Sirly Whirly Blog

You might find yourself in the same fortunate situation I found myself in, perhaps without even realizing it, where more players want to explore your setting than you can comfortably fit around a single table. And where some of those players would actually make for great GMs themselves. This post describes a way for multiple players and GMs to mix up who plays with whom for each session, without the need to syncronize notes. It follows my principles for a distributed campaign style .The GMs each control their own region within a shared setting, and information only travels between those regions through the player characters. Once someone starts GMing, they are free to do their own thing without needing to worry about what’s happening in the other regions. But at its best, a distributed campaign makes the GMs eager to affect other regions through the player characters, and delighted by what the players bring into theirs, for better or worse. Perhaps another region has been plagued by a ...

 Last week I ran the Wildsea. Next week I'll run Mythic Bastionland. The week after I'll run The Electrum Archive. A week ago I hadn't read any of the games' books, and some weeks I only have an hour's worth of reading time. Here's how to get a game to the table quickly, with a twist at the end. Illustration by Hairic under CC4.0 1. Don't read the book cover-to-cover. Go straight to the index, glossary and play sheets (such as character sheets, GM sheets and a quick rules reference). The more RPGs you've played, the more you'll already be familiar with the concepts of a new one. Ignore sections you're already familiar with, and ignore sections that you can avoid during your first session. 2. Ignore sections that you can avoid during your first session. D&D5e has separate 'play modes': exploration, travel, downtime and combat. If you're in a pinch, you could skip the sections on travel and downtime and start your session by locking...

Illustration by Emiel Boven under  CC BY 4.0 After playing Exquisite Biome by Caro Asercion , I had the feeling its overall approach to worldbuilding would work very well for all sorts of situations. So I jotted down a more generalised game on the back of an envelope. Soon, I got the chance to apply it. My Mothership players brought back new genetic materials, and they wanted to bioengineer them into solutions for their luxury ship. At the moment, it was being forced to survive indefinitely in deep space, which it wasn't built to do at all. I thought it would be fun to just do a worldbuilding game for a session, in which the players think of how the ship changes over a span of decades, as its crew uses their available means to adapt to deep space survival. It was a great session, so I've written the steps down, with some wording adapted from  Microscope by Ben Robbins . We'll set up a big picture , the type of things we will  focus on, lenses  through which to insp...

For the last year-and-a-half my campaign style across various games has converged to something I've started to call a 'distributed campaign style'. It's an open table, episodic sandbox where multiple GMs can run adventures in the same living world without anyone needing to manage its cohesion, allowing GMs to focus their energy on the adventure at hand. It assumes OSR principles of play and takes inspiration from other sandbox campaign styles such as West Marches.  Agenda behind a distributed campaign Here's why I've been growing towards a rather specific campaign style: for a while now I've been a regular GM at a local public RPG night and have fallen in love with that format. In this context, there is an agenda that I hold in high regard. Always open to newcomers. Anyone can wander in and join to find new games and people to play them with. Standalone sessions.  Looking for something fun to do just for the night is a valid reason to join. So each session ...

I played Incarnis as a 2-player game. Turns out, that's a very quick way for myth creation, also known as mythopoeia. Mythopoeia is the act of making a myth. It was my core principle behind designing Incarnis: playing the game should empower to be a myth maker. With the truest artisanship, from nothing, Brahlyt made itself. A being and a place at once, Brahlyt basked in the glow of its own being in a state of blissful wholeness. Then, one day, Brahlyt spoke to itself. It presented itself with a beautiful, simian creature, formed from its own essence. 'Look what I made us,' Brahlyt said. And Brahlyt answered, 'We do not need anything other than ourselves.'   The simian crumpled up into a malformed little monkey, stooped and bow-legged. Heart-broken at the dismissal of this love letter to itself, Brahlyt sliced a stone tablet from its centre, and the god split into two; Brahl, god of senses, and Yt, god of craft. Yt clutched the stone tablet to himself as Brahl shriek...

Since December I've been running Mausritter on Wednesdays at the RPG night in a local restaurant. It's an open table where each session different players can sign up and drop in. A session takes up 3 hours, and I aim to make each session self-contained, so that players looking for a one-off have a good time. To facilitate this, I've picked up some methods along the way. Maybe they're of use. 📅 Synchronized calendars When a week passes in real time, it passes in game time too. The same is true for the start of a new season. This simplifies high-level time keeping and allows for a full rest in between sessions. 😱 Flight response Mouse knights go where other mice won’t. But even you have limits. 15 minutes before the session ends, you are overwhelmed by the session's building threats and you gain the Flight Response condition. This ensures expeditions are contained within a single session and raises the urgency to seize the available time. 📣 The knight's call A...