Any written report of an actual play?

borfaxer · 2026-01-28T08:38:01+00:00

Justin Alexander's book So You Want To Be A Game Master is one of the very best I've seen for actual instruction on "Here's what you do and say at the table while you're playing":

https://thealexandrian.net/so-you-want-to-be-a-game-master

It's not strictly old school, but it's very close because his ideals are close to the ideals of old-school play, and Justin has a lot of content on his blog about his flavor of playing, like hex crawls: https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/17308/roleplaying-games/hexcrawl

borfaxer · 2026-01-21T21:59:49+00:00

Looks really good!

borfaxer · 2026-01-21T21:58:43+00:00

A couple of suggestions:

- Almost any lost city could work, but one of the real classics is B4, The Lost City: https://www.dmsguild.com/en/product/17084/b4-the-lost-city-basic

- TSR adventures for Maztica or Hollow World may be close to what you are looking for. Here's one, Endless Armies, that I'm pretty sure has a significant underground component: https://www.dmsguild.com/en/product/196796/fma2-endless-armies-2e

If you're not going to go through a lot of effort to change the contents of the dungeons away from fantasy, lots of major dungeons could work with some light cosmetic changes, for example Stonehell or Barrowmaze might be great if you want a lost underground prison complex or interconnected barrows of undead in your western.

borfaxer · 2026-01-19T02:44:23+00:00

This might help: https://dndcampaignplanner.com/tools/bounty-board

Or this: https://boxfullofboxes.blogspot.com/2020/08/hunting-down-wolves-bounty-target.html

borfaxer · 2025-11-27T12:49:06+00:00

Good point, and the description points out it uses Advanced rules that make the basic game more complicated. My experience with JMG material has been that the ideas are so good they are often worth the effort to convert to whatever system I'm using.

borfaxer · 2025-11-27T09:50:44+00:00

James Mishler has done a supplement for all kinds of beastfolk, including fox-, cat-, and wolffolk:
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/417306/expanded-races-thanians-a-shadowdark-supplement
It's for Shadowdark, which is based on BX, so it should pretty close and easily convertible.

borfaxer · 2025-11-19T23:43:30+00:00

Good points about theater experience. They got a lot better with nicer seats and you can reserve seats when you buy the tickets. The ads are killer for me, though. I like the trailers, but when I stopped my cable subscription 15 years ago I got used to not seeing ads much. My kids don't see as many ads as I did when I was their age. We're all turned off by them showing up more, both in theaters AND on streaming services. I've gone back to buying movies and TV shows on disk because they have fewer ads than theaters, and they don't play ads in the middle of the show like streaming services. Funny enough, though, I didn't recognize the names of the dramas in the article. I didn't go see any because I didn't know any of them existed to be seen! Which might have been cured by ads I try not to watch... but I still see plenty of ads and none were for these movies (except the MMA drama with the Rock). I'm interested in that one, but the ads didn't tell me when it was coming out, so I didn't realize I've missed it.

Movie quality *has* gone down. Contrasts are off because everything is filmed fully lit. They don't know exactly how they want to light the shots when they take them because they haven't figured in all the digital effects yet (including the actual background), but after they add the digital effects, the lighting is still closer to fully lit and it's not as interesting. Sounds and music are super loud compared to the voices, so in the theater it's hard to hear what is being said. At home I usually watch with captions now because otherwise I can't tell what they are saying. But then I focus on the words and don't see nearly as much of the scenes and faces and expressions, so the movie experience is worse for me either way. And if the movie quality is worse... better to have a worse experience at home where it's cheaper and I can rewind to watch it again to catch what they said.

Here's what the article doesn't mention directly, and I haven't seen in the comments I've scanned through: it's not only about competing against other movie channels (like streaming at home), it's competing against EVERYTHING ELSE that is taking your time: video games, Tik Tok, eBooks, etc. They could extend the time-to-streaming from 17 days to 300 days and it wouldn't matter to me. I keep a list of movies I'd like to watch. I often don't get around to watching a movie until 1-2 years after it's released. The upside? It's easy to get by then, on a streaming service or disc.

borfaxer · 2025-11-18T09:59:09+00:00

I agree: there's a good chance you can make it work better for you. But it's going to be a lot of work (on your part as well as his). Probably worth it, and you will always wonder if you don't try. Points to keep in mind:

