up in an indie game anthology - it was actually in on one of the Level 1 game anthologies by 9^th Level Games for Free RPG Day I got at a recent event.

I thought Mesopotamians was interesting and having had experience of Runeblade I thought I'd like to give this a go.

I decided to type out the character cards, the character concerns and the van card myself and then print and laminate these so I had some playable cards which would take some abuse at the game table.

I also realised in a quick play test of the game, I needed more dice! Specifically more d6 and d10 dice. So after buying these I was all prepared to get a game organised.

I have been carrying the game around for the past six months or so and although telling everyone about the game and getting interest from others, there was never the opportunity to put this on the table. Until now that is!

Through player illness and forewarned absence the crew of players for my current Labyrinth Lord game was about cut in half. I had considered playing something else, or possibly continuing with the Labyrinth Lord campaign itself with fewer players, but decided to wait and ask the remaining players when they turned up. The consensus was to pause the Labyrinth Lord game and play something else, which is where the moment of inspiration hit me and I suggested we play Mesopotamians!

We all had a thoroughly good time, even though I got the dice mechanic wrong when I walked the players through the first round of play. A quick correction so everyone knew what to do going forward and I guided them through the second round of play. It was only after the game I realised I forgot to use the Goal tracker (which is part of the Van card) but having had my first play actual through with other people I think it all went well and I am looking forward to getting this onto the table again.

As far as the recent game goes I have the abridged the highlights of the game below, and if you think it sounds ridiculous and hilarious, that is because it was.

The Larrys

The unnamed band headed away from the clutches of the Evil Sorceress Azita as far as the end of the road to Darleen's Bar to set-up a gig. They gained Bob "Larry" Wiseman as their band-manager, invented the "Gilgamoshpit", settled a dispute with law enforcement regarding excessive crowds, and became an internet sensation with their first live-gig video all before leaving town for the big city.

On the way to the city they were beset by van troubles (flat tyre), dodged hitmen sent by Azita, gained a couple of magical artefacts (magical whips), recorded their world-sensational track "Bumpin' in my Transit" and finally defeated Azita in some sort of kaiju-esque final battle after she turned into a giant snake and rampaged through the city.

The unnamed band finally became known as 'The Larrys' in honour of their lost Band Manager 'Larry' who died in the final battle with Azita.

J

Rocks

As I had previously mentioned here I like wargames and love scatter terrain you can use to break up open areas of the game board.

Rocks are quite useful as scatter terrain and I thought should be quite easy to make. I had an idea to make rocks out of standard expanded polystyrene many years ago and had made several prototypes. The one you see in the picture is one of those prototypes which survived and was forwarded to this final build.

These were pieces of expanded polystyrene from household appliance packaging cut to rough shape with a sharp knife and then attacked with a blunt knife and finger nail to pull out lumps giving that rough surface effect. It didn't have to look perfect as everything was getting covered in a layer of wall filler, but I needed enough definition to not be lost when applying the wall filler.

Once the polystyrene was roughly where I wanted it shape wise, the polystyrene blobs were attached to pieces of hardboard I had cut for me by a friend who has a great woodwork set-up. I laid out the pieces onto the hardboard, traced around them, then left enough space for a lip if I wanted to add small foliage etc. before these were cut out and sanded. A final shape by hand with some wood files and some sandpaper and I had wooden bases for my polystyrene. After the polystyrene was attached to the wooden bases they got two thin coats of wall filler.

Next up was adding those bits of scenery scatter (sand, cork pieces, grit, etc.) to look like small pieces of rock had fallen off and gathered at the base of each. After these were assembled and dried, everything got a base coat of black paint and Mod Podge.

I was thinking along the lines of granite or slate for these so the paint scheme was a heavy over-brush with a dark blue, followed by successive over-brushes by lighter blues. I wasn't choosy about what direction I was painting on the over-brushed blues and so ended up painting myself.

It looks like I was killing Smurfs!

A few areas were given a red ink wash or a purple ink wash to add a bit of variety to the rocks. Everything then got a black wash before being dry-brushed with the last light blue I'd used, followed by light dry-brush with a white-blue.

Before I added the flock and foliage added a bit of green ink to those areas which might pool water or have water running down along the rock face.

You can get a sense of scale here with my 28mm Dwarf Warrior and Human Wizard models I use to check my builds. Much like my previous scatter terrain project, everything fits into an under bed storage box and will adequately cover a 4ft square game board.

I hope you like these and I have some photos of the final items which I hope you find inspirational.

