Campaigns I Want to Play - Dead Travellers, Psychedelic Cosmonauts, & Full Parsec Five

A couple years ago, at this point, there was a meme going around Google Plus of people posting screenshots of a randomly generated Traveller character made using the Devil Ghost website:

Here's an example. Generate your own.
Yes, I did keep going until I got a woman
who died during char-gen.

So, my friend Peter, who runs the Fantasy Heartbreak Workshop blog and the Starship Graveyard tumblr ended up having a couple conversations about the idea of playing dead Travellers. Since Google Plus has crashed into an iceberg and is current taking on water as it disappears beneath the waves, I'm going to transcribe part of those conversations here.

It started when Peter shared a tweet from Dennis Detwiller (no relation, as far as I know, to the immensely talented Dirk Detweiler Leichtey), and I responded with interest: "I want a game where you play Traveller Ghost PCs who died in character generation trying to save others from gruesome fates."

I want a game where you play #Traveller Ghost PCs who died in character generation trying to save others from gruesome fates.

— Dennis Detwiller (@drgonzo123) September 22, 2017

   
PETER: I never played Traveller (thought it always sounded cool enough) and games focused around ghosts generally seemed to abstract for me to wrap my mind around. But this idea gives it interesting focus.

The idea of a ship's ghosts trying desperately to prevent the crew from re-enacting an Event Horizon type incident or some similar catastrophe, seems really appealing. 

ANNE: Alternatively, the ghosts don't interact with the living at all, they just go off to have their own super-phantasmagorical adventures IN SPAAACE! 

PETER: I was going to say that seems a little abstract for my tastes.  But, you know what, might be cool.

ANNE: Yeah, I mean the idea of having the ghosts be on the same ship as the living characters (who are NPCs?), unable to interact with them, but somehow trying to save them from danger sounds kind of challenging to play. Like, that kind of thing works on tv and in books, but I don't know at the table.

(Maybe play the scenario once as the living characters, keep really good records, then play again as the ghosts who can "see" what the living characters are doing? I dunno, it's more work that I would want to do, especially because...)

The idea of playing ghosts who encounter crazy weird hallucinatory stuff on outre science-fantasy planets just seems so much cooler and more fun. I don't know if the heroes would be anything like Space Ghost, but the villains could totally be like the things Space Ghost finds and fights.

PETER: Yah. The dead among the living could be tricky. I'm not entirely sure how to structure it perfectly so the PCs have some capacity to influence things, but have to do it subtly.

The bizarre space phantom situations you suggest are the sort of thing I'd always pictured more for mortal Astral plane travellers. No reason one couldn't split the difference though.

You haul freight for the Imperium for half a lifetime. It isn't until death your real voyage begins...

He went on to suggest that a good starting adventure for this campaign would be Astral Marines - Patrol Sector Omega, a community-keyed hexcrawl, apparently inspired by a Luka Rejec post, with map by Gus L, and published on the Save vs Total Party Kill blog by Ramanan S.

Astral Marines - Patrol Sector Omega map by Gus L

 
Incidentally, one of the comments on that initial tweet was a link to one of my favorite Threadless shirt designs, "The Madness of Mission 6" - which included the following, appropriately insane text as part of its artists' note:

In 1976, Cosmonaut Nikolai Peckmann was sent alone to an orbiting space station for what would be called Mission Six- to study the radiation levels and strange circumstances that killed all four crewmen of the last research mission. By the third day, Peckmann’s broken transmissions were coming back to ground control filled with increasing paranoia and delusion. He claimed that the spirits of the dead cosmonauts were coming to claim him, and that he had to keep moving to evade them. He shouted that if he could capture consume these spirits himself while he still had strength, he could move to the next level of consciousness…Truly the rantings of an insane man. Indeed, video recovered later would show Peckmann running around the confined but maze-like station, downing emergency sedatives like a madman….pausing in a corner momentarily, only to throw back vitamin pills and give chase to his invisible demons. He had exhausted the entire cargo of vitamins, pills, and fresh fruit well ahead of schedule…It was determined that another mission to recover any remains or gather any more research would be a waste of the people’s money, and the station was allowed to drift out of orbit and into space- a failure never to be mentioned again. It was ordered and assumed that all video and paper evidence had been destroyed.

Madness of Mission 6

 
Anyway, so Peter and I both liked the idea of this game, but neither of us have played Traveller before, and both of us are sort of busy with other gaming and/or life projects.

Eventually my interest was rekindled when Peter posted an image of some appropriately awesome 1970s scifi art. I think it was around this time that I began to think of this as the "psychedelic cosmonauts" campaign.

Found on the 70s Sci-Fi Art tumblr

 
ANNE: This makes me think of our idea to do some kind of psychedelic space adventure with dead Traveller characters.

PETER: Every now and then I'd been puttering away at a little work on this sort of setting. There are usually about half a dozen different settings warring for attention in my brain, but I carved out a little time to separate this one from the pack into a mini-supplement for Minimal d6 system. It had gone on the back burner for several weeks until you reminded me about it tonight and I finished up a few details.

Not exactly what we discussed, but maybe you'll still find it of some interest:

What he posted next was a Google Plus link to a blog post. I'll post the blog link in a second, but it's worth sharing what we said at the other link as well.

PETER: Full Parsec Five is a sort of undead space opera setting for the Minimal d6 / Miso-Six systems.

Thanks to Anne Hunter jogging my memory tonight about our discussion that inspired it. Finally gave me the kick in the pants needed to add a few more details and get it up on the web.  Still think it would be great to give it a more thorough treatment some day. But perfect is the enemy of extant, so...

ANNE: I'm really digging the four types of astral space. I also think you're right that although they were ordinary astronauts before they died, they need the chance to become as weird as the things they're fighting/exploring.

The link Peter posted was to his blog entry on Full Parsec Five, a very rules-light ruleset he put together as a potential starting point. He also put together a list of other space opera RPG systems.

At the time, I wasn't sure what rules, if any, would be a good fit for the campaign we had in mind. Peter, meanwhile, was busy collecting links on his Google Plus feed. I won't lose much when G+ dies. I mostly posted links to my own blog, and mostly wrote a lot of "cools" and "thank yous" on other people's posts or in response to their comments on mine. I won't miss these archived conversations evaporating like snow on a too-sunny day any more or less than I regret the fact that none of my spoken conversations have transcripts. But I will miss this ongoing conversation with Peter, which is why I'm archiving it here. And it was Peter's own use of G+ to reshare so many links that first got me worried about the effect of the shift away from blogs and onto social media, long before Google announced that it was letting the air out of Plus and allowing it to float off into the atmosphere. Any social media feed may archive your thoughts, but without the ability to go back through that archive, search through the depths, or link back to anything, those thoughts are already as good as lost.

Anyway, Peter compiled quite a list of inspirational material, so I'm going to link to it here, so it's not lost. I have some of my own inspirations, and my own thoughts about rules, that I'll share next.

Giant Evil Wizard - D12 Things What Just Fell Out Of The Orbital Rust Belt

Monster Manuals Sewn From Pants - Plane Scrap

Markerslinger - The Mind Mine

Robert Moorehead - Space Hulk Generation Rules

Gorgo Mormo - Demons of the Outer Dark

Sheep & Sorcery - Tables for Derelict Space Ships

Cavegirl's Game Stuff - Astral Projection for OSR Games

Tarsos Theorem - Derelict Deserted Dreadnoughts

Tarsos Theorem - Sci-Fi Adventure Location Generator

In the mean time, the things that have inspired me have been images of people wearing salvagepunk spacesuits, or wearing spacesuits to explore dreamland, the afterlife, or other planes.
 

On Stranger Things, Eleven wears a diving suit to enter a sensory deprivation tank...

 

... and then psychically travel to another dimension called The Upside Down.

 

Psychics on The OA use a slight different kind of underwater suit to travel to the afterlife.

 

I don't know where the Euthanauts travel, although I would guess it's also the afterlife.
This is basically the plot to Flatliners and The Discovery too, right? Just without the space suits?

 

Prospect so makes me want my own space suit...
... so so sooo so want it.

 

I live in a noxious, pollen-filled atmosphere beneath a scorching, lethal sun, too.
Should I be penalized just because I live that way on Earth?

