Enchanted Nimbus #5

OSR News, Fast Travelling in Sandboxes & Recent Reads!

Welcome back to the Enchanted Nimbus! This month’s newsletter has a short blog on using Fast Travel in Sandboxes. A round-up of latest OSR-style news, blogs, articles and videos from other great creators. And lastly a new addition: list of my recent Fantasy/Sci-Fi Fiction and RPG reads. Let’s get started!

Feature: Using ‘Fast Travel’ in Sandboxes

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If you look at modern video games you’ll see the implementation of “fast travel” built into the game’s system design. Whether its traveling from bonfire to bonfire in Elden Ring or jumping to the different waypoints in Baldur’s Gate 3 fast travel is seen as a convenience for the modern day video game player. After all, who has all that time to travel by foot when the journey is largely inconsequential to the next plot point in the video game’s story?

Well it got me thinking about fast travel in our TTRPG spaces. When running a sandbox game, a lot of the time the journey is a major part of the story. Whether its some fateful random encounters as the party travels, or unearthing a point of interest lost to the ages of time. The sandbox presents plenty of opportunities to engage the players precisely because they are traveling about the good old fashion way: on foot, horse, or cart.

So, does that mean we should exclude methods of fast travel in our sandboxes? No, I don’t think so. Sometimes the players need to get somewhere fast. There should be options for that beyond getting a magic user high enough level to cast teleportation magic. I like the idea of fast travel being earned through exploration of the sandbox space. We can take a look at two commercial products to see how this is done well, albeit in different ways: Dolmenwood and the Halls of Arden Vul.

In Dolmenwood, parties can move quickly across the woods if they have found doorways to the fairy roads. The fairy roads allow the players to move at a faster (although not instantaneous) pace. Their end points are predetermined more like an airport monorail rather than a car where you pull off where you would like. There is still risk of encounters on the fairy roads and there is an additional risk/cost of time dilation for leaving the material plane. But despite the costs they are still useful to the players. And the party only gains access to them through their exploration of the sandbox. So in all, a great way to include fast travel for the party to utilize.

Next we have the Halls of Arden Vul, a massive mega-dungeon. Arden Vul has fast travel options through the use of its teleportation circles. To utilize the teleportation circles, the players need a set of colored tiles that let them power up the circle, and they need to know the correct tile sequence to place them in order to get to their target destination. The cost here is having the tiles and sequence codes so they can get where ever they’d like to go (that has a teleportation circle of course). The only way to learn the sequence codes is by finding the circle in a old-fashion delve or finding some intelligence that imparts the codes (and their destination) to the party. And how they find tiles can be piece meal (one at a time) or strike it big and find a complete set in a treasure hoard somewhere within the dungeon. In essence, they need to explore the dungeon!

I enjoy this design of enabling fast travel as a reward for exploring and engaging with the sandbox in a traditional sense in the first place. It lets the players feel like they are learning more about the sandbox and they get to feel cool once they have made sufficient discoveries to utilize your fast transportation methods.

Articles & Blogs

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• Dwiz over at “A Knight at the Opera” provides an in depth critical review of Mothership.

• Gus L. adds additional details to the Crystal Frontier in a new location found in his latest post: Mont Sainte Bec. You can check out the best-seller Tomb Robbers of the Crystal Frontier here.

• David at Monsters and Manuals lists out his Top 10 OSR Blogs, Now Defunct, Top 10 Influences on Play Style from Literature, Art and Cinema, and Top 10 Commercial OSR products.

• Over at the Alexandrian, Justin talks about using mythos style revelations in your RPG games.

News

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• Luka Rejec has launched Our Golden Age crowdfunding project on Backerkit. The game is a prequel to his popular Ultraviolet Grasslands science-fantasy game. It has a couple days left of crowdfunding at the time of this newsletter release.

• Ben Lawrence has announced the creation of a patreon to support future developments of Ultan’s Door.

