Dawnfist Newsletter - Carcass Crawlers, Compelling NPCs and a Social Crawl!

Welcome to the monthly Dawnfist Newsletter where we share community gems, helpful advice and always bring you a new creation of our own! If you aren’t already subscribed, click on the button below.

Our 5 Favorite Community Gems

Every month, we sift through all the goodness from the TTRPG community and handpick our five favorites — the ones we believe are the most useful and valuable.

This month, we devoured 203 articles, blog posts, threads, and videos to bring you the five absolute standouts. Because that’s the purpose of this newsletter, to save you valuable time and help you find some golden nuggets.

1. Riseup Comus has been hard at work the past months, creating a 13-part course in dungeon design. It’s finally completed, and it’s a fantastic trove of great advice. During the course you’ll design a dungeon together with the author, in a “Bob-Ross-style”. By the end you will have learnt many new tricks to designing really good dungeons. We especially like chapter 5, the “Dungeon Checklist”. It’s a list of 8 things every dungeon must have, from “A reason to explore” to “A reason to experiment" and “A reason to flee”. It’s a super simple checklist. If you make an effort to include all 8, I promise that your dungeons will become significantly more fun and exciting to explore.

2. Scutifer Mike, a YouTube channel about solo play, posted another video in his series of exploring Barrowmaze solo, using Old School Essentials. It’s a great video, as always from Mike, but it’s not this video in particular that we want to highlight as a community gem this month, it’s actually the entire channel. Because Scutifer Mike is hands down the best damn solo play YouTube channel we’ve yet to find! The secret sauce is the fact that his approach to solo play is quite old school, he lets the dice tell the story, and respects the outcome. There is no GM fiat or “plot armor” for his favorit PCs. It’s just raw TTRPG gameplay, paired with Mike’s infection enthusiasm. It’s just fantastic! If you haven’t checked out Mike’s channel yet, do so, and start from the first episode in his Solo OSE Playlist.

3. Dungeon Scrawler shares a really interesting idea on how to take inspiration form dungeon crawling and wilderness point crawling, and use that to design more satisfying and gamified social play. They call it the “Social crawl”. The essence is that the PCs will crawl a social network of people, just like they crawl a network of dungeon rooms or wilderness locations. Interconnection is key here, as in; the Innkeeper might know the guard captain at the castle and the local herbalist. Multiple ways to “reach” each connection is what makes this both realistic and compelling. The end goal of a social crawl could be to get an audience with the baron, but he won’t waste time on any random traveler. But if the PCs can gain the trust of the innkeeper, he might agree to introduce them to the guard captain, and they would be one step closer. It’s a fairly long read, but a good one, and I think they are heading someplace really interesting with this concept!

4. OSR Vault posted a D100 table of magical herbs. A great long list with system neutral herbs, ready to drop into any campaign or adventure. Some of the entries are really interesting and evocative, like: “Million Berries: Iridescent blackberries that never taste the same twice in a row. One berry might taste like oranges, another from the same branch might taste like fried liver. Though potentially delicious, they are quite poisonous and will result in awful indigestion after two or three.” and “Dog leaf: A brown leaf that grows wild in many plains. When smoked, the user salivates uncontrollably. Used in many halfling pranks.”. Greats stuff, highly usable.

5. Odinson Games wrote a great piece on how to create more compelling NPCs. This is a recurring topic in the TTRPG community, and we’ve probably included something similar in a past edition, but it’s worth repeating, because interesting and memorable NPCs are a critical component of any successful campaign. Point 2: “Something to discover with RP” is really cool, a tiny detail about the NPC that requires a bit of role-play to figure out. A great example from the article: “Perfume!? I’m not wearing perfume!” he insists. A lie, though. He reeks of it and seems embarrassed.”. Why is this NPC lying about wearing perfume? A great minor detail to explore further.

Monthly Dawnfist advice

Describing areas, rooms, items and NPCs in a memorable and snappy way is never easy. I have 20 years of experience running games, but still struggle with descriptions. Animals to the rescue!

It might sound weird at first, but I implore you to keep a random table of animals close at hand in all your games, because they are great for adding detail to anything.

In the post below I explain how you can use animal traits to more effectively describe everything from how an NPC looks to the smell of a dungeon room. Just roll up a random animal and think about what the first thing that comes to mind is.

• NPC description, I rolled Owl: “The man has large, round eyes that glistens with intelligence. (owls have round eyes and are always described as wise)

• Wizard’s shop, I rolled Peacock: “The wizard’s workshop is filled with books and bottles in all possible colors” (Peacocks have multi-colored tails)

The new thing - A new monster for Adventurous!

The bestiary in Adventurous contains 34 iconic monsters and foes, but you can never get too many! So this month’s new thing is a Carcass Crawler.

Carcass Crawler

A huge, pale worm with grasping tendrils and a fanged maw.

DESCRIPTION: Carcass Crawlers are vile scavengers that lurk in the darkness of sewers, crypts, and forgotten tunnels. They feed on dead flesh but eagerly attack the living to create fresh corpses. The crawler’s paralyzing tendrils and shrill screech make it especially feared by explorers and tomb robbers.

• HP: 18

• AP: 2

• IMMUNE: Can’t be stunned or mind controlled.

• RUBBERY HIDE: 2 AP.

• MULTI ATTACK: Carcass Crawlers make two attacks each turn.

Thank you for reading and don’t forget to explore our games, modules and supplements on DriveThruRPG via the button below. See you next month!

///Sebastian Grabne - Dawnfist Games