Two PSAs and Two Cool TTRPG articles

Gods, LLMs, and Human Brains, oh my!

Thanks to everyone who came here for the free TTRPG adventure, Troll of the Town. If you are here and you haven’t received the adventure, check your spam filter for emails from DriveThruRPG. If you still can’t find it, message me with the email you used to sign up, and I can retrieve your link or send a new one. The Troll of the Town promotion is going to end in a few days. But stick around, there will be other promotions, including one slated for next month!

Also, a quick reminder that this Halloween season, Vengeance of the Valravn, the scariest adventure Lazy Wolf Studios has published, is 30% in PDF. In addition to being a big adventure in its own right, Vengeance has enough extra setting information to be a player hub for campaigns in Norrøngard. Written by Yours Truly and Kelly Pawlik, I’m very proud of it and hope you’ll check it out if you haven’t already.

Meanwhile, I wanted to draw your attention to two very cool articles on the TTRPG hobby that have come across my path recently.

First up, Swords of Mass Destruction has a fascinating piece called “Rethinking clerics and religion, part 1.” I haven’t read part two yet, but here, someone doing a masters in religious studies presents a way of thinking about divinity to help build out your gods in a more authentic fashion. Instead of starting from the pantheon down, they invite you to think about a culture’s needs and values. The question “how do they eat?”, leads to a value on CROPS which can lead to RAIN or RIVER and CROP DISEASE. Whereas CATTLE points towards PREDATORS, FERTILITY, CATTLE DISEASE. A hunting culture values HUNTING, PREY, PREDATOR, WEAPON, TECHNOLOGY, SAFETY IN WILDERNESS. A raiding culture BATTLE, WAR, SHIPS, WEATHER, STRENGTH. There might be additional attitudes toward warring gods conquering neighbors etc…

From there, they ask “how do they do it?” and go into some thoughts on what worship and ritual might look like, with several intriguing ideas. This leads to “where do they do it?” and finally “who do they think is behind it?”

And then we start to finally address the who, the gods themselves.

It’s a fascinating approach and one I’ll be keeping in mind as I start to flesh out other, less developed regions of my own land of Katernia (of which Norrøngard is a tiny part).

The second article comes from Mike Shea, a.k.a Sly Flourish of Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master and many, many other brilliant works. Now, it’s no secret that I can’t stand ChatGPT and all the plagiarism software out there ripping off artists’ hard earned work. (You can hear the bias in my text, can’t you?) But Mike has written a very balanced, cool headed think piece called “The Best LLM for Generating RPG Stuff – Your Brain.” In a much more measured approach than you might get from me, Mike looks at the cost of using LLMs and Generative AI (high power and water cost, displaced workers, using human work with out compensation, etc…) and then asks pointedly, are the results of AI producing demonstrably better work than you can do yourself? Mike goes on to discuss the current state of generative AI, and then provides “GM Tricks” for helping stalemate your own imagination—the best LLM—and follows it up with a score of online resources, many of his own making, that are available for free right now to help you build amazing TTRPG worlds and campaigns. I appreciate everything Mike does as an ambassador of the hobby, and this article is no exception.

Both articles are great reads and great fodder for developing ideas in this amazing hobby. If you read them, let me know your thoughts!