I think most DMs have been there: the desire to run a D&D session with as little preparation as possible. Maybe you've heard of the awesome, “meta-breaking” module everyone is talking about, but don't know where to find it. Perhaps you're looking for the 2e dungeon you loved to run and its 5e conversion. These five resources are great databases for your dungeon-finding needs. 1) DMs Guild The DM’s Guild is the most popular place to find officially published 5e and classic dungeons and modules, as well as support thousands of independent authors bringing their gifts and fresh ideas to the games. From horror to holiday, children's adventures and more, you can find a premade adventure to fit any campaign, group, or situation. The ratings, reviews, and medal system ensure that it's easy to find the highest quality content for your needs. If you've never heard of this site, check it out at www.dmsguild.com. 2) Drivethrough RPG Drivethrough RPG (www.drivethroughrpg.com) is the place to go for off-brand, vintage, and independently published RPG content. You’re less likely to find things for free on this site, but can buy new and classic adventures from Dungeons and Dragons, Shadowrun, and Warhammer to less well-known titles like Witcher RPG, Cyberpunk, and Gamma World. The site is run by One Bookshelf, the same company that runs the DM’s Guild, so can bundle it and check out through either site. 3) Adventure Look Up The Adventure Lookup (www.adventurelookup.com) is a crowdsourced database (spearheaded by Matt Colville) on which players can search for new and classic adventure modules using a variety of descriptive tags. For example, when I type “goblins” in the search bar and select “Wizards of the Coast”, “5th Edition”, and “Dungeon” for my environment, it returns a total of 7 adventures. Clicking on any of them shows the site from which I can download them (all www.dmsguild.com in this case), the character levels they’re made for, and even if they can be soloable. While you can’t actually buy anything on the site, it’s a great hub for compiled adventures from all different sources. 4) Goodman Games Goodman Games (www.goodmangames.com) is a high-quality producer and distributor of classic and converted modules and rule sets from both well-known and obscure TTRPGs. They’re not free, but they are guaranteed to be professionally made, and sometimes they are the only place to get 5e conversions of old adventure modules. They also sell dice, accessories, and copies of old RPG magazines that are now out of print. 5) Kobold Press Kobold Press (koboldpress.com) is arguably the most well known third party publisher of TTRPG material. Their website functions much the same as Goodman Games, except they have much more independently produced material. They have their own magazine which they sell, and guides for designing your own content as well. 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. Picture Reference: http://dnd.wizards.com/articles/news/dungeon-masters-guild-now-open What’s more terrifying than the horrific monster charging towards you? The horrific monster you can’t see or understand. Mysteries are impossible to anticipate, and each can be a source of dread for your party. Intrigue occurs when your party goes to the mystery. Horror occurs when the mystery comes for them. In this special article by yours truly, the Malicious Manager, we’ll explore three types of unavoidable dooms that can stalk your PCs, make them distrust each other or even their own perceptions. The outcomes of these tales are played for dramatic effect. You wouldn’t let such terrible fates befall your PCs, would you? 1) The Inevitable Storm It starts with a low rumble. The trundling of dark clouds across the twilit sky comes next, edging ever closer. You can't help but stare into the encroaching darkness, lost in the shifting shadows that play along the horizon. Look too long and you might see a face, or maybe just a pair of cold, dead eyes, looking back at you. It mocks you and your insignificance. You think to warn the others, but they don’t see what you see. A thunderstorm holds fear only for children, they tell you. You look again. It sneers from the heavens and presses ever closer. Now you can hear it. The very air you breathe is heavy with its whispers. They fill you, mind, body, and soul. The rumbling is getting louder. Flashes of light crack within its profound darkness, and with each illumination, more of the presence can be seen. Panic starts setting in. You try to fight it, to tell yourself it’s all a trick of the light. You’re just imagining things. Then the storm covers the moon and darkness spreads across the town like a funeral shroud. Twisted terrors stumble out of the shadows at the edge of your perception. You cry to passerbys, to acquaintances, to your own friends, but no one believes you. They tell you to come inside the tavern, sit down, and remain calm. The storm will pass soon. You sit, wrapped in a quilt and sip warm cider by the fire. The shadows flicker and dance on the walls, but then, they aren’t your shadows. There’s a knock on the door. Before you can stop them, your friends open it wide. The crashing thunder mixes with their screams. The storm is here. 2) The Hunting Horror You’ve been traveling for a long while now through foreign lands, a guest of the local regency on a quest to pacify a cult-like insurrection. It’s nothing you and your companions haven’t dealt with before. The woods are especially dark at night, however, and a sense of unease is visited upon your camp before you sleep. One of your trusted friends reports hearing strange noises when they woke after midnight. You try to put such concerns out of your mind; it won’t be but another day before you reach the insurgents’ encampment. You reach the encampment the next day, or at least where it should be. It’s merely a circle of bleach-white stones, interlaid with a complex pattern of gashes carved into the earth. Neither your cleric nor warlock can make sense of the symbol. They conjure spells of detection and scrying to seek out nearby energies or life forms. Nothing can be found. Your cleric insists on purifying the earth before you move on, and they seem particularly troubled. You all agree and let them set to work. It happens faster than you can react. The cleric is pulled from the circle by a sickly green blur. You draw weapons, but all you see is the circle of stones, spinning and dancing through the air. The warlock is next, ripped bodily from your presence and into the surrounding wood. You are alone now. The insurrection never existed. This is the outcome intended by the regency. You hear it breathing now, still hungering, still slavering. It comes for you. 3) The Dread Within It’s really not a problem, you have to keep telling your party. It’s just a sense of malaise, something that all seasoned adventurers feel on occasion and let pass through them. The holy warrior you’ve come to trust with your life insists you visit a temple to seek succor, but you dismiss the notion. After all, your party won’t be able to track down those missing children without you, their trusty ranger. You follow the signs of passage through the marshlands. Fetid air surrounds you, causing a few of your number to double over and retch. The malaise has now become a serious headache, no doubt compounded by the stress of this particular quest and the uninviting conditions of the region. You press on, however, deeper into the swamp. The tracks suddenly stop, and what’s worse, you can’t even find the path you took that led you here. This is plainly impossible; you reassure your comrades, and yourself, that you will soon find the path. Indeed you do. Strange markings and crusted blood line the rotten trees, leading you down a long, empty road. A child suddenly steps from the woodwork, not but thirty meters away. You call out, trying get their attention. The child smiles. Your head pounds and you drop to your knees. When you look up, the child, if that’s what it was, is gone. You hear chuckling all around you. Your companions are laughing at you! One of them turns suddenly and you realize that you can’t recognize them anymore. They all close in on you, suffocating you with their stink. Their faces are misshapen mockeries of natural forms. You draw your blade. They cackle and produce yellow claws at the tips of their withered fingers. When you’re finally found, you can’t explain why you slaughtered your companions in their sleep. Your rescuers listen to your tale and one of them looks at another worriedly. “What missing children?” he asks. That concludes this series of stories, kiddies. Doom waits for no one, and now I am called away for another year, only to return next All Hallows’ Eve. Until then, may you roll well. In your graves, that is! David Horwitz (the Malicious Manager) is at once writer, editor, and blog manager for HLG. His love of horror media extends even to B Movie schlock, and will happily chat the night away with fellow connoisseurs of creepiness. You can find his work and contact info at his site, www.davidhorwitzwrites.com. Happy Halloween! Picture Reference: https://non-aliencreatures.fandom.com/wiki/File:CryptKeeper.png Let’s get one thing straight: I love Warhammer. I started with Warhammer 40,000 in my freshman year of high school, then was dragged into Warhammer Fantasy Battles before graduation. I left the hobby behind for years because I was broke (J/K! Still am!). As an adult I picked up roleplaying games. Needless to say, I was pretty stoked when I realized the newest edition of Warhammer Fantasy R oleplay was in development and the game went to the top of my “must play” list, along with many others who are craving Old World action (RIP WFB). Now that the game is here, does it live it to the expectations and standards of 30 years of WFRP history? Full disclosure: I was provided with a copy of the PDF for review purposes. 1) Combat Combat in WFRP is quick, narrative, and brutal. Cubicle 7 managed to tweak the typically slow pace of combat that is usually found in BRP games by adding in the advantage system. Attack rolls are always opposed and the winner is determined by who rolls the furthest under (or least over!) their melee skill. If the attacker wins, they hit and gain a cumulative +10% on their combat rolls; if the defender wins, they gain advantage. Whoever loses the roll also loses advantage. It’s also totally possible to crit will losing a roll, even if you’re defending, or fumble while succeeding; something that appeals to the black comedy inherent in the setting. It’s also pretty easy to knock characters down or kill them. In our second game, our party’s Apprentice Wizard lost half of his wounds to a single wolf bite. The following session, he was dropped to zero in two hits and nearly bled out. Thankfully PCs have resources at their disposal to keep themselves from dying on their first few adventures. Fate, fortune, resolve, and resilience allow PCs to avoid death, cancel out conditions like bleeding, prevent mutations (for now…) or possibly avoid the effects of critical hits. Crits don’t just do extra damage, they can maim or kill your character. You may not die, but have fun walking around without your left foot. 2) Careers Careers have been in WFRP since the game began in the 1980s, but they’ve been reimagined for the new edition. Career paths have been unified (it’s now easier to make it from an Interrogator to Witchfinder General) and lumped together in classes, which is mostly arrangement by theme. The list of careers is broad and varied. It’s possible to play anything from a Rat Catcher to a Noble, River Warden to Investigator. The careers can lead to some interesting parties. If you choose randomly, something encouraged by the game through bonus experience, you can wind up with a party that has a Scholar, a Witch, a Witch Hunter, and a Servant. That’s pretty diverse, but it can lead to narrative issues. Why is a servant out adventuring? And let’s hope the Witch Hunter doesn’t find out about the Witch! Careers can be changed through spending experience, allowing players to make the characters they really want to play, and allowing them to pick up skills and talents they can’t advance through their current skills. GMs are also encouraged to change PC careers based on narrative. On the lam? Now you’re all Outlaws. Did the Wizard start messing with dark magic? I guess he’s a Witch now. 3) Status Seeing as the setting is based on Renaissance Germany, it not terribly surprising to see class and status show up in the game. Status influences how much money you can earn between adventures (remember, they’re careers, not classes), and how you interact with others; it’s a bit tougher to for a beggar to intimidate a merchant than it would be for a noble. It feels like a gritty, grimdark world where the rich feast and the poor pick up the scraps. 4) So Many Things To Keep Track Of There’s a lot going on in this game and a lot to keep track of. Characters have to think about where their armour is covering them, how many fate, fortune, resilience and resolve points they have, lingering wounds from critical hits, whether or not there’s an infection from those wounds, and corruption from Chaotic influences. All of this on top of the encumbrance packed on their backs. It can be overwhelming. Fortunately there are a ton of optional rules to reduce the amount bookkeeping, simplifying armour points, and reminding the GM they can ignore encumbrance as they see fit. But out of the box the game gives you a lot of to keep track of, especially between adventures. 5) Progressive-ish I have to admit, I wasn’t expecting to find a game full of inclusivity, and I didn’t. Well, not entirely. There were a few pleasant surprises. For starters, there are no “races”. Instead they have been rebranded as species which is a welcome change and way more accurate. They also explicitly state that regardless of the name of the career, it’s open to everyone. Yes, we all know that anyone can be a “Townsman”, but it’s nice to see it in writing. It’s also nice to see at least a couple of careers with female-gendered titles. Seeing Nun instead of Monk, and Riverwoman was a pleasant surprise. It is about a fifty/fifty split between male and female career examples (at least until they get to the soldiers). There’s also a surprising amount of people of color displayed. That was one of the biggest surprises. Not to say there is equal representation (it’s still overwhelmingly white), but seeing a black man as a Noble was a treat. It should also be said that ethnic diversity in the setting is something that hasn’t been well communicated from Games Workshop or other IP holders to consumers (myself included). The Empire, especially in the east, has a wide array of skin-tones and isn’t the pasty Germanic nation that I previously thought it was. That’s not to say that representation is perfect. As I’ve said before, it’s overwhelmingly white and gender representation slips. There’s also the nagging lore bits that type-cast non-human species. Dwarfs hang on to grudges, High Elves are aloof, Halflings like to eat, and Wood Elves are wild and xenophobic. There are “good” and “bad” species. There’s a ton of intolerance too. Xenophobia, sex-negativity (thanks Slaanesh), and a deeply ingrained fear of the different are baked into the setting. But I suppose it wouldn’t be grimdark, and therefore Warhammer, if it wasn’t there. 6) Organization and Clarity The book can be a bit scattershot and unclear. There are places where one would expect to find particular rules, but they aren’t there, or you have to go searching for a trail of breadcrumbs to find the appropriate rules. As an example, the rules for Size begin in the combat section, but are more fully fleshed out in the Bestiary section. This isn’t too unreasonable, but the specific rules for how size affect damage (Damaging and Impact) are found in the weapons rules. One would also expect to find Injuries and Critical Wounds immediately after determining damage, but they’re preceded by movement, conditions, and Fate and Resilience. None of this is to say that the organization lacks logic, but it could use improvement. Where the editorial team did fail, however, was clarity. The book lacks clear examples of how rules work in actual play, and can be contradictory at times. It would’ve been really nice to have at least one example of how combat actually plays out or how to build enough advantage to cast a tough spell. There are also rules that could be a bit clearer. The worst example is on off-hand penalties for defending. At one point the rules seem to indicate that the penalty only applies on attacks, but weapons in the parry group ignore that penalty. Overall, there is nothing so egregious that a well written and thought out FAQ and Errata couldn’t fix, but it’s disappointing that the book requires on at all. Despite the fiddly bits and lack of clarity, this game is fantastic. Veteran gamers can grok it in a session, though newcomers might take a little more time. It’s worth it, because when they pick it up combat flies by and turns into the lethal character grinder that veteran WFRP players expect. If gritty and lethal isn’t your thing, this isn’t the game for you. But if you’re a fan of the Old World, or want to keep get a little dirtier than your favorite game, pick up the new edition of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay here. Image attribution: Cubicle 7 Entertainment Ltd. © Games Workshop 2018 Savage Worlds has been a fan-favorite setting-agnostic system for going on 15 years. But with a new edition and Kickstarter just around the corner things are a-changin’. We sat down with President Shane Hensley as well as COO and Managing Editor Jodi Black to talk about what’s new in Savage Worlds Adventure Edition. Savage Worlds Deluxe has been out for six years. Why bring out a new edition now? Jodi: Savage Worlds hasn't changed much since it was first released in 2003, but there have been changes, for example, to Shaken a couple years back. We had updated the PDF but needed to reprint the book to reflect that change, plus we wanted to redesign the layout for our Graphic Novel format. With any new printing we try to make things better, and the new Adventure Edition received the same treatment. We've been listening--literally--to thousands of Game Masters and paid attention to feedback in our official online communities now for more than a decade. Shane and Clint and the rest of the Pinnacle team have discussed rule tweaks for years, and held off because of the cascading effects such a change might make. The result is the Adventure Edition: updated to be Faster, more Furious in action, and more Fun to play! Which of the rule changes are you most excited about and why? Shane: Chases are pretty exciting, as are Quick Encounters, but my favorite by far is Tests (which replaces Tricks and Tests of Will) and Support (which replaces cooperative rolls). It seems subtle at first, but the way it actually plays means there's much more interaction between players, and it tends to be incredibly creative. We've had playtesters bamboozle a space pirate with her Science skill (Test with Science vs Smarts) and keep a teammate alive simply by telling them how much they admire their courage (Support with Persuasion while they were Bleeding Out). That's pretty cool. How easy will it be to convert older content to Savage Worlds Adventure Edition, and will there be a conversion guide of some sort in the foreseeable future? We'll release a simple conversion guide, but it's pretty easy. Mostly you'll just want to add a few new skills and ignore