A casual roleplaying game is one that has very few rules and mechanics. Most rulings are adjudicated on the fly, and for this reason they require a fair GM to run. The majority of roleplayers have a negative bias towards casual roleplaying games without having ever played any. Hopefully, with this article, I will be able to convince you to at least try them out! 1) Take A Break & Relax Sometimes you can get tired of a really long campaign or a certain theme or setting. Maybe you’ve had a difficult week, and all you want to do is blast aliens with a space cannon instead of solving the delicate intricacies of a complicated plot full of intrigue and mystery. But you also don’t want to spend hours creating new characters or learning an entire new system. Well in these cases, casual games are the way to go. They almost always have very short manuals, sometimes even being a single page long. They are also usually universal, meaning they have no setting or theme attached. Because of this, casual games are great for taking a short break. 2) Be Creative Again Most crunchy roleplaying games don’t allow complete freedom, as you are limited by the mechanics of the game in one way or another. Your character ideas have to fit the predefined rules of the game or otherwise it can end up being unbalanced or ‘broken’. Casual games use the same rules for everything. This means that a time-traveling samurai with cybernetic implants is just as powerful as a wild barbarian with a two handed axe. It may seem weird at first, but it allows you to be creative with your character designs. It doesn’t matter what your character is, because it's going to be as strong as everyone else. So what really matters is how your character does things. Because the rules are also light, it means you can attempt almost anything and the rules will cover those actions very easily. This allows players to be as creative as they want without thinking too much about rules, and without putting any strain whatsoever on the GM. 3) Involve New Players It’s also an ideal moment to invite new players to your table. Most detailed systems have very large manuals and a complicated rule set that must be learnt before a player can effectively join a game without slowing it down to a grind. Casual games usually take about 5 or 10 minutes to explain every single rule in the game. New players are also a great addition for casual games, because since they have never been bound by the rules of any system, they tend to be much more creative with their actions. After one or two sessions, these players might be willing to put a bit more effort and join your regular table. 4) Letting The GM Play Contrary to popular opinion, most GMs like being players. A casual game is an excellent opportunity to switch who is running the game and let your GM take a break. I can assure you they will be grateful. Some casual games also have mechanics for in-game GM rotation, where everyone takes a turn at running the game. Others can even be run without a GM. It is also a great learning opportunity. Running a game will teach you many things that you can use when you are a player again. It is also good to learn what it's like being the one behind the screen. 5) Practice Your Improvising Being a GM, one of the most difficult and useful abilities is improvisation. Without improvisation, every campaign you run will feel forced and players will lack any type of freedom. Most GMs don’t like improvising for fear it will ruin their campaign. Thats why, once again, casual games are a great time to train and hone those skills. If you’re feeling lucky, you could even improvise the entire oneshot, just following the players leads and seeing where that goes. I only recommend that as an exercise and not a style of running games. It can go either way, resulting in excellent stories or terribly dull ones. Some of the universal casual games I recommend are GURPS-Lite, Risus, Tango RPG, and Freeform Universal. If you want to play a short casual game that is tied to a specific setting you can try Lasers & Feelings, Honey Heist, The Witch is Dead, and Cthulhu Dark. There are many others out there, I hope you try some of them out! Rodrigo Peralta is a roleplayer and a DM that likes to playtest many different rpgs. He enjoys both highly detailed complex systems and barebone casual games. He participates in local roleplaying events as both DM and player. Picture provided by the writer My earliest RPG experiences were with Dungeons & Dragons 3.5, 4e, and Pathfinder. These are (each in their own right) wonderful games, full of arcane character options and high-powered tactical abilities that make it fun to build characters and fight monsters. However, while I have nothing against them personally, these are games I would have little to no interest in ever playing again and certainly never GMing again. This is in part because playing only those games gave me a narrow perception of what tabletop RPGs can be. Even D&D 5th edition, while more streamlined, is still far from my ideal game. I don’t mean to incite anyone to anger, again I have nothing against it personally, but for anyone with any interest in this artistic medium, it’s important to recognize that there are other kinds of games with other kinds of assumptions. With that knowledge, one can best leverage the strengths of a given system, or find the system best suited to a given game or to their preferred style, or bring aspects from one system to another. With that in mind, here are four games that changed how I think about tabletop RPGs. 1) Tenra Bansho Zero This is a Japanese tabletop roleplaying game, one of the few that has been translated into English, and one of the first non-d20 games I ever read, although unfortunately I still have not played it. I would like to play it one day, but even if I never do, even just reading it opened up my mind to new ways to think about tabletop RPG mechanics. The setting is a science-fantasy alternate universe based heavily on Japanese culture, history, and mythology. It explores subjects such as the introduction of Buddhism into Japanese culture and its relationship with Shintoism, the conflict between the indigenous peoples of Japan and the ethnic Japanese, and the psychological impact of transhumanism through body horror. The biggest hook of the system, to me, was the karma mechanic. During character creation, you may accrue karma points to give your character stat boosts or special abilities, and karma can also be spent in-game to succeed when you would otherwise fail or do things that would normally be impossible, a sort of cinematic “anime-mode.” However, if you accrue enough karma, you become an asura, a demon, and your character is taken away from you to become an antagonistic NPC. Characters have a series of personal goals, and accruing these goals allows you to accrue points which can be converted to karma, but also resolving these goals allows you to relieve karma. While the mechanics in games like D&D 5e tend to focus on combat, the idea of using game mechanics to reflect a narrative or philosophical construct radically changed how I thought about what tabletop RPGs can be. 2) Narrative / Story Games (E.g. Apocalypse World, Dungeon World, FATE) Narrative or story games are generally defined as systems that are simple, flexible, and intended to facilitate a particular kind of narrative. There are some contentions around the usage and definitions of these terms, but for the purpose of this article I think this is a useful way of thinking of these games. FATE uses a simple and customizable skill pyramid as the skeleton of all of its mechanics. Characters can effectively do anything it would make sense for them to be able to do from a narrative perspective by rolling a relevant skill. They may spending FATE points on aspects, short descriptors that interact with the environment or narrative, to give themselves benefits to their rolls. Apocalypse World, Dungeon World, and other Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) games are constructed for a very specific setting or genre. Actions are engaged with moves, meant to facilitate character interaction or interaction with the narrative. These actions are resolved with given degrees of success and failure on the roll that always keep the game moving forward. Both can be easily modified and are designed to be modified, but I like FATE Core for one-shots since it’s so simple and has a cinematic, fail-forward approach to gaming. I’m still wrapping my head around PbtA games, sometimes I feel like the mechanics in those games just get in the way of me doing what I would be doing anyway, but for someone with no experience with this style of play, these games can serve as good instructions for how to tell compelling narratives in a tabletop RPG. 3) Cypher System (Particularly Numenera) Cypher system, initially created for the game Numenera, was designed by Monte Cook, one of the lead designers of D&D 3rd edition. He is a somewhat controversial figure in tabletop, but regardless of what you think of him as a person or businessperson, he is undoubtedly one of the most influential figures in tabletop. Cypher is hands-down my favorite system, and while it seems to have carved a niche for itself, I think it’s a shame that it’s not more popular. Monte has stated that he designed the system as a way to correct for some of what he perceives as mistakes he made with D&D 3rd edition, and it feels as a result like a blend of the aforementioned narrativist games and traditional D&D, with some unique mechanics I have not seen anywhere else. It is super easy to run as a GM, with most obstacles or enemies being reducible to a single number. It also finds a strong balance between a wide variety of relatively deep character options that make character building fun, but does not pigeon-hole you into specific builds or become so deep or complex as to stifle storytelling. Many people seem to struggle with its three stat-pool system, which acts effectively as HP and ability points which can be spent to lower the difficulty of tasks as resolved by a d20 roll, but I think if you can wrap your head around it, it’s one of the most distinct and flexible mechanics of any RPG (although that may require a post unto itself). The Numenera setting is also excellent. The book is packed full of beautiful art, the system is embedded within the game so the Cypher core book is not required, and the setting itself is flexible and open to interpretation. It’s a post-post-apocalyptic, far-future science fantasy setting, one where ancient and advanced technologies indistinguishable from magic are utilized by a medieval world that has sprung up in this glorious refuse. Besides being a perfectly weird setting in itself, it also explains how to build a weird world and tell stories within such a setting in a way that really changed how I thought about worldbuilding. Despite having read so many science fantasy novels, I don’t think I really understood what makes weird worlds work until reading Numenera. 4) OSR (e.g. Lamentations of the Flame Princess, Dungeon Crawl Classics, Sharp Swords & Sinister Spells) OSR, or old school renaissance (some people prefer to say revival), refers to retro-clones of old school (pre-3rd edition) D&D or games derived from those systems. OSR is defined by a complex and highly debated set of properties and sensibilities, but is usually associated with player skill over character skill, intentional lack of game balance, high challenge, low heroics, high mortality, randomization, and GM “rulings” over rules. While once narrow in scope, this term has more recently been associated with games that share these sensibilities but are not strictly tied to old school D&D. Popular examples of OSR games include the weird 17th century-esque Lamentations of the Flame Princess, the slightly more mechanically deep Dungeon Crawl Classics, and more recent games like Into the Odd, Maze Rats, and Sharp Swords & Sinister Spells, which are novel systems in their own right. Honestly, OSR is not my preferred style of play, but it is certainly an interesting way to think about tabletop gaming. It is distinct from the crunchier, more tactical games like D&D 3.X, Pathfinder, and D&D 5e, and also from the narrative games. It is worthwhile to understand the history of the medium, and also to explore this new branch of an old style of game, and if nothing else, it has attracted a scene of writers and artists doing really weird, avant garde, novel worldbuilding and game designing. Quite frankly I think it’s the most interesting work in tabletop gaming at the moment. This is by no means a comprehensive list of every game you should play (or read), but these are a handful of games or game-types that have informed how I think about tabletop RPGs. I know I spend a lot of time in my articles talking about worldbuilding, and I consider myself a worldbuilder first and foremost, but game mechanics can inform a setting. Two games set in Forgotten Realms or some other traditional fantasy setting can feel completely different depending on whether you’re playing the heroic, tactical D&D 5e, or playing the deadly OSR games which encourage roguish behavior. A karma system like Tenra Bansho Zero allows you to explore philosophical conceits within the game itself. Narrative games allow you to tell a collaborative genre story without the game mechanics getting in the way of the story. Systems like Cypher may give you the best of all worlds, and a setting book like Numenera may make you a better worldbuilder and GM. No need to trash your D&D 5e or Pathfinder books, but if you’ve ever thought, “I wonder what else I can do?”, give some of these games a look! Max Cantor is a graduate student and data analyst, whose love of all things science fiction, fantasy, and weird has inspired him to build worlds. He writes a blog called Weird & Wonderful Worlds and hopes people will use or be inspired by his ideas! Picture Reference: https://cdn.pixabay.com/photo/2016/07/07/16/46/roll-the-dice-1502706_1280.jpg In a world of vampires, werewolves, mages, and even stranger creatures, it can be hard to stand out. For White Wolf’s line of creature horror RPGs, it can be harder still to keep the formula fresh. The new World of Darkness series (later renamed Chronicles of Darkness) was built with uniformity in mind. Each creature type had 5 subtypes and 5 social groups that defined them. Therefore, even though some mechanics and flavor would change between, say, Vampire and Werewolf, much of the experience felt tired and formulaic. Enter Mummy: the Curse, one of the last of the creature RPGs to be released before the Chronicles shake up. Though it shares the same basic structure as the others in its line, Mummy wildly alters the game’s feel. Here I’ll discuss why it’s worth a look, even if that look is a brief one. 1) Inversion Of Power In most RPGs, characters raise their power levels through experience and fight to accomplish greater and greater tasks. In D&D, this means leveling up and going from protecting the town to saving the world. In World/Chronicles of Darkness, this means watching your creature gain dots in a powerful supernatural trait (Blood Potency for Vampires, Primal Urge for Werewolves). This gives them access to stronger supernatural abilities and allows them to eventually increase their attributes beyond normal mortal limitations. The creators of Mummy needed a different style, else their undead beasties would basically just be Vampire reskins. When the Mummy wakes, they begin play with the highest level of supernatural power available to them (called Sekhem). They still gain experience and can acquire new power or raise their skills, but their sheer capacity for supernatural influence begins at near divine levels. Over time, the Mummy loses its raw might, eventually returning to slumber once more until called again, This makes for a mighty opening to a campaign; players can take their Mummies to an ancient enemy’s stronghold within the first few sessions and accomplish the incredible with little planning. There must, then, be a balance to this power. This comes with Memory, the antithesis to the Mummy’s almighty Sekhem. 2) Limitations Of Memory In another major change, Mummies begin play with only 3 dots of their “morality” trait, less than half that of their creature counterparts. Memory not only serves as the morality rating of the Mummy, dictating what actions they can accomplish without compromising their human values, but also how much they recall about their previous awakenings and their origins. At 3 dots, they care little about inflicting harm on mortals, and can recall only vagaries about their previous existence. They know their name and their purpose, but little else. As the Sekhem wanes over time, Memory can increase. This replaces supernatural might with the personal history of the Mummy, uncovering the identities of past lovers, friends, and joys. The descent into madness and inhumanity that often accompanies World/Chronicle of Darkness games is here reversed, allowing for bursts of strength followed by a softening of one’s heart and one’s muscle. Will the Mummy break from their curse of unlife and find apotheosis amidst a world they scarcely recognize? Or will they ignore their relationships and connections in favor of accomplishing their duty, that they may again sleep? Suffice it to say this change has implications far beyond the mechanical. 3) Redesign Of Format It is possible to play Mummy: the Curse in the same fashion as other World/Chronicles games. Each player takes the role of a Mummy and works, mostly in concert, to secure vessels of power and combat supernatural foes. However, Mummy lends itself quite well to a distinct design. In our game, for instance, only one player controls a single Mummy. A second player is playing his timeless companion, a Sadikh. And all the other players are cultists, normal humans with little to no supernatural power. Because the Mummy is so powerful, it can be cumbersome to have a group of 4-6 of them running around, wrecking a city within hours of game start. With this new format, the Mummy must choose when to apply their power and when to use more subtle means. Cultists can make deals, get the Mummy on planes, and exploit important resources. This becomes even more meaningful when we take into account the fact that the Mummy cannot interact with most of humanity within the first few days of their reawakening. The cult acts as that important medium. And while they are fanatically loyal to the Mummy, they are still independent actors; their will is their own. It’s unwise to disobey the great master, but not impossible. If you play a lot of White Wolf or Onyx Path like I do, then you tend to know what to expect when you open one of their books. Mummy pleasantly surprises, and while the lack of a major power progression keeps it from being an effective years-long campaign, it certainly makes for a satisfying and interesting short one. David Horwitz is a gamer and freelance writer with an obsession for exploring new forms of leisure. If you’re looking for an inquisitive mind and a deft hand, or just want to chat about gaming, contact him at www.davidhorwitzwrites.com/contact. Picture Reference: http://theonyxpath.com/category/worlds/chroniclesofdarkness/mummythecurse/ As an advocate of solo D&D, one of the most frequent questions I hear is “how do I get started?” Such a question, when posed in a setting such as a D&D Facebook group, can elicit a wide range of responses. For example: “You can’t play D&D solo. It’s a social game…” “I think there were some solo modules that came out with first edition...” “You mean video games, right?” ...which can all be a bit discouraging for someone eager to get into a bit of solo play. Despite what you may have heard, solo play has been part of D&D since the very beginning. The first edition Player’s Handbook was released with a solo adventure included to teach the basic rules. This was my introduction to the game, and being my first experience of D&D, is probably why I spend a big chunk of my time creating solo resources for players. Also, TSR created many solo modules for use with the first and second editions of the game, in particular the XSOLO series. Some of you may even be familiar with gamebook such as Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf, and if you grew up in the 80s (especially in the UK or New Zealand or Australia) and were into D&D, chances are you were into those gamebooks as well. In the US, “Choose Your Own Adventure” books were a big hit, but I never got into these as they never called for dice rolls or combat scenarios. This is not to detract from the social aspect of the game in any way. In fact, as you will see, it adds to and supports the social aspect. This is for those times in between games, or when you can’t find a group to play with. There are a number of reasons why someone might want to play solo D&D, but probably the main one is that they can’t find a game. With that in mind, I have compiled a list of five things that will get you started playing D&D solo. And by solo, I mean without a Dungeon Master. 