 
Also in the meantime, some more scifi gaming rules have come out that I think might be suitable for playing this campaign. The first is Highland Paranormal Society's "In the Light of a Ghost Star" ruleset. I think it was actually one of Peter's links that first made me aware of Nate Treme's art and gaming materials. This one is also pretty rules-light, but it's based enough on D&D that it seems intuitive to me, a person who is familiar with D&D.

 
The second is the "Mothership" game by Failure Tolerated. People looove Mothership. Throne of Salt loves it. Dungeons & Possums loves it. Tarsos Theorem loves it (and continues making cool scifi stuff unrelated to it at the same time.) I haven't seen people this excited about a ruleset since I noticed the existence of the GLOG-o-sphere (and actually, there's some overlap in the fandoms here...)  Mothership uses d100 ability scores and checks, which means that it's compatible with Eclipse Phase, and probably with Grand Tapsetry's Urutsk setting as well. Like Ghost Star, Mothership gets top marks its graphic design. It also has Stress and Sanity mechanics that might be useful for any kind of space-horror gaming.

But if I'm being really honest with myself, the rules that most excite me as a possible basis for a psychedelic cosmonauts campaign are Troika's. I'm not familiar with the older British games that Troika's rules are modeled after, but one peek at its gorgeous, utterly bizarre artwork (by Andrew Walter the aforementioned Dirk Detweiler Leichty), one glimpse of its text about golden barges and crystal spheres, and I'm already smitten. The art-heavy reprinting is called the 'numinous edition," and it is numinous indeed. The character occupations are so great I'm adding them to my list of favorite lists, and Dirk's art brings them to weird-Baroque life. Sure, you can play as a burglar or a questing knight, but you can also end up as a Rhino-man, as escaped servitor created by a dead wizard, or a robot powered by a mechanical analytic engine. I'd need to re-read the rules to fully understand them, but it seems like Brits my age are nostalgic for Fighting Fantasy the way Americans are for 1st edition AD&D (or maybe for Choose Your Own Adventure? the exact analogy is a little unclear to me) so I assume the mechanics are easy enough to learn and provide satisfying resolution most of the time.

Troika Numinous Edition cover by Andrew Walter

  

Lonesome Monarch by Dirk Detweiler Leichty

  

Monkey-Monger by Dirk Detweiler Leichty

 

Ultimately, the choice of rules will probably be up to Peter, or whoever the two of us can strongarm into running a the game for us, because while most of the entries I tagged with "Campaigns I Want to Play" are really campaigns I want to run, "psychedelic cosmonauts" truly is a campaign I want to play. Or maybe Peter will talk me into it. Or I'll talk myself into it. Time will tell.

What adventures do I think would work well for this sort of campaign? Well, not-so-coincidentally, I think In the Light of Ghost Star, Mothership, and Troika all have adventuring scenarios that look eminently rob-able.

I suppose my go-to mental image is something like the strangest episodes of the original Star Trek, combined with the various "only one person notices the rest of the crew has gone crazy" episodes of Next Generation, mashed up with AE Van Vogt's Voyage of the Space Beagle - where the crew first meets a giant displacer beast who takes over the ship, then flies too close to a planet of psychic bird people whose mental noise-pollution drives everyone but one crewman crazy, then meets an extradimensional alien assembled from spheres and cylinders who takes over the ship, then flies too close to a psychic nebula who drives everyone but one crewman crazy...

 
I'm also partial to some of the ideas and imagery from the new Shade the Changing Girl comics series, where human emotions are like drugs aliens take to get high, and madness is both a physical place you can go to, and a sort of unstoppable force of chaos that reacts to our actions and moods.

   
So far, so inspiring. And I think Peter's suggestion to use Astral Sector Omega is very solid. The initiating adventure for a campaign like this could be something completely doomed and hopeless - these are dead astronauts, after all, so Black Sun Death Crawl or Null Singularity are both pretty viable options.

 

  
The adventures that tempt me both, primarily on the basis of their reviews on Ten Foot Pole, are Paul Keigh's entries in Geoffrey McKinney's Psychedelic Fantasies series - Dreams of the Lurid Sac, Streams of the Lurid Crack, and Gleams of the Vivid Crack. Truly regrettable names aside, TFP's review suggests that these probably have the level of gonzo alien weirdness that I'm looking for:

"This thing has a core concept and it is focused on it. Elements of this adventure have been found in other adventures in bits & pieces, but no other adventure has, I believe, put them all together in one shell. You’re adventuring inside of a creature, the titular Lurid Sac. Remember Fantastic Voyage? The interior sets looked … alien? Weird fibers, colors, flows, creatures. Well that’s what’s going on here. Most of the “adventuring inside a create” things I’ve seen have been half-efforts. There are doors, or stairways built in, or something like that. None of that is in this one. No stairs or doors or comforts of home brought in by travellers. This is a truly alien environment … exactly the way an alien environment should be. Imagine a hundred overlapping bubbles, on maybe three layers. That’s the map. Where they touch you can massage the membranes to get through. Some of the bubbles have special purposes: the cortex, the mouth, the neck, the 'sponges' that allow access to the outside, and so on. The rest of the bubbles are procedurally generated, as are the contents. There are random monsters, events, contents, humours … you get the idea."

 
So that's what I want. The ghosts of dead astronauts exploring an invisible galaxy full of aliens, monsters, nightmares, madness, and phenomena that defy classification, forever.

5e Backgrounds, Lifepaths, Random Generation ... and an Unexpected Convergence with the GLOG

I like random character generation. Rather than coming up with a robust concept for my character and then trying to generate her, I usually prefer to let the dice make a lot of my decisions for me, then build my concept off of that. (Although that's not always the case - playing Numenera, I read through the available options and got inspired, which was fortunate, since random generation isn't super supported there.)

If a system allows random generation, unless your referee is a jerk, you can usually still pick options like it's a menu if you have a concept in mind. But if a ruleset isn't set up for random generation, it's usually hard to add it back in. And if you don't have a concept before getting started, it can be easy to fall prey to analysis paralysis, or else to just making the same character over and over. Random generation provides a starting point, it tells you who your character was, before you started playing them, before they started a life as a full-time adventurer.

Random ability scores are one way to insert some randomness into character creation; random backgrounds are another. Both of those are pretty de rigueur in retro roleplaying. Most players still expect to be able to choose their own character race and character class though. (Although again, there are exceptions. GLOG players might be expected to roll for a random race, and in Jack Shear's upcoming Cinderheim campaign-starter, players roll for both a random background and a random character class.)

Maybe the ultimate in random character generation is lifepath generation. This is when you generate a random character by creating them in stages that mimic successive stages of their life. The result is not just a random character, but one who has a bit of a backstory about how they got where they are at the start of the first session. The best-known example is probably Traveller, which infamously has a lifepath char-gen system where your character can die mid-creation. (That's because in Traveller, there are no levels or XP advancement; whatever skills and abilities you start the game with is all you're ever going to get. You go through char-gen in "loops," and in each loop you get richer and more experienced, but you also risk dying. At the end of each loop, you can choose to "retire" and start playing the game, or you can continue the process. If you die though, you have to start over, so when you get a decently good character, there's a temptation to enjoy what you've won so far and stop pushing your luck trying for more.)

There's no reason, though, that you couldn't have a lifepath generator that stops with you ending up as a 1st level D&D character. In fact, there are a few that do just that, so let's look at them, and some other suggestions for generating random backstory as part of character-generation.

2015 Gongfarmer's Almanac

First, because of my inordinate fondness for Dungeon Crawl Classics, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Paul Wolfe's "virtual funnel" from the free 2015 Gongfarmer's Almanac, vol 6. Like Traveller, the "virtual funnel" involves "looping" a character - or in this case a group of four characters - multiple times through a dangerous path. Each "loop" indicates an event that happened to the character, and requires some kind of save or throw to attempt.

If you fail the attempt, you take a penalty, sometimes death, usually damage, sometimes cash. If you succeed, you get a bonus, usually an ability score increase, sometimes a weapon, occasionally something magical. (If you roll well enough on the event table that "cash" is your penalty, the bonus is something really special!) And then, regardless of the outcome, you get some XP and a modifier on the roll to determine the next event. If the character dies, the next character inherits all the XP, money, and equipment received so far. When a character gets to 10 XP, they've made it to 1st level.

Good news! for Traveller fans, Paul Wolfe reports that in his playtesting, the first two characters in a group of four nearly always die, and about 1/3 of the time, all four die and you have to start over. (Pretty typical for DCC, really.) Calling this a virtual funnel is pretty accurate, since it pretty well mimics several features of zero-level play, especially the way that later characters basically get a free ride on their forebears coattails.

