by W. Eric Martin

Both designer Cyrille Leroy and publisher Catch Up Games debuted in 2015 with the tile-laying game Sapiens. I previewed that title in this space in September 2015, and while I correctly remembered Leroy using domino-style tiles to challenge players in their efforts to build a tribal civilization, I misremembered that space in which players competed, thinking that everyone was competing on a shared playing area instead of having their own boards. How quickly memory fades...

Unlike that earlier game, the 2018 Leroy/Catch Up title Fertility does indeed feature a shared playing area, with players once again placing domino-style tiles to do things and score points. The games lasts nine rounds, and on a player's turn they must place one of their three tiles on the board next to something that's been played previously, matching at least one symbol on their tile with an adjacent symbol in play. The more you match, the more resources you receive — but everything you receive other than wheat must be spent the turn you get it.


Nearing the end of play, with monuments starting to spring up

Every player has their own metropolis that they develop over the course of the game, with each player starting with a few basic shops, then acquiring districts — sometimes for free, sometimes for the cost of any 1-2 resources — that bear more shops. By "spending" resources in these shops, you can earn points, increase the value of the resources you've used, collect more wheat, and record the presence of gods.

You want to specialize as you build, but you're restricted by the tiles available for drafting, the districts available for purchasing, and the opponents who will keep you from placing tiles where they'd be the most use to you.


My metropolis at game's end

In addition to scoring for districts, gods, and wheat — which sounds like the name of an obscure Fleetwood Mac cover band — players can place their monuments on the game board by enclosing a single square between tiles, wheat, water, and the edge of the playing area. Whoever places the most and secondmost monuments on the board scores a bonus. Instead of competing to be a big shot, though, you can grab a resource of your choice from an enclosed area, but I hardly think that one resource is going to make up for the seven or fifteen points a monument might bring, so stick with the monument plan, I think.

I've played Fertility only twice so far on a review copy from Catch Up Games, both times with two players. The game provides a quick challenge, with all the thinky moments that one might imagine: Which tile do you place and where? Which districts should you buy and where should you spend resources? Which tile do you grab next? It's a fine example of the genre, marred only by cardboard components that feel thin and that have cutouts too narrow to pull apart from the sprue in a satisfying manner, leaving you to pick slivers of cardboard from the monument parts in an extremely unmonumental way.


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by Mike Petty

My party game Say Whaaat?! will debut from Drawlab Entertainment at SPIEL '18 in late October 2018. It's the latest version of a simple game I made almost 18 years ago. I'm really looking forward this new edition, and I'll explain why at the end of this post, but first please skim along as I take this opportunity to reflect on some highlights in the game's history.

I know most readers will not be familiar with my game. I hope aspiring designers and creative types in general will find something of interest. I will drop some names that will be recognized by those who have been in the hobby for a long time. Many friends I met along the way have gone on to enjoy a lot more success than I have, and I'm so grateful for the roles they played in the development of my game.

I jumped into game design with both feet over twenty years ago after discovering modern games like Settlers of Catan, Bohnanza, and some abstracts. I was well aware most designers never made a lot of money with their designs, so money wasn't my main motivation. I kept at it because I loved games and I got many ideas the more that I played them. When I had an idea I thought was promising, I felt a responsibility to see it through. I wanted to see how far my ideas could go.

Also, I went into education — initially teaching high school math — hoping to encourage students to follow their dreams. I played many games with students at lunch, including ones I made. Telling them about my small successes and inviting them to take part at times was one of my favorite ways to do that.

I ended up using this particular game in school far more than any other. (Teachers might be interested in this recent blog post about the many ways that I and other educators have used the game in the classroom.)

2001: Einstein and What Matters Most

I used to keep all my game ideas, no matter how rough, in a text file on my computer. When I had time, I'd skim through them and flesh out any that sounded promising. For a long time I had a quote from Einstein written in that file. I've seen it worded different ways, but here's how I remember it now:

Sit with a pretty girl for an hour and it seems like a minute. Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. That's relativity.

I found that fascinating, and I felt there had to be a game in it somewhere. Over time it developed into the idea of arranging random words relative to each other in some way. I eventually made a small deck of word cards and tried the core activity with my wife. She has always been my faithful encourager and ever-willing playtester. "Light" and "chocolate" were a couple of the words I recall. The question we used for that initial test was, "Which do you need most?" For each round, we'd draw five cards. One of us would rank them, and the other would try to guess the ranking.

There wasn't much to go on, but the idea had something to it. (Will Niebling gave a talk to the aspiring designers at an early Protospiel gathering. He called that elusive quality of promising games "a spark of life". That term has stuck with me whenever I'm playtesting games and deciding which ideas to pursue.)

After that brief playtest session, I remember thinking the question should be changed to "Which is most important?" From then on, the design became the party game of what matters most. I called it What's It to Ya?

In July 2001, five or six of us, all mutual friends of designer Stephen Glenn, met in Charlottesville, Virginia, for the first Protopsiel (which Stephen called "Protospiele" at the time). I didn't play What's It to Ya? there, but I learned that my prototypes looked terrible compared to the ones Dominic Crapuchettes and Greg Daigle made! I decided to spice mine up, drawing a couple characters in the shape of arrows named "Up" and "Down" and adding them to the ranking cards.

2002: James Droscha and The Low-Budget, Low-Risk Approach to Game Publishing

I built up the deck and kept trying the game with friends. One early playtest (again, as more of a ranking activity than a game) was with my friend Terry Carr. We laughed hysterically while we played. I was fascinated that a game about the most important things could be hilarious at times. I also saw how it could spark brief conversations and that I was learning things while we played.

As the rules were finalized, I considered the partnership game the official way to play. Players paired up and would score points by guessing each other's rankings. I worked out rules for groups of odd-numbered players, too. I have a fond memory of testing that version with a couple of students at a Taco Bell on our return trip from a chess tournament. All the playtests with students were a hit, which was very encouraging.

That summer I met James Droscha (who goes by James Kyle when designing) at the second Protospiel. Our guest of honor was expected to give a presentation back then, so James shared the process he went through to get his game HellRail to the world. In those days, before Kickstarter and POD services, an aspiring designer usually had to make connections with publishers or risk losing a fortune (and a ton of storage space) by self-publishing thousands of copies.

James' method was to slowly build up attention for a game by starting with a low-budget, hand-assembled print run. He printed and cut the cards for the first edition of HellRail himself. The game ended up in Games Magazine's "Games 100", which in turn led to a contract with Mayfair Games, then with Franjos.

I came home that summer excited to try the same thing with some of my designs. I called them Black & White Games and I sold them from Terry Carr's online game store, Fair Play Games. Near the holiday season, What's It to Ya? became the second title I produced following James' low-risk approach.

I remember getting some copies at Office Depot. For that first run, I printed only ten for a little less than $10. The low-risk and low-budget approach was just my style! I hoped the amount of fun in the little box would be perceived as a bargain.


Pictures of that first edition, which sold for $5

2003: Yes, It Really Is Fun

I made another print run of around thirty copies and sold them throughout the year. That will seem like a ridiculously slow pace, but I was always working on other games, learning what worked and hoping eventually one game would catch some attention.

I met Kory Heath and Dave Chalker at Protospiel that year. I especially owe them and Greg Daigle a huge thanks for their encouragement to keep moving forward with What's It to Ya? I used to start with a few blank cards and ask the group to write words on them before I even explained the rules. Kory wrote "Mike Petty" on one of the cards. They all felt awkward ranking me less important than telephones later in the game, but I understood.

About a month later, an up-and-coming reviewer, Tom Vasel, had some nice things to say about the game. Then at the end of the year Bernie DeKoven (author of The Well-Played Game and giver of the Major Fun Award) wrote a short positive review, too. I sold out my second print run at that time. One cherished memory was assembling those final copies with my family. My two children were only three and four, but they enjoyed folding the small boxes I used in that inexpensive edition.

2004: The Games 100

Terry Carr teamed up with me to make the second edition of What's It to Ya? He paid for a slightly better small printing of 250 copies at a local print shop. Scott Starkey (another designer who had joined the growing ranks of Protospiel regulars) provided the art for that edition, and I loved the style he brought to it. One of my favorite pictures from those cards is still my avatar here on BGG.


The second edition, with Scott Starkey's art

The highlight that year didn't come until November. I was overjoyed to learn then that my game had been selected for the "Games 100"! Just like my friend James, I had reached that milestone without paying a fortune. The remainder of our print run sold out quickly after that. I anticipated the next mile marker: Would a publisher show interest in the game?


No image included, but they picked it!

2005-2008: Making, Being Made, and Letting Go

It turns out publishers were not interested. I tried shopping it around for a few months, but eventually Terry and I decided to publish a quality edition ourselves. He graciously put up a considerable sum of money for it, and I did the legwork to bring the production together.

I wish I could say it was a huge success, but I soon found out I wasn't much of a game publisher. We took too long to get started and we lost momentum as the big shipment didn't show up at the Fair Play Games warehouse until late summer 2006.


The 2006 edition of What's It to Ya?

I had a ton of fun promoting that edition with many groups at that time. We were in local papers. I was able to watch many players have interesting conversations as they played, laughing and giving high-fives while pondering big ideas. I made videos about people playing and ran contests in the Fair Play newsletter. I used it to kick off lessons in school about values and priorities.

Watching people play and hearing how they think (or don't think) about values and preferences made me consider my own priorities. In time it changed how I think about life. I've had spiritual discussions with people during the game or I've used it as an example after the fact. Those reflections on what really matters and why have informed my theology.

But as much as I saw its value affirmed time and again, our efforts to promote it ended with less than stellar results. Some of our business and production decisions as well as my written rules hindered sales. I eventually concluded that print run would be the end of What's It to Ya?

Shortly after my decision to let it go, I got a call from Tim Walsh. He had enjoyed a lot of success with mass-market games years earlier and he was working as an agent at the time. He came across my game and contacted me. When we first talked, he told me he felt God brought us together at that time. I had a lot of respect for Tim's work and his faith, so I took that comment seriously. I was excited to see where he could take the game.

Tim was great to work with. Compared to working hard to make something happen, I only had to read his regular email updates. By late 2008, I was offered a contract from Find It Games for publication in North America.

2010-2012: Oh, Really!

They finally released my game in the middle of 2010 as Oh, Really!. My kids, now old enough to appreciate the significance, were excited when the big stack of designer copies arrived. They actually had never played the previous versions, so it was a memorable time for us as we enjoyed the game that day as a family.

I was grateful for their work, but honestly a few of the publisher's decisions about the rules and components left me scratching my head. That was the trade-off for letting someone else do the hard work of publication.

In time, we watched Tim promote the game on a morning news program. My son and I saw it on the shelf in a family bookstore that year, too. Seeing it in a store was a big deal for both of us since all of my other games sold online or through direct sales.

During this time, I made a number of digital resources for the classroom based on the game, and the subject-specific activities and lesson plans based on Oh, Really! were a popular section on my blog.

Though personally satisfying, these highlights didn't equate to significant sales, and the publisher eventually decided it didn't warrant a second printing. It was still a blessing to see that my simple idea had gone quite far. I realized it sometimes continued better without my efforts. I came to appreciate it as the gift that it was.

2016 to Present: It's Still Going

In the middle of 2016, two publishers contacted me about printing a new version of the game. I'm grateful to both of them for reaching out. I hadn't been focused much on game design in recent years and had done absolutely nothing to promote What's It to Ya? or push it to other publishers.

The first surprise email came from Happy Baobab, asking for rights to publish in Asia, then a couple of months later Drawlab Entertainment asked to publish in all other regions.

Happy Baobab's edition (which brought back the original title of What's It to Ya?) was released in late 2017 in Korean with English rules and translations on the cards. They were the first publisher to change my ranking mechanism. The previous editions had players use cards that represent the random words, and the player placed those cards in order from most important to least. Happy Baobab flipped that around, having the player place cards numbered 1-5 next to the word cards to signify relative importance. I had considered something like that many times, but always opted for the tried-and-true method. I agree now their new method is more intuitive.