some old ones. If something points to an Edge or Hindrance, just use the one in the new edition rather than the old...that kind of thing. Of course a few things might need a bit more work...we've changed Chases completely, for example, so any book that has a special rule for Chases might not make sense in the new system Why did you decide to break from your previous model and release GM tips separately from the core rules? Shane: The Savage Worlds Adventure Edition focuses on the adventures our friends around the world are having...mostly as players. It takes a special kind of person to step up and agree to Game Master for her group, so we decided to keep those sections separate. While it's certainly beneficial for a player to read the Game Master section, odds are higher he will focus on the sections to create his character instead. You recently unveiled a new licensing program called Savage Worlds Adventurer’s Guild. What makes this licensing program different from what you have previously done, and what sets it apart from what other companies are doing? Jodi: Several other companies have created "Community Content" programs like DM's Guild is for Dungeons & Dragons, and each has essentially copied the setup and edited to their needs. We confess to doing largely the same, but with some very important changes. Licensing is tricky, right? We cannot allow there to be any confusion about intellectual properties we have licensed for Savage Worlds such as Flash Gordon™, Rifts®, The Goon™, Fear Agent™, The Sixth Gun, Lankhmar, or Solomon Kane. We also need to retain the intellectual property rights for our own settings like Deadlands, The Last Parsec, East Texas University, Weird Wars, and Rippers. For these reasons and more, no setting IP is available for use by the Savage Worlds Adventurer's Guild. Guild licensing allows access to the core Savage Worlds game mechanics (only), so creators can make their own settings come alive! We also decided creators should keep their own IP. This means anyone who publishes content in the Savage Worlds Adventurer's Guild retains the rights to that product. They can sell the rights, defend them, and if HBO comes calling (just as an example) to develop their cool story idea into a miniseries, Pinnacle doesn't have a place at the negotiation table. This is different from other Community Content programs. Next, products published in any Community Content program pay royalties to OneBookShelf (who hosts the site) and the company who created the game system. Instead of the higher royalty fees others are collecting, Pinnacle's royalty is only 10%. This is largely to offset the development costs of templates, art, and other assets Guild members will have access to. Finally, some Community Content programs limit the formats available. We're opening it up to everything. Cards, Fiction, Adventures, Maps, etc. ...all are allowed in our program! We're pretty excited about the Savage Worlds Adventurer's Guild and can't wait to see what cool products our friends make to share. If everyone says your homebrew setting or campaign is epic, write it up! Got a cool science fiction character stat block, art, and backstory to share? Or maybe it's the diary of your campaign, written from the point of view of your bard character in iambic pentameter. Whatever it is, if you think others might like it too, the Savage Worlds Adventurer's Guild may be the place for it. If you could bring in any new IP as an officially supported setting, what would it be? Jodi: We've got a LOT we want to do after the release of the Adventure Edition, and a new Deadlands edition is near the top of the list! There are always a lot of cool settings which catch our eye, but we prefer to play those cards when the time is right. :) Check out Pinnacle Entertainment’s whole line including plenty of Savage Worlds here, and the new Savage Worlds Adventure Kickstarter 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: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/545820095/savage-worlds-adventure-edition There are a lot of game designers within our small community of tabletop RPGs that have created a wide variety of games. The creativity of our fellow gamers is truly staggering, and with the many D20 variants, D6 games, and and completely original mechanics, it's no surprise when only a select few catch our eye. I enjoy digging through the sea of available games from time to time, and finding ones that really shine. Below are five roleplaying games that deserve your time and attention. 1) Vs Ghosts Want a nostalgic throwback to the glorious days of the Ghostbusters? Look no further. Vs Ghosts focuses on the goofier side of monster hunting in the modern era with fun cartoonish art and eye-catching layout. It uses a standard deck of playing cards as a randomizer, with a character drawing a number of cards equal to their most relevant attribute and choosing the highest card. It is rules lite, and would be easy to teach to kids for a fun romp through a haunted mansion. It would be great for the occasional one-shot but has the legs to run a longer campaign as well. 2) Romance Of The Perilous Land This hidden gem revolves around Romantic Fantasy, focusing on old British folklore. It is a complete game in only 50 pages, and uses a straightforward d20 system firmly rooted in OSR games. This game is clearly inspired by the fantastic Black Hack system, which means it’s fast and flexible. There are six classes to choose from: Knight, Ranger, Thief, Cunning Folk, Barbarian, and Bard. A full bestiary containing many creatures from ancient lore can be found as well. There is only a PDF version on DrivethruRPG, which is Pay What You Want so it can be had for free if you’re so inclined. 3) Summerland The setting in Summerland is highly evocative, a post-apocalyptic world where nature took over, destroying the modern world and forcing mankind into a simpler life. To make matters worse, there are those who feel a primal call to revert to their base nature, and must fight against it. Summerland is a game of people overcoming past traumas and finding healing in a primal world. The current edition of Summerland uses a version of the Open D6 engine while the first edition had original mechanics that were more simplistic and narrative. 4) Mythender This fantastic game tasks the players with slaying gods while struggling to maintain their humanity, resisting the call of god-hood. The more a character strives to slay the oppressive gods from above, the more likely they are to succumb to their power as they grow strong enough to slay them. The game itself is fairly narrative, but the rules are also heavy and take a while to get used to. You'll need a lot of dice and chips/game tokens, but you're in for one epic tale. And to sweeten the pot, the PDF is free with an option to buy a print version. 5) Blood Of Pangea This game is firmly rooted in the sword and sorcery genre, where savage barbarians take on sinister wizards with only an axe in hand. It revolves around a 2d6 mechanic, and a resource called Might that players can use to boost their rolls, cast magic, or avoid death. Character creation revolves around writing out a short story for your character composed of only 30 words. Though the game is primarily narrative, there are still rules for encumbrance, armor, and money, giving it a solid old school feel. The game really stresses resource management, knowing when to spend Might, rely on your armor to stop a hit, or when to use Might to increase a roll. It's easy to spend money on some of the games with higher production values and the flashy cover. But next time you're thinking about buying a new game, maybe check out one of these hidden gems. The passion that these developers put into their work shows, and is worth the asking price. Nathan Carmen is the founder and head writer of the Indie RPG company, Tricky Troll Games. Nathan loves building worlds and improving his craft when he’s not busy parenting. Reach Nathan at trickytrollgames@gmail.com or check out the TTG website at https://nathanccarmen.wixsite.com/trickytrollgames Picture Reference: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/187788/vs-Ghosts?term=vs+ghosts&test_epoch=0affiliate_id=657321 Being the Game Master is hard. I get it, you’re the one that has to do all the checks and balances of the campaign. NPCs, items, spells, maps, dungeon layouts, and the story. You also have to check and balance the PC’s character sheets to make sure everything adds up and balances out, and if you have a gaming group even remotely similar to my own, you may find yourself the only one who can actually math properly. So I can sympathize when you might just NOT want to bother trying to balance an entire campaign setting AND plot along with everything else. It’s just easier to use the book… I can sympathize, but I also humbly disagree. I already find most premade campaigns lacking in substance, but I am not referring just to the premade materials. You can use a large portion, (if not all), of premade campaigns and still create a largely story-driven setting. I would also like to note I am also not suggesting you create an entire mechanics system from the ground up for your story, (though I have been known to do this and even keep that entire system due to the preference of my gamers). I also realize you probably don’t want to have stacks and stacks of paper notes sitting on your side of the table. (I have also been known to get… over zealous on the notes at times.) I know your PCs do not want to sit there for 15 minutes watching you leaf through stacks and stacks of notes while you try to figure out where they are going next. I get it! I really do! However, as both a writer and a Game Master, I have learned some nifty little tricks to help you create a more immersive and story-driven world without doing more than you are likely already doing as a Game Master. 1) Weapons And/Or Armor Level Up Part of the problem with many campaigns, especially like the ones found in Dungeons and Dragons, is managing all the items, weapons, armor, and other such gear your PCs will acquire. To minimize bloat, (and save some of the Game Master’s brain cells), try creating weapons and/or armor that level up with your PCs. This can be as simple as magic weapons that grow as the player characters face certain challenges in the campaign world, gain feats, or face, and in some cases conquer, their fears. A personal favorite of mine, if you really wanna get creative, create living weapons with souls with and their own personalities. Weapons that the players must form a bond with in order to properly wield and unlock the weapons most powerful innate abilities. 2) Edges And Flaws For All Characters This is a requirement in all of my campaigns of any length! I played DnD for years and got really bored with how almost all characters were similar. When I picked up Shadowrun 3rd edition, I was blown away by the level of customizability for just the characters alone, not even counting weapons, armor, and cybernetic implant modifications. Requiring all characters to have Edges and Flaws can add an entire new layer of story and plot to your campaign. Runa the mage has a severe case of arachnophobia? Well, when the party faces off against a group of Driders in the underdark she’s gonna be put through her own personal hell. Gorag Stone-Heart is a brave dwarven warrior who fears nothing… but he can’t swim and is secretly too terrified of water to learn? Well when your ship sinks off the frigid coast due to a pirate attack now you have a whole new layer of drama added to your campaign. The possibilities are literally endless! 3) Center The Campaign Around Player Character Back-Stories Almost every player I have ever sat down with has some kind of story for their character. We’re all human. We love to hear and create our own stories, especially when we feel passionate about something or we are trying to explain the unknown. (Ahem… Religion… Ahem!) So why not integrate that concept into the very meat of your campaign? Create or tailor the campaign around who… or better yet, what your characters are. Your party is composed mostly of fighter classes? Perhaps they are all students of a guild going on an epic quest to prove themselves? Maybe they are classmates of a combat school that never really got along and are now stuck working together. Have a party of a bunch of different classes and/or races? They were forced to work together by a king or deity and not a damn one of them has ever wanted to get to know the other, let alone work with the other. However, now they have no choice but to try and get over themselves if they are going to have any hope of survival. Racism is an epic flaw or back-story to use here! 4) Allow Time For Social Interaction In every, and yes, I mean every campaign I have ever run, or have ever had the pleasure… (or displeasure in some cases) to play in, there is always… always a point where we are sitting around a campfire, at a tavern, or in some social environment and nine-times-out-of-ten, there is drinking involved! Use this time to allow your player characters to be social with one another. Attractive female elf has caught the eye of the Barbarian? Let the scene play out! The half-drow rogue gets drunk enough to finally open up to the priestess? Let her talk about her feelings and her time in the underdark. A long conversation/conning session starts up between the bard and the high-level wizard NPC? Let them hash-it-out verbally. I’ve seen better character development in one dialogue session than in all the dungeons they’ve run combined. 5) Two Words: White Wolf This may seem like a joke entry but I am being completely honest here. White Wolf games do not have Game Masters, they have Storytellers! The reason they are called Storytellers and the reason all of their settings have a unique but interchangeable character sheet is simple... Their system is literally BASED around telling a story and letting the players be “actors” within the story. I had a player who wished to play a Masquerade style vampire in one of my Shadowrun sessions once. Though technically this could be considered “lore-breaking” as vampires in Shadowrun are very different than Masquerade vampires, I allowed it. I found the system actually transfers very well into any game system. This is not to say you should go to the same trouble of doing conversions for one system to another but take a look at one of their books and system, really dig into it! Sit in on a White Wolf or World of Darkness game session sometime and see how they structure their campaigns and stories. The results might surprise you! 6) The Social Experiment You awaken from cryosleep. As you fall out of your stasis pod, gasping for breath and freezing on the cold-metal floor, you realize you are surrounded by several other individuals, all wearing the same prison jumpsuit as you. The alarms are blaring and you can feel the ship groan and rumble; chunks of it break apart into the void of space. A digitized voice crackles on the overhead speakers, looping the same warning message: “The main haul has been breached! Life-support is failing, all personnel please evacuate to the escape pods immediately!” You look to the few survivors around you, the lot of you come to the same bleak discovery: Not a single one of you can remember who you are or why you are here! You have little time to think about that however, as you can hear… something… tearing and clawing at the airlocks. The hardened doors begin to twist and buckle against the abuse, threatening to dislodge at any moment. You have no choice. If you want to survive this, you’ll have to work together and figure out who you are and why you are here! I ran this plot during a space opera I designed recently and my players absolutely LOVED it! It allows for maximum social development and plenty of hack-n-slash mixed in. Easiest way to do this is with an all human campaign. The Game Master hands all players a blank sheet of paper and creates mock character sheets as references for him/herself. As players are faced with challenges and find weapons, you have them roll to discover their abilities. Conversely, if you wish for a little more creativity you may have your players pick race, height, weight, eye color, hair color/style, etc. Adding flaws to the player-characters’ sheets contributes to an epic adventure, and when the players are under duress, (facing overwhelming odds and/or are injured) forcing them to roll a Willpower check decides whether their negative personality flaws and traits manifest themselves or not. Nature Vs Nurture. Last but surely not least… 7) It Is Called R.O.L.E. Playing Not R.O.L.L. Playing Sadly sometimes I think this rule is lost on many a Game Master. The point of role-playing is to escape reality for a bit and have some fun! The dice should never replace creativity or fun. Dice should only be used to retain balance and to resolve whether an action is successful or not. The more creative you let your players be, and, conversely, the less restrictive your rules are, the more joy and fun you as the Game Master, and your players by extension, will have at the table. You don’t have to get so caught up in the storyline and plot that your PCs can’t make their own choices. Heck if you want, let them write the majority of the plot with their decisions. Just make sure they don’t kill themselves or destroy the world in the process! I have played a number of tabletop games and have designed a number of campaigns that I have run to conclusion. Some I have had to let go for various reasons… lost players, work schedules, etc. I will admit, going for more of a storytelling feel and losing a player or having a character die can put a dampener on the campaign as a whole. But if you are clever and creative, you can turn even this problematic situation into storytelling gold! Incorporating one or even all of these rules into your next campaign may just bring an added, (or missing), spark to your game night and hell, who knows… You might just decide to publish something too… one day. Lilliana Deeters is a veteran gamer and Game Master. She has written and designed a number of custom campaign systems, (Trademarks Pending), as well as developed easy to implement conversion tables for already popular tabletop rpg systems. Lilliana is a three-time published author, all three of her novels are based around a Shadowrun campaign https://www.amazon.com/s?k=remnants+the+corporate+Chronicles. Lilliana also works as a Graphic Artist for Black Starr Creations, who generously custom designed a free image for this article. There is a place for stock monsters like skeletons and ghouls, but there are those who believe that every monster should be unique, and that every unique monster should be a story unto themselves. With Halloween fast approaching, we can use the themes of the holiday to explore how to create unique monsters without relying on tired cliches that have lost much of their meaning. Last Halloween, I ran a one-shot in my Phantasmos campaign setting which was intended to evoke the feeling of Halloween, while using mostly original or repurposed monsters, so this will be a breakdown of how I used the themes of Halloween to create new monsters. 1) Start With A Basic Concept Halloween is a holiday about spooky monsters, candy, “trick or treat,” and costumes, and it is also thought to be related to pagan harvest rituals. One could easily go to skeletons, vampires, ghouls, ghosts, werewolves, jack o’lanterns, and other recognizable monsters, but to me these only represent superficial characteristics of the holiday. Let’s explore the underlying themes of the holiday derived from the original pagan harvest rituals. Let’s create a new pantheon of monsters, unburdened by prior expectations, to frighten and unsettle your party. Through these creations, we can also explore the concepts of labor, the rewards for one's labor, and the anxieties around failure and uncertainty in trying times. 