Here is a neat bit of ancient technology: A qanat.

A common problem in arid regions is how to get enough water for your irrigation needs. Digging wells is one possibility, of course, but the water table might be far beneath the surface.

However, the neat thing about the water table is that it runs parallel to the surface - so if the terrain rises up and forms a mountain, the water table will rise up beneath the mountain as well. Thus, you can tap the water within the mountain simply by digging a tunnel into the flank of the mountain.

Which isn’t exactly a trivial undertaking, of course. Still, some qanats in the Middle East have been in use for several thousands of years.

And for #TTRPG , such qanats represent a good entrance to the “Underdark”, or whatever the local “Realms Below” are called - or vice versa, and monsters might emerge from them. And what happens if a qanat suddenly ceases to bring water? Naturally, some daring adventurers have to go in there and solve the problem, or else an entire community might starve!

Pathfinder 1E or 2E?

I don’t have much practical experience with the latter, but it did move away from the notion that NPCs must be created with the same system as PCs.

Yeah, GURPS character creation can take quite a lot of time, but once the character is done it flows very smoothly, so that doesn’t bother me. But GMs need to create NPCs all the time, and the speed of character creation is very, very important.

I particularly like the monastery - we need more places like this as adventure locations!

Another candidate: The Centralia Mine Fire, an underground coal seam fire that has been going for sixty years, and which could continue to burn for 250 further years!

I wonder how dwarves or other subterranean civilizations would deal with something like this?

Another one: The “Bergpark Wilhelmshöhe” in Kassel, Germany.

This is a masterpiece of Baroque landscape architecture, and the Hessian landgrave at the time was only able to afford it because his father sold of Hessian subjects to the British so that they could put a stop to those pesky rebels in the North American colonies. The park is built across a hill slope (and covers an elevation change of more than 250 meters). Its highlights are the “Wasserspiele” (“Water Plays”). On every Sunday and Wednesday during the warmer seasons, water is released from a vast cistern at the top, located beneath a giant bronze statue of Hercules. Over the course of 75 minutes, this water flows down a series of artificial waterfalls and channels until it powers a giant fountain close to the bottom of the park.

Beyond that, the park has all sorts of other attractions - a fake ruined castle, a fake ruined Roman aqueduct, and a series of miniature temples to assorted Roman gods. This park makes a perfect setting for all sorts of cinematic adventures and/or occult weirdness!

I took it from Wikipedia, which says that it is from the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve in Costa Rica.

Truly, a scenario to warm the shriveled heart of any veteran GM.

From what I gather, there were actually fewer accidents under this system than with the ladders.

There’s even one still in operation, at Sankt Andreasberg where it’s used for maintenance at the local hydroelectric power plant installed in the former mine shaft.

I wish that someone had warned me that one of the most important aspects for picking a system to run is how difficult or complex it is to create NPCs or monsters.

I ran D&D 3.X for a time, which… wasn’t great for that.

Then I ran Exalted 1E and 2E, which were worse.

These days I mostly run D&D 5E, which is (a) vastly simpler when it comes to NPC prep, and (b) has so many stat blocks in both official and unofficial sources that I rarely need to come up with something custom.

A honorable mention goes out to GURPS, which is actually pretty easy to run for once you know what you are doing - first you need to keep in mind that “character points” are mostly for player characters, and can be ignored for NPCs for the most part. Then you also need to keep in mind not do overdo it with defensive stats, or else combat will get bogged down and boring.

The author isn’t wrong, and such issues are worth thinking about when either running campaigns or doing #ttrpg worldbuilding. At the very least, dungeon inhabitants tend to be people or creature who live in this marginal environment because they were pushed away from more fertile regions (such as the fertile surface lands typically inhabited by player character ancestries).

Even if you do use some of this default structure, it’s worth introducing some scenes and elements that could make the PCs (and the players) think: “Hold on, are we actually the good guys here?”

I do hope they use the ORC license for this, like they do for their other games.

Thanks, these are excellent and very helpful!

A good fit, thanks!

I mean, I realize that the margins in the TTRPG industry are razor-thin.

Still, this doesn’t sound like something that should require a lot of effort.

Yeah, but why should I be the one to do it, and not the company?

One possibility that might be interesting is if religions have some sort of ceremony that “marks” children for the afterlife of their religion, such as baptism for Christianity. Without this ceremony, the souls of children - or people in general - will develop into other types of spirits, instead of moving on to the afterlife.

As the linked story shows, religious parents could be very distraught if they thought that their children would not end up in the same afterlife as they did.

So what happens if the parents end up in different afterlives? It’s certainly something to ponder.

I 100% understand any culture I make up, definitionally.

If true, that’s very impressive indeed. Every custom, every belief, every fashion, every turn of speech? I study folklore - “culture” is a many-headed beast, and fractal.

I doubt that even Professor Tolkien truly understood the cultures of Middle-Earth “100%”.

In many cases, the player characters are themselves unfamiliar with that culture, in which case any mystery, mistakes, miscommunications etc are valuable in-character roleplay. And when the PCs *would *be familiar with a relevant aspect of a given culture, you can simply tell them that detail, no need to loredump everything.

I do believe that player should be able to gain a basic understanding of the cultures their characters come from. The question is how much information can they get, and process?

As an example, consider Glorantha with its many intricate cultures. The players don’t need to know everything about the setting - indeed, it is so complex that few people have even read the majority of the source material. However, it is essential that they understand what their home culture believes, and how members of that culture expect the characters to act.

This was my very first RPG, back in 1990.

The first piece of advice: Don’t have player character deckers. Make them NPCs. The decking rules are a horrible, horrible mess that takes the action away from the table.