Player's Handbook

The random bonds, ideals, and flaws built into 5e's core rules are one method of getting random backstory, albeit one that really doesn't resemble a lifepath at all. Instead, it generates specific moments of backstory to ensure that you have three distinct kinds of moments that you can call on during play to gain "Inspiration." Inspiration is pretty much a "hero point" - you can spend it to gain advantage on a roll, or to remove disadvantage. You can only have one point at a time, although you can give it away to another character if you want.

Your "bond" is an NPC you know and care about, likely some kind of parent/mentor or sibling/friend. (Would it be worth trying to categorize and tally up the different entries in 5e's backstory tables? I really don't have the heart.) But it's also some task you're trying to accomplish for that person. The way "Inspiration" works is that you have to act on your bond, ideal, or flaw to receive it, so these entries are written to be very actionable (if perhaps overly simplistic?) Your "ideal" is like an ethical code that your character follows, or at least, one rule from such a code. Again, they're all things where it would be very easy to point out an example of your character following their ideal to show that you earned Inspiration. Like the other two, "flaws" are mistakes or mis-steps that you're encouraged to make in order to receive your hero point.

Unlawful Games suggests giving every character a goal, a kind of thing that they're looking for, not for Inspiration, just to give them some extra oomph of motivation, but this might be a pretty good replacement for ideals if you were in the market for one. I'm not sure how I feel about all this. Rotten Pulp makes a pretty well-grounded argument against offering extrinsic rewards for roleplaying. On the other hand, Dyson Logos suggests giving out Inspiration the way Numenera give out magic items - with the profligacy of a Dickensian landlord trying to ward off the Ghost of Christmas Past through a flamboyant display of generosity - to encourage the players to acquire and spend them freely rather than trying to save them up. Personally I wish that Inspiration were both more powerful and a little harder to come by. Like, it should be harder to get than just saying a catchphrase once a session, but also something that if you earn it, really does something to help you out. Anyway, that's a thought for another day.

Weirdly, 5e's recommended method of character generation almost inverts the lifepath idea. You pick a character race, then class, then set your ability scores (which are immediately modified by your race, unless you forgot since you read about that two steps ago), then finally you pick a background (and if your background skills are the same as the ones you picked for your class, then you have to go back again and select a different class skill to replace the doubled-up one.) It's really counter-intuitive.

Xanathar's Guide to Everything

Xanathar's Guide to Everything has a kind of lifepath generator for 5e characters. You still pick your race, class, and background, but then the generator helps fill in more backstory. There's a series of tables to learn about your family, although I find these tables to be oddly preoccupied with things like where you were born, your birth order among your siblings, and other information that feels like it's of dubious value at the table. There are tables you can roll on to find out why/how your character "chose" the background and class you picked for them, and then a life events table that you can roll on multiple times. Instead of "looping" through the table like in Traveller or Paul Wolfe's virtual funnel, you roll once to find out how old you are, roll again to find out how many events you experienced, and then finally roll on the table once per event. Your "event" is most likely to be an actual event (and then, most likely to just be "make money working your job"), with about a 1-in-3 chance you are connected for good or ill to an NPC, and about a 1-in-4 chance of some unusual experience. Some author or group of authors on the D&D Wiki has a lifepath generator for 3rd edition characters, and a 5e version that changes little, but is slightly worse. I might like this one better than the official version, mostly because it's a bit streamlined than the one in Xanathar's Guide.

Cinderheim

This is a lifepath just for generating backstory though - it's an optional additional step after character creation is finished. Jack Shear has announced that he's working on a lifepath generator for his Cinderheim campaign that actually generates (most of) the character for you. Roll once to learn who your parents were - and thus what your background is. Then roll on a sub-table to learn another fact about your parents. Roll again to learn who your mentor was - and thus what your class is. And again, roll on the sub-table to learn an additional detail. It's elegant in its simplicity, and the subtables remind me of Into the Odd's new Bastionland careers, possibly just because that's the first place I saw something like that, and it made an impression on me.

Goblin Laws Of Gaming

Probably my favorite lifepath character generator though comes from Goblin Punch's GLOG rules. You generate your character in thee life stages - childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. In childhood, you roll 3 random events. Each event is paired with two ability scores, and awards a specific number of points to each. For example "You read books in the library" is paired with "+1 Str, +4 Int", while "You once destroyed a book" gets you "+2 Str, +1 Int". In adolescence, you get asked 3 questions. Each question is a dilemma that your character faced as a teen, and your answer gives you advantage rolling a dice for one ability score, and disadvantage rolling for another one. For example "Did you divide the food evenly (Int), or give the hungrier ones a little bit more (Wis)?" In adulthood, you get to roll twice on a table of random careers and then pick the one you want. You then roll four random events that happened to you during your pre-adventuring career. About half the events ask you to test one ability score to potentially improve or worsen another, and the other half award you additional starting skills and equipment. For example, if you join the army, you might get an event like "Is your scar awesome or disfiguring? Where is it?" that instructs you to "Test Con to influence Cha", or like "You are haunted by your memories. Of what?" that tells you "Learn Ghosts" as a skill.

The events in the GLOG's lifepath generator are not very specific to any particular campaign. They're less like specific backstory events and more like prompts to guide the invention of those specifics. One of the strengths here is that the generator creates a random character as you go, so that specific elements of the random backstory get tied to specific improvements (or injuries) to the character as they advance through the stages. It's entirely possible to know that you were a weak child, but your adolescence made your stronger, and you toughened up in the army - precisely because each event is tied to a specific change to an ability score.

On the other hand, if all we want is random backstory, Bardiches & Bathhouses suggests only using your class to generate it. He actually suggests using four subtables per class (double what Jack and I2TO are using) to help establish things like how you got started, what specifically you do, potentially some major beliefs, and how the NPCs in your home community feel about you. In all 3 campaign settings (Cinderheim, Bastionland, and ... Bardich-Bathhouse-land?) the subtables provide specific, evocative detail that help tie the character to the setting. If you wanted to use any of these set-ups in a different type of campaign world, you could keep the broad mechanics, but you'd need to rewrite the details. The backstory that comes from 5e's default bonds, ideals, and flaws gets around this problem by being both more generic and more vague, and then asking the player to fill in the details. It's the same way in the GLOG. Ten Foot Polemic uses a similar approach for his list of 100 retroactive backstories - the incidents described are non-specific enough to belong to almost any time and any setting, and it's up to the player add in the setting- or character-specific details.

One last suggestion that feels worth mentioning here is The Retired Adventurer's idea to physicalize backstory by tying it to specific objects, like a diary or a letter. Having that item in your inventory then serves as a mnemonic reminder of the relevant bit of backstory.

There's a partial convergence between 5e's backgrounds and its classes. Acolytes are a little like proto-clerics, criminals are like proto-rogues, entertainers like proto-bards, hermits like proto-druids, outlanders like proto-barbarians, soldiers like proto-fighters, and sages like proto-wizards. The correspondence is imperfect though. Most of the backgrounds seem like precursors to at least a couple classes, and most classes have more than one possible precursor background. And then there are the backgrounds like Sailor and classes like Monk that feel untethered from any sort of matching. (As an aside, this is probably because you have 3 "base" classes - fighter, thief, and wizard, plus wizard-thieves, ie "bards" ... plus like two more wizards for some reason, "sorcerers" and "warlocks." Then you just add on descriptors to get the others. Divine wizard is "cleric" and divine wizard-fighter is "paladin." Wilderness fighter is "barbarian," wilderness thief-wizard is "ranger," and wilderness wizard is "druid." Monks feel out of place in this system because they ARE, they are literally from an entirely different genre of fiction than any of the other characters. Although I guess you COULD probably consider them fantasy-Asian fighter-wizards.)

There's a second convergence (the one I promised up there in the title, the one that surprised me) between 5e's backgrounds and the GLOG's random careers. "Army" matches soldier, "clergy" matches acolyte, "criminal" matches ... well, criminal, plus maybe charlatan, "forest" more or less matches outlander, "hobo" matches either hermit or urchin, "nobility" matches noble, "rural" fits most of the same idea as folk-hero, "sailor" matches sailor, natch, "scholar" "wizard's apprentice" matches sage, even after the name change, and "town" matches the guild artisan / guild merchant pretty well. I think that just leaves entertainer unaccounted for on 5e's side, and the GLOG's lone remainder is the "strange" career for a backstory involving meeting fairy tale monsters. (And "strange" isn't even really a full career, one event on each other career table tells you to roll once on the "strange" table.) It's interesting to me though, that two different designers (or TEAMS of designers in 5e's case) converged on pretty much the same list of pre-adventuring character backgrounds. If you wanted to design your own list of generic backgrounds, the areas of overlap might be a good place to start, and their areas of disagreement might help you focus on what you think is most important for your list.

