Delving Wolf

A while ago (almost a year, time flies!) I wrote a post asking whether we should bring back Hit Locations, including an example of a Dragon modified for this idea, the "final boss" of the Icespire Peak campaign I was running online, using Owlbear Rodeo as VTT. I can finally  announce that I've been able to use that stat block, as I've finally managed to finish that campaign! So I can now return to you with my impressions of how the fight went and whether I find it actually usable in play. Let's get to it! First things first, before getting to this fight I added another bit to this stat block, after the Legendary Resistances and Actions, Lair Actions and Hit Locations: borrowing the idea from Nimble 5e, I added a Last Stand to the Dragon, something that would trigger once it reached 0 HP, giving it 40 more HP and adding a bit more damage to its attacks. Now let's get to the fight itself: although it covered most of the last session (after quite a bit of plann...

When I started this blogging endeavor I was hoping I'd keep it up as much as possible, but knowing myself I was worried I'd stop after a while like it happens way too often with hobbies or things I get into...but here we are. On January 5th 2025 I published my very first post , an introduction, and since then I published 52 posts, one per week, every Sunday at 16.00 CET (the one you're reading right now is number 53). I thought I'd take this chance to do a little recap of what happened during this year (TTRPG-wise) and what my plans are for 2026, both for this blog and for TTRPGs in general. During this 2025 I did not manage, like I hoped, to find a new IRL group to play TTRPGs, and many things have happened (both good and...less good) preventing me from dedicating the time I'd have hoped to this hobby, be it playing, GMing or writing adventures or such. With that said, 2025 is also the year I started playing solo TTRPGs , I published my very first small adventure  ...

A bit of context before getting into the meat of it: as I mentioned in other posts, I'm in the middle of running an online campaign of Dragon of Icespire Peak (D&D 5e's Essential Kit campaign) for a few friends, and eventually they'll end up fighting the titular dragon, and I want to make it a more interesting encounter than how it is presented, because as it is in the book it is...underwhelming. So I started planning what to add: legendary resistances and actions, lair actions, some minions, making it fly and change the environment (it's a white dragon, so ice patches for players to slip on or to use as cover), but what else could I add? That's when I went to my library for ideas and, while flipping my copy of  Fantastic Medieval Campaigns  by Marcia B., a faithful rewrite of the 1974 Dungeons & Dragons rules which includes a few snippets from the supplements in its appendices, I stumbled upon Hit Locations, originally published in Supplement II: Blackmoor....

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...

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 is my entry into the Onegeon Jam , which was created by Cats Have No Lord  after he published his Onegeon Manifesto  on his website. As soon as I saw the post on Bluesky, I knew I had to participate. I've been drafting ideas for adventures and even a whole setting lately, but I've not posted anything finished in quite a while. This is the perfect chance to change that. In short, the idea is to write a single room of a dungeon that is interesting enough to make the reader want to slot it into a dungeon they're running. Simple and effective.  In the Manifesto, when it came to possibilities of what to put in the room, one of the options is "a weird little freak living there", and that immediately caught my attention. I thought about it a little to flesh it out (but not too much, I want it to be generic enough that it can fit into any world) and came up with this: As soon as a PC touches the door to this room, it slowly opens itself, only darkness...

Sometimes inspiration strikes you when you least expect it. The idea for this week's post comes from a walk I was taking with my wife a few days ago; we were talking about a 5e one-shot someone in a Discord server we're both in proposed recently, set underwater and where every player would be of the Locathah race. Now, for those unexperienced with D&D 5e, Locathahs came back as a playable race after 2e (something I just discovered while researching for this post) for a charity bundle, but they are considered - as far as I know - a joke race because of one specific trait:  Limited Amphibiousness. You can breathe air and water, but you need to be submerged at least once every 4 hours to avoid suffocating.  So, as my wife and I were discussing the choice of such a peculiar restriction, we were saying that outside of these specific circumstances (a fully underwater setting) Locathahs are almost unplayable, unless everyone in the party is committed to the bit and is ok with a ...

This week I'll go back to Cairn 2e after creating a PC for it a few weeks ago . This time I'll follow the procedure presented in Cairn 2e's Warden's Guide  to create a monster in just a few simple steps, strating by (you guessed it) rolling on some random tables, in the best OSR tradition.   Let's start with the Monster Appearance  table, which asks us to roll a d20 twice, once for  Physique  and once for  Feature : Physique : 5, Eyeless ; Feature : 20,  Wings. So it's some form of bat.   Next, we have the  Monster Traits  table, for  Quirk  and  Weakness : Quirk : 6, Draws symbols ;  Weakness : 12,  Music . Ok, I'm getting ideas. Maybe it's some kind of familiar, drawing symbols on preys for its master, but music distracts it, preventing it from following orders? Not sure yet. The third table we roll on is  Monster Attacks , for  Type  and  Critical Damage . Type : 8, Shoots ; Critical Damage...

A while ago I was watching  this video  about Sword World, the TTRPG that was created in Japan when TSR refused to let them publish Replays (basically their version of Session Reports) with their official names - specifically for the campaign that then became known as Record of Lodoss War, a fascinating story - but one thing that stood out to me of the system was the concept of Fellows, which is what this post is about. But what are Fellows? To learn more about them I found the unofficial English translation of the game (easily found on Reddit,  here ). I'll use that as a reference, but I'll modify it a bit to make it work with OSR games. In short, to quote the Rulebook: Fellows are characters who assist the PCs in their adventures. Fellows are available on social media and in fan magazines. Players select those they wish to take with them on their adventures and have them travel along. So they are basically NPC versions of PCs that people make available online, so t...

