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Recently I watched a video about all of Brennan Lee Mulligan's house rules for Critical Role Campaign 4. Brennan Lee Mulligan is taking a West-march like approach. Already some old school heads are curious. I was immediately interested when Brennan said "I am employing a very different strategy with the big bad to honor the things I admire the most about this table which is I don't know who the PCs will determine to be their big bad.". Mr Trad went up on stage and said prep situations not plots to thousands.  Brennan Lee Mulligan Death and Dying Actions Already the campaign is different from most with a few major house rules. First there are death actions. if you are rolling death saves, you can get a different action based on if you got a success or failure and how many success and fails you have. (For example if you succeed a death save you can give another player heroic inspiration) Now, for an OSR scenario, this isn't viable. But I would twist it into if you d...

As part of Prismatic Wasteland's  Appendicitis N blogwagon , I got to thinking about my appendix N and how one implementation worked really really well. So here's a few pointers on how I try to bring in an inspiration.  1. Define how important the media is to the tone and vibe of the game.  When you create your campaign, having some inspirational media can really help. When you add a piece of media to your touchstones, how important is it? Do you want to have it only be a small part of the vibe or is it a big part of the game? One touchstone I used for a campaign was Vampire Survivors, an action roguelike bullet hell. I didn't want to simulate the themes, I wanted to emulate the tone of progression where each advancement adds a new dimension to your gameplay. Sure, the numbers could become massive but instead they change how damage is delivered. This is done by adding more projectiles, allowing some weapons to pass through enemies or even add elemental effects. That's w...

I was rewatching some old Mr Beast videos and I noticed a segment where he got a couple contestants to a room. The floor was covered in the stickiest glue in the world and the only thing the contestants were told was "This is the stickiest floor in the world! Now get across it.". This really got me thinking about traps in my game and making them more puzzle like. The glue floor has a number of traits that make it a good puzzle. First off it has multiple approaches to interact with it. What you see in the video is contestants throwing their shoes and socks onto the floor as platforms and jumping the remaining distance. You could power through it, push someone onto it or wash the glue away. That is a lot of different approaches to this trap and that's before magic enters the situation.   Before I continue, I understand that Mr Beast is a controversial figure. I am not sure what the controversy is about and I don't follow the slop. I don't interact with any Beast med...

For the longest time, I ran 1.5 hour campaigns. I would run them for my local youth club. There were rules set by the organizers that helped mold my prep. First, I had an 1.5 hour time slot total. That includes set-up, cleaning up after wards and gaming, so my sessions happened fast. Secondly, I only have around 4-5 sessions. I did largely oneshots for the first 2 years and the last one I did an actual campaign. My prep was guided by these rules and still help me today. Here is my prep process for that last 4 session campaign.  First off, rule system. 5e isn't big in my area. Gamestop ceased all operations in Ireland and they had the most tabletop stuff (dice and 5e mainly). I ended up creating a rough 2d6 system loosely based off of Kal Arath. At this point I would assemble all the random tables and spark tables I need. Secondly, I would prep the starting 3 missions. I like sandboxes and I found them easy to run as my players were part of a community. I prepped the mission by gett...