One final note, Bardiches & Bathhouses other post about backgrounds argues that backstory is intimately tied to character goals and motivations. He then talks through some of the most common backstories, and points out potential problems caused by some of them being pretty anti-social to try using in a cooperative game. This is an entirely different view of backstory, and one that's unrelated to the other background elements I've talked about so far. In the kind of retro-roleplaying games I'm used to, the characters might have different occupations, but they all have the same motivation - to find treasure. Empire of the Petal Throne adds a slight wrinkle to this by making all the characters barbarous foreigners trying to both make their fortune and find their way in a bizarre alien city. In Mouse Guard, Spears of the Dawn, and Mutant Crawl Classics, again, the player characters have different "jobs" but they all have the same role - that of newly-minted tribal defenders who explore the wilderness and fight off threats to their home village. The fact that one character is a glass-blower and the other's a beekeeper is irrelevant to their in-game motivation.

But 5e is a game where the player characters want different things. It's not just that one wants jewelry and one wants gemstones and one wants a magic sword. It's that one wants to help their noble family, and one wants to explore their village's hinterland, and one wants to lead their army to victory. That table of goals from Unlawful Games that I linked to earlier also introduces divergent motivations into the party. I worry a little that this is "splitting the party" at the very moment of character creation, but I would hope that most player groups can think of missions that advance multiple agendas at the same time, or else can agree to a bit of friendly "turn taking" to advance one goal at a time. I also suspect that the emergent motivations that always come up during play as a result of the players interacting with the setting will help to re-unite the party behind a common motivation.

Kyle Marquis's Dungeon I Want to Explore - The Sea of Vipers

Kyle Marquis is a game designers who tweets at @HexADay. His ongoing project is tweeting out hexmaps at a rate of, well, you can probably guess. Anyway, he's completely finished one so far - The Sea of Vipers. It looks pretty cool!
 

Sea of Vipers by Kyle Marquis

 
The general feel here is that particular gonzo blend of Stone Age meets Sorcery meets Saturday Morning Cartoons meets Super Science that I associate with the Anomalous Subsurface Environment or with Operation Unfathomable.

The world is ruled by a wizard called the Technogogic Implementer and administered by a bevy of vice-potentates, The Enthroned. Among the gods who rule this world are Ootoon, the Flowing One, the god/goddess of slime. Other NPCs and factions sound nearly as cool.

The individual entries are just as good, with that special blend of creative imagery, evocative names, and terse prose (imposed here by Twitter's character limit) that people love to see in their RPG writing.

I've picked out a handful that I enjoy, really just the first five that were too good to not write down. All these samples are from the left-hand side of that first island, because that's how quickly I got to five. I think Hex 0622 is my personal favorite so far. I really want to see those fish, kill that aboleth, and steal that treasure!

One thing you can't tell from this sample is that there seem to be a lot of interconnections between the hexes, as well as a lot of NPCs with agendas that the player characters could choose to become involved in. For example, one hex has a dragon searching for crystal shards from a half-dozen other hexes in order to assemble them into a weapon to go murder a wizard. If the players like that idea, they could easily spend a session or several tracking down the missing shards and pitching in to un-throne the potentate ... or they could just as easily try to defeat the dragon and earn the wizard's favor.


Hex 0416 "Werewoses. Cavemen bites shift your mind back to a prehistoric simian body when the moon rises, as your body runs amok in this time."

Hex 0622 "Beneath a long-dry riverbed: ancient aboleth mummy guarded by skeletal flying fish. In its treasure hoard: the TRILOBITE OF HOURS."

Hex 0723 "Rock troll vampire that couldn't reach its lair before dawn. It simultaneously burns and petrifies, forever, but can say 1 word/day."

Hex 0728 "Unicorn graveyard. Magically hidden until recently; anyone finding and speaking of it will trigger a horrible magic-horn gold rush."

Hex 1007 "Coast patrolled by mermaid pirates in upside-down catamarans. The captain has a lobster on her shoulder that says 'Yar!' "


Anyway, if that interests you, check it out on Kyle Marquis' website.

Laughing Panjandrum's ASCII Dungeons I Want to Explore - The Imminent Church Engine

I have no idea who Imminent Church Engine is, and I can't remember how I initially found a link to their website, but I'm glad I saved a copy. They've created two quite-beautiful dungeon maps using only colorful ASCII text characters, and I'm hopeful that they'll eventually create more.

Church of the Ailing Flower by Imminent Church Engine

Tomb of King Oraine by Imminent Church Engine

The first is the Church of the Ailing Flower. I think it may technically be the larger of the two, though that's in part because of the large exterior space. In all, there's fewer rooms and less going on in here. The small square rooms on the right-hand side are also meant to be stocked using a small random table during play.

The second in the Tomb of King Oraine (also called the Tomb of Cursed Glass on that index page I linked to.) This one has more rooms, more interesting paths and loops, and more going on. There's more treasure and a few different factions for the player characters to interact with. Personally, I also find this one prettier. There's more contrast, and even areas with a lot of similar-colored tiles have a bit of variation that breaks the possible monotone up nicely. The pink numbers also look good against all those cool colors. I think the only way I could like it more would be if the background were dark blue instead of black. I definitely feel an urge to try copying this visual style.

I would categorize both these adventures as "horror," since both involve exploring a creepy abandoned space, piecing together clues about what awful thing happened here in the past, and then potentially fighting a single large and extremely dangerous monster at the climax. Which isn't to say there aren't a number of small monsters in each dungeon, but the "boss" of each area is much more dangerous than anything else in the place. (Although by this argument, Mega Man is also a horror game, so my definition might be flawed.)

The writing here is pretty terse, but manages to pack in a lot of visual detail, and in both cases, the dungeons are fairly tightly themed. The Church has a lot of floral and, well, church imagery, while the Tomb is full of machines and glass. Here's an example that really highlights the visual imagery of the writing, from the entryway to the Tomb:

"1 Entrance - Tomb door is shut but unlocked, overgrown with vines. Hall also overgrown with lichen and flowers. Sunlight shines through cracks in the ceiling."

The monsters and treasures are all unique here. The monsters are written up in a way that's rules-light and is basically universally compatible. You get the number of hit dice, how they attack, and how they defend themselves. A couple monsters have special considerations, like the fact that if a Creeping Thing kills someone, it'll "begin to ravenously devour the victim, ignoring all else." Again, the writing here is brief, but I think gives you enough to work with so you're not grasping at straws. The treasure is similar, brief descriptions of the objects, followed by a price, denominated in silver.

There's something so fascinating seeing something like these two dungeons. The art is an aesthetic I've seen before, but not often, and not recently, outside of roguelike video-gaming. There's a spark of vital creativity, yet the text also has the hallmarks of someone who's well familiar with the evaluative standards that Bryce Lynch of Ten Foot Pole, for example, applies to adventure writing. But who is the author, what are their views, have they used these at the table, do they have a blog? Who knows. Instead they just sit there, deprived of context, not even a diamond in the rough - a diamond in the void.

Be sure to check Imminent Church Engine's page again in the future to see if they post any more of these images.

Update: After posting this, Laughing Panjandrum, the creator of these images, reached out to me and shared their blog link. You can find them at Imminent Demon Engine, where they're currently writing about a Dark Sun -esque setting!

Additional Actual Plays

In my first post about other bloggers' actual play reports, I asked my readers to nominate any play reports they knew about that I might have missed. I also put up the call on Google+ and MeWe. I've also kept my eyes open for people talking about play reports, and I've watched for new blogs posting play reports. This exercise also jogged my memory about a few that I knew about but had forgotten. The links below are in the order I received, found, or remembered them.
 
 
FM Geist recommended the sex, drug, and ultraviolence-filled urban adventures over at Last Gasp.
 

 
 
Jack Shear recommended the Blades in the Dark play reports over at Fictive Fantasies. That link should take you to a campaign overview page, where you can first find links to all the worldbuilding done in support of the campaigns, and then links to play reports from six separate campaigns set in the same world.
 
