Silksong & Monkey Island Meet Aliens: My Own Kooky Appendix N

By JimmiWazEre

Opinionated Tabletop Gaming Chap

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TL;DR:

My own “Appendix N” blends Stephen King, Terry Pratchett, Alien, Robocop, Monkey Island, and Hollow Knight into a stew of survival, satire, exploration, and corporate dystopia. These influences shape how I run games: players face real risks, moral greys, teamwork challenges, and a world that keeps unfolding the more you explore.

What Is Appendix N?

Back when, a million years ago when D&D first came out, one Gary Gygax included in the rules something called ‘Appendix N’. This was meant to represent something akin to his reading list to help nascent DM’s (who’d never seen D&D or any other RPG before) to understand the themes and vibes required to run D&D according to the intended vision of the authors.

Fast forward to today and it’s a neat little historical artefact for nerds to pour over and count off how many items they’ve personally consumed.

This week, I thought it’d be cool to share my own personal Appendix N (or perhaps ‘Appendix DMT’) for no better reason than to share a little bit about myself. This covers not on thematic things I like, but how these cultural artefacts guide my person GM style.

Let’s get crackin’!

Appendix DMT

The Gunslinger By Stephen King

The first book in King’s Dark Tower series is a favourite of mine, it tells the story of Roland Deschain, the last of the Arthurian Gunslingers, (essentially cowboy paladins) and his pursuit of the nefarious ‘man in black’ as he flees across the desert.

The book explores Roland in his anti-hero phase, where he continually has to struggle with the consequences of the sacrifices he makes (namely in other people) in order to achieve his ends.

I like the moral greyness here. The fact that there’s no easy ‘good’ option is something that I like to carry forwards into my games, making sure that my players don’t always get easy black and white choices in front of them.

IT By Stephen King

I read a lot of King, OK? Anyway, IT was the first King book I read, and I’ve always loved it. I love how Pennywise is presented as this mocking force of nature, but that his weakness (the unwillingness of his victims to be intimidated) is apparent from the start, and telegraphed in how he goes out of his way to ensure that his victims are always properly terrified before who goes in for the kill.

This is a great lesson for GMs, as it keeps games fair because it avoids designing arcs where players are spoon-fed the monster’s weakness at a pre-planned point, and instead leave it entirely up to them to connect the dots in their own time.

The other inspiration IT has upon me is the idea of the plucky underdog. At its core, this is an OSR principle, that an underpowered character can win the day not through raw toe to toe power, but through cunning and guile.

Mountain Survival By Edward Packard

I think this was my older brother’s - kicking about my childhood home in the late 80s. It’s a ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ book about: “You and your pilot; Jake Mckay [iirc] are flying over the Canadian Rockies, when all of a sudden the engine begins to splutter.” What follows is an interactive story about the survival choices you make as you attempt to navigate the wilderness on foot and find rescue for yourself and the injured Jake.

Invariably, many decisions lead to your untimely death. I distinctly remember a brutal choice about climbing up either the left, right, or middle of a crevasse and one of the choices leads to a boulder falling and wiping you out mid climb!

Mostly though, the choices you make are logical and well telegraphed allowing you to make an informed decision, and this is a principle that I like to carry through to my game. The risks are real, often fatal - but never a gotcha, never (ironically) ‘rocks fall, you die’.

Moving Pictures By Terry Pratchett

Compared to the others in this list so far, this ones going to come out of left field a bit I suspect :) Thing is, I like comedy and satire done well. Now, I’m far from a comic master, barely a comic novice, but what I take from Pratchett’s work here is the sparing introduction of silly and tension busting NPCs.

Mr. “cut me own throat“ Dibbler, the sausage in a bun salesman is brilliant, introduced carefully and not over used - making him easily one of my favourite characters in the book and a golden inspiration for a handful of similar characters of my own. Such as Bombastic Barry, and his brilliant bazaar of bodacious baubles and bewitching bric-a-brac, a joy to play and reintroduce at least once per campaign as part of my ongoing ‘Barry-verse’.

Alien

OK, leaving books behind now and moving onto films - Alien is a massive influence on me, I find corporo-dystopias to be a really terrifying and interesting sandbox to explore, and the idea that the real monsters aren’t the creatures crawling around in the vents, but rather your fellow humans, screwing you over for a payday.