1) Get A Flipmat And Minis To really make your solo play tangible, tabletop is the best way to go. And the best way to do that is to get yourself a flipmat and some minis. Paizo put out a product called “Pathfinder Flip Mat: Basic Terrain Multi Pack” which is a set of two, double-sided flipmats that portray wilderness, dungeon, ocean and urban backgrounds for you to draw on with dry erase markers. Add miniatures to this, and you’re all set. Of course, Wizards of the Coast has a huge range of minis for every class, which you can find online or at your local game store. My method is to buy the mini, then create the character that fits with it. You can start tabletop adventuring even cheaper than this. Go and buy a bunch of one inch washers from your local hardware store, then get some sticky paper and a one inch holepunch. Find a cool image for your PC, then print it onto sticky paper, punch it out with the holepunch (or adhere it to the washer and cut around the edge with scissors) and voila! Flat, circular tokens for your gameboard. You can do the same with monsters also. If you are really strapped for cash, you could use coins or even dice to represent PCs and monsters. And you can find all sorts of great maps on Dungeon Master’s Guild (there’s a lot of free maps packs) and sites like dundjinni.com. With a little creativity, you can have a cost-effective tabletop setup in no time. 2) Question / Answer Mechanic All right, you’re all set up and ready to get started with your solo tabletop campaign. What now? You are going to need some tools to effectively replace the Dungeon Master. And the most important of these is a question/answer mechanic. Simply put, this is a way of getting answers to questions using dice rolls as you journey through the adventure. Solo adventuring is pointless unless we can create the adventure as we move through it, so that the twists and turns are revealed as we encounter them. The most well-known version of the question/answer mechanic is the Mythic GM Emulator, which uses D100 rolls to answer yes/no questions framed by the player. There are likelihood modifiers (adjusted according to the current situation) and also a Chaos Factor which goes up or down according to events within your game. Also, every time you roll a double (11, 22, 33, 44) you get a random event, the nature of which can be determined by rolling on another table (or by any table you might choose to introduce). Mythic GM Emulator is available on Drivethrurpg here). In my product, The Solo Adventurer’s Toolbox (available on Dungeon Master’s Guild here), I created my own version of the question / answer mechanic which uses d20 rolls to get yes/no answers, with a likelihood modifier. This is basically a stripped-down version of the Mythic Mechanic. Let me give you an example of a question / answer mechanic in action. Lorna and Dumon, a druid and a ranger, enter the town of Wadale after several days on the road. Casting her eye about, Lorna looks for an inn. At this point, the solo player poses the question: Is Lorna able to find an inn? (All questions need to be framed so they can be answered with either “yes” or “no”). The town is a reasonable size, so it’s likely that there is an inn here. Using my own Q/A mechanic, the player can use the modifier +2 (Likely), and then make a d20 roll. The results could be as follows: 1-6: No 7-12: Maybe 13-20: Yes In this case, the result is an 11, but when we add the “Likely” modifier of +2, it pushes the result up to 13, which is a “Yes”. (If “maybe” is the result, then perhaps an investigation check is required). From this, we know that Lorna is able to find an inn. Now we can move to another table which tells us the nature of the inn, the name of the inn, what NPCs are there, and other details. Combining those elements with question / answer rolls, we can move through the adventure with ease. 3) Story Elements And Setting It goes without saying that you will need a world for your adventurers to travel in. There is something to be said for using an established setting. All the worldbuilding has already been done for you, so when you reach Neverwinter in the Forgotten Realms (for example) all you need to do is grab your copy of the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting (or type “Neverwinter” into Google) and you will instantly see what sort of things your PC might be dealing with. But then, there is homebrew as well. The beauty of soloing with homebrew is that you get to flesh out your world as you travel through it! By “Story Elements” I am referring to a way of answering specific questions, or providing detailed answers that the question / answer mechanic is incapable of furnishing. In the Mythic system, there are the Event Meaning Tables, which provide 100 subjects and 100 actions. Using two d100 rolls, we can create infinite combinations such as Travel / A Burden, Malice/Magic, Inspect/Messages, Disrupt/Leadership and many, many others. In The Solo Adventurer’s toolbox, I have a chapter called Story Element Interaction Tables which provides a list of basic situations according to terrain, accompanied by a list of 499 verbs which the player can roll on until a situation presents itself. 4) Tables. Lots Of Tables In order to generate a wide variety of encounters, situations, locations, NPCs and all the other things that make up a campaign for your character, you will need a large selection of tables and random generators to help you generate these things. Let me introduce you to a few excellent tools that will help you create all the variables you need for your campaign. DONJON RPG TOOLS: If you are not already familiar with this site, you need to get to know this one. This site is a go-to for DMs and contains generative tools for creating NPCs, taverns, merchants, monster encounters, loot, towns, dungeons… everything you need for a full campaign. Pair these resources with a question / answer mechanic, and you are underway. Check out the Donjon page here. With a goal of creating a one-stop shop for soloing, I created a similar spread of tables for The Solo Adventurer’s Toolbox. But I also encourage players to use any tools that come to hand. D100 TABLES: Here is another crazy resource that I found on Reddit one day. This is a community created selection of tables that covers just about everything you could think of, and more. Even if you’re not a solo player, this is well worth a look. Check out this insane collection of tables here. 5) Journal And last, but by no means least, there is the concept of journaling, which is arguably the most crucial component of solo adventuring. Simply put, journaling is the act of taking notes as you adventure, documenting your characters’ actions, discoveries, motivations, NPC interactions and everything else that occurs within the course of your campaign. There is no need to get overly detailed with your journaling. For example, you don’t want to be interrupting every stage of your quest to note: “Draxar moves down the corridor, then comes to a junction. He continues west, then comes to a door. It is locked. Taking out his thieves’ tools... “ etc. You don’t require that level of narration. Instead, you can let your PC complete stages of the quest, then summarise those stages in your journal. What journaling does is make your adventuring concrete, and also provides you with a record of clues, quest notes, important NPCs and other things. It also goes a long way towards replicating DM narration. By entering the notes of the quest as you venture through it, you are effectively becoming a sort of pseudo-narrator yourself, telling the stories of your characters as they venture through your world. If you are venturing in your homebrew world, then these notes can form part of your worldbuilding. And there is an added bonus to all this: once you are finished with your quest, you can convert the adventure concept for a full party. So your solo adventuring accomplishes two aims at once! So, to summarise, solo D&D is definitely achievable, but we need to assemble a few tools to streamline the experience and make it easy and enjoyable. The five points listed above will be enough to get you started down the path of solo adventuring, and should provide you with a framework to create some meaningful and immersive quests. With a view to facilitating freeform solo adventuring, I created a product entitled The Solo Adventurer’s Toolbox. It contains all the things listed above (apart from flipmat and minis) and much more, comprising a complete system for freeform solo adventuring within any world. However, following the points listed above should be enough to get you started. Also, come and find us on Facebook: we have a group dedicated to solo adventuring named Dungeons & Dragons Solo Adventures. It’s a great community where you will find many tips and resources all related to solo adventuring. Paul Bimler is a writer of solo adventures for D&D and releases under the small label 5e Solo Gamebooks. He also teaches music production and lives in the city of Christchurch in New Zealand. So far Paul has five gamebooks and a number of other products released on Dungeon Master's Guild. He also runs a Facebook page named D&D Solo Adventures. Picture Reference: https://www.dmsguild.com/product/235268/DD-Solo-Adventure-Tables-Of-Doom--5E-Solo-Adventuring Welcome to High Level Game’s newest feature. Storyteller’s Vault Reviews. The Storyteller’s Vault is a community content creation site developed in conjunction between White Wolf and DriveThruRPG/One Book Store. Several blog contributors are Vault creators, and are happy to help promote this community of creators. Some of these reviews may also be present on the Vault itself. These articles will collect reviews from a club of creators on the Vault. Our major focus will be on reviewing works from creators in the club to start, and then we may expand out to other products on the vault. Our first book will be Guide to Dying, by Secrets of the Masquerade. This is a supplement for Wraith: The Oblivion, which was just released for creators on the Vault. Each reviewer has their section, rating, and then content of their review below. Shannon 5/5
So often when a Storyteller is spooling up a Wraith: the Oblivion game, they become preoccupied with the setting of the chronicle – because Wraith can have so many – and the antagonistic factions at work within the chronicle – because, again, Wraith can have so many – that simple yet critical details get lost in the shuffle of things that happen in between character generation and the first night of sitting at the table to begin the story. Arguably, one of the most important things that seem to get left at the truck stop isn’t so much “How did your character die?” but rather the investment of time, thought and, in fact, emotion, that should be attached to the answering of that question. One of the things that makes Wraith: the Oblivion so emotional, and to be certain, one of the things that has endeared the game to those who love it the way that they do, is the emotional investment required of both the Storyteller and the characters who run and play the game, respectively. Within the overarching setting of the World of Darkness, there is no other game that demands of you to think about the most horrible thing that could possibly happen to you – a death so untimely and, in many or most cases, unfair – that it will literally define your character and everything that your character does throughout the duration of a chronicle’s lifespan. The Psyche, the Shadow, the Corpus, Memoriam, Fetters, Passions, Thorns… all these things are born from how your character met her end. People who die peacefully in their sleep do not generally leave ghosts behind. They simply “Transcend” into the next phase of existence and bypass the dark horror of the Underworld, the Shadowlands, the Dark Kingdoms of the Dead and the Labyrinth. Shadows of the Masquerade’s Guide to Dying supplement is a kick-starter in its best-possible incarnation. Not for a story, but for characters entering a story. Not for setting a scene, but for the players on the stage, and for the director who will guide them through the gossamer of the Underworld. The supplement asks the question "How did you get here, anyway?" of the reader, and shifts the player out of a "comfort bubble" and into an area of thinking about things that most people do not want to think about on a regular basis. Or even on rare occasions, for that matter. While presented as a “Guide,” it is more of a toolbox of thought exercises than anything else. When I see the word “Guide” in a title, I think of mechanics and step-by-step instruction on how to do this or why you would want to do that. This is not necessarily the case with the Guide to Dying. In the most liberal sense, some of the explanations of causes of death could be viewed as a sort of mechanic… but even that is a bit of a stretch. What the Guide to Dying does do – and does well – is takes the time to clarify no only how a character’s death is reflected directly in the ghost that death creates across the Shroud, but why. First off, the supplement is absolutely beautiful in the same way that all Wraith: the Oblivion products are. The solemn melancholy of the artwork lends to the mood of the subject matter, and the reader is stricken with a sense of wanting to curl up under a quilt to read it on a deep-gray Winter’s day. A nice funerary bouquet of Internal and External causes of death are presented and explained – For example, “Malicious Intent,” “Freak Accident,” or “Death by Illness” – and then, in turn (which I found exceptionally cool, to be completely honest) there are three example characters proved who died in any number or, if you’d like, combinations of these causes. Now that would be enough for a beginner coming to Wraith: the Oblivion for the first time. But Shadows of the Masquerade takes it a step further; for each cause of death that has befallen the given character, given their background and given a couple of the clarifications on their general disposition as conceptualizations, the overall effect that each cause has on their Fetters, Passions and Shadow is afforded and explained. This is an awesome tool for people who have a hard time with the concept that playing a ghost is actually about playing two distinctly different characters that are, while arch-enemies, also the most fundamentally closest of allies and, in fact, the same being. It’s a tricky concept for people new to the game and the systems, and the Guide to Dying handles this exceptionally well. I had one, single heartache with the example characters as provided and written; each one of them, based on a given cause of death, is assigned to a Guild. Now, while this is somewhat helpful to an extent, I think what would have been even more useful would have been assignment within a Legion given the nature and causation of the deaths of the example characters. Sure, the Haunters might Reap a ghost who was accidentally killed by a Good Samaritan, and I roger that as being completely logical. However, The Reapers of the Lady of Fate would probably also have dibs on such a poor soul, and would have, additionally, Hierarchy “sanctioned” Haunters within their ranks. This doesn’t take away from what is presented in the Guide to Dying, but I do think that it bears mention that there are a lot of other factions and forces-at-large in the Underworld than just the Guilds Reaping Cauls on the regular. With Wraith: the Oblivion being opened up to the Storytellers Vault in just the last week, Guide to Dying is a top-notch debut supplement that does a lot to set the standard for what Wraith: the Oblivion Storytellers and players will look for to enhance and enrich their trans-Shroud Chronicles. Sebastian 5/5 I love toolkit books like this. Short, sweet, to the point, without need for tons of flowery exposition. I found this short book to be quite helpful. Too often, I personally get a little bogged down by all of the metaphysical elements of Wraith. Granted, these elements are what makes the game more interesting, but in the end, it is about our characters. This book is a refreshing gathering of examples and inspiration. Ideas that might be used to inspire my next character, the next antagonist, or even a full blown storyline. After all...the passions behind why anyone becomes a wraith is what drives the whole game. I particularly like the introduction. Sure, we can all sit and brainstorm how a character died and how it affects them. But...having a bit of a "cheatsheet" of origins as they relate to the game can save a few minutes when preparing the next game session or story arc. Josh 4/5 How did I die? Really, this is the central question in Wraith character creation, but often it is a quick sketch on the side of the character background and ignored. The elements of death help direct enfants toward a specific Legion, but these situations are large scale buckets and don’t take into account the small intricate details of how and why someone ended up crossing over with unfinished business like they did. One of my favorite things about the Vault is the ability to find books and booklets that allow for creators to dive into the minutiae of the World of Darkness in a way no official work would ever be able to go. Guide to Dying provides 2-3 options for how three different characters could die. It also precedes the pre-generated character details with some reasons why a character died, including external and potential internal factors to consider. These are all good factors and are well presented. The layout is top-notch, and the art is very well suited to the material and SotM utilizes a mix of art packs provided by White Wolf, other artist works for sale on the Vault, and privately acquired art that really helps put the visual quality of the book nearly on par with a professional RPG product. The only drawback here is that some of the sentence structure is awkward. It’s readable, but as an editor who helps other non-Native English speaking authors, I noticed quite a few sentences that were oddly structured. For me this does mar the product a little, but only a little. I do think the quality of the product is still top-notch and something that I would recommend to storytellers or players looking to get a better feel for this element of Wraith: The Oblivion. Matthew 4/5 To begin this review I would like to start by saying I found this products organization, both in layout and presenting information, was Stellar. It is quickly apparent that this product was well thought out and had a clear focus. That focus was to help determine the the effect of one's type of death has on the wraith character and help to guide the the character creation choices. The book is divided into 2 parts. The first touches on the different types of death a character may experience. The second is a few sample characters. I want to point out I really enjoyed the approach taken with the way these sample characters were written. Each is presented with a background from before their death with some possible life highlighted life choices. Then it presents a few possible the deaths that lead to their rebirth as a wraith, and how each of these deaths would impact the direction of their supernatural existence. This part drew me right into this product, and I want to make this stand out as an excellent way to help both players and storytellers. Especially if the task at hand focuses on a young wraith. This book will be a great tool. If I had to hunt of a drawback for this product, I would say it is very line focused. This book would have little use outside of use in the Wraith line. But this a minor flaw and one that many product is expect to have. As well, it may have little impact in helping design a elder wraith, it is a product that focuses on the moment of death and not the centuries past. All and all I enjoyed examining the pdf and find my insight to the Wraith line enriched by reading. I would give this product 7.5 out of 10. Resonance granted for by this review is Death Born. Come back next time for our reviews of Progenitors: Crash Cart, Volume 2 Today we get the chance to grill the masterful Gentleman Gamer about his newest creation, They Came From Beneath The Sea! This game uses the Storypath System and is the fourth game to be deep in development by Onyx Path that uses that system. That said, this game is drastically different tonally than Scion 2nd Edition or Trinity Continuum, so we are looking forward to hearing from Matthew Dawkins himself about what makes They Came From Beneath The Sea! different than other games in the Storypath line. If you're unfamiliar with Mr. Dawkins, here are a few key links to learn about the guy. Facebook YouTube Onyx Path 1) Tell us a little about the setting and tone of the game, sir, if you could? At first glance, the setting and tone of They Came from Beneath the Sea! is one of camp farce, humour, and rubbery costumes. In truth, it can go as harshly horrific as you like, or as ridiculous as you want. It has all the gravitas of a B-movie from the 1950s. The characters are utterly serious. The audiences... Not so much. 2) From what we've read so far, it seems like this is an excellent game for one-shots and single sessions. I'd like to know what sort of ways you expect people will play this as a campaign. Good question! One of the best ways of running a lengthy campaign of They Came From is to delve into the alien societies. They may all wish to invade / destroy / enslave humanity, but they don't co-exist peacefully. With whom do you make an unholy pact, to drive back a third party? Start a campaign with a seaside invasion, take the fight to the aliens, go to the sea floor in a submarine, attack an alien base, find there's a manipulator behind it all, return to land to find another race of aliens has moved into your town... There's a lot of ways a campaign can go! 3) Why does Storypath work for this game? How have you adjusted the core system to fit with the themes and mood of the game more effectively? Initially I was designing my own system for They Came From, but when I previewed Storypath I realised it was perfect. The character Paths are a wonderful way for constructing an archetypal character for this kind of game. Stunts are a lovely, spontaneous way of taking actions. Momentum (or in our case, Rewrites) are a fantastic mechanic for rewarding failures. I had to fold Quips, Cinematics, and Tropes into all that, and it was pretty seamless. 4) Using the basic set-up, is it possible we will see other B-Movie tropes in the book or in future supplements? Perhaps a kitschy Lost in Space type set-up? Absolutely! Hijack a mad scientist's rocketship and go to the moon, where you'll find the true minds behind the brain-eater eels! As an example, anyway. This core book focuses on the aquatic threat, but can go anywhere from any B-movie medium. 5) What ways can the community get involved in this game? Run actual plays! Give gaming reports! Do reviews of the early access document! Share and back the Kickstarter! The community has been so supportive of this brand new property and it's been truly heartening to see and experience. Please continue to do so into the new year, as it's important to me (and Onyx Path) that our properties like this do well and find their audience. 6) Let's digress a moment, tell our folks about the Onyx Pathcast and why they should be listening to it right now while reading this and backing They Came From Beneath The Sea!? The Onyx Pathcast is great fun. Dixie Cochran, Eddy Webb, and myself chew the fat about the roleplaying industry, the construction of our books (from writing, to development, to editing, to art), and provide deep dives on many of our games. We have a great rapport you might enjoy and even get to interview industry guests every couple of episodes or so! And why back They Came from Beneath the Sea? It's the first game to explore this genre so well, and I've never playtested a game that's been so consistently fun to explore. 7) What else are you excited to see coming out from Onyx Path in the next, 6-10 months? So many things.. Lunars is coming up for Exalted. Pirates of Pugmire is going to be fantastic. I'll be developing the stretch goals for V5 [Chicago By Night], and possibly further books for that line! Oh, and the Contagion Chronicle is coming, and you'll want to get infected... We've got to thank Matthew for coming by and sharing his thoughts with us. Don't forget to back the Kickstarter and join up to fight the Crab Army! Every good American would! (*Should not be construed to exclude non-Americans from backing the Kickstarter. Capitalism will run roughshod across the back of the Communist Menace worldwide!) The writing team here at High Level Games loves checking out new RPGs and sharing our experiences. Thus we have our attention focused on the horizon, ever watchful for the latest editions and originals in the works for our beloved hobby. As a New Year treat, we’d like to share with you the games and supplements that are “Coming Soon in 2019.” We don’t want to hog all the hype to ourselves; tis the season of giving, after all! With our breath bated and no further ado, here is each writer’s most anticipated 2019 release.