 
David Wilke recommended the session reports over on his own Anxiety Wizard blog. It looks like he's sent his players through a variety of LotFP adventures, including World of the Lost, Deep Carbon Observatory, and Red and Pleasant Land.
 
 
Michael Bacon suggested the play reports collected in the Thursdays in Thracia campaign over on the Bad Wrong Fun blog. Unsurprisingly, this is a campaign exploring Jenelle Jaquays' Caverns of Thracia megadungeon, apparently using Necrotic Gnomes' B/X Essentials rulebooks at the table.
 

   
 
Doug M recommended his own Smouldering Wizard play reports. That link goes to a master list of campaigns, each with their own set of reports: exploring the Endless Tunnels of Elandin using Holmes' Basic, visiting Larm using Labyrinth Lord, a campaign in the Ruined Hamlet of Blixter using Mutant Future, and OD&D campaign on a Quest for the Dwarven Mine, and another OD&D campaign collecting the Chronicles of Nolenor, a one-shot Witches of the Dark Moon game using Swords & Wizardry, and another Swords & Wizardry game set in Ravendale.
 

   
   
Andreas Habicher recommended Papier und Spiele, where he led a four-part play-by-poll game exploring The Spider Pit, using Maze Rats rules. Unfortunately, these posts aren't tagged, but Papier und Spiele is a new blog, so these are the only reports on there right now.
 
 
Seeing that play-by-poll campaign reminded me of some other things I'd forgotten before. I mentioned Blog of Holding last time, but I forgot to mention the Mearls campaign widget he has in his sidebar. Hereticwerks also used reader surveys as the basis of their long-running Bujili campaign. In addition, Hereticwerks has a few other actual play reports that I forgot completely when I was writing my first list.
 

 
 
John recommended his own Wandering Gamist play reports for his Adventurer Conqueror King campaign. John's reports put a statistical overview of the session right up front. These have traditional categories like XP and treasure, but also how long he spent playing the session and prepping beforehand, and exactly how much within-game time elapsed inside the dungeon. More traditional narrative summaries, anecdotes, and post-mortem thoughts follow after all this.
 
 
Bryan recommended Olde School Wizardry which ran a Dwimmermount campaign. Of special note is that many sessions in this campaign (which have their own tag!) were run with middle-schoolers as the players.
 
 
Aos has restarted his Metal Earth blog after a bit of a hiatus, and he's posted reports about session 2 and session 3 of a B/X campaign set on Mars. Currently these aren't tagged. If you like his art, you can also check out his Cosmic Tales comic. Tales of the Grotesque & Dungeonesque also has a few reports of from his time playing in Aos' Mars campaign.
 

 
 
The impending demise of Google+ has encouraged people to resume blogging after a hiatus, post more on their blogs, and even start new blogs. For the record, I think all this is great, but it probably can't take the place of a centralized location for aggregating commentary on blog posts, gaming discussion, and friendly non-gaming conversations among the small number of people who have gaming blogs and the much, much larger number of people who read them. That said, you can find a list of OSR blogs here, a list of non-OSR gaming blogs here, and Ramanan S of Save vs Total Party Kill has put together a file that you can load into an RSS reader for an instant OSR blog feed. (I don't know who started the OSR one, Jack Shear started the non-OSR list.)
 
Anyway, as a result of all this activity, I noticed or took a second look at some blogs I either didn't know about last time, or didn't realize were posting play reports.
 
 
Weird & Wonderful Worlds ran a Shieldbreaker campaign. He also has a few reports from his time as a player in Throne of Salt's Danscape games.
 
 
I don't know where I first saw everyone on this list, but I do know where I first saw Underground Adventures. Wizard Lizard was posting play reports directly into MeWe's Into the Odd community, and I suggested he should start a blog, and he did. He's using Into the Odd's rules to run his players through the Barrowmaze.
   

 
 
Tales of the Rambling Bumblers has an old Elves & Espers campaign that seems to be set in a fantasy Victorian city using Savage Worlds rules. You also have to love anyone who uses old Lego mini-figures both as miniatures and as the photo for the blog header.
 
 
Michael (who recommended "Thursday with Thracia") didn't recommend his own blog, Buildings are People, but I did notice that he's running a Formalhaut campaign using Gabor Lux's Echoes from Formalhaut zine.
 

 
 
I noticed that Fallen Empires is running a campaign that visited the Maze of the Blue Medusa and the Gardens of Ynn. (Ynn seems to be a pretty popular destination these days!) Isaak is using a list-of-accomplishments format similar to the Wandering Gamist. I'll confess it can be a little difficult for me to tell what actually happened in most of these sessions.
 
Carapace King has a couple campaigns worth of reports. Dikes Fall Everyone Dies takes place in a horrible, Hieronymus Bosch-ian Holland, while his new Ben-Dagra campaign sounds reminiscent of Yoon-Suin.
 
 
How on earth did I forget Judge James' Living 4 Crits blog? He doesn't tag his posts, but almost the entire blog is play reports, most of them using Dungeon Crawl Classics. James also does a great job linking to the previous reports in each series at the beginning of each post and to reports from other campaigns at the end of each one.
 
 
I also remembered that Superhero Necromancer a couple of campaigns in his own Rainy City setting. The Rainy City exists at the end of the world, where it's always raining because the wall separating the Prime Material Plane from the Elemental Plane of Water has sprung a leak, and so the world is slowly flooding. Literally every spell, monster, and magic item that exists is unique, and in the first campaign, the players are wizard thieves trying to get the good stuff while the getting's good. In the second campaign, the players are all parliamentarians in some kind of wizard's parliament.
 
 
Dennis Laffey from What a Horrible Night to Have a Curse both runs his own games and blogs about being a player. He's running his own campaign based on Ars Ludi's West Marches ideal. He's also played for several years in another GM's Vaults of Ur campaign (where he plays a Sleestak, no less!)
 
 
In retrospect, it should have been obvious to me why it's mostly Game Masters who post play reports online - it's because it's mostly Game Masters who keep blogs. Chris P is actually a rare counter-example (I think) because as far as I know, he only plays in online games, never runs them, but he does keep a blog where he sometimes talks about it. I've actually played alongside Chris is like three different open-table games; he's a very canny player who, to me, exemplifies what people are talking about when they write paeans to the wily players of yesteryear. In one memorable session, his character wore a treasure chest as a backpack - and eventually revealed that it was a cursed or magically trapped chest, which he opened to unleash the curse on an attacking monster. The chest had some kind of treasure in it which he had never recovered, because it was more valuable to him as a magic beam weapon. Among the play reports, you can also find a link to a lengthy Google Doc that describes his sessions exploring the Colossal Wastes of Zahar.
 
 
Chris Wilson of Journey into the Weird ran a game that ended in a (near) TPK, and wrote about it. So far this is his only play report, there could be more to come.
 
 
Roger suggested his own blog, A Life Full of Adventure. He's mostly been running Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, but appears to have recently started a 5e game.
 
 
Beloch Shrike is back! You may recall that my previous post started with me being inspired by Beloch posting some play reports. Unfortunately, almost immediately after that, the Papers & Pencils blog went away for awhile because it got hacked. Fortunately, it's back, and Beloch has continued his series of posts looking back at his old Dungeon Moon campaign. He's also written a post-mortem for his just-retired Fuck the King of Space campaign. I find his insights about what worked well and what he would do differently in the future very valuable.
 
 
Nate Treme from Highland Paranormal Society has a couple play reports and player art associated his own In the Light of a Ghost Star campaign.
 

 
 
My friend Peter posted about a game of John Stater's Tales of the Space Princess he ran for his family. So far, I think this is the only play report on his blog, but it sounds like it was fun.
 
 
Finally, and most recently, Kyrinn S Eis found the Dragon's Breakfast blog, which turns out to have play reports for a hundred-session-long nautical campaign set in his own Far Isles setting. It looks like he's also gearing up to start a Classic Traveller campaign, which certainly has enough material to go a hundred more.
 
 
I'm sure there are more blogs out there that host play reports, but I'm willing to call an end to my part in this little experiment. It was fun hearing from so many people about actual plays that they like, and interesting to rediscover parts of my own sidebar that I'd forgotten.
 
