Sunday 25 August 2019

Kickstarter: Downtime and Vermillion

I'd like to direct your attention to two ongoing Kickstarter campaigns (and something else):

  1. On Downtime & Demesnes is Courtney Campbell's next book. It contains great advice and procedures for handling downtime activities, as well as multiple ways for PCs to spend their hard-earned cash (which, in most OSR games, is often thousands of gold pieces): arena fights, theft and assassination, orgies and philanthropy, sages, hirelings, mercenaries, spell research, magic item creation, purchasing land, building castles and strongholds, crossbreeding magical creatures and more, with separate releases for B/X and 5E. Disclaimer: I'm a paid copy-editor on the project.
  2. The City of Vermilion is a mega adventure cooked in the magical kitchen of The Merciless Merchants. It describes a sword & sorcery city ripe with adventure potential with multiple locations in, around, under, and above the streets of Vermilion. Disclaimer: I have received a review copy of a different module from the Merchants earlier this year.
  3. Back when their project was on Kickstarter, I was contacted by Knight Owl Games to help promote their Kickstarter for Worm Witch: The Life and Death of Belinda Blood - which I totally meant to talk about here, but then I completely forgot about it... Fortunately, they gathered the necessary funds to make this book a reality, so the least I can do is review it once it hits the virtual shelves of DriveThruRPG.

2 comments:

  1. I'm in on both of these - they look really good! What happens between adventures is too often handwaived, I think. But it's the connective tissue that differentiates a campaign vs a string of mods.

    I'm especially interested in the flowchart method for running the urban adventure material in Vermilion - that's another area where any tool easing the process is very welcome.

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    1. Interestingly, "downtime" is only ever downtime in my dungeon-based campaigns. Neither in Vikings & Valkyries, nor in Sword & Magic before that did we use explicit procedures, because events and plots just followed each other so naturally (sometimes, players barely had enough time to heal up).

      Nowadays, I like keeping a firm hand on the general campaign structure, however, and I appreciate all the tools I can get to help with that.

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