Delving Wolf

The idea for this week's post came to me while watching this video , which talks about the rule present in OD&D The Underworld and Wilderness Adventure Booklet and in AD&D 1e's Dungeon Master's Guide about time between sessions passing in the game world at the same rate as in the real world: if a week passes between sessions, a week passes in-game. As SupergeekMike says in the video, this system has become obiquitous in OSR games, with 1:1 timekeeping even turning into somewhat of a meme, while in more "modern" games like 5e timekeeping basically doesn't exist because downtime is more often than not non-existent, or if it exists it's usually done in-session, with something like "Ok, you spend 2 weeks in town to do this, let's continue from after that". Obviously I'm not saying that everyone does it, but it's the most common occurrence I usually see. But which system is better? Well, it depends. If your game is more open table...

This week I'm bringing you the recap of the second and third session of the GMless 5e game me and my partner play every now and then (we don't have a dedicated day at the moment). While the system we chose is 5e and we use Mythic as our GM emulator, I decided to sprinkle some old-school rules here and there to make the game more interesting without it getting too crunchy or cumbersome: for example, during the travel scenes I roll to see if there's a random encounter about 3 times per day, and when an encounter does happen, reaction rolls help us decide whether said encounter is going to end up in a combat or not (as you'll see below). Like the first part, this recap is written by Tancaliel, my partner, and does not include the dice rolls like I do in my solo sessions, but nonetheless it should not be difficult to catch the spots where rolls happened. Enjoy! Caezora and Einar meet with Father Paric to discuss the practical details of the mission. A teleportation network ...

The TTRPG space is full of amazing, creative people, this is not a secret. Many of them could be considered geniuses - although I'm not going to name anyone in particular as this is not my first day on the internet, you can think of whoever you deem worthy of such title - but in my opinion what creates the best results, be it games, modules, art, actual plays, whatever, is the collaboration . Collaboration is what leads to the best results, to the most original ones, because it's the output of multiple minds coming together and creating something a single brain, no matter how brilliant, will never be able to. Where am I getting with this? Here: Let's start from the beginning: on the 1st of January 2025 Idle Cartulary published The Zungeon Manifesto , rallying fellow TTRPG (and especially OSR) aficionados to stop listening to our inner demons telling us we weren't "good enough" to write content and to make a simple zine containing a dungeon - a zungeon, and en...

This week I'll bring you a recap of my first successful solo RPG adventure, unlike my first attempt .   This time I decided to use Labyrinth Lord as my system of choice, because it's currently the most likely ruleset I'd like to use in my own sandbox/open table game, if I ever get to have one - although my preference in this regard changes pretty frequently.   For the adventure, since I decided to keep using a single character following Black Streams: Solo Heroes 's rules, I chose the small dungeon included in that pdf, The Yellow Toad God's Well . It took me about three sessions of 1 to 2 hours each to complete it, mostly because I discovered I like to write down everything that happens almost as if it was a journaling game, as you're about to read, and I didn't want to rush it, I wanted to use this as a chance to relax and unwind.   I'll start by writing down character creation, and then proceed with the recap of the three sessions: good read!...

In this week's article, which will conclude the series regarding inspiration and setting for now, see the previous entries here , I want to talk about an idea I recently had to add to your campaign world to get your players more interested in your world. The idea came from a bit of this video , where it mentions a cartographer NPC, and the gears in my brain immediately started turning: what if you put a similar NPC in your campaign world? Maybe it's someone that would like to explore the world and make a map of it (or an atlas, to keep the theme from the video) but is unable to move on their own, due to old age or an injury, and asks the party to collect data about the various regions of the world. Therefore he'll ask the party, when they come back to visit him, to bring him descriptions of the various places they visit, so he can "live those places through their tales". At the table, this would translate in the players being able to, if they're interested, wr...

In  last week's post I talked about the ways I find inspiration when it comes to settings and descriptions in TTRPGs, and today I want to provide a practical example of this, using an idea I had last Sunday.   I went to visit Mont Blanc, which with its 4809 m stands as Italy's tallest (and Europe's second tallest) mountain for my and my partner's anniversary (even though we got up to 3466m), and as the cableway was bringing us up we went through the clouds, and as soon as we got above them I saw this:     Something instantly clicked in my mind.   Maybe not the most original idea in the world (it must have been done before, even though I'm not aware of it), but I immediately pictured a world with a few tall mountains, maybe distant from each other, so tall that people from the surface can't see them all, and on top of each there is a city. These cities would not be reachable from the ground just by climbing and would trade with each other using airships ...