State of the Blog Year 7

 Well, this is a bit awkward.

Content

I only published one (1) singular post this year, Brief Thoughts on Fantasy Monotheism. It was a short, mostly stream-of-consciousness pondering of a model of fantasy divinity that better merges Standard Fantasy Polytheism with Big Centralized Church in a way that allows a lot of the broad tropes, stories, and dynamics people want out of both of those, while at the same time opening new and more detailed possibilities by making this model explicit and visible to the players.

There were some aspects of this idea, as I noted in a comment, that I forgot to even mention in the post itself, so I regard it as somewhat incomplete, and I may return to the topic at some point to flesh it out further, possibly revamping my old Shrines and Saints system (the more I think about it, this remains one of my best ideas that I've never fully executed on. I might need to port this to PF2e).

Since this is rather thin on the ground, I might as well list some of the blog posts I started drafting, but never finished:

Some Early Thoughts on PF2e and the Old School and Fleeing in Pathfinder: A pair of posts I've been writing and rewriting periodically since I started playing PF2e: there's a lot I love about the system, but there are holes in it, especially around parts of exploration and fleeing from combat, that cry out to be filled: with that, I could see myself running a somewhat trimmed-down version of the system for an old-school style game.

Worldbuilding: The Transmigration of Souls: A fragmentary exploration of what exactly an angel, devil, demon etc *is* in terms of fantasy metaphysics. Not quite sure what direction I was going with for this one.

What is a Goblin, Anyway? Monsters as Statblocks vs Play Patterns: Following a disagreement with JB from B/X Blackrazor (though I have no idea where to find that argument now) a reflection on AD&D monsters and how we can interact with them as statblocks or as play-patterns+flavor, and what these different approaches imply for your game.

The Warlock: Mercenary, Company Man, Vassal: Inspired by a Pointy Hat video, an exploration of different ways to imagine the 5e Warlock as a fantasy archetype, tracing source inspirations from the medieval witch to Dr. Faustus, to Daniel Webster and The Devil, to Elric of Melniboné and Harry Dresden, showing how the notion of what a 'pact with dark powers' even means and implies, metaphysically, changes a lot with cultural assumptions, and we can play with these possibilities in fantasy RPGs. 

Whence the Bandit?: A draft I've been coming back to repeatedly for over a year now, but which I can never get right: intended to be an exploration of historical banditry as a social phenomenon and significant literary portrayals, from Water Margin to The Count of Monte Cristo. The poverty of the fantasy bandit as a trope or archetype is, in my opinion, rooted in the cultural distance to this phenomenon, such that it's been totally flanderized and nearly worthless, but we can recover it with some reading and re-energizing of the concept.

Diagnostics

In spite of posting almost nothing this year, the one post I did write is... one of my most popular posts to date? I haven't been checking my stats lately so I didn't notice until I sat down to check, but I haven't gotten a post this widely-read since Ship of the Damned, which was published four years earlier. 

My stats also show that the blog received 103,000 reads in the last 12 months, making this by far my most-read year. The vast majority of these views are concentrated in my old, top posts, with Intro Statistics for RPGs: The Wheaton Dice Curse continuing to be my most popular post by a country mile.

I'm inclined to think most of these views are bots of some variety, particularly since one of my views from the last 24 hours supposedly originated from 'perplexity.ai'. In all likelihood, a lot of undisciplined web scrapers are crawling the blog and providing phantom views to posts.

That said, there are hopefully some new, actual human readers in the crowd and I do invite you to introduce yourselves in the comments!

Away From the Blog

I know I said this last year, but good goddamn this has been an eventful and busy year for me. I don't even know where to begin, so let's start at the end. 

As of a couple weeks ago, I finally finished my MS degree and have now moved out of Chicago to Manhattan, and will soon begin a job search in earnest, along with searching for a new, in-person tabletop group. Earlier in the year, I became a great deal more involved with my local software meetups and open-source communities, and have now spoken several times at meetups and small conferences. I spend a good bit of my time these days contributing to an open-source black hole simulation codebase (I'm not an physicist, just a code monkey helping them optimize it). I also got involved with a group of academic sleuths, helping them to detect and publicize scientific frauds and developing software to help them do it. 

In all the commotion, role-playing fell by the wayside: I did complete my PF2e game this spring as expected, though I had to rush it with less time than expected and it ended up being quite railroady, which I regret. I ran a couple pick-up sessions this summer for colleagues at my internship, and for my little cousins, all in PF2e. I had intended to at least run a couple small sessions this fall, but the final quarter of my MS proved to be far too busy.

Hopefully, I'll be back to regular play at some point in the coming year, which will get the blog juices flowing again. 

One other obstacle to the blog is that I'm increasingly writing elsewhere on other topics, mainly on software on my personal site and on scientific topics on a substack (though I'm increasingly dissatisfied with the platform and may move that somewhere else in time). I started this blog and a lot of my internet presence kinda-pseudonymously, but I'm no longer bothering to keep these separate, so have at the links. The software stuff is a lot of inside baseball, much of it talk transcriptions, tutorials, and reference material rather than more accessible introductory stuff (though I am currently writing an introduction to scientific Python and high-performance computing patterns that I will publish on my personal site, if that's the kind of things that tickles your fancy).

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So ends another year of blogging and gaming! Special thanks to regular readers and commenters gyrovague and D-Skelector, and to new commenter Dave Bloodaxe! I hope all of you have an excellent holiday and a wonderful new year!

State of the Blog Year 6

Thus have we reached the 6th anniversary of A Distant Chime! On to the reflections. 

Content

I wrote only 13 posts this year, the same as 2022 and a bit less than in 2023. Most of these posts were AD&D session reports or playtest notes for the House of Pestilence. Now that I'm running PF2e as my home game, I've fallen off the habit of making session reports, largely because I conceive of this blog as a space for discussing old school games first and foremost, and I just don't feel such a strong urge to blog and record games when they're not old school. Granted, I also just graduated and am in the process of getting a masters' degree, so I have considerably less free blogging time than I used to. Nevertheless, I do occasionally get a spark of creativity (or obsession) and write something that isn't a session report.

Highlights for the year:

The biggest without a doubt was Village on the Borderlands Review: C'mon Man!, in which I reacted to the fracas at that moment around Mark Taormino's module and its caustic critical reception. Sitting at some 11k words, I believe it is the single longest post on this blog by a considerable margin, and I wrote it all in a mad rush just as I was unexpectedly moving house. I stand by every word of it. 

In World Without Fire, I elaborate a concept for a campaign based in a world where humanity is unable to create fire, driving dependence on sentient flames, like ancient pagan gods, in order to survive and thrive. 

In AD&D Session 9: Return to Castle Xyntillan, I brought my then-current campaign and my old CX campaign crashing back together. It was very nostalgic for me, and I think the players also had fun. 