They also decided not to include (or possibly they completely overlooked) the partnership rules. Because of that, some graphic design choices, and some of the card content, this has not been my favorite edition. I understand it was aimed at a different market, though, and I respect their decisions. They've sold a lot more games than I have!

I appreciated Zee Garcia's positive review of the game, but had to laugh when he said he wasn't familiar with the original game. I wondered if he asked his partner, Tom, about it. Maybe he would have remembered reviewing it fourteen years prior...

And that brings us to the new version coming out in October 2018. I'm really looking forward to Say Whaaat?! because:

• This is my first game officially being released at SPIEL.
• They included the original partnership rules. Yes! (Most people tell me it's their favorite way to play.)
• I love the look. I proofed the rules a couple of months ago, and I've been excited about it ever since. The team at Drawlab Entertainment did a great job!

I'm grateful to see the game is still going. I hope it results in much laughter, amusing thoughts, and fun conversations for those who discover it.

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by W. Eric Martin

As SPIEL '18 gets ever closer — or rather, as I move ever closer to SPIEL '18, it being an event fixed in time whereas I travel through that substance in a predictable and mundane way — I find myself racing to preview as many games as possible. I receive samples of many titles that will be widely available at that show for the first time, and I play as many as I can in the time available to add a bit more information about this game or that to what's already available, especially since feedback from actually playing a game usually provides a better understanding for what it is compared to reading a description or the rulebook — at least I hope that's the case.

Yu Wang's Majolica from Blue Magpie Games sort of made sense after a first (and second) rules reading, which admittedly was undertaken by a Chinese-speaking guest who was presented with the rules upon arrival at my house and ordered to teach us the game. (I've now played the game a second time with English rules from the publisher.)




The basics of Majolica are straightforward: Draft tiles from a central pool, assign them to workshops, complete orders for points. If you've played games, then that won't be new to you. What is new is how the components are put together and how the logistical challenge of managing everything feels like an actual business — at least in one regard.

Each player has four workshops where they are creating tiles, with each workshop having a different condition for when the ovens are fired and tiles delivered to an order. The leftmost workshop needs two sets of three tiles, the next one three sets of two, then two sets of two, and finally one set of four. When a workshop is full, then it "runs" and delivers 1-3 tiles to the order currently assigned to it, after which it ships most or all remaining tiles to the next factory down the line. You can picture yourself being the owner of a chain of tile-firing workshops, and as one batch is completed, you deliver some to an order while restocking another workshop. (I'm not sure why you wouldn't fill the order completely from the tiles in hand, but I suppose you're trying to supply stock to multiple outlets so that you can partially satisfy all available customers instead of frustrating some by having nothing at all. That's how many businesses seem to work, after all: "Yes, you can certainly order that mattress. Just place a hold and down payment on that, and we guarantee we'll have the box spring in stock next week.")

As you draft tiles, you must assign them to a single workshop, and when it's full, it runs, shipping extras to the next one, and if that one is now full with the right combination of goods, it runs as well. As a business owner, you want to see everything humming along, with orders being filled regularly — but your ability to do that depends on whether you can draft the right tiles.

The central board has four copies of four colors of tiles in a 4x4 grid, and on a turn you draft either (1) one tile from an exterior part of the grid and a new order card that you must assign to a workshop, (2) one tile from an exterior part of the grid, with the ability to reassign orders as you wish at your workshops, or (2) all continuous tiles on one exterior edge, which in the picture above would be three tiles from whichever edge you chose. When you take more than one tile, you must place them in the same workshop, but since everyone's dipping into the same pool of raw materials, you can rarely take everything that you want at once.

I wish that I could play more than the two games I've played so far on a review copy from Blue Magpie Games, but other games need attention as well, so I'll pop this write-up in the kiln and make my way to the next workshop to keep going...


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by Chris Marling

I've always enjoyed the "I split, you choose" board game mechanism: One player divides a group of items into smaller sets, but the other players then get to choose one of these sets first. It's a fabulous and underused concept most famously employed in the classic San Marco and more simply in New York Slice (formerly Piece o' Cake) — with games such as Coloretto, Isle of Skye, Castles of Man King Ludwig, and Biblios using a take on the system in their mechanisms.

Of these, I found Biblios most fascinating. One player takes as many cards as there are players (plus one) and they give one card to each player, while setting one on an auction pile for later — but what makes the decision delicious is that you see only one card at a time, so you have to allocate them as they come out, adding a big "press your luck" element to the game (another mechanism I really like). But while I enjoyed my first few plays of Biblios, this is only about half the game — and I didn’t find the other half very compelling. This drafting is followed by an auction phase that just doesn't do it for me.

Don't get me wrong. It's a great and well-respected design, but the overall package just wasn't for me — so as you do when you're a budding game designer, I set out to try to make something that was.




The First Draft (Ho Ho)

I made the first cards for the game in December 2013, with the intention of making a tiny two-player microgame. (Hey, they were cool at the time!) The basic mechanical ideas for the game were in place and haven't changed since: Player 1 draws a card and assigns it to either themselves or their opponent. The next card will go to the other player — but on either pick the player could spend energy (generated by some cards at the end of each round) to draw one extra card, giving them more of a choice. After drafting, the drafter would attack their opponent: wounds vs. defense, plus a (1-3) dice roll. This would go back and forth until one player had lost all of their 25 health and the game was over. A simple use of the excellent Biblios mechanism in a smaller, faster, nastier, and sillier little battle game.

For first testing, I created a 14-card deck. (It was to be a 16-card game for Brett Gilbert's Good Little Games website, with the other two cards being a scoring and a health card.) There were eight weapons and six armors. Each player could have one of each and could never refuse a card drafted; any new card discarded the old one. Weapon strength ranged from 2-8, with armor 1-6 to ensure players would always be going downhill health-wise — although energy could also be spent to heal at the end of your turn. I dubbed the game "War!Drobe" (a title which, pretty unbelievably, would be taken by another game in the following years). The theme was simple: Two wizards each powering an automaton, which they were manipulating through time and space into odd fighting machines. Half the cards were medieval, the other half sci-fi.




The First Hurdles

Having damage and defense on every card was quickly dropped as it was a pain to add up each time while offering nothing of real worth to the game. At the same time, two card slots and just 14 cards made for very little replayability — and every time I played, I was thinking of (and being given by opponents) great ideas for new cards. I instead made the decision to go to three slots: one weapon, one armor, and one "enhancement" — an idea I'd toyed with as an extra list of things you could do on your turn with energy, but which had proved unwieldy in practice. As cards, though, it helped to add loads of cool special powers.

I also abandoned the idea of this being a pure micro game. There were way too many fun ideas to play with, and ideas for extra sets of cards. But what about a microgame that came in two-set decks? The first could be "Medieval and Sci-Fi", but you could also buy "Ninjas and Buccaneers" or "Crusaders and Magicians". I moved to eight-card decks, each of which had three weapons, three armors and two enhancements — and each of which had mechanisms I tried to fit to theme: magicians gained and used more energy, sci-fi items did big damage, crusaders healed well, etc.

Testing Testing Testing...

Other mechanical issues included game duration, deck size, and card balance. Health dropped to 20 (or a 12-point short game) to stop the game overstaying its welcome, while I settled on a three-deck (so 24-card) standard game, or two-deck tactical game in which you'd have a much better idea of what was coming. I also moved away from any thoughts of a microgame as the general gaming population quickly fell out of love with the format (as sales of Empire Engine will sadly testify!). This freed me to add "concentration cubes" (to replace an energy track), a custom die for damage, and player sheets to keep your cards on.




Card balance was an interesting one. In theory it didn't matter much as the game used a shared deck of cards, but many small issues developed in terms of decks clashing with each other in annoying ways. Some deck combinations would lead to way too many concentration cubes or to too few; some would see very slow damage, others ridiculously fast wins. It took a lot of combo plays to ensure they all fell into an acceptable (but still random and fun) range of results over any given game.

The final big change to the system was to do with healing, which was slowing the game down a little too much and adding an extra decision point to every round that felt unnecessary in many situations. I solved this by making healing a last-gasp desperate act you could call upon only if you had five health or less left at the end of your turn. Having this as a late game decision added a bit of extra arc to the game, too.

The Publisher Problem

I took the game to SPIEL in 2015 to show to publishers. While several found the concept intriguing and enjoyed their play, it became clear the bigger publishers weren't looking for a two-player game. I went away and made rules for a three- and then a four-player variant. It was surprisingly easy to up the number of players — a good lesson for anyone who gets stuck in a rut of their idea of a game. Taking on other ideas while occasionally taking a big step back from your game can be hugely useful.

Also, while perfectly playable, the lack of art on the prototype failed to convey the playful feel of the game. This hadn't been an issue with other games I'd demoed as they were more "Euro", and publishers were used to seeing them as drier prototypes! I thought about better ways to present the game and came up with the idea of locking the cards together to make a larger picture. I didn't make the whole game into cards in this way, instead doing example cards to show a publisher how it might look finished.




I hoped this would fire the imagination, without having to spend an awful lot of time, energy, or money creating a bunch of art that would probably never be used. I settled on making the image the actual wizard, simplifying the theme a little in the process. I found some art online which luckily depicted a wizard, a ninja and a Viking in the same style — three of the themes I'd chosen for card decks. I feel they got the idea across image-wise, without me having to do too much extra. A talented graphic design friend at work (thanks, Simos!) helped me with the layout, and I was ready for round two of facing publishers, this time at UK Games Expo in 2016. (Sorry, I would have linked to the original images, but I can't re-find them on Google).

War!Drobe Finds a Home — as Witless Wizards

Unfortunately, UKGE wasn't the best place to meet publishers back then. While many companies had stands, their decision makers were rarely in attendance (with some notable exceptions). However, a productive meeting with LudiCreations saw head honcho Iraklis suggest I contact his friends at Drawlab Entertainment. We met up at SPIEL '16, and the deal was done. After a frustrating 2017 (for both of us) when progress stalled due to reasons beyond our control, Drawlab got into top gear in 2018. Asterman Studio were brought on to do the art and have done a magnificent job.

Drawlab also made some changes to the rules, simplifying a few things but largely keeping the original game intact and changing the theme slightly, for the better I think, while we worked together to add a lot of humor to the card titles. A close-to-finished version was demoed at UK Games Expo 2018, which was followed by a successful Kickstarter campaign a couple of weeks later, and now a five-year process is coming to an end with Witless Wizards set to debut at SPIEL '18.

So that's that — how a marvelous design concept introduced to me by excellent designer Steve Finn was adapted from a serious hand management auction game into a humorous take-that fighting fantasy game.

Chris Marling


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by W. Eric Martin

Martin Nedergaard Andersen's Papering Duel from Korean publishers Mandoo Games and Dazzleedu has a delightfully silly premise: Two roommates disagree over what the wallpaper in their room should look like, so they're competing to determine what the pattern will be.

This game didn't need a theme or story behind it, and you can ignore the story if you wish as the game remains the same, but the addition of this story makes the game more than what it already was. People hook into games through different points of entry, and this flavoring gives you a way to imagine the gameplay beyond simply placing transparent plastic tiles on a board.

I mean, yes, that's what you're doing in the game. On a turn, you place 1-3 of your tiles on the 3x3 grid to create one or more "styles", with a style being a horizontal, vertical, or diagonal pattern in the same color or symbol. If you create three styles on the same turn, you win. If you create zero styles, you lose. If you create one or two styles, then you draw one or two cards from your deck to refill your hand.


Victory!

The next player must eliminate each of the styles you created by covering at least one of the three spaces in it. If they can't do so, then they've given up and acknowledged your wallpapering suggestion as superior to theirs.