Editor’s Note: to the right of the dashes are the names of the writers that chose the games, not the names of the creators or publishers. 1) Swords of the Serpentine - Phil Political drama? Check. Magic that’s as dangerous to the user as the target? Check. Gritty setting? Check. GUMSHOE? Check. Swords of the Serpentine checks off almost all of my boxes (we’ll see how much black humor pops up), and looks to be another excellent addition to the GUMSHOE line. 2) Kamigakari: God Hunter - Aaron der Schaedel Kamigakari is a game from Japan, set in modern day Japan, where you play as a supernaturally endowed hunter of otherworldly beings protecting an unsuspecting populace of mortals otherwise ignorant to the horrors hidden from them. The kickstarter for Kamigakari was fully funded in November of 2018, and is expected to be available in the Summer of 2019. 3) Trinity Continuum: Aeon and Core - Josh Heath The original versions of the Trinity Continuum are some of the few RPG books I’ve held onto over the years. I took Adventure! and Aberrant to Korea with me while I was in the Army. These games are part of the reason I explored non-World of Darkness games. The 2nd Edition will include a modern setting similar to the shows Leverage or other action story shows without high powered Supers. The Kickstarter ran in 2018. It will be coming with the Space Opera setting, Aeon. I’ve been reading the 1st Ed books in exciting anticipation. Color me sold, this is the game I’m most excited about in 2019. 4) Strongholds and Followers - Rich Fraser Raising a cool 2.1 million dollars on kickstarter,Strongholds and Followers is my eagerly awaited gem. OK, so maybe this is cheating, but I didn’t think it would be out until January (technically the hardback won’t). Authored by the self proclaimed King of Kickstarter (jokingly, but it stuck as these things do), Matt Colville, this sourcebook for the fifth edition of Dungeons and Dragons covers something sorely missing for this edition of D&D. It’s strongholds, and followers, get it? I played D&D from Basic, Expert, Companion, Masters, and Immortals (BECMI) box sets through second edition before quitting and all of these editions had plans for strongholds and followers. Followers were an automatic thing once you reached ‘name level.’ See, in first edition, each level had a name associated with it and at ninth level you reached your name level (High Priest, Lord, Paladin, Ranger Knight, etc.). People started to know who you were so living in a bar isn't going to cut it anymore and some of these people want to join you, as opposed to just being hirelings. So Matt developed his own systems over the years and decided to release it to the public. With his extreme popularity, rightly so, on youtube he started a kickstarter and the rest is history. 5) Yellow King - Leyshon Campbell This Kickstarter has been blasting through stretch goals because everyone knows Robin Laws knows how to make a great game. The multiple worlds and multiple selves will allow campaigns to run the gamut between subtle horror, alternate realities, and full dystopia. The different eras allow for even more variety, up to and including a generations-long legacy game where you play the great-grandchild of your first character. But even for those who will not run a whole game, there is so much rich material to mine here that it’s just not possible to not get your money’s worth out of this one. 6) Mon Dieu Cthulhu - Ross Reid As a result of the success from the popular Achtung! Cthulhu, Modiphius has not only released multiple versions of it, but is also venturing out into other time periods. Mon Dieu Cthulhu currently only has a few fiction pieces but has been slated for a future RPG release which I for one cannot wait to get my tentacles on. Rubbing elbows with swashbuckling soldiers avoiding musket fire and blasting a cannon at the unholy gods of old is going to be a blast. 7) Silent Titans - Max Cantor This is an OSR adventure written by one of the most prominent OSR writers, Patrick Stuart, with layout by Christian Kessler and art by Dirk Leichty. Patrick is an excellent writer full of engaging prose and weird, totally original ideas, and Dirk’s art looks incredible. This kind of avante garde work truly elevates tabletop into an artform, and is unlike anything you’ll find from the mainstream publishers. If Patrick’s other works such as Veins of the Earth or Fire on the Velvet Horizon are any indication, this book will be full of all sorts of interesting mechanical considerations that can be taken into other games, and will probably work as a setting unto itself. I’ve already backed the (currently live, and already successful) kickstarter, and would encourage anyone on the fence to check out his other works! 8) An Atlas of the Horizon - Jarod Lalonde An Atlas of the Horizon is a passion project that has been worked on for the better part of five years, and as such, there are a lot of hopes riding on it. The kickstarter (which has already surpassed its goal) tells us that it is an intensely character driven rpg taking place in a world that is approaching a proverbial boom in culture, trade and all other aspects, and the world is just waiting for guiding hands to shape it into what it’s destined to be. Atlas is shaping up to be a game that looks to the horizon (god that nail was hit on the head) and smiles at what it sees. It focuses on optimistic themes, and honestly in this day and age, I really do think that we could all use a little more optimism. In all honesty, this appears to be a game that wants to make a statement, and I’m interested to see what it has to say in the coming year. What are some of the upcoming games you are excited for? Drop us a line anytime and let us know! High Level Games has a lot to be thankful for in 2018. We also have plenty that we’re eagerly awaiting in the coming year! Stick with us, because it’s going to be a blast. And if you want to show your support, take a look at our Patreon page. Thank you, and have a critically successful 2019! -David Horwitz, Blog Manager Picture Reference: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/255133215/strongholds-and-streaming Hooray! It’s Christmas time! Seeing as Santa is still busy making the gifts, we at High Level Games have taken it upon ourselves to gift you and your players preemptively, in an aggressive first strike against Santa. Our plans for jovial domination are not yet realized, and as such, this is primarily a way to distract you all long enough to not notice our Santa bots replacing the actual mythical figure. It’s time to receive our gifts!
1) The Coal Cannon This is perfect for any campaign setting that has just a little bit of flintlock technology in it. Also suitable for magic settings. The coal cannon is the weapon Santa uses to fight off people who decide to assault the North Pole directly. It is a handheld cannon that takes one round to load with a piece of mundane coal. However, after being loaded, it grinds the coal up into shards and fires them at high velocity. As such, anyone within a ten foot cone in front of the user has to make a dexterity saving throw or be subjected to 3d10 piercing damage. There is, of course the option to heat the coal cannon. Once loaded, if the wielder waits a round or longer before firing the coal cannon, it begins to heat the coals, causing Xd6 fire damage where X is the number of rounds waited, on top of the base 3d10. However, if more than two rounds are waited, there is a 15% chance the coal cannon explodes. This destroys the item and causes 3d10 piercing damage and 5d6 fire damage to everyone in a 10 foot radius around the explosion. An item like this is very useful, however it holds a lot of danger for the average user, particularly if they don’t know the full capabilities of the coal cannon. The item itself would be considered very rare or similarly difficult to come by, as Santa only produces a few of these: one for himself and some for his most elite guard. 2) The Cracker of Nuts All know of the Nutcracker. It’s a simple tool often decorated during the holiday season to enhance feelings of Jolliness. However, this is no simple nutcracker. This is the Cracker of Nuts. The Cracker of Nuts is exactly the same in appearance to a normal holiday nutcracker, with the exception of it being labeled as “The Cracker of Nuts” on the base of the figurine in golden text, and it having truesight out to thirty feet. When any item small enough to fit inside the mouth of an average nutcracker is placed inside its mouth, the item transforms into a number of walnuts equal in value to the item used, oftentimes spilling out of the Cracker of Nuts mouth. Additionally, if walnuts are within the line of sight of the Cracker of Nuts, it transforms into a six foot tall version of itself and begins stomping on, or otherwise cracking all walnuts within sight. The only issue with this otherwise comedic item is that there was a minor mistake in its creation. Once per year, on the 18th day of the 12th month, the Cracker of Nuts attempts to crack skulls as well as Nuts. On this day, any creature within the line of sight of the Cracker of Nuts is considered a walnut for the purposes of this magic item, and the Cracker of Nuts will commence the cracking. The Cracker of nuts has an AC of 18 (natural armor) and 225 hitpoints. It can take one action, being Crack, which deals 3d6 bludgeoning damage. His stats are listed below. The Cracker of Nuts is kept in a dungeon, in a cell by himself for the 12th month of the year, if it is located in a city or village. The Cracker of Nuts: STR:26 DEX:8 CON:20 INT:2 WIS:8 CHA:10 3) The Chains of Krampus We have begun to dabble in NSFNL (Not Safe For Naughty List) content. If you are on the naughty list, this is a very dangerous item indeed. These midnight black chains are warm to the touch and make anyone of evil alignment feel guilty when within ten feet of them. If the manacles are clamped onto a creature of evil alignment, the creature is considered frightened of the being that attached the chains on to it. Additionally, if the creature who put the chains on issues a command to the bearer of the chains, the creature must make a saving throw as per the Geas spell, with a difficulty class of 22. Lastly, as a bonus action, the creature who attached the chains can cause spikes to protrude inside the manacles, causing 2d4 piercing damage and causing the creature wearing the manacles to become petrified until a bonus action is used to release the creature from their petrification. The manacles have no effects on good or neutral aligned creatures, or Krampus himself. Fiends take 8d12 damage from the spikes inside the manacles when activated. 4) Hat of Festivities (Christmas Edition) The Hat of Festivities is a fickle little item. However the Christmas variety is the least unpredictable. It grants the wearer a +2 to their AC as well as access to the Ray of Frost, Friends and Prestidigitation cantrips. Additionally the christmas edition grants the wearer resistance to frost damage. Hat of Festivities cannot be worn by anyone on the Naughty List (decided by the DM) and the hat will actively move off the heads of those on the Naughty List. Hats of Festivities only exist for the month in which their assigned holiday occurs, after which they disappear until they reappear the following year in a new location. 5) Gift of Giving A delicate yet beloved magic item. The Gift of Giving appears around people who have just survived a hardship, such as a victorious army, a child surviving a sickness, an adventuring party narrowly escaping death and other similar situations. When someone opens the beautifully wrapped box and reaches in, roll percentile dice. A table is below to tell the DM what to give the character accordingly. The Gift of Giving is said to be a living creature that is made purely of sorrow, wanting only to spread cheer and kindness. When all creatures involved in the hardship have pulled something out of the box, it disappears, leaving behind the smell of peppermint in the air and a small note that says something kind to either the collective or each individual that took a gift. 01-25% - Trinket or Common Magical Item 26-50% - Uncommon or Rare Magical Item 51-75% - Very Rare or Legendary Magical Item 76-100% - Artefact or Gift they wanted as a child (because they can be just as important to a player) I hope this helped spread some Holiday Cheer. Please, wherever you’re reading this, whatever holiday you’re celebrating, take a moment today and really bask in the knowledge that you’re here, and there’s so much good you can do in this world. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Jarod Lalonde is a young roleplayer and writer whose passion for both lead him here. He’s often sarcastic and has a +5 to insult. Dungeons and Dragons is his favorite platform. Although he’s not quite sure if it’s Cthulhu whispering to him in the small hours of the night, or just persistent flashbacks to the Far Realm. Picture Reference: https://www.tribality.com/2014/12/24/dd-5e-holiday-adventure-the-darkest-night/ Editor’s Note: What’s the gift that keeps on giving? Patreon subscriptions! It’s like buying a game system or supplement for a friend. Sure, they’re going to love it, but you’ll get some joy out of it too. Check out our Patreon and give a little, get a little. First off, full disclosure: I have worked on two projects for Pugsteady via Onyx Path Publishing. You’ll see my work in the forthcoming Roll of Good Dogs and Cats, and Adventures For Curious Cats, and so I am a tiny bit prejudiced in favor of the recently released Monarchies of Mau. That said, the book, the game, and the world of Realms of Pugmire is already one of my favorite fantasy RPG settings of all time. Why? What about this game of cats, dogs, and other animals catches my eye? Me, a fan of horror, deep storytelling, and games that are dark for the purpose of exposing light? 1) Not A Funny Cat Story The first is that Pugmire and Mau are family friendly, but they are not games for children. They are intricate, deep, and powerful game worlds that offer a hook that people initially find funny. How? For example, you play anthropomorphic cats who wear armor and call themselves monarchs. They believe that they once were worshipped by The Old Ones, humanity. They take artifacts of Man and use them for Necromancy and other magic. These things seem like they could be silly. But then, they are also presented as people. People that laugh, that cry, that fight against the darkness to seize a chance at creating a world that is good for them and their families. Demons have destroyed at least one of the Monarchies of Mau. Darkness and corruption are attempting to infiltrate these places. Sure, you’re a cat, but you are also faced with challenges our feline friends would protect us from. 2) Intrigue and Adventure The Monarchies of Mau are inspired by a mix of Venetian, Chinese, and Feline cultures. They are city states that hold secrets close to their hearts. Such a setting offers intercultural intrigues and stories of wheeling and dealing for those that love such things in their games. On top of this, high adventure can be had vying against creatures of various types, including unseen demons, undead, and the normal high fantasy creatures that you would expect to see in a fantasy game. So, run your favorite adventure for D&D, Pathfinder, or OSR, and toss in a splash of cats, dogs, badgers, and others. Or, pull out your paths, stories, and chronicles that touch on intrigue, diplomacy, and information and run those instead. The Realms of Pugmire are your oyster. They offer an opportunity for every sort of tale. 3) Well Crafted Mechanics Monarchies of Mau is based on the OGL system for Dungeons and Dragons. It also pulls inspiration from 13th Age and other games that have done good things with the basic d20 OGL rules. In a sense, it pulls out the best of everything that has come before and distilled it perfectly for this game. Mau uses a simpler leveling system, distilling down to 10 levels what would normally take 20. And... this works. You gain an ability every level, and you start off more powerful than you would even in a 5th Edition game. The mechanics are the same, you roll a d20, with proficiency bonuses and Armor Classes, but the game feels peppier, quicker, and more powerful all at the same time. This is one of the best things that designers with years in the industry offer us, and Eddy Webb, the designer of Pugmire and Mau, has the background to help distill the best parts of the game system for his world. Josh is the intrepid Chief Operations Officer of High Level Games. With 20 years of playing rpgs, Josh started with Mind's Eye Theater LARPs and loves the World of Darkness. He runs, www.keepontheheathlands.com to support his gaming projects. Josh is the administrator of the Inclusive Gaming Network on Facebook. He’s running a Changing Breeds game. He’s a serious advocate for inclusive gaming spaces, a father, and a graduate from the International Peace and Conflict Resolution graduate program at American University in Washington, D.C. You can also find Josh’s other published adventures here and here. Image from the GM’s Screen For Monarchies of Mau Editor’s Note: What’s the gift that keeps on giving? Patreon subscriptions! It’s like buying a game system or supplement for a friend. Sure, they’re going to love it, but you’ll get some joy out of it too. Check out our Patreon and give a little, get a little. Starting out in roleplaying games is more than buying the stuff and jumping in. Getting a group together is hard enough for some people, and then the extra monetary cost of buying minis, rulebooks, supplements and any extra bits and pieces for a game. Not everyone has enough surplus cash to throw at the hobby, so for those who don't want to break the bank to test the waters, here are eight free roleplaying games for you to check out. I mean why not, they’re free. 1) A+ Fantasy A+ Fantasy has an attribute system very similar to classic RPGs but different enough to make it its own. Instead of rolling up numbers for your usual six attributes, A+ Fantasy has four to which you assign a grade, which range from A+ to D- and affect dice rolls. Modifiers are different than the norm, as to succeed you must roll two d6 and get at least one six, and the modifier adds to this. The ruleset is very easy to understand and is laid out in a great way, at least in my opinion, I read through the full rules in just over 30 minutes while sitting in a waiting room. This is definitely worth checking out if you are thinking of diving into D&D. 2) Magic and Steel This game has more reading to it than A+ Fantasy but has a fairly well developed system, based off of old style D&D with a few modern twists to keep it interesting. The character creation seems solid and is simple enough for a new player to get to grips with and complex enough for a seasoned vet to get in there and create more interesting characters. The rule book screams fan made and admits as much in the introduction, but if you like old school fantasy this is a game for you. 3) D100 Dungeon D100 Dungeon intrigued me to no ends, I read the description and thought, how can I be both GM and player? The answer is I can’t, but D100 Dungeon can be the GM so I can be the player. Tailored so that you are not pitted against your friends this game provides everything you need to run solo. You print out your map sheets and character sheet and read through the rules, which really are quite easy to understand. It took me a couple of days to get through them but when I did I was eager to get going, to play all you need is the roll tables in the back, the print outs and if you didn’t already guess the dice type, some D100. I haven’t got round to playing this yet but it’s definitely on my todo list. 4) GURPS Lite A great system used in various games and inspiration to even more, it has been used in tabletop games and video games such as the first Fallout games and even adapted for the later ones. The lite version of the system is free, however, and gives a good taste of how the full system works with all the key points laid out. Choose some buffs for your character and combine them with some flaws... it contains everything you need to create a GURPS game. The only downside is that I found it rather wordy so be prepared to read. 5) The Very Important Task I loved this game as soon as I read the rule sheet. Yes a single sheet. In The Very Important Task everyone plays and GM’s another player’s game, taking it in turns, which simulate one month at your job. Each player tries to complete a task given to them by their manager (another player) as well as completing the very important task for their overall career, to win you simply must complete the very important task, gain executive level in your job or be the last employee standing (or sitting if its an office job). It’s not a long game but can fill an evening and helps introduce some key elements of roleplay as the managers are encouraged to go to the extremes when forging the personalities. 