In Draft: Simpler AD&D Psionics Rules, I put forth a basic rewrite of the mechanics and flavor of psionics, with plenty of gaps left to fill. 

Diagnostics

Blogger tells me that the blog has seen 52k views, more than the year before despite lower density of overall posts. I've also seen 38 comments, mainly driven by the Village on the Borderlands review, which is by far my most popular new post. Intro Statistics for RPGs: The Wheaton Dice Curse remains my most viewed post of the year and overall. I really had no idea that would be what people found this blog through! 

Presentation

I rarely advertise posts outside the blog anymore. I suppose it ain't broke, so I'm not fixing it. 

Index

The blog's index is presently... 4 years out of date. I'll probably get around to fixing it up later. 

Away From the Blog

As with last year, it's been a busy and eventful year for me, but I've managed to keep up a more-or-less weekly game for parts of the year. Though I didn't blog about it, I was quite happy this summer to have multiple games with my uncle and little cousins, playing PF2e. I came into this hobby on my own, so it's nice to introduce and teach the new generation. I expect my current PF2e game will last through spring, after which I will be moving and will need to find an entirely new group. I may also end up reviving Cascabel, the setting of my AD&D campaign, but running it in a old-school-ified hack of PF2e, as I outlined in The Pathfinder Megadungeon. That remains in the future, though. 

I can't believe it's been a year already, but I'm also quite happy to note that my submission to the NAPIII contest came in 2nd, considerably better than I had hoped amid the stuff competition. Last year, I also teased that I was working on another module, Three Lives in the Crystal Pyramid of Xeen-Thoth. Development on that actually got quite far, but in the absence of a group I could use for playtesting (now that I'm running PF2e instead) and everything else keeping me busy, I'm afraid it's fallen by the wayside. I am, however, working on a short (unplaytested) AD&D module for another contest, which I'll need to finish up in the next week. 

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So ends another year of blogging and gaming! Special thanks to Man of the Atom, D-Skelector, gyrovague, and Sully, I hope all of you have an excellent holiday and a wonderful New Year!

State of the Blog Year 5

This is the 5th anniversary of A Distant Chime! Another good year of gaming ends with another Christmas Eve, now on to the reflections!

Content

There were slightly more posts this year than 2022, in large part because I was back to regular play reports for my AD&D campaign. All the same trends continue from last year, except for the fact that I'm now living with my partner, and homemaking takes up extra time (though I no longer have to look for other spaces to run games, which is great). Highlights from this year: 

Thoughts on AD&D Currency thinks more deeply about the currency conversions in AD&D, and what we might conclude about the implied worldbuilding behind them. 

On Playing Raw: Nasty, Brutish, and Undercooked challenges the assertion that playing Rules as Written (RAW) is superior to homebrew

The GM Is Dead, and we, Murderers of All Murderers, Have Killed Him is a rather overwrought title for a post examining various perspectives on interpreting the rules and world of D&D, via a very strange forum discussion. 

And finally, my AD&D play reports document my current game, starting with AD&D Session 1: Violence Breeds Violence

Also, I wanted to point out a couple of posts outside the blog that just came to my attention.

Daniel from the Basic Red blog has just broken his silence after a few years of hiatus; I remember Basic Red fondly from my early days in the hobby, and I'm glad to see he's back, so show him some love!

Red_kangaroo from Library of Attnam (one of the first old-school blogs I read, come to think of it, this is a year for nostalgia!) has a post on GLOG class quests; it's a delightful little thing that reminds me of what I loved about the GLOG. Almost tempts me to go back to it. 

Diagnostics

Blogger tells me the blog has received 48k views in 2023, somewhat less than last year, once again mainly on the strength of my backlog. My most viewed post was Intro Statistics for RPGs: The Wheaton Dice Curse, which continues to have a much longer life than I ever expected. 

Presentation

I only sometimes share my posts outside the blogroll nowadays; still, I keep reaching people, so I suppose it ain't broke. 

Index

Whispered legend holds that this blog once had an index. Today, this is naught but a cruel joke. 

Away from the Blog

With how little I've been posting, you might think I've been sundowning this place, but I haven't. Rather, most of my RPG energies have been pointed in other directions. 

2023 was a busy year for me overall. I was studying, working, building a relationship with the love of my life. And I've been running games, both my (unfortunately undocumented) L5R campaign in the beginning of the year and my ongoing AD&D game at the end. However, my real attention was focused on two long-running projects. 

The first, which began late last year, was preparation for my current AD&D game. More than learning the rules, setting up a world, and making a bunch of supplementary material (maps, weather generators, and such), the biggest time sink there was rewriting the AD&D PHB. While I generally stick to the rules, my game was different enough (different species, new classes and spells, and the like) that handing my players a copy of the 1978 PHB plus a bunch of 'but in my game this instead of that' supplements would have been confusing and frustrating. 

I'm sure this project started with a smaller, scope, but it eventually turned into a full rewrite, plus my own campaign-specific details. I think most of the time wound up being spent on the spells: I managed to cut the word count by something like a third and make a lot of them easier to read. That and all the formatting, since I have a neurotic fixation on making everything fit in two-page spreads. 

I've hesitated to share this for a while, because some of the classes are from someone's else's paid supplement, but I wound up just pulling them out of the version I'll share. You can find the PHB for Bell and Candle here. 

That project was basically finished in late summer, with a few corrections made after players found typos and errors. The project occupying my time now, as I've recently blogged about, is The House of Pestilence, my entry in the NAPIII module contest. 

I've tried making things before: years ago I was supposed to make an adventure with Joseph Robert Lewis, but then the pandemic happened and everything got sidetracked. I've also made all sorts of promises on this blog, like an attempt at an underwater play supplement, which went nowhere. The times I have successfully made something it's because I had a deadline. My entry for Wavestone Keep was baseline. My entry for Out of the Sewers (still unpublished) was better. But I can safely say that House of Pestilence is the best thing I've made. 

It's not quite done yet; I have to consolidate feedback from the first playtest and hopefully do another one with my in-person group, plus I'm waiting on art and improved cartography. Still, this is the first time I've really been proud of an RPG thing I've written. With all luck, you'll be able to pick it up in the NAPIII anthology some time next year. If not, I'll release it myself. 

I hope to keep running AD&D for a long while to come, and keep you all updated with play reports (session 6 play report is in the works...). I also have plans for my next writing project after NAPIII is done. While I won't make any promises, since I'm not being driven by a deadline on this one, I hope to delight you all with Three Lives in the Crystal Pyramid of Xeen-Thoth one day soon. 

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So ends another year! Particular thanks to Melan and JB for their support, and I hope you all have an excellent holiday and new year!