2) Setting The Tone In order to set the tone, I created Daddy Delightful, an ominous, fey-like being, a bringer of the harvest, like Santa Claus with a dark twist. He rewards those who overcome their fears and anxieties towards labor. While he will defer the suffering of those who fail in their labors by providing them candied fruits and syrupy sweets, this will only exacerbate their inevitable suffering at his hands. He comes to the village once a year, just before the harvest. He is generally subdued, but can be a manic influence on those around him. He has no tolerance for those who express their anxieties publicly, especially those who would incite fear in others. He is tall, lanky, and thin. He wears a black tunic with a neon, multicolored quilted pattern. His face is obscured by a pointy hat. He carries a staff of pumpkin on a stick, and can summon a mechanical plow which he rides down roads and fields alike. 3) Driving The Plot The village is full of fey creatures, and one in particular is the nuno sa punso (nuno), adapted from Philippine mythology. Nunos are dwarf-like, have the appearance of old men, and live in termite mounds. I decided to make them more explicitly termite-like fey creatures. Things like nail-biting and nervous eating or teeth grinding are commonly associated with anxiety, so I thought the wood-eating and mound-building behaviors of termites would be a good analogy for these anxiety behaviors and themes of labor and harvest. Bloody Fingers is an urban legend, a nervous old nuno afraid of change and afraid of others, his fingers bloody from ripping his nails, which stick in his bloody teeth. It is said that he resides in the Lost Mounds, and will kill anyone who trespasses for being too carefree and playing when they should be laboring. The urban legend explores the fears of the elderly about the youth, the trend that the elderly believe the young are too lazy, and this is reflected in his violent misanthropic and nail biting behaviors. Whereas the party’s interactions with Daddy Delightful may be dependent on their own behaviors, if they even get entangled with him at all, Bloody Fingers is an unambiguous threat, and for whatever reason the party is in the village, he will be an obstacle they must overcome to achieve their goals. 4) Fill In The Middle We’ve established that this is a fey village, that at least one type of fey, the nuno, have termite-like features and behaviors, and that this is a time of harvest. Between the village and the Lost Mounds are the oko-men, based loosely on the Orisha Oko from Yoruba Mythology. They are multi-headed creatures of various sizes and shapes in the general appearance of pumpkins on a stick, and are said to be the spirits of those who failed at their goals or those who wrongly embrace a novel thing as tradition. While they are essentially stock undead monsters in terms of game mechanics, their appearance and mythology contributes to the basic concept we’re exploring. “Pumpkin on a stick” is reminiscent of pumpkins, which are associated with Halloween, but have a bright red color like a tomato and are small and multi-headed; they are familiar and evoke a sense of Halloween, but are different enough to signal that this is not your usual jack o’lantern. The myth serves several purposes. There is the recurring theme of failure at labor and the consequences of failure during harvest, but also a critique on how traditions change or their meanings are lost, how they can outlive their purpose, and this ties back to Bloody Fingers as the old man afraid of the youth and afraid of giving up traditions. 5) The Twist (The Final Horror) While it may already be the case that the party doesn’t know what to expect in this unusual Halloween world, it doesn’t hurt to throw in a twist: one last monster to encounter right at the end, the Big Bad they didn’t even know to be afraid of. It turns out Bloody Fingers isn’t just a vaguely supernatural, murderous old man, but is in fact possessed by a demon. Inside Bloody Fingers is the Laplace Demon, a giant beast who will tear through the little nuno’s body upon encountering the party. The Laplace Demon is a real-world concept, an attempt to mathematically model a deterministic universe. Conceptually, this is intended to evoke the self-fulfilling prophecies of those so afraid of failure that they never try in the first place. It has the spine and musculature of a boar but the underside and legs of a termite. In addition to the termite legs, it has a secondary set of front limbs like a bat, with insect-like wing membranes. Its face is like a cross between a boar, a bat, and a termite. The termite and insectoid features support the visual theme of insectoid fey, the bat wings evokes the association between bats and Halloween, and the boar-like features reflect over-consumption or the wrecking of harvest. And with that, we’ve created a very basic, Halloween-themed micro-setting. It explores the basic concept of Halloween as a harvest ritual and the historical fears associated with the changing of seasons from fall to winter, but it does so in a way that does not rely on tired cliches that have lost their meaning (and critiques it, to boot). Even if you’re not interested in the thematic through-line, these monsters could be used to spice up an otherwise traditional Halloween setting. On the other hand, even if you’re not into the monsters, you could explore this thematic through-line using your own monsters, or even the traditional monsters. 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://wallpaperstock.net/house%2c-halloween_wallpapers_54545_1920x1080_1.html We have all been there. That friend who’s been fence-sitting for years finally agrees to give D&D a shot. The significant other who has been curious but hesitant to get their feet wet. And if you are anything like myself, your love of spreading the good word of our delightful hobby can be a bit, shall we say, enthusiastic. Okay, why mince words, we can get a bit crazy. Not that I blame us. Like anyone who is truly passionate about their pastimes, we want to share, and we want others to see what we see. We want to them to experience the adventures, the stories, and the grand worlds of our imagination. But that desire to share can quickly become intimidating and, let’s be honest, overwhelming for those taking their first steps into the world of tabletop gaming. Now, to keep from scaring the straights, here are a few hard-earned lessons from mistakes I have made in the past. 1) Let The Wookie Win It is no secret that games like Dungeons and Dragons can rack up its share of dead player characters, and this can do wonders for creating suspense, drama, and realism to the action that can propel a game. But nothing can be more frustrating to a new player than being hacked to pieces by a dice-lucky kobold. By making your new player think they can’t win, or that an already complicated game is obviously too difficult for them is a serious turn off. So, let them get some games under their belts before you bring out the murder mobs. Instead, if you want to create a sense of lethality and danger, make an important NPC and let them take the fall at a key moment. Star Trek had Red Shirts for a reason. Let your newbie be Kirk. It may also help to run a mock combat BEFORE the real game starts. Let’s face it: the combat mechanics are the stressor, so maybe giving your new players a test drive may help sell them on the car, or game as the case may be. 2) Bait The Hook Early With more experienced gamers, you can take your time, set the mood, build the suspense through careful and deliberate subtlety. But if you don’t hook new players early, you may never. Having them spend 2 hours shopping at the village store and whacking mole rats for a bit of coin may be a great way to establish a rich character background, but players who have no idea of the scope and depth an RPG can reach are going to be whipping out the iPhones to kill the clock right quick. So don’t hold back. Give them a taste of the action early and don’t let up! 3) Keep It Simple Tabletop roleplaying games are light years beyond most board games in complexity, and the hundreds of pages of rules can scare the dickens out of new players. There is no reason to come out of the gate with every subtle rule and nuanced monster. Keep the rules down to the basics, only what you need to make the game fun and interactive. And don’t rule-lawyer them! If it doesn’t ruin the game, flub a rule or three. It will create a more interactive game and allow your players to warm up before they really start to dive in. If you like, try working up some simplified house rules that cut down on the mechanics and raise up the fun. 4) Play Their Game, Not Yours The best way to hook players is to show them how games can reflect their tastes and interests. If you know your group is into Marvel movies and Teen Titans re-runs, then it’s time to get caught up on your capes and cowls. If they have read Harry Potter to the point of breaking the spine of the book, maybe a touch of modern fantasy might be in order. Either way, play what they like. If they get into the game, you can start to introduce them to new materials, and eventually they will learn that an inspired Storyteller is best, and they will hopefully be willing to try out that epic Space Pirates game you been plotting for years. This rule is especially true of mood and theme. If you know your players like a dramatic, character driven game, don’t hit them with a dungeon crawl. If they like a humorous romp, don’t try to hand them a dark goth-punk world full of despair and horror. And for the love of Tyr, know your players! Don’t run themes that hit on real world issues and traumas that your players have experienced. If they have recently lost someone close to them, don’t murder their home village! This will turn them away from game, most likely permanently, and justifiably so. 5) Let Them “Role” At Their Own Pace Roleplaying games can be intimidating, especially to people who might be shy or uncomfortable in a new situation. Keep this in mind, because while most of the fun of a good roleplaying game is diving into the characters and sharing their story, the act of roleplaying a character for the first time can be scary. Let them roleplay as much as they feel comfortable. If they simply want to tell you what their Cold-war spy character does instead of speaking in a phony Russian accent, let them. Forcing roleplay is only going to create pressure, and games should be fun. Don’t be a bully and let them play. 6) Create Suspense, Not Confusion Nothing works better for a hook than a good question. By building suspense, your players instinctively want to know what will happen next. Let them hear the scratching at the door without showing them the monster. Let a few NPC’s vanish without immediate explanation. If you can make them curious, you can make them invest more into your game. But keep it simple. Like tip number 3, introducing too complex of a story can be just as overwhelming as the mechanics. While we all want the political intrigue of Game of Thrones or sweeping mythos of Call of Cthulhu, asking your noobs to keep straight 30 NPCs, six political factions, and a pantheon of deities worthy of the Greeks is a fast path to a rage quit. 7) Hold Off On Showing Them Critical Role Don’t misunderstand me. I love me some Matt Mercer, but don’t set the bar this high. If your players come in with a visions of high production value and professional actors to bring the game to life, they are going to leave disappointed. Remember, shows like this have a magic wand called “editing” that can smooth over the spots where we take a potty break or roleplay our character with a mouth full of Doritos. No one would watch a video of you and your friends spending 45 minutes looking up encumbrance rules. Let your players go into this knowing it is a game with friends and leave these awesome shows for after they have fallen in love with the “reality” of the game. 8) If All Else Fails, Let Them Go As soul crushing as it may feel, not everyone is going to be into gaming. It is a truth we all must come to grips with. If a new player shows up, gives it the old college try, and still walks away ‘meh’, then that is that. Some people juggle geese, and that is okay. Don’t ruin a friendship or relationship over a game. You don’t want someone who games out of obligation, and you seriously don’t want to pressure friends and family into an activity that takes up hours upon hours of their week if they are not having fun. Smile, let them go, and find something else that you both like to do. 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: http://dnd.wizards.com/products/tabletop-games/rpg-products/rpg_starterset Running a sandbox game isn't for the light hearted, organization is prime and being ready to respond to player actions is a close second. If you are properly prepared, a sandbox is an easy way to run a game. There are books, blogs, and podcasts by the dozens talking about different methods of pregame preparation. All have their own method; preparation is something that everyone does differently, just like dungeon mastering. So which one is for you? I can't say, but I can give you insight into the tools I use. Aside from good pens, a mechanical pencil, and a bunch of dice what do you need to prepare for a sandbox game? I'll tell you what I use and why. 1) Red Tide And An Echo Resounding These two books by Kevin Crawford revolutionized my preparation style. They have advice on your GM binder and what to keep in it, an easy system for randomly determining and populating an area with cities, towns, ruins, and lairs and maps to steal. An Echo Resounding sets up domains and factions, details domain turns, and mass combat, should things get ugly. Both are short and easy to read and come with detailed examples to help you work through it the first time. I've adapted them to my style and use them for most of my randomly determined areas, and sometimes for pre-populated ones too. These two well worn and sticky-tabbed books are easily in the top three most used in my library. What's the top one? 2) Dungeon Masters Guide I prefer the first edition dungeon masters guide, but the fifth edition is no slouch! Both cover things beyond the rules of their respective edition, talking about time, non-player characters, and adventure locales just to name a few topics. The random tables in each cover personalities, traits, motives, and best of all random dungeons. If I'm drawing out a dungeon for a game, making non-player characters, or creating an encounter, one of these is what I reach for. Seeing a theme yet? 3) Random Tables Random tables help you get away from same thinking. Anytime I need a question answered in my preparation I turn to a random table to break out of similar ideas. Similar ideas can be great in the beginning, even enforce a theme, but after a few sessions they start to seem stale. Random tables mix it up creating wild combinations that you need to make sense of; things I couldn't have come up with on my own. The books on my table lately have been The Dungeon Dozen, d30 sandbox and Tome of Adventure Design. The latter being my most used book in the last six sessions I prepared. 4) A Good Monster Book Monsters are the base of encounters in Dungeons and Dragons. Whether you are making random tables or static encounters, you are going to need a lot more enemies than the ones in the back of the Players Handbook. Sometimes just flipping through a book will inspire an encounter or maybe even a whole adventure. That's the way the fifth edition Monster Manual is written, according to Mike Mearls. If you haven't read the Monster Manual, take the time, as it's well worth it. After exhausting that, pick up Tome of Beasts, Tome of Horrors, or use the fifth edition Dungeon Masters Guide and make some of your own! 5) Tablet, Laptop, Or PC I like to run digital. Most of my collection is in PDFs, I make maps and graph paper, and keep all my notes online. At my game I run with my laptop, dndbeyond.com, and Nitro PDF reader. I even have a tv set up for maps, pictures of monsters, and rules to show the players. At home I like to prepare on my PC; there are four basic programs I use. A digital art program for maps, handouts, and paper minis. Photoshop is what I use, but GIMP, painter or whatever you have will work too. With online notes syncing across all devices, I can prepare wherever on whatever is handy (I do a lot of work on my phone). I use OneNote as my GM binder and have a lot of worksheets and forms set up to help me with the common things like settlements and adventures. OneNote works for me, but Evernote and Google Drive, or offline applications like Scrivener and Campaign Logger are also options. A PDF reader for all my PDFs, Nitro, Foxit, or Acrobat all work fine. The last one is a web browser. I get a lot of encounters, maps, paper minis, and ideas from the internet. Places like ENWorld, reddit, and Discord are some of my go-to communities. Remember great dungeon masters steal ideas! Just don't publish stolen material. 6) Paper Yes, as digital as I like to be, plain old paper is a staple for my game preparation. If only for scribbling notes or sketching an encounter, I always seem to find a need for paper. I have a disc bound notebook to jot stuff down quickly or take notes during an encounter. I use this notebook for when I'm stuck, somehow staring at a blank sheet of paper gets my creative juices flowing. A doodle here, a number there, a list of names, and I'm off to the races, heading toward OneNote with ideas in hand ready to develop into a solid encounter. Preparing for a game is a path all dungeon masters have to trudge down, but it doesn't have to be such a chore. We're dungeon masters partially because we love to create and sometimes we need some help with that creation. Having the right tools can make that session preparation a whole lot more fun and easy. I hope I’ve introduced you to some that fit into your preparation style. 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. As someone who takes a visceral pleasure in knowing the ins and outs of a system, I understand the appeal of making it do things that some people don’t expect it to. Whether it’s making a character build for Luke Cage in Pathfinder, or coming up with unexpected multiclass combinations for 5th Edition DND, doing something out of the ordinary with an existing rules system can be a lot of fun. However, with that said, it’s also true that a lot of the time a certain game is simply not meant to accommodate certain themes or play styles. As an example, Pathfinder is so steeped in high magic (it’s in the history, the culture, the Golarion setting, and what feels like more than half the available classes get spellcasting) that attempting to run a low-to-no magic game is going to be problematic past the first few levels. If for no other reason than the game is assuming you have access to magic weapons to fight monsters, magical healing to press through multiple encounters, etc. so you’ll have to re-engineer everything from the ground up. Call of Cthulhu is great for investigative type games, but making it a class and level-based game is sort of the opposite of what it’s intended for. 5th Edition Dungeons and Dragons is a lot of fun, and it’s really flexible, but it doesn’t really accommodate a modern fantasy game that’s more about monsters like werewolves and vampires as PCs. Especially one where there are no fantasy races, no divine casters, and where other major elements of the rules don’t apply. Despite that, though, I bet we all have a story about a DM who tried to make an idea like this work. If you’re that DM, here are some questions you should ask yourself. 