Delving Wolf

Last Sunday I had a Duet D&D session with my wife, and it led me to think about something related to DMing (GMing, Refereeing) that many of us will take for granted, but it bears repeating for those that don't: games are not sealed compartments, and what you learn in a game can and will make it easier for you to run better games in any system . Let's start with a bit of context: this is a D&D 5e campaign that started over a year ago with me as the DM and my wife and a friend of mine as the players (plus one sidekick and a DMPC to make it a party of 4) set in Eberron, my favorite "official" D&D setting. Sadly, after just a few sessions the campaign ran into an abrupt stop because of...life happening, and it was put on indefinite hold. Recently I found myself wanting to get a regular weekly TTRPG night with my wife, including solo and GMless games...and it felt like the best opportunity to bring this back as a Duet game. We are 3 sessions in at the moment, a...

This week's post is part 3 of the mini series about my new TTRPG design ideas inspired by the Mork Borg universe (see part 1  and part 2 ). My third and (for now) last idea is not a game system, but rather a supplement: the working title for now is Mork Wars . Inspired by  Grinding the MMORKG , a Cy_Borg supplement I recently found that aims to mash together Mork Borg and Cy_Borg (including a guide on how to convert characters between the two systems), this supplement aims to do something similar, but in a bigger scope: allowing a Cy_Borg campaign to include one-shots of any other Borg-inspired game while still being in the same campaign. Admittedly, as of right now I'm still waiting for my copy of Cy_Borg, which will arrive on my birthday (December 6th, almost there!) and only then I will define better this idea and properly write it down, but for now the gist is: instead Cy there is a VR game that is attracting a lot of attention lately, where you pay some credits to play as...

This post is a follow-up to the one I wrote last week  about my new TTRPG design idea inspired by Mork Borg, Bronze Borg. This time I'm going to write about the second idea I came up with recently, with the same purpose as the first one: to keep myself accountable and make sure I continue working on this. This second project is called (for now) Steam Borg  and, as the name suggests, it's a steampunk version of Mork Borg. Steampunk has always been a genre that fascinated me (although I've not ready many books about it, I should correct this! If you have suggestions, please send them my way) and it's what got me interested in the Eberron setting in D&D in the first place, before discovering that it's not actually a steampunk setting; it's still my favorite "official" D&D setting, though. My ideas for Steam Borg are all still works in progress, but so far my idea is a world where steam research has brought a lot of progress, but ended up ruining t...

As someone who enjoys running games and is interested by the OSR, it was only a matter of time before I got the idea of creating my own system. Let's face it, the DIY nature of the old-school games makes game design the natural follow-up. This didn't start now, for a while I've been writing down what elements of the different games I liked the most, with the vague idea of someday putting them together to make my personal heartbreaker, and I'm sure I'm not alone in this. But then Mork Borg happened. Or rather Pirate Borg, to be precise. I've been aware of the Borg games for a while, but never pulled the trigger because the aesthetics, while cool, seemed a bit..."much" to me; I'm not too much of a fan of grimdark and excessively violent imagery. But I was interested. When I finally got the Pirate Borg book I was instantly hooked, as I mentioned in my character creation post ; and the process was so quick, so easy and yet so evocative that I immediate...

The following is part 1 of my solo Pirate Borg campaign. It focuses mainly around the character I created in this post , which was so interesting to me that it prompted me to set up a whole solo campaign . Let's dive right in! Samuel Robert Thomas screamed as he kicked a seashell into the sea. After ten years, ten long and painfully obedient years serving in the Royal Navy, all he had to show was a dirty uniform and a fishing rod, which had been given to him as a favor by Captain Ellis. To give you a chance to survive , he said. How the hell was he supposed to survive alone on a desert island? And even if by some miracle he managed to get back to civilization, he was also a wanted man with a bounty on his head! Sure, it wasn't a big one, but still! And, last but not least, they shaved his head! Ok, maybe it was the least important thing among those listed, but it still bothered him; he'd never forget the faces of those he considered his comrades in arms laughing while two m...

This week I'm going to create a faction for my future Silksong-inspired Duet campaign, which was the subject of this post  and for which I created a Realm in last week's post . Just like I did for the Realm, I'm going to use Cairn 2e's Warden's Guide procedure  to do so. Let's begin!   1. First of all, let's roll 2d20 to establish the  FACTION TYPES : -  Type : 15, Revolutionaries; -  Agent : 10, Laborer. We have a working class faction already, and the two results work well together. Nice! 2. Next we roll 2d20 again for the  FACTION TRAITS : -  Trait 1 : 12, Keen; -  Trait 2 : 5, Corrupt. Ok, so they're very passionate about their cause, but corruption poisons their ranks. A story as old as time. 3. Now we roll for the  FACTION ADVANTAGES . First we roll 1d20 to establish the number of Advantages this faction has between 1 and 4: 1, so it has 1 Advantage; now let's roll 1d20 again to discover which one it is: 16, Resources. Since ...