The Colours of Pentagrams: Status update

Boy, it's been a while since I've dusted off ye old blog. Over four months in fact!
But yes, much to my delight I am still alive and running games. In fact, I am now here to present some of the stuff I've done in those four months that I have been absent from here in no particular chronological order.

Thing #1 - Spooky forest adventure

So I don't even remember how much I had shared of this on here, but at one point I had this plan of re-writing the forest crawl I partially ran some of my sandbox players through.

Unfortunately, as often is the fate with lot of personal projects that has been put on an indefinitively long hiatus as I at one point realised that I need to re-write and redo the layout of large portions of it.
I do now have a bit more realistic grasp of what kind of polish it needs thanks to feedback from several great minds, but the workflow I had for parsing the book together was so inefficient and painfully slow that if I ever get ignited by a burning passion to finish this particular project I'll be starting from the ground up again.

Thing #2 - Starting a West Marches game

Yup, I did that. I have a feeling that it is also something I might have mentioned before on this blog but don't feel like going back through old posts to find if this actually happened or if it's just a feeling I have.

The game currently has a grand total of seventeen players on roll20, although over half of these are not super active. A more realistic number would be maybe four to six properly active players that I can consistently hear from at least once a month.

Running a game of this type has been an interesting experience so far, and I would at least like to claim that I've learned a thing or two from running it.
For example, at the beginning I had a lot of trouble balancing the travelling portion of the sessions in such a way that travelling didn't take too much time but still felt like a meaningful thing to keep in mind for the players rather than something to brush by in favour of getting into the adventure sites and doing proper adventuring.

It has also been a big challenge to me to keep the game moving as I tend to gravitate towards slower paced gaming where the players dictate the pace things move at rather than me hurrying them from scene to scene.
The sessions I run usually aim to be four hours in length, and fitting an entire adventure within that timeframe is not always the easiest feat to pull off, but I feel like I have gotten a better grasp on how to pace oneshot adventures thanks to it.

Oh, and for those wondering I am running the game based off of the "In the Shadow of the Tower Silveraxe" zine, with things like Stonehell, and some smaller dungeons tacked on in order to give the players even more sites to explore.
Currently the Harlowe House from Sam Sorensen has played a big part in the players' interests.

As you can see, there are some additions to the milieu

Thing #3 - My very own souls-heartbreaker

It's the thing everyone who GMs and is a fan of the soulsborne games is eventually fated to start tinkering with.

The idea I had for this hack was to attempt to write a world that could be played in any ruleset rather than a ruleset for running a particular type of world. "Make rules for a world, not a game system" was one of the things as my inspiration.
As it is currently written and as I am currently running a test of it, the game is based on the very barebones skeleton of Lamentations of the Flame Princess, but you really could substitute that with any system that can handle combat and preferrably has low starting power-level.

Some other inspirational sentences I have floating around in my notes and drafts include things like "Warm and comfy fairytale-like horror", "World where one can walk into the distance and disappear" and "Memories as items/loot".

Other huge inspirations have been Through the Veil from Liches get Stiches for general ideas on how to build the atmosphere and some level design principles that they go over in later posts of that series, as well as a snippet of a blogpost that I actually had to employ the help of other people in this community to find. The post in question is called Consumerism in your OSR games by Vagabundork, and a section of the post called "a time for introspection" has been serving as a great central building block for this little project of mine.

The modular "tack-on" ruleset for running souls-inspired worlds in most traditional roleplaying systems is still heavily under construction and playtesting and will probably go through several more changes, but for those curious on what I have scribbled together so far you can find the up to date draft here.