I love the idea of modular micro maps that can connect together, so I've been working on a solo RPG that uses that mechanic. This is a map of floor 13 of the dungeon I'm exploring, constructed from 6 basic room shapes (with a little flexibility to make them join up in some places).

The shapes I use with 1d6 are:

1. Straight hallway
2. L shaped hallway
3. T shaped intersection
4. Four way intersection
5. S shaped hallway
6. Open rectangular room

I have an old laptop set up with mint (what I had a usb laying around for) and running foundryvtt with docker. That's all set up and working great, starts services on reboot, runs headless.

What I would like to do, mainly because I think it would look cool, is have a small CRT screen that I have plugged into the laptop via HDMI to display the performance status with htop, or docker output or something. I can do this with starting a terminal session with the other display plugged in, but this requires user interaction and all of that.

This side of linux is kind of new to me, so I am not sure what direction I need to start looking in. Is it possible to set up a service to run headless and output to a display in a way that automatically comes up if the device is rebooted? Or is it possible to modify my existing docker container to output logs to display?

Appreciate any input to help get me pointed in the right direction.

EDIT: Solved!

Thanks to everyone for pointing me towards getty, grub boot settings, and bash profiles - got a setup that I'm happy with.

I was able to disable the laptop monitor and enable the CRT by adding this to /etc/default/grub

# Disable laptop monitor (LVDS-1) and only output to CRT (HDMI-A-1)
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="video=LVDS-1:d video=HDMI-A-1:1024x768"

(don't forget sudo update-grub to apply)

I initially set it to 640x480, but display was better with higher res and large font size, which I scales up with sudo dpkg-reconfigure console-setup

I created a service account for this, and set up a systemd service to start getty on that account based on those docs

[Service]
Type=idle
ExecStart=
ExecStart=-/sbin/agetty --skip-login --noreset --noclear --autologin axies - ${TERM}![](https://ttrpg.network/pictrs/image/cf0ab3f3-9674-4578-a230-c8f3df7a7bdc.webp)

Then I added htop to the ~/.bash_profile for that user and... done!

Only thing is there is some overscan on the display and initially about 3 rows / cols were cut off on each side. I was able to adjust the CRT display itself to mostly mitigate this, so now only a bit is cut off and it's usable, but it's not perfect. I tried setting the margin in the video options in grub with margin_top, margin_left etc., as per these docs but that didn't work, even though I verified the resolution was applying correctly. But it is functional!

My distro of choice is Debian (I like their philosophy and it works great on my laptop) but I have an nVidia card in my desktop PC, and driver management was kind of annoying. Decided to try Kubuntu, which worked ok, but I didn't really love, and then I didn't update for a bit too long and had some repo issues trying to install updates. I didn't bother digging into what the fix would be, since I had been considering Bazzite for a while, as it has been talked about a lot for gaming.

Knowing literally nothing other than "Bazzite works out of the box with nVidia" I figured I'd give it a go. First off, I was surprised at the size of the image, and how long the install took. I did some reading about atomic distros and began to understand why things were set up that way. Seems pretty cool! I still don't love that as soon as I logged in on my fresh install, Steam opened up and asked for a log in, but that is what I signed up for with Bazzite, I guess. The nVidia drivers out of the box worked fantastic, as advertised, and I love a good KDE desktop, so it's not all bad.

Initially I was frustrated that some things weren't working in the flatpak versions of the app (couldn't get to my 3d printer using the .local address from the browser because flatpak has a bug with mDNS) and layering a package with rpm-ostree seems like overkill and not a good experience. Then I watched some videos on distrobox.

I can just distrobox create --image debian:latest debian-box and then use apt install for whatever packages I want, export them and use them as if they were natively installed on Bazzite??? And this works on any distro??? I have been using Linux exclusively for a few years (and on and off for more years), but I have been totally out of the loop with distrobox and atomic distros. This feels like the same level of magic I felt when I first dual booted Ubuntu back in the Windows Vista days. This seems like it will fix 99% of the issues I run into on Linux.

I know distrobox isn't exclusive to atomic distros, but I wouldn't have discovered it if not for Bazzite.

Anyway, none of this is really new info, but I just wanted to nerd out about it for a bit with people who will know what I'm talking about.

It's meant to be played on graph paper. The general idea is a randomly generated dungeon crawl. When you get to a door, you roll 1d6 and draw the next room! Each M is a monster, and each L is loot, which also has random tables to determine what is what, or you could use random tables from any other system with the general idea.

I started working on a solo notebook RPG after getting sucked into GnollHack on my phone ruined my progress on reducing screen time (also RIP Grindor, level 19 elf ranger, killed by Scorpius due to me not understanding illness mechanics😭).

I wanted something on paper that has a similar vibe (though this has nowhere near the depth). Just fighting monsters, exploring infinite dungeons, collecting loot and learning spells.

I have never written an RPG system before, but it was fun! I'm still finishing up development and making tweaks as I play, but it's finished enough to play test!

Recently came across this post on writing up a redacted document of all of the important info related to the world / story, and un-redacting things as the PCs discover. This lets them know what they don't know, and kind of the shape of what they don't know. https://ttrpg.network/post/20269477

Which reminded me of this well-known write up, Don't Prep Plots, which, while not entirely incompatible, is at least a very different approach.

Got me thinking of the way I do things, and a mix of all of the different things I have read. I try to run a pretty sandbox style game, but still have a lot of stuff going on in the world for the players to follow. In many cases the players will go towards something I haven't prepped or thought much about, and that improvised collaborative story telling lets me as the GM find out new information about the world right alongside the players.

I have started to think of this kind of gm prep as "Mad libs prep"

Mad Libs is a game where there are pre-written sentences, with blanks that need to be filled in by the players. E.g. "We get into our and to the beach" - players don't know what the sentence is when picking the words, so you can end up with that becoming "We get into our toaster and sleep to the beach". The idea is to have enough existing structure that things can get where they need to be, but with enough unknowns that can be filled in with whatever the players (who don't know the whole story) throw out there.

For GM prep, this can be knowing that there is an evil wizard who wants to take over the kingdom, and he needs to do it. The missing noun can be filled in by the players without them knowing.

For example, they become very interested in hunting for ancient magic artifacts? The essential is a legendary amulet and now the PCs are in a race against the mad mage to decipher its secret location.

Or maybe the PCs become monster hunters for hire, and the is the scale of a dragon or something similar, and the PCs run into the evil guys and uncover the plot.

Or perhaps the PCs really latch on to a side NPC that doesn't have much background fleshed out and becomes this person, who has some previously unknown connection to events that is discovered along the way (e.g. Martin Septim in TES IV).

The idea in general is to have enough material to know interesting things will happen, but not getting hung up on having every detail filled in. This also can be holding the things you do have prepared loosly, so maybe you had planned for the BBEG to have a secret lair in the mountains, but the PCs are really into a swampy forest area and end up wanting to spend all of their time there. Rather than "Ok, the BBEG has been up here uncontested the whole time and now the world ends, you all die" - the of evil layer is now deep in the wilderness, which can lead to a lot of changes, creating new lore, creatures, quests, etc.

Maybe all of this stuff is obvious but I am a relatively new GM and have mostly been figuring it out on my own. I'd love to hear other prep methods and tips!