When you use the special tiles in the game, each player has tiles that feature a gray square that doesn't contribute either a color or a symbol to the creation of styles. Instead, it emblazons the wall with your personal symbol, whether orthogonal or diagonal, and if the opponent doesn't cover it, then they lose.

I've played Papering Duel seven times on a review copy from Mandoo Games, and the game has a similar feeling to Quadrio, an abstract strategy game I covered in January 2018. The games aren't similar in playing style, but rather in how you can lose in a couple of moves through thoughtless, haphazard play or carry out a tense, tiny battle if you're aware of what the other player is doing and trying to look ahead past the current turn. It's a tight little game that Mandoo should try to license through Pier 1 Imports or some other home-furnishing store because the gameplay is simple enough that you can jump into in a minute, and I can imagine it serving as a nice add-on item for those buying new pillows and a decorative lamp for their home.

(Disclosure: Mandoo Games hired me to edit two rule sets for other games it's releasing in 2018.)

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by W. Eric Martin

• Sand Castle Games is a new California-based game publisher run by Maud and Cyrille Daujean that will debut in 2019 with the Tom Lehmann title Res Arcana, which features engine-building, deck-management, and resource management. As for the setting:

In the four corners of the world, the sky is covered with clouds, the oceans change color, the atmosphere crackles with magic. In the dim light of an alchemical laboratory, on the snowy summit of a sacred mountain, in the depths silent of a corrupt temple, powerful mages prepare for confrontation.

They harvest, handle, and consume the essences that make up the magic of the world to create mysterious artifacts. As they bring out strange creatures from the void, they conquer terrible places of power and invoke gigantic dragons to defeat their opponents!

In Res Arcana, you'll get to do the same...

• German publisher ABACUSSPIELE will debut a new title by Matthew Dunstan and Brett J. Gilbert at SPIEL '18: the draft-based, city-building game City of Rome. What's more, the publisher will have limited quantities on hand at SPIEL '18 of the English-language version of the design from Z-Man Games, which is titled The Great City of Rome — which kind of says something about how those in Germany and the U.S. think about such things. Here's my summary of the rules:

To rebuild the Eternal City, the Roman Emperor summoned the most talented builders of antiquity. Each of them is trying to draft the best city — but talent is not enough. Only those who know how to please the Emperor, cleverly exert their influence, and invest at the right time will succeed in City of Rome.

In more detail, the game lasts fourteen rounds, and in each round, players draft one of the building cards in play and add it to their hand. The drafting order depends on how closely you stand to the emperor. At the start of a round, you reveal a new "action strip" that has three bricks and two cogs in some order, then players take turns placing their figure on one of these five spaces; the closer you are to the emperor, the earlier you draft, but the fewer resources (bricks and cogs) you receive. (With only two players in the game, each player places two figures on the action strip and takes two complete turns each round.)

After drafting, you can take one build action and one produce action. To build, you must pay the cost in bricks — paying two coins for each missing brick — then place the card you're building adjacent to another card of yours already in play. You start with two building cards in play, so you'll have at most sixteen cards at game's end. These cards must fit in a 4x4 square, so plan carefully since you'll want to place some buildings next to other ones to earn the most points and to get the most out of a produce action. Some buildings give you a special action or influence tokens when you build them.

To produce, you must have two cogs — paying one coin for each missing cog — then use the production action of each building in your city once.

Every few rounds, an influence card is revealed, and whoever has the most influence tokens at the end of that round collects the card, then discards their tokens.

At the end of fourteen rounds, players score points for their residential buildings, temples, aqueducts, coins, and influence cards and tokens. whoever has the most points wins!

• U.S. publisher Pandasaurus Games has announced that it will release Arraial — a Nuno Bizarro Sentieiro and Paulo Soledade design that MEBO Games will debut at SPIEL '18 — in the U.S. in Q2 2019.

More and more deals for SPIEL titles are being announced prior to SPIEL itself, which I suppose is one way of ensuring sales for the licensed version. Don't bother carting that game back from Essen now because you can get it stateside from us in the future!

• Another license being picked up is the older — some might even say "classic" — Lords of Vegas from Mike Selinker and James Ernest. Mayfair Games first released Lords of Vegas in 2010, following it with the Lords of Vegas: UP! expansion in 2014, and now Z-Man Games has signed a deal to distribute the remaining inventory of the Mayfair Games' editions of these titles, in addition to developing and releasing the Lords of Vegas: Underworld expansion that Mayfair had teased prior to its demise. Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

I love introducing games to people, but you need to have the right games on hand for this process to succeed. My favorite game is Carl Chudyk's Innovation, but I'm unlikely to whip out Innovation at a casual gathering and coerce folks into building and splaying because it's a thinky game, a focal point for the evening rather than something to play on the side while waiting for burgers to finish on the grill.

One of my go-to games for several years was Dieter Nüßle's Strike, which debuted from Ravensburger in 2012. It's a great game to play at a restaurant, as long as you can keep the dice on the table, and when I brought it to a picnic for high school exchange students, Strike had a crowd around it for hours, with players tag-teaming in and out of games as they ate, played soccer, and hung out with friends who were all heading home to different countries.

Strike is simple. Each player starts with 6-9 dice, and on a turn you must throw a die into the arena. If any die in the arena now shows an X, remove it from play; if any dice show matching numbers, claim those dice and end your turn; if nothing matches, you can end your turn or throw another die in. If you run out of dice, you're out of the game. If the arena is empty at the start of your turn, throw all of your dice into the arena instead of only one. Whoever stays in the game the longest wins.




The goal of Strike is equally simple: Hang out with people, and enjoy moments created by the gameplay. You're not making plans for anything, and you're not building an engine for the future — you're hoping to make crazy shots while watching others (and yourself) get exasperated or surprised when the unexpected happens. I've played Strike with some people who don't bring the same enthusiasm to the game that Manny shown above does, and it falls flat. Some games create an experience all on their own, but others — including Strike — are a facilitator of moments, assisting players in creating memories.

With Strike off the market in the United States and possibly in Europe (although I saw copies for sale at retailers in early 2017 while at the game fair in Cannes), Ravensburger has now released Impact: Battle of Elements, which is largely the same game. The box includes five fewer dice, so now players start with 5-8 dice instead of 6-9, and the box is smaller, although the floor of the arena is roughly the same size as the one in Strike.




The presentation of the game suffers from the smaller size, though, despite being mostly the same. The large golden bowl of Strike — which resembles an arena — creates a focal point for play; the box is a target for the eyes, then you have the target within a target. With Impact, you have only the box and its thin plastic insert, which resembles, well, a box. You lose the feeling of the arena, and with that the feeling of you being a spectator for some kind of dice-y combat.

The gameplay itself remains the same, so again as long as you're also doing your part, the game remains enjoyable. Beyond that, Impact has replaced the pips of the original dice with elemental symbols, and the game includes variant rules in which the starting symbol in the box affects what happens when you collect dice showing the symbol during play: stone makes you stack those claimed dice into a single object, and you'd throw them all in together on a future turn; fire makes everyone race to build a tower, with whoever does so first claiming the matching dice; and so on. I don't know whether this game needed special powers, but they exist for those who want it and easy to avoid for everyone else.


Youtube Video Read more »

by Vladimir Suchy

Which comes first: a game's mechanisms or its theme? In a March 2018 interview, Kuba Šotola opened by asking Katka from Delicious Games and me about the theme of our upcoming release, Underwater Cities. The question started me thinking about theme vs. mechanisms in game design and about what I focus on first. I've come to realize that it really depends on the game — and sometimes they both come first!

The mechanisms are the essence of a Eurogame. As a player, that's what I'm looking for — innovative mechanisms. The theme is less important. For example, when I'm playing my favorite game, Castles of Burgundy, I know I'm building something in Burgundy, but that's about it. Of course I also appreciate games like Amun-Re or Terraforming Mars with mechanisms that nicely tie in with their strong themes.

Even though I play games mostly for their mechanisms, as a designer, I often develop theme and mechanisms simultaneously.

Let's look at Shipyard. I started with the action-selection mechanism — the idea that some actions would be chosen frequently, but you could get paid for choosing actions no one else had used recently. As soon as I had that mechanism outlined, I decided on the theme of shipbuilding, then each individual action was designed around that.

One action gets you smokestacks or sails for moving your ship. (I liked the idea of setting the game in that slice of history when both sailing ships and steamships were viable.) Another action gets you a canal for your shakedown cruise. Another action gets you crew. Everything, except the core mechanism, was designed around that theme.




Theme was integral to 20th Century. I had this idea for an auction game with two different methods of payment, and I knew I wanted to make a game about ecological principles — about the tradeoffs we have made between economic and ecological prosperity. I ended up with a game that has multiple auctions in which you pay with the science or money your economy produces, but you also might have to "pay" by taking on garbage or pollution. The theme worked really well with the mechanism that interested me.

Theme can inspire game design, but you have to be sure it doesn't tie your hands. During development, you might discover that you need to alter a mechanism to make the game better. It's hard to make that change if it goes against the theme. For example, in a historical setting, it could be difficult to explain why the farmer should collect taxes from the nobility, even when you know that mechanically the game needs that rule.

Of course, some themes are more flexible than others. In a fantasy setting, you can find a way to justify anything.

My strongest theme may be in Last Will. You've inherited a nice sum of money from your rich uncle. Whoever can spend it the fastest will get a huge fortune. Some people play the game just for that experience.

The same theme is in the movie Brewster's Millions, which I didn't see until I read the Last Will reviews that mentioned it. I didn't get the theme from the movie. I was actually trying to make an economy-building game in reverse. The idea of a game in which you try to get rid of your resources goes hand-in-hand with the theme of Last Will — and once I had that solid theme, I could build all the mechanisms around it.

Last Will started out as a pure card game, by the way. The worker placement mechanisms came in later.

So in Last Will, theme came first, and the development process was mostly about refining the mechanisms. It's not always that way. Pulsar 2849 started out as a historical game about noble families in a period of coup d'état.

The playtesters' response wasn't as positive as I would have liked, but they agreed that the dice-drafting mechanism was good, so I revised the design. This time the game was set in the Early Middle Ages in Great Britain. The prototype required a lot of material, and I discovered that it would probably be too expensive to produce, so I revised the game again.

The third revision was still built around the idea of choosing stronger or weaker dice and receiving balancing compensation. Most of the supporting mechanisms were inherited from previous versions, but I added a traveling component that inspired my revised theme. Now the game was about English merchants visiting villages.

These revisions took about five years, and finally I had a game good enough to license to Czech Games Edition. They liked it, but their playtesters weren't keen on the medieval setting.





So we made some changes. England became a huge star cluster, the merchants became interstellar energy corporations, and those villages off the beaten path became pulsars. Sören Meding gave the game beautiful futuristic artwork, and we were suddenly in the year 2849.

And it works! Those mechanisms didn't care if they were in medieval England or a 29th Century star cluster, but I don't think the theme feels "pasted on". You know you're building something in Burgundy — I mean, in space.


Testing of Underwater Cities

Underwater Cities is another game I've been working on for a long time. Like Last Will, the game is based on a design idea — worker placement where the available actions are always changing. I played around with lots of mechanisms inspired by this idea, and finally I settled on one in which the actions don't change, but you have the ability to augment them with cards, so an action that might be somewhat weak could become really good if you combine it with the right card from your hand.




For most of the game's development, the cards were the workers, and I was thinking of it as a "card placement" game.

Once I had the core mechanism, I looked for a theme to build around. I liked the idea of building cities under the sea — you don't see a lot of games like that — and that theme led to all the domes and tunnels and kelp farms that you need to support an underwater economy.




I ended up with 220 cards, each unique, each related to the theme of settlement on the wet frontier. Milan Vavroň's artwork has brought the theme to life, and we're coming out with it at SPIEL '18.