1) Can I Make This Work? The first thing you need to do is look at all the parts and pieces you have, and ask if it’s possible to turn the game you have into the game you want. While it might seem obvious, a lot of DMs don’t sit down and evaluate the materials they’re working with first; they just dive in and start making changes, assuming they can get the end results they want with enough tinkering. Reflection at this stage can save you a lot of frustration later on. 2) What’s My Return On Investment? I’m all for modding a game to make it more fun. Hell, you could make the argument that a large portion of my job is to think of stuff for other dungeon masters to add into their games to keep their fun and engagement running high. But from one mechanic to another, let me ask you this… how much work are you willing to put in when you don’t have to? Imagine, for a moment, that your game of choice is a pickup truck. It’s durable, it’s dependable, and you know that if you need to really haul some heavy weight, it will do the job. What that truck will not do, though, is win a drag race against a sleek little speed demon geared to pick up and play. It doesn’t matter if you beef up the engine, add a NOS unit, and remove some of the bulkier, workhorse aspects… this truck isn’t meant to be a dragster. You can make it faster… but the question is why? Why would you do that, instead of just getting one car for racing, and one car for hauling? This is what I mean when I talk about return on investment when it comes to your time and energy as a DM. Because on the one hand, if you really know a system, you’ve already put in that time to learn it. You’ve probably got books and pdf files chock full of resources, as well as experience. But what that doesn’t cover is how much work you’re going to have to do to modify the game, and then to explain/teach those modifications to your players. Then there’s all the re-tooling you’ll have to do to your modifications (often on the fly), when it turns out something you thought was solid doesn’t actually hold up in practice. That can lead to frustration all around the table, and sap the energy from a session. Before you start a mod, all you need to do is ask yourself this question; are you putting in more time, energy, and resources into modding the game you know than you would in finding a different game that was made expressly to do what you want? If the answer is yes, then ask yourself why you’re doing that. Because on the one hand, it’s true that learning a different game takes time, effort, and usually costs you money. On the other hand, though, you’re also putting in resources to mod an existing game… and the further you have to mod it to do what you want, the more resources you’re putting in. 3) Am I Stuck In My Comfort Zone? There is another factor at play when it comes to these total overhauls, and it’s one that kicks objectivity right out the window. Because if you know a game really well, and you like playing it, then you may not want to start over to learn something else. And if you’re going to be the DM, you’d rather have some version of your game of choice than a game you’re less familiar with… even if that game does exactly what you want for your story. However, while it’s perfectly possible to assemble a Russian fighter jet cockpit from spare farming equipment parts, you may want to step back and ask why you did that. Because even if you can recognize all of the parts and pieces in play, and even if you can drive a tractor, that doesn’t mean you can fly a MIG made of tractor parts. Or that your players will want to. The question of when changes have become too much will depend entirely on you, and your game. But when you start trying to twist your game’s mechanics to do things it was never intended for, it might be time to put down the combine harvester, and to look for a different machine specifically built to do the job you need. But if you decide to stick with your initial plan to heavily modify an existing game, ask yourself why? Is it because this is really the best game to tell the story you want, and to provide your players with the proper experience? Or is it because this is the game you know best, and you’d be more comfortable trying to make a tractor fly than in using an actual plane? For more by Neal Litherland, check out his Gamers archive, or head to his blog Improved Initiative! Picture Reference: http://www.infobarrel.com/How_to_Build_Luke_Cage_in_The_Pathfinder_RPG The following article discusses a game that contains disturbing images and scenes of explicit violence and gore. If you’re a fan of Capcom’s survival horror games, most notably the Resident Evil series, the above line is without a doubt familiar to you. It’s similar to the message splayed across the screen every time you boot one up, warning you that what you’re about to see is, frankly, horrifying. I bring this up because it’s something I can’t stress enough: today, we’re going to be talking about Nechronica, a fan-translated game from Japan about zombie-cyborg little girls in a far flung future where humanity is completely wiped out. The themes and imagery used in this game are gruesome. If you’ve got a weak stomach or are easily disturbed, this isn’t the game for you. Consider yourself warned, dear reader. 1) Who Made This? This game was developed by the Japanese game company Incog Labs. This is a company that was also responsible for the release of a game Golden Sky Stories, which is the absolute polar opposite of Nechronica (by virtue of it being a heartwarming game about cute animal spirits helping the villagers). An unofficial translation is currently available, and still a work in progress. The core rules for playing (dice mechanics, character creation, etc.) have been completed, as well as some of the game’s setting information, and even a few sample scenarios to help give any new GMs an idea of how the game might be run. What the game is missing, however, is details on devising one’s own scenarios. So while one could extrapolate from the information present in the sample scenarios, that only does so much in lieu of more distinct guidelines. 2) What’s The Premise and Setting? As I mentioned in the beginning of this article, Nechronica is a game set in the far flung future, about 200 years from modern times. As computer and weapon technology advanced, humanity found themselves in a constant state of war. It was initially between nations, but as bio-weapons began seeing use, war quickly changed: humans were now trying to survive against their creations. The humans lose, and after they’re completely wiped out, all that’s left are the bio-weapons called dolls and their AI commanders called Necromancers. To idle their time away, the Necromancers like to instill memories of what human-life was once like into their dolls, making what once destroyed humanity into a facsimile of it. Nechronica is a game where you play as one of these dolls, possessing memories you can just barely recall of a life you may have never actually lived, while dancing along a war-torn hellscape to your sadistic master’s whims. 3) What Are The Mechanics Like? Characters in Nechronica are composed mostly of skills and equipment they posses, most of which affect what you can accomplish in combat. Skills are acquired from your Position (what role you serve in Doll society) and your Classes. Additionally, your Classes also dictate what parts are available to you. This game has some very detailed combat rules, with almost every part that makes up your character serving some purpose in combat. Outside of combat, most of what you’ll be doing is exploring and conversing with other players in character. Any sort of roll made outside of combat can be assisted with any part you have, assuming you can justify how it would help. (Thankfully, these parts include basic things like “Eyes” and “Arms.”) Nechronica has comparatively simple mechanics. Everything is based on d10s, and you’re aiming to hit 6 or higher to succeed. Anything higher than 10 is critical success, which usually only grants special results in combat. However, critical failures are achieved on a 1, which usually end with any parts involved being destroyed. The threats in this game are both being destroyed utterly, which happens when all parts are broken, and having your heart broken. Dolls in Nechronica have what are called “Fetters,” which represent their connections to other dolls. Stressful situations, such as horrifying encounters or even battle, cause these Fetters to acquire madness. When all of a Doll’s Fetters acquire a certain amount, their heart is broken, they lose their mind, and become one of the very monsters they fight against. 4) What Is This Similar To? I’ve frankly had trouble finding any contemporary game that can accurately be compared to Nechronica. However it does have a few idiosyncrasies that are more common in Japanese games (tabletop and computer) than their Western counterparts. There’s a certain kind of poetry present in the names. For example, in combat, there are five zones that characters can be in; a center zone shared between enemies and the players, and two back row zones for either side. Instead of naming them something like “center,” “short” and “long” for either side, the zones are instead named after various after-life worlds, such as Elysium, Tartarus, or Eden. Additionally, much like many other games from Japan, Nechronica has very effective mechanics in place that unite combat and roleplaying without being cumbersome. For this game, it’s Madness and Parts. Madness is gained during combat, so it behooves you to participate outside of combat to reduce it beforehand. Furthermore, while Parts have explicit uses in combat, and their outside of combat use is left open ended. Overusing them is ill advised: critical failures are always a possibility that end with Parts breaking. 5) Is It Worth Getting Into? This game is meant to be really dramatic; you’re taking on the role of a literal plaything, that may wind up completely broken either physically or mentally. So if you can stomach horror and play things straight, this game can really dial up drama. If you’re more prone to clowning around and turning everything into a farcical comedy (like yours truly), it can lend itself to some hilarious moments. Moments such as an obsessive cannibal being trusted wholeheartedly by an oblivious ditz. A ditz that isn’t freaked out by a slimy green ooze seeping out of their third party member’s eye and into their mouth. Instead, the ditz would completely lose her mind when her favorite dress gets ripped up. Just bear in mind: as of this writing, there’s no official translation, so if you’re the sort that insists on supporting the original creator no matter what, you’ll need to engage in the somewhat risky and very expensive practice of importing from Japan. Aaron der Schaedel may or may not have inadvertently joined a frog-worshipping cult after making a soft-cover book out of the fan-translated .pdf of Nechronica. He actually isn’t sure if they’re really a cult, but even if they are, at least this isn’t the first time he’s found himself in the company of cultists. Aaron can be found on twitter @Zamubei (For now…) Picture Reference: https://solarisjapan.com/products/nechronica-supplement-hakoniwa-no-monogatari-guide-book-role-playing-game Wizards of the Coast recently released Waterdeep: Dragon Heist into the wild and it is a unique take on their usual two hundred fifty plus hardback adventures. Instead of starting at level five and going to fifteen or past, this adventure is purely tier one, levels one to four (five by the end). Wizards had Kobold Press do something similar in the beginning of fifth edition with Hoard of the Dragon Queen and Rise of Tiamat, but this is the first hardback that focuses on the lowest levels and newer dungeon masters. Wizards has a habit of writing adventures for people who have played Dungeons and Dragons before, leaving a lot of advice, technique and common issues left out. Waterdeep: Dragon Heist does a good job of putting options and comments in the text that encourage good gaming habits. 1) Useable Maps Although a printed Mike Schley map looks great on the table, a drawn map is a more common occurrence at the tables I’ve played at. Instead of the usual (albeit beautiful) Schley painted maps we have more generic Dyson Logos maps. Dyson has a simplistic, gameable style that translates well to the battle maps that most of us use for our games. Also, these maps are smaller and lend themselves to be used over and over; in fact the book leads the new dungeon master to this conclusion. 2) Replayability There are often things written in adventures directed to entertain the dungeon master while reading that the players will never see. This book takes that a step further and gives you four ten step paths reusing the same ten maps as different locations each time. Again, this promotes good dungeon master habits (reuse, repurpose, and steal) in new dungeon masters and keeps the dungeon master entertained on subsequent playthroughs of the hardback. Getting your fifty dollars out of a product has never been this fun. A dungeon master can run this for the same group and only the first two chapter are the same, and even those will likely play out different as the second is very free form and weather effects will wreak havoc on the players’ plans. 3) Leads Dungeon Masters In the Right Direction When Things Go Wrong It’s said that no plan survives contact with the enemy, this is true in Dungeons and Dragons as well. When four minds go up against one, those four players will always think of things the dungeon master has forgotten. For example, when a non player character is mentioned they let the dungeon master know that if that NPC is dead or otherwise removed from play they can just be substituted with a generic version of them. There are also many ideas of how to handle the situation when those players go sideways or get stuck in the story. 4) Sandbox Done Right Starting at around level two, the players are given the option to do what they want. New and even seasoned players can get analyzation paralyzation when faced with more than three choices. When the dungeon master looks at you and asks, “What do you want to do?” a player will likely freeze up. In the sandbox chapter of Waterdeep: Dragon Heist, they don’t just dump you into a list of locations hundreds of miles apart (looking at you Storm King’s Thunder), but instead give you ideas of what the players can do and of things that can happen during this time. 5) Using Non Standard Rules Waterdeep: Dragon Heist could have stuck to the core rules and not made any changes to them, but instead Wizards again chooses to lead a new dungeon master into a good routine by suggesting that some things may not work the normal way. Using variant rules like “Skills with Different Abilities,” taking disadvantage to give another player advantage, or the addition of constant weather effects during each season, Wizards encourages a new dungeon master to look beyond the rules for options as they come up. 6) Obvious Money Sinks In each Dungeons & Dragons hardback adventure there is always an incredible influx of gold that the characters receive. Waterdeep: Dragon Heist expands upon some of the rules in the Dungeon Masters Guide for spending gold. Running a business is covered in the Dungeon Masters Guide, but setting one up isn’t. Waterdeep: Dragon Heist not only lets the dungeon master know how much gold is needed to repair and run the business, but also who players will need to talk to and what happens if players eschew the guilds. There are prices for some scrolls as well if the players wish to purchase them, I don’t remember seeing these anywhere else and will use them as a base when pricing scrolls in the future. In most Dungeons and Dragons official material there is a lack of advice for someone just starting to run games. As far as direct advice, there still is, but if you take a look at the habits Wizards is trying to develop in Waterdeep: Dragon Heist there is some great insights. While I’d rather see a section of advice, this is heading in a good direction. In fact, I think Wizards of the Coast finally out did the Starter Set adventure (Lost Mine of Phandelver) in ease of entry for a new gaming group. This would be my new recommendation for a dungeon master just starting if the price of the required books and dice wasn't so high. 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. Image source: 2018 Wizards of the Coast While tabletop games are traditionally played with pen and paper around a table, increasingly they are being played online. With more phone apps coming out every year, even people playing in person are adding more tech to their games. Discord is one of my favorite tools for playing RPGs: the versatility of the tool makes it essential for online play, and can enhance table play for secret conversations, organizing campaign notes, or even just adding cool music. What follows are 5 amazing tools to enhance your RPG experience on Discord. 1) Avrae The most useful capability of Avrae is that you can import characters made on D&D Beyond or through a google sheet, and automatically generate macros for them. It makes it very easy to do text-based combat over Discord using simple commands like “/attack”. Other useful tools on Avrae include an initiative tracker, advanced dice rolling (2d6+4 drop the lowest or reroll), and the ability to look up spells, monsters, items and more from the database. With just a few simple text commands, you have access to all of the 5e SRD and can easily simulate most aspects of a campaign right from the Discord app. Though it’s the most comprehensive bot for Dungeons and Dragons, the weakness of Avrae is in its focus. Avrae is only usable with Dungeons and Dragons campaigns, and focused particularly on 5e. If you’re playing Pathfinder, or any other system, you won’t be able to use it. 2) Dash Delta The Dash Delta bot has slightly different functionality, but supports multiple systems including: 5e, 3.5, Pathfinder, and Starfinder. While you cannot import characters, it still has a complex inline dice roller and the ability to look up spells, monsters, and items. One thing it does differently than Avrae is you can generate random character or tavern names, gossip, and weather. For example, when I type in “/ generate tavern-name”, it gives back “The Kobold and the Barbarian.” When I type in “/generate weather”, it returns “Today the weather is wet with a flurry of snow. The weather has been like this for several days. The weather is causing the sun not to go down. The locals are loving the weather.” This is a great tool for any GM that wants to roll some random table without clicking through various browser tabs, book pages, or links. 