It’s bleak as hell, but I always like to hold onto this whole ‘the good guys are actually the bad guys’ trick in my back pocket for deployment from time to time.

Robocop (1987)

More corporate dystopia and now with a healthy dose of satire. Robocop is a masterclass of combining the two to great effect without compromising the integrity of the film. In fact, the satire only serves to underline the absurdity of the fascist corporate oligarchy that the American system has descended into.

Thank goodness that’s just a work of fiction though. Right guys? Right? FFS.

The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)

That whole Mines of Moria scene, dude… it’s easily the most tense element of the entire franchise for me and it reduces our hard as nails heroes to mere mortals, running for their lives as they face the consequences of their mistakes.

Hell, even Gandalf ‘dies’, underlining the whole new ethos that I bring to the table every time - my players aren’t invincible and sometimes running is not only necessary, but also tense and great fun.

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The Secret of Monkey Island

Did you ever play this? Gem of an adventure game back in the 90s, I had it on my brother's Amiga. Easily one of my favourite games of all time - a classic that just keeps giving the more I go back to it!

But what do I take away from it for my GM style? Certainly not the linearity of the problem and solution loop, that goes against most of my GMing ideals, so I guess the key thing is its sheer irreverence, and parody.

Everything is a joke, normally grounded in pop culture. I think it's fine to take some of that and bring it into a game, so long as you don't over use it.

The other thing of course is Pirates! Definitely my favourite swashbuckling subject matter, and something that set me on a life long path for appreciating all things 1715 Caribbean!

World of Warcraft

I was deep down the WoW rabbit hole back when it first came out, up until the Cataclysm expansion where despite some cool new features, like instanced story telling, the game definitely started being dumbed down for the masses.

Which should tell you what I take from it; difficulty and the reliance on roles and teamwork to overcome threats. That's so much more interesting to me than modern games and TTRPG design which instead focus on these ‘one man army’ character builds.

If the problem you dish out as a GM can be solved by one PC’s character sheet in an instant, then the problem has failed to be interesting.

Faster than Light

I've lost so many hours to this one, it's a rogue-like where the idea is that the game is difficult and you're going to lose often, and each time you'll start again and have a blast. Learning, and getting better with each iteration.

For me, the key point to take away is that losing shouldn't be unfun. When players die, and have to roll up something new then it should feel like an opportunity and not a punishment.

How do I think you achieve that? Don't rely on deep character stories and arcs, let that stuff come naturally over the game. If there's no preplanned character arc to lose then players willingness to accept a new character is hugely improved.

Hollow Knight: Silksong

If you've not played Silksong or it's forebear; Hollow Knight then I pity you my friend! It's such a great example of a modern day metroid-vania.

But what is that and why's it relevent? Well, a metroid-vania game has a focus on exploration, hitting dead ends, exploring again, unlocking new solutions, backtracking and then using those solutions to progress at a previous dead end.

This is a framework we can carry carefully into TTRPGs. Not necessarily in the sense of locking progress away behind a predefined solution, but rather in keeping locations fresh and interesting for the players to visit many times and find something new each time - like a dungeon where the players return later with new knowledge/items, revealing paths that weren’t options before.

Conclusion

So that's it - my appendix N. What's yours? Answers below the line, folks. I look forward to reading them.

Hey, thanks for reading - you’re good people. If you’ve enjoyed this, it’d be great if you could share it on your socials - it really helps me out and costs you nothing! If you’re super into it and want to make sure you catch more of my content, subscribe to my free monthly Mailer of Many Things newsletter - it really makes a huge difference, and helps me keep this thing running!

Catch you laters, alligators.

How I’m Laying The Foundations Of A Great Pirate Borg Campaign

By JimmiWazEre

Closeted Pirate. With many opinions on tabletop games.

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TL/DR:

Pirate Borg grabbed me like a sea curse and hasn’t let go. Here’s a look at how I’m preparing my first campaign

Why Pirate Borg?

I picked up Pirate Borg (PB) on a whim after seeing a few favourable reviews on YouTube, I was out of town and in a LGS and there it was. It’d have been rude not to. Scanning through it on the train journey home I was really pulled in with it’s evocative vibes and rules-lite grounding. I was reminded of the old Monkey Island games I used to play on the Amiga.

