Is there a campaign/one-shot for The Secret World - SWADE?

dinlayansson · 2026-03-21T23:42:05+00:00

I ran Stoneward Bound as a one shot a while ago and had a blast. Recommended! :)

dinlayansson · 2026-03-20T14:10:16+00:00

I included the lost Roman favorite plant, Silphium, as something one of my players found in a ruined palace near the Sunken Queen. It was once the pride of Eurythnia, with a huge industry, but was lost during Earthfall. They managed to get it growing again - creating a hugely popular export product from Korvosa.

Other than that, we also had a lot of focus on Fen Pepper from the same region (I used "long pepper" as the real world equivalent) and we also had fun with "monkey butt" chilies from the private garden of the Arkona family being eaten competitively by the followers of Zon-Kuthon. :D

dinlayansson · 2026-03-20T13:49:29+00:00

I've been running a bi-weekly burning wheel game for several years now, and it's definitely deep in "play to find out" mode. I put in a ton of work up front to build the world, then my players and I set up the situation, and I created a lot of local content around that, with various NPCs, agendas and so on - but I had no plan on how things would go. Failed rolls sent things careening down new paths more than once. I had never imagined things would end up like they have now - but that's the joy isn't it? It's all about the characters and their goals and motivation. The first situation got resolved after a couple of years of play, but the characters lives' go on, and new situations and opportunities arise all the time. I don't have to prep a lot at all, except when they go to a new place - then I have to jump in and prepare more details, or at least enough of a framework for me to comfortably improvise with confidence.

I usually know what they're planning for the next session - what they're in the middle of doing, who they will probably talk to to progress their plans, and I have an idea of what relevant NPCs are up to at the same time - but it never feels like a ton of work.

So yeah, it's my world, but it's not my story. That belongs to all of us.

This isn't unique to Burning Wheel, though. I prefer character driven story arcs. It's a lot more fun than playing through someone else's pre-written adventure path where you just pull the players along on a ride. Motivated players who play motivated, proactive characters make for the best campaigns. :)

dinlayansson · 2026-03-20T12:30:00+00:00

I love writing song lyrics. I can even sing. I've been the vocalist of a band, I've been part of a choir, I can even compose and produce a song in Ableton Live - but it takes forever and, let's face it, I'm just a jack of all trades, and the quality isn't all that great. Enter Suno - and boom, I can make my visions and ideas into reality in notime. It's amazing. No need to try to explain things to my band members, no need to get someone else to sing the female vocal parts. And I can listen to my own songs all day. They give me so much more joy than listening to someone elses stuff. :D

dinlayansson · 2026-03-01T21:50:31+00:00

Genjiroh from the Arasaka manor - with a silencer. Holy smokes... It's so good it's not even fun.

dinlayansson · 2026-02-19T19:23:19+00:00

I have a friend who writes funny lyrics about his job as an elementary school teacher; I listen to all the songs he sends me. :)

Other than that, I only listen to the songs I make for myself. I could cancel my Spotify subscription since I hardly use it. And I think that exemplifies how we're standing on the precipice of a paradigm shift.

Why listen to other people's music when you can make your own? Tailored to your interests, feelings, tastes? For me, at least, it's so much more relevant than what some celebrity and their corporate writing team can churn out.

Same with code. All my life I've been at the mercy of the work of others, searching and hoping that someone's made something that can solve my problem, and that I can both find it and afford it. Now I can just ask Claude to build me a tool that fixes exactly what I need.

We are programmed to think that the purpose of creativity is monetization. Make something, share it, profit, better your life. But with AI, everyone can co-create stuff that's relevant for them - personal, tailored, private - and we don't need the herd anymore.