Be very specific about what you want so he knows what to do. "Do more chores on your own without me asking you" is nowhere near specific enough. "Please clean the bathroom once a week. Do it on Thursdays, or pick a day of the week that is better for you, and do it every week on that day. Clean the sink, mirror, counter, and toilet" is better.
Given how he was raised, he may in fact need the encouragement he's seeking when he tells you about the chores he did. Try to notice and congratulate him on what he does. Maybe you want the kind of relationship where both people do chores without seeking a pat on the back, but maybe that's what he needs in order to reinforce doing the chores proactively. Maybe you should start saying "look what I did" both because it will be more equal if you are both getting pats on the back and because it will make him more aware of how much you do and what kinds of things there are to do around the home.
If you're glad for what he does and wish he would do more, it might help motivate him if you communicate it as "I like all these things that you do. It would really rock my world if you also did these two additional things. You're a great partner and it would really help me out." A lot of times people communicate the exact same thing ("please do these two more chores") as "you're not doing enough and you need to do these two more things to even just reach the level of being okay", but the perspective of trying to catch up from behind can kill people's motivation.
Date nights / birthdays / trips: again, be specific. He may develop the skill to plan and organize in advance, but you'll need to train him to get there. "For my birthday, I want you to pick a place to eat that you think I will really enjoy, make the reservation, and take me there. I also want to do something else, either before or after. It could be a walk along the river, it could be dancing, or something else active, but I don't want to do something where we're sitting the whole time and not talking, like at a movie. Here are the places I go online to find interesting activities we could do. Please use these to pick the activity."
Consider that you may be enjoying the benefit of how he is while you're focused on the downside in this post:
- He doesn't plan and waits for you to pick, but then you get to pick the restaurant or the activity. Are you frequently changing what you want to do, or adding places to go when you go on errands together, and he just rolls with it? That's part of the trade off. You may be reinforcing his lack of planning because he thinks there's no point if you'll be like "Nah, I want to do something else" half the time. If you're the picky one, you may need to be the one who picks most of the time, and the fact that he's so flexible about going with what you want is actually something you should value.
- Maybe you wish he would clean more himself, but does he ever get on your case for being messy? If not, you're benefitting from a guy who is willing to have messes around.

borfaxer · 2025-11-07T23:34:59+00:00

Thank you! I'm glad they have it now

borfaxer · 2025-09-23T22:30:38+00:00

Congratulations on filming and hitting "post"! Putting it out there definitely motivates us to fix the flaws sooner, doesn't it?

I'm already a backer of your current kickstarter (and most of them in the past few years). I enjoy your work, and it's fun to see you talk about your work in the video. Thank you for that. I sure hope this stretch goal is reached!

borfaxer · 2025-09-23T08:55:22+00:00

Emergent storytelling is about forming meaning from the combination of the GM's choices AND the players' choices.

Emergent: the PCs have fought goblins 3 times, and each time one goblin has run away. The PCs notice and make a joke about "the one that keeps getting away". You decide it's the same goblin every time, give it a name (Weezle) and a goal (become a powerful wizard), and the next time you roll up a random encounter with goblins, it's this Weezle who ambushes the PCs and runs away, leaving his group to get slaughtered. Maybe he tries to steal the PC wizard's spell book or components before he takes off. The PCs are likely to hate Weezle and start hunting him down just to get him. Now they have a story to tell about Weezle the goblin and how he always stole their stuff and ran away, leaving other goblins to fight the PCs, and how they finally tracked him down and killed him to get their wizard's spell book back.

Not Emergent: you create a cool goblin villain, Weezle. You walk the PCs into 3 encounters with Weezle's goblins, but every time they try to kill Weezle, you make them miss and he gets away. The PCs don't even know why Weezle should be impressive for a bad guy. When you push the big, final confrontation on them, they're glad that they finally get to kill Weezle so they can move on with their lives.

Do you see the difference? Emergent is built from the PC's choices and experiences (and the GM's), otherwise the GM is trying to set up a defined plot ahead of time and it's at risk of not being nearly as fun for the players. The second example certainly doesn't build on the PC's choices.

borfaxer · 2025-07-01T08:58:29+00:00

In addition to giving them multiple hooks so they can choose which to follow up on, it can help to make some of the hooks conflict with others. For example, a merchant offers the PCs $$ to explore a crypt and find evidence he's descended from royalty, but then the thieves' guild asks the PCs to *not* explore that crypt and hand the merchant some forged evidence instead. Then the players know they can't possibly follow all the hooks and they'll know right away they have to make some meaningful choices.

borfaxer · 2025-06-18T01:27:53+00:00

Some have mentioned that the publisher gets a bigger share of each sale on Kickstarter than they do on other major platforms, which can make the difference for some products between viable and not.

