I’m up a bit earlier than my wife, had my coffee, and settled down with the tablet and the laptop to be as unproductive as possible.
I just read a blog post by Jack Tremain. He writes about procedural content generation:
The best thing for me about Old D&D and its clones (and what brings them over any other games) is, in my opinion, how they are the only rpgs that care about procedural game generation. That is: you have a looping mechanic that keeps the game forward, by the chemical reaction of the PC’s advancement rules (XP for gold) and the dungeon stocking chart (or hexcrawl generation chart). As long as you have this, there is a game going on. This allows the GM to wholeheartedly assume the role of a “referee”, instead of burdening him with the tasks of being an Omniscient God, a plot writer, a world builder, a wise mathematical balancer and fun enforcer. – Why OSR
I had noticed this because Jack had added links to his blog posts to the appropriate sections on the Links to Wisdom wiki. I still love the idea of this wiki.
This wiki collects cool OSR house rules. Feel free to add, edit, improve and remove! – Links to Wisdom
There is a bit of a scope creep, I think, since there are introductions and design pieces linked as well. In any case, I’d like to encourage you all to add to it. I promise it won’t be as hard as it is for me to comment on Google blogs (Blogspot, Blogger). I tried to leave a comment on Jack’s post, had to sign in, had to open the YouTube app to confirm it was me, and by the time I got back, my comment had disappeared into the great unknown. How frustrating. If only people had their email addresses somewhere on their blogs!
If you have read through the five part series by Keith Hann, A Historical Look at the OSR, and you would like to take a peek at some of the old blog posts, you can still find them linked from the Links of Wisdom wiki.
This final part is dedicated to explaining how this very concrete base fragmented into the increasingly incoherent movement we see today, a movement frequently having nothing to do with or even in direct contradiction of what it began as. – Part Ⅴ
Oh, and if you have a blog that I can add to the RPG Planet, let me know! 😃
A Planet is a website which collects posts from member blogs and displays them on a single page. We are trying to keep the blogosphere alive! – RPG Planet: What is this?
Wow, what a disgression. I actually wanted to talk about procedural adventure and setting generation for role-playing games! You know I love this. It’s why I’m still working on Text Mapper and Hex Describe after all these years. ❤️ I still find it the most inspiring method. I know that Traveller also has a sort of procedural content generation: animal encoutners, patrons, systems, subsector… it doesn’t really have adventure, though. Or at at least not with the granularity I could use.
For a long time, I wasn’t sure about this. I wanted to like The Great Pendragon Campaign for the King Arthur Pendragon role-playing game. I wanted to like the Adventure Paths for Pathfinder. I imagined myself liking the big Call of Cthulhu campaigns. Luckily I had already realised that I wasn’t ever going to play all of the adventures I bought. I did run Rise of the Runelords, though, and the beginning of Shackled City. Eventually DM James took over, ran the rest of the campaign for us, and ran Legacy of Fire for us. I also ran a handful of the smaller adventures Paizo had published. But somehow I wasn’t happy. They seemed to require more prep than I was willing to invest. They never quite had the tone I liked. I was never quick in finding the information I knew to be in there, somewhere. Not enough prep? Perhaps. But that was the problem, I think. In the end, I just didn’t want to do read through these adventures twice, with pen in hand. I’d rather read something else.
Perhaps Lance Duncan says it best:
I can do a well-run session using a module, but at that point it must be practically memorized, and in the time it takes to get to know the module to that degree I could have prepared so much more material myself. – On Modules
Anyway, that reminds me. I need to be tinkering with my random tables! Gotta add some crab men to those ports. 😈
There’s a port down by *Old Rivulet*. The dock workers and porters are not showing up for work because they are all smoking dream grub at the White Plough bathhouse. It is run by *Finlay* but they claim not to know where the drug is coming from. Watching the inn keeper for a few nights reveals their contact: sneaky *Lindel* is dropping off Worm Leaf and they are paid by *Elie le Prince* (2906).
Coming along nicely.
There’s a port down by *Deep Stream*. The fishermen are disappearing and their wives are worried. As it turns out, the demon lord Garaskis is promising them power and revenge and granting them “gifts”. Watching the water for a few nights reveals their presence and leads a bold tracker to their nearby cave: 12 **crab men** (HD 1 AC 3 2d6 F1 MV 12 ML 8 XP 100; one arm turned into a big pincer; back protected by carapace).
Remember David Bowman’s Spawning Grounds of the Crab-Men in Fight On! magazine issue 03? Good times!
#RPG #Old School
(Please contact me if you want to remove your comment.)
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When I did this a while ago:
http://cosmicheroes.space/cgi-bin/superherohexcrawl.pl
Part of the inspiration was your random tables ideas, etc.
– bluetyson 2021-12-26 00:42 UTC
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What the fuck! I just added it like one minute before you read it hahah. How did you know It was me who added it? I was hoping that it looked like I had fans or something.
– jack tremain 2021-12-26 03:51 UTC
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@bluetyson Nice! The URL makes me think that this is a Perl script. That would make two of us, using Perl for RPGs. 😄
@jack I check campaign wiki recent changes regularly. 😅
Can I add your blog to the RPG Planet, or the OSR Planet?
– Alex 2021-12-26 11:32 UTC
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please do, I just found out they exist, but it is always nice to see oneself on blogrolls!
– jack tremain 2021-12-30 12:20 UTC