TL;DR
This newsletter is packed with crunchy content. Several topics emerged as we prepared for a new launch. Actually, it's not a launch, but a crowdfunding campaign for a mini setting that we hope you'll love and support. That's why this newsletter might be a bit delayed.
🎲From the Table - My home game is back this year. The first session we had a full party and got to play a very narrative game. On the other hand, the second session was side quest time (group not full) and we did a small hexcrawl.
📺My Media - I’ve been watching Dungeon Meshi, just like everybody else, and started to watch (new to me) Yu Yu Hakusho.
🛜Current Issues - The future of TTRPG is the talk in Brazilian Xwitter. As a professional forecaster and “futures” teacher (really, these are my two dayjobs), I have some insights of my own.
📝Design Talk - It may be serendipity but hexcrawling is everywhere for me. The side quest premade adventure I’m running has one, a series of great back and forth articles appeared on the web, and I’m releasing my own crawl through Crowdfundr on Zine Month.
🎲From the Table - Home game is back
After a longer than planned hiatus at the end of last year, we came back in full swing for January. Nobody remembered anything but the point is we left the main party (18th level by now) on a cliffhanger. The best cliffhanger of all: TPK. I had plenty of time to plan their return so, I was thinking that, in exchange for not really dying, I want them to get something negative in return that I could use to make more plots. In the meantime, I was also playing Baldur’s Gate 3 and the idea came from there. One of the PCs is a great old one warlock and has a mind flayer as a mentor. You get where I’m going with this.
Their main mission, after defeating Tiamat on Tyranny of Dragons, is to find out what happened to Bahamut, who is missing. They went to Lunia, the first Heaven, to look for the dragon god’s palace. There, they were defeated by a host of demons (what are they doing there?) and took to Avernus as prisoners. That’s where Zellix, the mindflayer mentor, enters the game. Her goal is to advance the Old One’s goals and to make Staell, the warlock, into the perfect tool for their master’s plans. Zellix would call every favor she had with hell’s denizens in exchange for one member of the party to receive a ceromorph, a larva stage mindflayer that connects to your brain. The session was all talk, no dice, as the party discussed if they should do it, or how they could get away with it. In the end the warrior-monk took it but, as it started to crawl inside, he cast flaming burning hands *on his face*. I thought it was enough and let them get away with it. Next week they’ll try to get into the Second Heaven, but the doorman only allows the pure of heart to pass…
The side quest is a premade adventure from DMDave. A small town is getting attacked by trees turned into aberrations and the party must find out what is happening in the woods. I placed it near the home base of the main party and had some of their retainers, usually NPCs, to be the characters this time. After defeating the invading force last session, the party was going to start to investigate the woods. This part of the adventure is a small hexcrawl, with each hex corresponding to half a mile (20 minutes’ walk), which is rather small compared to other published adventures. The map is 11 x 17 hexes (187 total), but only has 8 keyed locations in addition to the starting town. This is low density, but all locations are clustered on the left top side of the map, and it is hinted that this is the right direction.
I enjoyed DMing this type of gameplay for these specific players. They had different preferences: one valued the story above the system, while the other sought a challenging game. Balancing these expectations was crucial to avoid boredom or frustration. The procedure was also essential, but the fifth edition was rather sparse on it: it only required choosing the speed, making a survival roll to reach the destination, and rolling for a random encounter. I won't reveal the details because one of the players might read this, but it went smoothly. I gave them hints about their options and used their skills to indicate if they were on the right track. This was especially important, and I'll explain why later.
📺My Media - Anime old and new
Let’s start with the new kid in town. Dungeon Meshi is a new series from NETFLIX released weekly. It tracks the adventures of a party in a very active megadungeon but with a twist. They are learning to cook the monsters in their way! It leans on the funny side and so far all the episodes have been great.
It gives you a kind of setting where you can play all those pdfs harvesting monsters without the grit.
It shows you how the economics of a well-known megadungeon might work in a populous place.
It stresses out the whole “ecology” of the dungeon, including factional interplay.
Yu Yu Hakusho is a classic 90’s anime that was immensely popular in Brazil. I don’t know if it took too long to get here but, at the time, I considered it to be for younger kids than me. It was huge here for the same reason we still enjoy Woody Woodpecker and Chavo del 8: an extremely well-done localization. The kids in the show are not talking in standard Portuguese with precise translation from Japanese. They talk like I remember I talked in the 90s. The strong accent, odd phrasal construction, well used old slang. Coincidence or not, NETFLIX just launched a live action version.
