Delving Wolf

After creating a realm , a faction and a forest for my future Silksong-inspired duet campaign (I talked about how the idea came to be  here ) it is now time to create a dungeon that will be part of said forest.To do this I will once again use the procedure  included in Cairn 2e's Warden's Guide. Let's begin! We already know our dungeon will be an Abandoned Manor part of the Shrouded Shelter forest, and that somewhere in it is the place where "The Veil between worlds is thin", where the Mirror can be activated (with all its consequences). First of all, let's make a few rolls to learn more about this place! 1. Let's first roll for the  HISTORY  of the Manor: - Original Use , d20: 12, Impenetrable vault - Built by , d20: 2, A fanatical cult This lines up with my original idea: This cult (whoever they are) built the Manor to secure the Veil; the Wizard we talked about during the forest creation might be the leader of the cult, or maybe its main researcher (a...

It's time to return to the forest I created using Cairn 2e's Warden's Guide generator a few weeks ago  and continue to expand it, weaving the various results together to make it interesting to play in. Let's continue where we left off. In area 9 ( the hut with legs which is also a thieves' camp ) there's a bandit hideout on top of a platform elevated from the ground by four wooden poles and they always have a lookout, so a direct approach has very little chances of success. Attentive characters, though, will notice that a few of the trees around the hut protrude their branches very close to it, giving them another option. The bandit leader,  Neria  (she/her), is usually in the hut, together with 3/4 more bandits. Let's flesh her out a bit using  Cairn 2e's NPC tables , where I already got her name: - Name , d20: 17, Neria - Quirk , d20: 2, Bald - Background , d20: 14, Mystic - Goal , d20: 18, Survival - Virtue , d20: 5, Disciplined - Vice , d20: 2...

It's time to return to the forest I created using Cairn 2e's Warden's Guide generator a few weeks ago  and continue to expand it, weaving the various results together to make it interesting to play in. Let's continue where we left off.   In area 2 ( the toxic spores area with watchful dead ), deep within a field of rotten mushrooms is hidden a Mirror, a magical artifact that allows communication with deceased people...at a cost: whoever uses it becomes the new guardian of the Mirror (a wight). Stepping on the mushrooms requires a successful save (STR in Cairn, CON in D&D and the like) to prevent being poisoned for 24 hours; submerging oneself in running water cures the poison [A river should be added in some other part of the forest, to offer a way to get rid of the poison]. The wight will attack anyone that touches the Mirror which, to be used, has to be in a place where "the Veil between worlds is thin" (area 3). The Elves know all this (it's an El...

It's time to return to the forest I created using Cairn 2e's Warden's Guide generator 3 weeks ago  and continue to expand it, weaving the various results together to make it interesting to play in. Let's continue where we left off. Area 4 (the hidden village popular with smugglers)  is the den of a weretiger, Scratch, who is the "leader" of a group of smugglers. He's the only one permanently living there, but Scratch's Den  is known amongst smugglers even from far away for being a neutral site for exchanges, where things will go well (because no one in their right mind would try to cheat while in the Den, or they'd immediately pay with their life). Only criminals know about the Den. The bandits are not welcome here (they're too loud and "rude" for Scratch). He doesn't know about the Elves. Hidden in area 5  (the rotting farmhouse with the bound creature) , always guarded by 3 bandits, is a  Pegasus , chained to the floor and with ...

It's been a while, but this week I'm returning to Cairn 2e's Warden's Guide, specifically to its  forest generator , to create a a forest to use in the Silksong-inspired 5e Duet campaign I'm preparing for my wife (I'll actually start it, eventually! But for now I'm alternating various different games already). 1. We start by rolling for the  FOREST DESCRIPTION , 2d20: 4,  Dying  and 19,  Sunlit ; 2. Next we need to establish the  SPIRIT OF THE FOREST , 2d20 again: -  Virtue : 5, Cultivating ; -  Vice : 16,  Prideful; 3. Now we need to find out the  FOREST AGENDA , rolling, you guessed it, 2d20: - Goal : 2,  Awakening ; -  Obstacle : 19,  Vulnerability ; 4. The next step is to roll a few d6s on a sheet of paper to generate the  POINTS OF INTEREST (POIs)  of the forest, numbering them and assigning a type to each of them based on the number rolled (each type then has 2 d20 tables to characterize them). Let's see wh...

A few weeks ago I wrote a post detailing how I generated a Treasure Map for the Pirate Borg Duet campaign I run for my wife. Three weeks ago I continued that by describing how I created the island that map leads to and the pirate captain that's shipwrecked on it. Now it's time to bring the special coin that'll be the main thing to find in the treasure (which will then lead to more adventures) to life. To do that, I'll use the Coin generator included in Down Among the Dead , the newest Pirate Borg book to come to life.     1. First of all, we roll for the  MATERIAL , 2d6: 7,  Silver  (worth 1s); 2. We then roll for the  ORIGIN  of this coin, 2d6: 3, Deep One ; 3. Next we find out the  CONDITION  of the coin, d6: 6,  Mint ; 4. Now we roll for its  VALUE , d6: 4,  Normal ; 5. This is where we roll for the  TWIST , d20, but in this case I've already picked 4,  Treasure Map , for our purpose; this prompts another roll to...