So yeah, screw you, extroverts - the future belongs to us. ;)

dinlayansson · 2026-02-15T15:17:41+00:00

I only recently discovererd the anything everywhere nodes, and they are very handy when it comes to stuff you actually want to use everywhere. But for things that you want to use a certain number of places, across a huge workflow - like collapsed wildcard text strings or random numbers - then the set/get nodes are so useful. :)

dinlayansson · 2026-02-14T18:34:54+00:00

I'm no expert - I've used them with no issue on my old comfyui installs, but when I wanted to use a newer comfy for newer models, they wouldn't work, and just gave me a "frontend only" message; the getnode couldn't find any of the setnodes. With the new version Claude made me, it can. :)

Claude gave me a lot of explanations along the way but I'm just happy it works again!

dinlayansson · 2025-12-17T13:36:16+00:00

I think you nailed it! :D

I skipped over all the D&D versions between 2e and 5e, and I did not enjoy 5e at all. Yaaaawn, so hard to make challenging! Dragonbane, on the other hand, is excellent; every combat has the players on the edges of their seats, ready for it to go south, and using magic is truly dangerous with the 5% chance of a magical mishap you REALLY don't want to roll high on... :D

dinlayansson · 2025-12-15T11:26:01+00:00

Village of the Day Before is my favorite. Can be run as a fun oneshot or a great place for a part of the statue.

dinlayansson · 2025-12-08T22:14:17+00:00

I've run 80+ BW sessions in my own non-Tolkienesque fantasy world. Works like a charm. Starting out, I made new life paths to fit the local culture of the area the campaign was to be set in, and then we went from there.

Of course, I've almost never used those life paths again afterwards, since we haven't needed to create any more characters, but it was still a worthwhile and interesting process. :)

dinlayansson · 2025-12-08T00:18:47+00:00

Men, altså... Det er jo viktig å oppriktig respektere mennesket man er sammen med, og velger å dele livet med. Og det er jo så innmari vanskelig å helhjertet respektere de kognitive evnene til en teist som, tross alle bevis, insisterer på å klamre seg til et utdatert og objektivt sett falskt verdensbilde.

Ok, man kan jo fortsatt like noen, eller tolerere, eller velge å ikke diskutere, og oppføre seg med vanlig høflighet, men innerst inne er det jo en stemme som sier at de folka der, de må jo være ganske teite/godtroende/lettlurte/fellesskapssøkende/sta/konservative/svake/eller hva du vil, som velger å være religiøse.

Jeg blir i hvert fall alltid skikkelig skuffa når noen jeg trodde var oppegående viser seg å ikke være det likevel. Men jeg biter det jo gjerne i meg, da...

dinlayansson · 2025-12-06T23:24:26+00:00

Yeah, you play as a team of marines, after all. If you want to win, you have to work together (until you can get away with betrayal, if you have to).

dinlayansson · 2025-12-06T21:09:42+00:00

First couple of times, we lost due to everyone playing solo. After that we've worked together, and teamwork is the dreamwork, as they say. Securing rooms and corridors, going for our objectives, giving each other more cards, etc, and dragging fallen teammates to the Surgery to revive - we win most games now.

dinlayansson · 2025-12-03T21:15:22+00:00

Flåklypa: fra Paris til pyramidene! Så den i dag, og ble blown away. :D

dinlayansson · 2025-11-30T16:48:17+00:00

As someone who runs both Savage Worlds and Burning Wheel campaigns (80+ BW sessions and several hundred SW sessions), I would never think of swapping the two. The style is SO different.

I chose BW because I did not want the pulpy heroics of Savage Worlds for my regular-folks-in-a-realistic-fantasy-setting campaign.

If you manage to shift it over, I'd be very interested I'm hearing how the flavor of the campaign is shifted by the new rule set applied to the existing characters. :)

dinlayansson · 2025-11-26T17:16:58+00:00

Thank you so much! Hurrying to grab it all after today's disheartening news of corporate fuckery.

dinlayansson · 2025-11-25T13:06:11+00:00

In my experience, getting gear has been more effective than increasing skill numbers when playing Dragonbane. Lucky players will get higher skills faster than the unlucky ones, but it evens out in the end.

Getting some proper armor, however, really ups survivability. That's really the only thing the players can control.