Vladimír Suchý
(Diary translated by Jason A. Holt)


Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

Continuing my practice of highlighting SPIEL '18 titles that are only edging their noses on the periphery of most radars, I thought it time to cover Terra Shifter, a co-operative puzzle game from Shou-Fu Chang and Sharp Point Publishing that was *surprise!* available at SPIEL '17 in a booth about as far away as possible from the front doors. (I've already covered Sharp Point's Game of Suspicion, a micro-deduction game also available at SPIEL '17, in this space, so this video relieves one tiny sliver of obligation from my shoulders.)

Terra Shifter challenges 1-4 players to transform the Earth — whether by rotating a tile, flipping a tile, or shifting a row or column to move one tile to the other end of a line — in order to complete one of the personal missions held by the active player. Missions will be something like having exactly five penguins in a snow terrain or having two sets of exactly four sheep in different grasslands. If this player completes a mission, then they can also complete one of the four goals that need to be fulfilled in order to win the game. If you can't complete a mission in the five actions available on your turn, then you burn mission cards from your hand and the deck — and if you can't draw a mission card when you need to, you lose.




While marketed as a co-operative game, Terra Shifter doesn't fit the "fighting arm-in-arm against a common foe" model of most co-operative games because it's difficult for players to team up or chain their actions together. You do your thing, then I do my thing, and so on. Maybe we'll be able to knock out a goal together, but it's hard to work in concert since I don't know what your missions are. I suppose that we could all reveal our missions, but at that point why are we bothering to play together since we've eliminated any need for other players?

Just play the game as a solitaire challenge, and spend as much time as you want puzzling over how to do things without forcing others to sit around waiting for you — and when you're ready for it, start adding disasters to the mix to up the difficulty level.


Youtube Video Read more »

Publisher: Aegis Studios

Welcome to Season 2 Episode 20 of Calculated Risks, in which we play Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition!

IN THIS EPISODE: Gurius must deal with being left alone on Athas while Kressemar and Anu face the wrath of Alessa...again.

Join the Calculated Risks: An Eberron Adventure Facebook Fan Group

Listen to Calculated Risks: An Eberron Adventure on iTunes, Spotify, Anchor & more!

Dungeon Tales #2 is NOW AVAILABLE at https://www.dmsguild.com/product/249537/Dungeon-Tales-2

Submit YOUR adventures to newdungeonadventures at gmail dot com for a chance at inclusion in Dungeon Tales #3! LGBTQ, POC, Female, Non-binary creators WANTED!

New from Bob at the DMsGuild!
Mordenkainen's Lost Notebook: https://www.dmsguild.com/product/252689/Mordenkainens-Lost-Notebook
Spells from Kara-Tur 2: https://www.dmsguild.com/product/252856/Spells-from-KaraTur-2

New From Travis:
DMs Guild

The Haunt 2: https://www.dmsguild.com/product/253875/The-Haunt-2

Haunt 2 Fantasy Grounds: https://www.dmsguild.com/product/254477/The-Haunt-2-Fantasy-Grounds

The Lady of Trollskull Priory: https://www.dmsguild.com/product/252105/The-Lady-of-Trollskull-Priory

Yearning to Breathe Free Fantasy Grounds: https://www.dmsguild.com/product/253424/Yearning-to-Breathe-Free-Fantasy-Grounds

Pugmire Canis Minor:
The Pugmire System Guide for OGL 5E Creators: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/252746/The-Pugmire-System-Guide-For-OGL-5E-Creators
Bizarre Bestiary: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/251279/Bizarre-Bestiary

Scarred Lands 5e Slarecian Vault
Blood & Ink: Tattoo Magic https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/250986/Blood--Ink-Tattoo-Magic

Wracklings: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/251509/Wracklings

Pugmire Canis Minor
Bizarre Bestiary https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/251279/Bizarre-Bestiary

EBERRON at the DMsGuild!

Gurius's Guide to Stormreach: https://www.dmsguild.com/product/250064/Guriuss-Guide-to-Stormreach

Magical Things of Eberron: http://www.dmsguild.com/product/248899/Magical-Things-of-Eberron

Spells & Formulae of Eberron: http://www.dmsguild.com/product/249479/Spells--Formulae-of-Eberron

Wandslinger's Guide for Eberron: http://www.dmsguild.com/product/248632/The-Wandslingers-Guide-for-Eberron

Wayfinder's Guide to Eberron https://www.dmsguild.com/product/247882/Wayfinders-Guide-to-Eberron-5e

TWITCH CHANNEL NOTES:
On Monday, October 22nd at 2 PM CST we return to Scarn for Scarred Lands: Myths and Matchmakers!

On Monday, October 22nd at 5 PM CST we speak with Alan Tucker on the DMs Guildhall https://www.dmsguild.com/browse.php?author=Alan%Tucker

EXTREME DROWESS: Roja's Quest part 4 premieres Wednesday, October 24th at 8 PM CST!

We return to Eberron on Friday, October 26th at 10 AM CST for Calculated Risks: An Eberron Adventure!

Starring: Alina Popescu, Mihai Suteu, R.P. Davis

Gamemaster: Travis Legge
Associate Producer: Corey Frang
Executive Producer: Steve Heiden

If you prefer video, you can watch the episode on YouTube below! Please be sure to like, comment, share & subscribe!

This episode is set as Pay What You Want. If you like what you hear, and would like to help us make more of these, please consider dropping a few coins (or dollars) into purchasing this episode. You can also support future episodes of this show while getting sneak peeks and other perks by supporting Travis Legge on Patreon!

Price: $0.00 Read more »

Publisher: Studio 101

Раздаточный материал для игры Кориолис.

Price: $0.00 Read more »

Publisher: Aegis Studios

Welcome to EPISODE 19 of EXTREME DROWESS: An All-Girl All-Drow Adventure Through the Underdark for Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition!

IN THIS EPISODE: The ladies deal with the aftermath of their shared vision as they try to make their way back to the Underdark.

You can now get EXTREME DROWESS as a podcast on iTunes, Spotify, Anchor, and everywhere you download quality podcasts!

Starring:
VictoriBelle as Akroma Oros, Dragon-Blooded Sorcerer
Milena Deneno as Liahana Yaeldrin, Nature domain Cleric of Lolth
Rachel Judd as Rauvaena Dyrr, Paladin of Lolth
Rosa Lita as Roja the Destroyer
Sarah Scharnweber as Xilmys Netyoive

Dungeon Master: Travis Legge

TWITCH CHANNEL NOTES:

We will return to Eberron for Calculated Risks: an Eberron Adventure on Friday, Oct 19th at 10 AM CST! Join the facebook fan group!

We will be back in Scarn Monday, Oct 22nd at 2 PM CST for Scarred Lands: Myths and Matchmakers! Follow the show on Facebook!

Monday Oct 22nd at 5 PM CST we will be in the DMs Guildhall with Alan Tucker https://www.dmsguild.com/browse.php?x=0&y=0&author=Alan%Tucker

EXTREME DROWESS returns Wednesday, Oct 17th at 8 PM CST! Like the Official Facebook page!
FROM TRAVIS:
Pick up Dungeon Tales #2 at https://www.dmsguild.com/product/249537/Dungeon-Tales-2

The Haunt 2: https://www.dmsguild.com/product/253875/The-Haunt-2

The Lady of Trollskull Priory: https://www.dmsguild.com/product/252105/The-Lady-of-Trollskull-Priory

Storytellers Vault (Mage)
http://www.storytellersvault.com/product/172945/Truth-Beyond-Paradox
http://www.storytellersvault.com/product/249211/Razors-and-Thunderbolts-The-Ksirafai

Support this show and get exclusive content at Travis Legge's Patreon

Pick up Travis's RPG work at DMs Guild: http://www.dmsguild.com/browse.php?author=Travis%Legge
and DriveThruRPG: /browse/pub/338/Aegis-Studios

Join us LIVE on Twitch every other Wednesday at 8 PM CST!

This episode is set as Pay What You Want. If you like what you hear, and would like to help us make more of these, please consider dropping a few coins (or dollars) into purchasing this episode. You can also support future episodes of this show while getting sneak peeks and other perks by supporting Travis Legge on Patreon!

Price: $0.00 Read more »

Publisher: Studio 101

Бланк заданий для игры «Кориолис».

Price: $0.00 Read more »

Publisher: Aegis Studios

Welcome to EPISODE 18 of EXTREME DROWESS: An All-Girl All-Drow Adventure Through the Underdark for Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition!

IN THIS EPISODE: Continuing the story...Roja has abandoned the party to try and overcome her fears and come to grips with the traumas she faced in the Shadowfell. In the process she stumbles upon a new adventure.

You can now get EXTREME DROWESS as a podcast on iTunes, Spotify, Anchor, and everywhere you download quality podcasts!

Starring:
VictoriBelle as Akroma Oros, Dragon-Blooded Sorcerer
Milena Deneno as Liahana Yaeldrin, Nature domain Cleric of Lolth
Rachel Judd as Rauvaena Dyrr, Paladin of Lolth
Rosa Lita as Roja the Destroyer
Sarah Scharnweber as Xilmys Netyoive

Dungeon Master: Travis Legge

FROM TRAVIS:

Dungeon Tales #2 is NOW AVAILABLE at https://www.dmsguild.com/product/249537/Dungeon-Tales-2

Yearning to Breathe Free is NOW AVAILABLE at http://www.dmsguild.com/product/244598/Yearning-to-Breathe-Free

Support this show and get exclusive content at Travis Legge's Patreon

Pick up Travis's RPG work at DMs Guild: http://www.dmsguild.com/browse.php?author=Travis%20Legge
and DriveThruRPG: /browse/pub/338/Aegis-Studios

Join us LIVE on Twitch every other Wednesday at 8 PM CST!

This episode is set as Pay What You Want. If you like what you hear, and would like to help us make more of these, please consider dropping a few coins (or dollars) into purchasing this episode. You can also support future episodes of this show while getting sneak peeks and other perks by supporting Travis Legge on Patreon!

Price: $0.00 Read more »

Publisher: Aegis Studios

Welcome to EPISODE 17 of EXTREME DROWESS: An All-Girl All-Drow Adventure Through the Underdark for Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition!

IN THIS EPISODE: Continuing the story...Roja has abandoned the party to try and overcome her fears and come to grips with the traumas she faced in the Shadowfell. In the process she stumbles upon a new adventure.

You can now get EXTREME DROWESS as a podcast on iTunes, Spotify, Anchor, and everywhere you download quality podcasts!

Starring:
VictoriBelle as Akroma Oros, Dragon-Blooded Sorcerer
Milena Deneno as Liahana Yaeldrin, Nature domain Cleric of Lolth
Rachel Judd as Rauvaena Dyrr, Paladin of Lolth
Rosa Lita as Roja the Destroyer
Sarah Scharnweber as Xilmys Netyoive

Dungeon Master: Travis Legge

FROM TRAVIS:

Dungeon Tales #2 is NOW AVAILABLE at https://www.dmsguild.com/product/249537/Dungeon-Tales-2

Yearning to Breathe Free is NOW AVAILABLE at http://www.dmsguild.com/product/244598/Yearning-to-Breathe-Free

Support this show and get exclusive content at Travis Legge's Patreon

Pick up Travis's RPG work at DMs Guild: http://www.dmsguild.com/browse.php?author=Travis%20Legge
and DriveThruRPG: /browse/pub/338/Aegis-Studios

Join us LIVE on Twitch every other Wednesday at 8 PM CST!

This episode is set as Pay What You Want. If you like what you hear, and would like to help us make more of these, please consider dropping a few coins (or dollars) into purchasing this episode. You can also support future episodes of this show while getting sneak peeks and other perks by supporting Travis Legge on Patreon!

Price: $0.00 Read more »

Publisher: Studio 101

Бланк персонажей ведущего для игры «Кориолис».