State of the Blog Year 4

This is the 4th anniversary of A Distant Chime! Time really does fly, I hope you're all having another wonderful Christmas Eve, now onto the year's reflections. 

Content

In keeping with the trend from last year, 2022 saw fewer posts than any previous full year. There's a few reasons for this. I've been balancing school with a part time job this year, I've been dedicating more time to running games than writing about them (the L5R game the last few posts were about is ongoing, I just haven't been good at writing up play reports). The biggest difference is that this year I've started a long-term romantic relationship. That said, there are a few posts I recommend reading:

Books for Dungeon Masters: The Peregrine, by J.A. Baker recommends an excellent nonfiction book, whose prose can be a great aid to DMs learning to narrate

Julius Wavestone Keep Killing! is a short adventure I wrote for Bryce Lynch's Wavestone Keep contest, which got a decent review from him, and which I found gratifying

An Alternative Humanity in Vampire: the Masquerade takes Justin Alexander and Yora's criticisms of VtM's Humanity system and proposes an alternative which lends itself to a quite different playstyle. If I run VtM in the future, I'll do it this way

Diagnostics

Blogger tells me that this blog received 60k views this year, more so than any previous year, accounting for a plurality of my all time 150k views. How this occurred in a year when I wrote less often than ever before I'll never know. I suppose this is the strength of a big backlog. Interestingly, the most popular post this year was the Epilogue for my Castle Xyntillan campaign series. 

Presentation

I occasionally share my posts on the OSR discord, but that's about it, but it doesn't seem to have hurt readership too much. 

The Index

Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level posts stretch far away

Away from the Blog

I've been running fewer games online (only a handful this year so far), and more in person. Still, those were fewer games than in previous years, less than twenty, a far cry from the pandemic days when I would regularly run two online games a week. I don't regret this, since that time is going into things I value more highly, but I am feeling the effects of not having a nearby, stable group a lot of the time. Most of the people in my Ptolus game earlier in the year are also in my current L5R game, but I can't rely on them also being around for more than a couple years out. This is both because it's a university group, and because I move around a lot, I don't live in one place for more than a few years at a time, making cultivating a solid group for long-term in-person play difficult. A couple months ago I tried to recapture some of the magic by gathering players I knew from DMing online during the pandemic for an AD&D 1e game, the world for which I've been prepping for a while now, albeit privately rather than on the blog. I managed to make a session work, but some player fallout after the session heavily demoralized me, and speaking with a couple players it's clear that the environment for online play just isn't what it was a couple years ago. My best players are older, married with kids, and during a time when they were laid off or otherwise had more time on their hands, it was possible to dedicate a lot of time to games. But this is less the case now. 

I intend to take a break from DMing online, and from playing online as well (with the exception of participating in Rick Stump's very occasional sessions and PbP) and focus on in person games, even if those campaigns are shorter term and for shifting groups. 

If there's one thing I'm proud of this year, it's that I introduced my little cousin (10 years old!) to old school D&D. I did that last year actually, but when he visited for the summer he was obsessed, and I wound up running some simplified AD&D 1e for him and my girlfriend. They had a delightful time, and I've now set him up with OSE books and Rich Burlew's color-in monster tokens, which he should be getting... oh right about now. He intends to run games for his friends in school, and I for one can't wait to watch that happen. 

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Thus ends another year! I hope you all have an excellent holiday season, spend time with your families, and special thanks again to commenters Sofinho and Spwack!

State of the Blog Year 3

Welcome to the third anniversary of A Distant Chime! I'm glad to be here another year with a great community, and hope to keep writing with you all for a long time! Happy Christmas Eve! Now onto this year's reflections!

Content

I've posted fewer pieces this year than any year prior. I attribute this to my having only a limited time and energy budget for RPGs, especially since I'm back in school now, and that budget is taken up more and more by actually running the game. I not only finished the Castle Xyntillan campaign, but started an Icewind Dale campaign in 5e and brought it to a satisfying conclusion, and started and concluded a Legend of the 5 Rings 4e campaign for most of the same group. 

My notetaking for both these campaigns is terrible compared to that of my CX game. How terrible, you ask? I don't know for sure how many sessions each ran for, that's how bad. I'm not sure why my notetaking degraded so either. By the end of the CX game, I was having great difficulty remembering funny interactions between players, which I could do quite easily at the start. Still, I wager those two games combined totaled around 60 sessions, so I've run an excess of 70 total sessions this year. This means that I'm now well above 100 games run in my career as a GM. It's a big step up from the blog's early days, when my writing was more fiction-like, ungameable, and I had quite little GMing of playing experience. 

That said, I still managed to write a bit. 

The posts which I still recommend reading include:

Iron, Amber, Wood and Bone: Using Courtly Rings In Your Game

Factions (or Lack Thereof) In Castle Xyntillan

Castle Xyntillan: Epilogue and Post-Mortem

Module Doctor: Oni Mother Okawa Part 1

Principles of RPG Narration

Finally, my favorite thing I wrote this year was The First Rat Bank, a dungeon which I submitted to JB's Out of the Sewer! contest, and won one of the two top spots. You can find the first draft of it (which has some very notable formatting errors I didn't catch before I sent it in, special thanks to Melan for taking a look at it!) at Actually Making a Dungeon: The First Rat Bank. If you want to see the cleaned-up version, keep an eye on JB's blog for when he publishes the collection. It's for charity!

Diagnostics

My stats page tells me that I accumulated some 50 thousand views in the last twelve months, and I no longer trust it in the least. At various times in this same period I've noticed quite strange behavior in my blog views, with various unlikely countries suddenly spiking with hundreds of views in a short period, apparently driven by a single viewer. This explosion in viewership, at the same time that my posting rate has dramatically slowed, was not at all accompanied by an increase in comments or followers. I have no idea what this is, but it's definitely not real readership. Some other bloggers, such as Sofinho, have noticed very similar behavior. I'm just not going to bother looking at these stats going forward unless I can figure out how to separate the real views from... bots? I have no clue.

Presentation

I've stopped really advertising myself as much, outside of just posting links to the OSR server when I write a post. I no longer trawl the OSR Pit, nor the OSR subreddit. I feel like I'm missing so much there, but can't find the time. Still, I'm having a good time writing here for the followers I already have, so i've little to complain about.

The Index

Has not been updated in... oh my that's a long time. I suppose I'll have to hunker down and work on that, but not today.

Unfinished Drafts

I have... a lot of them. Some are posts which I started writing but got sidetracked on. Others are essays which I've come back to repeatedly, but haven't been able to bring into proper form. Others are less posts on themselves and more reminders to my future self to write something. Some I've just gone ahead and discarded, while others I do intend to one day finish. I list a few here. If any sound especially interesting to read, comment below and I'll prioritize them.