3) RPG Bot RPG is a system-agnostic bot that allows you to create a character right in discord by answering a few questions. One unique feature is that it allows you to add pokemon to your inventory, and even set the stats of the pokemon. Perhaps the most useful function is the bot has an extensive inventory and economy system. Using this bot, servers can accurately portray an economy system that includes character inventory, an auction system, loot, a lottery, and a market. It even allows you to “pay” other characters through whatever fictional currency system your server is using. This is a great addition to any RPG server that either focuses on Pokemon or which wants to simulate a large, out of session economy to immerse its characters even further into the world. 4) D1-C3 D1-C3 is a bot specifically designed to enhance Star Wars RPG games. This bot supports Edge of the Empire, Age of Rebellion, and Force and Destiny. This bot is able to track initiative and manage the destiny points of your players, as well as roll any combination of SWRPG dice. The bot is made by the same company creating the new Genesys game, so it reflects their design philosophy and will work with that system as well. 5) Branch Branch is useful for those who want to add some thematic and environmental music to their campaigns. Branch will play the audio from any youtube video you select, and so can be used to curate a playlist for your campaign. Whether its music for battle, taverns, or a PC death, you can use simple discord commands to play them at the appropriate time, and control the volume for each of your players. It’s not a perfect app, as there are a few glitches and it needs some more features to make it even better, but it updates daily. You may not use much technology in your game, but if you do, consider using these discord bots to lighten the load of being a DM. 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. Picture Reference: Discord logo from https://www.podfeet.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/discord-logo.png I’d like for you to think back on your first time ever roleplaying. For most of us, this experience was one met with equal parts excitement and nervousness, and I am no stranger to having new players pop in an out of my games. I see this all the time. Players walk through the threshold, arms heavy laden with books and dice and paper, but as soon as they sit at the table, something shifts. When play begins, they are expected to know how to transport themselves into a fictitious world full of unfamiliarities. Strangely enough, however, actually playing the game is something that most green players have a pretty decent handle on. It is the unwritten rules that catch them. You will notice that across tables, games, and engines, there are some terms of agreement and etiquette that are simply understood by the seasoned players. By their very nature, these unwritten (sometimes even unspoken) rules have to picked up along the way as one progresses through their roleplaying career, but that is just not good enough now-a-days. So, whether you are a DM wanting gameplay to go a bit smoother with your newbies or you are a fresh player yourself feeling like you just are quite getting it, here are the 10 Commandments for Players. 1) Thy DM Is God Sometimes referred to as “rule 0,” understanding that your Dungeon Master has the final say on virtually everything is the first step towards becoming a good player. If you have never DMed before, I will be the first to tell you that it is a lot of work. However hard you think it is, multiply that times ten. Dungeon Masters are not only facilitators for gameplay, but also the storyteller, mediator, and godhand. It is crucial to remember that your host is wearing a lot of hats in their best attempt to give you a couple hours of fun and diversion. Their job is hard; don’t make it any harder than it has to be. That is not to say that you always have to agree with your Dungeon Master, but qualms need to be brought up in a respectful, constructive way. Saying something like, “Well that’s not what the rules say,” is not a valid argument. Dungeon Masters are, just as their name implies, masters. They are skilled artists, no matter how new. Often times, Dungeon Masters will bend or even break rules to help facilitate new mechanics or ideas, essentially creating their own variation on the engine they are working with. They have a lot of power, and yes, they have to treat it with caution. But mid-game is no time to start vocalizing your distaste for your god. DMs are omnipotent, and it would behoove you to come to terms with that. 2) Thou Shalt Respect The Table Now here is something close to my heart. The metaphor of the table is an intriguing one. Think about it: tables represent gathering, discussion, sharing, cooperation, and unity. When you come to the table, you should be coming with the purpose of sharing in mind. Sharing ideas, sharing a collective story, sharing parts of you that you express through your character are all things that crop up at the table. The table is, in this way, a kind of sanctuary. Roleplayers play this particular breed of game for the transcendent experiences that so often accompany them. For the length of your session, you have the privilege to zip out of the world of the mundane to slay beasties, sit on mountains of treasure, and be as extraordinary as your imagination will allow. The table is the foundation for all of this. When you sit down in this sanctuary, the time of real life is put on pause. The stressors of life suddenly have no more consequence. That rent that you are worried about paying is not in your Dungeon Master’s world. Whether they realize it or not, when players arrive to the table, they are often looking for something inside themselves. Their unconscious brain builds a simulation that it can toy with and experiment on things that it normally wouldn’t have access to. I’ve seen players learn some pretty deep things about themselves through role playing games. I have even taken some life lessons away myself. I will never forget a moment in one of my campaigns when one of the beloved NPCs, Hugo, was about to fake his death in order to protect the PCs. Obviously, the players had no idea what was about to happen, but Hugo went about saying his goodbye’s without tipping his hand. Moments before he steps out into an arena to do the deed, something hits me. A lump in my throat. The players look at me kind of confused. I knew that I was literally about to hurt these people in a real way. I had to give them something. Hugo takes one step into the dusty arena, turns around, and says, “No matter what happens, I’m so glad we had this adventure.” They knew then that something was up for sure. That day, there were real tears at the table from everyone, myself included. Tears from them, because they didn’t give the farewells that they would have, if they had known. Tears from me, because I had just broke the hearts of my friends. Moments like that are why I respect the table. Respect the table, and it will always give back. 3) Thou Shalt Not Be Distracted Get off your cellphones. Can I move on now, Josh? What? That’s not good enough? Hey folks, get off your cellphones, dammit! Unless you are doing something that pertains to the game at hand, how about we stop everything else. Once things are ready to go for your game night, that is not the time to make a call, make dinner, talk to the dog, dress a child, engage in coitus (... I shouldn’t even have to say that one), and basically anything else that pulls your attention away from the awesome game before you. Here is a little test to tell if you’re engaging in distracting behavior, and it comes to you completely free. Ahem. Did you say any permutation of the question, “What did you say?” If so, you were being distracted. That is not okay, friend. As mentioned previously, your Dungeon Master works tirelessly to make an engaging game for you to play; don’t let a text from your boyfriend disrespect that. This rule is high on the list of commandments, because it can be a real game changer. The minute one person decides to buckle down and cut out distractions, gameplay remarkably starts moving much smoother. Distractions are like a virus. One person gets the “pet the cat” strain, and it quickly becomes an infection. Sooner or later, the person seated next to them catches the “watch them pet the cat” strain. Oh no! The whole table is infected with Feline Distractyitus! If one person would have had a bit of self control and said, “Hey, why don’t we keep the cat off the table?” this whole plague could have been avoided. Everyone at the table is responsible for minimizing distractions during play, not just the DM. Do your part in keeping people engaged; your Dungeon Master will appreciate it. Who knows, maybe you will get that +2 flaming battle axe you have always wanted as a reward. 4) Thou Shalt Honor Thy Commitments Never, ever, under any circumstances put your friends in the position of asking you to stop coming to game night due to repeated tardiness or absence. I cannot stress this enough. There is no greater awkwardness then having to dismiss a player, because often, the reason for their absence would be a legitimate one under other circumstances. It is vital to remember that when you don’t arrive on time, especially if you gave no heads up, you inconvenience everyone at the table. I once had to ask a couple players to discontinue their characters due to repeat offenses like this. We had a scheduled date and time every single week, and this schedule was clearly communicated to everyone. Strangely enough, these players always managed to double book and plan something for that date and time. A lot of the time, that time was spent with their family members. I totally get this. I even tell my players to remember that Pathfinder (our game of choice) is just a game and should never get in the way of important, real life happenings. Funerals, holidays, unexpected emergencies, vacation, getting called into work, etc. are all legitimate reasons to not be at my table. Wanting to swim with your other friends, playing golf with your dad, having brunch, and what not are absolutely not legitimate events to plan over your scheduled roleplay time. This goes doubly if you did not even have the decency to give everyone some notice. It might just be a game, but if you made a commitment, you made a commitment. Honor that. You are an adult and should be more than adept at honoring your word, and if you are not an adult, this is a good exercise in following through with an agreement. If you have other things that you would rather be doing, please for the love of the nine, just excuse yourself from the campaign. Do not be so selfish as to assume that everyone else is okay with skipping a session for you again, because I can tell you this: they might be now, but they won’t always be. 5) Thou Shalt Do Thy Homework I won’t harp on this one too much, but it is important nonetheless. As a player, you have a handful of things that need to be in order before each session. Most of the time, this will just mean arriving punctually with your dice, papers, and what-have-you, but other times, your list may bit a bit larger. On days where you are to be leveled up, make sure you are squared away before play begins. If you have spells that need to be prepared, at the very least give them some thought and have a general idea of the arcane wonders you would like to sling. Everyone else at the table has their own homework to do; don’t wait until people are ready to play to whip out your core rule book. Here is a million dollar idea. Someone needs to make a dunce hat with the words “Hold on a second” written on it. If you feel like your DM would want to put that hat on you, adjust how you prep. Most of the time, level up takes ten minutes tops if you have done it before, and there are tons of online resources to give you hand if you feel like getting creative. The more time you give yourself to do your homework, the more room you give yourself to come up with cool ideas for your character. Think of your homework as an investment that you are putting into the game. Almost always, the people who do their homework and don’t rush to finish it minutes before the game are more satisfied with their characters abilities and quirks. Homework forces you think about your character and how they are constructed. Don’t cheat yourself out of that. 6) Thou Shalt Not Fudge Fudging is the quiet, often unseen, bending or breaking of a rule in your favor. Dungeon Masters have quite a bit license to fudge as long as it is well meant. Honestly as a DM, sometimes fudging is just more convenient. It is less work to just tell your players to roll 2d10 when they get hit by a spike trap than to calculate the damage of every single spike and the force that they hit the player with. Fudging is also tactically useful when trying to tell a cohesive narrative. This privilege is not afforded to players though. In the Dungeon Mastering community, we have a word for players who like to fudge. Cheaters. If you roll a three but you really wanted a five, you do not have the license to quickly pick up your dice and turn it to show that you rolled a five. I have had several players that do this. They roll, wait for it to stop, but as soon as it stop, they quickly snatch it up to “look at it” then tell me what the result was. This fudging technique is easy to spot, but there are some more complex fudges that DMs and players miss. Falsifying character sheet information is one of the main offenders. Often times, your DM will not scrutinize your sheet for errors very often. You are expected to have enough integrity to operate within the designated rules of your station as a player. Games are rules. When you break the rules, you break the game. 7) Thou Shalt Encourage Thy Neighbor If you were to have me write this list a year ago, this commandment probably wouldn’t have been here. I like this one a lot though, and it warms my heart to see my players follow it. I hope I can speak for all hosts out there when I say that watching players help one another to complete a task, check rules, give helpful suggestions for play style, and generally encourage good roleplay are some of the most rewarding times in all of gaming. Even if you are brand spanking new at roleplaying, you will never be in the wrong if you encourage a fellow player to join you in battle or help you solve a mystery. Telling players they did a good job. Giving high fives. Cheering when your neighbor rolls well. All of these things not only bolster commandment number 2 but also build an atmosphere where that kind of behavior is not only accepted but encouraged. Parties that encourage one another always wind up having more fun than the parties that don’t. If a player at the table seems like they are down or confused, give them a hand. Some of the greatest adventures I have ever had the privilege to master have been the result of a couple players scheming with one another. If you feel like your table is getting toxic or even awkward, throw out a thanks or a good job. You will be surprised at how far that will go. 8) Thou Shalt Ask Questions Never be okay with not understanding. If you aren’t quite understanding a rule or something that your host is telling you, say something! Most players and Dungeon Masters don’t assume that you have memorized every page of the rule book. It is okay to not understand! This is especially important in situations where your Dungeon Master has homebrewed something. I, myself, am a pretty avid world builder. I am presently working on a whole new dictionary in my conlang, Driggan. I make up mythologies of heroes and villains. Different countries will have different customs and modes of doing things. Economy changes based on the kingdom and currency. I can hardly keep it all straight in my head, and I am the one making it up! I will be the first to admit that. I love when my players ask questions, especially if it is pertinent to their characters’ motivations. Once, I played with a tengu rogue character who loved stealing bones. Buried bones, burnt bones, bones still being used inside a creature, any bones would do! I loved when that player would look at me ask things like, “How structural does that dog appear to be?” or, “On a scale of 1 to 10, how much does that lady look like she is using her skeleton?” Asking questions like these or questions about rule clarification are only ever going to help you! Often times I will throw my players extra bones (hah… puns) by asking prying questions in this way. I want to encourage players to look through the eyes of their characters. One person might see a spooky animated skeleton trying to kill them, while another person may see it as the newest item in their collection. Ask questions, as it will give you a better understanding of the world around you and of how the game works in a mechanical way. 9) Thou Shalt Share This goes back to commandment 2 in a way, but it is worth mentioning. Share your ideas. Share your plans. Share items. Share the spotlight. Share feelings. Everyone’s voice is equal at the table. If your character has a cool plan to thwart the machinations of the BBEG, don’t keep it to yourself just because you are afraid the others might not like it. Share your character’s thoughts, and don’t wait for your DM to ask for them. If your character walks into a room full of jewels, you have every right to gush and explain how awestruck they are! Sharing brings richness to the party like nothing else can. When you share with a player or NPC, imagine it as a little knot tying them to you. By the end of the campaign, that little knot should have turned into a massive net ready to catch any narrative salmon your DM throws at you. Also, don’t be afraid to share personal feeling with a NPC. This one sounds a little odd, but when players start divulging their character's motivations and convictions to an NPC something special happens. That NPC slowly rises in the ranks of priority in a DM’s mind. This is irresistible to a good DM, because so often they are crafting monsters and NPCs that want to kill you. It is a great change of pace to have a pocket full of fake fantasy friends that each interact with you in their special way. I am seeing that evolution happen in my present campaign between a kitsune character and a fantasy cyborg NPC. For one reason or another, she has grown really attached to that mechanized, dwarven misfit, and there is a real comradery developing. Do I know where it will lead? Nope. Am I thrilled to see where it will lead? Yep! 10) Thou Shalt Die With Grace Markus Zusak, author of The Book Thief said it best, “A small fact: You are going to die.” At some moment in time, your character will more than likely be hacked, mangled, chopped, screwed, broken, beaten, battered, mushed, mashed, flattened, filleted, scrambled, blended, sliced, crunched, crushed, or all of the above. Start every session knowing that fact. The most exciting parts about roleplaying games is the extraordinary ability for the players and their respective characters to cheat death. Characters leap from great heights. They plunge into hordes of baddies. They weather a flurry of blows with only a rusty sword in hand. Against all odds, they come out of these scuffles with little more than a few bumps and a big ego. Sometimes. Sometimes they die, though. Sometimes they die tragically and with a bang. Other times they die so ingloriously that it could make an onion cry. No matter how it goes down, know that death is the most vital mechanic to making most roleplaying games work. Believe it or not, the fear of death is a pretty good motivation. It can be discouraging or unsatisfying, and maybe you won’t want to make a new character for a while. That is just fine, friend. Mourn the loss of your character, but don’t let that be the end. There are more adventures to go on. There are more beasts to slay and plans to