The show follows a school kid that got in debt with the Spirit World and know works as a spiritual detective, doing missions fighting against supernatural opponents. It is the classic fight anime, with the protagonist gaining ever increasing powers to fight stronger and stronger foes. Not unlike some of our games, right?
It shows very well how to quickly get the premise of the show going: Yusuke is a spiritual detective. A goal I always have for my games is to have a clear “what the PCs do” and it can’t get clearer than “you owe your life to the spirit world boss, now you are his agent”.
It also sets up the quest giver NPC right at the start. You don’t need more than four episodes to imagine a game based on this.
The basic lore is familiar. For an anime watcher you don’t need to explain again how afterlife works in Japanese fiction. Specific lore gets added a step at a time, and only when it will be used.
🛜Current Issues - The Future of TTRPGs
I don’t remember where I read it. It was on Substack and the writer was talking about going to a Con and that you should not forget what you do on your day job if you’re a part-timer. That may be the exact experience someone needs. I asked on Twitter what folks did and how it related to gaming. My own answer was that, as an economist, I read and wrote a lot on technical topics, and this is a nice skill to have, writing modules and games.
Then, Brazilian Twitter started talking about the future of TTRPGs, what trends we see for the next 10 years, etc. and it just clicked on me. It is a bit dumb if you think about it but I’ve been for the last five months on my day job, exclusively thinking about the future of our industry 25 years from now. I put 2 and 2 together and realized THIS is what I specialized about. If I can do it for the oil industry, I could do a decent job thinking about our little corner of the world.
How do we do it in company? It is not simply good old econometric forecasting (though we do it too). When you think about the distant future you must expect structural change happening. In the 1970’s some people developed a technique to do this called “prospective” or “scenario building” (time to google for “Schwartz” and “Godet”). It is a way of imagining different futures with the goal of, eventually, base your strategy on how things might develop.
On Twitter most of the talk was about some trends we already see such as streaming, solo games, VTTs, etc. Could we have predicted how we play today in the year 2000? That’s the exercise I’ll be proposing on this newsletter in a parallel series to this. I’ll be asking questions on the subscriber’s chat and Twitter to hear your opinions.
📝Design Talk - To hexcrawl or not to hexcrawl?
The topic seems everywhere. I already told you about my last session, where I took my players on an exploring trip through a forest. I was reading Justin Alexander’s new book and the last chapter I read were his hexcrawling procedures. What really caught my eye and of many others was a blob post by Goblin Punch called “Hexcrawls Kinda Suck”. That could be hard to swallow while I’m trying to sell one. What are his main points?
Hexcrawls are flawed. The author argues that hexcrawls have many problems that make them less fun and engaging than dungeoncrawls.
Hexcrawls lack specificity, surprise, size, meaningful choices, engagement, resource management, and homogeneity. The author lists these as the main differences between hexcrawls and dungeoncrawls, and explains why they make hexcrawls less satisfying and immersive for players and GMs.
Hexcrawls can be improved. The author proposes some guiding principles and rules to make hexcrawls more enjoyable and interesting, such as prioritizing gameplay over realism, making smaller and more unique hex maps, creating directional constraints and barriers, providing more information and hooks, and using morale and food as resource constraints.
He later followed that with his fix to the problem: “Okay I Fixed Hexcrawls Now”. In it he exposes his complete procedure for running them and making them. His concept of expeditions is very intriguing, but what I liked most is the way he describes each hex.
All hexes have a name and a defined terrain type.
All hexes have a description.
All hexes have something going on, there is no “empty” hexes.
There is more than one thing to do: the one you see on your first time, the one you see on the second time or when you spend time exploring and hidden stuff.
There’s lots of great ideas going on and if you, like me, love this kind of gameplay, check it out. I’m stealing “statblock” (which is like Alexander’s), just adding a space for “radiation” for my next publication, “The Colony”.
📆#ZineMonth
Zine month celebrates zines, which are small, self-published, and often DIY magazines. It takes place in February and highlights the zine makers' and players' creativity, diversity, and community spirit. Zine month also invites people to create, share, and support zines, and to explore the history and culture of ttrpg zines. 🎲
Most people do it on Kickstarter, the main crowdfunding platform on the internet and the site pushes the campaigns, helping them fund. Unfortunately, Kickstarter is not available for us in the Global South. Crowdfundr is a competitor platform that also promotes a ZineMonth and is available worldwide. That’s where I’m running my campaign! You must have received an email from there with the launch.
Early support is very important and if each of you supports The Colony, we would have more than 50% of the goal on the first few days! This is a huge accomplishment and would help the campaign get off the ground in a big way. We would just need that each of you got ONE more friend to support. We can do it!