It's eight years after a huge 10-player pre-pandemic one-shot, with those events becoming the backdrop.

Eight years ago, the social contract with the feudal lord broke down when the nobles and their enforcers fled before a wave of marauding beastmen. The PCs, 0-level serfs that barely survived the raid, tracked the raiders to their lair, to rescue friends and relatives that were taken prisoner.

A third of the town died in the raid, and many more were killed or maimed in the rescue. It took years to recover. The first winters were rough; even without the lord's grain tax. With the loss of so many able-bodied and most of the livestock, surviving winter was all anybody could think about.

But the desperate years forged a new community. Old grudges and debts were erased. Families took in orphans, widows and the maimed. Cropland and livestock herds were pooled. The nobles were replaced by a council of elders and de facto democracy. Some families refused at first, some even fled, but those that stayed only survived by being banqueted by their neighbors.

Years later, the town now thrives. Without the burden of the lord and his court, the communal stores are full and nobody fears hunger.

Rumors are the nobility still believes the town destroyed, but it's only a matter of time. To stay a freehold, the town needs resources, for growth, defenses, and diplomacy or a military.

That means gold. Lots of gold. But they know just where to look for it.

ETA: Okular + MuPDF backend seems the best answer for Linux.

Original Gripe:
Why is there no such thing as a pdf viewer capable of flipping through a game book (e.g. the OSE bundle on DTRPG) as fast as a physical book?

I mean, startup time is one thing; rendering a book with all of the art and fonts and backgrounds, sure, take a minute to do so, especially with the really dense books with tons of complex layout.

But why does every pdf viewer seem to throw out the rendered pages and only keep a handful open at a time? I have 64GB of RAM, I can fit the entire book in memory; heck, it could rasterize the entire thing to .bmp and store a thousand copies of it, easily, so why do they all prefer low memory usage to speed?

ETA: In the tradition of complaining about something followed by finally getting a lucky search result, I immediately found MuPDF, which is very fast engine but not really usable as an app itself, but is used as a backend by several other apps. One of those apps, Okular, also has memory configuration options, one of which is "greedy" which will use up to half your RAM to keep rendered pages in.

So #Okular + #MuPDF appears to solve my problem, finally, after years of griping about it.

Ditch evince!

#pdf #pdfviewer

A recent B/X Blackraiser mailbag question (https://bxblackrazor.blogspot.com/2025/03/dear-jb-mailbag-21.html) has me thinking about the experience of writing #backgrounds for characters. A lot of players, myself included (on the rare event I'm a player and not a DM) find staring at a blank page while being asked to come up with a creative-yet-compatible character background an unpleasant experience. That's part of why the games I run typically don't involve writing backgrounds much; I encourage players to think about their character's relatives and youth but generally let the gameplay fill out the rest.

But we could do better. Questionaires are a bit annoying, too, but I think with some light effort they could be tailored to the campaign, cutting right to the important themes. Here's a couple simple questions that I think could work for my upcoming OSE-ish game:

- What does your family do? Are you following in their footsteps, or did you want to be something else?
- What was your upbringing like? Were you a troublemaker? A perfect son or daughter?
- Apart from other PCs, who were your friends and enemies/rivals? What families did they come from?

What simple questions would nudge players of your campaign into coming up with a modest bit of character-building that fits the story?

Are there any resources for finding easy-to-modify, high-sandbox-compatibility published modules?

I'm currently using Bryce's reviews at https://tenfootpole.org/ironspike/ and the adventure database at https://adventurelookup.com/adventures but neither emphasize the criteria I'm using. Specifically:
- magic level (very low fantasy in my case)
- high environmental storytelling and interactivity (as Bryce would define it) and minimal external plot
- usability (also as Bryce defines it)
- Jaquay factor (which has been studied enough it might even be reducible to a number or two)

I mostly need a few dozen low-level site adventures approximately meeting those criteria or close enough to get there with less effort than writing a module from scratch. Caverns of Thracia is a pretty good example, as are a handful of OSE, Labyrinth Lord and S&W modules I've found thus far.

But my list of candidates is from too broad a search and maybe 5-10% are actually good fits after reading them through. I can't imagine trying to do this without piracy...

Obviously I am also considering doing it all myself, and I'm building the smaller sites found during hexcrawling by hand. But the work to match a single well-written, well-playtested, well-fitting dungeon module is than I'm able to put into the whole campaign in a year, and I'd like to launch this campaign sometime this decade...

TL;DR: Looking for published campaigns with great endings, or other written accounts of ending long-running campaigns, to steal design and ideas from for my own.

The finale for the 13-year campaign is drawing tangibly near, and I'm trying to design a series of encounters within a too-big-to-play-out climactic cross-plane war.

Several years ago, I stole a chunk of Red Hand of Doom to work into the game, and it ended with a really satisfying pair of battles; one to save a city from an invading humanoid army, and one with a short dungeon crawl to put a stop to the priest of Tiamat that instigated it all. The first worked because the battle was largely narrated, with the PCs running around having smaller encounters at key moments, and that worked really well to both sell the scale of the thing while not getting bogged down in combat (because 3.5e...) And then the dungeon crawl was short but challenging, and ended with a fight against an avatar of Tiamat, which is just iconic.

What other published campaigns have satisfying conclusions? Published could mean official products (like RHoD) but it could also be somebody's Actual Play blog or even a podcast in which they talk about how they ended a long campaign...