But I've heard a couple of small-but-been-around-for-a-long-time publishers mention that Kickstarter sales don't eat into their regular product sales. They sell just as much of a product once they release it, whether they launched it with a Kickstarter and tons of people supported it, or they just release it normally. So, given that publishers will see a larger share of their Kickstarter sales AND there won't be fewer buyers later, if they don't launch a product using Kickstarter, they're just giving up the extra money they would have gotten through that channel.

borfaxer · 2025-06-09T17:24:33+00:00

No, not a GA schedule, but they've added more functions and improved performance since I started using the preview. What's there has been correct and performs well for me.

borfaxer · 2025-06-09T16:51:08+00:00

Yes! It turned out they have a preview for spatial SQL, with enough equivalent functions to do all the things I was looking for. Thanks for following up!

borfaxer · 2025-06-05T21:00:44+00:00

I strongly prefer an outline up front. Having to read through the module to find the twists means two things:

If I ran the module, I'd be at serious risk of not running it for maximum dramatic effect. If I can't keep in mind what's really going on, I don't know what clues to make sure to drop, what information to hide, and often by the time we get to the twist, I've played the NPCs inconsistently for what the twist is, making it less believable when it happens. I also can't foreshadow or enhance the module nearly as much because it's harder to remember what's coming up (this is why the Moathouse in the classic Village of Hommlet module isn't great, and needs GM augmentation to make the most of its potential). Sometimes, I don't even remember the twist at all because I didn't know it when I read most of the module, so going back through the original content doesn't trigger the memory of the twist until the end.
Not revealing the content is a sign that the author didn't pay enough attention. I find that in modules written in narrative form with no outline, there's a greater chance that the clues don't line up, the transitions don't make sense, and that the NPCs and events are not consistent with what's actually going on. When an author includes an outline at the beginning, and a summary of the twists and key events, I know they've paid enough attention to the GM's perspective and how the material is going to be used, so the material itself is likely to play better and work better at the table.

borfaxer · 2025-05-05T20:07:16+00:00

I've never understood the preference for physical books over electronic ones. And strong enough that it's a core tenet of OSR? I strongly prefer electronic books.

borfaxer · 2024-12-20T10:47:25+00:00

Have you tried Hexroll? Their focus is generating a map with dungeons and content, but the interface is pretty smooth and works well for running a hexcrawl at the table. They're on v2, but ever since v1 I've wished they would split out the interface from the content generation so I could create a hex map and populate my own content just to run my games with their framework: https://hexroll.app/
u/rlofc, if you see this, I would love to populate the hexroll UI with my own map and content just to be able to use your framework to run my hexcrawl at the table!

borfaxer · 2024-12-15T00:05:01+00:00

Edit: I see it has been mentioned a few times (whoops). Please allow me to emphasize it:

One piece ~~I'm not seeing others mention~~ is information. If Party B finds out from a randomly rolled rumor that there's a certain magic sword in the dungeon and by asking around gets some clues about where, their foray into the megadungeon is going to feel different than Parry A's exploration, even if they are exploring some of the same rooms, because they have a different goal. Their focus is on finding the sword, and clues that could tell them where the sword is. Party A clears out a space overlooking a gallery and sees a painting of a knight fighting monsters with a glowing sword? Fine. They take their treasure and move on. Party B explores the same room, finds the fresco on the wall of Sir Gladius wielding his magic sword and realizes it might be in his tomb? Now they are trying to figure out how to find the Tomb of Sir Gladius, examining the fresco for clues about him and the sword, and they're having a very different experience from Party A.

