CHAINMAIL: 07.14.2024

Chainmail is a weekly newsletter dedicated to sharing the abundance of excellent content available in the TTRPG space. You'll find YouTube videos, blog posts, quotes from books, and many other forms of media related to improving your skills as game masters and world builders. Enjoy!

"A Meaningful Campaign" - The Wandering Gamist

This is an article digging deeper into that famous Gygaxian phrase: "YOU CAN NOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE NOT KEPT" (Gygax wrote it in all caps). The way the Wandering Gamist gets into it though, highlights an idea that I think is vastly overlooked and something I want to explore in some of the design I'm doing. When people think "campaign", they think "a party of the same characters going on a grand quest to save x, y, and z". But I think there is the potential of far more excitement and variety if instead a campaign can involve any number of characters that explore their own goals, weaving in and out of party compositions and allowing for various storylines and parts of the world to be explored.

Instead of forcing your dwarven rogue to join the paladins to the holy waters of the north, send them into the sewers to convene with the rat queen of secrets. The player can create a new paladin character, and now the players have two veins to explore week after week. Do they create ratlings and delve the sewers, or continue down the righteous trials of the holy waters? The world truly blossoms and the potential for new adventure increases.

The blog post gets into this and explores how time keeping is essential for holding a campaign like this together.

The Most Insidious Fallacy in Gaming - The Tomb of Lime Gaming

The sunk cost fallacy can be insidious in many aspects of our lives. This video goes into how it manifests in our TTRPGs. Whether it leads to a GM latching onto a special plot they must see through, a player unwilling to put their character in harms way, or fear of learning a new game; the sunk cost fallacy can keep you from getting all of the enjoyment this hobby offers.

Ideas That Kill You: Primer to Infohazards In TTRPGs - Playthings of Mad Gods

"Infohazards" as described in this article are pieces of information that, when discovered, can lead to emerging conflict and tension. Most likely, you are using infohazards already in your games but understanding that they exist and how to utilize them fully will unlock a lot of new options for you as a designer and GM.

I hope these resources inspire you! If you haven't already, the best way to stay up to date with everything hothead related is to join the discord. See you next week!