I wish that someone had warned me that one of the most important aspects for picking a system to run is how difficult or complex it is to create NPCs or monsters.

I ran D&D 3.X for a time, which… wasn’t great for that.

Then I ran Exalted 1E and 2E, which were worse.

These days I mostly run D&D 5E, which is (a) vastly simpler when it comes to NPC prep, and (b) has so many stat blocks in both official and unofficial sources that I rarely need to come up with something custom.

A honorable mention goes out to GURPS, which is actually pretty easy to run for once you know what you are doing - first you need to keep in mind that “character points” are mostly for player characters, and can be ignored for NPCs for the most part. Then you also need to keep in mind not do overdo it with defensive stats, or else combat will get bogged down and boring.

The author isn’t wrong, and such issues are worth thinking about when either running campaigns or doing #ttrpg worldbuilding. At the very least, dungeon inhabitants tend to be people or creature who live in this marginal environment because they were pushed away from more fertile regions (such as the fertile surface lands typically inhabited by player character ancestries).

Even if you do use some of this default structure, it’s worth introducing some scenes and elements that could make the PCs (and the players) think: “Hold on, are we actually the good guys here?”

I do hope they use the ORC license for this, like they do for their other games.

Thanks, these are excellent and very helpful!

A good fit, thanks!

I mean, I realize that the margins in the TTRPG industry are razor-thin.

Still, this doesn’t sound like something that should require a lot of effort.

Yeah, but why should I be the one to do it, and not the company?

One possibility that might be interesting is if religions have some sort of ceremony that “marks” children for the afterlife of their religion, such as baptism for Christianity. Without this ceremony, the souls of children - or people in general - will develop into other types of spirits, instead of moving on to the afterlife.

As the linked story shows, religious parents could be very distraught if they thought that their children would not end up in the same afterlife as they did.

So what happens if the parents end up in different afterlives? It’s certainly something to ponder.

I 100% understand any culture I make up, definitionally.

If true, that’s very impressive indeed. Every custom, every belief, every fashion, every turn of speech? I study folklore - “culture” is a many-headed beast, and fractal.

I doubt that even Professor Tolkien truly understood the cultures of Middle-Earth “100%”.

In many cases, the player characters are themselves unfamiliar with that culture, in which case any mystery, mistakes, miscommunications etc are valuable in-character roleplay. And when the PCs *would *be familiar with a relevant aspect of a given culture, you can simply tell them that detail, no need to loredump everything.

I do believe that player should be able to gain a basic understanding of the cultures their characters come from. The question is how much information can they get, and process?

As an example, consider Glorantha with its many intricate cultures. The players don’t need to know everything about the setting - indeed, it is so complex that few people have even read the majority of the source material. However, it is essential that they understand what their home culture believes, and how members of that culture expect the characters to act.

This was my very first RPG, back in 1990.

The first piece of advice: Don’t have player character deckers. Make them NPCs. The decking rules are a horrible, horrible mess that takes the action away from the table.

Yeah, as a German the settlement patterns within most D&D settings looked deeply weird to me. But for all of its pseudo-European trappings, D&D owes at least as much to the tropes of the “Wild West” genre.

The problem is that cities are usually dependent on the resources of the surrounding countryside. You have to protect the fields and the mines as well, unless you can somehow produce all that stuff within the city walls.

Keith Baker always encouraged this kind of creative reskinning of classes.

And, of course, the privilege of superbeings has been explored in #ttrpg before, such as in the setting of Aberrant.

Eberron is one of my favorite DnDoid settings, precisely because the designers put a lot of thoughts into this stuff.

Seoni, the “Iconic Sorcerer” from the Pathfinder RPG.

I rarely have buyer’s regret for TTRPG products, but Carcosa ranks high on that list. The “Sorcerous Rituals” section is maybe worst - do we really need a detailed list of how sorcerers sacrifice humans to work their magic? Not to mention one ritual (“Consign to the Lightless Lake”) where the sorcerer actually rapes his victim.

I will never buy anything from Geoffrey McKinney again.

Done. Thanks for the suggestion!

No one has mentioned Reign yet?

Its basic assumption is that the PCs are all part of a “Company” - an organization that might range from a small mercenary band to a large kingdom - which interacts with other such groups and organizations, and PC actions can improve the odds for the Company to succeed.

Interesting thoughts. My main exposure to OSR is via the works of Sine Nomine Publishing - their worldbuilding tools, in particular. I haven’t actually played or run any OSR games, but this look at their design philosophy is appreciated.