Blogging back for March, and thoughts on April and beyond

Sorry for not being more active, real life takes its toll once again.

I haven't really had any time to read around the blogosphere or to get anything written, but here's a whistle stop tour of the (active) blogs that sent me hits in March, as a thankyou!

of Dice and Dragons, of course, has been keeping the RPG Blog Carnival rolling - please go show your support if you can, there are still some slots available to sign up to host in 2023 I believe!

Seed of Worlds has several very readable recent posts, and many better and more frequent blog link lists than I do (or can)

Hobgoblinry showcases some Oathmark Orcs and some Mordheim Skaven and terrain

Sea Of Stars has not only been hosting the March carnival but is also embarking on an A-Z blogging challenge for April (good luck!)

DIY & Dragons has a 2022 in review (not just gaming) in a smorgasbord of interesting things

and Shuttered Room has been cataloguing creatures, all the way to Z! (more talent and tenacity than I)

I'm planning on getting back on this horse every month, as part of my bid to be a more sociable blogger, and trying to participate in the Carnival and just see what great stuff is going on.

Dungeon23 has burned me out but I'll hopefully be back on that as well ... I have a whole shelf of stuff I could review ... comments welcome on anything you'd particularly like to see more of!

Seedy Sci Fi / Cyberpunk bar generator

As I'm currently enjoying running Mothership as much as I used to enjoy running Stars Without Number, and this month's RPG Blog Carnival theme is "Taverns, Bars, and places to meet", I thought why not combine my old love of one-roll generators and my new love of spark tables into a bar generator for your favourite SF TTRPG?

Image credit: Pazuah on DeviantArt

So grab a fistful of polyhedrals and let's see where the party ends up:

This place is:

d10 tens	d10 units
a backstreet or spaceport hotel bar	filled with noisy arcade machines
a streetside kiosk in a shipping container	selling local moonshine
a laser-lit all-night club	rumoured to have a secret back room
a trendy wine bar in a respectable 'hood	tended by an AI/robot/alien
a high class cocktail lounge	with live music playing
a trucker / hauler / biker bar	hosting an open mic contest
a pop-up bar in someone's hab block	allegedly run by the mob
a snug in the back of an ethnic restaurant	with the best bartender in town
rooms in a church, mission, or similar	with plenty of under-the-counter goods
a motel bar in the middle of nowhere	with a priceless bottle under glass

Current patrons (reroll each day / as needed):

Quick and dirty slap chop tryout

I've been putting off painting my minis for a while now, mainly because I worry that the output doesn't justify the time invested.

So today I've decided to treat my as-yet-unpainted Blood Bowl minis as "just board game minis" and give them a super quick and dirty 3 colour slap chop paint job. Skin, cloth, armour. Let's just get stuff done - starting is the important thing, after all. If only I still had the 90s one with the polystyrene board...

I usually use a rattle can zenithal base but I thought - especially as I live in a cold, damp, windy climate - that I'd give slap chop drybrushing a go. Honestly, apart from the colour schemes I chose I'm happy with the results (in context) and each of these minis took less than an hour tops.

Drybrush Threepwood

In retrospect, I think I should have stuck to my guns and gone with my gut blue armour for the Ork (Deff Skulls til I die) and maybe a less clashy undersuit for the Human, like grey?

However, for the time invested - and the Just Getting Stuff Done factor - I'm happy. This is my first time working with SpeedPaints and they seem to be just fine. Poor pallette hygiene suggests they mix well, which is something to explore in future. Time to finish these (and the Infinity Nomads) and get through WarCry so I can buy more minis...

#dungeon23, Level 3, gets a little weird

Leaving level 2 behind us the party descends the slime waterfall to level 3, which I rolled "Song" and "Edge" on the spark table for so I'm running with it, at least for now!

Rolling a few sparks from the words I generated last time got me the following:

Denizens/monsters: Enchanting Diver & Cutting Siren

Places: Poetic Ravine & Edgy Theatre

Hazards: Melodic Blade & Steep Echoes

Treasures: Musical Sword & Sharp Melody

I'm filing half of these away for next week, I might roll some more and see what I can put together... Some of these spoke to me though, or at least seemed to fit together, so this is what I have come up with for this week:

It's been an interesting adventure, I'm already pondering the "Edgy Theatre" and how that might fit... thoughts and comments always welcome!

February Blog Carnival wrap-up, and #dungeon23 sparks for March

First things first, let's wrap up the February 2023 RPG Blog Carnival!

Alesmiter brings us procedures for speeding up wilderness travel - "Let's see how we can accelerate this if we stop asking the dice if an encounter has occurred and start asking them when the next encounter occurs."

Sea Of Stars brings us a procedure for generating ships coming into port - "Ships are arriving in Port Imperial all the time. So, for inspiration for such ships, we have another random table!"

Image credit: mcrassusart

Seed Of Worlds brings us procedures for generating encounters by rolling overloaded dice on unlockable encounter tables - "So together we get the below - a flat chance of it being the type of encounter from the d6 and the probability curve of it being whatever is out there wandering about."

RPG Wandering brings us hexflower-powered procedures for tracking any kind of progress - "The basic idea of a hexflower is a random table with a memory. The next encounter/location/treasure rolled depends on where you currently are on the grid. This appeals to me as a way to track the PCs progress on all sorts of long-term projects, from inventing magic items, to tracking down an old ruin in the wilderness, to investigating some long-forgotten lore."

I wrote up a review of Skycrawl, an indie setting with a whole load of interesting procedures, and have started working on a spark-table-of-spark-tables for procedurally generating dungeons - more on this below!