Price: $0.00 Read more »

Publisher: Aegis Studios

Welcome to EPISODE 16 of EXTREME DROWESS: An All-Girl All-Drow Adventure Through the Underdark for Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition!

IN THIS EPISODE: Akroma, Liahana, and Rauvaena learn the truth about Akroma's new weapon, and its connection to Vizeran.

You can now get EXTREME DROWESS as a podcast on iTunes, Spotify, Anchor, and everywhere you download quality podcasts!

Starring:
VictoriBelle as Akroma Oros, Dragon-Blooded Sorcerer
Milena Deneno as Liahana Yaeldrin, Nature domain Cleric of Lolth
Rachel Judd as Rauvaena Dyrr, Paladin of Lolth
Rosa Lita as Roja the Destroyer
Sarah Scharnweber as Xilmys Netyoive

Dungeon Master: Travis Legge

FROM TRAVIS:

Dungeon Tales #2 is NOW AVAILABLE at https://www.dmsguild.com/product/249537/Dungeon-Tales-2

Yearning to Breathe Free is NOW AVAILABLE at http://www.dmsguild.com/product/244598/Yearning-to-Breathe-Free

Support this show and get exclusive content at Travis Legge's Patreon

Pick up Travis's RPG work at DMs Guild: http://www.dmsguild.com/browse.php?author=Travis%20Legge
and DriveThruRPG: /browse/pub/338/Aegis-Studios

Join us LIVE on Twitch every other Wednesday at 8 PM CST!

This episode is set as Pay What You Want. If you like what you hear, and would like to help us make more of these, please consider dropping a few coins (or dollars) into purchasing this episode. You can also support future episodes of this show while getting sneak peeks and other perks by supporting Travis Legge on Patreon!

Price: $0.00 Read more »

Publisher: Studio 101

Бланк системы для игры «Кориолис».

Price: $0.00 Read more »

It is fair to say that I have run a number of campaigns. Some epic, some pretty good, and plenty that were meh or worse. Over time, I have gotten a good feel about if a campaign has what it takes to be worthwhile or not, but it takes a few sessions to be sure. Knowing that, I have made it a practice not to put too much detail or effort into an early campaign until I am sure that it is going somewhere.

The 50 Page Campaign

I did not always follow the advice above. There was a time when I would spend quite a bit of time working on campaign ideas, settings, plots, NPC’s, etc in order to prep for a new campaign. Some time back, at the turn of the century, I was setting up to run a Mutants & Masterminds campaign. I got really into creating this alternative history for the world, deriving all the changes in modern history and culture with the arrival of superheroes during World War II.

As settings go, it was easily one of my best ones, and it culminated with a 50-page alternative history that explained the whole setting. The campaign lasted about 4 sessions before the players lost interest. Truthfully the setting had some issues. It was plenty realistic…too realistic.

The point is that I spent way more hours working on the setting/campaign than getting to play the actual campaign. That for me was rock bottom. After that, I swore off investing too much in campaign prep.

The Campaign Prep Tightrope

There is a problem with not investing in campaign prep, and that is that the game may not be interesting enough to keep running unless you do some prep, and that by doing none you may have committed your game to failure. So you have to do some prep to make sure the game takes off, but not so much that if it fails you will regret the time spent. It’s a tightrope.

Depending on the game you play, what you need to prep for a campaign is going to differ. Some RPG’s — like many Powered by the Apocalypse games — do enough initial prep that just running the first session generates enough material to get going. Other games are not that helpful, and you wind up having to do some work to have enough to get the game started.

The Rule of Four Sessions

I have a rule about campaigns. I give them four sessions (defined as the time we sit down to play a game) before I ask my players if the game is worth continuing. Four sessions gives you a reasonable time to understand the mechanics, the setting, etc. Four sessions also gives the players enough time to figure out if their characters work, need tuning, etc.

Here is the thing. I don’t save limping campaigns, I humanely put them down. Either my players are positive and want to keep playing, or I take the next book off the massive stack of unplayed games I have collected via Kickstarter, and we play something else. A’s are passing in this class.

Just Enough Campaign Prep

Now we are getting somewhere. Knowing that in four sessions the fate of the game will be decided, your prep should be scaled appropriately. What does that mean? Here are a few tips:

• Avoid deep conspiracies and plots. Those are a lot of work and need more than 4 sessions to complete. If the game takes off, you can build one of those starting in session 5.
• Be evocative and vague. When you name and describe things, make sure that you are being evocative enough to capture the players’ attention, but at the same time be vague so that you don’t have to invest time in creating backstory. For instance: The God of Smiling Retribution.
• Run a one-shot. Depending on how much material you can get through in four sessions, you may not need more than a one-shot (defined as a single story; start, middle, and end) to play through all your sessions. In many cases published material winds up being able to fill that time.

What If It Takes Off?

So after the fourth session, everyone is on board. Now is the time to ramp up your campaign prep, and get this campaign into full gear. Here are a few ways to make that happen:

• Build an Arc. Plan out a multi-session story arc to be the first arc of the campaign.
• Add depth to a few NPCs. Based on the NPCs that the players took interest in during the first four sessions, add some backstory and motivations to them.
• Build your villains. Did the opposition in the first four sessions survive? If so, its time to get them ready for a campaign. Figure out who they work for, what other plans they have, and who works for them. If they did not survive, who is going to miss them and want revenge?
• Retcon. If you made something in the first four sessions and your game survives, then you can retcon what that meant to the greater campaign world.

Know When To Hold ‘Em…Know When To Fold ‘Em

Starting a campaign can take some work, but don’t make it too much work for yourself until you know you have something good going on. A solid four sessions will let you know if you have a campaign or if you have been playing a slow one-shot. Make sure you prep enough to make the game interesting but no so much that you will regret if the game does not take off. Likewise, once a game takes off, dive in and build out that awesome campaign you envision.

What about you? Have you ever over-prepped on a campaign? Do you have a four-session rule? How do you know when a campaign is a hero or a zero?

Read more »

Join Ang, Camdon, and Taylor for a discussion about Taylor’s recent Gnome Stew article “Skipping Stones: RPGs Without Conflict.” They may be exploring the idea of games that can solve problems without violence, but will they be able to non-violently avoid the stew?

So you may be expecting this to be another one of those articles going on at length about how much smarter RPG nerds are than other people. It’s not that. But we do have an article that disagrees with that position in our archives if you’d like to read it. It doesn’t quite predate Unpopular Opinion Puffin, which is a shame because it would have made a stellar example of the meme and that would be a good excuse why we didn’t include it.

So that aside, where the hell am I headed instead? Well, here’s a common rule of thumb for Dungeons & Dragons or any RPG that shares its 3d6 stat generation (or RPGs that have a similar range of stats): Your character’s IQ is equal to their INT score times ten. In fact, Gary is said to have repeatedly endorsed this interpretation. This came up on a discussion board I’m part of recently and I had a minor epiphany I’d like to share here (along with some math). While it may be valid to say: “Your INT score times ten is equal to the approximate real world IQ equivalent to their mental capacity”, it is absolutely not valid to say “Your character’s game world IQ is equal to their INT times ten.” Minor difference, but to me, the fun part is why this is clearly the case.

The explanation starts with something called the Flynn Effect. Very loosely, this effect says that aggregate results on IQ tests change, sometimes dramatically, over time. But why then do IQ scores stay in the same range and are interpreted the same all the time? In order for IQ scores to be useful, they have to be standardized even over time so they are routinely normalized so that recorded IQs at a given time follow a normal distribution with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15.

Which of course means that after converting a 3d6 stat score which has mean 10.5 and standard deviation of square root(35/4)* to an in game world IQ score, INT 10 would not be an IQ of 100. INT 10.5 would be an IQ of 100. Similarly, shifting by a stat point would not change your IQ 10 points. It would change it by 15/square root(35/4) or about 5.1 points.

Now, of course different roll methods will result in different conversions but surprisingly enough PC rolling methods aren’t really of interest. In most campaign worlds if we include both assumed and explicit instances generic NPCs will so outweigh PCs and NPCs of interest that the game world’s “IQ distribution” will be based entirely on generic NPC INT scores. This means that for most common 3d6 stat systems, in world IQ scores would be based off of a 3d6 roll. Of course the message board where this came up was a 1e message board, which often used three “averaging dice” for generic NPC scores. These are six sided dice with faces 2,3,3,4,4,5. Those dice create a less bell shaped curve with the same mean of 10.5 but a standard deviation of square root(11/4). So INT 10.5 would still be IQ of 100, and shifting by a stat point changes your game world IQ by 15/square root(11/4) or about 9 points. Which is pretty darn close to Gary’s rule of thumb after all.

One last note: All adding a bonus or a penalty to a stat does is shift the distribution over by that much. So if you’re looking at a +2 INT race, just add +2 to the mean score and keep the standard deviation the same. So for the below table, you’d just add 2 to every value in the INT column.

INT Score	3d6 game world IQ	3 averaging dice game world IQ
1	52	14
2	57	23
3	62	32
4	67	41
5	72	50
6	77	59
7	82	68
8	87	77
9	92	86
10	97	95
10.5	100	100
11	103	105
12	108	114
13	113	123
14	118	132
15	123	141
16	128	150
17	133	159
18	138	168
19	143	177
20	148	186

 

*Variance of a single d6 is 35/12. Since the 3d6 are independent of one another, the variance of the three of them added is 3* 35/12 or 35/4. Standard deviation is of course square root of variance.

** Variance for a single averaging die is 11/12. Independent, so variance for 3 is 11/4. Standard Deviation is then square root(11/4)

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The drow have become a fixture in Dungeons and Dragons, and that brings a lot of baggage to the game, since they live squarely at the corner of “a lot of players like even sentient, free willed beings to be born evil so it’s okay to kill them” and “hey, this thing that was born evil looks a lot like a human being and also happens to have dark skin.” Over the years, there have been several attempts to reconcile this concept, but those attempts just seem to multiply the awkward tropes associated with drow, oddly, without decreasing the overall appeal of them as an element of the game.

Given that most of this baggage is associated with a species that is unique to Dungeons and Dragons, it’s interesting that a game that addresses the politics of occupation and occupiers controlling the narrative of a culture, utilizing elves and drow as examples, comes from a game that isn’t derived from any version of the d20 SRD. In this review, we’re going to look at the game Spire, a unique RPG system that explores what life is like in a drow city occupied by elves, and to what ends your drow will go to make a lasting change to their home. Spire successfully funded on Kickstarter last August and went on sale in March of this year.

The Construction of the Spire

This review is based on the PDF version of the product. The PDF is 220 pages in length, with about five pages of thanks and the names of Kickstarter backers, a character sheet, and a two-page index.

Major sections of the book have full page artwork, which is color line art in washed out colors, highlighting the tone of the work. The artwork consists of bold black lines, and splashes of color are more representative of the emotional impact of the scene being presented than a realistic use of lighting or colors.

Headers are underlined in red, with blue sub-headers and dark grey sidebars. All of this is on blue pages with a light background image of concentric circles. It is a visually striking presentation that helps to convey the tone of the stories the game is trying to tell, but the easily seen headers and sidebars do an excellent job of breaking up the information presented into logical divisions.

Welcome to Spire and The World of Spire

The first image you see in this section is an amazing image of the titular city of Spire with an overlay graphic showing the relationships of the neighborhoods to one another. Welcome to Spire, the first section of the book, gives a high-level pitch about the tone of the game, the dice used, and paragraphs on what it means to be a player and a GM. If you are wondering if this is the kind of RPG that has a “what is an RPG” section, it does, but it’s contained on two pages and interspersed with discussions of tone and expectations for the setting.

The World of Spire section describes the broad status quo of the world. If you already know that drow are elves that live underground, dislike sunlight, and have an affinity for spiders, none of that is subverted. After that, just about everything else is. The core concept is that the players are portraying drow characters that are members of The Ministry, a secret cult/revolutionary organization, trying to reclaim Spire from the Aelfir (high elf) oppressors.