Politics in RPGs: A response to Prismatic Wastelands' post Apolitical RPGs Do Not Exist. 

Module Doctor: Oni Mother Okawa Part 2, in case you want me to torture myself further in the process of demonstrating how to cut down narration and description.

Parable of Smake-Hands Jimmy: Some dungeon poetry and kooky short fiction of dubious worth.

A post examining the differences in medieval and modern worldviews with regard to magic and fantasy. 

Reflections from my time as a player instead of a GM, and how they contrast,

The many kinds if 'inns' and their implications for your fantasy world. 

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Thus ends another year! Stay safe and spend time with your families, and special thanks to frequent commenters Tamás Kisbali, Sofinho, Spwack and Melan! 

My Mapping Journey: Or, How to Moderately Screw It Up

(Still around! Not gone! Lots of running, and even some playing, just not much writing!)

I've been keeping abreast of the Angry GM's Open World posts, the latest of which takes a strong stance on prep time vs play time, namely that for each period of play, one should generally spend less than half that time prepping. That includes maps, which should be crude and utilitarian unless they're player-facing aids, and especially battlemaps, which you mostly don't need.

Which got me thinking about my own journey through mapping in games. 

The vast majority of time I've spent playing and running games has been in the last year and change, ie in the pandemic, and that means online play. In that time, I've used a different approach with nearly every campaign. In Castle Xyntillan, I had the players draw their own map with Mipui, with more than a little help from me to make to accurate to the original book.

Later when I got involved in some other campaigns, I started using Roll20. 

In my Icewind Dale campaign I've been using the official digital book, with most necessary maps already included. Those which aren't (some quite bafflingly absent) I stole from the subreddit. In my current Legend of the 5 Rings game, I'm mostly displaying a poster map of the Empire, and switching to a dojo battlemap which I draw on to represent various environments (it's all the dojo of life, you see). 

As a result, I spend almost no time mapping, and in the L5R game in particular I use theater of the mind almost exclusively. 

I bring all this up to contrast what not to do with mapping in Roll20, or any other VTT software. 

The first time I used Roll20, I was hooked into GMing on a 5e West Marches server, and told to make a quick intro adventure to get new players a first session.

Given very few constraints, I decided that I wanted to adapt a module instead of making up my own dungeon on the fly. I selected Raggi's Tower of the Stargazer, which I adore both on it's own merits and as a metal reference. 

Where was your star?
Was it far? Was it far? 
WAS IT FAAAAAAAR!?

Given that I already had the module and its map, I figured this would be quick and easy, just need to replicate what's in front of me in digital form.

Pop quiz, hotshot. You're adapting a map into a VTT, you refuse to employ quality (that is, paid) assets, and you've literally never done this before. Do you;

A) Use simple shapes and outlines to show the basics of the space and leave the rest to description?

B) Screenshot the preexisting, beautifully detailed maps and size them properly in the VTT?

C) Do your damnedest to replicate every single piece of furniture, spending the better part of days just trying to find the right asset and routinely screwing up all the layers because you still have no idea how the system works. 

You can guess what I picked. The first two options didn't even occur to me, though looking back almost a year later they're both painfully obvious. 

I wound up running a single session of the Tower with a slapdash 5e retrofit, and afterwards spent my time on that server processing character submissions. 

NEVER. AGAIN.

I am perfectly content with my theater of the mind and pirated screenshots, thank you very much. 

All you boys, girls and sentient AI looking to get into online GMing, follow the Angry GM's advice here. If your prep time is taking anywhere near the expected amount of play time, let alone for a sub-component like mapping, something's wrong in your approach. 

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If you enjoyed this post, be sure to comment below and follow the blog! Until next time, have an excellent week, and I hope to see you all here soon.

The Campaign That Wasn't: Curse of the Wednesdays

Woof! Now that's what I call a hiatus. Rest assured, I've been active gaming (in particular, learning a new system) and don't intend to stop writing for the blog. Just need to work my way back in with a few short posts before diving into any systems or writing longform. 

I find true the maxim that if you need something done, ask a busy person to do it. Around last month I very suddenly became less busy, and my drive to write fell substantially as a result. So here's a story of what I did(n't get to do) in between. 

Over my little break, I unexpectedly dove into Legend of the 5 Rings RPG, a system and setting based on the collective card game of the same name. I ran my first session earlier this week after some ill-fated attempts to join a game, which resulted in playing a quarter of a session over two weeks. This is about that latter tale. Next post is about some system considerations and how that impacts player expectations. Right now, funny story. 

Just two blokes against the GM's world

The Curse of the Wednesdays

When I first got into L5R, I obviously wanted to find a game to try out the system. I had little luck. Most games were for the 5th edition, not the 4th I was interested in. Still, I applied for a 5th ed game promoted by a GM looking to upload the recordings online and build a career as a paid GM. 

And I got rejected, as the game was already full. Ah well. I put it behind me and looked elsewhere. 

Imagine my surprise when I got pinged a few days later asking if I still want to play. It turns out his group had unusual bad luck and, despite the large group he'd recruited for just this purpose, needed another player for this session to go forward. 

The game was in 3 hours, of course. Cue speed-reading the rulebook and making a character in a system I don't understand. 

When I arrive on their server, I get an inkling of what's going on. Seven players, besides me, had been gathered explicitly to offset the tendency of online randoms to flake, find schedule conflicts and disappear without warning. Nevertheless, one player suffered a sudden death in the family, the Lion player had work at the time, the Mantis had recently developed a kidney stone and was in and out of the doctor's office, and the remaining players either flaked, ghosted or were unavailable for miscellaneous reasons I can't recall. This would have been their second session, except that they had missed a few players the previous week and only had a session zero then. 

It was me (CRAB CLAN! BEST CLAN! CLACKETY CLACK!) and the Falcon player with the GM, waiting on the Mantis, who insisted that she would be present at a slightly delayed hour and the game could go forward. 

I found the Falcon to be good company, and the GM was largely quiet. Good thing as well, as we spent the next two hours waiting before it was called off and delayed to next week. We learned the next day that our Mantis had truly abysmal luck on her end, running out of cell battery at the same time that her PC decided to buckle down for a lengthy update. 

I tweaked several errors in my character waiting for next session, looking forward to actually playing. In the intervening days, a couple players I didn't know left the server. I spoke with the GM, and in one conversation he told me that he was looking at paid GMing because, after so many years of running the game, he was fatigued and it just wasn't enough to run without recompense. 

I really should have run at that point. 

The next Wednesday rolled around and it was me, the Falcon, and the Lion. The Mantis was once again unavailable. Still, 3 is a quorum and we got down to playing. 

