Books
No books this week.
For some reason I had the impression that I haven’t been doing very well with regularly reading this year, but actually there have only been 6 weeks so far in which I’ve not finished a book, and there have been enough other weeks where I finished two or more books that I’m still on track to beat 52 (not that that’s a strict target).
Roleplaying Games
Another cool kickstarter has launched to claim my money! Nothing for months on end, and then three at once? Is this a conspiracy? Is late summer the best time to launch your crowdfunding project or something?
This new one that’s caught my eye is Wind Wraith, a “wavecrawl” setting. I actually saved this a while ago, and it just happened to go live this week.
One of my many GMing dreams is to make a big fantasy world by unifying all the cool settings I have into one harmonious whole.
The Halls of Arden Vul
My poor players just can’t seem to hold onto a thief.
Not having a way to pick locks, they decided two weeks ago to hire a thief. They got a pretty competent, albeit level 1, retainer for a good price, and returned to the dungeon. He lasted a session and a half, being killed last week by a translucent flying octopus.
So this week they decided to hire another thief. This one made it back to the dungeon, picked a few locks for the players… and then got killed and eaten by ghouls, in a surprise battle that also claimed the party’s long-suffering torchbearer, who had been with them from the beginning.
This was a pretty bad fight too, as the surviving characters only managed that by abandoning their comrades and fleeing. They couldn’t recover the bodies. So all the equipment (some of it magical) that the two retainers had on them is now in a ghoul nest.
We’ll pick up next time still deep in the dungeon, the surviving party members beat up and sat against a spiked-shut door separating them from the ghouls. How many will feel the sun again?
Miscellaneous
This week I thought “wouldn’t it be nice if all the rules I use in my Arden Vul game were in one document, rather than needing to refer to three rulebooks, three zines, and a separate house rules document?”
So I started to write an RPG rulebook. I do this every so often. I enjoy dabbling in game design and in typography. I never finish anything, but it’s fun while it lasts.
Voila, my two-page write-up of the Acolyte class:
This is based on the class as presented in Carcass Crawler issue 1, with the x-in-6 skills from the 3d6 DTL House Rules, and with a couple of other small tweaks. I wanted to keep each class to a two-page spread, where the first page covers all the main class features, and the second page just has the progression table and any class-specific aspects to character creation and advancement.
I’ve taken inspiration from my copy of Whitehack, which also does the landscape A4 format, which I don’t think I’ve seen any other RPG book do. Very handy for displaying wide tables and fitting a lot of content onto a two-page spread.
I think it works pretty well.
Will I finish this project? Almost certainly not. I might finish all the class write-ups, but I expect I’ll get bored at some point writing up all the rules. And even if I did finish it, I couldn’t publicly share the completed book, as it’ll be based so heavily on copyrighted content.
But it’ll be a fun project for a little while.
LaTeX tabularray
I wanted to specifically mention the tabularray package, which I used for the progression table above. It is fantastic.
Everyone who has used LaTeX would agree that tables are a weak point. There’s a bunch of semi-incompatible packages implementing bits and pieces of functionality you need (like automatic sizing, or being able to break over pages, or having better control over rules and spaces), and you just have to cobble together something that works well enough.
But tabularray, which I’d not used before, has changed that for me. LaTeX tables are… actually good now?
Here’s the source for the progression table:1
\begin{tblr}{ colspec={cccccccccccX}, row{1,2}={font=\bfseries}, column{4,9,11}={rightsep=\colgroupsep}, } \SetCell[r=2,c=1]{f,c} Level & \SetCell[r=2,c=1]{f,c} XP & \SetCell[r=2,c=1]{f,c} HD & \SetCell[r=2,c=1]{f,c} Attack & \SetCell[r=1,c=5]{f,c} Saving Throws &&&&& \SetCell[r=2,c=1]{f,c} Skill Points & \SetCell[r=2,c=1]{f,c} Turn Undead & \SetCell[r=2,c=1]{f,l} Notes \\ \cmidrule[lr]{5-9} & & & & D & W & P & B & S & & & \\ \midrule 1 & 0 & 1d6 & +0 & 11 & 12 & 14 & 16 & 15 & 1 & 50 & \\ 2 & 1,500 & 2d6 & +0 & 11 & 12 & 14 & 16 & 15 & 4 (+3) & 55 & \emph{Can heal by touch} \\ 3 & 3,000 & 3d6 & +0 & 11 & 12 & 14 & 16 & 15 & 7 (+3) & 60 & \\ 4 & 6,000 & 4d6 & +0 & 11 & 12 & 14 & 16 & 15 & 10 (+3) & 65 & \\ 5 & 12,000 & 5d6 & +2 & 9 & 10 & 12 & 14 & 12 & 13 (+3) & 70 & \\ 6 & 25,000 & 6d6 & +2 & 9 & 10 & 12 & 14 & 12 & 16 (+3) & 75 & \\ 7 & 50,000 & 7d6 & +2 & 9 & 10 & 12 & 14 & 12 & 19 (+3) & 80 & \\ 8 & 100,000 & 8d6 & +2 & 9 & 10 & 12 & 14 & 12 & 22 (+3) & 85 & \\ 9 & 200,000 & 9d6 & +5 & 6 & 7 & 9 & 11 & 9 & 25 (+3) & 90 & \emph{Can create magic items; gain followers} \\ 10 & 300,000 & 9d6+1 & +5 & 6 & 7 & 9 & 11 & 9 & 28 (+3) & 95 & \\ 11 & 400,000 & 9d6+2 & +5 & 6 & 7 & 9 & 11 & 9 & 31 (+3) & 100 & \\ 12 & 500,000 & 9d6+3 & +5 & 6 & 7 & 9 & 11 & 9 & 34 (+3) & 105 & \\ 13 & 600,000 & 9d6+4 & +7 & 3 & 5 & 7 & 8 & 7 & 37 (+3) & 110 & \\ 14 & 700,000 & 9d6+5 & +7 & 3 & 5 & 7 & 8 & 7 & 40 (+3) & 115 & \\ \bottomrule \end{tblr}
You can specify row and column formatting! You can have cells occupy an arbitrary number of rows and columns! It has all the functionality of tabularx, longtable, tabu, and booktabs!
I’ve only scratched the surface of what it can do, but I’ll never go back to doing tables the old way.
Link Roundup
Miscellaneous
I actually wrote a Python script to generate this, to ensure every class looks the same.↩︎