foil. If the death of your character is particularly difficult for you to cope with, ask you DM if your character can say some last words or do something iconic to them. I’ll put a link to it, but as a DM one of the hardest goodbyes to a PC ended with a flick of a coin. Allowing him that small gesture literally altered the world forever. It was tough to let him go, but death means something. It too deserves its place at the table. Being a player is rough, especially when you are getting into a game full of seasoned adventures. With luck, you can implement these commandments into your play style to help for years to come. I am by no means the authority on how to play every roleplaying game, but I can say that I know the difference between a good table and a bad one. You will find that dissonance at the table or awkwardness often comes from the infraction of one of these commandments, but simple tweeks in attitude and perspective can have any group back on the fast track to kicking evil’s butt! In the end, the most important commandment of all is to have fun in a way that everyone else can have fun. These games mean so much to so many people in so many different ways, and finding a simple foundation like these ten commandments can be the first step to participating in something truly wonderful. Amen. Andrew Pendragon is a veteran roleplayer, Dungeon Master, and story teller. His work can be seen featured on outlets like the Chilling Tales for Dark Nights podcast and the Youtube channel BlackEyedBlonde, but he takes the most pride in his High Level Games affiliate podcast The Dragon’s Horde where he, alongside his co host, answers listener submitted roleplay questions and weaves them into a false-actual-play adventure! Picture Reference: https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/468233692479236713/ It’s not often that I come across a game that breaks the mold. Sure, some systems will improve or change up the formula significantly enough to make a splash. Blades in the Dark, a game of heists in a broken world, delivers a wholly different tabletop experience. This alone makes it worthy of note, but the smooth execution of this new system makes it worthy of praise. As I am a grognard whose style doesn’t shift much from game to game, system to system, I struggled somewhat with adapting to Blades’ unique style. I hope to elucidate these key differences for those who may be in a similar situation, as the game is too good to pass up. 1) Setting Expectations In Blades, players roll a number of d6s equal to their skill, plus some additional dice depending on circumstance. Like most games, the GM describes the difficulty of the task. Unlike most games, this difficulty does not dictate a number of successes or target number to achieve. Instead, the GM sets the consequences and the effect of the action should it succeed, and players roll and take the highest die result. For instance, a player may describe how they want their character to bull rush a thug who has a gun trained on them. In most situations, the GM would judge this action Desperate (the most dangerous rating) since it is unlikely they will emerge unscathed. Additionally, the GM would rule this as a low level of effect. The player character isn’t likely to incapacitate the thug with a single charge. However, should the thug be standing on a ledge or near a wrought iron grate, their capacity for injury increases, and so does the effect level. The narrative circumstances directly affect the mechanics of the game in this way. The player then rolls, and should the highest die result be a 1-3, they fail with consequences (they are shot and unable to connect with the thug). If it’s 4 or 5, they succeed with consequences (they slam into the thug, but also take a bullet for their trouble), and if it’s a 6, they succeed without negative consequences (the PC hits the thug before they can get a shot off). It’s up to the GM to keep their players informed about the aspects of a scene so that everyone’s expectations are the same. What if the PC had a gun too? What if that PC decided to talk down the thug instead? The GM applies a rating entirely dependant on these shifting circumstances, which makes the next point all the more important. 2) Gathering Input This game, more so than most others, relies on a give and take by the GM and players. For instance, the players choose which skill they want to use to complete any given task. The GM is encouraged not to deny the player’s selection, rather to ask the player to describe how they want to use that skill to accomplish that objective. In the previous example, the PC could use their Skirmish skill (most often used for scuffles), and the GM would most likely rule as described. Should they instead ask to use Prowl, they would have to describe how that skill applies to the situation. Do they try to duck behind cover, skulk through the shadows, then clobber the thug once their unaware? It’s up to the player, but the goal remains always to serve the narrative. The GM is also intended to take input from players on how they want the consequences to apply to them. Physical harm and negative outcomes can be resisted by the player, but doing so causes Stress to accumulate and puts the player closer to a permanent Trauma. Sure, you didn’t get shot, but it means you had to throw yourself behind cover at the last second, and the near miss left you rattled. The GM is the final arbiter on how the consequence is avoided, or if it’s merely reduced in strength, so the power does lie ultimately with the GM. This keeps the gaming table in check while also making players feel more involved in the storytelling process. 3) Narrating Time Time is a funny construct in Blades. Things are not always done entirely chronologically, and there can be significant gaps without any actual gameplay problems. Showcased here is the flashbacks system. Before a job, your gang of (mostly) competent criminals meets under the lantern’s glow to plan out the fine details. The players, however, do not. Instead, they take preparatory actions, such as scouting the base or researching the target, decide on a style of heist, then determine the point of entry. The game then cuts immediately to the action. Any and all remaining details are filled in by the gang declaring flashbacks in the middle of the heist. “I planted a gun under the seat during prep,” is a tried and true one. “I brought flowers for the girl we have on the inside to convince her to help us.” These are all actions that players can take during a heist that affect the past yet aid the PCs in the moment. Depending on how wild and unlikely a flashback is, it might require some Stress on the part of the character. Still, this mechanic provides a dynamic way to skip the endless debate about each minute detail of a job beforehand and get right to the fun. It’s also the hardest thing for GMs and players to get used to. Once you get the hang of it, though, you may want to import the system into every other similar game you play. Blades in the Dark is a fantastic game with a really detailed setting, but it’s so much more than that. It truly innovates in a major way and provides a new, and in some ways better, way to run TTRPGs. It’s just we grogs who need the occasional kick in the pants to keep our minds open so we don’t miss these gems when they come around. David Horwitz is a gamer and freelance writer/editor 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: https://www.evilhat.com/home/blades-in-the-dark/ Between RPG products, novels, comic books, TV and movies, random blogs, and so on, there are already so many amazing worlds out there. Many of these worlds are tried and true and have decades of lore and refinement. But, for as amazing as some of these worlds and tropes may be, they aren’t novel, and they aren’t yours. Those worlds have already been explored and those stories have already been told. There’s nothing wrong with tried and true, with staying within the lines of a setting or a genre, with telling a story that has already more or less been told, but what I love about tabletop is that it allows for something more. With no artistic talent, programming experience, or a crew of performers and a special effects team, you can build a novel world. Your players can experience genuine wonder in the exploration and discovery of things truly never seen before. There is nothing wrong with orcs and elves and dragons, but at some point, they became mundane. You know what an orc is, and it makes you feel warm and fuzzy and nostalgic, and as the worldbuilder I’m just leveraging your knowledge and nostalgia. That’s simple and sensible enough, but where’s the fantasy in that?! If you want to build worlds that make you feel the way you did when you first read Lord of the Rings, let’s try something new! Here are 5 tips to bring fantasy back to the fantasy genre. 1) Understand The Tropes This first tip isn’t about building a unique world per se, but it’s an important first step. Why do we love orcs and elves and dragons? As I discussed above, part of why we still use these creatures is because they’re known quantities, and they’ve worked in the past. But more than that, they hold some symbolic value. Elves can represent a people in tune with nature, or the end of an old age, or (if you’re going for more of a fey interpretation) whimsy and wonder. You need to understand what the tropes are and why they exist in order to change them. 2) Subvert The Tropes Now that you’ve thought about what the tropes mean, subvert them! Maybe in your setting, the elves are undergoing a magi-industrial revolution, using new magics to twist the forest into woody machines. Maybe the elves are a new race, and this is a world in which the age of humanity is coming to an end, rather than the reverse. I was a preteen when I first played the video game Warcraft 3, but the idea that the orcs were once a noble, shamanic people prior to the events of the first game blew my mind. By that point, between Warcraft and Lord of the Rings, I thought I already knew what an orc was supposed to be. By subverting my expectations, Warcraft left a lifelong impression on me of what the genre of fantasy can be. 3) One Unique Thing I’m borrowing this term from the tabletop RPG 13th Age, but I think it can just as easily apply to worldbuilding as to character creation. This is in-line with the above, a single subversion can entirely change the nature or tone of a world. However, other additions or changes can also make a world unique, without totally subverting it. In this world, maybe halflings have elongated faces and big eyes, as if they evolved from a lemur. Maybe that inspires you to place the halflings on an isolated, Madagascar-esque island, rather than The Shire, deep in a Euro-inspired forest. Maybe elves have bluish skin and white hair, making them just a little more alien. Maybe they actually are the descendants of ancient alien refugees, and there are subtle hints throughout the world that their magics are in fact advanced technologies. 4) Borrow Generously Maybe you don’t just want one change, but a world entirely different from traditional fantasy. It can be daunting to build a whole world, or even to decide where to begin. In such a case, take from what’s already out there! So you have a fantasy setting, but instead of orcs and elves, you have daleks and twi’leks, and instead of paladins and wizards you have jedi and onmyoji. You can change the names, shuffle around details, adapt them to whatever technology level or setting aesthetic, it’s just about giving you a place to start. At this stage it might seem a bit slapdash, like a child smashing their toys together. That can be fun, but let’s take it one step further: how do these disparate elements come together? In the process of answering that question, I think you’ll find that the world starts to build itself. Even though these are known quantities, by arranging them in a unique way, they can become something novel and greater than the sum of their parts. 5) More Is More (But Also Less Is More) If you’re like me, and the problem is that you have too many ideas, rather than too few, don’t be afraid to go all out! Throw every idea you can possibly think of up on the board and see how it shakes out. The reality is that many of your most unassuming ideas will end up being your best, and many of your personal favorites aren’t going to work the way you expected. Plop it down like a big brick of marble and chip away at it. Share your work on r/worldbuilding or elsewhere on reddit, start a blog, or seek advice in some other way. At the end of the day it’s your world, but consider what other people have to say, and if they tell you something isn’t working, don’t be afraid to chip it off. So here’s the world I came up with, just in the process of writing this article: A peaceful tropical island, inhabited by a small, lemur-like people known as halflings, is invaded by the powerful, arcane lich army known as the daleks. A few unassuming halflings are rescued by a great onmyoji, a tall woman with light blue skin and white hair, wielding a glowing blue saber of light. She takes the halflings to the continent, where they learn about a war gone awry between an old race known as humans, and the blue-skinned elves who have begun to succeed them. Out of desperation, a sect of humans placed their souls inside arcane boxes, giving up their own humanity to bring human civilization back to its former glory, as they perceive it. Amidst a world in such turmoil, what place is there for the halflings? 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://wallpaperstock.net/best-friends-fantasy-world-wallpapers_w50899.html What can you do when you have no players waiting for you to blow their minds with a great story? Well, I looked to my kids one night after a bedtime story request. My trouble was that I find reading my kids bedtime stories to be more of a tedious chore, so I decided to stick to what I enjoy and pulled out a child-friendly RPG. Getting kids into roleplaying games can be tricky, the following are my choices of systems that I think are great roleplaying games to play with kids. 1) Tails Of Equestria Created by one of the writers of the My Little Pony TV show, this book contains the core rules and an adventure to get you started. All you need are character sheets, dice and some tokens to reward good roleplaying. The book takes you step by step through the very easy to read rules and character creation, with the addition of a starter adventure that would take two perhaps even three sessions. As it comes from an existing universe of characters and locations, there are lots of possibilities to grasp your young ones’ imagination, aided by a TV show that you can use as an inspiration source. 2) FATE Accelerated This version works better than Core FATE for kids, as the Approach system is far easier for younger kids to understand, compared to using a list of skills. Asking a child “what does your character do?” followed by “how does s/he do that?” then having them roll the dice and get excited about the result is very rewarding. There’s no setting too far for this generic system to work with: the sky, or underdark, or goblin mines, or starship… you get the point. My only advice is to get some ideas about a good point economy before just jumping in. 3) Amazing Tales Fairly new to the market, I picked this up as soon as I found out about it. It’s very simple and you can be running a game with your kids in around 10 minutes after opening the front cover. The character creation is fun and simple. You just need a name, picture, and things they are good at and your kid is ready to get adventuring. With only three parts to character creation kids should easily be able to concentrate long enough to get the job done, just fill out the super simple character sheet, of which there are a few designs (either text only or picture boxes to explain your skills), and you’re on your way. The rulebook comes with three child friendly settings for you to jump in feet first. 4) Lasers and Feelings This is a free, one page rule set that makes it simple to quickly roll up an entire game using only 3d6, although it is better with a few more dice. Within just a few steps and the provided tables you can roll up a character and the GM can quickly throw together a session. If you scout online you may even find homebrew variations including settings like Mouseguard. With only a single page of rules, Lasers Feeling is the simplest game to run: name your character, pick a number between two and five (inclusive), then roll up an adventure on the tables. Whatever game you choose from this list or elsewhere, make sure you keep in mind that children can have short attention spans which can lead to them not playing. This is fine, just call a break and come back another time. Including your child’s ideas into the game can prolong their enjoyment of it and focus, so be flexible and remember that if they enjoy playing now, you can run games for them and their friends creating the next generation of roleplayers. Let’s keep this great hobby alive! Ross Reid is a roleplay enthusiast who enjoys creating and running campaigns both as GM and player, he is currently in the middle of a one year CoC campaign with his original character still breathing, and has a preference toward the FATE games. He is currently working on a 24 hour roleplay marathon split over three days to raise money for a children's hospital in Edinburgh, Scotland. Picture Reference: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/222950/Amazing-Tales-complete-kids-RPG The dungeon master has the power to make or break a game. Good dungeon masters can transport you to a land of fantasy, and make even the clunkiest of game mechanics fun and engaging. Bad dungeon masters, on the other hand, can take what looks like a great game on paper and make it into the kind of experience that will drive you to drink. If you have yet to be visited by any of the dungeon masters on this list, then beware! For in your future you may yet have to contend with… 1) The Naked Emperor Every dungeon master was once new. There was a time when you didn’t know where the monster stats were, when you bungled a plot twist, or when you messed up rules calls more often than you got them right. But most dungeon masters learn from these mistakes, re-read the text, and eventually find their groove. Not the Naked Emperor. No, for you see, the Emperor has no need of such plebeian things like books or lore with which to make their decisions. Clothed in the invisible garments of their own brilliance, it’s uncommon for the Emperor to even know the mechanics of the game they’re running beyond the very basics. Convinced that the stories they have to tell transcend such things, questions about damage, resistances, or even class features are met with a dismissive wave of the hand. In short, the Naked Emperor is the know-nothing DM who has no interest in getting into the mechanics of how the game runs, because that isn’t their concern. They rarely keep players for long, and when those players find other groups it can take some time to forget the behavior they learned in the Emperor’s Court. 