Now, I don't want to come across as overly harsh here. I want to come across exactly as harsh as necessary. I've spent most of my RPG-playing career as a GM. I treasure moments to sit on the other side of the screen and play, especially when the GM is new and just spreading their wings for the first time. It has its own charm, and even GMs with very loose system knowledge can run solid sessions with enthusiasm and reasonable calls.

So I was surprised to find a GM, supposedly very experienced and looking to get paid for this, delivering an extremely low-energy exposition dump, at the end of which he simply fell silent. Only with further player prodding did he realize that he forgot to set the scene. So he set us in the middle of Winter Court, called for us to make Earth rolls to stay awake during the proceedings (we failed) and then had a major NPC break into the room and make a startling declaration. In the GM's own words, both the NPC and the news were "a big fucking deal."

The Lion player developed convenient connection issues early into the game and had to drop out, leaving just me and the Falcon. As soon as the second wave of exposition was over and our characters were awake, I finally got to investigate a bit. Literally, exactly as the GM was telling me what to roll, his voice sputtered out and he disconnected from his own server. 

The Falcon and I spent the next few minutes laughing our asses off and confirming that the other had experienced the same thing. He even pointed out to me a detail I'd missed, that the GM's repeated swearing in odd places, beyond killing the tone, also would have made it difficult to monetize the audio on Youtube. And lest I not stress this enough, this game was supposed to be a demo reel in support of getting paying players. 

When he reconnected, we learned that his entire neighborhood's wifi had gone out, and the session was delayed again to next week. 

I would like to say I left immediately, but it took the Falcon letting me know he was bailing to do the same myself. He ghosted, but I took the time to write a polite, but firm message to the GM explaining why I left and that I wouldn't advise GMing as a career for him. His only response was, "Well ok." 

I subsequently invited the Falcon to join my regular server, opened a side-game there to introduce players there to L5R 4e, and had a fun first session that I expect will continue for the foreseeable future. It even took place on the same day and time as the old game, the cad that I am. 

Thus was the Curse of the Wednesdays broken. 

State of the Blog Year 2

Welcome to the second anniversary of the Blog Formerly Known as Espharel! You can find last year's reflections here, for comparison and contrast. Here are my reflections from a second year of blogging, plus what the blog looks like from this side of the curtain.

What is A Distant Chime?

One big change from last year. The blog has a new name! Truth be told, I can't remember exactly when I did it. Maybe around summer? I also accompanied that with a spring cleaning of the old place, a new background, a browser symbol, the works. Much nicer on the eyes. It doesn't have the clean-cut, straightforward appeal of some other blogs I could name, but it has its own identity.

The name change was motivated by a feeling that the blog was held back by a weird name. I have no data to back this up, but when these sorts of fits take me over it's best to let them run their course. Thus the makeover.

I mentioned in last year's State of the Blog that the name Espharel was a nonsense word which came to me out of nowhere, which I selected when my first choice for a blog name was taken. The subjective quality of the word recalled to me the chime of a bell; perhaps describing a City of Bells. So when renaming the blog, it didn't take long to settle on a new and improved title.

Content

Last year, I noted the shift in the kind of blog content I posted, from imitating Goblin Punch with bestiaries and locations, to later become a GLOG class creator, and after that transitioning into an adapter of other settings and media, such as Joseph R Lewis' short stories and the Elder Scrolls setting, into GLOG content.

The biggest change this year was that I started running games regularly. I had a GLOG game in my university, but it was slapdash and infrequently attended. People were busy, and a homebrew system which didn't have the elements they wanted didn't build a strong campaign. I also had the ESGLOG game, but it was extremely slow, went via text on Discord, and collapsed when the pandemic hit. 

I floundered for a while, writing blog posts without a game running, then trying and failing to start campaigns. My plot to playtest my underwater OSR rules, Point Nemo, fell apart pretty much immediately (well enough that it did; I had virtually no material to test!) and a brief stint on a 5e West Marches server inoculated me against that sort of environment. 

Then the Castle Xyntillan game began. Since late April, we've had sessions nearly every Friday night, totaling 29 sessions, around three hours each. The lion's share of all the time I've ever spent GMing has been on this campaign. It's pointing towards a conclusion, though it hasn't reached there just yet. The party now knows about the greatest treasure in the castle, and has a solid grasp of where to find it, and the metaplot I've overlaid onto the campaign is reaching an ending. I expect it will continue a good ways into next year before concluding.

Then there's the very brief playtest sessions of Depravities of the Dinosorcerer. I called them off after just a few sessions, since I really didn't have enough material to go further, and the group's small size negated much of the point of playtesting. Ah well. 

And now, I'm even running a 5e game which I expect will continue for some time. The me of even a few months ago would have been surprised by this. It came together much more quickly than I had expected, and regular Saturday sessions (at a much more convenient time than Castle Xyntillan's late-night game) seem to have a lot of enthusiasm behind them.

Now, my content is composed in large part of play reports, short essays and discussion articles, some advice on running certain modules, and only rarely something that could be considered playable content. Depravities of the Dinosorcerer is on the backburner, as running two campaigns and writing regular posts takes up all the bandwidth I'm willing to put in the direction of my hobby, and writing and playtesting a module of my own is just so much work. 

On one hand, I don't wholly like this move away from playable content. On the other hand, it's a lot easier to write, and in many cases more enjoyable. I'm no longer doing quite so many systems, since I don't want to be putting out too much content which isn't playtested. But I also don't have endless opportunities to playtest. So it goes.

Diagnostics

My tools tell me that the blog has accumulated 32.5 thousand pageviews, averaging 88-ish a day, and 113 comments in the last year, accounting for the vast majority of blog views (all time views are at 37, 420 as of writing) and comments (113 of a total 128). Granted, a bunch of those comments are my own, responding to others, but that's in the minority.

In the latter months of this year, I committed myself to trying to get a monthly average of 100 page views per day, if not more. I have succeeded in doing this for the months of May, June and August, and am well on track to succeed for the month of December as well.

Posting Rate

My least active month this year was in September, where I posted only four pieces to the blog, of which three were Castle Xyntillan Session reports.

Most of my months hover around 6 or 7 posts. Once per week reliably, plus some more erratic posts. The months of May, June, and last December all hosted 11 posts. Once this post is added this December will break that record, with 12, and several more to come before end of year! 

In the last State of the Blog I wrote about how, during the Christmas season, I was putting out a 'blistering' output of one post every two days. Like last December, I had a lull early in the month where nothing got posted, followed by a flurry of subsequent activity. Except that this year's flurry is nearly daily, as opposed to a more disciplined 48-hour schedule. I attribute some of this difference to the change in content described above.

Once this post is included, posts for this calendar year will number 96 in total, 99 once one includes posts which came last December after the last State of the Blog. (Alas! I fall one short of 100! I didn't even know I was working towards that, but now I have another milestone to beat next year.)

