The Ash, the Elder, and the Hen Elm

 I started imagining a dungeon based on the connecting branches of our christmas tree, which is a story I won't go into now. It got quite big, which made me wonder when it starts to qualify as a megadungeon? I know various people have expressed various opinions online and in some of the game's earlier editions, but this is the method that makes most sense to me for defining a megadungeon. Note, this doesn't factor in features that make a good megadungeon, things like multiple factions, entrances and exits, etc. A megadungeon is one with enough encounters to take you at least  from the game's starting level to the level at which your characters have a scope of power and concern beyond dungeon-crawling. Ideally, this can be reverse-engineered to a number of rooms to have that many encounters. (N.B. this standard probably means that games which don't provide a clear method for making dungeons, don't provide any way to level up/gain game-changing power through dunge...

 It's been a slow month, because A) I've started a new job and B) I've been working a lot on worldbuilding for my actual, y'know, games. I wonder how much there's a relationship between running simpler or less GM-centric games and maintaining a blog? That'd be interesting in terms of what it implies about the TTRPG blogosphere - it's certainly notable that indie games (often low/no/distributed GM, procedurally-driven) and OSR (procedurally-driven, often well-worn core conceits) dominate the space.[1] Both also tend to have light or modular worldbuilding, so that anything new you write for your home game can be put up online as well. The amount of explaining I'd need to do to get one of my settings across in order to share stuff I made for it puts me off a bit - not because they're exceptionally weird or unique, just because the value I get from them is in the depth and complexity of interrelated elements and they therefore have years upon years of ne...

I thought I might get this done in an hour. Counting editing, it's probably taken four. Good omen!  If you don't know RPGaDAY, it's this: What better way to give you a sense of who I am and how I write when under time pressure (which a lot of these posts probably will be), and me a sense of what kinds of things I might like to write about?  I'm 99% sure the first TTRPG/s I bought this year were all of the ones in the Palestinian Relief Bundle at once, back in April. I tried to work out which of those I read first but I didn't keep notes and I've read a lot of them in previous aid bundles so it all gets a bit jumbled. I otherwise tend to get mostly free games (or in the case of large/defunct companies, 'free games'), and ask for paid ones as gifts rather than buying them myself, because I don't have much in the way of money at the moment . Most recently , I played (ran - I'm assuming this counts) a game of my own design called The Face of the Wor...