Khrux @ Khrux @ttrpg.network

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There are plenty of resources for survival and base management out there, but honestly my advice is that you don't need to worry about reinventing the wheel, because nobody has the wheel which fits your cart but you.

When introducing tertiary sub-systems, the fewer and simpler they are the better, over a full campaign it's not too bad to have them become complex but there is no sense in bloating your game with sub-systems you don't end up using, or using one set of survival rules that don't gel with your base rules.

If you make your own rules, they may be rough around the edges, but in a way that suits your table, and you'll be more equipped with chopping and changing them on the go to fit your groups needs.

That said, this hobby is built on us learning from eachother and celebrating our resources, so here are the resources I would suggest. I'm not going to recommend and paid resources here because I don't think you need them when you'll likely be using less than a quarter of the content in each.

For survival, the critical reason to look at resources is because it's poorly supported in 5e, and the reason it's poorly supported is because the exploration pillar doesn't function as strongly as the social and combat pillars.

Firstly we can look at survival for your party. I'm quite fond of the point crawl approach, which is more narrative and flexible than a hexcrawl but still sets up a reason not to skip travel, which is often what ruins survival. I'm choosing sly Flourish to link to because this article links to a further dozen articles about the subject.

The next obstacle is to look at the current mechanics in 5e that trivialise combat. The fact that you're looking for survival and settlements makes your wants perfect for the gritty realism optional rules, found on page 267 of the DMG. I'd probably alter this further and say a long rest is 3 days while adventuring away from the settlement and 24 hours when in the settlement. Plenty of spells trivialise survival too, such as goodberry, catnap and tiny hut. I can't recall the first place I hear this advice (it may have been via Zee Bashew on YouTube) but pick out the problem spells and have them require a costly material component that is difficult to obtain, which is consumed in the casting of the spell. Suddenly having that component becomes exciting. The conversation about resting here is vast and useful.

I'd replace exhaustion with the 2024 revised rules version, and I'd give it out reasonably liberally for characters who push themselves on their adventuring day. A character who gains a point from skipping a meal, marching too far and having a disease all at once feels the weight of them without also crippling the character entirely.

The other side of this coin is survival for your community. For this, I'd look no further than Ben Robbins' advice on the west marches. This is a ruleset really designed for drop in and out play that puts the responsibility on the players to choose their goals. Where I think you'll find this useful is how it's centered on a settlement that the party use as a base for their expeditions. Speaking of Ben Robbins, he set the bar for collaborative storytelling RPGs with microscope years ago, but the DNA of this game went on to inspire a game called The Quiet Year by Avery Alder. This would absolutely be my first point of thought for building a settlement survival mechanic. First I'd just play it as it is and experience how it works, then I'd lift the spirit into 5e as follows:

• Each session or in game week (whichever feels more natural, or pick something else if you think this is too fast or slow), a player pulls a card, on it are 1-2 prompts defining an unexpected event in the town, such as disease, a stranger arriving, or a resource being discovered, if you put 2 prompts in a card, the player chooses one.

• In addition, each session or in game week (again choose any scale you like here), the settlement votes on something that can be put forward by the players or a notable NPCs. I'd handle this as a council where each player character has 1 vote and there are twice as many additional votes from notable NPCs (i.e. 4 players and 8 NPCs so 12 votes). I'd simply roleplay this vote. If it's something obviously useful like diverting a river while having a water shortage, the vote may be a no brainer, but the party will need to clear the manticore from the path of the new river or whatever. However because this isn't locked in as a mechanical rule, story can emerge naturally. Perhaps the rogue and barbarian get into a brawl with the ealdorman's son and now he's pressuring members of the council to vote against your interest, perhaps your warlock develops a relationship with the brother of the person who votes on behalf of the laborers and she is more inclined to support your party's requests. As a DM, you'll also be getting information from the party as to what they want to handle.

• Each in game session or week, a grander part of the setting advances, perhaps a nearby kingdom becomes more totalitarian or winter approaches, whatever it is, the information is always heralded to the party, so they know the outside world is also progressing and also you can show any main plot you may have is also progressing.

My advice for what not to do for the settlement is this.

• Don't let the settlement be able to outright lose. It's one thing if the PCs die, but if the settlement is wiped out, there is nowhere to progress.

• Don't give the settlement decaying needs like food, warmth or happiness. Unlike a videogame where these can be addressed as mindless busywork, the party must consistently put time to this what may obstruct the story. Think of a film, if the water shortage is solved, it is solved until it's narrativly right for it to be disturbed, let the cards with prompts introduce this sort of conflict instead.

• The party need to be able to be the expedition team for the settlement, otherwise they have less of an inventive to leave. Somebody needs to scout the area and tackle nearby threats. I'm guilty of being a player in a game where we spent so many sessions not leaving the safe city that the DM had to narrativly destroy the city to get us exploring again.