Audience Size

Last year, I noted that most of my blog post got between 30 and 50 page views, with some notable posts, especially my Elder Scrolls GLOG posts, receiving more than that. 

This has, to say the least, changed. The typical range after a week of being online is between 100 and 200. Some posts, such as CX session reports, and other miscellaneous post get notably less, around the range of 80-90 views. It's kind of a trip, knowing that I can post something and reliably get a hundred eyeballs on it.

I didn't record the number of followers I had this time last year, but I seem to recall it was less than ten. We've recently gotten up to 21 followers, plus some others who don't follow directly but nevertheless signal boost the blog via their own platforms (special thanks to Anne of DIY&Dragons!). 

Presentation

I've experimented with titles for posts a bit especially on some posts which are more commentary than content. Namely, more provocative titles such as 'Stop Antagonizing Your GM with this One Simple Trick' and 'Stop Writing Lazy Quest Intros'. I used to title these sorts of posts 'OSR Discussion: [insert relevant title here]' but felt that they were getting less engagement than otherwise. Changing this seems to have worked. Or maybe it's a different element entirely and I'm misattributing the reason for this shift.

I started crossposting occasionally to reddit (especially to the regular r/osr blogroll), and sometimes to the OSR Pit. However, I've drifted away from the latter platform, since it doesn't seem that shameless self promotion fits the tone there very well.

Notable Posts

The elephant in the room here is the original Shrines and Patron Saints post, which remains by far my most read post. It came out immediately after the first State of the Blog, so I've had to wait until now to really talk about it! It accumulated a truly ridiculous amount of views very quickly, and its position at the top of my popular posts page has allowed it to keep doing so. It has just shy of 1400 views by now. I have no idea how or why this happened. If you were responsible for sharing it widely, please let me know in the comments below.

Besides that, ten posts which I particularly enjoyed writing follow:

OSR Rules for Underwater Play: Light and Pressure

Alternate Alignments: Down with the Law/Chaos!

How Jaquaysed is Tomb of the Serpent Kings?

Legendary Layouts: Castle Xyntillan, by Gabor Lux

The Six Homeric Metals

Ridiculous and Made Up: Retrospective on Letter from a Dungeon

Visualizing AD&D Combat Rounds: Inigo Montoya is Second Level

Intro Statistics for RPGs: The Wheaton Dice Curse

Stop Writing Lazy Quest Intros

The Smiling Sphinx: A Magic Shop That Isn't a Magic Shop

The Index

I have one. I have so far failed to put it somewhere obvious, and it has been sadly neglected, as I have not updated it in some time. Put this one up as something to fix.

Endnotes

I've started using intentional endnotes in some of my posts. Standard stuff, a line of dashes ending the post, followed by a request for readers to follow the blog and comment. I think it does increase comments, though I haven't looked at it concretely. So far my use of these is inconsistent, but I will likely make more of a habit of it.

Also, I still have no idea how the 'schedule post' button works. 

Unfinished Drafts

Holy Crap I've got a bunch of these unfinished drafts floating around. I include the premises of a few of these, mostly based on books. Comment below about which of these drafts you'd most like to see completed!

Oaths and Vows: an expansion on the Shrines and Saints systems, retooling it for more flexibility and easy application.

Emperor of All Maladies: a post on vampirism, analogizing it to cancer via Weinberg and Hanahan's six 'rules' of cancer described in Dr Siddhartha Mukherjee's book, The Emperor of All Maladies. 

The Faecrawl: an approach to hex or point-crawling in a space-bending Fae realm based on the Kingkiller Chronicles.

True Names: a system for determining and using true names for PCs in old-school games, based on the Wizard of Earthsea. 

The Day of Wrath: an approach to adding to your game the sense of impending apocalypse described in Mark Bloch's Feudal Society, pages 91-93. 

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Thus ends another year of blogging! Be sure to follow the blog and comment below. A special thanks to my most frequent commenters, kaeru, Sofinho, Griffin and Spwack! Merry Christmas, Feliz Navidad, Buon Natale, חנוכה שמח, and to all, a good night!

Contra Grognardia on Lovecraft: Nihilism, Eternalism and Meaning

I expand here on a comment made under a new Grognardia post on Lovecraft and the decay of Geek Culture™. This is only tangentially about RPGs or even Geek Culture™ to begin with, and then it falls off a cliff into amateur philosophy. This as also written in a rush, so I may return to the subject with more thought. You have been warned. 

(And just as I was finishing, another comment came up which is exactly appropriate to what I was writing about. Well, I have a game in half an hour and I'm not pushing the post back. John, I'll get back to you.)

James' post covers the transformation of Lovecraftian fiction and its elements, most obviously Cthulhu, into commodified, brandified, blandified, domesticated products, completely alien from the horror they originally evoked. Most obviously in the form of Cthulhu plushies and plastic figures.

I must confess to being one of James' targets in this, in spirit if not materially. I don't own any Cthulhu plushies, but I don't take Lovecraft seriously. I love the work, but I don't regard it as really horrific anymore.

Why yes, I am being deliberately provocative

I referred to Lovecraft, Speculative Realism and silly nihilism, a post by David Chapman, a former MIT AI scientist turned Buddhist philosopher and blogger (a quote from one of his papers adorns the blog banner at the moment). Chapman's point, which I summarized in the comment, is that the horror of Lovecraftian fiction hinges on the subversion of the assumption of human importance and a benevolent plan. Chapman calls this stance 'eternalism.' 

And yes, Chapman does in fact own a Cthulhu plushie. 

Nihilism is a subversion of eternalism, and the infringement of one on the other can bring about the sense of hopelessness and cosmic irrelevance which made Lovecraft important. Lovecraft's writing technique and storytelling are methods for emphasizing this. 

But without an eternalist stance to subvert, the actual horror of Lovecraft loses potency. I, and most other Lovecraft fans I know, started reading him in their early to mid teens. Stories like Pickman's Model (by far my favorite) are excellently creepy by introducing disgusting, disturbing elements into our own world. But stories like Call of Cthulhu fell flatter for me; they were still enjoyable as adventure fiction, but they weren't quite so scary.

Chapman explains this is because eternalism as a stance no longer holds so much sway. Two other commenters, Anon#8107 and John Higgins (of Playing Dice with the Universe) point out how technological advancement, especially in biology and astronomy, turned eternalism on its head. When the existence of black holes is a documented physical phenomena, when deep space telescopes can reconstruct the birth of the universe, and we can show definitively how organisms evolved, without any distinct plan, over billions of years, the eternalist position becomes untenable. 

The forbidden knowledge which mankind cannot comprehend, was in fact comprehended, and we're still here. Did that mean it had no effect?