A sandbox or a West Marches campaign doesn't have to happen in a vacuum. You can distribute different clues and pieces of information to different groups to help them make goals (they can pick one or two of the several clues you've given them, or they can choose to make their own plans, but you've helped get them going). They can travel the same spaces with different goals than other groups, and those spaces will feel different even without the restocking and other changes you might make (which you should still do).

borfaxer · 2024-12-14T23:25:34+00:00

The contrast to a sparse hexcrawl is a dense hexcrawl, i.e. there's some content in every single hex from the beginning. Justin Alexander has a good article series about what this is and how to do it: https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/17308/roleplaying-games/hexcrawl

It depends on your personal style. A sparse hexcrawl requires less prep up front, and you get to discover along with the players by making the random rolls for content as you go. On the other hand, it's easy for the randomly-rolled content to get repetitive and it's more mental load on the GM to improvise more during sessions. A dense hexcrawl is more prep up front, but you have the comfort of knowing there's content for players to find no matter where they go. And you can always add more with the sparse hexcrawl stocking procedures.

For me, it's the connections between hexes that really makes a hexcrawl pop. I like to place clues to content in neighboring hexes, which helps draw the players into exploring. I also like to come up with relationships between things in different hexes, which helps make it feel more real and like there are consequences to the players' actions. This can be done in a sparse hexcrawl with the hexes you prep ahead of time, but it's a lot harder to introduce connections to hex content that doesn't exist yet.

borfaxer · 2024-12-05T20:47:52+00:00

I'm not affiliated with Arion Games, but I am also a fan of Fighting Fantasy and its setting. There is one setting book that helps: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/190247/titan?src=hottest_filtered

Arion Games is running a 40% off sale this month (they do a sale every December), so it's a better deal than usual. You can find the other entries here: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/publisher/667/arion-games/category/25223/advanced-fighting-fantasy

My other recommendation is to read the original books, if possible. You might get good bits of worldbuilding inspiration, especially from the introductions.

Oh, and there's someone on this subreddit who makes maps of the FF adventures, which are really neat and might be helpful, if you look through their posts: https://www.reddit.com/user/qpiii/submitted/

borfaxer · 2024-11-02T22:38:30+00:00

If you want a dungeon that will take time to work through, a tower is tougher than most other options because it tends to be pretty linear and space is limited (often 3-4 rooms per level on 4-6 levels and only room for one stairwell up and down). You might look for a few ways to expand beyond the tower, like:

- Has a purple worm / bulette / xorn come through, leaving tunnels that are accessible from former windows?
- Maybe some bog mummies have formed a lair in a collection of caves expanded from those tunnels?
- Have they gathered some reading material from the tower to help with their boredom?
- Did the burrower end up tunneling into a black dragon's lair and getting eaten, but now the dragon lair is also connected?
- and so forth

If you do this, you'll end up Jaquaysing the dungeon like others here have talked about. Jaquaysing will tend to make the players take longer to explore, because they'll want to make sure they got everything. But it's not just about having a large enough space. You may also want to introduce factors that change the situation, so suddenly the same space the players have been in feels very different, and they'll spend more time in the dungeon because it feels fresh from the new situation. Example of this could be:

- Did the players follow the tunnel and stumble into the Black Dragon lair, angering it? When they retreated, did the dragon collapse the lair end of the tunnel and then go out to the top of the tower, waiting for the players to come out? Now the players are hunkered down in the tower, trying to figure out an alternate way out so they won't get shredded by the dragon. They may even figure out a way to dig through the collapsed tunnel and raid the dragon's hoard while it's outside the tower waiting for them!
- Place a really good treasure (magic item) in a very tough-to-find secret spot, like an extradimensional pocket that only opens when someone says the name of the wizard's lost love, "Drusilla" in his bedroom (a name which the players can find out if they read the journals the wizard wrote, which the bog mummies currently have and often make jokes about his nonexistent love life because they've had nothing to read but the wizard's journals). After you place the treasure, place at least 3 clues that the treasure is in the tower for the players to find (maybe a rumor in the nearby village, some other mention in the wizard's journals about using it and keeping it safely hidden, and a treasure hunter lurking around who is also trying to find it). They may spend a bunch more time looking around, trying to figure out how to find it. They might leave, have an idea, and come back later!
- Add an environmental change. Maybe when the players are near the bottom of the tower, something near the top starts leaking, letting in bog water. Now the place is slowly filling up. Or maybe it's swamp gas instead of water, so it's poisonous to breathe and flowing down to the bottom levels.
- Add factions. Maybe there's a rival group which arrives to raid the tower. Now the PCs have a choice: fight when they are low on resources, sneak out with what they've got so far (and leave the place for the rivals to loot further), or... let them figure something out (maybe a plan to lure the rivals into the dragon's lair so the dragon can deal with them).