2) The Author In an ideal game setting, the dungeon master runs the non-player characters, the plot, and the world physics. The players are in control of their characters, and the actions those characters take. The dungeon master sets up the situation, the players react to it, and collaboratively they tell a story. Not at the Author’s table. The Author sees themselves more as a director of all the action taking place at the table. While the players might be the ones behind the characters, they’re treated more like actors on a set. They can improvise, and put their own spin on things, but the Author insists on certain paths being taken, and certain actions not being taken. Their games are characterized by problems with one-and-only-one solution, by constant interruptions explaining to players why their current actions will not work, and at times literal divine intervention pointing an arrow down a specific path. No matter how beautiful the setting, how flowery the words, or how attentive to mechanical detail an author is, their games tend to feel more like a police state where you are attempting to guess the dungeon master’s desires rather than playing. Because without freedom, you’re not playing a game… you’re just part of a play where only one of you has the script, and he won’t share it with everyone else. 3) The Schoolmaster A good gaming group has its share of messing around, in-jokes, and silliness. After all, you’re getting together around a table with your friends pretending to be elves, dwarves, wizards, and assassins… it’s kind of a silly thing to be doing, and taking yourself too seriously can backfire. No one seems to have told the Schoolmaster this, though. The Schoolmaster has underlying rules to how a game table should be managed. Players should be attentive, listening to all of the information they relate before taking the baton back so they can begin roleplaying again. The Schoolmaster expects you to listen when they talk, and to follow their lead. In short, they treat their players more like children who need to be corralled, and less like adults who are here to have fun together. When the dungeon master tries to get everyone’s attention, it’s a good idea to listen. But when they start threatening to give players detention, and lecturing instead of being part of the game, it’s time to move on to a table run by someone who isn’t possessed by the spirit of Ichabod Crane. 4) The Adversary RPGs are full of uphill battles, ambushes, tense negotiations, and hard-fought skirmishes. These are the challenges the characters have to overcome in order to reach their goal, and to bring the story to its completion. And while no dungeon master wants to make it easy on the players, most of them don’t want to kill the party. The Adversary does. For the Adversary, the story is a secondary concern. The game has a binary outcome, and for them to win, the party has to die. Adversaries tend to have enemies that are noticeably outside the party’s weight class, but they are also the first to cry foul if a tactic or power proves particularly successful against their villains. They will out-and-out strip abilities from player characters, stating that they no longer work, or switch tactics entirely to ensure that strategy is nullified completely. Worst of all, though, Adversaries have no empathy for the players’ goals. They may pay lip service to the idea that you’re all here to tell a story, but the Adversary won’t consider the game a victory if they haven’t made the players bleed for every inch of ground they cover. Adversaries breed mistrust, but even worse, they can lead to players grabbing every advantage they can possibly find. This often leads to dungeon masters who aren’t adversarial thinking these players are just power-gaming munchkins, more concerned with bonuses than with the story. Adversaries leave scars and habits that can be hard to unlearn. 5) The Punisher A good dungeon master lets the laws of cause and effect play out in the world. They arbitrate things neutrally, and allow complications and solutions to arise naturally from the actions of the player characters. In short, their actions have consequences, but those consequences fall into the “what comes up must come down” school of mechanics. This is not the case for the Punisher. For the Punisher, any act that fails is an excuse to inflict upon that character an Old Testament level of pain or humiliation. A Punisher’s critical fumble deck is well-thumbed and dog-eared from use, and they’ve never once asked players if they even wanted to use that optional mechanic. They simply take it as a given. The Punisher takes glee in natural 1’s, and may even attach consequences to regular failed rolls, as well. Broken weapons, injuring yourself, feedback from spells that failed to penetrate an enemy’s defenses, and even slipping on random banana peels and falling prone in the middle of a fight are all commonplace for the Punisher’s games. Some Punishers play it straight, giving the same drawbacks to the monsters, but they fail to see that a monster breaking its weapon has a much smaller impact overall than a PC who has lost their primary weapon in the middle of a dungeon. Punishers tend to suck the fun out of a game, particularly if the table is on a good run of bad luck. Adding insult to injury may be done in the name of “realism,” but the result is more often a game that feels like it actively wants you to stop playing. There are certain challenges we all have to face in life as gamers. Remember that if you’re ever faced with one of these dread DMs, remember that if you survive you get XP… and you’ll learn to recognize the signs the next time you see one of these game masters across a table. For more from Neal Litherland, check out his Gamers archive along with his blog Improved Initiative! Picture Reference: https://dungeondutchess.com/tag/gm/ “Any axe is a good axe.” Ah, Dwarves. Every races has a certain stigma behind them in small human towns. For the most part, adventurers seem to be the exception to this. Although not every Elf is for equal rights, and not every Halfling is brooding and in (really adorable) plate armor. Of course it's worth exploring these wonderful little worlds of stereotypes because often they're based on a shred of truth. Or in other cases, a rather large pile of truth. 1) Elves A personal favorite of mine, Elves are the pointy eared, bow-shooting, magic-casting tree folk with an unnatural beauty and a thoughtful nature. Beware, because behind that calm and collected nature sits a xenophobe true and true. Who hasn’t wanted to spew racial slurs at everything under the sun every now and then? Humans? Inferior. Dwarves? Idiots. Halflings? Won’t amount to anything. Elves are the gods’ masterpiece and no one can take that away from them. When you start peppering everyone on the field in a volley of well aimed arrows, the party may reconsider using you as gnoll bait. 2) Dwarves Drunken brawling is a fun hobby, and the only hobby that Dwarves probably made into an art. If you can’t drink yourself under the table as a Dwarf, you just aren’t living to their full potential. Not to mention your average Dwarf almost likes their liquor as much as they like their friends, with their Lawful Good tendencies and all. You’ll be the envy of the party, as being proficient in smith's tools lets you maintain and create armour and weapons for the party. But don’t let those pesky Elves get word of your craftsmanship, otherwise they’ll be begging for some of your work. 3) Gnomes Wisecracking and friendly sometimes Gnomes are a little underrated, but when you mix magic and tinkering the results are usually rather splendid. Albeit being so small may have its disadvantages, it usually means you’re just that much harder to hit with a battleaxe. When the going gets tough, Gnomes have a tendency to make the going softer, between a loveable nature and invaluable skills Gnomes are quite the asset to any adventuring group, mostly due to their friendly natures and the neat little gadgets and do dads. Just don’t let them hear you demean their work, or it may spark quite the little fury. 4) Half-Orcs Fury. Gods. Good and evil. These are all the truths that a Half-orc faces in their lives. They all feel the pull of the god that calls to their very blood. All know the anger that makes their heart beat and their blood boil. The very fact that they are seen as being born of evil causes many to end up there. Their tenacity, both of body and mind are what marks Half-orcs. They aren’t made of stone. They’re made of bone, and when they pull yours from your body, you’ll know what it means to be a Half-orc. Bunch of badasses. Of course, real world stereotypes aren’t fun, but games are games, right? 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.ie/pin/299207968980723733/ With the amount of media the average game master encounters in their day-to-day lives, It’s easy for them to assimilate that media into their games. Some may consider this unoriginal, but in this ever expanding sea of pop culture we find ourselves in, it is impossible not to be inspired. When it comes to your home games, there’s no reason you can’t take ideas you like from your favorite franchises and blend them together. As a matter of fact, I would argue that doing so for your group can be incredibly beneficial. I’m not condoning plagiarism of course, or trying to rewrite an existing setting and sell it. But if it’s for the entertainment of those in your group, there’s no reason not to pillage and plunder intriguing concepts by other creative types. Here are four reasons it can be beneficial to your campaign. 1) Familiarity When everyone is inhabiting an imaginary world together, it helps if all of the players and GM are on the same page. If your world features a concept that is similar to something found in pop culture, it can pay to simply explain that to the players. There’s a reason many fantasy settings feature the classic races of Elves, Dwarves, and Halflings. They’re familiar. Most gamers have at least heard of Lord of the Rings and the creatures found within Middle Earth. This is not to say that you need to follow a path that is so well trod. There are so many wonderful places to pull from that many gamers would understand. If you’re running a dark sci-fi game that features man-eating aliens, there’s nothing wrong with pointing out their similarities to the Xenomorphs from the Alien movies. This puts the players in the right frame of mind from the get-go. 2) Catered to the Players If a game master is familiar with their player’s interests, it can help to reference those things and spark their passions. While this is similar to familiarity it is separate for one major reason: Passion. Just because someone is familiar with something doesn’t mean they are passionate about it. Is a player in your group obsessed with Harry Potter? Why not add a school for heroes in your setting? Do you have a player that loves the exploratory aspect of Star Trek? Consider running a hex-crawl in your setting. 3) Something Totally New My favorite reason to steal ideas from various sources is how easy and fun it can be to combine those ideas into something else completely different. Some of the most unusual concepts can be merged together to create something amazing. The results could be bizzare, like combining the dark fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm with the far-flung future of the modern space opera. Alternatively it could be a bit more subtle, like combining elements of the matrix with vampire hunting. Regardless, the results can be wholly awesome, and incredibly unique. 4) The Hype Train With the Marvel movies in full swing right now, it’s no surprise that superhero RPGs are big sellers. These sort of influences can really get a gamer pumped, and there’s no reason a game master can’t tap into that. Have you designed a space opera setting? Ask the players if they want to play in a campaign where they are wanted criminals who happen to be the universe’s last hope, like the Guardians of the Galaxy. If you time it right, this can be a big boost of energy to get a campaign started. This may be best for shorter campaigns; as the hype dies you may find the game loses its staying power. We all have influences from our favorite franchises, and there’s nothing wrong with embracing those passions and putting them into the game. They are a part of you after all, you may as well use them to your advantage. Nathan Carmen is the founder and head writer of the Indie RPG company, Tricky Troll Games. Nathan loves building worlds and improving his craft when he’s not busy parenting. Reach Nathan at trickytrollgames@gmail.com or check out the TTG website at https://nathanccarmen.wixsite.com/trickytrollgames. Picture Reference: https://comicbook.com/marvel/2018/03/07/marvel-cinematic-universe-movies-ranked-best-worst-black-panther/ Since their introduction in the Van Richten's Guide, Ravenloft has gone to great lengths to make fiends diabolical again. There are no legions of hellspawn, no hells or heavens to travel to, no blood war cutting down thousands of faceless fiends an hour, cannon fodder for a multiversal conflict. Fiends in Ravenloft are rare, each a unique individual character, usually surrounded by a web of intrigue best suited for a high level party. However, this is still a fantasy setting, and making fiends rare and unique has made them less accessible for situations when the plot calls for it. Friendly contact with an evil outsider is a requirement to get into the Blackguard prestige class, and Pathfinder gave us many more classes and archetypes that assume these monsters are everywhere. If your plot calls for a pact with darkness but fiends are scarce, here are some creative ways to get the job done. 1) The Ebonbane Despite being trapped with in a magical crystal coffin in a very remote location, the Ebonbane's legend has spread among those seeking shortcuts to power. Those who come to bargain with him are frequently lulled by his imprisonment, thinking themselves in control as they slice their palms and place a bloody handprint on enchanted crystal. The truth is, they will never leave Shadowborn Manor unless he owns them, body and soul. What he offers: Black Blade magus archetype, enchanted magic swords. What he asks: the Ebonbane compels his agents to work against the Knights of the Shadows. They find themselves hating anyone wearing the insignia or cloak of the Circle. Over time, this hatred grows to overshadow any prior ambition that caused them to strike their original bargain. 2) Baltoi The Bound Slumber spell cast on Baltoi doesn't prevent her from dreaming. She has one of the few perpetual dream spheres in the Nightmare Lands, and while the Nightmare Court has tried to corral her influence by sequestering that sphere in a Mist Oubliette, she has corrupted some of their ennui. Born of nightmares and tainted with demonic essence, these vile creatures bring her dreamers to tempt and corrupt. What she asks: Baltoi demands that each of these diabolists perform a rite that grants her domain powers, or weakens the spells that bind her. She doesn't care what they do after that. What she offers: Many don't survive performing the rites she demands. Those that do gain access to the full spectrum of summoning from the lower planes and undergo two stages of transposition with a fiend of the appropriate alignment. 3) Tsvtieyft Schattendertodd Bearing a name that means roughly “Second Shadow of Death,” this tenebris elevates the depraved and disturbed into legendary serial killers, its “Lustmorde.” The legends of its proteges always mention the city of Morfenzi, so those who would seek it out know to look for it there. If your campaign calls for a Jack the Ripper or Sweeney Todd, it's easy enough to say they traveled through Morfenzi at one point, and followed the call of darkness underground before journeying on. What it offers: The Lustmorde are not usually spellcasters, so the gifts of the Second Shadow are those befitting a cinematic serial killer: mild damage resistance or natural armor, even bonus feats that like Diehard are perfect for a killer who just keeps coming. What it asks: The master of the Lustmorde demands not just a body count, but murder as art. It drives its proteges to take risks for more kills even as it protects them. Of course, all three of these fiends are powerful enough that they might grant any boon the plot calls for, and ambitious or desperate enough to assist anyone for any reason. While you can always have your would-be diabolist stumble across The Black Duke or Elsepeth, it's nice to know some fiends that are exactly as far reaching as you need them to be. Leyshon Campbell has been playing and writing for Ravenloft for over twenty years, from the Kargatane's Book of S series, playtesting D&D 3E in a Ravenloft campaign, to the ill-fated Masque of the Jade Horror. He married his wife on Friday the 13th after proposing to her on Halloween. By tradition, the first story read at birth to each of their three children was The Barker’s Tour, from Ravenloft’s “Carnival” supplement. He is currently running the “Queen of Orphans” Ravenloft campaign. Picture Reference: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/17529/Van-Richtens-Guide-to-Fiends-2e?it=1 Character creation can be a truly enjoyable experience if done correctly, or a real chore otherwise. Sometimes this line is a fine one. Hero Builder, a new production by The Table Candle, endeavors to bring full customization to the d20 system experience. Much like Mutants and Masterminds or other similar point-buy systems, this game gives the power to the players in creating every aspect of their characters. Here are three reasons to give it a look. 1) Familiar Mechanics Most players and GMs today are at least somewhat knowledgeable about the d20 system, be it through D&D, Pathfinder, or the countless products released after the system went OGL. While it has a few tweaks here and there, the Hero Builder system is largely the same as other d20 products. The GM (here called the Hero Master) sets a DC for each action and the players roll d20 plus skills and bonuses. It is more akin to Pathfinder or D&D 3.5 than 5th ed. While many may see this as a step backwards, those older editions did allow for more customization and less simplification, something Hero Builder benefits from immensely. The game works best on a grid system; in our test game, players took advantage of the tactical options available to get the best use of their powers and abilities. 2) Unique Abilities Hero Builder contains a long list of abilities that modify or enhance actions characters can take, much like the proficiencies and feats of the aforementioned d20 games. These come from characters’ Bloodlines (custom races or backgrounds) or are added separately as special abilities of the character. When you create a Bloodline, other characters can be of the same bloodline and attain the same abilities, or generate their own bloodline. This not only helps create important distinctions or commonalities between characters, but also aids in world building. The Hero Master can co-opt the player-created bloodlines into their narrative to customize the game setting and provide touchstones for in-game cultures. 