The aelfir can’t feel sadness and may not feel empathy either. According to the aelfir, the drow were once aelfir who were cursed for their evil ways and forced to flee from the sun, although there are drow that believe that drow have always been the way they are now, no curse involved. Spire is a huge, mysterious tower like city, that had plenty of space within it to shield those living in it from the sun.

Humans also figure into the story, as a mercenary element crazy enough to dig around ancient cities that predate the modern age, reverse engineering arcane medical procedures, steam-powered devices, and firearms.

There are sidebars that discuss lands beyond Spire, Drow Traditions, and Aelfir Traditions, and while there is a lot more lore coming, this relatively short section already showcases that the game is walking a tight line between recognizable and subverted tropes.

The Rules, Skills and Domains, Equipment, and Bonds

The next sections of the book are The Rules, Skills and Domains, Equipment, and Bonds. While these are all distinct sections, the unified way in which these elements work with one another makes these sections feel like more of an extended explanation of the game.

Characters roll a d10 to resolve an action. If they have a skill that pertains to the roll, they can add a d10. If they have a domain—an area of expertise where they are comfortable operating—that applies to the roll, they can add another d10. Sometimes equipment, circumstances, or character abilities will allow the character to roll with mastery, adding another d10. Since mastery can only be applied once per action, most die rolls will cap at four dice, although some character abilities play with this cap.

More difficult tasks remove a die from the die pool, so that four dice pool, against a difficulty 2 task, only allows the character to roll two dice. The highest die resolves whether the action is a critical failure, a failure, a success at a cost, a success, or a critical success.

Failure usually results in stress, which is tracked under five main resistances (some characters might also have an armor resistance added to the list as well):

• Blood (Physical health)
• Mind (Mental well-being)
• Silver (Wealth and resources)
• Shadow (Ability to operate secretly)
• Reputation (Social standing)

The stress taken will vary depending on the stakes of the initial action, and might be generated with a d3, d6, or a d8. As soon as a character takes stress, they roll for fallout, which has minor, moderate, and severe levels depending on the total amount of stress the character has taken.

What this means is that some failures don’t have immediate consequences, but every failure starts to add up. It also means that the rules for taking a hit to your personal funds are the same as taking a blow to the body in combat, although the fallout, when it happens, will be different.

Different character types have different actions that allow them to remove stress when they take those actions, which reinforce the theme of that character type. The world makes more sense to a vigilante that can bring transgressors to justice, and someone well versed in commerce is going to set things right by cutting some deals.

Bonds work the same way as resistances, but they have their own list of fallout, and a character doesn’t check for fallout as often as they do for their regular resistances. Most equipment has something it’s very good at doing (which might allow a roll with mastery), and something it’s not suited for (which increases the difficulty). Weapons and armors have their own tags, which have special effects when rolling a 1 or a 10, or allowing stress to be rolled multiple times, keeping the best or worst result.

Characters and Combat

The next sections of the book cover characters and combat. Character creation consists of choosing a durance, a class, and picking a few starting abilities and equipment.

The durance is a period of indentured servitude that the drow serve under the aelfir to “repay” them for what the aelfir contribute to society. Depending on the durance selected, your character might gain more skills, or special boxes they can add to their resistance that doesn’t count against their normal stress.

The character classes available in the core rules are the following:

• Azurite (A well connected mercantile priest)
• Bound (A vigilante with items that have minor gods dwelling in them, boosting their power)
• Carrion-Priest (Death worshippers with pet hyenas)
• Firebrand (True believer revolutionaries)
• Idol (Famous, well-regarded artists)
• Knight (A member of a once proud martial organization that now operates like a gang)
• Lajhan (A priest of the moon goddess of the drow)
• Masked (A drow that learned subterfuge and espionage while serving under the aelfir)
• Midwife (A drow that is part spider and protects the young and the future of drow society)
• Vermission Sage (A drow sage that has learned secrets of the city’s extradimensional spaces)

Several of the class abilities grant the character the ability to use magic. Magic in this setting always has a price, and often spells will cause a character to mark stress, usually in a manner that matches the tenor of the religion and the type of spell being cast. A character using their own pain to fuel a spell might take blood stress, while someone sacrificing valuable items may take silver stress, and some spells might require more than one type of stress to be taken.

Each character class has a list of Low, Medium, and High advances, and there is a list of extra advances based on narrative choices the character has made in game. For example, joining the city guard allows for advances other characters may not be able to access, as does getting infected with a magical blood disease that is trying to bring an extra-dimensional being into the world.

Advances are earned by making some kind of change to the city. Small changes earn low advances, moderate changes earn a medium advance, and severe and potentially irreversible changes result in high advances. Characters are expected to gain low advances often, with the other advances gained at the end of major, long term objectives.

Combat is handled as a conversation, a convention that shouldn’t be too difficult for players accustomed to Powered by the Apocalypse or similar games, but for gamers from a more traditional background, this might be a trickier adjustment. Unlike most of those games, however, Spire suggests that you may want to just ask for an action and then move to the next player at the table, unless there is a logical follow up action that would make sense to resolve before moving to the next player and asking them what they are planning.

Districts

There are multiple chapters detailing the districts of the city, and they comprise a large portion of the book. In addition to giving locations, the various sections include example NPCs, organizations, and sidebars that call out more of the setting or potential adventure hooks.

The districts covered in this chapter are:

• Districts and Factions of Academia
• Districts and Factions of Commerce
• Districts and Factions of Crime
• Districts and Factions of High Society
• Districts and Factions of Low Society
• Districts and Factions of the Occult
• Districts and Factions of Order
• Districts and Factions of Religion

The details on the various characters operating in the different districts reveal a great deal of depth about the setting in an almost incidental, yet memorable way. You find out that some of the aelfir don’t agree with the oppressive ways of their kin, that gnolls, who are portrayed by almost everyone else in the setting as savages, are given to being inquisitive and intellectual, but for various reasons still cultivate their savage reputation. There are intelligent corvids the size of drow, and floating sky whales, and a failed interdimensional sub-way system that may end up causing everything to collapse into an alternate dimension.

There is an amazing depth of setting lore touched upon in these chapters, almost always in a way that makes you want to use that lore at the table. Each district has several easy to grasp plot hooks that almost write themselves if the PCs only wander into the district.

Running the Game

The earlier sections of the book make it clear that there can be several difficult topics in the game. It’s based on resisting an oppressive force, and characters are assumed to be members of a revolutionary organization that can easily fall into terrorist tactics. Several of the character types are borderline nihilistic. This tone is addressed in this section, and right at the beginning of the chapter there are discussions about lines and veils and the X Card, as well as the importance of checking in with players.

There is also discussion about turning the dials up and down in the game. While characters may always have to make hard choices to fight for a better future, they may attempt to be more heroic or at least compassionate about their actions. GMs are instructed to consider how evil, alien, or just out of touch they want their aelfir to be.

There are several places where expectations are broken into different stages, such as the usual progression of a story arc, or the questions you should ask when designing a villain. I especially like the sidebar that details what kind of story elements you might expect to be introduced if players pick certain character classes.

Appendices

There are various appendices in the book detailing new gods, random items and events, a glossary of city slang and terminology, ancient cities that humans have found and what they salvaged from them, antagonists, suggested media, and the best appendix of all, goats native to Spire.

Much like the information in the district chapters, there is a lot of implied setting detail on the random lists, in what special words exist in the setting, and the fact that there are very specific, special goats in the city (some of them are just bursting in arcane energies and are great to sacrifice, and others are really big and probably not good eating).

The section on new gods also provides advances for followers of those gods, allowing for more customization for players that want to go that route. Antagonist don’t provide specific stats (most NPCs just have a set amount of stress they can absorb before being removed from the scene), but there are random tables to see what other factions might get involved in a mission when the PCs are operating on the streets or effecting city level change.

Side Note—Introductory Adventures

I am a huge fan of introductory adventures in core rulebooks. I can’t say that I’m always likely to run them, but I think just seeing the structure of an adventure, as laid out by the game’s creators, often shows a lot about how the game should run.

Spire doesn’t contain an introductory adventure, but there are several products referred to as “campaign frames” available as “pay what you want” digital products at the One Book Shelf sites. The titles currently available are Kings of Silver, Blood and Dust, and Eidolon Sky.

Revolution!

 The lore is compelling and delivered in gameable sized chunks that make it easy to digest. 

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There is a ton of lore in this book that is just familiar enough to feel comfortable, and then quickly subverts that comfort zone to make the setting its own unique place. The lore is compelling and delivered in gameable sized chunks that make it easy to digest. The mechanics are new and engaging, but, like the lore involved, the mechanics feel just familiar enough, until they go their own directions. It can be a huge boon to be able to introduce a system where everything, from combat to social climbing to buying and selling, can be introduced in a unified system.

Counter-Insurgency

The book has a well-placed and well-written safety section, but topics like cannibalism, terrorism, and oppression may override the wondrous weirdness of potentially living cities, sky whales, and god powered ropes. While the text does a great job of breaking down elements that might be introduced when different character classes are in play, I think a little more discussion of what classes work best together to create different campaign frames may have been helpful as well.

Strongly Recommended—This product is exceptional, and may contain content that would interest you even if the game or genre covered is outside of your normal interests.

I think if you have even a passing interest in fantasy settings, the information in this book is going to make for a solid purchase, even if you never use the ruleset. I would never advocate for someone to push themselves into territory where they feel unsafe, but if the themes discussed in this review are within your tolerance, exploring the setting is going to be a joy.

Additionally, the mechanics of stress and fallout are both familiar and combined in a new and exciting fashion, and I think that even people that are a little burned out on fantasy may want to keep an eye on these mechanics and how they managed to promote and resolve story elements.

What are some of the most refreshing fantasy games that you have encountered? What games managed to redefine genres for you? Are you a fan of games that find a way to resolve very different actions in a unified fashion? Let us know below! We would love to hear from you.

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The night we started back in on our Tales from the Loop game was nearly breathless with excitement. We’d taken about a six month break and played another truly epic medium size campaign, but this game had stolen our imaginations for months. We wanted to know what had happened to Harrison, Stacie, Mags, Ivanka, and Shoya in the intervening ten years. We wanted to know what the next mystery would be. We were chomping at the bit.

Life is life, though.

Between our first campaign and this continuation, circumstances had changed for some of our group. Dear friends had to call it and a new friend had joined in. This kind of shuffle is inevitable as we get older — we have other priorities, other responsibilities and claims on our time. Life doesn’t proceed smoothly as we might wish for ourselves or the people we care about and sometimes gaming is the casualty. So, as we gathered to set up the next chapter, we found ourselves down two players and up one, facing the age old dilemma: how do we integrate this new player into our campaign? It’s time to riff off the old recipe and make something similar, with some new flavors. 

There are a number of key items to consider:

• Relationships – Drop the new player in with relationships to the existing party
• Player prior knowledge – How will you deal with them not knowing things in-game?
• Goals – Align the new character’s goals with the party’s goals
• Investment – Get the player invested in the game quickly

Relationships

The primary way to embed a new character in your game is by immediately having relationships with your long standing characters. The newcomer needs to have a minimum of one relationship to someone in the party that has the same level of commitment as the other characters do to each other. How you create this will depend on how you’re adding this person in to the game — are you coming back to a game that you’re picking back up, where you can have a session zero again? Are you dropping them in cold mid arc? Consider if there’s no pause taking a little time as a group to establish these relationships. A character made in a vacuum will have no reason to relate to the others.  A single ingredient off to the side is not part of the stew. Marry the flavors. 

