CHAINMAIL: 11.18.2023

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!

The Obliqueness of Real World Place Names - Monsters and Manuals

In a past Chainmail, I included a YouTube video about creating more realistic names for your locations. That video is one of the most viewed that I've shared, showing me that this is a part of worldbuilding you guys are interested in. This is a short article, but it highlights what makes names of locations in real life so striking. Hopefully, after you read the article you might have some ideas for how to inject some of the "strange obliqueness" of real locations into your fantasy ones!

Fix 3 Things To Get Your Players Engaged In Your World! - Dungeon Masterpiece

Baron de Ropp nailed it in this video. It is about focusing on the worldbuilding that is directly related to your player's characters and the things they are encountering. It also talks about how to intertwine their backstory with worldbuilding to get them more invested.

The points he is making are very related to my own video "Create D&D CONFLICTS that HURT" which I highly recommend checking out if this topic is interesting to you.

100 Harmless Dungeon Denizens - OSR Vault

This is a d100 table of unique harmless creatures to add to your dungeons. Stuff like "Peppermint Polies", "Vulture Slimes", "Fuzzworms" and so many more vibrant additions to your dungeons that not only have interesting flavor attached to them but also have some sort of gameable element that could allow you to expand these creatures into something more.

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!