I recently had a friend start playing D&D 5e with an apparently terrible GM and she nearly quit the game after a few sessions of torture. I shared some of my favorite 5e play reports with her, some imaginative, weird, artistic games, and the next time I talked to her, she said she was quitting her GM but not quitting the game. She wants to play good D&D more than ever.
 
I'll leave off with a call-to-arms from Ben L of Mazarin's Garden (another one I forgot last time), who wants us all to remember the games we played on Google Plus and Google Hangouts:
 
"For the love of God, if you have a community on G+ for your game, even if that game ended long ago, please export the community so some record will remain of your shared play. So many worlds are about to be extinguished, and along with them the memories recorded in countless session reports, downtime threads, scheming plans, posted maps, ephemera, funeral threads celebrating dead PCs. Don’t let it just disappear into the void."

Secret Santicorn 2018

A group of D&D bloggers ran a "Secret Santicorn" this year. I didn't participate, but did notice the posts appearing in my blog's sidebar, and I'm capable of following links, so I decided to reconstruct as much of it as I could.
 
"Secret Santicorn" works like any other gift exchange - each blogger makes a request for a D&D article, and fulfills one request made by someone else. Many of this year's participants are part of what I consider the GLOG-o-sphere. I believe that the exchange was set up on Discord, so it's possible that some requests were fulfilled there. While I can tell that I don't have all of it, I can't tell how much of it I'm actually missing. It could be as few as 3 entries, or there could be longer chains that are missing.
 
(Note, because of the way the gifts are exchanged, the completed blog entry list is like a circle. I've chosen to start with Throne of Salt, but I could have begun anywhere.)
 
 
On the first day of Christmas, Throne of Salt wrote "Animal Mutation Table" for Dungeon Antology,

On the second day of Christmas, Dungeon Antology wrote "The Rift Unending" for Demogorgonia,
 
On the third day of Christmas, Demogorgonia wrote "The Hyperlight Dragon Kills You in Reverse" for Ten Foot Polemic,
 
On the fourth day of Christmas, Ten Foot Polemic wrote "The Powerglass" for Unreal Star,
 
On the fifth day of Christmas, Unreal Star wrote "Santa's Sack is Full of Guts This Year" for The Die Uncast,
 
...
 
On the seventh day of Christmas, The Whimsical Mountain wrote "Kowloon Planet, High Rise Defenses and More" for Buildings are People,
 
On the eighth day of Christmas, Buildings are People wrote "Sci-Fantasy Extraterrestrial Race" for wr3cking8a11,
 
...
 
On the tenth day of Christmas, Unlawful Games wrote "The Magician plus Bonus" for SherlockHole,
 
...
 
On the twelfth day of Christmas, Rogue's Repast wrote "The Alchemist's Basement" for The Bogeyman's Cave,
 
On the thirteenth day of Christmas, The Bogeyman's Cave wrote "Ke'Sik Locales and Encounters" for Dungeonliar,
 
On the fourteenth day of Christmas, Dungeonliar wrote "Codpiece Crafting" for Tales of Absolute Doom,
 
On the fifteenth day of Christmas, Tales of Absolute Doom wrote "Unicorn, GLOG Race-as-Class" for The Bottomless Sarcophagus,
 
On the sixteenth day of Christmas, The Bottomless Sarcophagus wrote "4d12 Supernatural Mystery Clues or Occult Sacrifice Components" for Hmmm Marquis,
 
On the seventeenth day of Christmas, Hmmm Marquis wrote "Mothership Culture Tables" for Throne of Salt,
 
... and a partridge in a pear tree!

Links to Play Reports

Not that long ago, Papers & Pencils posted an introduction to a new batch of "actual play" or "play report" posts, and it got me thinking about all the excellent play reports I've read in the OSR blogosphere over the years.

In my efforts to collect the links below, I've also come up with a couple recommendations about writing play reports.

First, it really helps if you tag/label your posts.

Ideally, tag your posts both with whichever "actual play" synonym you're using, as well as a second tag with the name of the campaign. Sometimes it's nice to see all of someone's play reports together, and sometimes it's nice to see the play reports for one campaign interwoven with posts laying out setting materials for it. Without tagging, it's very difficult for anyone to find your old reports. At best, they can try to expand all the month and year folders in your archive, and look for post titles that sound like they might be actual play. The gold standard, if you feel up to it, seems to be to create a static page of links to all the reports in a single campaign, so that people can easily read them in order.

On my own blog, the games where I'm the referee are tagged as session reports, and the games I play in are tagged as play reports.

Second, narratives are easier to read than transcripts. If you want to quote yourself or your players directly, be warned that a little goes a long way, and a lot is probably too much.

Third, practice every good writing skill you know. Some of these reports I like much more than others. Another time I might try to understand what separates my favorites from the ones I like least. For now, let's say that it's probably best to go with a conversational style. Some people can write within-fiction accounts well, either fictional news report from within the campaign world or fictional first-person narratives allegedly written by player characters - but it's my impression that those are more difficult to do well than talking through it in plain language. Frequent paragraph breaks are your friend; a wall of text is not. The right amount of detail is a balancing act, but it's probably better to highlight a few amusing anecdotes and summarize things that happened in a straightforward fashion. Personally, I also enjoy hearing from other referees how they made certain decisions and rulings as a kind of post-mortem, but the absence of that analysis also won't doom you.


Jeff's Gameblog
Probably the first "actual play" reports I ever read were written by Jeff Reints. As far as I know, the first campaign he blogged about was his Cinder campaign. A few years ago, he probably would have been most famous for his Wessex campaign, also known as "The Caves of Myrrdin". More recently, you might have heard of his Vaults of Vyzor campaign. I really love the fake old first-person dungeon crawler CRPG graphics he put together for his Vyzor posts. You can see an example below. (Jeff's players also create a lot of maps and art, and he posts a lot of it in the session reports. It livens them up even more.) Jeff doesn't tag his play reports separately, but he does tag them with the names of his campaigns, so you'll see the reports alongside all the things he creates for them. It was much shorter lived, but he also ran a few sessions of Doom of the Jaredites, a hexcrawl based on the Mormon myths about the lost tribes of Israel settling in the American southwest.
   

   
Roles, Rules, & Rolls
Roger ran at least two campaigns that I'm aware of. One was to send players into the Castle of the Mad Archmage megadungeon. The other was his Trossley campaign. Roger tags the campaigns, but not the play reports. Over the course of those two campaigns, he wrote his own Cellar of the Castle Ruins dungeon level, that I believe fits directly above the CotMA. Frankly, it's worth checking out everything in his "Rules and Tools" sidebar. You can see a map of the Cellar below.
   

 
Telecanter's Receding Rules
Telecanter didn't start out tagging any of his posts. If you browse his archive, you can find a number of early play reports by looking for entries that have the same name, followed by a Roman numeral, for example in September 2009, he has a series of posts about a game he called Epithalamium. Later, he started tagging his play reports as either post-session narratives or post-mortems. These overlap a lot, and most reports are tagged with both, but there are a few you'll only see by looking at one or the other. Like Roger, a lot of Telecanter's games featured a dungeon of his own making, the Coastal Caves, which is in the one-page dungeon format. You can see an image of the map below. Telecanter wrote a lot of really interesting free content, and I highly recommend checking out the links along the top of his blog, all of the really, but perhaps especially the DM Aids.
 

 
Dreams in the Lich House
John's blog is pretty much just setting creation and play reports, and the settings he creates for his campaigns are all pretty memorable and interesting. He doesn't tag play reports separately, so you'll find them interspersed among his campaign materials. His Gothic Greyhawk campaign is the oldest one I'm aware of him writing about. I started reading his blog while that one was coming to a close and his next campaign was getting started. It's one I've written about before, the famous Black City campaign, set in an alien city on a frozen island in a north sea, explored by pirates and vikings. Next he spent a fair bit of time building a Harrow House campaign, but I don't think there are actually any play reports in there. Instead I think he ran an ancient Greek themed version of the same idea, which became his Taenarum campaign. He ran one of the only Dwimmermont campaigns I've seen. More recently he started a 5e Illyria campaign, although it didn't last long. If you were going to check out additional materials on John's blog, I'd definitely recommend looking at the collected links for the Black City project.
   

 
Hill Cantons
Chris writes about his game sessions using a fictional news gazetteer. Usually he ledes with rumors and information to set up the next session, but usually follows up with information about what happened at his table recently. He also ran a Traveller campaign that he wrote about too. I've praised Chris' writing about undercity pointcrawls before. Another very cool idea of his is the Chaos Index, which allows player hijinks to cause escalating metaphysical disruptions to the campaign setting.
 