It’s consumed me! I’ve gone in deep down the special interest hole, consuming every piece of quality pirate content I can find:

• Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (the rest are varying degrees of beautiful garbage - fight me!)

• Black Sails on Netflix

• The Lost Pirate Kingdom (a short docu-drama series on Netflix)

• The Pirate History Podcast on Spotify

• Real Pirates Podcast on Spotify

• The Republic of Pirates by Colin Woodard

• On Stranger Tides by Tim Powers

• Countless YouTube videos on the differences between Sloops, Brigs, and Frigates - fore and aft sails vs square rigged sails, how they work. What a “Jib” is. Blackbeard, Benjamin Hornigold, Black Sam Bellamy, Charles Vane. The list goes on, and I love it all!

I especially love the idea of taking all that and then smushing it with other cool things like: the legend of Atlantis, El Dorado, Voodou, Necromancy, Cultists & Cosmic Horror, the Bermuda Triangle & mother trucking big assed beefy sharks! Anachronisms be damned!

Awesome. I have a very good feeling about this!

Structure & World Building

I’ve just finished running the Lost Mines of Phandelver (my thoughts on that will be up soon) and one of my players, Chris, is going to be taking up the GM mantle again in November to run us through Curse of Strahd. This gives us just a couple of months of palette cleansing time, so I’m thinking that sandbox style campaign is the way to go. Fortunately, PB seems to have been built with that in mind.

The developer, Limithron has provided a free campaign hex map of the “Dark Caribbean” and alongside the multitude of official and third party modules, this means that you can just feed the players rumours for one of these modules, and then drop it in as an adventure site in one of the hexes. That’s exactly how I’m doing it anyway.

The Dark Caribbean Campaign Map

Here’s one of the official maps that I’ve relabelled to be player facing, and drawn shipping lanes all over it so that players can make informed decisions about where the best pirating might be found. The GM version of this contains spoilers so I won’t be posting it here, but it’s basically this with a load of adventure sites keyed in.

Campaign Setting

PB comes with a framework of fictional history for you to work with. For my campaign, I’ve taken this and built upon it, whislt still keeping it fairly abridged. There’s a version that’s GM facing, containing facts for the players to maybe find out if they’re interested, and there’s also a common knowledge version (below) that the players will have access to from the start.

Known Facts

It is end of the beginning of the 18th Century. The so called ‘Golden Age of Piracy’ is almost over.

As foretold by the Voodou shamans - the dead have risen. Sailors and settlers vanish. Graves are empty. Ships return crewed by corpses.

A strange white powder called ASH is the most valuable substance in the region. Some use it as a drug, others for occult rituals. It's the main reason anyone still braves the Caribbean, and it’s harvested from the burnt remains of the undead.

The sea has opened up a yawning abyss South West of Cuba, darkening the sky above and inspiring terror throughout the region.

The pirate republic of Nassau still holds out, but barely. It’s one of the last ports free from colonial authority.

Familiar Rumours

An Old Stone Church in Havana is ruled by fanatics. They chant to a “Deep God” and claim death is not the end.

The mythical city of Atlantis has risen in shattered pieces from the Bermuda Triangle. Relics from its ruins fetch a fortune, and many who seek them go mad.

Additionally, strange golden artefacts have found their way to market, which the antiquarians have traced to the lost city of El Dorado.

Blackbeard; the legendary pirate of Nassau was thought dead - killed by the British Navy. But somehow, he’s returned. He is changed; undead, terrible, and now commands a fleet of the dead laying waste to everyone in their way.

Sailors whisper of a lone tribal figure, seen in jungles or cliffside ruins, never speaking, never ageing. His arrival always precedes catastrophe.

Conclusion

So there we go. If you’re one of my prospective players - I hope this tickles your pickle. If you’ve just stumbled upon this, I hope you can find inspiration in some of this.

Hey, thanks for reading - you’re good people. If you’ve enjoyed this, it’d be great if you could share it on your socials - it really helps me out and costs you nothing! If you’re super into it and want to make sure you catch more of my content, subscribe to my free monthly Mailer of Many Things newsletter - it really makes a huge difference, and helps me keep this thing running!

Catch you laters, alligators.