May 5, 2024

Loot Goblins - Adventure Point- Unique-ish Exploration - The Mind's Eye View

I’m only the Vice President, I can’t just ask for nukes!
-Michael DeBondt Out-of-Context, Jan 15th 2024

Future of Loot Goblins

The funny thing about game development is, at least for me, it energizes you for your next project. I fully expected to be dog-tired after Loot Goblins launched. But instead, I find myself wanting to do so much more. I know it was made for PocketQuest as a one-off, but I love this game.

I'm not sure how exactly I'm going to build on it but I desperately want to. The easy option would be to make a book of pre-made heists for people to pick up and go. The three in the back of the book were easy enough to make. I certainly have more ideas, such as one completely themed around existing heists that were never solved. Or maybe just a bunch based on a specific genre (Fantasy, Sci-fi, etc).

I want to give more in a single book than pre-made heists though. Originally Loot Goblins was going to be separated into sections based on the world type. Each with its own section of heist tools themed for the time and place. Definitely could take some of those ideas and fill a new book. Why waste them after all?

Regardless of what it is, I'd expect a new Loot Goblins supplement of some sort this year.

Adventure Point Campaign: Interparty Rivalry

For those not in the know, I run a monthly 5th Edition D&D game I call Adventure Point. The design is to enable drop-in-drop-out play so people can come and go as they want or have time for it. This particular campaign revolves around the players being a part of a monster-hunting guild called the Guild of Thorns. I currently run two separate games, one online and one in person at a local game shop. Though technically most of them could cross between the games, they stay in their group and consider themselves two separate parties. I imagine it’s mostly because of disinterest in playing via a different medium.

Recently my irl party tried to sneak into the Guild of Thorn’s restricted “Black Bestiary” for some information for a hunt. They were successful but left behind evidence and now there is this huge party-spanning manhunt trying to find the culprits. It will be resolved next week and I’m excited to see where this ends up. For the most part, the two parties haven’t interacted at all. Sometimes one would clean up the other’s failed hunt but other than that it’s been quiet.

This is really interesting to me as the tension seems to be group with very little… well not very little but not much influence of myself. I may have put fuel on the fire by turning the manhunt into an event so players to spend downtime helping or hurting the manhunt. Especially with the conspirators able to blame any NPC (or PC) they want if they succeed.

I did keep people's choices hidden to try and grow distrust in the parties. But they stayed honest and together through it all. But the back and forth has now evolved(devolved?) into carving threatening messages in the rooms of PC’s who helped the manhunt. It definitely will need to be watched to keep the general peace, but everyone is having fun still! We will see if that changes though. The hunt concluded last week with the conspirators succeeding in pointing the finger at someone else, but I haven’t been told WHO was being blamed yet. That will be decided this weekend, right in time for the online group's session…

Unique-ish Exploration Tables

For some reason, I was thinking about The Alexadrian's series on running hex crawls. Firstly, highly recommend that series. It has helped me so much in my Adventure Point Campaign and opened my eyes to how I can run future campaigns.

One of them describes using several encounter tables for different terrains and areas. Putting more focus on preparing tables for different biomes and using the same one for similar geographic areas. It could make the region slightly dull but it's better than preparing 10+ tables that you might never use.

But what if you didn't have to fill out the entire table? Say we're running an island campaign and it's a pretty large island. But overall it's still the same biome. If making a bunch of tables is too exhausting, and using one is too dull, let's just use a single table but make 3 or so options region-specific.

Roll	Result
2	Hex Determined Encounter
3	Normal
4	Normal
5	Normal
6	Normal
7	Hex Determined Encounter
8	Normal
9	Normal
10	Normal
11	Normal
12	Hex Determined Encounter

Now say we have 10 hexes/regions. We now only need to make 30 new table results vs 110 if we made separate tables. We can change the positions if we want, but I think this spread of two rare and one common encounter for each area adds just enough variety.

I have an old project I affectionately call the Storm Queen's Fury. It was a campaign I built for a private friend game but I made it to put it out as its own thing for 5e. It got complicated and I ran out of time. But this mini-revelation has me interested in it again.