Hey 2024

New year. Not been blogging a lot lately, mostly working on a dungeon, I'll tell you about it.

Initially I had "The Fugilin Vaults" in my head for a name but that fits the lower levels more so than the above ground stuff, which is a Mansion. For the map I looked at the Versailles palace and did a more compact version of that. Having the exterior layout, I listed all the rooms I wanted to have, utilitary-like. Stuff like boudoirs, bedrooms, kitchen, stables, vineyard, etc. Once I knew how many rooms I needed, I drew main arteries of traffic throughout the palace, occasionally drawing squares or more fun shapes that would smooth out some edges and keep the Palace vibe. I cut these squares into smaller ones and finished with doors and stairways. Then I distributed the rooms willy-nilly to try and make it make some modicum of sense, giving each room a one-word simple name that reminds me what it is, and a number for the later keys. I've started working on the detailed key and it's flowing fairly easily and intuitively, the main issue is my lack of energy and motivation to do anything right now. I don't know if I want to subject my creative process to the whims of bipolar any longer. Maybe I don't have the choice, unsure. But in the mean time, I've decided to try and produce more stuff, to keep practicing. Train imagination muscles. Write more, perhaps.

I have encounter tables for each level, there are two above ground floors (ground/1F, and 1F/2F depending on whether you're speaking british english or american english. In French we say rez-de-chaussée for ground floor and 1er étage for 1st floor, but I still find calling the ground floor "1F" is easier for my brain, so I haven't decided which I'll use). Then there's a big two-pages spread basement mainly based on the bunker map from Amnesia: The Bunker with some changes here and there cause I wasn't super strict with this one. Further down are the first two levels I drew previously, which are more "classic" dungeoney (though they lack vanilla monsters, as I preferred focusing on horror-themed monsters from my Appendix N. Lots of Fear & Hunger and Silent Hill and other semi-derivative weird stuff). I don't write stats for monsters, no point. Maybe I'll tell you what rules I'm using at some point but they don't matter and I currently have no brainworms ratatouilling me to ramble about mechanics so I won't. This too shall pass. I have clear picture in my mind for who the inhabitants of the mansion were, or still are. I'm putting more adventurers in the dungeon too. There's humans and creatures, no monsters-that-could-just-be-people-but-aren't.

I'm giving characters little tables to roll on to quickly generate details, but the bulk of the work is on the player. You get a build, some flair or trait or gimmick, a name, gender, give me 30 or 100 words backgrounds, play the lil' guys like they're people. I wrote about it before, Weird Writer wrote about it the other day. C'm'on. It's not hard.

People like to start long-winded discussions about nothing in the tabletop RPG hobby cause they like to pretend stuff is hard when it really isn't and probably have not even tried the thing, it's just for the pleasure of talking about nothing. I don't get it but no kink-shaming. It just slowly sucks out any will I have to interact and engage with people on tRPGs. So I won't. I'mma do my moderatin', and share insights when prompted or when I think I have something to contribute, and thassit. If you want Deep Thoughts you can read blog posts. Or write some for a change. So that's one resolution for the New Year.

Another one is I think I'm not really beholden to any audience (which my stats tell me I do have, hi!) so I think I'm just gonna go ahead and post about whatever, even if unrelated to tabletop games. Cause I wanna and it gives me a space to air out words. I'll keep using the tags so you know what to look for if you're only here for elfgames which would make sense. Won't put the non-RPG stuff on blogrolls of RPG servers. Might do weird mixes of talking about experiences and play and other stuff in a mish-mash stream-of-consciousness bit like I tend to do.

Anyways yeah, another resolution is I'm trying to produce creative stuff in depressive phases, not just when I feel like God's Chosen One and don't need to sleep/eat/drink for 48h in a row. So this is what that looks like. Worst case scenario it'll help readers nap, which is good, you should take a nap, especially if reading this at work. Unless you're helping airplanes not crash into one another or something similarly important. But if you're part of the vast majority of people right now who are in employment but whose job's function is merely to suck the soul out of you and waste your precious, precious human life, then go nap, it'll do you better than reading this.

Anyways I re-read the Three Little Black Book, 1977 edition of Classic Traveller, which I own an old boxed set of I got for like 50 bucks this one time, and since they can be tricky to digest or refer to in play, I made a lil' PDF that has most of the useful bits except combat (cause it's not the crux of the game really). Here it is.

 

 

EDIT: I'm putting my weird personal shit on another blog in an attempt to contain the apocalypse and to keep my blog link on other tRPG bloggers roll without making people too uncomfortable. Here is the link if you're interested for some voyeuristic reason.