How you play with relationships will vary what kind of depth you need to make the new character feel like they have interaction options and aren’t blocked out of role playing in scenes. At my game table, we routinely play with friendships, romances, and rivalries, so when it came to integrating the new player we negotiated doing both with him: Chaz is Stacie’s fiance, which immediately made him Harrison’s rival. He is committed to being in this story because Stacie’s not going to go off without him and he’s not going to leave her (at least not without some seriously good drama — I guess we’ll find out!).

Player Knowledge

The next thing you’re going to have to make a decision about is how to handle the player’s lack of knowledge of what has gone before. There are a number of ways to do this, from having everyone try to explain it to handing this poor player a manual of your previous gaming stories to study, but my favorite is to justify why they won’t know, and as a GM, make sure to have fun playing with that. This is the route we’ve gone, where Chaz knows some of what Stacie’s told him, but he didn’t truly take her at face value when she told him there were time travelers and dinosaurs involved. Now he’s confronted with the reality of the situation and we get to see his character evolve to process and handle the realities of both Stacie’s past and their shared present. The important thing about specifically integrating a character without plot and story background is that you can play with their lack of knowledge, but you can’t punish them for it. It should be fun that they can discover things or you can have deep conversations with them about what came before. It can’t be not knowing some key thing, therefore this monster kills you.

Having said all of this, we are also playing in the 90s. We know the 90s. There’s no setting to really have to explain beyond our basic location information, which we set up in our session 0. You are going to need to communicate more unique settings at least in general, and work with the player in a meta sense if there are things their character would know that they simply don’t yet. 

Goals

The goals of the new addition need to align, at least in the short term, with the party. If you meet someone new in a tavern, they should be planning to travel the same way as you are, or maybe they’re the only other person who fights back when the demons attack the patrons. In my game, Chaz and Stacie just want to get married! And if that means stopping an invasion and an interstellar war, well, you don’t want to see Stacie in bridezilla mode. The relationship is helping us out here a lot in terms of goal alignment. Chaz has his own unique goals, of course — one day, one of his whacky inventions is going to be huge! It’s always just around the corner. In this moment though, in our campaign, his goal is aligned with ours: save the world, get married. Salt and pepper — different but meant to work together. 

Investment

The last and possibly most important consideration is investment. If the player is not invested in this game, they’re not going to have fun…and really, isn’t that what we’re all here for? It’s key that you get them invested in the game, the character, and the stakes as soon as possible. Some of that can happen in your session zero (or character creation for the addition if you’re not coming back from a pause), and some of it needs to be the responsibility of the GM to pull everything in as quickly as possible. Relationships with the other characters create investment, and so do goals that are aligned. Once the game actually starts, all of that needs to be brought to the table hard to drag the new character right into the story along with everyone else. Chaz was immediately offered a Vice Presidential position where he can invent new things all day at the new company his Dad just bought (yes, he absolutely just purchased the Loop and surrounding campus), tossing him directly into the cross hairs of our story line (I can’t even begin to explain but it has to do with clones and aliens). Immediately he was invested not only in the theory of the game, but now also in the practice. And with that, soup’s up and we’re all digging in!

Have you had to integrate a new person in to an ongoing campaign? How did you do it? What worked, and what didn’t?

 

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Recently I’ve had a few conversations about using safety tools in role playing games and it seems like a topic worthy of bringing up with the Gnome Stew audience. Whether you run a high fantasy dungeon crawl or a modern day police noir game, safety tools offer the opportunity for deeper vulnerability with a mechanical way to rein in subject matter that becomes too intense.

Note: This article is not a discussion about available safety tools or why to use them. Once you have decided to use one or more safety tools in your game, this is how to move forward with implementing them into your game.

Introducing Safety Tool and Content Discussions

When opening a game session or kicking off a campaign, start with a discussion that includes content warnings and safety tools. It is best to lead with this before there is a problem whenever possible.

One of my favorite ways to introduce safety tools was given to me by a player in one of my convention games. The message is: we may not know each other very well and because of that some people may be inclined to hold back their role playing. Having clear safety tools in place lets us amp the role playing up to 11 while knowing that, when needed, we can rein things back. It’s a get out of jail free card. (Thanks Terra!)

Let participants know that the initial discussion of content and safety tools is just step one. The game facilitator is not solely responsible for the safety (or fun) of each individual, role playing is a group activity and people should be taking care of each other. As a game develops, the content and tone may shift and participants may need to self-advocate to stop a certain line of role play that was not anticipated.

Trust and Respect for the Tools

As a Game Facilitator it is your responsibility to set the right tone and create buy-in for safety tools and self-advocacy. If the participants can’t trust that the safety tools will be respected then they are of questionable value at the table.

It is vital when a safety tool is introduced that the game facilitator takes it seriously. Make it clear that the tool will be respected every time and that there will be a clearly understood result when the tool is used (i.e. the game stops and the subject matter is retconned). Require verbal confirmation that all participants agree to use the safety tools and hold people accountable to that social contract. There are consequences for not respecting the safety tools – such as a warning or removal from the game – and those should be clear up front as well.

It is useful to highlight that participants can use the tool in relation to the game facilitator’s content in addition to their fellow players. Safety tools are add-in game mechanics that apply to all participants equally.

Make the tools easy to use

After introducing the function of the safety tool and explaining how to use it, make sure that it is easy to apply. This can take on different meanings depending on the tool. Here is an example related to using the X-card, one of the most basic and prevalent safety tools in table top gaming. For those who may not know, the X-card is typically a 3×5 index card with an “X” drawn on it. To activate the tool, a participant touches the X-card which indicates a hard stop of the game. When activated, roleplaying should immediately discontinue and the story rewinds to exclude whatever led directly into the X-card being used.

Consider the realities of using the X-card. Some game tables are large and cluttered with books, maps, minis, dice, snacks and drinks. Having one central card may not be useful and accessible to every participant. The safety tool has to work with the physical set up of the game, including if the game is run online through a voice or video conferencing software. The physical ability of the participants may also inform safety tool choice or modification.

Here are some optional ways to enhance the accessibility of the X-card as a safety tool:

• Give every player their own copy of the X-card.
• Instruct players that they can say the phrase “X-card.”
• Let players know that they can hold up their arms to form an “X” to activate the X-card.

Use Tools that are Right for Your Game

There are a multitude of safety tools and more will be introduced. Explore what safety tools are available and use the right ones for your game and your group. Ask your players and your community what tools they have heard of and what works for them. Different safety tools have different functions and are appropriate for different styles of play.

For me, one of the places that safety tools in table top role playing fall short is based on passive versus active consent. In the case of a tool like the X-card, someone has to reach out and stop the role playing from happening, effectively saying “No more.” If for whatever reason a person does not do this, their discomfort likely won’t be recognized by the group.

In LARPing there is the OK check-in, where players introducing challenging content use the “OK” hand signal to ask their fellow players about the content without breaking the moment. Each player must give a response of positive, neutral, or negative to this question. This encourages more active consent, as opposed to a participant asking someone to stop, the player initiating asks permission to continue.

Emotions and Body Language in Role Playing

As a convention game master I meet and play with new people all the time and often my games touch on darker themes and graphic violence. I want players to buy in on a deeper level, I want them to feel emotion in my games. But is a player avoiding eye contact or becoming aggressive in character or because the player is on edge? For me, this is where it can get confusing, especially among very expressive players or with people I don’t know well.

If I am running a horror game, I want the player and their character to feel tension. My ultimate goal is to create a memorable experience where the player wants to come back and play at my table. I may heartlessly inflict trauma on characters, but I want my players to have fun. It can be a real challenge to determine if someone is reacting in or out of character. That’s why it is best to ask plainly.

It is helpful to keep an eye on the body language of the participants, but it also means trying to differentiate between in-character and out-of-character responses. If someone seems agitated or disengaged it is useful to step back, break the immersion, and check in. While this is not specifically a safety tool, giving yourself permission to pause the story is important. It probably won’t be your favorite thing to do, but if it means keeping participants safe and included throughout the game, it is worth it.

Pro Tip: Use a Safety Tool if You Experience a Fight, Flight, or Freeze Response

There aren’t that many times in my decades of role playing that I’ve needed to use a safety tool. I’m lucky. I play with people I trust and I have lived a relatively easy life. I can explore hard content through role playing and it doesn’t feel that close to my reality, hence in most games I’m starting from a position of safety (not vulnerability).

The few times I can think of where I needed a safety tool were not related to gore or violence. I needed safety tools due to things that were happening in my life that I did not want to relive through play. For example, role playing a support group for people who recently lost loved ones after my mother had died. That’s not something I had anticipated in the game, nor something I would have thought I needed a safety tool to stop. If someone had asked me in advance for a list of things I didn’t want to role play, I never would have thought of that one. It caught me off-guard in the moment and I didn’t recognize that I needed to stop play and I should have.

If you, as a participant, are experiencing a Fight, Flight, or Freeze response: use the safety tools. Whether that means stepping away from the table for a break or pausing the whole game is up to the person in the moment. Step one if you feel a physiological response to a game is to protect yourself and use the safety tool. This isn’t the only reason to use a safety tool, but for me, it was the time I didn’t use my “get out of jail free” card when I should have.

Final Thoughts

Safety tools are a valuable addition to the tabletop role playing hobby and they are becoming more and more prevalent. While at first I was skeptical, I have learned their value, especially as I gravitate towards more intense role playing experiences.
What safety tools have you used? Have you ever experienced someone disrespecting the safety tools? Was there a time you probably should have used a safety tool but didn’t/couldn’t?

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This is part 3 of my review of the Pathfinder Playtest from Paizo. You can see part 1 here and part 2 here. In this part of the review, I’ll comment on Advancement and Options, and Playing the Game. The fourth segment will contain my thoughts on Game Mastering through Appendices.

If you’re interested in reading along with me during the review, you can pick up the free PDF of the playtest rulebook at Paizo’s site:

Advancement and Options

Advancement

When I hit the advancement section, I was expecting a long and involved process, which is the nature of the crunchier games like Pathfinder. I was pleasantly surprised to find the advancement instructions to be only a single page. It’s straightforward and simple. I like this quite a bit.

One thing I made a strong note of is that each level is 1,000 XP. The increasing experience point requirements for higher levels has gone the way of the past for Pathfinder. This means gaining levels is a linear process, not an increasing barrier. I find this incredibly interesting on how higher-powered obstacles will turn in experience points for the characters. I’m assuming the XP award information will be found in the GM section, so I’m looking forward to getting the other side of the coin for this process.

Archetypes

There are seven archetypes offered in the playtest book, and they mention that this is a sample. The seven they have are just enough to give a taste of how things work, but still provide some options for characters during the playtest process. Based on this taste, I can’t wait to see the full buffet of choices for the archetypes.

Archetypes appear to be replacements for prestige classes. Like with prestige classes, some of the archetypes can be taken at lower levels, which others have higher requirements, including some events that must happen with the character before the archetype can be chosen.

There are two types of archetypes: multiclass and prestige.

Multiclass archetypes allow a character of one class to tap into the powers of another class, but in a limited fashion. This allows for a fighter to gain some healing ability or maybe some rogue skills. Like with the rest of the power-gain systems, these are based on feats. One thing to note here is that a character cannot multiclass into a class they already have. In other words, you can’t be a cleric and gain extra cleric goodies by multiclassing as a cleric also.

Prestige archetypes are, as the name implies, more like prestige classes. These archetypes can focus in a character’s abilities and add some new options for their class. While the text in the playtest book is limited, I can see some expansion happening not only with the choices available, but more in-depth descriptions of the archetypes as well.

I like that the archetypes are placed in the “options” section of the book because they are far from required to call out a character as being special or unique, but there is extra flavor and style that can be gained by leveraging an archetype. One thing to note, is that an archetype does not directly deliver extra “class abilities or powers” like prestige classes did. Choosing an archetype just opens up more options for feats that a player can choose from for her character.