  • It’s been awhile since a new Ultan’s Door has come out so its nice to hear Ben is still working on making new content for the setting.

  • Ultan’s Door is an evocative zine set in the dreaming plane of Wishery.

  • Even if you aren’t interested in supporting the Patreon, it might be good to keep tabs on when new products are launching if you enjoy the setting.

• Chaocylpse put out a small zine SOLUS covering how he runs solo OD&D. The zine is PWYW.

• Shadowdark by Kelsey Dionne won 4 Ennies this year at GenCon including Best Game of 2024. Quickstart Rules here. Game can be purchased here.

Recent Reading/Listens

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I enjoy reading fantasy & sci-fi fiction in my spare time. I actually probably listen to more audiobooks than I do physical reading. Mostly because I put an audiobook on when I’m walking the dog, driving to work, or doing chores around the house. I find that doing so has dramatically increased the amount of fiction I am able to consume in a year.

I figured maybe its worth sharing what I’ve been listening to and sharing my thoughts and any ideas I like from them for potential future RPG campaigns. Of course, I’ll also cover RPG products I’ve been reading lately as well.

Fiction:

• Song for Arbonne by Guy Gavriel Kay (Audiobook).

  • GGK does a really good job of taking real world historical settings and making them fantastical (similar to the Mystara Gazeteers).

  • Its a story about how the past shapes the future for two kingdoms at odds with one another. Worldbuilding and characters are solid. It is very fantasy-lite compared to some of his other works.

  • Rating: 8.5/10

• The Complete Chronicles of Conan by Robert E. Howard.

  • This is a re-read for me. I am just barely getting started on it. But its classic sword & sorcery for a reason. A product of its time, but still one to be a appreciated.

  • Rating: 9.5/10

• The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold (Audiobook).

  • This was an interesting book. I really enjoyed the worldbuilding focus on the religions. They have some interesting depth that is usually lacking in D&D style RPGs (e.g. the sun god likes light and hates undead. Thanks.)

  • The story is focused on courtly intrigue. Action takes a backseat. Which is fine as long as you know that’s what you’re getting. Can be a bit slow at times, but overall enjoyable and had some nice twists focusing on the divine curse.

  • Rating: 7.5/10

• Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold (Audiobook).

  • Currently working listening to this one. It is a sequel to the Curse of Chalion taking place 3 years later and follows a character that is only a minor character in the first book.

  • Its interesting as it follows the perspective of an unusual character: a middle-aged dowager queen. Despite that, it does seem to have a bit more action than the first book in the series.

  • Rating: TBD

RPG Materials:

• Swords & Wizardry Complete Revised by Matt Finch.

  • This is my first time reading through Matt Finch’s wonderful system. I have skimmed the books before, but I want to give them a deeper dive that they truly deserve.

  • While I admit I’m not familiar with TSR’s official rules of OD&D, I really like what Matt has put together here. I also enjoy his designer notes telling the reader where he has made interpretations of the original rules or deviated from them. He also provides alternatives that are “common” among OD&D groups.

• Dolmenwood Campaign Book by Gavin Norman (Necrotic Gnome).

  • I kickstarted the Dolmenwood Campaign and I’m incredibly pleased I did so. The Dolmenwood setting is a an absolute master class in sandbox presentation in a commercial product. The information layout is superb, the information is well referenced and throughout the book making it easy to use and find the information you need as you use the book to run the game.

  • The actual content of the sandbox is imaginative, the dark fairy tale vibes are cool and felt under-represented in D&D style games until recently. They may not be everyone’s preferred setting, but I look forward to bringing this to the table. I’m already laying plans for this to be the next game I run this fall.

  • Note: The product is not for commercial sale yet. You can however, pre-order the books on the kickstarter website and get access to the digital files which are 99% complete.

Videos

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Justin Alexander talks about how the map is your adventure:

Daniel at the Bandit’s Keep talks about adventure design, epic adventures and human-scale adventures:

I work on creating a rumor-based dungeon:

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Thanks for reading!

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