Spider Queen

I'm shifting campaign soon. My current campaign, Wave Rats, a sort of high-seas Into the Odd (punny name based on Maze Rats, originally an ItO hack), was stressing me out. I think I've figured out why, and what I'm doing about it - but also how I can plan sessions with this structure less stressfully in the future. Wave Rats was supposed to be a sort of Caribbean West Marches - you'd pick a destination, sail there (with all the potential complications that raises) and do the thing you'd elected to do. Brilliant thinking, thought I, self-aggrandisingly: Sailing simplifies the hexcrawly travel bit of West Marches play (again, my players aren't the hardcore types that love tracking their iron rations by the half-pound, for which I am grateful). Further, and most importantly, islands are lovely discrete adventure sites. By zooming out a little, each island basically acts as a dungeon, with one dungeon turn equalling about 8 hours for travel by foot plus actions. Thi

I've been prepping for a hexcrawl - well, a glorified hex flower really - to run in the Black Hack 2e. More on that in a minute. This post is going to be a collection of thoughts cashing out how I'm actually going about creating cities, villages, bandit encampments - the whole settlement spectrum. A note on the coolness of the Black Hack, because I don't have enough for a whole post yet: David Black has a very cool vision. It's clearly influenced by B/X D&D and Warhammer, but there are subtler notes in there as well, like the old Dragon Warriors books.  I'm also a fan of things like the Void, referenced in the creation of daemons and the random, twisted Void spawn. If you hadn't guessed, the Void is basically Warhammer's Chaos, complete with chaos daemons and chaos spawn. It's going to be capital-C Chaos in my game, the ubiquitous sword and sorcery kind, with some beastmen cribbed from Warhammer. Last cool thing before this turns into a post of its o

This blog is still ostensibly focused, at least in part, on OSR play. So, while I get on with writing my Black Hack campaign setting, and until I can blog about that, here's a point of comparison between the new school and the old school: You pretty much need at least one healer (meaning: Cleric) in old school Dungeons and Dragons. You don't need such a thing in fifth edition Dungeons and Dragons. Is this noteworthy? Well, it says a lot about the specific mechanics of the games in question, but also more broadly about their expected playstyle. Let's start with specifics, briefly. In 5e, there exists a concept called the "short rest". Basically, this amounts to a breather, taking one hour, in which a character can roll as many of their Hit Dice as they want, and recharge that many Hp, up to their maximum. Those hit dice are then expended, to be recharged with future "long rests" of 6 hours (4 for elves, for reasons). So, for those who've played Into t