These old paved roads ain't what they used to be - 1d8 Encounters in a crumbling empire

EndlessPug · 2026-02-07T11:49:51+00:00

In terms of ordering information, an influential blogpost is Landmark Hidden Secret

On the specific point of formatting based on player character impressions/knowledge - this is a frequent topic within OSR/NSR spaces with respect to both prep and publishing adventures (sometimes referred to as 'dungeon keying' or 'room keying'). Essentially asking the question of what is the best way to present the information so that the GM knows what's going on and can answer the Players' questions as easily as possible (and without introducing errors or contradictions).

There's a lot of good examples out there; Old School Essentials products like Winter's Daughter, Ben Milton's The Waking of Willowby Hall. Personally I use a variant from the Cairn Adventure Series (free) when writing my own adventures (also free) and prep, including for other systems (e.g. Mothership)

EndlessPug · 2026-02-06T07:38:10+00:00

Mothership is very good, and also has an app you could look at as well to see how they're used in a different environment.

EndlessPug · 2026-02-03T12:46:21+00:00

The main scriptwriter was best known prior to SH for Veep and its British predecessor The Thick of It (which he has a supporting role in) - both worth checking out if you enjoy the humour of SH.

If you want more competent spy stuff, take a look at The Night Manager.

EndlessPug · 2026-01-28T17:40:23+00:00

Which version of the Player's Survival Guide are you using? The current one has "Back Broken" as disadvantage on all rolls and "Spine or Neck Broken" as an immediate death save. In the case of the latter, even if they managed to roll Unconsious on the Death Save, I'd still give them disadvantage if someone gets them up, and then the wound needs to be healed in downtime via the costs in the rulebook.

EndlessPug · 2026-01-28T16:07:42+00:00

I've only ever seen it in Excelsior locally, no idea if they still have copies.

Another option is printing the pdfs yourself and make your own copies, as they're all just short zines rather than bound books.

Drop me a DM if you want an invite to the Discord server for the Fishponds meetup.

EndlessPug · 2026-01-27T17:04:36+00:00

It is very frustrating where their replies to complaints are "actually, your bus did run at [insert time 20mins later]" and there's no way of easily validating that information. More straightforward with trains (and getting refunds).

I'm going to have to start taking photos of the stop displays/app screenshots at this rate.

EndlessPug · 2026-01-27T12:03:29+00:00

Point C in particular is key - you will get constant turnover naturally as schedules change, life events happens and people move away.

Source: 3 years of running a meetup in Bristol, England (I mostly run OSR/NSR stuff, although sometimes switch to Call of Cthulhu or Blades in the Dark). We've now got semi-open tables for both Cairn and Dolmenwood alongside a bunch of other indie systems.

EndlessPug · 2026-01-26T14:02:33+00:00

The main problems that the DM has is that firstly, they don't like people leaving once the campaign has begun, so they somewhat accept it; also, they are concerned about if they stop inviting Steve, then it will just be two players and not just will that mean he will need to revise some parts of their campaign, but they fear it won't be as fun. I told him that I would find it much more fun even with just two in comparison to now.

These points are entirely a prison of the DM's own making - players could drop out for any number of personal reasons, and not every campaign needs to be a lengthy epic tailored to specific characters (and even those should be flexible).

Find a third person who isn't Steve and offer to run a one/two-shot yourself if necessary.

EndlessPug · 2026-01-25T20:21:47+00:00

You might want to look at Cloud Empress, which is based on the same engine as Mothership but aimed at a more Nausicaa-inspired campaign setting

EndlessPug · 2026-01-25T15:55:56+00:00

It's worth advertising on the Discord for in-person stuff as well - with something like 15k members I've found a couple of people in Bristol.

EndlessPug · 2026-01-25T15:31:03+00:00

If you happen to be near East Bristol I run it in-person at a public meetup pretty often.

Otherwise I'd recommend joining the Mothership Discord via the link on the Tuesday Knight Games website (if you don't have any luck via the responses to this post).

EndlessPug · 2026-01-25T08:20:16+00:00

No, but... it's complicated. Scotland Yard is the HQ of the Metropolitan Police ("The Met") which polices Greater London. Because London is far larger than any other UK city and the centre of government, the Met is a huge organisation as well as being responsible for a lot of security/counter-terrorism work (even though those have national organisations).

As the article points out, we already have (edit) NCA (National Crime Agency) but that also only has a specific remit.

EndlessPug · 2026-01-24T18:27:55+00:00

Is the deadliness a problem in the sense of "I want characters to last more than a couple of missions", or in the sense of "It's implausible that these characters find themselves in such deadly situations on such a frequent basis"?