J

Refreshing old models - Cottage

The cottage you see here was scratch-built by me back in around the years 1992-1993 when I was in secondary school undertaking my Duke of Edinburgh Award Scheme. For my Silver badge I chose as my skill - Crafting; specifically table-top model scenery crafting (like you would have for model railways which is how I pitched it to my teachers, although I had to explain at length that I was not constructing model railways).

The cottage was constructed from the instructions and template as presented in the Modelling Workshop series in White Dwarf Magazine, issue 130. Issue 130 was released in 1990 and I still have the Modelling Workshop pages from this very magazine tucked in a folder somewhere.

Foamboard, balsa wood, cereal box cardboard, DAS modelling clay, wall filler and some Citadel Paints were all used in the construction of this piece. I was playing a lot of Warhammer Fantasy Battle at the time, so it was definitely a piece I could use on the table, and the cottage was something which I thought I could achieve in building to completion as one of the pieces to present for my Silver badge.

The cottage was at the time stuck to a bit of corrugated cardboard which was then painted green and flocked to give it that in-world appearance. I was never really happy with the base, but I needed to get the cottage complete and out of the way as I had other buildings I was in the middle of constructing for my Silver badge.

The cottage itself is now about 30 years old and has seen it's fair share of play and abuse. There was damage to the tiles especially on the corners, the corners of the chimney stack lintel and the chimney pot itself.

Rather than just touch up the piece to repair the damage, I decided to go full on and replace that base I had disliked since the beginning, as well as fully repair and repaint the model.

I began by ripping off the original base and then finding a suitable base to add the building back on to. I had acquired off cuts of some really thick card (about 4mm thick) a number of years ago. The building was a good fit to an off-cut I had allowing for some space around the building to add some detail in terms of foliage so I went with this.

Before fitting the cottage to the new base I had to repair some of the wooden laths which formed the bottom of the walls. The glue and paint I originally used had ripped off some layers of wood from the bottom leaving a gap. Once these were repaired the the building was stuck to the new base in preparation for the rest of the repair.

Thankfully there was not too much damage to the tiles which needed repair and so re-stuck those tiles which were loose, and where the corners were dog-eared and ragged I just cut these bits away.

The chimney pot and chimney stack lintel were replaced completely. The lintel was just another piece of thick card (the card you find at the back of a file pad) which was easy to restore. My original chimney pot was made from a single piece of DAS modelling putty. My new chimney was made from the pen barrels and plasticard.

Once assembled, everything which was added new was given a quick brush with watered down wall filler, to fill in any gaps and give a cohesive appearance to the original construction, before being painted black to match the original base colour. The entire building, base and all was given a brown wash to tie everything together before I got to repainting the piece.

I think the foliage and flock I added really helps to bring this piece to life and here's to playing with it for another 30 years!

I will leave you with some pictures of the final piece. Enjoy!

J

RPG Saturday

You may remember I mentioned in a previous post here that I was hoping that RPG Saturday would get off the ground – especially as this meant I could get some more regular role-playing in.

So what is RPG Saturday?

RPG Saturday is currently just an unofficial gathering of people enthusiastic about playing tabletop RPGs which was spawned off the back of Free RPG Day. I am currently organising a loose collection of gamers to try and build a community which I am hoping will turn into something more concrete and hopefully more official in the future. I am very reliant on others to provide venues and help with marketing, and although I have been organising this for about eight months now, it still just feels like organising a group of friends around to your house for a game – not that there is anything wrong with that – but it is a lot of effort up front.

I am pleased to say that there now a regular monthly RPG event, which I decided to name as RPG Saturday, currently running at OnTableTop and although it has been a reasonable success so far, it is a lot of hard work as I am the main organiser for this – I have no one to blame but myself as I was the one making the most noise about not having a local RPG meet-up, and after my persistent bemoaning that there wasn't a local RPG event it seems only fair I am the one trying to bring RPG players together.

Most of the work so far has been in actually trying to corral and herd people to attend, which has often times led to just chasing people through private channels to see if they will turn up on the day. At least right now I don't have to organise the venue, which really takes a huge burden off my shoulders - a big thanks to the folks at OnTableTop for having the space available for this each month.

So how does RPG Saturday work?

The plan behind RPG Saturday was to play several different game systems over the course of the year. It is not about running one-shots, but more about mini-campaings, or short adventures which can form the basis of a larger campaign. One of the problems which was discussed back in Free RPG Day 2022 was that if you start a big campaign you have a forever GM and a small group of players dedicated to that game, but you also end up with several people who are not playing that game or who don't want to play that particular game – therefore you really need to have a pool of GMs and systems available to play, to keep the masses engaged and coming back every month. It was this mindset which has led to the running of mini-campaigns or short adventures which would be able to be run over two to three sessions, four sessions at a stretch, after which we could then play something different. This would hopefully keep people coming to the event, but also provide the GMs a break.