6) The Great Long Dark Anyone looking to get into horror RPGs should consider this their first step. A quick game aimed at small groups, the rulebook has beautifully haunting artwork which helps set the scene. You take the role of both a child travelling to a place of mystery and despair, also as a parent escaping to a better place. Play takes shape in the form of five acts, the first two acts have you play two cards and roleplay the results, after which you answer a question of your choosing from a list from your character's point of view. No dice rolling but plenty of atmosphere and personal connections to help you come back for another helping. 7) Ghosts of NPCs Passed Aimed at groups who are currently running a campaign, this game is a nice distraction for change of pace or can even just be implemented into a session to aid the players. It allows a GM to call forth the spirit of any NPC the players may have decapitated too early or a poor passerby who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Upon summoning a spirit the players go round one by one adding to a backstory for that NPC, ending on the second wave round the group with his last day and finally his demise at the hands of player X who plays the murderous warlock in the group. This game could also be used to emphasise how one player seems all too happy to help NPCs shuffle of the mortal coil. 8) To The Temple Of Doom!!! A really nice little game, this easy to understand rule set has a revolving GM and a shared goal. Each player creates an archaeologist to play, assigning five stat points over three skills and then creates an artifact, ventures into the temple and takes it in turns to create a chamber within the temple. You then throw in some puzzles, bad guys and traps for the team to overcome. At the end is a big showdown against a vast evil trying to destroy the world. Death isn’t the end in this game either as anyone who falls prey to the traps of the chambers can either be possessed and show up to aid the evil or die and become the GM for the final encounter. No matter which, if any of these you try out i’m sure you will have lots of fun and hopefully will inspire you to play other great roleplaying games out there. To compile this list I read through around 15 titles including some fan made RPGs from the likes of Inception and even the Metal Gear universe, but for the sake of the editors I chose the non fandom games, though they were really good systems and well worth checking out. Although the rules are free you will need dice and a way to print some items out in most of these but compared to a full price system the cost is much more affordable and accessible. Ross Reid is a lover of all things tabletop, he recently hosted a gaming marathon for charity lasting 24 hours over three days, he is currently working on getting the rest of his family into roleplaying games so he no longer needs to leave the house to get his gaming fix. Folks who’ve read my work over the years know I play a lot of games, but I’ve also done a fair bit of design work as well. I’ve worked with third-party publishers for popular games, and I’ve written for independent clients whose projects are all over the spectrum in terms of genre and mechanics. If you’re thinking of making your own game, then let me give you some quick advice on avoiding a few of the most common traps I’ve seen folks fall into. Tip #1: The Fewer Steps, The Better All tabletop RPGs have some variety of conflict resolution system. It might be dice, cards, a Jenga tower, rock-paper-scissors, but there is always some system in place to determine whether character actions succeed or fail when there is a challenge. And there are usually bonuses and negatives that you have to add in to modify your character’s chance of success. I say this from the bottom of my heart: do not make players go through multiple steps to resolve something. Adding complication slows down the game, and makes a lot of players less likely to enjoy your system. Give you an example. In your classic Dungeons and Dragons or Pathfinder game you add up all your character bonuses first, so they are a single, static number (this step can even be done before game start, saving a huge amount of time). You roll your die, then add that number. You compare the result to the target you have to hit. In the midst of a tense situation, such as swinging a sword, moving into position for a stealthy ambush, etc., a player does a single addition problem, and the result is generated. Boom, bam, done, move the story along. A lot of designers, though, think that adding multiple steps to resolve a single action is a good idea. They give you multiple charts to roll on to find out what part of the body a blow landed on, for example, or they make you roll under a target number, and then divide by five to find out how many successes you got on that action. Sometimes they turn every action into a roll-off between the player and an NPC, which means you now have two people doing two separate equations to figure out if an action succeeded or failed. Sometimes this is done in the name of realism, and sometimes it’s just to be different, but it is never a good idea. It’s like making someone fill out multiple forms at the checkout before they can buy that thing they want in your online store; you want actions resolved quickly, before your customer decides they’re better served elsewhere. Tip #2: Addition is Better Than Subtraction For most people, addition is easier than subtraction. Not only is it easier, though, it’s more satisfying. You will always get more engagement from players who are adding up bonuses to reach a higher target number, than you will players applying negatives and trying to squeak by a lower threshold. Look at your game’s primary kind of math. If you’re asking players to do quick addition, then it’s going to be easier to learn, and more players are going to be able to get into the swing. If you’re asking players to subtract (or worse, divide), then you may quickly find yourself talking to the backs of potential players’ heads as they walk away. Tip #3: Do Not Bury Your Lead If you want your game to get noticed, then you need to offer your players a unique experience that’s unlike anything else they can get on the market. If your game allows players to be cyborg minotaurs fighting Viking sky pirates riding ice drakes, you should not only tell potential players that, but it should be your goddamn cover art! A game will live or die based on what makes it different from its competition, since most players already have a shelf full of games. So what does your game have that all those other games don’t? Is it a totally unique fantasy setting that foregoes the usual Tolkien-esque elements? Is it a d12-based system that you can learn in less than an hour? Or is it a sci-fantasy game that embraces Afro futurism or Arab futurism rather than more traditional, Western genre visions? Don’t hide that! These are the elements that will get people to pay attention to your game, but so often designers push those things to the background so that someone can easily miss them if they don’t read to page 194 in the core rule book. Tip #4: Don’t Be Different Just To Be Different I talked about this in my post Fantasy Writers, If You’re Just Changing Something’s Name, Don’t Bother, but I feel this needs to be reiterated for all the game designers out there; there is nothing wrong with using the terms, ideas, and tropes that gamers are familiar with in your product. If you have orcs, that’s fine. If you have light elves and dark elves, more power to you. If your dwarves are known as miners and smiths, and your gnomes tend to make unstable inventions, that’s okay. These tropes will give players an immediate sense of familiarity, so using them is not some kind of cardinal sin you need to seek penance for. On the other hand, if you just go through a setting with a thesaurus and change everything’s name, players aren’t going to thank you for that. Especially if your short, burly, bearded miners know for the quality of their smithing are called Urshines for no reason other than you didn’t want to have stereotypical dwarves in your game (despite making them exactly that, with a different name). The same is true when it comes to mechanics. If you’re using an Open Gaming License to make your system, don’t tweak and change stuff just to be different; all you’re going to do is frustrate and annoy players who now have to recall all the fiddly little differences if they don’t make a wide-ranging impact on how conflicts are resolved. If you’re making changes, make those changes noticeable, memorable, and give them an impact in your game beyond making players remember a dozen pages of new terminology. #5: Have An Overall Vision To be clear, here, I’m never near the top of the chain of command when it comes to designing game settings and mechanics. I’m a merc, usually hired on to write setting fluff, or to contribute X number of powers, spells, feats, or what have you. Normally I like to think I’m pretty good at this job, however, if you’re not going to do everything in a game yourself, you need to have an overall vision to communicate to all the folks helping you build this game. And even if you are making the whole thing by your one-some, you should still be able to communicate your vision for setting and overall mechanical structure to people you would like to buy and play your game once you finish it. An elevator pitch can make the difference between being forgettable to your public (or requesting mountains of edits from your work-for-hire team), and smooth sailing all the way to your publication date. For more gaming advice from Neal Litherland, check out his Gamers archive, or visit his blog Improved Initiative. Alternatively, take a look at his Amazon Author Page if you’d like to check out his books! Picture Reference: https://www.tested.com/tech/3275-dd-of-the-future-why-virtual-tabletop-gaming-is-going-to-be-awesome-video/ The Wild West is a unique genre of fiction. It has it’s larger-than-life characters and legends, including encounters with the other world, lawless lands where might makes right, and even tales of lost treasures! This genre has all the trappings that make for fantastic tales of adventure, so with that in mind, let’s take a look at Westbound, the tabletop RPG that blends The American Wild West with Fantasy! 1) Who Made This? Westbound is produced and published by the Canadian game company Island of Bees, and is currently their only released game. Nevertheless, they’ve put a great amount of effort into designing the game, and it shows: marvelous artwork, handy diagrams and charts, and even layout flourishes that compliment the Wild West theme. 2) What’s The Premise And Setting? If you’ve somehow managed to avoid watching any of the classic Clint Eastwood movies, or other flicks from the spaghetti-western genre, Westbound harkens to a romanticized era in North American history called “The Western Frontier.” This was an era when settlers from Europe expanding westward from the east coast of North America, into what would become the modern day nations of the United States of America, Canada, and Mexico. However, Island of Bees punches up the fantastical element. While the Western Frontier is already a very storied body of history full of tall tales and unbelievable legends, Westbound also includes contemporary fantasy tropes. Among them are parallel worlds, magical wands and musical instruments, and the classic fare of races including elves, dwarves, orcs, and goblins. One thing I find particularly interesting about Westbound is some of the more unusual inclusions. Ogres are included as a playable race, complete with their own variety of magic that revolves around eating themselves stupid. There’s also the inclusion of musical instruments as weapons; they may not physically harm enemies, but they can still cause a great enough amount of distress to rob enemies of the will to fight. (Meaning you can annoy somebody into submission with an accordian.) 3) What Are The Mechanics Like? Staying true to the western theme, Westbound forgoes using dice in favor of a standard deck of playing cards. (So if your GM or another player really ticks you off, you can switch to everybody’s favorite rage game of 52 Pick Up.) Outside of combat, drawing cards and comparing them to a target number is the method used for resolving checks. In combat though is where things get interesting. The game changes from simple draw and compare to a meta-game of managing a hand of cards for your offence and defence. The long and short of it is that you can either play cards from your hand to raise your ability to resist damage, play them against opponents to take them out of a fight, or burn through your cards to get to something more useful. To add an additional layer of strategy, though, each of the above combat actions functions a different way. Cards played to defend must be done in descending order, while cards played to attack must match the traditional sets from poker. (2 of a kind, full house, etc.) Character creation is composed of picking a Sort, Breed, and Archetype, which are similar to Class, Race, and Background in Dungeons and Dragons. Each one grants a different kinds of abilities, with Sort mostly pertaining to combat, Archetype focusing on social interactions, and Breed granting miscellaneous abilities. Additionally, whenever a character levels up, they pick which of the three aspects they wish to improve, giving some control to the player over what their character shapes into. 4) What Is It Similar To? As far as game mechanics go, Westbound’s use of a deck of cards is more than just a novelty. It grants some degree of certainty that a character will get an awesome moment, since used cards get discarded. It cuts both ways, though, since even those good draws will be discarded. The only other game I can think of that grants this much certainty over how much a character can truly accomplish is Golden Sky Stories, which completely eschews dice and randomness altogether! In regards to setting, I’d be inclined to say that Westbound is a graceful advancing of the Dungeons and Dragons time period. Even if you’re unfamiliar with the Western Frontier, there’s still plenty of contemporary fantasy elements to take hold of. This union of Wild West and Fantasy works really well together, because there was still lots of superstition that circulated in the 19th century to weave in magic. 5) Is It Worth Getting Into? Definitely. If you want to try something new, but don’t want to abandon fantasy, Westbound is a great choice. It offers a unique set of mechanics, and a setting that’s refreshing and familiar all at once. Plus, the artwork is fantastic, and featured in a few sets of special playing card. Useful for if you want to add more flair to your games of Westbound, or if you like the art, but maybe not the game. While Aaron der Schaedel is definitely enamored with Westbound, his favorite mix of wild west and fantasy remains the video game series Wild ARMs. You can inform Island of Bees of this treachery via Twitter @WestboundGame or tell Aaron his taste in video games is trash @Zamubei Picture Reference: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/82773185/westbound-revolvers-and-rituals First, this isn’t designed as therapeutic advice, nor should it be construed as such. Mental health coaching and support is its own thing and we recommend you seek out a professional if you need that support. Second, this is not an attack on you if you are a chronically ill writer who is struggling in a way that makes everything you do harder. I empathize. I support you. Your productivity does not give you value as a person. These are the ways I make myself feel better, while fighting chronic illness and mental health monsters. Your mileage may vary, your output may vary, and you are still a writer. You are still a wonderful person that brings something to the world. Don’t ever let anyone tell you otherwise. These are my suggestions for writing through chronic pain and depression. You’ll find that some are on numerous blogs and suggestion lists. That’s fine, they might be good advice. If you have others, please leave them in the comments or refer to this work in your own blog! I’d love to have the community lift each other up and support one another. 1) Write Something In 2004 I spent several months living in my car in and around San Diego. I worked, but I couldn’t afford an apartment. So, every night I’d go to Starbucks for 4-6 hours, read a book, and write. What I wrote wasn’t anything ‘useful’, it wasn’t a novel, or a game, or even a short story. It was the inner turmoil of my brain. One night, I realized I was depressed. Not because I was living in my car, but because my life had stalled. Then the next night I realized I knew where I wanted to go down the line. The day after that, I wrote out a plan to hit my goal. Most of my writing was internal ravings about writer’s block up until those three days. What I didn’t realize was that I couldn’t write because I wasn’t supposed to be writing a story or a novel or anything like that. Instead, what I needed was a direction in life and I needed to write that. Writing whatever came to mind helped me to get somewhere, it just wasn’t where I thought I was going. I still have this notebook, in a box, somewhere in my house. It’s not filled with things I’ll ever publish. That wasn’t the point of writing those nights. 2) Acknowledge You Are Sick This is also known as, TAKE A DAMN BREAK. It’s ok to realize you can’t keep writing. Hell, you might need to take a year, two, or more off before you can pick up the pen or slap the keyboard again. This is hard if you earn your living writing, though, and trust me, I understand. If the words are not traveling in their little caravan from your mind to the screen, or page, or whatever, then you can only force it so much. It’s ok to say, “I’m sick, and doing this isn’t good for me.” That doesn’t make you weak, or a failure, or a bad writer. It’s totally, unconditionally, without question, fair. If you wake up and you think, wow, the pain is a 9 today. I’m going to take it easy, drink a cup of tea (or coffee, or whatever), and that’s great. Admitting you need a break and taking one is strong, healthy, and helpful. Admitting you are sick is GOOD. Admitting where you are is a HUGE step toward making plans that work for you. 3) Collaborate Writing through illness can be particularly hard because you do have ideas and you often start on them before a bad day slams you over the head and takes your brain away. So, how and what can you do with this? Collaborate. Seek out folks that are willing to work with you. Maybe you get 75% through a project and you get whammed. Reach out to your collaborators and go, I’ve got this piece, it’s this far finished, I think it should go here and here; does anyone want to work on it with me? 9/10, someone will go, yes, I’d love to work with you on this. Now, I’m not telling you not to pay them or cut them in on a percentage. I think you probably should do that, but it depends on your collaborator and how your relationship works. That’s on you, but I usually cut my collaborators in on a percentage or I pay them a bit up front to show them I appreciate their time, effort, and work. THEN I make sure to credit them alongside myself whenever I market the piece. 