   
Tales from the Sorcerer's Skull
Most of Trey's recent play reports take place in his own wonderfully Oz-ian Land of Azurth setting. (It reminds me a lot of Wampus Country, as well.) Trey seems to frequently use well-known adventures, but re-skin them. Most recently his players visited a Yellow-Submarine-themed Misty Isle of the Eld, and before that they went to Castle Amber. Trey has a couple of books that collect his Weird Adventures and Strange Stars settings. He's currently working on something with Silver-Age-style supervillains, and (much beloved by me) his slowly accumulating science fantasy setting. The map below comes from his unnamed science fantasy world.
 

 
Tales of the Grotesque & Dungeonesque
Jack meets my gold standard for play report tagging. All his play reports share a common tag. Each play report is also tagged with the campaign it took place in. And then his two longest-running campaigns - Krevborna and Umberwell - both have static pages so you can find all the reports in chronological order. I've actually played in Jack's Umberwell campaign.
 
For any of these play reports, good writing helps, but it's probably also important that your session was lively and your players enjoyed the experience. I don't think there's any writing style in the world that could make it enjoyable to read about the kinds of online games where you explore two rooms, spending half the session trying to solve a puzzle with no clues, and the other half in excruciating slow combat. Jack's sessions (that I've played in at least) typically involve a fair bit of exploration and investigation to gather clues, with a climactic battle at the end once you understand enough to confront and fight the source of the mystery.
 

 
Dungeon of Signs
Gus labels both his actual play reports and tags the individual campaigns they belong to. His play reports are mostly divided between four different campaigns. The first campaign Gus ran was based on the Anomalous Subsurface Environment, although it mostly took place in the campaign world outside the famous megadungeon, rather than inside it. His second campaign (or family of campaigns) is based inside his own HMS Apollyon setting. Gus also played in a Wampus country campaign (hosted, unsurprisingly, by Erik from the Wampus Country blog) and a Pavelhorn campaign (hosted by Brendan from Necropraxis). Gus wrote quite a few dungeons and adventures, and you can find them on his PDFs to Download page.
   

 
Monsters & Manuals
Nomisms writes lots and lots of setting material, including his well-known Yoon-Suin setting, but he has relatively few actual play reports. (He may have slightly more than I realize, because he tags his campaigns, but not his play reports, the two I found here are campaigns that only exist as actual play.) His Cruth Lowland campaign is, I think, set in a kind of Dark Ages northern Britain. Three Mysterious Weirdos takes place in a fantasy Edo Japan, much like his Valleys of the Winter People setting materials. Some other fun settings he's developed over time on the blog are Behind Gently Smiling Jaws, an Inception-style campaign that takes place in the mind of a dreaming immortal crocodile; New Troy and There Is Therefore A Strange Land, both of which are high-fantasy with fairy knights and interdimensional travel; and two I'm especially fond of - a planetcrawl through fantasy moons of Jupiter, and The Fixed World, where different parts of the world are always the same time of day and the same season, so Always-Winter-Always-Morning is near Spring-Morning and Winter-Noon, etc. You can see his map of it below.
   

 
In Places Deep
Almost all of Evan's play reports are from his long-running Nightwick Abbey campaign. If you've heard of Evan before, it's probably because of Nightwick, which you can see a partial map of below. I briefly played in one of Evan's online games, maybe a session or two, in his ancient Mesopotamia inspired Uz setting. More recently, Evan's written a couple of good retrospectives about what it takes to run a megadungeon campaign for as long as he has. Like Hill Cantons, most of the play reports here take the form of within-campaign fictional news reports. (I don't know the best way to assemble players for an open-table online campaign, but putting out a call for players on his blog seemed to work for Evan the time that I played.)
 

 
Hack & Slash
Courtney's session reports are mostly from awhile ago, and most of them are transcripts rather than summaries. Unfortunately, we don't get to see any of the actual play that goes into his Numenhalla megadungeon, pictured below. Courtney's blog shares a lot of his thoughts on player agency, and his great love for dungeon tricks and traps. Recently he's been publishing Numenhalla in segments, alongside advice for running a resource-management heavy megadungeon campaign using 5e.
   

   
Unofficial Games
Zzarchov's recent play reports are from his Xanthandu campaign, seen below, which I believe is set in a kind of fantasy Polynesia, or at least some sort of fantasy tropical island with a French colonial governor. A few are Neoclassical Geek Revival games (for which he also has example-of-play transcripts, which I am given to understand are lightly fictionalized versions of real events, emphasizing the use of his houserule mechanics). Zzarchov also played in Evan's Nightwick Abbey game, so some reports on that appear as well. If you recognize Zzarchov's name, it might be because he has written quite a few adventures, including Scenic Dunnsmouth, which uses dice-drops and playing cards to procedurally generate a Lovecraftian village, and Price of Evil, which uses similar techniques to generate random Gothic haunted houses. I'm also quite fond of his "seed tables" for generating random wilderness hex contents. These are each three related 1d8, 1d6, and 1d4 tables, where rolling triples 1-4 or doubles 5-6 gives additional results, which I think is a smart use of the dice.
   

 
False Machine
Patrick's earliest actual play posts are all his adventures in other people's campaigns. He mostly wrote these as first-person within-fiction narratives. More recently, his posts are about games he's running. First in his Islands of the Imprisoned Moon campaign, which I think takes place in a fantasy Polynesia, and second in his Syr Darya campaign set in Nomisms from Monsters & Manuals' Yoon Suin. His most recent post covers something like 11 sessions in one long go. I've mentioned Patrick's Deep Carbon Observatory on here before, and he also wrote Veins of the Earth (among others).
   

 
Blog of Holding
Paul has only a couple groups of play reports. He has one series of actual play in a setting based on the fictional game Mazes & Monsters. He has another series of play reports from a game he played with D&D designer Mike Monard. Paul doesn't really tag any of his posts. Those two series are unusual because they are tagged - but my favorite group of his play reports aren't. My favorite is Paul's "Downton & Dragons" campaign which combined D&D with Downton Abbey, and took place in four parts. You might have heard of Paul from his project to turn D&D's "random dungeon generator" into a dungeon map.
 

   
The Alexandrian
Justin's play reports all take place in his Ptolus campaign. After each play report, he also posts a post-mortem talking about some gamemastery decision he made for the session. Justin's blog also meets my gold standard (and may actually represent the high-water mark for organization) since he not only tags his play reports, and his post-mortems, and the campaign itself (so that you can view both together), he also has an index page linking to each entry. Justin's blog is also a treasure trove of good advice and interesting ideas, and he wrote the "Halls of the Mad Mage" dungeon that I've used on a couple occasions.
 

 
Planet Algol
Probably the best way to read Planet Algol's play reports is to go over to the sidebar of his blog, scroll down past the images, and start at the beginning of his "Algol Adventures" links. However, he has more play reports than show up in the sidebar, and there is a tag you can use to find them. While you're there, it's probably worth checking out his page of links to many of his campaign setting materials.

Henchman Abuse
Anomalous Subsurface Environment was one of the first OSR megadungeons, and I remember seeing someone point out that the guy who wrote it also had a hilarious blog where he wrote about his players exploring the place. It's really good. Pat does tag his play reports, but honestly, most of his posts are play reports, and the relatively few that aren't are all about him designing rooms and traps and monsters.
 

 
People Them with Monsters
Jeremy didn't write a lot of session reports, but they were mostly related to his evocative Outland campaign setting. Outland really captured my imagination, especially with the cool house rules document and cool character sheet. You can see a map of the setting below. Outland was similar to one being outlined by another blogger on the now-deleted blog called "A DM's Tale" (or something pretty similar). Both settings were human-focused, but had things like morlocks and demons rather than elves and goblins. It helps that Outland has a good name, for sure, but I liked the variety of weirdness he was creating (and I appreciated his willingness to admit in his reports when things didn't go the way he'd hoped). Today you might know Jeremy from his very helpful DCC reference document.

In their own ways, I think Planet Algol, ASE, and Outland are all inspired by or were responses to Geoffrey McKinney's Carcosa setting. Carcosa came out a little before my time. By the time I started reading gaming blogs, Geoffrey had already deleted his and gone into semi-retirement. I wasn't there to see how people first reacted to his setting. I think I first read about it in some RPG trivia post that listed it alongside FATAL and The World of Synnibarr. But for people who were around at the time, it seems like the combination of sci-fi, fantasy, and weird horror tapped some deep vein of interest and inspiration. Which is probably why Carcosa is still interesting and still popular today. It's also why I still find Planet Algol, Henchman Abuse, and People Them With Monsters worthy of revisiting.