Not quite. Chapman makes the case that the expansion of nihilism into the public consciousness, predicted by Nietzsche and moaned about endlessly by existential philosophers since, was a disaster. Some claim it was the cause of the World Wars. Certainly, the world is dramatically different in spirit than it was a century ago. 

Comment Responses

One reply to my comment offers a good point. knobgobbler writes:

Maybe that's where you live, but I see a whole lotta people who are neck deep in delusions about themselves, the universe and their place in it. If they're losing one religion they're joining another. Consumerism promises a sort of immortality through your purchases if you just. keep. buying.

I don't think 'cosmic meaninglessness' has gained anywhere near the acceptance you think it has.

I can confirm that people are neck deep in delusions about themselves where I live too. I regard this as baseline (cf Elephant in the Brain, Simler and Hanson, highly recommended). Nihilism is one of the foremost delusions I see in my general area, but knobgobbler's region may have a different flavor.

And I would bet good money that the religions people in knobgobbler's area are joining are one of two types. First, spineless, maximally vague creeds like Consensus Buddhism, or Universalist Christianity, or some New Age faith which throws everything from spirit guardians to energy healing in a spiritual grab-basket. Second, evangelical faiths with a high degree of orthodoxy and which prioritize faith, most likely one of any number of evangelical Christian sects, but also possibly Islam depending on the region. 

These two approaches to religion are major responses to the advent of nihilism; monist and dualist flavors of eternalism. The former tends to emphasize the idea of 'oneness' in a variety of domains, while the latter emphasizes, clear, eternal and objective boundaries.

As to the third point, I must confess I've never gotten this line of criticism. I assume it's Marxist in origin, but consumerism as a religion doesn't have much traction in my head (though perhaps I will understand if I start buying plastic figurines). Chapman does discuss consumerist spirituality, but in the sense that contemporary attitudes treat religions and faith as piles from which one can grab elements and stick them elsewhere, as opposed to coherent systems which must be taken whole.

Another commenter, Corathon writes:

I disagree that most people - at least in the USA, where I live - subscribe to the belief that existence is meaningless, or that murdering a human being has no more moral weight than swatting an insect, or that nothing is true (and consequently everything is permitted). And even those that claim that they do believe don't usually act like they do. Thankfully.

I first want to make a distinction: first, the statement that life/the universe/everything is not ultimately meaningful. Second, the statement that life/the universe/everything is meaningless.

There are degrees: the core of nihilism is that there is no ultimate meaning. From there, some go ahead and say that life is meaningless. Some go as far as Lovecraft and say that everything is meaningless. The Speculative Realists described by Chapman seem hellbent on going further. But those are not the only options. 

The core problem with nihilism, which makes it thoroughly silly in retrospect, is that it shares eternalism's view that meaning requires something objective, or eternal or obvious to be real. Eternalism claims there is such a thing, so there is meaning. Nihilism claims there is not, so there is no meaning (to whichever degree). The third option here is to recognize that you can make your own meaning. In fact, it's not all that hard. 

Behavior is a better indicator about what people 'really' believe than what they say about themselves (again, Elephant in the Brain, read it already). It is not original to point out that virtually nobody acts as if they believe in the faith they profess. The stock phrase is, "People used to believe their religion, now they believe in their religion." Likewise, none but the most dedicated nihilists can bring themselves to act as if life is meaningless. Most don't get further than dressing in black and giving in to malnutrition. 

No shit they don't act like they believe that life is meaningless. It's pretense. It's pure edginess. It's a fucked up form of play that's trendy among philosophy majors. Even they manage to make some meaning out of their lives (possibly by trying to outcompete each other in how much they definitely don't care) while desperately trying not to. 

After Nihilism

We already went through nihilism. To butcher another sci-fi property, nihilism passed over and through us, and we remained. 

Nihilism used to be very scary. It threatened the social and philosophical order at the very base. It was a major cause for concern among the academic and religious establishment when it first began to spread. And it kept spreading. And the face of the world changed utterly as a result, with dire and harmful results for faith, family and society as a whole. Once it came, the only way to escape it was to, in Lovecraft's phrase, to flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. 

And people did flee. The explosion of evangelical faiths following the World Wars in particular seems to me everything that Lovecraft predicted. 

But the result of this was not the destruction of humanity by an Elder God. It was a new generation growing up amid the ruined shells of prior meaning systems. The terror of nihilism was in the anticipation, but once it arrived, people were still here, and after they got over their goth phases, they still managed to make some meaning out of their lives.

Nihilism is no longer scary. It's just a problem. A massive problem, with distinct and visible harm to those it afflicts, but nevertheless a problem which can be ameliorated and solved. 

That's why Lovecraft doesn't horrify. Stories like Pickman's Model can very effectively creep out, but, in Chapman's words, his overwrought aghastness at the lack of ultimate meaning just comes off as funny. Silly. Endearing, in the same way that mathematicians horrified by non-Euclidean geometry are endearing in retrospect. 

That's why we can show Lovecraft's stories to children, buy Cthulhu plushies, and play RPGs where the player characters go insane as a result of comprehending the vast indifference of the universe. It no longer hits close to home. Hell, when James Maliszewski first came back to the blogging scene, I announced 'That is not dead which can eternal lie!'

A Personal Digression

If you allow me a personal digression: When I was very young, I was an aficionado of astronomy. One night, I watched an educational video which taught me that, in the far future, the Milky Way would collide with the Andromeda galaxy. This distressed me for days, until I wrapped my head around the times and distances involved, and realized that I didn't actually have much riding on the integrity of the Milky Way. 

For a much longer period of time, starting some years after that, I was distressed by nuclear war. For years I remained convinced that nuclear holocaust was likely to occur, and in the dark of night, when a strong wind picked up or a truck passed along the road or a plane passed overhead, I would cross my fingers and toes, close my eyes, and think to myself, 'Ah, so this is how it ends.'

This happened quite frequently, though more rarely as time passed and Armageddon never seemed to come when I expected it. 

It lasted for so long because I reasoned myself into that position through a shoddy understanding of global nuclear policy. I did not actually live my life as if I expected to die horrifically, except at those times, when alone, because I recognized I would be teased for it. If I actually believed, I might have insisted on moving to a secure bunker. 

Likewise, a great number of people reason themselves into any number of positions, from nihilism to wicca, and may talk at length about them, while still acting in largely reasonable ways, and not acting on the obvious results of their philosophy. 

(Closely regarding John's comment linked at the top, I also routinely induced existential fear in myself by trying very hard to imagine death. I can generally scare myself a lot with that, but less than before. I intend to use this as a practice for desensitization to that terror, and hopefully to understand it better. I have also heard that some psychedelics induce a sense of non-dual awareness which offers some insight, but I have not yet been able to confirm this myself).