4) Work On Something Else This can be having a few pieces to work on at a time, or it can be totally non-writing work that you feel is helpful to you to work on. For me, I’ve been doing layout for books that others write as a way to feel like I’m still doing something/producing work that I can be proud of. This works for me, it uses a different part of my brain, and it doesn’t require the same sort of mental health that my writing work requires of me. Now, for you, it might be knitting, building a car, whittling, playing video-games, or whatever it is. Find something else that you can do, that you love to do, and work on that for some time. You might get writing ideas while you do it, and even if you don’t, you are still doing something you love. Of course, this can be hard too, depending on your chronic illness. I’m with you. Go back to point 1, 2, or 3 if you are at this stage and you don’t know what to do. It’s ok to take the space and time you need to be healthy and happy. 5) Bonus Point – Have Allies Your network of supports is essential to feeling like you belong to a community. That’s a human thing, but I find it really essential to accomplishing things when things get bad. Post on social media talking about how you are having trouble. Call a friend and talk about whatever works for you. Having allies, friends, and a support network will always help. And if you don’t have folks that get it around you or on social media? Find a group of fellow creatives online who will understand where you are coming from. Lurk, read their posts, engage with them, post about where you are in your life right then. All in all, my friends and family have done the most to keep me going when shit has gotten hard. Without them, I’d have drowned by now. Also, being a good writer ally requires you to give back when you can. Trust me, you might not have the spell slots all the time, but when you have them, use them. You’ll build hope, trust, and strength when this happens. I hope these ideas and thoughts are helpful. You might wonder what they have to do with a gaming blog, but, honestly, I hope it is obvious. I haven’t had an article of my own here since MONTHS before HLG Con. That event broke me, for a while. I’m only now starting to realize just how bad, and doing things to work through it. Of course, it isn’t easy. For those gamers that run games, or play, or create them when dealing with these struggles, I salute and honor you today. You are worthy and I’m thankful for you. Josh is the intrepid Chief Operations Officer of High Level Games. With 20 years of playing rpgs, Josh started with Mind's Eye Theater LARPs and loves the World of Darkness. He runs, www.keepontheheathlands.com to support his gaming projects. Josh is the administrator of the Inclusive Gaming Network on Facebook. He’s running a Changing Breeds game. He’s a serious advocate for inclusive gaming spaces, a father, and a graduate from the International Peace and Conflict Resolution graduate program at American University in Washington, D.C. You can also find Josh’s other published adventures here and here. Art by JH Illos My earliest RPG experiences were with D&D 3.5e, 4e, and Pathfinder. These games are known for being “crunchy” (having many complex game mechanics), and 3.5e in particular was known for having a glut of supplemental materials of dubious quality. With these games, because of the breadth and depth of mechanics and the focus on tactical combat, supplemental materials often negatively impacted game balance, and that had a chilling effect on my perception towards homebrew or 3rd-party published content (materials not produced by Wizards of the Coast). Over the years I’ve moved away from those kinds of games, and towards more rules-light games like FATE, Cypher, and OSR (D&D 2e or earlier, or modern games built with a similar design philosophy or shared mechanics). One thing that I’ve found so refreshing and rewarding about these systems is how easy it is to modify the games to suit your needs, without having to worry too much about negatively impacting game balance. With some consideration, these modifications could even work for a medium-crunch game like D&D 5e. Here are 3 ways to modify games. Treat these as ways to think more about why the mechanics of a game exist, and how changing them affects game balance and the play experience, so that you can come up with your own modifications! 1) Power Points Here I’m using power points to refer to any kind of system where players gain points for their actions, which can later be spent to affect future actions. These are often employed in “narrative” games, as with the fate points in FATE, to encourage players to roleplay and to interact with the world in a way that drives the plot forward. However, I think this system can be used for several other purposes, such as to fill “holes” in character builds, to bring a little cinematic flare to medium crunch tactical combat games, or even evoke unique themes. I ran a campaign in my Phantasmos campaign setting using Numenera as the game system. The Phantasmos setting has various species and classes of its own, not all of which mapped cleanly to the options available in Numenera RAW (rules as written). Let’s use Arpaia the dogu apoptomancer as an example. Dogu are a species with several unique abilities such as shifting between a humanoid and monstrous form, and a sense of hyper-touch, and apoptomancers are a character class focused on the manipulation of controlled cell-death and the neuro-immune system to induce metamorphoses. Rather than constricting the player to a limited set of descriptors (like species) and foci (like feats) that reflect all of these varying and specific abilities, we had him train in the skills “dogu senses” and “apoptomancy,” which he could use to do things that his character should be able to do, but aren’t strictly built into his RAW character sheet. Importantly, if he were to use these skills in any way on a scale of power or utility comparable to his actual RAW special abilities, he would have to spend power points. Not only does this give him greater flexibility in character building and ensures that he can always do the things he should realistically be able to do, this encourages creative thinking and interactivity with the story to get power points and leverage his abilities. A final note on power points: The game Tenra Bansho Zero has a really cool karma system, which is used both for character building and as power points. However, in that game, as you acquire more karma, you become increasingly likely to turn into an ashura, a demon. The point of the game is in-line with the Buddhist philosophy of separating oneself from material attachment (as expressed by resolving karma). The strengths and weaknesses of material attachment, the Buddhist themes of the setting, are actually instantiated within the game mechanics using power points! 2) Change The Dice So this gets into probability theory, which really should be a whole post in its own right, but I’ll go over some basics here. While many games use a d20 for action resolution as a matter of convention, I think most good games are mindful of their dice. A d20 is a very different beast than a 3d6 or FATE dice system, and understanding these differences can radically change how a game “feels.” Note that I will not be discussing games which use dice pools here, as the probabilities get a bit more complex, and I think that would be better suited for its own post. A d20 is a uniform distribution, meaning there is an equal probability of rolling any value, which from a range of 1 to 20 means 5%. The wide range and uniform distribution are why people often describe d20 as being “swingy,” meaning it is common to roll excessively high or low. A 3d6 is a normal distribution, or bell curve, meaning that you are most likely to roll the mean, and the further from the mean a given value is, the less likely you are to roll that value. With a range from 3 (rolling [1,1,1]) to 18 (rolling [6,6,6]), 25% of the time you will roll a 10 or 11 (27 ways each to roll a 10 or 11) , whereas you will only roll a 3 or 18 <0.5% of the time each (because, as already stated, there is only one way to roll a 3 or an 18). This is why 3d6 is less swingy; most of the time you will roll somewhere near the middle of the distribution. So despite the fact that these dice mechanics have very similar ranges, they have very different probabilities. I’ve already explained how this affects swinginess, but it also affects the impact of modifiers. Unlike a swingy d20, with 3d6, assuming a difficulty of 10 or 11, you’re more likely to narrowly miss or succeed, so the impact of a small modifier is greater. For example, normally you would have a 62.5% probability of rolling a 10 or greater. However, with a modifier of +1, the range is now 4 to 19, but the dice remain the same, so essentially you’re sliding the distribution up by 1. In other words, because a roll of 9 now gives you a value of 10 (roll+1), and there’s an 11.6% probability of rolling a 9, you can add that to the 62.5% for a 74.1% probability of rolling 10 or greater. With a d20, that +1 only nets you an increase of 5%! That being said, for d20, no matter how many modifiers you have, each nets you +5% towards a higher value, whereas with 3d6, because the probability of a given roll gets lower the further you go from the mean, higher modifiers give you diminishing returns. It may help to think about weapons. In Dungeons & Dragons, a greataxe has a damage roll of 1d12, a uniform distribution comparable to a d20. Greatswords have 2d6 damage dice, a normal distribution. They average about the same; minor quibbles aside they are roughly equal in power, but they behave differently, and in a way that reflects a specific intention. Compared to the greataxe, the greatsword will be more reliable, it will generally deal about 6 damage, only occasionally doing exceptionally more or less. The greataxe will average about the same, but will swing wildly from very little damage, to very high damage. Keep in mind that these dice distributions also affect character progression and relative power. In a game where dice modifiers improve over time (such as by leveling up), there will be a much larger difference between lower level characters in a 3d6 system than a d20 system, but a much larger difference between higher level characters in a d20 system than a 3d6 system. All of this is to say that dice matter! There is so much more I could say about probabilities, but as a last aside, keep in mind that the range of values on a die also matter. For instance, for FATE dice, you roll 4 dice, each with two negatives, two neutrals, and two positives, meaning you have a normal distribution centered at 0. Because the range extends into the negatives, is a relatively narrow range of -4 to 4, and is centered at 0, the impact of a modifier will in general be much larger than a 3d6 system, where the range is much larger and entirely positive. All of this is to say, if you understand how these distributions affect your game, you can substitute them safely. If you want to play D&D 5e where the game is less swingy, and where characters become significantly more powerful from level-to-level at lower levels, but there is less of a power curve at higher levels, just substitute your d20 for 3d6! 3) Combat Modifiers Obviously not every game is about combat, or treats combat to varying degrees of abstraction, but even so, many games deal with combat, and often not well. Personally, I’ve always felt like coming up with tactical character builds in crunchier games is fun, and the idea of combat is fun, but in practice it often gets bogged down. Either the game is so crunchy that it’s slow and cumbersome, or the game is so light that it becomes rote and stale. However, there are some simple ways to make combat faster or more fun, without fundamentally altering the game! The easiest thing is to abstract. As the GM, try to apply narrative flourishes to the enemies’ actions. Describe how they attack, how they defend, how they behave in response to the players (even if it’s just a matter of taunts or sneers or wide-eyed looks of apprehension). Encourage the players to do likewise. Regardless of what spell/ability/move they do, let them have fun with how they describe the flavor of that action. A “missed” attack is much more satisfying when it’s described as a sure strike that was deftly parried, or glinted off the enemy’s armor. This can be difficult to do at first, but the more you practice, the more natural it will become. In terms of mechanics, one option is an escalation die. One way to implement the escalation die would be to have a d6 appear at the beginning of the second round facing 1, and increase the number each round, up to 6. All combatants gain the value of the escalation die to their attack bonus, so that as combat progresses, all combatants are more likely to hit, making the game deadlier. This creates tension, it makes weaker enemies potentially more dangerous if in large enough numbers, and it moves combat along quickly and in a satisfying way. This kind of modifier could be applied as a random roll instead, reflecting the randomness and deadliness of real combat, or could be set to a specific value as a way to signify the stakes of a given encounter. An alternative way to do an encounter die would be to have the die lower AC, increase the damage roll rather than the attack roll, or give the defender a counter-attack chance (x or lower on a d6 allows counter-attack / attack of opportunity, where x is the value of the escalation die), or activate special abilities from the enemy or evoke some other “event”, such as more enemies arriving or a change in the environment. In addition to affecting the flow of combat, these alternative options can also have fun narrative implications. Manipulating quantities of enemies and action economy is another useful combat modification, especially for mass combat or “boss fights.” Hordes of weaker enemies may seem cool at first, but either they’re too weak, in which case they’re ineffectual and their turns are a boring waste of time, or they’re just powerful enough that through sheer number of actions they can overwhelm the players in a way that is also unsatisfying. Instead, by clumping these weaker enemies into a smaller number of more powerful swarms, the encounter can be faster and more engaging. Even quicker, one could make the entire swarm a single entity with multiple actions. Likewise, rather than defaulting to giving a “boss” enemy a swarm of underlings to balance the action economy, an especially big-bad could get multiple actions per turn, or for a literally big-bad like a kaiju, its body parts could be treated as separate entities. These are all intentionally loose and system-neutral, to show how you can go about thinking of any game. Crunchier games will be harder to modify without accidentally creating imbalances or “breaking” the game in other ways, but even those games can be modified if you carefully consider what affects the modifications will have. Modifications can affect how a player perceives an encounter, how they build their characters, the balance of the game, and the flow of combat, and any number of other things. If you understand the game and understand what you and your players want, then you don’t have to be afraid of modifications! Max Cantor is a former cognitive neuroscientist and soon to be data engineer, whose love of all things science fiction, fantasy, and weird has inspired him to build worlds. He writes a blog called Weird & Wonderful Worlds and hopes people will use or be inspired by his ideas! Picture Reference: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MadScientist While some campaigns and one-shots may start out at high levels, it seems most start between levels 1-3. If you’ve played Dungeons and Dragons long enough, you’re probably sick of fighting the same overused creatures at low levels. Goblins, kobolds, undead, and bandits are among some of the most common (and hence boring) adversaries for low level players. Other creatures like lycanthropes, fey, beasts, and myconids are less common, but still border on repetitive. With just a little bit of creativity, and your trusty Monster Manual, you can feature these low-level, frequently forgotten creatures into your next one-shot or low level campaign. While they are 5e specific, similar creatures can be found or created for other TTRPGs. 1) Animated Objects Think of an item. It could be something mundane and unassuming, or something rare, horrifying, or even rusty or rotting. Now imagine that item trying to kill you. Animated objects are usually used briefly in low level campaigns, but imagine building a whole module or one-shot out of them. Libraries full of flying books, armories full of weapons, and kitchens full of plates and utensils all animated to make your characters distrust every single item they see. There’s technically only three animated objects in the Monster Manual, but with generous sprinkling of the animate object spell, just about anything can be turned into a deady item. 2) Bullywug Do you remember what a Bullywug is off the top of your head? I completely forgot about them until I paged through my Monster Manual again. They’re little frog people that love to terrorize those who trespass through their swamp. Sneaky, territorial, and willing to take captives, it’s a wonder I have never heard of them being used in low level play. While there is only one instance of them in the Monster Manual, give them some class levels in rogue, fighter, or wizard and not only will they make for a formidable story thread , but you can even scale them into higher levels of play. The swamp-based opportunities are abundant. 3) Dinosaurs Who doesn’t find Jurassic Park both slightly terrifying and creatively immersive? It’s the perfect inspiration for a low level D&D campaign. Dinosaurs do it all: flying, swimming, running at high speeds with giant snapping maws. What’s not to love about a dinosaur campaign? With a total of six in the Monster Manual, they won’t require the creative effort of the bullywug, unless you want to scale them past CR 8. Finally, you can set them in almost any environment. 4) Lizardfolk If we’re being honest, we’d have to admit that Lizardfolk are basically goblins that can hold their breath and ambush you from underwater. There’s less options for them in the Monster Manual (three stat blocks), and they are not as environmentally flexible as goblins are. I assume these are the reasons they’re not as popular as goblins or kobolds. However, their lore presents some great opportunities for a rich low level campaign. They craft great jewelry and tools, and have an awe of magic that could give a unique roleplaying opportunity to any magic users in your group. They love feasts and sacrifices, which can make for a great story elements. Finally, they worship dragons, and are often exploited by them. A low level Lizardfolk campaign could easily transition into a high stakes dragon plotline. 5) Modrons These little guys are so cute and have a lot of potential. But if you’re not running your sessions in Mechanus, there’s little plausible reason your players would encounter them. These little creatures are fun to run and to play against though, so pull up your creative britches and figure out a reason to run a few sessions with these guys. Maybe they’ve gone rogue, or maybe it’s time for the “Great Modron March.” No matter what you figure out, with at least five canonical options, you’re sure to have a great time playing with modrons. Whether you’re able to make a short campaign out of these, or just stick to a one-shot, they’re sure to provide a type of fun that’s different than goblins, kobolds, and zombies (oh my!). There’s a lot of other low level creatures that we didn’t cover, but could still use some love. Check out the Monster Manual and Volo’s Guide to Monsters for even more ideas. Ryan Langr is a DM, player, and content creator of Dungeons & Dragons 5e. His passions include epic plot twists, creating exceptionally scary creatures, and finding ways to bring his player’s characters to the brink of death. He also plays Pathfinder/3.5. In his real life, he is a stay at home dad, husband, and blogger of many other interests. Photo credit: Goblin art by Armandeo64 (armandeo64.deviantart.com) CC BY-SA 4.0 The most important element in roleplaying is communication. Sometimes players will assume that their DM has understood what they are attempting, only to find out a scene later that their idea went completely over the DM’s head. The following listicle will help your DM understand you better and reduce any problems that originate from a lack of proper communication. 