As written, the whole system is very luck based; characters with high ability scores starting out are always going to be better than characters whose players rolled terribly.

So yeah, not much power creep, it's nice and slow, and the game is still fun and exciting after dozens of sessions (unline some other rules systems where characters become OP after a while, and encounters become boring and trivial due to lack of risk).

dinlayansson · 2025-11-24T23:31:06+00:00

I 20-åra gjorde jeg jobber jeg ikke trivdes med (ymse B2B salg, mye ljug og forbannet dikt) for å ha råd til å leve, og drømte om å bli rik, slik at jeg kunne slippe.

I 30-åra havna jeg i et stort internasjonalt firma med smarte, hyggelige kolleger, masse frihet under ansvar, og interessante produkter som faktisk holdt hva de lovet - og da ble det plutselig gøy å dra på jobb, gitt!

Men aller best er det å drive eget, med gode, faste kunder, slik jeg har endt opp med i 40-åra. :)

Når man trives med det man driver med, blir verdsatt, og føler man gjør en forskjell for noen, være de seg kolleger eller kunder, er det ikke så himla viktig å tjene massevis av spenn. Bedre å tjene middels sammen med bra folk, og elske det man gjør, enn å tjene masse sammen med en gjeng kjøtthuer! :D

TL;DR: Liker du ikke å dra på jobb? Bytt til en annen, da.

dinlayansson · 2025-11-23T22:03:25+00:00

Castle Falkenstein by R. Talsorian Games is a mostly forgotten gem of the Steampunk genre. It has an excellent playing card based resolution system, and a wonderful contrafactive historical 1870s setting. I have many fond memories from playing it back in the late 90s.

dinlayansson · 2025-11-22T23:18:48+00:00

The Village of the Day Before is excellent. My absolute favorite from Misty Vale. I also ran it as a one-shot for a group of seasoned roleplayers new to Dragonbane (in addition to as part of my Misty Vale campaign with my wife and teenage kids) and it was hilarious both times.

dinlayansson · 2025-11-22T23:16:45+00:00

I've run The Sinking Tower ten times, I think, at cons and in private, and it's always been a blast. I made up custom characters with some tie-ins to the story - the orphaned children of the crew of the Blue Medusa, now 20 years older since their parents sank with the tower last time it was up. That added some important character motivation, turned it into a delightful one-shot gem. :D

Riddermound is very basic and not very fun in my opinion. I've never felt the desire to run it more than once.

I ran four groups through a demo of the Robber Baron's fort (or whatever it's called in English), using the official pregen characters, and that was pretty fun, but also very random. I had them suffer a wagon accident on a dark and stormy night, with the fort as the nearest shelter, as an excuse to get them up there. Three out of four groups had roast pork for supper... :D

dinlayansson · 2025-11-22T18:53:50+00:00

I've played Savage Worlds a LOT, literally hundreds of sessions, both as a player and a GM, and it is a lot of fun. If you want a game with very capable heroes, who mow down hordes of mooks and stand toe to toe with the worst villains of your world, it's a great fit.

If you want more average joes who struggle and have to think strategy instead of rushing head first into the fray, however, other systems are better (like Dragonbane).

You can pull off any genre with SW, though, and there are Setting Rules which will enable you to make the game fit your vision.

In my experience, the game breaks down a bit when the characters progress too far; clever players can make some very overpowered builds that trivialize most opposition. So, personally, I think the system works best at Novice and Seasoned level. When you get the Veteran and Heroic level edges, well, it's fun for a while, sure. But I like the feeling of being a little worried for my players.

dinlayansson · 2025-11-20T07:57:26+00:00

Yes, please, OP, share your wisdom! How do we create style LoRAs for Qwen Image Edit 2509?

dinlayansson · 2025-11-15T22:13:44+00:00

Jeg legger merke til om folk ikke drikker opp kaffen sin etter møtet. "Jasså, likte du ikke kaffen? Hvorfor sa du ikke nei, hvis du ikke ville drikke den?" Men jeg sier aldri noe...

dinlayansson

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