Snarkiness

Another practice I find quite funny is the use of quotes from authors who would have hated my essay to support it. CS Lewis likely would not appreciate the points made here. Still, I leave you with a quote of his which summarizes my feelings about the passing of nihilism, from the Screwtape Letters, Chapter 31:

Defeated, out-manoeuvred fool! Did you mark how naturally — as if he’d been born for it — the earth-born vermin entered the new life? How all his doubts became, in the twinkling of an eye, ridiculous? I know what the creature was saying to itself! “Yes. Of course. It always was like this. All horrors have followed the same course, getting worse and worse and forcing you into a kind of bottle-neck till, at the very moment when you thought you must be crushed, behold! you were out of the narrows and all was suddenly well. The extraction hurt more and more and then the tooth was out. The dream became a nightmare and then you woke. You die and die and then you are beyond death. How could I ever have doubted it?”

P.S. 

None of this is to say that I condone the commodification that James describes. I am told that those plastic big-headed figurines are called 'funkopops' and I find them revolting. 

If you have enjoyed what you read here, please comment below and follow the blog. I have no doubt that my conclusions here will be picked apart, and I will likely come back to this. Until the next post, have an excellent week!

An OSR Underwater Setting: Re-Examining Point Nemo

Earlier this year, I made a handful of posts writing rules for an underwater campaign setting, Point Nemo, which Anne of DIYandDragons has helpfully looked over. The last mention of the setting on the blog was over six months ago, when I announced a playtest and a roadmap for the product, and talked about getting the zine out by Q3 2020.

Which given current circumstances is more than a bit embarrassing. That playtest never got off the ground, and looking back on it now I can say that it wasn't very well thought out. I had rules, but barely any content with which to playtest them. In addition, the whole thing was GLOG-based, which limited the possible pool of participants of the playtest, and which would limit the end product as well.

Add to all that the fact that I have never before published a product, or made a competent dungeon. In retrospect, the zine was much further outside my abilities than I had thought. Ignorance is bliss.

Phobia by Flora Silve

Point Nemo is still around, and I fully expect to one day publish it, but it will not be soon. I figure I need to publish a decent product, something simple like a dungeon, before moving on to creating settings and rules. 

I also plan to update the draft rules for use with OSE/S&W rather than GLOG. They're mostly the same, except that GLOG has a big focus on attribute tests, which really don't show up elsewhere.

In the meantime, I want to take a moment to more thoroughly describe what a Point Nemo setting/campaign would look like, which I don't think I ever really pinned down.

The Setting

Point Nemo is set in the ocean of your preferred fantasy world. Earth-similarity is assumed as a starting point, since the ocean is weird enough before involving magic or monsters. 

It's not a setting which requires a long and involved history with a mountain of proper nouns. Rather, it's a collection of assumptions which can be safely made of a great number of fantasy worlds, and into which world-specific material can be readily reflavored or added. It contains mundane elements like pressure sickness, sharks and shipwrecks, but also more fantastic elements, such as zombie submariners, narcospecters and sea-bottom artificial environments. Since the great majority of published fantasy worlds, as well as those played every day at the table, don't prescribe much detail about their oceans, the material in Point Nemo may be quickly adapted by modifying the relevant fantastical elements and adding those implied by the world, such as Triton civilizations or Deep One temples.

This approach has its limits, of course. If you're playing in Arnold K's Centerra, and Arnold has decided that the deep oceans there are coated in sentient enchanted mercury, the zine's material likely won't be of too much use.

But so long as your world doesn't go to those lengths, the level of tolerance should be quite high. Whether you're looking at Age of Sail high piracy, Victorian steam(ship)-punk, Lovecraftian adventures beneath the waves, or something even wackier, Point Nemo should be able to fill in your setting's oceans quite well.

The Campaign

What would an adventure or campaign played using Point Nemo look like?

I intend for the end product to include a decently sized (and playtested) adventure, mixing wilderness and dungeon exploration. Exploration of the unusual features of the sea bottom, whether shared with our world or unique to yours, is the draw. Point- or hexcrawling along the ocean bottom is a unique proposition, with its own considerations for spotting landmarks and locations of interest.

A self-contained adventure would include a wilderness environment, with a dungeon or three hidden among the locations, and a variety of objectives scattered about. Relatively simple, applying a preexisting wilderness structure to the undersea environment.

A full underwater campaign, however, in which the vast majority of game time took place underwater with the expectation of long term play, would involve a different dynamic. Rather than exploring a set area, the campaign dynamic would focus on depth. Going deeper into the ocean requires greatly expanded equipment or abilities, and operating under conditions at deeper and deeper ocean levels is increasingly wearying. The various levels of the sea are analogous to levels of a thickly sliced dungeon, where even accessing the lower levels for more than a few turns is a major proposition. 

Starting from an island or coastal town, and/or a mobile base such as a boat, the progression would involve gradually exploring from the shallows on down, assessing the treasures to be found deeper, and setting up progressively more advanced forward bases underwater. Obtaining magical diving gear to plunge into the midnight zone, reestablishing the air seals on an abandoned dwarven deep-sea geothermal plant, or stealing a sea-lich's submarine are all examples of mid-high level objectives which give the party more security, mobility and options in their deep sea adventures. 

Certain temptations would exist as well, such as seeking out inhuman mutations which allow easier deep-water operation in exchange for becoming a pariah on the surface, or swearing allegiance to the sea-elf queen in exchange for protection from narcospecters. The arc of such a campaign takes the party from new explorers ho haven't figured out how to avoid the bends, to seasoned, equipped and highly knowledgeable deep sea adventurers who can spend weeks or months at a time without breaking the surface.

The final goal of such a campaign, the equivalent of the infernal dungeon level or the holy grail quest in another campaign, would very likely be Point Nemo. What is Point Nemo? It's the singular point on the planet's surface furthest away from land, where the nutrients from coastal runoff do not reach, where hardly any marine life survives, where land is a distant myth, and any mistake leaves you hopeless and alone in one of the most inhospitable locations in the world. In our world, that place is located in the South Pacific, over 1600 miles away from the nearest island. In your world, it may well also be the center of a giant ocean vortex, at the center of which lies a submerged megatemple that has remained untouched since Atlantis fell.

That is what Point Nemo could feasibly deliver on: flexible deep-sea adventuring across a wide range of levels, with custom equipment, monsters, basic and advanced rules for underwater play, and sample adventures ready to go. That product is not complete, nor is it soon to come to market. I remain convinced it is a good idea which deserves as good a treatment as I can give it, and I'm going to gather experience making and publishing good products before I bring it to light.

If you find yourself inspired by this, let me know below, especially if you might one day like to be involved in playtesting. Likewise if you take it upon yourself to make rules or  setting for this very thing, let me know!