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...

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 ...

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....

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 want to write about something I've noticed in games I've been a part of, both in person and online: sharing the spotlight. It's natural that some people are more comfortable than others taking center stage during games and leading the actions, coming up with plans or interacting with NPCs, but this doesn't mean that more introvert or shy players should be left in the sidelines and only speak when it's their turn in combat. This is even worse in online games, as not being able to see  the other people means a risk of a shy person getting talked over when they try to start talking, not on purpose obviously (that's a whole different problem), but because people cannot see whether someone is about to talk or not. That situation would most likely lead to those people not having fun and ultimately leaving the game, which in my opinion is the only way to "lose" as a group in a TTRPG. Some would say that it's the Referee's job to move the s...

This week's post is both a plea for you reading this and a reminder for myself. Lately, partly because of various personal reasons, I've been thinking less about TTRPGs, I was struggling to come up with ideas for adventures, to read some of the many rulebooks in my backlog, even the motivation to write in this blog seemed to be lacking. I was starting to get worried my passion for this hobby was fading away. I had so much on my mind at all times and TTRPGs, which recently occupied a good chunk of my thoughts, seemed to be relegated to a small corner. The truth is that I just needed to play. Because of those same reasons I mentioned before I didn't have time to set up any new game, either online or in person; the store I contacted to run in person games saids they'd start organizing that after the summer vacations, and online games with people from different timezones are at times a nightmare to schedule, so I had not run or played in games for almost a month. Then I fin...

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 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...

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...

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...

 Lately I've gotten back to an old project of mine, which I started about 10/15 years ago (and stopped working on a few years later), which is writing a fantasy novel. Now that I've restarted it I've been trying a new system to organize my notes, especially about worldbuilding: instead of filling a bunch of notebooks of random ideas in the order they come out of my head (I've always been a fan of a more analogue approach to writing, it helps me focus better) I've been trying a method I found online, used by many authors, one of which is Ryan Holiday, who explains it in this video : before starting to write even the first chapter, take a bunch of index cards and write down your ideas, putting a header or topic in the top right, so you can store them and, when the time comes to actually start writing, you can just pick up the notes you prepared and use those. Why do I bring this up in my TTRPG blog? Because this system could very easily be used for many TTRPG-related ...

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...

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...

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 ...

    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...

Hello everyone, and welcome back to Delving Wolf! In this week's post I want to talk about settings in TTRPG, specifically in a fantasy one (as that's the genre I'm most familiar with). Even within the fantasy genre, the importance of a setting varies between games: some are defined by their official setting, others are more malleable and can be played either in a published setting or in a homebrew one; D&D 5e is an example of this. There are many official settings for 5e, from Forgotten Realms, to Eberron (my personal favorite), to Greyhawk (with the new 2024 rules), to Dragonlance, to some more niche ones like Theros and the other Magic the Gathering-inspired settings; if we take previous editions in consideration, we can add many more like Mystara or Dark Sun. While older settings have their rules, cities, regions, deities and habits clearly defined, often in multiple books or magazines (sometimes even with too much detail: do we really need to know the taste of Drow...

 Hello everyone, and welcome back to Delving Wolf! In today's blog post I figured I'd talk a bit about the reasons that led me to approach the OSR community, and what changes it has sparked in my life. When I actively entered the world of TTRPGs I only knew about 5e, not unlike most people just entering the hobby; I was only vaguely aware that there were previous editions of D&D (and why should I have cared? They were old, the newest one had to be the best anyway) and I even remember the first time I heard  about Pathfinder I told my friend I played with at the time "Did you know there's another TTRPG?" or something similar. Yeah, I know. But Pathfinder itself never caught my attention, because at the time I knew it as "D&D with more math", so that newfound knowledge remained a seed for some time. Then, a year or so later, that seed sprouted, and I started exploring the new (to me) and vast world of TTRPGs besides D&D 5e: I spent so much time...