{BOOK OF RUNEHAMMER} CHAPTER 2 (Patreon)

For their November custom chapter of doomed scripture, Runehammer requested:

"Throughout the Doomed Realms I see sticks. What is the wider role of wood in this world? The species of trees, styles of lumber, magical or strange timber varieties, or the deification of certain tree stocks? Green forest seems scarce... why? What lurks or thrives in such bare-limbed skeletal sticklands?"

Ended up being a fun challenge to try and approach blight in multiple unique ways rather than them all just involving rot/decay. Hope you all enjoy the ideas/assets, and thank you to Runehammer's generous tithings which made this chapter free for all our brothers and sisters!

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{tl;dr} After re-reading Runehammer's ICRPG, I decided to updated the PDFs' format to make them not just something you flip through before a session, but the actual canvas upon which you build your worlds and prep your sessions

{Format Update} For the past week I've been feeling uninspired and unfulfilled with my writing. I felt like I was coming up with cool lists of unique ideas, but I couldn't shake the feeling that ideas alone aren't enough to be of real value to you faithful Patrons. So I did what I always do when I'm feeling a bit lost in the hobby and I flipped through Runehammer's very own ICRPG {Index Card RPG} for some creative guidance and recentering.

What I was quickly reminded of as I reviewed the GMing advice section is that this hobby isn't just about coming up with ideas or talking about those ideas. It's about actually getting a group of friends around the table and playing the game. It also isn't about prepping enough ideas to cover any possible thing that might come up in a location. It's about prepping only what is necessary and letting the players' choices and actions guide the rest of your impromptu prep right there at the table.

That got me inspired to go back through my most recent creations and ask myself if it met those 2 criteria. Spoiler alert- they didn't. In fact, they were sort of the exact opposite of that. Rather than giving you a manageable number of ideas and accompanying maps/tokens that you could actually use in your games, I was just dumping 18 random ideas in your lap and expecting you to find the art and maps to make them come to life. No bueno.

With all that in mind, I made the decisions to limit myself to a single d6 list for anything I want to add to my setting/campaign. A single d6 list that captures only the most crucial information about the location/npc/monster/etc and then leaves the rest totally up in the air for me to figure out at the table. I don't believe my role as "Father Doom" is to give you every single answer for every single aspect of monster or location. I think my role is to give you a little spark of creativity that you can then take and mold into your own campaign however you need to.

Additionally, the text on the PDFs is now centered and more spaced out to give you more space to make notes directly on the page during your sessions. This was heavily inspired by Runehammer's journaling method where all of his notes are hand-written in a journal that he has with him at the table.

Being a fan of digital writing, my adapted approach is to treat these PDFs as the "core truths" of any given creature or place which you can slip into your 3ring binder, and then as you need to add things to it over the course of the adventure you can do so right on the page without needing to search through dozens and dozens of folders in some note-taking software. 

The art files are also finding a new use with their own "index card" printout pages. Just cut along the dotted line, and you'll have a quick index card to use however you want in your game.

I hope all of this is making as much sense as it is to me, because this all feels right. I'd started to stray from the minimalist GM mindset that ICRPG preaches, and that is a sin I will cleanse myself of with more frequent chapter releases going forward! If it's not making sense though, just let me know if the comments haha.

Unholiest Regards,

Father Doom {Landon G,}