A few weeks ago I wrote a post detailing how I generated a Treasure Map for the Pirate Borg Duet campaign I run for my wife; this week I continue that by reporting how I generated the island that map leads to and the captain of the other crew that is already there, with the help of the Uncharted Islands and Pirate generators in the Pirate Borg rulebook.  1.  For the  ISLAND , we rolled: -  Size , d6: 1, Tiny ; -  Terrain , 2d6: 6, Mostly flat ; -  Vegetation , 2d6: 7, Fertile grasslands; -  Prominent natural feature , 2d6: 4,  Numerous sea stacks ; -  Notable animal inhabitants , 2d6: 8,  Pigs and boars (large) ; -  Inhabitants , 2d6: 10,  Farming settlers ; -  Best place in the island to hide treasure? , 2d6: 10,  A sink hole ; -  Anything here worth a fortune? , 2d6: 5,  Buried treasure...somewhere  [Well, duh! But appropriate]; -  Natural Hazards , 2d6: 6,  Coral reefs ; -  Current co...

In my Duet Pirate Borg game my wife's character recently found a treasure map, so I headed to the Pirate Borg rulebook, specifically to the Treasure Map generator, to work on it. 1. Let's start with the TYPE OF MAP  (d4): 3, Scavenger Hunt . Ok, so it'll be a multi-part hunt; I like it; 2. Next we roll for the MATERIAL  the map is made of (d12): 8, Whittled into a bone or skull . This sounds very cool, but the PC already has the map, so it's better to keep it for the second piece of this scavenger hunt; for the starting map I'll go with 1, Parchment; 3. Now we need to establish the GEOGRAPHY  of where our treasure is hidden (d8): 8, Inland . A land adventure, nice; 4. I'm not sure I'll actually use this part, but it was in the process, so I rolled it for fun: THE INVISIBLE INK IS REVEALED  (d10): 5, If soaked in alcohol . Good to know; 5. It's time to roll for the COMPLICATION  that will spice things up (d8): 8, There is so much treas...

I recently started a Duet Pirate Borg campaign for my wife (it started as a one-shot, but then we decided to continue it), and during the Christmas holidays we found ourselves in a hotel for a few days, and I wanted to have a session while we were there. We were flying there, so we couldn't bring many things with us: a minimalist approach was needed. Once we were there, we found out we didn't even have a table in the room, so we adapted to play on the bed. My setup was just a set of dice, a printed character sheet + rules reference sheet, a pencil and eraser, and the Pirate Borg rulebook PDF on my phone (I was running the Curse of Skeleton Point sandbox from that book). That's it. Of course this setup would not necessarily work for  any  TTRPG, but Pirate Borg (or any of the Borg games, for that matter) work wonderfully in this scenario: the GM might roll dice for encounters or other things during the exploration or dungeon crawling phases, but not in combat, when it's ...

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 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 ...

Lately my wife has been obsessed, like millions around the world, with Hollow Knight: Silksong. It's a beautiful game, and I look forward to playing it when I eventually finish Hollow Knight first (if I find the time for it!). A couple of weeks ago she found on Instagram  this 5e subclass  inspired by that game, and that immediately sparked an idea in my mind: a Duet campaign where she would get to play a character with that subclass, to merge two of her favorite hobbies...and mine too, which doesn't hurt. The game system will need to be 5e, obviously, and my idea is to not even try to follow the plot of the game of anything like that, it would take too much tweaking; instead, I'm going to create a world which her character would be able to explore freely, and make its own story. It's still a work in progress, but by brainstorming with her so far I've come up with a Monastery, the home of the "Weavers", who are the ones who managed to perfect the art of tu...

This week's post will be a trip down  memory lane for me. Let's go back to November 2021. The world was doing its best to come out of the pandemic which had dramatically changed the way we see and value things for many of us. Many people approached the world of TTRPGs  during  the lockdown, as a way to escape the boredom and keep our sanity, but I didn't; instead, I started  after  I was finally able to go back to work. As I explained in my first entry in this blog , I had started watching D&D related shows but had not pull the trigger yet. But my birthday was approaching, I had no ideas on what to ask as a gift, and I found the D&D 5e Essential Kit, which promised to be a good entry point, for quite cheap on Amazon, so...why not give it a try? I'd like to point out that at that point I had no one to play with; I did start with a friend who was interested in trying it out as a player with me DMing, but I asked him only  after  ordering my gift....

This week I want to talk about a way of playing TTRPGs that I learned to appreciate recently: duet games. Technically it's also how I started playing role-playing games. When I started it was just me and a friend, we didn't have anyone else and knew almost nothing about the hobby (by then I had only watched a bit of VLDL's Adventures in Azerim campaign), so we made a character each (mine being a DMPC, the Dwarf Fighter Zodd Khazad), added a sidekick and started the Icespire Peak campaign that way, as I briefly mentioned  in my first ever blog post . But we immediately started looking for another player, because  obviously that wasn't the way games are meant to be played . That's what we thought.   And in a way that is  true, that's how the hobby started, with massive campaigns with many players, even more than the standard 4 players + DM that is famous now. But that's not the only way to play. Solo games are a thing, a beautiful thing that I'm discoveri...