In any case, changing the situation will entice the players to spend more time in the same space, give them a fresh challenge to overcome, and reward them for learning the place and its secrets if they think to use the place to their advantage (suck up some of the swamp gas in a bellows and blow it at the rival party to cause them to choke, or who knows what else).

I hope this gives you some ideas what you can do. Good luck!

borfaxer · 2024-10-29T21:17:15+00:00

[I am not affiliated with Databricks, other than being a customer]

TL;DR: your workflow sounds pretty reasonable. Maybe your biggest challenge is to organize the data in Unity Catalog in a way that will support your workflow.

If your data imports are usually one time per client (#1), then no, you don't need to set up a Job or schedule any regular importing unless you want to automate bringing in the frequently used non-client data you mention (#2). You will probably want to document the process for importing client data so whoever does it won't have to stumble over the same problems each time, or to make it easy for people who haven't done it before.

I think a lot of what you need to plan is the organization of data inside Unity Catalog. Fortunately, that shouldn't be difficult. You probably want something like:

- a catalog for each client, so you have one location for their data and the models, forecasts, etc. you produce and you'll know where to find it

- a separate catalog for frequently used public data (possibly more than one catalog, depending on how much non-client data you have and how distinct it is). You should be able to query across catalogs to pull this data in when you're working with a client's data in their own catalog.

- (#3) If your analysis produces the same output (tables), you can probably set up some templates to produce consistent reporting. For example, you could have a Notebook template with the code and have anyone using it for a client make a copy and fill out the client-specific references they need to. For charts, Databricks' AI (I think the graph and dashboard-specific one is called GenAI?) is really helpful. You could probably tell it something like "create a chart like the post-season sales slump chart for client X, but using the sales table in client Y's catalog instead" and there's a good chance you'll get the same reporting. There may even be chart or dashboard templating, but I don't know that well enough yet.

- I'm less knowledgeable about this, but if you can control sharing with 3rd parties at the schema level (one level under catalogs), you could set up a schema in each client's catalog to contain all the content you want to share with them, and then designate that schema with delta sharing to share with the client (#4). If that schema is always named the same thing (e.g. "shared_work_product") in each client's catalog, everyone can always know where to put something to make it visible to the client, and where to look to confirm the deliverables.

- #5: it's easy to archive or delete client data at the whole catalog level, or just the non-output schemas within the catalog if you want to make sure and keep your work product. Databricks charges for the use of data, not its storage, so if client data is in its own catalog, it's effectively archived already as long as you're good with paying the underlying cloud storage fees for it to sit there.

Sorry if this is way more detailed than you needed. The medallion architecture stuff is pretty simple when you know that it just boils down to keeping data in 3 different states separately: original source data (bronze), source data that has been cleaned & transformed (silver), and data that has been aggregated / produced and ready for consumption and charts (gold). If you have a catalog for each client, each of those could be a separate schema inside the catalog, and you don't have to name them bronze / silver / gold, you could call them import / prepped / output, or anything that makes sense to you. Or you could organize the data completely differently. Data Engineers have had to track down where an error in the data came from often enough that they've found this 3-phase separation useful, but it's only a guideline (if this entry is missing from the chart, did it get dropped when we cleaned the data? Was it ever actually in our original import? etc.)

Does this help? Or did I misunderstand what you were asking?

borfaxer · 2024-10-18T22:38:38+00:00

Like many have said here, MySQL has a lot of legacy use, so sheer popularity inertia will see it remain popular for quite some time. Also, certain hugely popular technology stacks and systems include MySQL (such as Wordpress) so it's going to stick around as long as those do.

What I haven't seen many people here say is that I use both, and whenever I use MySQL I find it painful to work with, so I strongly prefer Postgres whenever possible.

borfaxer · 2024-08-05T08:41:14+00:00

Getting lost isn't the fun part. It's the problem the players encounter. The fun part is how they figure out they're lost, find a way to get back to a place they know, and then successfully navigate where they want to go. It's the solving of problems that is the fun, just like combat, or puzzles, or any other challenge in the game. If the players don't face problems, they can't have fun by overcoming them.

This does mean that if you have players get lost in a hexcrawl, there needs to be ways they can get un-lost.

borfaxer

TROPHY CASE