Welcome!

Welcome to my new blog, which I'm currently putting together. It will contain posts on the random thoughts I have on roleplaying games.

The first couple of posts will be on:

  • My entry into the 2021 One Page Dungeon Contest - a short delve into the Barrow of the Two Brothers
  • A quixotic quest to develop usable hexcrawl rules for D&D 5e
  • Random weather using simple Markov chains
  • Some session reports on a new Ptolus campaign I'll be running in the second half of 2021
  • Why is the myth of the "swingy d20" so enduring?
Cheers, Len

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Is random weather in role-playing games too random? Using simple Markov chains to make RPG weather more realistic (Markov Chain Weather Part 1)

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Weather is important in role-playing games. This is especially true in wilderness and seafaring exploration adventures, where poor weather can affect navigation, travel speed, and visibility. In this post, I'll describe a method to generate random weather using a simple Markov chain (see the end of the post for the tables). Nearly all RPGs provide some way to randomly generate weather and include its impacts. One of the problems with random weather tables is that they tend to be “too random”. Rolling once a day on a random weather table can result in the weather jumping unrealistically between different types (Storm! Cold Weather! Hot Weather! Storm! etc.). Real weather isn’t completely random all the time. For example, mid-latitude weather tends to flip between regimes of unsettled stormy weather and regimes of settled weather. When the weather is unsettled things do indeed feel random as the passage of storms and fronts bring rain, snow, and strong winds. But when the weather is ...
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Barrow of the Two Brothers: One Page Dungeon

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My entry into the 2021 One Page Dungeon Contest can be found here .  The Barrow of the Two Brothers is a short adventure for a Level 1-2 party. Two long-dead brothers, Ethelred and Olaf, are buried in the barrow. In life, they fought and murdered each other over their dying Mother’s crown and as a final punishment they were interred together. The spirits of the two brothers haunt the barrow, waiting for someone to finally allow them to rest.
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Creating localized RPG weather using a simple Markov Chain - an example of a foggy swamp (Markov Chain Weather Part 3)

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The weather can vary a lot from one location to another. For example, fog can form in a swampy valley even when the surrounding hills are clear. Similarly,  precipitation in a mountain range is more likely to fall as snow and winds will be stronger. I’ve previously posted about using a simple Markov Chain to generate mid-latitude RPG weather that has realistic time variations. This post describes an extended Markov Chain method to produce weather that also varies from location to location. 
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