• Don't overthink rules for settlement defenses and bonuses to player rolls. A pre-written guide on how palisades slow advancing goblins and the effective power of putting longbows in every able hand is probably no more useful than making it up as you go, and certainly takes more time. However if you enjoy making these rules, feel free to write anything that comes to mind, do what you find fun.

I really thought I'd be putting recommend resources here rTher than my own advice but I'm pretty happy with everything I've said here. I hope it's of use. I also wrote this on my phone in work so apologies for any typos.

I had a lucky group to play it, where we often try to shoehorn writers room style play into 5e to it's detriment.

Unfortunately it's paired with 100+ 5e sessions and no others have lasted more than 5, which is probably where my cynicism about it comes from. Plenty of mine were also one-shots.

The location I may have put the most work into in my first campaign was an enormous hidden library and I loved it.

I was particularly inspired by the artwork of Giovanni Battista Piranesi and funnily enough years later I read the amazing novel Piranesi which takes place in an infinite, beautiful space with flooded districts.

I think my experience sounds less helpful, your idea sounds a little more mystical like The Library from Avatar: The last Airbender while mine was closer to that space at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark where the government keeps all their anomalies.

But regardless, this is a library, so for the few who can access it, it's still used for study. Information may not just be in books, but there may be marine alchemy stations, underwater instruments and weapons kept like a museum. Another option is times that let you learn how to overcome the resistances or immunities of underwater monsters, or deal extra damage to them, or even control them.

Also if people often get lost in the library, what happens to them? Are there corpses in the library or does someone clean them up? What happens to their items?

Finally I'm gonna pitch something I heard way back on a blog that I thought was really cool, and I'm assuming you're running 5e, apologies if I'm way off the mark. The ethereal plane has no water, so it's "oceans" are filled with ladders, ropes and bridges. Throughout this section of the library, you can lay down this lore, and eventually reveal a spell that lets you ignore water while submerged in favour of this mythic space of snakes and ladders. If some enemies or even a couple of PCs get their hands on this spell (or magic boots or whatever), underwater combat suddenly becomes very dynamic, so some creatures swim and others run and climb in the same space.

Fate is probably about as freeform / fits all as you can get, and compared to other similar systems like GURPS, making the kind of alterations to make it fit Fantasy Vs apocalyptic Vs cyberpunk etc is really easy, but the system remains evocative as you chop and change it.

I'd absolutely recommend it as a one-shot system, although it's also good for campaigns too. Players are encouraged to leave some parts of their character sheet blank and fill it out in the session as they discover who they are, which I think really helps players have satisfying characters for one-shots as they don't get stuck not knowing their characters.

I've only played 10-15 or so systems with a a few forays into extremely niche systems, but I've really enjoyed Fate Condensed, far more than I thought I would. My regular group are the ideal audience for it too as we all have a very 'writers room' approach to storytelling.

I've only ever worked on personal splatbooks and although it's not a resource for making better content, the biggest resource I've learnt from is the difference between Fate Core and Fate Condensed. Fate core is 5 times the legnth of condensed and practically unlearnable from the book alone, fate condensed changes nearly no rules and you can learn in an afternoon without issue. Both have free SRDs online to actually peruse and I'd love a resource that explored how the creation of Fate Condensed went. But even without that, it's a fantastic study in streamlining and blocking sections.

I like the approach of having a deeper document to dive into, I've read plenty of setting guides that are so dense that I just bounce off them.

Don't really overthink translating their names. Oftentimes a character will have a particularly sneaky name or a strong name, but thlse names are definitely just made up, and rather than translating, just choosing an apt name is also a good approach.

I can't remember the specific examples but I remember hearing that throughout even early 5e, characters have had their names lifted from words in other languages, leading people to suddenly having a shopkeep named Villain or something like that. The designera for 5e do amazing work but don't assume they choose their names in any grander way than we do.

Have fun naming characters but if you encounter a difficult one to translate, don't be worried about just naming a character Águila or something, even if it's unrelated to their current name.

I love it, the question I'm left with is "As a player character, how does this culture impact me?" I can see I'm a competent individual with a role in the caravan sponsored by the empire, but who are the empire? What are the typical beliefs and ideals of the people of the caravan, so I have an idea of how to complement and contrast them? Can I play any race? Can I have knowledge of the desert or play a desert terrain ranger?

But even without that information you're more than ready, this is a great pitch that I'd love to see as a player. Your audience at the end of this is 3-8 people or whatever and have more than enough here to tell me you have a compelling world that I'd have fun exploring, don't overthink perfection in this hobby where chance and circumstance dictates half the fun and get this to your players.