1) Goal This sounds trivial but most players will almost always assume the goal and not mention it. “I want to climb the wall” sounds like a goal but it isn't, because it doesn't let the DM know why you are trying to climb the wall. “I want to get to the top of the wall so I have a better position from which to shoot my bow” says clearly what your intention is. Without a clear goal, the DM may misunderstand and end up narrating a result that you didn't expect. Sometimes this issue can be solved immediately, but in other cases this won't become apparent until after the encounter. At which point arguments ensue: “During the fight I climbed the trees, but it never gave me any protective cover!” “Well, you just said that you wanted to climb the trees. You never told me why.” 2) Means How you are going to do what you are attempting. This is the big one because here you can be creative and ingenious. Your DM might even reward you with some in-game bonus depending on how you do it. Climbing a wall barehanded isn’t the same as using a grappling hook. A single goal usually has many ways of achieving it, so don’t always go for the trivial option. Imagine the surrounding environment, what things are around that can be used. The DM will usually not be exhaustive in his description which leaves room for imagination. This is also a good time to look through your inventory. DMs will usually pick the most obvious means, if one is not specified, and assume you are using no equipment. This can result in losing potential positive modifiers to your skill test or, even worse, getting negative modifiers! 3) Skill Do not leave the skill test choice to your DM. Some games have an exhaustive list of skills and your DM won’t have all your skills memorized. He does not know what you are good at and what you are terrible at. If you want to use your “Lie” skill but the DM asks you to do a “Charm” test, go ahead and tell your DM: “I would like to use my Lie skill.” Some DMs might not like this style so be sure to talk it over with them. Try to be reasonable and not ask for a skill check with an unrelated skill, like using your strength skill to sing. Though sometimes using a completely ridiculous skill can have hilarious results. Your DM may and should encourage you to explain how your skill is being used. 4) Assistance Unless your character suffers from delusions of heroism, you might want to ask other characters for help. NPCs are not just side quest givers, some have skills that can and should be used to your benefit. Most DMs will fill the world with helpful NPCs just waiting to be used. Town guards can help you fight off those outlaws mugging your party in the alley. Some recurring NPCs, such as a previous quest giver, can become allies. They can provide information or resources for your current adventure. Even your enemies can be of aid if you understand their objectives and motivations. After all, if the dragon attacking your town is after gold why not lead him to your rival’s larger and richer city. 5) Personality Skill tests are the best moment to show how your character behaves. A barbarian and a duelist might both fight with swords but how they fight differs completely. Think about how this skill test relates to your character. A fear of heights might make a wall climb more interesting, or perhaps an old grudge fills you with fury as you strike your enemy. Personality can also be used to show intent. A scholar holding his book to his chest with sweat falling down his brow while hiding behind a shelf is cleverly not going to try to ambush the beholder. Don't forget that you are playing to have fun and “I jump backwards as I flail my sword around while yelling ‘I hate skeletons!’’ is always more entertaining for everyone at the table than: “I attack with my sword.” With all this in mind, we can change: “I wanna climb the castle wall” to: “I want to get to the top of the castle wall so I can sneak in. I’m going to look for the best catapult expert in our unit and I want to convince him to launch me. I want to use my Charm skill and with a wink and a convincing smile I say: ‘If you get me on top of that wall, I will end the war and you can be on your way home before dawn.’” Rodrigo Peralta is a roleplayer and a DM that likes to playtest many different rpgs. He enjoys both highly detailed complex systems and barebone casual games. He participates in local roleplaying events as both DM and player. Picture provided by author. Metagaming, in a board game, is the game above the game. It's the social savvy in Bohnanza or Monopoly, tricky wording and deals in Cosmic Encounter or Diplomacy, or the planning ahead needed in a game of Chess or Risk. Metagaming is a board gaming skill used in most games, from Yahtzee to poker. So why is it so frowned upon in role playing games? The common scenario is that a group of players come across a troll and start burning it or throwing acid and the GM calls shenanigans. I believe this is because the dungeon master feels cheated because their encounter becomes trivialized with the knowledge the players bring to the table. In my opinion, player knowledge and skill helps the players get into the game. Who, in a fantasy world rife with orcs, trolls, and vampires, would venture out to fight monsters with no common knowledge? Tell me, how do you kill a vampire? Do you think someone who lived in a world where vampires really exist would have more or less knowledge than you? Taking all that into perspective metagaming takes many forms that we just don't recognize. Let's take a look at some of the oft overlooked forms of metagaming that we already do at the table and then we can talk about that player who brings a monster manual to the table. 1) It's A Game First up, the shortest answer: it’s a game. Frank the fighter doesn't know what second wind or weapon proficiencies are. He only knows how to power through and what he can wield. Anytime you invoke mechanics not based in the fiction, react with rules, or state an action to perform, you are metagaming. 2) Player Skill D&D has its roots in player skill. It is only in the later editions that emphasis on skill checks have made their way to the front of gaming. Deciding when to cast a spell or invoke an ability is player skill. Figuring out puzzles or how to get past an obstacle is the player using their skill to complete a challenge. Skill use is still metagaming by using a mechanic to eliminate a barrier. By leaving the decision in the players hands they can be the guide of their character and keep them in the game longer. 3) We're All Playing Together Hey, let's have fun. We don't need to come down on a player that uses common sense, even if it's outside of a fictional character. Keeping the game moving and fun sometimes needs a little nudge from outside of the fiction. Sometimes the player, if they realize they've gotten off track, can be creative and move the group back in the right direction. If everyone focused on the fiction, there may be no reason to play after one adventure because that haul set you up for years. Besides, adventuring is stupid and dangerous. But since we all got together to roll some dice with familiar characters, buck up young cleric and head to into that dungeon anyway! 4) PvP Can Be Fun... ...but only when everyone has bought in. Can we have a discussion in real life before we start a fight to assure that we are all on the same page? We can in a role playing game, and if we can see both sides of the disagreement it makes the player versus player all the more fun. What could be more fun than taking the age old “paladin versus thief” conundrum meta? Maybe the paladin’s player sees the thief’s player roll a pickpocket check, but tells the dungeon master that he wants to hear the reaction and go to the person aid when they discover what’s missing. This can build tension at the table instead of resentment, especially if the thief’s player can get meta and explain the (lack of) remorse when the party offers to help retrieve the item. Other players can chime in with ideas that could lead to the thief planting evidence on one of her biggest adversaries and pinning the theft on them! A whole scene, and maybe an adventure, created by using the players to control the characters and the scene. So meta. 5) Keeping Secrets Is Bad Who's the new guy and why is he so quiet? What's he hiding? If we all know these things at the table, then we can ask leading questions and make our scenes all the better. Why worry if the dungeon master brought in a ringer if the DM can just say, “this guy will betray you, but your characters don't know it.” What an exciting betrayal you all can set up together. I love working with my players to make plots against their characters. Two heads (or even more) are better than one, so why not let them in on the fun?! Of course I still like to play some things close to the vest, if only for the surprise factor. Cooperative storytelling works a lot better if we all work together to advance the fiction. How better to bring a team together than by taking input from all sources? It’s like a brainstorming session; there are no wrong answers, only ideas! By sourcing our table and asking what is good for our fiction we can go beyond the limits of one mind and can riff off of each others’ suggestions. Playing in and building together a shared world remains the best reason to accept metagaming at your table. Richard Fraser has been roleplaying since the early days of Dungeons and Dragons and started with the red box in the eighties. He currently prefers to DM fifth edition D&D, though reads a lot of OSR and PbtA. He currently has podcast, Cockatrice Nuggets and maintains a blog, both of which can be found at www.slackernerds.com. Picture provided by the author The following is an excerpt found in the journal of the former Count Moneybags Von Moretax. It was found in the Corporate Dungeon ruins behind the headquarters and was restored by the High Level Games historians. These are believed to be his final words. Ah the noble’s life. Sipping expensive mead atop your throne made of ivory crafted by a peasant is truly the only way to live once you’ve done it for twenty minutes. But alas. Here I am. Imprisoned for claiming that the king’s head was too round when all that expensive mead finally got to me. So here, in the dungeon I will recount some of the ways my other nobles have fallen from grace. Believe me, some of them are rather quaint. 1) Framed Yes, the most time honoured tradition of the nobility. Perhaps because it kills two birds with one stone, in that it removes another noble from power and if you’re clever enough and it hides some atrocity you’ve recently committed. There are of course many hurdles to consider: noble seals from other houses, daggers owned by other people, paying off servants and then promptly killing them as well, and a plethora of other minor issues to consider. Perhaps you have a right hand man you place too much trust in, and some plucky adventuring group could weasel information out of him. You may want to kill him. Not to mention such things may leave a paper trail. Perhaps a private investigator gets ahold of your bookkeeper? Hm? Said bookkeeper, not knowing the situation, shows her your costs and paychecks and sees thousands of gold being sent to shut people up. Can’t have that. Guess you should burn down the accountant’s house. I would tell you more, but I can’t tell you everyone's secrets, now can I? Not that I would ever partake in something so low. But you know who would? That Duke Silverbrand. I’ll bet if the royal guard searched his bedroom after eight tonight, they would find some damning evidence proving that he framed a certain Prince for a murder he committed. 2) Trash Talk Yes, this is the reason my execution is scheduled tomorrow. If there’s one thing you should know about those of noble blood, it’s that their egos are as fragile as a two hundred year old man's bones. This is particularly true of royals. Your kings and queens, princes and princesses… they just can’t take a joke. Another simple fact is, many nobles can’t stand their king. So it really is just a matter of tricking them into saying what they want to in front of the right crowd. Instead of telling you how to do this (it’s quite simple really, liquor and a group of people is really all you need). I will now quote some things that got people executed and/or banished. “King Richard? You mean that man with the exceptionally pointy head?” - Viscount Talksmacker of Trashington. “I’m telling you, the King put some sort of curse on the Queen. No way a man with such a small number of brain cells gets a woman with such - agh! My arm!” - Baron Badguy of Vill-any, spoken in front of the king, who had just come back from a sparring match with live steel. “Prince Keith is the human equivalent of a book with no pages.” - A man whose name was stricken from the records. “Is the King around? No? So we’re talking smack then lads?” - Duchess Exe of Cution. “King Richard is so round and discoloured I wouldn’t blame you for mistaking him for a boar testicle.” - Count Moneybags Von Moretax In short, it doesn’t take a lot to get a man killed in most noble courts. 3) Sleep With Someone's Spouse Now this may not get your nobility revoked officially (unless it’s with the queen) but there’s a very good chance you will be the laughingstock of the public and the newest target for some noble who knows where to find a hitman. In other news, water is wet. The typical noble won’t just have you killed for this, but most likely tortured or mutilated in some uncomfortable way. However the fact that a certain noble will forever be known to time as “The Cuckold” is sometimes worth the pain. This is typically not something that ends up as public knowledge, however you can guarantee that your reputation is ruined in court. P.S. Seeing as I'm about to die tomorrow... sorry Martin. 4) Don’t Tow The Line This is by far the least fun way to die. In every noble court, there are unspoken rules. Don’t get caught committing your crimes, and if you do, make sure your back is nice and ready, because it’s about to get stabbed multiple times. Don’t insult people in any blunt way, or you’ll become a pariah. Most importantly, don’t break the norm. Norms change from court to court. But I promise you, if you’re treating the public with respect (not lying to them, lowering taxes, trying to give them anything for free or god forbid actually listening to them when it comes to government policies), you’ll be in a grave faster than you can count to two. I remember one poor man. Oh the poor soul! He said in public court that he thought we should get rid of the toll to cross the bridge into the city. Not only was the movement shot down unanimously, within the week, but the man's home was burnt down, his farms were salted and his body was found in the sewers with twenty six stab wounds. In short, it’s very easy to be removed from a court in a number of increasingly uncomfortable ways. Don’t do bad things. Don’t do good things. I highly suggest that if you don’t want to be disgraced, you just enjoy the money and agree with the local consensus. I imagine that these are my final thoughts. As such, I would like the last thing I ever write to be to my family. Tell my wife I loved her, but not as much as my tax money. Tell my son he can do anything he wants, but not as much as my tax money, and lastly, tell my daughter to marry up. This was the last thing found ever written by Count Moneybags Von Moretax. Our scholars are finding more of his older works, however, and day by day, the man who was Count Moneybags Von Moretax is painted further as a kind, loving and just ruler, who was put to death by unjust laws. Jarod Lalonde is a young roleplayer and writer whose passion for both lead him here. He’s often sarcastic and has a +5 to insult. Dungeons and Dragons is his favorite platform. Although he’s not quite sure if it’s Cthulhu whispering to him in the small hours of the night, or just persistent flashbacks to the Far Realm. Picture Reference: https://www.pinterest.com/tah223/nobles-highborn-and-officials/ As much as we would like to pretend, we of the Dungeon Master ranks are not quite as omnipotent as our *cough* imposing stature may lead others to believe. The truth of the matter is, anyone who has ever had players in a game knows that the best laid plans are quickly and at times violently crumpled into a ball of spent paper and frustration once dice start rolling. This can make Prophecy, one of the most classic fantasy and sci-fi tropes of all time, into one of the single most frustrating and difficult to successfully navigate. Many a good-intentioned DM has fallen prey to the pitfalls of trying to control fate only to realize that while their all-powerful sages and gods-on-high may be able to see the future, the dice render it invisible to the humble eyes of the DM. Wait! Don’t toss your blind prophet into the wastebasket just yet! The Prophecy trope can add depth and story to your campaign and give your players a real sense of value and importance, if you take the time to craft your prophecies correctly. Here are a few hard-learned bits of advice for sailing the murky waters of destiny. 1) Avoid Specific Numbers I know, you want to add that bit of gravity to your campaign, where low and behold, the ancient prophecy of doom calls for 4-6 warriors to arise from the ashes to stop the tide of darkness. And oh! What a coincidence! That number matches exactly that of your party. While this can add a sense of destiny to the campaign, it is a fast path to Headache-ville. Players come and go. Real life pulls the party away from the table, and suddenly your prophecy is not quite so prophetic. Not to mention PC death. Nothing takes the wind out of your Sails of DestinyTM faster than the “chosen one” biting it from some punk Kobold on a lucky dice streak. Instead, try to keep numbers out of the game, or if numbers are a must, keep them vague. Simply saying “A band of warriors” is just as effective and creates a more open-ended experience. Juggling the “sacred number” is most likely going to lead to weak fixes or heavy railroading. I’m not saying it can’t be done, but if you seek to keep the teeth-clenching to a minimum, leave your options open. 2) Keep To Omens You Can Control If you are going to rely on the actions of your players to play out your Prophecy, your campaign will most likely end up less King Arthur and more Monty Python. While I love me some chaos, most of us are not looking to conclude our epic campaigns in the same vein as the end of Holy Grail. Omens can be a powerful tool for setting mood, tension, and foreshadowing the dire events that can really raise a campaign to the next level. The trick is to stick to events that you can control. Your players may be able to slay a hundred orcs, but can they stop a storm of blood? Can they keep a town of villagers from pulling a Rapture and vanishing off to domain of their god of choice? You can let the players actions go in the direction of their choice but using mysterious happenings and natural disasters allows you the power to keep your story moving forward, while still giving your players the freedom of choice they deserve. 3) Imagery, Metaphor, And Symbolism Let’s face it, if you really could predict the future, would you be filling out character sheets or lottery tickets? Okay fine, first the lottery tickets, then the character sheets. We cannot predict the future without wielding the Club of MetagamingTM. But that doesn’t mean we can’t set the stage. Classic literary devices to the rescue! Using imagery, metaphor, and symbolism allows you to present clues and hooks for your players without establishing a set series of events. Using images, especially in dream sequences or prophetic works of art, allow your character to see hints and omens that perhaps you didn’t even plan for. If when “the blue tides flood the fields of steel” is implied as symbolic, then your omen could be anything from a field of soldiers controlled by the blue-blooded aristocrats to just a flooded swimming pool. If you can leave the omens locked in imagery, you can sit back and simply be alert for the omens to present themselves in the roleplay. If you are lucky, it will be with the players actions that these omens come to fruition. 