Exploration & Exorcisms

And why I can't get pumped for the Free Federated Alliance vs the Confederated Commonwealth League

This Week’s post touches on the always contentious issue of exploration incentives in TTRPGs. Here’s where I land at the moment.

So maybe I don't want to add in too many artificial mechanisms to encourage the players to explore. Perhaps that attention should be going toward helping the GM make a world interesting enough that the players want to go and see what's on the other side of the map, rather than going there because a Seer told them to.

Check out the full post here.

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Elsewhere I’ve released a free adventure site for Halloween.

Bit of a primer if you want to check this one out:

This adventure site was written to be used at the table by myself.

It’s presented here in a slightly tidied-up form, but things are still very much presented in broad-strokes. This works for my games, as I enjoy having to improvise to fill the gaps at the table. I encourage anybody trying out this adventure site to try out that style of play.

You might remember it from an actual play I did with the TKG guys a few years ago. The video is busted for the back half of that video but the audio holds out!

Enter The Droner House if you dare.

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Coming Soon

Over on Patreon I’ve been thinking Battletech’s handling of its Factions, and the general lack of excitement I feel for them at this stage of my exploration of the game.

I was speaking in a Discord about how there’s a lot I love about the larger setting, but it took me a long time to really grasp what most of the factions were about, and even then I still don’t feel especially drawn to any of them.

I contrasted this, obviously, to Warhammer/40k where I think I knew which team I was supporting after flipping through my very first White Dwarf. But I've praised the Battletech setting for its groundedness, so I don't think you need to go wacky with this. 

Yeah I made fun of the faction names in my subtitle, and that certainly doesn’t help, but overall I feel like they’re just lacking that hook-factor that makes me excited to play one of them.

I contrasted this with one of my favourite PC game settings of all time. The post will go public next week, but if you check out the current version of Titanic Bastionmechs you might be able to glance at the new factions there and realise which game I’m talking about.

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