← All posts

Tridodranial Update #3

Illustration for Tridodranial Update #3

Welcome to the third tridodranial (quarterly) update for January through March of 2024. I’m starting with a review of my goals from the last update to see how well I managed to stick with my plans. But first, brief comments on how the games I’m playing:

  • Cities Without Number: We “finished” our campaign in this game. The GM found the constant mission planning and lack of overarching narrative to be taxing in the amount of prep needed per week. This is not the first time we’ve had this problem with very driven mission based games (ie Blades in the Dark). We did end on the best session of the game we had, so I would say overall our issues were and “us” problem and not design flaw with the game. I would also say, I didn’t come away disliking the game, just sometimes campaigns peter out or fall flat. All in all, a fun time in a genre I’ve never touched before.

  • Worlds Without Number: We are dipping back into playing in our Worlds Without Number setting. We’ll be making new characters and setting up the basis for the campaign in the coming week, so that’s going to be super fun.

Finish and Release Pretender to the Flame

Pretender to the Flame was released on the 13th of February on DriveThru and Itch.io. The booklet is currently sitting at 91 downloads on Itch.io and 123 downloads on DriveThru. There are no purchases on Itch.io, but $15.50 of sales on DriveThru (of which I theoretically get $10.08). This is a drastic improvement over A Opossum’s Hat, which is what my bar for this product was, so this is a win.

In order to finish the booklet however, I made some concessions. There are a couple of low effort art pieces in the booklet, one is a repeat of the cover and the other is a Pexels photo converted to a painting with Fotosketcher. I also, only ended up with 3 drafts and the last was edited as a marathon over one weekend. I’m sure its not my best writing, though perhaps my best writing isn’t that great either. All in all, I’m glad I’ve finished it, its always good to have something completed rather than just work put into the ether.

Further Plan and Prepare for the Investigative Horror Campaign

I have been continuing Lore24, at a reduced pace thanks to other writing projects. I am narrowing the region design to the area of MS and LA that I grew up in, which is allowing me to pack in a lot of occult problems for the players to deal with (not all of them will be happening at the same time of course, but some will overlap).

I’ve got a couple of important factions and antagonists working in the area, and I think at this point, I just need to sit down and flesh out what the over arching situation is going to be and how I can bring that into an open table format.

I also need to do some more research on running open tables and get the GM hat on for actually playing over just world building and adventure seed writing.

Read More TTRPG Systems and Adventures

I read a good many RPG related books this quarter.

  • Beyond the Wall system along with its included “adventures”: I quite liked this system’s approach to adventure writing. Rather than set encounters, the adventure was a collection of tables that are both filled out and that you fill out with your ideas and directions to the GM like, “just as the players get a hold on the situation in the village…” after which it describes a scene or tasks you with rolling to determine an event.

  • Frogs of the Feywild: A cute little 5e adventure that I purchased to help him reach a sales goal. Its got the classic format and sections.

  • Principia Apocrypha: I’ve read this before, but I reread it. While I’m not exactly the audience for this book, I enjoy reading the advice within the book to incorporate the bits I like into my own writing and GMing. I’m toying with the idea of changing my encounter descriptions due to a piece in this book.

  • Solo Gamemaster’s Guide: I read this as part of my ongoing exploration of SoloRPGs. I do intend to attempt some solo gameplay again soon.

  • Tiny Prep: I wanted some advice akin the Lazy DM’s method, but instead this is a habbit building book disguised as a GM prep advice book. It has some helpful tables and talks you through writing your own. I can see how it would be helpful, but I’ve tried the advice of the book it’s pulling from, Tiny Habits, and failed then so I have low hopes for my usefulness from it.

  • The Silent King: This is a tiny pamphlet adventure. Its PWYW, the layout is fun to look at. I read it to get a handle on the “minimum viable adventure”. It’s a good adventure, you should grab it.

  • Tell Me About Your Character: I read this in January, and I honestly don’t remember much, this was essentially a list of questions to answer about your character. I’m not entirely sold on its effectiveness, but I may give it a try with my upcoming character.

So I did meet my reading goal of 1 system and 2 adventures. I feel the reading has led to some changes in mind set and some ideas, so all round success.

Be a Better Player

Honestly, I feel myself making the same mistakes roleplay wise as I always have done. If anything, reading several articles and books about “best advice for better roleplay” has made me worse, or at least more worried, not better. So, I think I’m just going to chill out and take a new approach to this goal going forward. I’m not an actor or a writer working through a character in isolation, so I shouldn’t treat myself like one. Check the goals below for the type of improvement I’m going for instead.

Outside of My Goals I…

This quarter I also made several art pieces, not all have made it into any books so I’ll put them up here. These are all made with a mix of Blender, photobashing, and Fotosketcher.

Handful Temple

An adventurer delves into a dark place finding a temple cradled in large stone hands.

Owl Temple

A sun washed image of a temple carved into a cliff face. A statue of an owl looms within the entry arches.

Swamp Guardian

An adventurer stands in front of a large creature within a vibrant swamp. The creature is mostly reptilian, however its head is a skull.

Tree Shrines

Several trees are decorated with ropes and red papers. A forest of honored trees.

The Person Faced Otter

Person Faced Otters are others, they shouldn’t exist, but sometimes they do. They inhabit rivers or lakes and stories say they pull unsuspecting prey into the water. They may lure unwary travelers into the water with screams and calls for help, or simply wait near paths.

They have the body of an overlarge river otter, however their head twists into a mocking visage of a human face. They can converse like a human, and sometimes use this to lure their favorite prey to its death. Once prey is caught, its energy is drained until its life ends.

Test Landscape

A simple test landscape to test the rigging of the crowned character that appears in several works.

An adventurer stands next to a stream in front of trees as a series of red lanterns float above the water.

I also made a “map generator”, which is really more of a “map decorator” in Blender. You feed Blender an image with red, green, and blue regions, which it then applies certain textures to. This allows me to quickly generate a “Dyson-like” map to put in things. Mostly this saves me doing hatching and saves me drawing small details on maps. I can expand this with tokens for furniture, doors, and such as well. The test map input and output are shown below.

I also published a small article, Why I Always Run Mysteries. Its about mysteries, why I love them, and how I run them. Its free and was a fun small exercise in a more unusual layout.

Goals for April through June

  • Write and release a small RPG zine

    • Currently writing, shooting for 20 8x5 pages
    • Aiming for at least 50 downloads

  • Reading

    • 1 new system
    • 1 adventure
    • 1 “wild card” book

  • Be a better player

    • Improve focus during game
    • Take better notes
    • Make sure not to hog the spotlight
    • My only metric here will be the legibility and completeness of notes