Mid-tier, I’d say. 😉

But a wiki is only a problem if you expect the players to read it all.

For me, as a GM, this can easily mean more stress since I now need to incorporate player ideas into the setting which might not mesh with my own plans.

I will buy any Sine Nomine Publishing books unseen for their amazing worldbuilding tools, but I’m not particularly fond of OSR rules as a whole. I can deal with D&D 5E or Pathfinder 2E, but beyond that I have little interest in level-and-class systems.

It’s a book reviewing/organizing site, similar to Goodreads - but noncommercial, distributed, and part of the Fediverse.

Whoops! I don’t know how that link got messed up, but it should work now.

The “Framing Quest” - or rather, “Framing Mystery” - worked well for my sandbox campaign.

“What happened to the prior civilizations in this region?” was a great overall motiviator for the PCs to explore the region and gather new clues.

I do hope someone updates the Iron Gods Adventure Path for the 2E rules at some point.

Good point - there have been similar types of metafiction, although I don’t know any where the focus was on folk tales.

I feel I ought to buy a bunch of Pathfinder/Starfinder stuff in order to support them.

The idea would be a custom fantasy world, starting with continental outlines and working my way inwards to focus regions.

And I would use QGIS.

Yeah, if I were to do this, I would use QGIS.

Pathfinder 2E has a very similar power curve as D&D 5E. In fact, it might even be worse for Brancalonia as characters basically get their level as a flat bonus on everything.

Sounds like a fun game!

I am personally not overly enarmored of OSR rule systems, but I’m a sucker for good worldbuilding and worldbuilding tools - I buy Sine Nomine Publishing stuff unseen, for instance. Maybe I should give this a closer look.

Ouch! That sounded rough. But I’m glad you learned some valuable lessons from it.

The closest I can think of is the “Earn Income” downtime activity, but that’s not exactly the same as what you pay NPCs.

Here is a neat bit of ancient technology: A qanat.

A common problem in arid regions is how to get enough water for your irrigation needs. Digging wells is one possibility, of course, but the water table might be far beneath the surface.

However, the neat thing about the water table is that it runs parallel to the surface - so if the terrain rises up and forms a mountain, the water table will rise up beneath the mountain as well. Thus, you can tap the water within the mountain simply by digging a tunnel into the flank of the mountain.

Which isn’t exactly a trivial undertaking, of course. Still, some qanats in the Middle East have been in use for several thousands of years.

And for #TTRPG , such qanats represent a good entrance to the “Underdark”, or whatever the local “Realms Below” are called - or vice versa, and monsters might emerge from them. And what happens if a qanat suddenly ceases to bring water? Naturally, some daring adventurers have to go in there and solve the problem, or else an entire community might starve!

Pathfinder 1E or 2E?

I don’t have much practical experience with the latter, but it did move away from the notion that NPCs must be created with the same system as PCs.

Yeah, GURPS character creation can take quite a lot of time, but once the character is done it flows very smoothly, so that doesn’t bother me. But GMs need to create NPCs all the time, and the speed of character creation is very, very important.

I particularly like the monastery - we need more places like this as adventure locations!

Another candidate: The Centralia Mine Fire, an underground coal seam fire that has been going for sixty years, and which could continue to burn for 250 further years!

I wonder how dwarves or other subterranean civilizations would deal with something like this?