I've tried to adopt note taking tools mid campaign and let me warn you, it's nearly impossible to move all your content over. I had dozens of documents and the like on Google drive, several pages of rough notes on my desk and one player who's journal was so good I normalljust asked her.

That said, Sly Flourish's Notion document ticked all my boxes in a recent oneshot I did, my only issue being my lack of familiarity meaning I had to spend a moment finding the right space.

As opposed to bespoke campaign management like worldanvil, notion can be built from the ground up. Mike of Sly Flourish has already done the work but as we build familiarity with the tool, it will be easy to monkey with and end up with a perfect tool.

It'll take you a ridiculous amount of time to move all the content over, and let me just put an idea out there that you can decide if it's right for you.

If it's getting too complex for you to track, check in with your players to see if they can keep track themselves. If they can't, that's a prime point for your antagonist to thin the herd. In my regular game where I'm currently a player, the DM orchestrated the mass demise of two bloated and powerful factions, resulting in some amazing plot and much less for everyone to keep track of.

Alternate win conditions is my favourite way to spice up combat, although I think it's important to drop a healthy amount of normal fights to the death in, because many characters are only at their best when outputting damage.

On top of that, considering that if you make the goal to calm a rampaging giant, the bard with a suite of enchantment spells may find that trivial while the barbarian may have nothing on their sheet that can aid them. One solution is to introduce interactive objects such as a voice amplifing horn on a roof to speak to the giant, but that still favours mental and social skills, which will favour spellcasters in the end.

My piece of advice which I'll swear by is inelegant but has always worked for me; ensure there is something dynamic in the encounter that dealing damage to is good. Perhaps it's knocking down a monument to block a road and cause the giant to steer (in terms of telegraphing something like this, just tell your players it's an option, you don't need to be cryptic), but the monument is guarded, making an ettwmot to knock it over more dynamic. Better yet, make the giant unable to be calmed because a band of unselie pixies and quicklings are slashing at his back and legs, and those quicklings work for a fey antagonist to the game. Suddenly the characters who are built to be dynamic can stil ltry to charm, convince and steer the giant, but the PCs made to deal damage can simply battle these fey. Assume the party are reluctant to kill the giant because they need information from him, or he's a friend.

The distilled version of this idea is this: "the PCs have aim A, dealing damage will either not help them achieve it or make their lives more difficult once complete. An antagonist force is causing the stakes of aim A to rise, so aim B is to thwart them, and in this case, damaging them is fine. That's a format that is vogue enough that using it multiple times would often go unnoticed.

One other suggestion is a little more complex; have a series of dynamic encounters all related to the same goal. This goal can be lifted from a game such as capture the flag. Suddenly splitting the party is fine as your paladin may stay in one room to guard your flag (or totem or whatever) while your hasted monk dashes ahead to capture your opponents. Alternatively, it's a bomb planting goal. An arcane explosive must be planted in a room to disable to infernal portal, but each point is guarded by cultists. As your party arrive in room A to take control of it and plant the bomb, the cultists in room B rotate round behind you, and now you must defend room A. Perhaps you give the arcane bomb to your rogue and tell them to hide outside room A until the party attack B, and when the cultists rotate leaving A unguarded for the rogue to sneak in and plant the device.

This latter option is always fun to do but it's really important to consider that if your party don't typically have many encounters or don't often delve into dungeons they'll come up much less often, and that's fine.

My final piece of advice is simply to ensure that you have at least two kinds of enemy that function very differently, which could be as simple as archers and knights. You will always have dynamic encounters because no battle will ever play out the same.

I've ran one pirate 5e game and there's nothing about 5e that is an issue, I'd have been really excited to see the default setting and monster manual of TotV be pirate themed, especially with all the content being D&D compatible. I don't really mind though.

I'm really excited for MCDM and their product, and I think a more tactical game will appeal to a lot of players. I've actually found a love for FATE recently and I feel that my regular group could probably enjoy this system the most, but beyond one-shots, transitioning systems is tough.

Something the OGL debacle did for me is make me realise the kind of game I enjoy, as everyone was saying "go to pathfinder, it's d&d but 20% more crunchy", I realised I want the opposite, and decreasing the tactical side of 5e was my way to go.

I'm very excited for this game as a piece of content but curiously it hits nothing I'm after at all. When Project Black Flag named themselves Tales of the valiant, I was sad that the default setting would be traditional fantasy instead of pirate fantasy. I love a lot of fiction but the heroic tales bounce off me where dark fantasy, postmodern plots and even cosy adventures all hook me in. When I watch a very cinematic movie (in terms of action rather than its visuals), I don't really care for that part.

I'm very excited for this game and 1 year ago I'd have thought it's what I wanted because Matt Colville said it was what he wants. I'm still really excited for this product largely because I'm excited to see MCDM thrive, but this year has been a ride that's taught me this product isn't for me.