Short post here, here’s the games in my “to-play” pile, sorted by immediacy. I thought it would be a nice way of keeping track of stuff that’s caught my eye.

Games I’ve not played yet:

• Beak, Feather & Bone - An IRL friend bought me this. Not only do I therefore want to report back, but it is a short story-telling game and thus ready for dropping into a blank session. And it has bird-people. Need to import an image into roll20 for a game.
• Ultraviolet Grasslands - Love Luka’s art, getting ready to start a play-by-post of this. My games always end up a bit grim, so I really want an excuse to make a cheerful gonzo game with a Mad Max bent.
• Hypertellurians - For some reason I just really want to play this atomic raygun RPG. I’m not even sure why but I have it in PDF and physical and it looks like a laugh and relatively light. Mind you, so does a lot of stuff I already own!
• DELVE - A solo dungeon-building game. I’m waiting for the physical book for this one. It might be a bit fiddly compared to a pure story-telling game as it involves some light cellular automation of rooms to cover invasions and water flow and stuff. Worst case it would be easier on roll20 or similar where I don’t have to pack it up.
• Ex Novo - another story-telling map-building game that was in the Racial Equality bundle. It can be played solo and I definitely want to give it a go.
• Humblewood - a 5e campaign that’s finally arrived across the Atlantic. It’s very beautiful, and I will save running it for post-pandemic. For completeness it’s worth noting it’s available on roll20 now…

I played the ENNie award-winning Thousand Year Old Vampire. The story is that you’re a Vampire that can live for Thousands of Years. This game is the Ronseal (™️) of RPGs in that sense. Consider it Highlander, the RPG.

TL;DR It is great.

I wanted to try a 5e game but with OSR rules for dungeoneering. For that, I used Considering Bees from AAW which I had in print with VTT assets from their Kickstarter in 2019. This is a level 2 adventure, and pits the players vs, well, bees. 🐝 🐝 🐝

This took two sessions of about 2.5 hours each, and had two PCs each running a single character. We played in roll20. I tried to set up proper dynamic lighting (the new style) but cocked it up reasonably-well so defaulted back to the old version (was showing the whole map to the players). Perhaps next time I’d just buy it on roll20?

Ross, of 2-minute table-top provides maps, and assets to his patreons, and on his shop. And Dungeondraft packs of those assets. Including a train.

I like trains.

🚂

70px for roll20

Well, I bought Dungeondraft. I regret it only in the sense that drawing maps is now my life. Roughly, the workflow:

1. Paint the terrain (and water)
2. Paint the cave
3. Plot the dungeon walls
4. Draw the cliff-tops as a path that can be edited
5. Drop on lights, tables, torches, mushrooms, rocks
6. Export

Tried having a quick game of The Quiet Year due to a last minute cancellation in a regular game. I normally like planning ahead, even a “no prep” game, so this is a big deal for me. Can I actually just set up a game and go?

Well, yes! 😌

Player: Is this game dark and miserable?

Me: No, someone told me they played as meerkats in a zoo. It’s as light or as dark as you want.

Behold the tale of the brutal religious civil war of the penguins… 🐧🐧🐧

This post is just spoilers for Witchburner. You probably meant to read this one.

LOOK NO FURTHER. YE HAVE BEEN WERRRNNED!

🧙‍♀🧙

I ran Luka Rejec’s Witchburner in Old School Essentials over Discord for my wife and a few friends, back at the height of lockdown. None of them had played OSE before, but as this is a pretty social-based story, it didn’t matter too much.

The plot

The Mayor pats down her forehead with a napkin and looks left, then right. The councilors arranged around her in their finery nod assent. She looks down at the motley witchfinders, spoken for by the Lord Rightmaker. “Our request is simple. Find the witch before All Saints’ Night, before the month ends, and we shall pay you 3,000 cash.” The shadow-skinned councilor smiles, “And the council will cover your stay at my inn.” The bushy-haired priest looks uncomfortable, “Now go, find that witch, before she brings Winterwhite’s hunger on us all!”

The idea is that the rural town of Bridge is plagued by evil portents, caused by witches, and the party is brought in as Witchburners to find the Witch, and Burn them.

Minor spoilers below the break.

The Quiet Year is a sort-of-coop map-drawing and story-telling game. You use a deck of cards (special printed deck or there’s a lookup table for a normal playing card deck) to draw events, and use them to tell a story. I say sort-of-coop, in that it’s more like Roman consuls where each day/month it would swap who was “in charge” rather than agree or compromise on a single coherent course of action. In fact you’re explicitly not supposed to actually talk through each event together and agree it. You draw on the map the result of each event to build a recording of the story, and you can start building projects to fix the problems beset by your tiny community.

The events are things like:

An old piece of machinery is discovered, broken but perhaps repairable. What is it? What would it be useful for?

As the seasons turn towards Winter, they get darker:

The weakest among you dies. Who’s to blame for their death?

There are other better reviews, and I don’t really want to do that here. Although I suppose this is a small review of the roll20 module that I used.

I make maps for my games. And sometimes, I just make maps because I like them. Hex Kit is a tool I use for that, because it’s so easy to get started! Now, I’ve not tried any other software, so I daresay Wonderdraft or some other mapper is better, but if you’re drawing hex tile maps, at a relatively large scale, you can do something easy very quickly indeed.

Here’s a small starmap I made for a SWN game I was playing in. I think I spent about as long looking up the existing names as I did drawing it.