3) Sheer Breadth Of Power After generating the statistics and special abilities of characters, players then build their powers from the ground up. Powers are categorized by type, and each section describes how to build the power using points assigned at character creation. Powers cost a resource to purchase and a resource to use in game. So a player might make a bruiser who has a bunch of low cost survivability and damage enhancing powers, or another may create a single utility power and one massive damage dealing power, becoming the archetypal glass cannon. Players can create anything in between, adding healing, summoning, warding, or buffing powers to their repertoire. The balance seemed to be without major issue during out playtest, with each character able to perform as intended and to satisfying effect. Hero Builder does also have a few issues to work through in its current state. The complexity of the character creation process absolutely necessitates a “session 0.” During my second attempt at a playtest, my group sat down to make characters and play, but I had to give up in the middle of character generation because my players were getting too restless. The GM needs to sit down with each player individually to create their characters well in advance of the first session, and as such, the game does not lend itself well to one-shots. With so much time invested in creating unique and intriguing characters, players will be loath to abandon them after a single session, or more likely, loath to put the time in necessary to create them in the first place. There are other minor issues with the book, including typos and the like, but largely, Hero Builder brings fun customizable high-fantasy flair to the d20 system. The game includes three modes of play: commoner, heroic, and godly, though I highly recommend the latter two. If you’re going to loosen the reigns and let players create their dream hero, give them the points to go wild with it. Hero Builder is available here! David Horwitz is a gamer and freelance writer/editor 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: https://funnyjunk.com/Hero+builder/bmTzLoz/ Shadowrun! It’s the oft overlooked and sometimes reviled cousin of Dungeons and Dragons. As a franchise, Shadowrun does everything Dungeon and Dragons does. It’s got novelizations, board game and video game spin-offs, and is even up to five editions! Some of these editions even vary wildly from one another to the point where you may as well be playing a different game when you use a different edition. Despite this, Shadowrun sometimes feels like it’s cursed to live in the shadows (Ha!) of Dungeons and Dragons. It’s not without reason, though. After all, their 5th edition core book is about 500 pages long, all of which you must have AT LEAST a passing familiarity with. By contrast, D&D has three core rulebooks, but you only need one of them to know the rules, and it can be treated more like an encyclopedia if you know what to look for. Enter Shadowrun: Anarchy. This is a ruleslite and scalable edition of Shadowrun. Today, we discuss the edition of Shadowrun that breaks all the rules, so strap in, chummers! 1) The Setting For the uninitiated, Shadowrun is a game set in a dystopian, cyberpunk future. To make this even more nutso-buttso, it’s our world 50 years from now with magic having returned to the world in 2012. Magic here refers to spells, otherworldly energy, and all manner of supernatural critters. Critters, such as otherwise ordinary wild animals that were made more vicious because of the influx of magic, vampires and ghouls whose conditions are literally a disease, or even the god-like Dragons who, in Shadowrun, are embodiments of magic itself. While technology advanced rapidly in Shadowrun, it’s still very familiar to the technology we have today. What’s a comm-link? It’s like a smart-phone. What’s the Matrix? The Internet. Why is everything, including my gun, connected to the Matrix? Probably the same reason our world has WiFi slow-cookers. Being set in an alternate version of our world works to great effect in Shadowrun; it makes everything much more immediately relatable. For anybody like our Corporate Overlord Josh Heath who is interested in promoting diversity and inclusivity, this is a very useful quality. If you’ve lived on planet earth, you have a place with some emotional attachment in Shadowrun, and that’s a good starting point for imagining yourself in a different world. 2) The Rules Are Still Very Similar To Core Shadowrun As mentioned earlier, Shadowrun 5th Edition has some dense rules, which makes it difficult to cut things out or simplify them without damaging the feel of the game. Shadowrun: Anarchy is a fine example of this; it drastically simplifies things, and something does get lost along the way. However, the end result still resembles Shadowrun: fists full of dice that either end in a total miss, or an accidental kill. There’s still the divide between magic and cybernetics; going too heavy on one makes the other impractical. That je ne sais quoi they call Edge is also still present, allowing somebody who’s otherwise not special in any way what-so-ever to somehow accomplish big things through dumb luck. Shadowrun: Anarchy is a narrativist take on Shadowrun, but it still still remembers that it’s Shadowrun, and most importantly, that it’s a game. The story is much more important in Anarchy, sure, but they don’t neglect players (such as yours truly) who want the figurative crunchy bits they can sink their teeth into. 3) Gameplay Is Scalable Shadowrun Anarchy, to contrast many of the other editions of Shadowrun, doesn’t have a lot of content; not explicitly written in the book, at least. There is a few basic lists of everything you’d expect: weapons, tools, spells, NPCs and sample characters. For folks who find these lists lacking and want more, Shadowrun Anarchy does include methods for padding them out. The first such method being a conversion guide, which describes how to bring a character, spell, or other thing from the more detailed versions of the game into Anarchy. Since Anarchy is the simpler of the two, this usually means stripping away details that Anarchy doesn’t accommodate, such as the difficulty of acquiring a given item or learning a spell. The second method is the “Shadow Amp” creation rules. Shadow Amp is the name Anarchy has given to spells, traits, cyberware, and other stuff that would otherwise amplify a shadowrunner’s abilities. These are guidelines which can be used to create anything your imagination can dream up. Though if you’re really pressed for time, such as introducing a strange new piece of technology or magical artifact mid-game, there’s even a guideline Shadowrun Anarchy has for completely improvising new things: it gives a 2 dice bonus (or penalty!) to whatever it sounds like it would. The conversion rules, character creation, shadow amp creation, and the various sample lists means that Shadowrun Anarchy comes with numerous ways to play, both out of the box and for those who want to take their game a little bit further. 4) It’s Not Dungeons And Dragons Dungeons and Dragons is the one game almost everybody in the tabletop gaming fandom has some familiarity with. Despite this, though, it doesn’t really do a good job as a “common language” among RPGs; it’s too wildly different from everything else that exists. In fact, it can be argued that there really isn’t any unifying thread between RPGs other than they’re played around a table and dice get thrown around. In other words: if you want to overall become better as a GM or a player, exposing yourself to different games is the thing to do. After all, different rulesets are suited to different games. Shadowrun’s tendency for rolls to be either wildly successful or hilariously pitiful allows for more incorporation of improvisation, especially in it’s more narrativist form as Anarchy. Any plans, be they the players’ or the GM’s, aren’t guaranteed to happen without a hitch. And if that sounds like a familiar scenario in other games you play, what better way to practice handling it than playing a game where such a scenario is commonplace? Aaron der Schaedel’s claim to fame before being the resident weeb of High Level Games was a series of videos he did breaking down the rules of Shadowrun 5th Edition. They’re still available on his now scarcely updated YouTube channel. Picture Reference: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/194759/Shadowrun-Anarchy If you are familiar with my show, The Dragon’s Horde, then you will also be familiar with the concept of “the sleepy dragon list.” For those of you not in The Horde, the sleepy dragon list is a bit of an albatross hanging from my dungeon mastering neck. In brief, it is a shorthand list of ideas that I have for items, adventures, NPCs, and such. Items on the list include things like “He thinks he is a werewolf. He is not” or “weird (sexy?) key.” Then there is the infamous “sleepy dragon.” It has dwelt within the list for nigh 4 years now, and I have yet to remember what the heck I wanted to do concerning a sleepy dragon. Despite this, I have continued to expand my sleepy dragon list with tons of narrative seeds to get a story on track. One of the most frequent questions we get on the show is from new DMs asking how to get things started. To this I say, ask no more, friends; Pendragon has 7 adventure introductions to get the creative juices flowing! 1) The Herd In the city of Sherrack there is a small village nestled within a grassy basin. Here, traders and farm hands amble about their day selling, harvesting, and discussing the recent goings-on over at Gumby’s farm. As of late, the resident octogenarian and shepherd has had quite the ordeal keeping his flock alive. Every day or two several of his flock go mysteriously missing; stranger yet, more sheep emerge from the woods to to fill their place the following day. Little do Gumby’s neighbors know, that he had recently developed an acute fear of his impending mortality and has turned experimenting on his flock to find the secrets of immortality. And little does Gumby know that the Divine have their eye on him and have sent a couple watchdogs his way in the form of sheep whose wool cannot be sheared. 2) Maiden Voyage The Briny Steed had seen much better days on the sea. Now it rests patiently in harbor, waiting for its next (and probably final) voyage. Through bribery, philandering, and “oh, come on’s” the wannabe captain, Earl Stoutheart has managed to convince the party to commandeer the vessel and sail it across the Scattered Sea. The gang lies in the belly of the ship, waiting for nightfall, but when the time arrives, they emerge to a sight most strange. The ship has already departed on its own accord and seems to be in command of its own heading. It is a ship’s turn to do some commandeering for a change, and the party is along for the ride of a now sentient maritime vessel. 3) Alcohol Poisoning You haven’t heard of the Drinking Hat?! Why, it’s the finest saloon for miles around. Well, it used to be anyway. Built in the husk of an abandoned grain silo, the proprietors of the bar have converted it into a massive, multi tiered drinking house. Tubes snake their way from the mountain of barrels above down to the respective patron, but I wouldn’t go there if I were you. Recently, a group of thieves guilders met an unfortunate end after having their drinks. They could have chosen any number of barrels to sip from, but the poor sods must have gotten one that had been tampered with. Some say it was just bad luck, but I say differently. I say they were assassinated. On my honor as guild master Roan, those responsible for the death of my men will pay with more than just coins. 4) Showstopper The bardic hall in Brint is known nationwide for being the home to more than its fair share of celebrities. The flying Charnelli twins. Finnigan the wondrous. Heck, even Mertick and his performing bear Bathsalts have stopped by on occasion. No one expected a show stopper from Cleopatra though, but a show stopper it was. Everyone assumed she would live and die as a modest tailor until she took the stage to sing. The issue is, no one will ever know how the show actually went, because no one ever left. The morning after her performance, the the owner of the hall found the entire crowd dead in their seats! She has since been arrested for murder, but she says she is innocent and they simply dropped dead in the middle of her act. Cleopatra’s head is on the chopping block, and your party may be the only ones who can prove her innocence. 5) Repo Let it never be said of Matilda that she was anything but a saint. Known for her meek generosity, Matilda enlists the help of the party to help her with a job a little outside the capabilities of a sweet aged woman. The thing is, locals are tired of the stagnant water of the swamp nearby, and they plan on draining it completely. This is all fine and good for most people, but not ‘ol Matilda. She informs the party that she left a large cache of treasure in a lockbox somewhere within the belly of the marsh. Should they find it, she would be more than happy to give them a cut of the booty. The party drudges around in the murky waters, following Matildas instructions closely, but when they arrive, not only do they find treasure but also a corpse clutching the lockbox. Upon further investigation, it appears that the body is wearing a locket with a picture of Matilda inside. Upon further further investigation, the party hears a group of locals approaching. Upon further further further investigation, the party is discovered by the locals (Matilda included) ripping the lockbox from the arms of a dead man. “That’s Harold!” Matilda shrieks, “And that is my lockbox!” Turns out Harold had mysteriously disappeared a year ago, taking both his and his wife’s savings with him. Matilda weeps in the arms of the closest friendly local, but what’s that? Did she just glance over and smirk? 6) The Call Of Pazuzu (I incorporate something similar to the following in each of my campaigns. This cult is kind of like my signature; I would love to know if this inspired an adventure of your own). Your party is headed off for a new adventure in unfamiliar territory. About a day from their destination, a group of naked elves and humans approaches with open arms. They inform the party that they are thrilled to see new faces and are about to, in short, start a celebration. Whether they join the naked folk or not, the party has to pass by the strangers’ camp which has a massive, half finished totem looming overhead. The nudists are busily gathering scrap wood to finish the totem, and they gleefully sing, dance, and try to rope the group into helping. Despite their cordial, unsuspecting nature, these individuals have been waiting a year for that particular night to summon their favorite pestilence demi-god, Pazuzu! An otherwise silver moon slowly begins to shift to a blood red crimson; then, with the totem complete, Pazuzu in all of her pestilent glory animates the statue and chooses it as her personal avatar. Whoops. 7) The Bane Of My Existence “Sleepy Dragon” The role of an effective storyteller can be a daunting task, especially since most of the work of a Dungeon Master happens in real time, but having good narrative seeds chock full of possible hooks and intrigue can make the job that much easier. Nothing feels worse than getting to the table and not feeling like you have enough content to work with; veteran and beginner DMs alike know this. Hopefully you can find ways to plant these seeds if you find yourself in a pinch, and maybe you can start crafting a Sleepy Dragon list of your own! A brief aside, if you come up with a cool answer to the Sleepy Dragon conundrum, feel free to tell me about it at TheDragonsHordeCast@gmail.com so we can feature it on the podcast! Andrew Pendragon is a veteran role player, Dungeon Master, and story teller. His work can be seen featured on outlets like the Chilling Tales for Dark Nights podcast and Youtube channel BlackEyedBlonde, but he takes the most pride in his High Level Games affiliate podcast The Dragon’s Horde where he, alongside his co host, answers listener submitted roleplay questions and weaves them into a false-actual-play adventure! Picture Reference: https://www.deviantart.com/legend13/art/Sleepy-Dragon-s-Teddy-275967993 GMs the world over have felt the need for more and varied content to inject into their worlds. After all, even in the most linear of campaigns, PCs will delight in moving off the rails to inspect the living world around them. Take it from me: there is no amount of preparation a GM can do to account for every possible contingency the players can throw at them. That is why sourcebooks are so handy; they remove the burden of constant improvisation. Though this can be fun, it is eventually exhausting. What happens if your players keep poking around towns that are supposed to be simple stops on the journey of your intricately crafted plot? Eventually, all of us could use a little outside help. Here follows 3 enjoyable aspects of the small but eminently useful A Baker’s Dozen of Rumours (and the Truth Behind Them), written by Neal Litherland for Azukail Games. 1) Ease Of Introduction The entries in the list of rumours are focused towards a fantasy game of no particular description. There are Cardinals, ships, and half-orcs, to be sure, but each of these are interchangeable with other similar nouns. Trade out the Cardinal for a local temple priest, or the half-orcs for human barbarians. In this fashion, these rumours fit perfectly well in any fantasy game with naught but a minor alteration here and there. Need a little chatter for a port town’s common square? Try Black Sails and Bloody Currents, a rumour about a group of privateers that suggests they may also be the pirates they are hired to combat. Looking for something a bit more mystical? The Wizard Alshamus, a tale of a black tower and the wizard who resides there. He’s friendly to all appearances, but is there something sinister sequestered in his spire? These rumours can function even as lead ins to campaign beats you’ve already planned, as many possibilities are covered with these 13 entries. 2) Style And Substance The rumours and truths in each of the 13 tales are not only accessible, but also flavorful. The stories presented here most often skillfully avoid tropes while still featuring familiar archetypes. Sure, there’s a tale about a witch in the woods, but the witch is a man and is ultimately not responsible for the calamity at hand. The other twelve stories are equally well written. The premises are each interesting and the follow through on the truths do not disappoint. What’s more, the structure of the stories as rumour followed by truth is a clever way to allow the GM to quickly read the shorter rumour section during play, if need be. The truth sections can be absorbed during downtime or between sessions. 3) Mutable Truths The resolutions of each rumour are presented as possible scenarios, not required outcomes. This makes them endlessly tweakable for those of us who like to infuse our own creativity into sourcebooks. One notion I had was to create other possible outcomes to the rumours and let the party follow whichever path they prefer, or use the other as a source of red herrings. The versatility of the rumour/truth presentation allows for adaptability and variance so the GM can keep things interesting and thematic. This sourcebook is a great table mate. What’s more, I would like to see more of these bite-sized story seeds in this format produced for other settings. The only mild criticism I would level is more of a hope, and that would be that future entries include an illustration of each tale if possible. As it stands, there are only four in the publication, and as I like the minimalist style presented, I would like to see more. However, at the price of 2 dollars american, this sixteen page treasure trove of ideas is well worth it. You can check it out or pick it up at RPGNow, and find more of Neal Litherland’s works at his website. David Horwitz is a gamer and freelance writer/editor 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://www.rpgnow.com/product/246287/A-Bakers-Dozen-of-Rumours-And-The-Truth-Behind-Them?src=hottest_filtered |
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April 2023
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