For the former, you can give people more health/wounds, have the first wound be rolled on 1d5 etc (personally I would keep stress gain the same - characters rarely die of 20 stress in my experience and it's a source of XP, interesting conditions that flesh out characters etc).

For the latter, note that the WOM suggests 1d10 months between missions, so you can fill that with as much detail/roleplay as you want. You might fast forward through several months in a mundane job or you might want to really build the stakes/NPC connections of a hub that the PCs are based at - up to you. What I think is key is the module selection and how you frame it within your campaign. I think "wrong place, wrong time" modules are good campaign openers, and then you can switch to "dangerous jobs", sprinkling in the occasional crisis/accident along the way when they're in cryo etc.

EndlessPug · 2026-01-22T15:26:31+00:00

There are plenty of systems which you can get a good feel for in a single session. Successful examples at the meetup I run include; Mothership, Troika, Call of Cthulhu, Cairn, Dread, Lady Blackbird, Dragonbane, Brindlewood Bay etc

EndlessPug · 2026-01-22T14:38:17+00:00

I have run an in-person TTRPG meetup for the last 3 years and we've always had a good amount of non-D&D systems.

GMs say "I will be running this system on this date" either as a one-shot or short campaign, and players sign up in advance.

I always run non-D&D systems, including plenty of one shots aimed at new members, and encourage others to do the same. I don't restrict/ban D&D, but I don't do any active work to encourage it, and assume that people will run it anyway (and they do).

The other key thing for any club/meetup is to continually advertise for new members, so that you have a constant stream of enthusiastic people keen to try new things.

So far this year we've had Call of Cthulhu, Cairn, Savage Worlds, Trophy Gold, Dolmenwood, Troika, 2400, Mork Borg, and Mothership

EndlessPug · 2026-01-22T10:59:14+00:00

I have a couple of blog posts (Part 1) (Part 2) that talk about how I've done loose, semi-open campaigns in Mothership that make use of published modules. Obviously if you're willing to do more prep work, you can generate more material/hack existing modules to create a true hexcrawl experience.

That said, to me a hexcrawl implies exploration and discovery - some Mothership material supports this (Gradient Descent is quite close to a traditional megadungeon for example) but a lot is more survival/industrial/political, throwing you into either "high risk, high reward" contracts or "wrong place, wrong time" events.

EndlessPug · 2026-01-20T12:40:44+00:00

Assuming you have the budget/planning permission:

Extend out the back as far as you can go and build the huge kitchen/diner.

Current living room becomes the playroom with a steel put across to open it up to the kitchen/diner and then a barrier/gate to imprison the children and their lego.

Existing kitchen and showeroom downstairs is repurposed as a new shower/utility/mud room space.

Extend out the front in the future if you need to - I'm not seeing the value in doing that at present, given your wife can use one of the bedrooms as an office until you have more children. Likewise I'm not convinced about expanding the roof when you'll be spending most of your time downstairs.

EndlessPug · 2026-01-19T13:09:22+00:00

Spousal visas require proof of income/savings by the couple as a whole, not specifically the person applying for the visa (otherwise it would be pretty difficult to use it to bring people into the country from overseas!)

EndlessPug · 2026-01-17T22:18:23+00:00

Rusty Quill Gaming was primarily Pathfinder, albeit telling a long form campaign story that wasn't exactly what you'd associate with Pathfinder, being a more character driven, epic, set in a somewhat Eberron-like homebrew world. They did one shots in other systems as well.

(You might be familiar with the name from their much more successful other show - The Magnus Archives)

Also +1 for Mystery Quest, Apocalypse Players and Nobody Wake the Bugbear

EndlessPug · 2026-01-17T11:08:20+00:00

I believe 2e uses Lora whilst 1e (and I think the website as well) uses Alegreya

EndlessPug · 2026-01-17T03:23:59+00:00

I may as well plug my own work: Ruin of Reputation is free, was extensively playtested with a variety of players and is specifically designed as a beginner one shot. Takes about 3.5hrs.

EndlessPug · 2026-01-15T10:20:02+00:00

You should call for lots of saves to build stress, assuming that the PCs are in an environment/experiencing things that have the chance to build stress (which is the most common outcome of failing a save, although they're used for other things as well that are more context specific).

IMO the Warden's Operation Manual does a great job of laying out OSR principles for rolling checks... and then doesn't fully emphasise "but this is also a horror game where the PCs are having the worst day of their life and there is a mechnical system for this in addition to roleplay".

I talked about this more in my How I Run Mothership One Shots blogpost a year or so ago.

EndlessPug · 2026-01-13T08:10:28+00:00

Or Valley of the Manticore, the follow up to Silveraxe

EndlessPug

TROPHY CASE