I don’t know what to Run Next. I’ve got options. What do you Think?

By JimmiWazEre

Opinionated Tabletop Gaming Chap

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S’up?! - My 5e Lost Mines of Phandelver campaign looks like it’s going to be drawing to a close in the next couple of months, I’ll have a write up of my thoughts on that module as and when.

But this has got me onto thinking about what to run next. Deffo not D&D 5e, I’ve quite had my fill of that system for the time being thankyou!

So, I’ve narrowed it down to two campaign choices - which do you think I should go with?

Campaign Ideas

Shadowdark - Dungeons of Drakkenheim

I came across the Dungeon Dudes’ actual play series a few years ago, and I must confess that I found myself quite getting into it. I liked the grim dark setting and the player driven story style of the adventure - it has a very ‘Mordheim’ vibe about it which tickles my pickle.

The premise is that the city of Drakkenheim has been struck by a magical meteor and now lays in ruin. The residual magic has a mutating effect on the local fauna, creating new beasts and monsters of a Lovecraftian persuasion. However, ‘Delerium’ - the name given to the magical fragments of meteor left about the place, commands a high value in the market, and so there’s no shortage of intrepid adventurers and factions lining up to go a plundering the city ruins.

To cap it off, there’s a power struggle because the royal line has apparently been severed during the incident, with differing factions wanting to install new kings, or hunt down the existing royal family somewhere in the city. Lots of political intrigue to be getting on with.

So it sounds pretty cool, and when they released a campaign book for it (Dungeons of Drakkenheim), I figured it’d be rude not to pick it up!

Sadly, it’s designed for 5e, however now that I’ve got Shadowdark (which is built off 5e, but stripped of all it’s heavy baggage) and the recently completed Shadowdark Monster Conversion kit, I’m thinking that it probably wouldn’t be too difficult to convert the adventure over. Especially since the city of Drakkenheim is sort of a megadungeon, and Shadowdark seemingly seems to be a perfect match.

Mausritter - The Estate

I think I was introduced to Mausritter by Ben Milton over at Questing Beast a few years ago, and I was immediately charmed by it. So I picked up copies of both the core rules and “The Estate” which is a hex crawl sandbox adventure, featuring a dozen or so premade adventures for the different keyed location of the hex map.

The premise is that it’s the familiar D&D trope, except that you’re a mouse, and the world is full of mafioso cats, snakes, owls, rats, and other predatorial critters which essentially puts you at the bottom of the food chain. “The Estate” is a full hex crawl adventure that literally takes place in the property and grounds of a human’s stately home, some some adventures take place in the green house, others in the drainage system or chimney.

It’s built off the rules lite “Into the Odd” system, and aside from the low power level of the player characters, it’s main distinguishing features are that it is classless - your abilities are dictated by your current inventory. Also, you do not roll to hit, all hits are automatically successful, both ways, and it it’s just a question of how much damage.

It’s one of those games that’s been sat on my shelf for a while, having only played it the once with my Wife in a duette, so it’s definitely due it’s time in the sun.

I like it’s inventory system so much that I named it one of my favourite TTRPG mechanics, and built my own D&D house rule off the back of it!

Conclusion

Which gets your vote? Reach out in the comments below and let me know!

Hey, thanks for reading - you’re good people. If you’ve enjoyed reading this, it’d be great if you could share it on your socials, and maybe think about subscribing to the Mailer of Many Things! Either way, catch you later.

Using time as ttrpg currency to press urgency

Hey there, I’ve got a bit of a crazy idea in my head. A few months ago I watched a sci-fi movie called “In Time” starring Justin Trousersnake. It was OK to be honest, the hook was that in a dystopian future traditional currency is replaced with ‘life-time’.

The way this worked, upon birth people were augmented with a system that stopped them biologically aging at the point of early adulthood, but at that exact transitional moment, a clock on their wrist starts ticking backwards, counting down the rest of their lifespan.

This life-time as it’s known, is then traded as a currency, your wages are paid in life-time, and you buy your food and pay your rent with life-time.

The film was attempting to make a very blunt point about the modern low tax, low regulation, free-market Western economy, so of course - this situation empowers those that are ahead to get further ahead. It leads to the lower classes getting paid poverty wages forcing them to turn to loan sharks, gambling and criminal activities to survive.

As far as the film’s story goes, life-time creates frenetic pressure on Mr. Trousersnake as he’s literally in a race against time to save his mum, the girl, and the entirety of society from the evils of cAPiTaliSM.

Using real timers in games

OK, carpark that for a second, because now I’m going to talk about Shadowdark RPG and then rein it all back together again.

There’s a cool mechanic in Shadowdark whereby whenever you light a torch, you set a timer going on your phone for 60 minutes. At the end of the timer, the torch goes out. This serves to keep the urgency up and stop the players from becoming too cautious, it encourages them to take creative risks and makes the game much more action packed.

It’s method contrasts against OSR D&D which tries to solve the same problem, but it instead measures the passage of time abstractly using “dungeon turns” as 10 minute blocks per round of player actions (Modern D&D doesn’t bother with any of this, and just encourages hand waving it away).

While Shadowdark’s real-time method isn’t perfect, since the flow of in-game time rarely matches real-world time, it feels more organic and immersive. Traditional dungeon turns require conscious discipline to do right, and can easily feel rigid and boardgame-like, requiring bookkeeping that can bog down gameplay.

All that said, on balance, if you’re used to abstracting anyway, using real timers won’t break verisimilitude, and the Shadowdark method works well.

OK, so what’s the big idea Jimmi - this blog is meant to be about getting to the point?

OK, OK, sheesh. You’ve probably put two and two together by now, or read the title of this post, so I’ll get to the point.

In sci-fi games, what if we applied ‘life-time’ to track player character wealth? You could have them set a timer on their phone which you could add to and subtract from manually as the situation required.

Players could steal life-time from enemies or have it stolen from them. They might raid a bank where dormant life-time is stored on USB-style devices or loan time to desperate NPCs.

My theory is that, like in Shadowdark, that this would drive the player activity and create a sense of urgency at the table, effectively getting rid of those sessions where everyone mulls around with analysis paralysis.

As a bonus, it’d also take care of having to manually account for the weight and amount of your character’s currency!

Conclusion

Using life-time in this way feels like it could be a game changer, but I’ve not tried it myself yet, so I’m going to integrate it into future games of Mothership to see how I get on with it. Mothership specifically seems like a good fit to me, since the tone of the game is all dystopian future and economic horror anyway, but you might be able to bake it into your fantasy games - magic is a thing! Get in touch if you have any thoughts about it. I’m on Bluesky or you could use my contact form.

Hey, thanks for reading - you’re good people. If you’ve enjoyed reading this, it’d be great if you could share it on your socials, and maybe think about subscribing to the Mailer of Many Things! Either way, catch you later.