4) Hindsight Is A Natural 20/20 There is no rule that says players have to know the prophecy beforehand. Many a classic story arc has involved the daring heroes chasing down the relics of the past, with each riddle or scrapped of ruined parchment offering just a hint of the events that will befall the world. Keeping the pieces of the prophecy one step ahead of the players allows the Storyteller to fill in the gaps after the fact, so instead of the Storyteller jamming events down the players throats, they can simply fill in the prophecy with the actions the players have already taken. While you have a thin line to walk between a chilling sense of doom and an angry mob of players who feel as if they can do nothing right, this allows approach keeps your hands off from players actions and away from the pains of keeping your campaign motivation alive. One way to circumnavigate the “nothing we do matters” anguish is to let a few of the prophecies they find actually be wrong. This will help throw them a curveball to keep the game interesting, and also help the players feel as if they are making a difference. 5) It Was All A Lie?! Perhaps one of my favorite ways to handle prophecy is to have it all turn out to be false. Ancient texts can be manufactured. Dreams can be faked. Revelations can actually just be the rantings of a madman. The influence of religious or prophetic dogma can be an incredible tool of mass manipulation, and your villains can wield it like a rogue abusing his backstab stab with a ballista, because nothing keeps the peasants in-line like the threat of God’s angry wrath! Or maybe the prophecy was just a means to give hope to the hopeless? The Matrix teaches us many lessons about being a “the ONE,” and by turning prophecy on its head, we are presented with bold new avenues of storytelling and adventure to explore. 6) When All Else Fails… Let the prophecy be thwarted. Nothing will make your players high-five across the table in a chorus of “Woots!” more than giving Fate itself the ol’ one-finger salute. What you as the storyteller must realize is that this does not mean the story ends. Your players have thwarted fate. They have thrown the cosmic wheel into a tailspin, as what should have happened has not. There is a wealth of potential here that could be exploited for an even greater story, making your prophecy just the prelude to a grander adventure. Maybe by stopping the prophecy, a new world cannot be reborn. Maybe chaos begins to unravel all of reality. Or maybe the contradiction of the gods’ will undoes the powers that be, leaving the world without a divine hand of guidance? All of these are excellent story-fodder, so don’t throw your game in the trash just because your original idea didn’t follow your script. Above all though, listen to the pulse of your game. By being organic with your approach to prophecy, and letting your players guide you instead of you guiding them, you might be amazed at what you can create. Michael Lee Bross a contributing editor for D10Again.com and an avid lifetime gamer. He been a game master, player, world-builder, and designer for nearly 30 years. He is also a graduate of the MFA in Poetry program at Drew University, and is an active writer of both poetry and speculative fiction. His work has been published in such periodicals as Lifeboat, Mobius Poetry Magazine, and Let’s talk Philadelphia. His poetry chapbook, “Meditations on an Empty Stomach” also won the 2015 Arts by the People Chapbook Award. Michael currently teaches English at the University of Scranton and East Stroudsburg University. Picture Reference: https://shamanicstudies.co.uk/courses/divination/ Alright, nerds. Let’s talk about math. I realize this is a subject that isn’t exactly en vogue in some TRPG circles, sometimes met with “Story is more important!” or the ever popular “I’m bad at math!” Respectively, my responses to both are “It’s not a dichotomy” and “If you play D&D, you might be better at it than you realize.”
So with that said, let’s explore some of the fields and applications of mathematics as they appear in Dungeons and Dragons! 1) Arithmetic This is the simplest form of mathematics, and it covers the manipulation of numbers. Adding, subtracting, multiplication, and division are all different functions of arithmetic. Taking damage is subtracting the results of a damage die from your remaining HP. Taking half damage for a saving throw against a red dragon’s breath weapon is adding up all the damage dice rolled, and dividing that total by two. It’s the simple stuff, and besides ascribing the name to this field of mathematics, there’s not much else of interest here. Let’s move on! 2) Algebra A man once told me that Algebra is a pointless complication of arithmetic, because math is supposed to be about numbers, not letters. That fool was a highschool dropout, though, and was often willfully ignorant of just about everything: the point of algebra included. The letters involved in this form of math are its defining characteristic, since they represent unknown numbers or ranges of values. If you’ve ever wanted to figure out about how much HP a particular monster has without peeking at the Monster Manual (or other such catalogs), you likely employed algebra without realizing it. The tried and true method of counting up how much damage a creature takes before dying to ascertain its max HP is an application of Algebra, since we’re trying to figure out what MaxHP is equal to or less than. A further application of Algebra would be using the information of how much HP a monster has to develop a strategy for fighting it, since a creature is dead if MaxHP =< Y with Y being how much damage a creature has taken. If a know a goblin has roughly 7 HP, we can practically guarantee a fireball spell will eliminate a single goblin since it does 8d6 damage (yielding a minimum of 8 damage, assuming a failed saving throw from the goblin). “But wait, isn’t Fireball an Area of Effect Spell? Using it on a goblin is a waste!” This is true, which brings us to our next mathematical discipline! 3) Geometry Algebra is the foundation of several other mathematical disciplines, such as Geometry, which is mathematics as it applies to points, lines, and planes (in short, the math of shapes). To continue our Fireball and Goblin example, discovering the maximum amount of goblins one could slay with a single fireball spell would be a problem for Geometry. Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition describes fireball as a 20 foot radius sphere, centered on a single point. D&D 5e briefly describes some of the Geometric terms it uses, but doesn’t go in as much detail as earlier editions, and how to draw out these diagrams on a grid square has lead to some lengthy discussions on how to chart these phenomena. If you read that discussion, you’ll notice that even when presented with Pathfinder’s rules regarding the geometry of spell effects, there are still numerous other viable methods that get defined! In short, from a design perspective, it suddenly makes sense why 5th edition avoids including these lengthy sections in the books! Speaking of design, there’s one final discipline of math that any game designer worth their salt should have an understanding of. 4) Calculus Calculus! This is a discipline that gets a bad rap, as it’s often used synonymously with the phrase “any sort of math I’m too lazy to learn” when discussing rules-heavy games. As I mentioned earlier, though, a basic understanding of calculus is vital to game design, if not for your own games, then definitely if you’re designing new content for an already existing game. If arithmetic is manipulating numbers, algebra is using formulae to determine unknown numbers, and geometry an application of algebra, then calculus is the next step: devising formulae to express given phenomena. Meaning if you’ve ever come up with a mathematical way to remember the numbers on a chart in D&D and it’s been accurate, you’ve used a form of calculus before. Take for example, figuring out ability score modifiers. There’s a chart for this on page 13 of the 5th Edition Player’s Handbook (or on Roll20). You’ll notice, that the bonus for an ability score increases by 1 for every 2 that the ability score is increased by. We also know that 10-11 has an ability score modifier of 0. Observing this pattern, we can devise a formula to describe the relationship between ability score and modifiers! (x/2) - 5 = y In the above formula, x is the ability score, and y is the modifier. In order for this formula to work out, however, you have to round down no matter what the remaining decimal places are after you’ve divided. The computational explanation for this is that x and y for this formula are integers, and when dividing integers you discard remainders. In other words, calculus is about noticing patterns and finding ways to define these patterns mathematically. Game design benefits from this because if we know this formula, we not only don’t need to remember the chart, but we can also find out what information would be listed on the chart! To take this just another step further; let’s look at Proficiency Bonus and how it relates to character level. We notice that it starts at 2, and raises by 1 every 4 Character Levels. Thus, we can give it this formula: (x/4) + 2 = y Here, x is Character Level, y is Proficiency Bonus, and both x and y are integers (meaning we don’t deal with remainders when dividing). These are simple examples of where calculus could be applied in Dungeons and Dragons. However, if you understand the principle of noticing the patterns of how the classes are designed, you can extrapolate where they’d go further if they could go beyond level 20! Math is just as much as part of tabletop gaming as storytelling is, and as long as we’re using numerical representations for a character’s capabilities, it always will be. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, though. This aspect of tabletop games can even serve as an effective way to practice some mathematical concepts. After all, you may not need Geometry in your day to day life, but if you need to know if your Elven Ranger’s Longbow can hit that dragon as it’s flying away, you’ll be glad you know how to use the Pythagorean Theorem! If Aaron der Schaedel could find a way to use mathematics as a way to compensate for general social ineptitude, he’d find some contrived way to write an article about that, too. Until that day comes though, he’ll just stick to using TRPGs as an excuse to talk about mathematics. You can tell him to stop being a turbonerd via Twitter: @Zamubei Picture Reference: http://www.belloflostsouls.net/2018/09/dd-combat-by-the-numbers-dungeons-and-datamining.html When I first started out, my first contact with RPGs was when I tried to read and run the adventure found in the D&D 5e starter box and failed miserably after the first encounter. So, when I finally sat down to play a game run by someone else, I quickly realised how underprepared I was, with binders full of printouts, handouts, notes and God knows what else at his disposal I quickly adjusted my perspective. The next time I took a stab at being GM for the same adventure I came more prepared, I soon realised that my group was not that interested in D&D and it fell apart rather quickly. I did learn that preparation is vital when running a game for others, so whether you’re a brand spanking new GM or a seasoned veteran hopefully you can find something useful in this list.
1) Notepad & Pen This may be fairly obvious but it is the cornerstone of running a game, besides the rules and any supplements, so that you can quickly jot down anything that comes up or you need readily available, such as the names of the PCs, the alignment if you are playing D&D or aspects of the PCs if you are playing FATE. 2) Extra Dice Perhaps another fairly obvious one but having extra dice can really speed things along, from that one member of your group who always forgets their dice, to that overpowered character that needs 6d12s to roll for his very circumstantial damage. Extra dice can never go wrong, unless you have way too many then it’s just silly. So carrying an extra couple of sets of whatever dice you are using for your game should become a habit, just in case they are needed, and if not at least you can choose your favourite set. 3) Index Cards Torn bits of paper work for this one as well but to really show off, have index cards to write secret messages for just one player or to display some information that everyone needs readily available such as the number of turns before the tunnel collapses. In FATE, any scene or environment aspects can be written on cards for easy reference. Index cards can be used for a variety of different needs so I always have a pack in my gear just waiting to go. 4) Portable Whiteboard Or Chalkboard This is probably the most optional piece of kit for me as you either use it or you don’t. I use mine in some games to communicate layouts, zones, small maps, aspect lists and anything I might need to remember about the PCs and their abilities, which is also useful for the other players to see. For me this can easily be replaced by a reusable battle mat and the index cards but I enjoy having the A3 whiteboard to doodle on if my players just can’t get their heads round what i’m describing. 5) Counters & Tokens Having a ready supply of counters or tokens has many advantages: knowing who has Bardic Inspiration to use, as FATE points, to indicate status effects. I even used little counters that I wrote on to indicate how many and of what level spells my D&D players had, so when they used one of their first level spells they would give me the counter and would regain it after the appropriate rest. This worked well but I wasn’t that great at the D&D magic system, having just read the manual and jumped right into playing with other people who didn’t have any clue about the magic system either… it did not end well. 6) Good Friends Good friends are key to helping one become a good GM. A good friend gives positive criticism, not just pointing out flaws, but helping you work on trouble spots by offering ways to improve upon the running of the game. A good friend will add to your experience instead of draining your will to run a game, and will aid in the game creation by giving you hints as to what they expect from the game and the group. 7) Printer This is the most expensive piece of kit, but one of the most useful. Anything from character sheets to handouts, rules to campaigns... I’ve printed it all. If you don't own one ask your group if anyone does and ask to use it from time to time. Offer them ink for their trouble! Whatever the case, make use of this item. I recently used mine to print the entire rulebook for D100 Dungeon. If you don't have access to a printer then check out your local library. They usually have one they let the public use for a small fee per page. Whether or not you take any of these things to your game just make sure that you have fun and focus on the positives, don't get disheartened by problems you run into or players you wish you hadn’t invited. Learn from your mistakes and move forward with your skills, and keep in mind that not everything is good for every game. Find out what your players want from a game and tailor your equipment toward achieving that goal. Ross Reid is a keen roleplayer and GM who enjoys all things FATE and lots of things that aren't, In October he ran a game spread over three days totaling 24 hours for a children's hospital charity. This is a slightly updated version of the article that appears in my Nuggets #1 zine. I've been creating a new world seven hexagonal spaces at a time. Here is the beginning of that; an area for your player character to explore around a small village. It is written system agnostic and is easily adapted to any edition of old school role playing games. The village, Victoria's Tower, was built around and is named after a the wizard's tower at its center. There was an accident and the sun is frozen at dusk for 20 more days (totalling a month). The village and its surrounding hexes are stuck out of time. Anyone can travel back and forth, but no time passes naturally until the end of the month. Spells and other magical effects work normally. 1) Plains And Village A mage, Victoria, lives in a tower and a village has evolved up around it. Victoria built here because of the magic contained in the burial mounds from a long dead civilization. The village provides reagents from the sea in exchange for protection from the wizard. Victoria has frozen herself and cannot fix this. Her tower is protected with glyphs of warding and arcane locks. There are about 20 small crates filled with enchanted fish (see 12) here waiting for Victoria to open her door. 2) Plains And Farms Mostly farms and the location of the ancient burial mounds, these plains feed the village. There is an underground tunnel connecting the mounds to Victoria’s tower. If the twelve mounds are explored, four are connected to the tower and found emptied, four more are silent, and the last four are haunted by undead. One contains a flail, Beast Render, that smells of patchouli and deals +2 damage to beasts. 3) Plains And Lakeshore A body of water where fishermen catch gillies and stuff them into enchanted scarecrows on the shore. After four days the fish are removed and delivered to the wizard. There is also an island where reagents and medicinal herbs are grown. Barren mothers (unknowingly cause by Victoria’s experimentation with ancient magics) come here with their husbands to tend the area while the men fish. 4) South Tower Hills A well traveled road has signs of a fight and two dead worgs killed by a piercing weapon. There is a woman nursing her wounds under a small rocky overhang away from the road. Lune, an elven warrior, is armed with 2 short swords. She stands her ground if threatened, but seeks to be left alone. She is bringing the remains of two humans to add to the scarecrows in area 3. Once a month the scarecrows need to be refilled with fresh kills. Only Lune and Victoria know of this dark deed. Lune will not let players know about this unless her life depends on it. She will say that the remains she carries are from her family and she is making a pilgrimage to the lake to bury them at sea. 5) Moonlit Hills These tree barren hills hide a duchess, Lady Em Winter-Borough, waiting under the moonlight for a clandestine meeting with one of the clerics, she is dying and has a book of secrets to trade for a cure. The players will not recognize Lady Em, as she is from a kingdom far away. She claims to be Dass Whitehall, a noble from a nearby kingdom and is waiting for her slower coach, with her luggage, to catch up. Her coach is hidden here and can be found if players search the hex. If the players search within the coach they can find a diary and a contract that reveals Lady Em’s true identity and the fact that she is dying. Her family made a pact with a devil that has cursed her with disease. She is looking to find a cure or a loophole in the contract. 6) Ogre Hills An ogre, Rockgrinder, make his home here in an out of the way cave that players can find if they search this hex well. He hides if seen and has promised a raven (actually Victoria) to keep the town safe. Rockgrinder has a ring that lets him talk to animals and uses them for information. In addition to hunting predators, the raven leads him to food, but has been absent for over a week. 7) Plains Of Dissonance The wizard’s apprentice stays with a group of traveling men. These are clerics of an uncaring god and they seek to destroy the wizard because she is tampering with ancient magics. The clerics have no names. The apprentice can locate all the wards in the wizard’s tower and is being charmed by the clerics to give them the information. The apprentice has not entered the tower in eleven days for fear of accidentally setting the wards off. Richard Fraser has been roleplaying since the early days of Dungeons and Dragons and started with the red box in the eighties. He currently prefers to DM fifth edition D&D, though reads a lot of OSR and PbtA. He currently has podcast, Cockatrice Nuggets and maintains a blog, both of which can be found at www.slackernerds.com.