There is nothing to stop GMs running longer or more involved campaigns, it is just that we are asking of our GMs to curtail the action for that particular campaign arc to the smaller number of sessions. After a short break, that campaign can be picked up again. Should RPG Saturday grow and there are enough GMs and players available, there could be more regular games and campaigns played each month, rather than having to swap out every so often.

Again, with regards RPG Saturday, there is nothing to stop a group of players breaking off to play a particular game with a particular GM, although that does take away from the community spirit that RPG Saturday was intended to capture.

So far we have played through one shots of The Quiet Year and Most Trusted Advisors, and whilst the first part of a Blades in the Dark campaign is just about coming to an end, I have started a Mouse Guard campaign. Looking forward I have a game of Labyrinth Lord lined up, and there are also mutterings of D&D and Vaesan one-shots awaiting to be palyed.

There are around 8 to 10 players in the group so far, with about half of these turning up each month as regulars to play games. This is a good start although I would like to see the group grow so we can have more games run concurrently, but for this there would really need to be more GMs to step up to the plate and asking to run games.

It is all positive so far, so let's hope that RPG Saturday can keep going all the way to the next Free RPG Day where all this started! Speaking of which the next Free RPG Day is scheduled for sometime in June 2024 – maybe I'll see you there.

Misfit Hobbies - A Pop-Up Game Store

The wonderful Samuel Steele (formerly Tabletop Hub, now rebranded as Misfit Hobbies) has thrown his hat in the ring and started a pop-up game store. Samuel has taken a multi-faceted approach and is running demonstrations, open gaming spaces, workshops, RPGs, board games and miniature wargames, as well as have a small store front selling everything from Warhammer, Bolt Action, Fallout Wasteland Warfare, paints and scenery, even his own TTRPG Zines and Resources – all of which I can definitely get behind.

It is more of a community space and as such has a really cosy feeling. I have helped out by running a one-shot RPG and I ran my Meddling Kids scenario from Free RPG Day earlier this year. I had two new players to TTRPGs in my group which was really nice to see. I have also attended a board game evening and a terrain making workshop, as well as a couple of the demonstration events. I built a nifty ruined tower in the terrain workshop – not bad going for a few hours work, and will post about this separately.

The pop-up store ran it's course to the end of December 2023. The seven weeks it was open was very short, but time which I am grateful I spent in attending and supporting. I really wish Samuel all the best in this venture, and hope that he can get the funding he needs to keep the store running as a going concern. Obviously I have volunteered my services for both RPGs and Terrain Workshops in the future so lets hope that he can keep the store running.

J

Buildings - Wooden Sheds and Wooden Shacks

I decided to make some simple buildings from scratch for my table, these would be wooden sheds, and wooden shacks. I also wanted these to look aged and weather beaten. Also none of these buildings were designed to have playable interiors, which meant construction to be easier.

The wooden sheds would be simple box shapes with a tiled pitched roof, a simple door and a simple window. These would remind me a bit of my parents shed when I was growing up, except their shed had a bitumen roof rather than tiles.

I decided to go all out on the second shed and make it a T shape. I am not convinced this was a great idea for such a small building but I learned a lot of lessons when constructing this. The door knobs were map pins and the hinges were bits of card.

Once the sheds were constructed I gave them a base coat and initial dry brush. The tiles were a dark grey (almost steel grey) colour and the wooden walls were an umber colour. After this I ink washed everything and then brought back the detail with several dry brushes.

The wooden shacks were designed to be some sort of crude building with a rudimentary storage space to one side, to keep the likes of logs or tools.

I liked the idea of trying to give these shacks canvas or hide roofs. I cut up some old towels and sheets, especially material that had a distinct pattern or weave. These small strips were soaked in watered down PVA glue, then draped over the piece and poked and prodded with a cocktail stick until I was happy with the shape.

Again like the wooden sheds, the wooden walls started out with an umber colour. I decided to give a bit of variety to the roof, picking out different materials in different shades and colours.

Again like the wooden sheds, I gave everything an ink wash although I think I lost the colour detail in the roof when I did this. After the ink wash everything was given several dry brushes to pick out the detail. I finished the wooden shacks with some flock and grasses to add detail to the base.

Overall these were quick and simple to make and I am really impressed with the results, even though the paint job may not be what I was initially after.

J