This week's post is directly inspired by  this post  from Prismatic Wasteland, one of the best TTRPG blogs I know. Go give it a read, it's worth it. In short, that post wonders why D&D (and most TTRPGs derived from it) have a "Common tongue" that everyone seems to know - even though in 1974's OD&D non-human NPCs only had a 20% chance of knowing Common, but let's not nitpick - and most non-human species have their own language, shared between all members, no matter how far in the world (or multiverse, in some cases) they are spread, when that was not usually the case in the real world's Middle Age, which D&D is obviously inspired by. It then gives 3 possible solutions for this discrepancy: Ignoring it altogether, to avoid adding complications to the game, but they don't like this solution and neither do I;  Gamifying it, making it so that PCs don't start with a list of known languages, but every time they encounter a new one an...

It's a common thing in OSR games (and also mentioned in multiple TSR rulebooks, if I'm not mistaken) to have churches in major towns always having a cleric/priest with the Raise Dead spell, ready to bring back to life adventurers that passed away while "working", for a price obviously. It helps to lower the lethality of old-school games and is also a chance to give story hooks, because if the party doesn't have the money to immediately get the resurrection, the church might ask them to complete a service for them in exchange (immediately or in the future, as in "When we'll need you, we'll call you"). But why not expand on this? The inspiration for this post comes from a comment on a Reddit post I ran into a while ago. Sadly I didn't save the post, but the idea is that in a world where all of that is true, why would the priests themselves not take more advantage of it? Think about it: the clerics are supposed to send part of their loot to thei...

This week's post is, in a couple ways, a follow-up of one I made a few weeks ago . First of all, a bit of backstory: the idea for this post first sprang during my honeymoon cruise, a little more than a week ago. We were in Barcellona, doing a guided tour to the Sagrada Familia, and the guide's English was...let's say less than perfect, but because it was a mixed Italian/English group I could still follow. At one point we get to one of the entrances and, in front of it, there are two turtles supporting columns: The guide says that the turtle in the direction of the coast is a water turtle, while the one in the direction of the mountains is a tortoise, or as the guide put it, an earth turtle; her accent, though, made it sound like she was saying "Air Turtle". Instant ispiration. My mind, as it often does, started thinking about what an Air Turtle would look like, where it would live, and other possible details, and as I was voicing some of these ideas to my wife she...

A few days ago I was watching this video about alignment languages and ways to make them more interesting ingame (and also how Gygax actually intended them when he created them). I found it interesting that these were never supposed to be actual languages, but rather a way to give other classes what Thieves got in Thieves' Cant; not a full-blown language, but a bunch of signs and gestures used to subtly convey a message. Therefore, lawful creatures would be able to make subtle signs that only other lawful creatures could decipher, but chaotic creatures would be able to spot those signs and become immediately aggressive. A little bit too convoluted for my tastes. The video author, though, has an interesting idea: maybe each organized religion and follower of a specific deity has their own "language", which they can use to recognize each other while in the wilderness. This is an interesting idea, and a cleric could start with such a knowledge and immediately become a more ...

This week's post will be about one of my favorite videogames, Xenoblade Chronicles, which I played years ago on the Nintendo new3DS (it's originally on the Wii, then also ported to the Switch). Initially, this was supposed to be exclusively about this game's method of giving XP for exploring (something that shares with other games, for example MMORPG à la Guild Wars 2), but while thinking about it I found a few more connections to TTRPGs in general - and OSR in particular. You see, that game features a big, massive world; I'm tempted to call it open world, but it is separated into a few areas (although they are so big this can almost be considered nitpicking), and one thing that incentivizes you to explore that world is that you are rewarded for doing so with XP. Sure, you also get XP for combat and for completing quests (more on that later), but the fact that you get something every time you go out of your way to explore little corners of the world you find landmarks a...

Thursday was my partner's birthday, and since for my birthday she DM'd a 1-on-1 D&D 5e session for me (her first time DMing, and it was amazing) with an adventure she created for the occasion, I decided to return the favor. First of all I had to come up with an idea, something that I knew she'd like - and it didn't take me long for the word CATS to pop up in my mind; it was going to be an adventure focused on cats...no, better, I'd make her play as a cat! What system to use, though?  Multiple options seemed suitable: something rules-light like FATE, Tricube Tales, or something already cat-focused like Armakitten and Be like a cat, which I would've had to learn...but as I was trying to decide, I realized that she's always played 5e so far and I am the one more interested in trying new systems, so doing something like that would be more of a gift to me than to her. Better to stick with 5e then; everyone always hacks it in a million different ways anyway...

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 ...

    Hello everyone, and welcome back to Delving Wolf! In this week's post I want to share some thoughts about inspiration and how to find it, specifically while talking about a setting for a TTRPG campaign, mostly focusing on fantasy but whose principles should be adaptable to any genre you want to play (as a sort of follow-up to last week's post ). I will be mostly focused on creating a setting, but some of my ideas should be applicable to describing pre-made settings too.   As you can see from the pictures I'm adding to this article, I can consider myself lucky enough to live in a place, Northwestern Italy, that, despite its many flaws, has basically everything when it comes to landscapes: you're in the middle of hills and able to reach, within a couple hours drive or less, both mountains and sea. Sometimes, during weekends, I like to go hiking with my partner in some of these places, and it's during one of these hikes that inspiration suddenly struck me: I could...