 
Dungeonskull Mountain
Paul's play reports are divided between two main campaigns. His more recent one is his Rifts misadventures campaign. Before that, he had a Demon Verge campaign, which was based on an idea Jeremy from People Them With Monsters also had - to use Dwarfstar games' Demonlord boardgame map as a wilderness hexmap. This is an idea I love, and so I really enjoyed reading Paul's reports on his campaign there.
 

   
Redbox Vancouver & Redbox Niagra
These aren't individuals' blogs, they're blogs maintained by D&D clubs. They're connected to, or share members with (I think?) Planet Algol, The Mule Abides, and the whole Dungeon World scene.
 
I first learned about them because RBV played some sessions in the Anomalous Subsurface Environment as part of their White Sandbox campaign (check session 40 to see what I mean). Poking around, I discovered that their Black Peaks campaign included adventures in Stonehell, and that they had a brief Planet Algol campaign as well.
 
Separately, reading about Barrowmaze on Discourse & Dragons led me to RBN and their ongoing campaign through Greg's dungeons, including now Forbidden Caverns of Archaia (Which is great, because Greg doesn't tag his play reports - there are plenty of entertaining adventures, but you really have to scour his archive to find them.)
 
It's really fascinating to read these guy's play reports, because they're clearly interested in old-school gaming, and obviously getting together frequently to play old-school D&D, and yet they're socially almost entirely disconnected from the corner of the OSR scene that I'm most familiar with. Reading their reports is like looking into some parallel world.
   

   
Savage Swords of Athanor
Doug's is the last of the old blogs in the "so old they're now defunct" section of my list. I think all of his play reports take place in his pseudo-Roman setting of Estarion. Like Jeremy from People Them With Monsters, he also has a cool house-rules document. In the sidebar to his blog, Doug also has a series of setting documents you can download. They're less like zines and more like a broadsheet or gazetteer, but still kind of cool and worth checking out, especially if ancient Rome is your thing.
 

 
Papers & Pencils
As I mentioned up at the beginning of this post, Nick is the one who inspired me to kick this whole list off. He doesn't actually tag his play reports, but he does maintain an index for each campaign, linking to each session in order. His first campaign was Dungeon Moon, which was huge and probably over-ambitious, and I like that he talks with humility about what he wanted to do and what went wrong. While it was too hard to run as a judge, if Gus from Dungeon of Signs is any indication, the players all enjoyed the depth and scale of the place. Nick's second campaign was On a Red World Alone, which was set on Mars, the eponymous red world. His most recent campaign, and the one whose index he just published recently is Fuck the King of Space, where the goal and attitude are pretty much exactly what you'd expect from the name. I like science fantasy and even just regular fantasy set in space, so I'm particularly fond of that aspect of Nick's GMing. In terms of referee advice, Nick's also written a list of post-game questions for the ref to ask themselves to help guide preparations for the next session. Several new bloggers a little further down my list have adopted these and started adding them to the end of their own session reports.
   

 
Bernie the Flumph
Josh's play reports tend to alternate between a campaign set in Sine Nomine's Silent Legions, and various DCC adventures. I've played online in a game Josh was running once, set in his own Sanctum of the Snail adventure. I enjoy Josh's love for mollusks, and his personal quest to stat up the Flumph in every ruleset he can.

 
Against the Wicked City
Except for one early post about playing D&D with his toddler son, all of Joseph's play reports are about a group of players collectively known as Team Tsathoggua, who've been adventuring in a fantasy Southeast Asia that includes the Island of Purple-Haunted Putrescence and Qelong. Joseph's players are full of schemes, and seem to be constantly trying to set themselves up as local rulers. Joseph's campaign materials outside this game mostly focus on his linked Wicked City and Great Road settings, which are part of a fantasy Central Asia. He also writes reviews, mostly of horror-themed adventures and rulesets, most recently a series of posts about the newest version of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. You might also know his essay on the aesthetics of ruin, or his collection of weird character classes that's available to download from his sidebar.
 

   
Coins & Scrolls
Skerples has an ongoing campaign with a fairly stable group of players. Over time, his play reports have transitioned from being set in his own Tomb of the Serpent Kings and Steam Hill dungeons to taking place in his version of The Veins of the Earth. Skerples is notable for being very into accurate medieval and feudal history, while running a game where most of his players are insect people. (Technically his list of player races includes many non-insect options, but in practice, his games end up feeling more weird than if his players mostly played as hedgehogs and mice.) Skerples is also and enthusiastic adopter of the Goblin Laws of Gaming, making him one of the founding members of what I would consider to be the slightly separate GLOGosphere of OSR bloggers. (You can see all of Goblin Punch's GLOG posts here, and find all the pdfs of his rules here.) You may also recall that once when I was reviewing Skerples' vignettes of fantasy epochs, I said something like "Skerples should collect these into a book and offer it for sale." Well, Skerples did in fact collect them into a book and offered it for sale. My influence on the project is parodically denounced in the acknowledgments.
     

 
Throne of Salt
Dan is also part of the new crowd of GLOGosphere bloggers. His recent play reports all take place in his own planes-hopping Danscape setting. His games sound fun, and they remind me of that fact that virtually anyone who runs an online game with an open table that they announce on G+ is going to end up with a veritable "who's who?" of celebrity players. (Well, as "celebrity" as it gets among the OSR blogosphere anyway. But Dan's games end up being just as much celebrity games as Jeff of Jeff's Gamesblog's do.)
 
Eldritch Fields
Tamas has apparently been around for a few years, but I only just found his blog. He doesn't have many play reports, but there's quite a bit of variety, ranging from a Conan-style raid on a wizard's tower, to Cavegirl's Game Stuff's Gardens of Ynn, to his own adventure inside a giant fish.
 

     
The Scones Alone
Brian's blog is pretty new, so he only has a handful of play reports, all set in the same campaign, exploring A Red and Pleasant Land using Into the the Odd rules. Still, his reports are interesting, I appreciate his self-reflection, and there's a soft place in my heart for anyone who attempts to bring in NES games like Dragon Warrior and the original Castlevania as inspiration for their games.
 

 
Bearded Devil
Most of Jonathan's recent blog posts are actual play reports. I heard about Bearded Devil from seeing someone praising his hand-drawn city maps. They are gorgeous. He also draws headshots of all his player characters and NPCs. So I came for the art, but the play reports themselves are lively and interesting. One recent game took place in a city built inside the stomach of a flying psychic whale. Another involved an evil alchemist who was synthesizing fake royal jelly to usurp the throne become the false queen of the wasp-women.
 

   
 
People who run games seem to be much more likely to write play reports than players are. (And the players who write play reports seem to be players who are themselves also judges and referees.) I take notes almost every time I play or run a game, but I admit, I'm not always fast to write them up properly. Probably there are other people in a similar situation.
 
Despite this, I do think there's a real value in people sharing their gaming experiences. Seeing how other people run their games can give you ideas for things you want to do (or things you desperately want to avoid doing!) and it gives you a sense of what the community is like, what other players and other judges are doing at their tables. If you want to know what works well, what's hard to pull off, what people usually pay attention to, and what they ignore, there's no better way to find out than by reading play reports, especially if they come with some sort of post-mortem talking about how the referee prepped, how they made key decisions, or anything else important that came up during play.
 
I really like learning what's unique about people's home campaigns, but I think it's also quite valuable to see what happens when two different judges or two different groups play through common dungeons, or use two versions of the same campaign setting. First because it's important for a community to have a shared repertoire and language, a shared collective memory of key or formative events, and secondly because it's by seeing how different people interpret the same game text that you really learn how the game is played, you really see what's possible within the structures the game establishes.
 
In addition to post-mortems, I also really like to see lists of the player characters and retainers, lists of encounters/combats, lists of treasures found, and lists of XP awarded. Papers & Pencils' list of post-session questions might also be catching on. I find that these kinds of summaries are a good GM-aide (I often don't know how much experience to award until after I've gone through the list of everything the players did while writing up the report), and I enjoy them as a reader as well. Not only do they help me keep track of all the moving parts of the session report, they again show me how different judges adjudicate similar situations.