Author: Shane

Where are the billions of elven babies?

ShaneLeave a comment

First, lets get this out of the way: it’s all made up and the points don’t matter, so who gives a heck.

But that aside, given that:

  • Elves can live “well over 700 years” (PHB 5e 2014)
  • Human-elf progeny are possible so they do get down like that

Why aren’t there billions of elves? That’s a question being asked over on monsters and manuals.

If you live for a very long time, or indeed forever, you can make an awful lot of babies. Not only would it mean overpopulation. It would also cause severe social problems […]

But maybe this is too just much of a human biased thought. It’s possible that they just don’t like kids. No need to. Many of us have an inbuilt instinct to care for children – our own or others – because we know that’s the only way the species will carry on. That’s not really the case for elves though. They just need to keep existing rather than existing vicariously from children.

I bet that instinct only kicks in for elves in the last decades of their life. I’m imagining it like a Vulcan pon farr thing. Maybe there’s a new bad guy idea in there: really old elf who couldn’t get laid in time so has turned into a BBEG. Or a journey where the adventurers have to find him a partner before he explodes, so to speak.

Something like that.

I also quite liked a suggestion from the blog posts comments:

Elves are chiefly homosexual, and the number who are interested in the opposite sex is very small, or they only do it out of obligation solely for procreation.

scrap’s cool physical art

ShaneLeave a comment

You get to see a tonne of scrap princess’ art in books like Deep Carbon Observatory, but checkout their physical art too.

They have a bunch of archetypal TTRPG creatures.

An axebeak, by scrap princess.

But also some very cool made up (literal) trash creatures. I think this guy is a scrunger.

By scrap princess.

I get frustrated at myself sometimes when I think “I wish I had time to do that” but I have plenty of time. I also have plenty of means. I have a 3d printer – a good one – and all the tools found in the Hackspace. And yet…

Not to get too introspective, but I think the issue might be that I get frustrated when I make something that isn’t good. Getting through the ‘practice makes perfect’ phase is very itchy for me.

Thoughts for low prep, impromtu games

ShaneLeave a comment

I read a blog post recently, which I’ll have to try and dig out from my NetNewsWire again. Though, it wasn’t entirely about what I was excited about.

The article was talking about how some modes of TTRPGs are underserved, compared to sword and sorcery. They listed a few other thoughts, but the part I cared most about was the self-directed nature of some adventures that the players could go on.

Returning ‘gold as experience’, adventurers would mostly go plundering without too much concern about impact on a story. It tightens the normal adventure loop up to just Find Job -> Complete Job -> Loot -> Spend Loot.

The article talked about this kind of gameplay having a high casualty rate for characters. That’s much less of an issue because their emotional ties to world aren’t that great: the intent of the game is to fight things and take their stuff. A number of people in my group like making new character concept, so they probably wouldn’t mind some fast-levelling-fast-dying. They’d enjoy the opportunity to go through character creation again.

An issue I keep having as a DM is that I pick up ‘one shot’ slots in my group rotation and when the game inevitably runs over a single session, everyone really wants to get back into the regular campaign (including me!), so my stories never really get finished.

This world wouldn’t worry to much about that though. Since it’s probably just one Long Rest in length, it will most likely only last one session. There’s no real story to round off nicely and no need to set up a cliffhanger or tension for the next time we play. The intent would be to stick to that tight loop, completing it one evening.

There would be very little need to remember what happened last session, which could have been days or months ago. All the history that needs to be kept is the party’s inventory and the state of the base. Stuff that’s already kept on the character sheet anyway.

On the other side of that coin, preparation will only take a few moments too. An available battle map makes up the environment and there are a few encounter builders around to make a fun battle.

Game play flow chart

ShaneLeave a comment

This comes from the OSR subreddit (via QuestingBeast’s newsletter) and I think it’s a great idea for adventure writing.

The original author was considering this for a table of contents, which I think would be a misstep. It is a really nice, evocative piece of work though.

From u/Raphael_Sadowski on Reddit.

Spooky vibes?

ShaneLeave a comment

I was thinking earlier today that I haven’t posted here in a while.

I also have been thinking that I should worry less about publishing finished ideas, as I frequently tail off before that point. Then, the idea goes, forgotten, forever.

So why not plant that seed here? It will go unnurtured but at least it can get a couple roots down, to let it weather the storm of amnesty that inevitably comes.

Also so, I am an old fashion into a train journey escaping a long week, so here’s just a fucking photo of the blog post.

(I have at least checked that OCR can parse something out of it, for you screenreading devotees.)

Let me know on mastodon if you have any other recommendations for spooky metafiction.