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 ) I've started creating a dungeon (The Abandoned Manor) that will be part of said forest using the procedure  included in Cairn 2e's Warden's Guide. You can find part 1 here  and part 2 here . We expanded the first 4 rooms of the dungeon last time, so let's continue from there. 5.  LORE .  Room type : 11, Kitchen /  Clue : 6, Leavings 6.  LORE .  Room type : 4, Cistern /  Clue : 18, Temperature 7.  LORE .  Room type : 14, Shrine /  Clue : 5, Footprints 8.  TRAP .  Trap : 1, Ages /  Trigger : 4, Disturbing  5. This room used to be the manor's dining room, where the cult partook in rituals to try to connect with the deceased by having one of them consuming a large quantity of the mushrooms found in forest area 2. Some remains of mushrooms are still present only on o...

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 ) I've started creating a dungeon (The Abandoned Manor) that will be part of said forest using the procedure  included in Cairn 2e's Warden's Guide. You can find part 1 here . Let's continue! After rolling for the general characteristics of the dungeon and the factions inhabiting it, it's now time to roll for the actual dungeon rooms. 1. SPECIAL .  Special:  12, Pool / Feature : 9, Grows 2.  MONSTER .  Group : 18, Shape shifter /  Activity : 4, Fighting 3.  TRAP .  Trap : 10, Drops /  Trigger : 8, Interacting 4.  TRAP .  Trap : 14, Hypnotizes /  Trigger : 15, Speaking 5.  LORE .  Room type : 11, Kitchen /  Clue : 6, Leavings 6.  LORE .  Room type : 4, Cistern /  Clue : 18, Temperature 7.  LORE .  Room type : 14, Shrine /  Clue : 5, Footpri...

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...

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 ...

This week I'm going to create a Realm for my future Silksong-inspired Duet campaign, which was the subject of last week's post . To do so, I'm going to use Cairn 2e's Warden's Guide procedure , which seems very promising. Let's dive right in! First off, we are going to roll for the  PEOPLE  who live in this region, for which we have 2 tables,  Culture  and  Resources ; we roll 2d20 for each: -  Culture : Character : 3, Curious; Ambition : 10, Knowledge; -  Resources :  Abundance : 18, Water;  Scarcity : 2, Fuel. So the inhabitants of this region are interested in gathering knowledge, and the fuel could be wood...but I want forests in there; maybe it's a crime to recklessly cut trees, and gathering wood is strictly regulated, because the forests are sacred, or something. Next we go to the  MAPMAKING  phase: first we roll 1d6 to decide the number of landmarks present in the region: 3. I might add more later, but for now let's see wha...

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 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...

 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 ...

This week's post is about a new game! (at least for me) A few days ago me and my partner, while planning what to do next in our GMless 5e campaign Peace and Redemption (here's the links to the recaps of session 1 and sessions 2 & 3 ) we were talking about the fact that our characters had just reached the "wild" half of the continent, Utrad, and so far the only thing we knew about said continent was that it was big and populated by wandering tribes of various kinds of humanoids, and a couple of landmarks that came up when we first made the map, and that was it. We could've let the dice and the fate chart decide stuff on the spot during the sessions, but my partner espressed the wish to flesh the area a bit more a bit before diving into it, and that's when I had the idea. Recently I started planning (although I have not started it yet) an idea about playing a series of solo games where I would first create a world, then put some landmarks in it, then create...

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...