Picture Reference: Provided by the author As I’ve discussed before in my halloween special and fantastical micro-setting posts, I believe that what sets tabletop RPGs apart from other mediums is the absolute freedom to create. Some find this a burden and choose to stick by the book or by well established cliches, and others even look down upon those who would deign to use their imagination. Admittedly nobody likes the “snowflake / edgelord” half-angel / half-demon prince whose very existence places them at the center of the world. But let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater! There are plenty of ways to take the cliches and give them a twist, or take the “chosen one” character concepts and turn them on their head. Here are five ways to make interesting characters.
1) Add One Unique Feature Everyone has one idea in them! So, you’re an elf wizard, but you have a distinctive nervous habit; you tap your fingertips to your nose like the performer Sting or Dr. Cox from Scrubs. You’re the tough half-orc fighter but in your free time you develop con-langs. You’re the halfling bard who ends every verse with “can you dig it!?”. Nervous habits, catch phrases, hobbies, predilections, family heirlooms, or odd trinkets worth little in gold but containing sentimental value are all little things you can do to bring some depth to your character. Just one unique feature can lead to an explosion of character developments! 2) Play Against Type People think they know what a fighter, wizard, paladin, etc., are supposed to be, but what if they were different? In fact, what if they were opposite? Why can’t a fighter be intelligent and introspective? In many games, this is discouraged, because a fighter would need to put points into their “dump stat,” typically intelligence, in order to perform well on skills which benefit from the intelligence attribute. However, even in such a system, there are outside-the-box ways to make an intelligent fighter that isn’t poorly optimized. This intelligent fighter comes from a small, under-educated village, but his mom was once a scholar in a major kingdom. Although the rest of his village discouraged his learning and even bullied and taunted him, he is nonetheless well-read, introspective, and eloquent. However, he has anxiety and general emotional issues around his education, and when taken to task, his anxiety often gets the better of him (see tip 4). In this way, while on his character sheet he has low intelligence and this will still affect his rolls, in terms of his character, he can be roleplayed as an intelligent and introspective person. Going back to our Sting-like elf wizard, as opposed to the bookish dork, this wizard is a charming magician / rock-star, although he’s also callous and tends to turn people off who get to know him (justifying his low charisma). And what about the lawful stupid paladin? How about our paladin sees the corruption in his church. He believes in the general morals but not the exact letter and idiosyncrasies of the law. He’s the rogue cop of paladins. 3) Play Against Genre Conventions (the exception that proves the rule) So this one is a bit trickier, and may require that the GM and the rest of the party approve of it in order for it to work. In a typical fantasy setting, often times people resort to the “fellowship” story: A group of strangers or loosely associated individuals with varying backgrounds who come together to go on some quest. Whether this is your campaign or not, there are ways to inject different kinds of genre archetypes into the fold. Perhaps your character wears a masked costume and fashions themselves as a vigilante or superhero, as much Batman or Zorro as Robin Hood. Or maybe your character is an agent of the kingdom, a pulp superspy, or instead is a gritty hardboiled noir detective wrapped up in a plot beyond their imagining. Maybe your eldritch knight gets their strength and magical powers from an alien or extraplanar symbiote, fantasy Venom-style. Again, it’s important to make sure that this concept will work within the world and story that the GM is trying to tell, but this can be a fun way to utilize pre-existing archetypes while also seeming fresh and unique, and can potentially spice up the whole setting. 4) Give yourself a Hindrance (and be true to it) So I want to be very careful with this one. Hindrances should not be treated as an oddity, or a joke, or used flippantly. Do a little research, learn the logistics of the hindrance, and think about how it can add to the character without being the character. Especially if portraying mental illness, which is often stigmatized, please be respectful. This can be a fighter with a missing hand, a wizard with dyslexia, a bard with performance anxiety, etc. Unlike systems where disadvantages can be gamed to get more abilities and then ignored, in this case, the point is that the hindrance does affect the character and must be addressed. That’s not to say it needs to affect their character sheet. Perhaps the one-handed fighter has trained his whole life this way and is as capable as anyone else, but there is a story around how he lost the hand, or it’s a sensitive topic that enemies or other NPCs can use to provoke him. 5) Turn an unpopular concept on its head I know I railed on the half-angel / half-demon “edgelord / snowflake” character above, but actually I’m as much railing against the people whose only concept of a unique character is something like this, than the concept itself. I don’t think there’s anything fundamentally wrong with this half-breed, but let’s make it actually interesting! Maybe the end result of our half-angel / half-demon is something in the middle, something purely mundane. Everyone is out there looking for some exotic messianic figure, when in fact she’s really more of a Joan Smith the human-iest human. Maybe, rather than being some beautiful angel/succubus-like creature, she’s actually an awkward, twisted, Lovecraftian creature, like a cross between the Chaos God Nurgle of Warhammer 40K and the chimeric cherubs from Kabbalah or the Book of Ezekiel. Perhaps you’re chaotic evil in a party of good, but rather than being a third-tier Joker, you have some incentive to work with the party, and maybe their goodness rubs off on you after a while. Rather than being the petty, rogue rogue (pun intended) who pickpockets the party and stabs everyone, you mastermind heists, leveraging the abilities of the full party like Ocean’s 11 or Leverage (see tip 3). Whether you stick closely to the traditional fantasy archetypes, or want to play the “exotic” half-angel / half-demon, there are all sorts of ways to put a little spice or twist into it, to make the character, the world, or the campaign more interesting. Regardless of what system you’re playing or what’s on the character sheet, there is usually wiggle room, little nooks and crannies where you can get creative. Even just one unique feature can breathe life into a character. Good luck with your new character concepts, I look forward to hearing your stories! Max Cantor is a graduate student and data analyst, whose love of all things science fiction, fantasy, and weird has inspired him to build worlds. He writes a blog called Weird & Wonderful Worlds and hopes people will use or be inspired by his ideas! Picture Reference: https://cdn.pixabay.com/photo/2016/10/19/19/08/medieval-1753740_960_720.jpg It’s always great to see a new publisher on the scene, adding to our ever-expanding list of games we need to play. It’s even better to see one putting out a game that jumps in front of (more than) a few games already on said list. New Agenda Publishing, with their first game Orun, is exactly that. Inspired by West African culture and with a wonderfully diverse production team, Orun funded on Kickstarter in less than 12 hours and looks to be a delight to play. New Agenda’s Misha Bushyager sat down and answered a few questions about the game and Kickstarter for us.
What is Orun and why should gamers support it? In Orun, you play an envoy of the ascendant Oluru, called a Djali or Luminary. Not quite ascendant themselves, the Luminaries travel to different worlds as advisers, troubleshooters, and peacekeepers in the post-apotheosis galaxy. They explore lost star systems and ultimately help enlighten worlds and their people, waking the galaxy from its disordered indolence. It's a balance between more narrative games and crunchy games, with a system and worlds that allow for many stories to be told. Orun is heavily inspired by West African culture. Does this extend to the various species and pieces of technology players will encounter in the universe? Yes! We used principles and values from West Africa, especially the Yoruban culture when we were making design choices. The Horizon system is intriguing. Could you give an example of what a Legendary roll might look like at the table? Let's say you were trying to find out what bargaining chip would work best for a tricky negotiation. With a Legendary roll, you might know not only what button to push, but how to sweeten the pot for both sides so they'll both agree to it. Why did you decide to go with a square book? Four was an important number to us, so square just seemed to make sense. You'll find multiple of 4 all throughout the game. This is New Agenda Publishing’s first Kickstarter. How have you prepared yourselves for the challenge, and how are those preparations paying off? It's our first Kickstarter as a team but individually we have multiple Kickstarters under our belts. We waited until the book was mostly written to do the launch to minimize the time to fulfillment. We got our ducks in a row and quotes and artists lined up so we could hit the ground running once it was over. We've been working on this game for nearly a year now and we wouldn't be sharing it if we didn't feel like it was in a state that we could easily finish and fulfill it. Check out Orun on Kickstarter here, and New Agenda Publishing’s Patreon here. Phil Pepin is a history-reading, science-loving, head-banging, river-running nerd, who would like nothing more than to cuddle with his pups and wife. Picture Reference: http://newagendapublishing.com/ It isn’t often that my old internet memories come back to haunt me, but when they do, they come back with a vengeance. Today we’re doing an interview with Blaede, Nicolas Nayaert about their project, Seeds of Wars. This is an exciting supplement for me as I am familiar with Blaede from the old Birthright Forums, which are still up and talking about fan created supplements for one of my favorite settings. My GM, Jeremy (aka Osprey), was seriously invested in the development of materials for the 3.0 and 3.5 version of Birthright we played, and it is still one of my top three RPG experiences all these years later. 1) So, Blaede, to start, can you tell us about your inspiration for this project and why you developed it?
Hey Josh, as you might have guessed, my inspiration comes from the AD&D Birthright campaign setting. My Birthright campaign lasted for over 20 years and gave me my fondest RPG memories. In 2014, I developed an application to help our game master manage the campaign. You know how difficult it was to keep track of everything in Birthright. My initial idea was to create a web application for Birthright but we couldn't manage to get the licence so I decided to create a whole new setting. The game stopped being published in 1998. In my opinion, there is no other real realm management system on the market. I am trying to bring one back. 2) What else have you (or your team) written for that we can check out? When I decided to create a new campaign setting, not being a writer myself and not being an English native speaker, I knew from the start that I had to hire people to do the job. I started contacting the authors I enjoyed reading and/or that had a good reputation. During my search, I noticed Gen Con was about to take place in Indianapolis and I had a quick look at their Author Guest List for 2018. There I came across Erik's short resume and it seemed to me he was the perfect fit. He had already created an epic fantasy setting (the World of Ruin), had published novels in the storied Forgotten Realms, and was the lead creative consultant for Red Aegis, a big Kickstarter success from 2014. You can find his bibliography on erikscottdebie.com 3) If there was one thing that you would want everyone to know about this product, what would it be? Seeds of Wars is not a standalone game. You'll need another RPG system for character creation, combat & magic rules... but that's a good thing! It means you can use the game system you love to build your character and level up. SOW will provide a new fantasy setting and extensive rules to manage your realm. It's a bit like building up your character but instead you will be improving your assets. Whenever you feel like stretching your legs, pack up your bag, call your friends and go on adventure. You then switch to your traditional RPG system and spend some time fighting monsters, exploring dungeons, you know, that sort of things. Once you're filled up with emotions, you can come back to your headquarters, store the spoils of your expedition in your treasure room and go back to business! 4) Why Realm Management? What does that offer the TTRPG space that doesn’t already exist? To my knowledge, there is no other TTRPG on the market with the same level of macro management. You are managing a realm (not necessarily a kingdom, it can be magic schools, places of faith, trade guilds, cultural centers) and you really have to think on a much larger scale than in your traditional RPG. It offers a mix between diplomacy, economy, mass army battles and traditional adventuring. 5) Tell us about your setting. Thousands of years ago, the people known as the Vareene waged a brutal war against a galactic infestation known only as the Congregation. These humanoid aliens buried their last hope–a powerful artifact called the Catalyst–on the distant, primitive planet of Ceres, where the Congregation would never think to look for it. Cut off from their homeworld, the small enclave waited for the war to run its course, when they would return. The Vareene died out, leaving the small outpost on Ceres as their last legacy. The survivors integrated with the native peoples of the planet, giving rise to powerful bloodlines linked to the ancient technology of the Vareene, which eventually became known as magic. Over centuries and then millennia, the Vareene ceased to be as a distinct culture, and in time their origins and purpose became the stuff of myth and legend. 6) How can I use this for my games? Imagine I’m writing a Savage Worlds setting book that might have Ruler level play options. Can I use this for that? What about Birthright, or Pathfinder, or one of the existing settings that has realm level play? I mentioned you can use Seeds of Wars with any traditional RPG system. It means you can create your character and level up using the game system you like. Now, you CAN use our management rules with your own setting but it will require a lot of work from the GM to divide his map into kingdoms, the kingdoms into counties, enter all the realms date, all that is provided in our setting. It will be easier if we manage to unlock the web application stretch goal as you will be able to upload your map, draw the borders and fill in the data in a user friendly way. If you want to keep playing your Birthright campaign, the only added value would be the web application. Pathfinder is more focused on micro management and keeping your character busy between 2 adventures (which is fine, it's just a different approach). 7) If you had a vision of where this could go in the future, what would that be? We would love to keep publishing supplements for the game. The setting’s mythic story is a cyclical one: in every age, Ceres faces a rising doom. In the fantasy era, those with the genetic power of the Vareene discover buried secrets of their interstellar past and must overcome scouts from a small band of Congregation. Centuries later in the “modern” age, our heroes face an impending invasion by unlocking the power that lies dormant within the planet and also reverse engineering the technology of the scouting unit. And finally, after Ceres has won its first battle against the Congregation, the heirs of the world must take to the stars to confront their destined foes. On the digital side, there are also endless possibilities of improvements and new functionalities. 8) What, if anything, can community members do to support this project? I think what we need the most is visibility. We believe we have an interesting and original product and we have very talented people in the team. The difficulty for a project like this, with a first time publisher like me, is to attract people's attention. Especially people who are not familiar with Birthright and other macro management systems. If your readers would like to help us, they would definitely do so by spreading the word and sharing our posts on forums and social media. And if they really want to support us, of course they can pledge on our Kickstarter page. We are halfway there but it get more and more difficult to keep the momentum going. 9) Is any of this OGL or similar? Can folks work with you to use your framework for new products? Right now, we are focusing on getting the Kickstarter funded and hopefully unlock the web application. We want to offer the best product possible, hence we will write the corebook and develop the app with the teams of professionals we assembled. Beyond that, I am open to all collaborations, discussions, exchanges, suggestions for improvements, both for the management rules and for the application. It will be subscription based, which means we have to keep the players satisfied. The best way to do that is to listen to what they have to say and try to go in the direction they want to go. CHECK OUT THE SEEDS OF WARS KICKSTARTER HERE Josh is the intrepid Chief Operations Officer of High Level Games and he organized the first HLG Con. With 20 years of playing rpgs, Josh started with Mind's Eye Theater LARPs and loves the World of Darkness. He runs, www.keepontheheathlands.com to support his gaming projects. Josh is the administrator of the Inclusive Gaming Network on Facebook. He’s a serious advocate for inclusive gaming spaces, a father, and a graduate from the International Peace and Conflict Resolution graduate program at American University in Washington, D.C. You can also find Josh’s other published adventures here and here. |
All blog materials created and developed by the staff here at High Level Games Archives
April 2023
Categories
All
|
Proudly powered by Weebly