Animal Companions

Building an animal companion is much like building a character in that you have stats, feats, actions, and types of companions. There are some sample builds of animal companions, but they are base stats, not final stats. I’ve read through the animal companion section three times so far, and I have to admit that I’m still fairly well confused about how to stat out an animal companion. Seeing a “final stat block” of one of the examples would have helped me piece things together to see how it all works. My advice to Paizo for this segment is to look at the descriptive and rules text in this section an clarify things quite a bit.

Having said this, I think there are some slick options and actions for animal companions. I like them quite a bit, but I also didn’t see a limitation on which actions which types of animals could use or have. Maybe there were some things taken out of the final text to make the playtest book shorter that could have clarified everything in here.

There is also a section on familiars, and this section is pretty brief, but does explain familiar abilities and how they interact with the spellcaster. Somehow, this section is very clear to me on familiar stats and abilities, unlike the main animal companion section. The only thing I see that’s missing, which will probably land in the final product, is what happens when a familiar dies. This has always been key to this genre of RPGs, so I’m kind of surprised at the oversight in this area.

Deities

There are two pages of brief summaries for the deities found within Golarion. There are 20 of the world’s deities summarized here, and these summaries include alignment, edicts, anathema, and favored weapon. If you note that domains are missing here, that’s because they are included with the cleric class information earlier in the book. This is what I was talking about in my “part 1” of the Pathfinder playtest review. The deity information is split across two sections and hundreds of pages, which makes finding all of the details about a single deity cumbersome and slow. The domain listing should be combined with this section for ease of use.

Playing The Game

Now for the meat of the game mechanics themselves. There are 35 pages of rules. I’m hesitant to dive into the details of all 35 pages of the rules because that would make this portion of the review extremely lengthy. Instead, I’m going to gloss over repeating the rules, and just give my impressions and the highlights.

Modes

There are three modes called out in the text. Any veteran player will quickly see these and wonder why they are called out as they are “obvious.” However, to a new gamer, these are excellent call outs for them and are also top-notch reminders to the grognards in our groups.

The modes are encounter, exploration, and downtime. In short, encounter modes occur when seconds matter, detailed tactics come into play, and determining the order of PC and NPC actions really matters. Exploration modes occur between encounters. This can be creeping down a dungeon corridor, traversing overland terrain, or moving across a densely populated city. Lastly, we have downtime modes, which occur when the characters are in their home base, passage of time is measured in days or weeks, and not much dangerous action is going on.

I like these different modes because I’ve made plenty of characters that could create magic items, but never really had a chance to leverage those abilities. Calling out the fact that downtime exists would allow such a thing to take place.

Checks

The detailed descriptions of how to do a check make things clear. This is a good thing because there are subtle adjustments to the game between current Pathfinder and the new Pathfinder on what gets added into a die roll. The main change is skills are simplified. Basically, each skill add is equal to your level. Then an adjustment ranging from -2 through +3 is added based on the character’s proficiency rank.

The math formula for calculating the final result of a die roll is a little intimidating, but it’s not that bad. Of the 10 numbers involved in calculating the final result, one is the die roll, 4 are captured on the character sheet and summarized there. This leaves circumstance bonuses/penalties and conditional bonuses/penalties as well as the mysterious “untyped penalties” left to deal with. The circumstance/condition/untyped numbers don’t always exist, so it’s still basically, a d20 added to a single number that’s pre-calculated and written on the character sheet. Honestly, the diagram at the top of page 292 is great and should remain a reference.

Degree of Success

Success and failure are still the same. If you get higher than the target number, you succeed. Lower than the number, and you fail. Pretty simple. However, critical successes have changed a bit. If you get a “natural 20,” then you get a critical success. Also, if you get greater than the target number plus 10, then it’s also a critical success. I like this change to reward specialized characters and great die rolls. On the flip-side, a “natural 1” or less than the target number minus 10, then it’s a critical failure. This change makes for interesting storytelling for those times when the die rolls go extraordinarily well, or drastically poor.

Fortune and Misfortune

A new addition to Pathfinder, but not a new addition to gaming in general is the concept of “fortune” and “misfortune.” With fortune, there are two options. One is a reroll, and the other is rolling two dice and taking the better of the two. The same thing applies with misfortune where a successful roll may require a reroll, or two dice are rolled and the lower of the two are taken. This is explained in a sidebar before the actual rules of when fortune and misfortune applies, so I hope they clarify how to obtain and lose these conditions.

Dying

There’s an interesting twist and change with dying. Instead of it being based on HP or constitution, there’s a new concept here called “dying value.” If a character’s dying value reaches 4, then they die. When a character hits zero HP (you can’t go negative in this system), then you gain 1 or 2 dying value points (1 for a lethal hit, 2 if it was a critical hit). At this point, saving throws kick in to see if the character recovers. Success indicates a return to 1 HP. Failure adds 1 dying value, and a critical failure adds 2 dying value. When a dying value of 4 is reached, the character dies. Of course, these rules only apply to PCs, main villains, important NPCs, etc. The typical minion or mook should be removed from combat if it reaches zero HP, but that’s up to the GM to decide.

Honestly, I don’t think I like this system very well. It could be that I’m comfortable with the current system and it makes sense. I’m not sure how this simplifies or improves the game any, but I’m willing to give it a shot and see how it plays out.

Actions and Activities

As I talked about in part 1 of this review series, there are different actions and activities. There are free actions, reactions, and activities. Some activities consume more than 1 action in a character’s round. Each character gets 3 actions in a normal round. These can be moves, attacks, spellcasting (which usually consumes more than 1 action), reactions, and so on. These changes in how many things a character can do in a round appear to really streamline and simplify things. I think this is a beneficial thing for the overall gameplay in a system that many already complain that takes too long when encounter mode kicks in. We’ll see how actual gameplay works out when I get a chance to put rubber on the road with this system.

Areas of Effect

I just wanted to note here that with all of the changes Paizo is making to Pathfinder, they are leaving the various “areas of effect” from spells and powers untouched. This tells me they think that these portions of the rules are already clear, play well, and are dialed in. I agree.

Hero Points

Each PC starts a session with 1 hero point. She can earn more through good role playing, heroic action, taking notes, running initiative, bringing food/snacks to the game, etc. The book outlines that no more than 1 hero point should be awarded for in-game actions per session. Also, no more than 1 her point should be awarded for out-of-game actions per session. All PC’s hero points reset back to 1 at the start of each session.

Hero points can be used for three different things: staving off death, rerolling a d20, or taking an extra action in a round. These cost 1, 2, and 3 hero points, respectively.

I’m conflicted on the addition of hero points. I like the meta-game currency that many games use because it allows the players to drive the narrative of their characters more. This is a good thing. However, I think that Paizo dropped the ball here. The use of hero points is so incredibly limited, and expensive in hero point cost, that they are likely to be rarely used. Because of this, I’m not sure Paizo should have wasted the ink on printing the rules. They should open up the use of hero points with more options and consider reducing the cost of rerolling a single d20 to 1 hero point.

Perception

The section on perception explains everything a new or experienced player/GM needs to know about how the difference senses work, how things are detected (or not), and how different levels of light impact vision. While it feels like second nature to “know” these things about a game, having them defined in clear terms will help remove or reduce disagreements about how perception works.

Encounter Mode

This section details how combat works. The key change here is that initiative is based on the perception skill, so make sure your fighter-types have some focus on this skill. Also of note, is that initiative is rolled once at the start of combat to determine turn order and this order stays this way (barring someone with a high roll shifting to a lower position).

The steps in encounter mode are well delineated and easy to follow. I think even a newcomer to the hobby could leverage the text to fully understand how things work. Well done here, Paizo.

Basic Actions

The basic actions are lined out in their own blocks of text. I love this layout choice. In past iterations of games within Pathfinder’s lineage, each action type was smooshed in a paragraph alongside other blocks of identical text without the breaking headers that make things easy to find and reference. The way they have things lined up here, it’s easy to read, easier to understand, and surprisingly easy to find on the page when needing to do a lookup of a detail.

The common basic actions are outlined here along with some of the less common things like burrow, fly, mount, etc. that are in their own list to prevent muddying the waters for the common actions.

Exploration Mode

The exploration mode section is divided up into areas like traveling, socializing, and resting.

The travel section of things calls out most of the common activities that go on while traveling across large swaths of land. The details are fairly high level and allow the GM and players to collaborate on how things go.

The socializing section calls out different activities that go on here, but again it is at a high level. I hope Paizo does a bit of a deeper dive into this area beyond two-thirds of a column on the socializing. Maybe this is just a taste for the playtest?

Rest and daily preparations is pretty basic and doesn’t need much detail, so they cover it well here. To call note to the HP recovery, it is now the constitution modifier (minimum 1) times the character level in HP regained for natural healing.

Downtime Mode

There is all of half a page dedicated to this mode, and I was hoping for more. Granted, the skills section covers the various rules for the skill-based activities that can occur, but I really hoped for more. Things on my “expectation list” were: managing a stronghold, running a business, overseeing a guild, and so on. Perhaps this will land on the list of things we’ll see in an expansion book down the road.

Conditions

The “Playing the Game” section wraps up with a lengthy segment on conditions. It’s a long list of the various ways a character can be changed, adjusted, boosted, and limited. The list is, in traditional Pathfinder style, very long, but it’s also necessary for the game play to run smoothly. I like what I see here. The only thing that could make this a little better would be a bullet list of all conditions with a brief summary like what would be found on a GM screen. Putting something like this up front, before the detailed descriptions, would be a handy reference for GMs and players alike.

Conclusion

Now that I’ve consumed the “meat” of the book, I’m liking what I see. I think some refinement to the rules descriptions here and there would benefit the final product. This, of course, is what playtesting is for, so I think Paizo is on the right track for getting a 2.0 of Pathfinder nailed down and running smoothly.

Am I convinced to “upgrade” to the new version yet? I’m not sure yet. I think part of this comes from the “edition inertia” that I currently have. I own 30+ Pathfinder rulebooks and Golarion books at this point. That’s not counting third party support material, adventures, campaigns, etc. that I also own. This is a lot of things to step away from and set aside in favor of investing in the new edition. It’s become clear to me that conversions between Pathfinder editions will be required, so I can’t just pull a “1.0” book off the shelf and use it on the fly.

I am liking what I see, and I think this would be a fine entry point for a new gamer (especially if Paizo does a “Beginner Box 2.0”). Overall, I like it, but we’ll wait until I finish up with the book to make a final determination on what I do with the new version of Pathfinder.

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Today’s guest article is by Chris Spivey, talking about how the TV show Black Lightning makes fertile ground for a great superhero game and how to run one. Chris is the award winning author of Harlem Unbound and is currently working on an un-named superhero game for Chaosium. – Head gnome John

Considering the second season is airing any day now, I am coming to this retrospective and exploration later than most. The show spoke to me in a similar intensity, if not manner, as Black Panther did. That feeling made me consider staying in a quiet(ish) mood, keeping my overall thoughts and perceived implications of the show to myself rather than with the world. But my mind kept coming back to this show—its vision of superheroes, world building, relationship dynamics— and how it lined up with so many of my thoughts related to superhero gaming. A number of the beats have appeared in my superhero campaigns.

What changed my mind? Someone told me they don’t know why we need Black Lightning if we have Luke Cage. My first thought was, “What kind of logic is that?” If we all believed that, then we don’t need Arrow, The Flash, Daredevil, Punisher and especially not Iron Fist. But each of those shows is telling a different story with a different lead, (mostly) addressing issues differently. If anything, we need more shows like Black Lightning, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage and Agent Carter (we miss you, Peggy). I am still rallying for Photon, Blue Marvel, and Ms. Marvel. Hearing that comment solidified my need to share my thoughts about the show and how gamers can add the essence of the show to their own supers game.

A Brief History of the Superhero Genre

We can’t talk about superhero comics-related media without touching on the comic ages. Anything I write about superheroes has to include their importance and impact on society, each age reflecting society at the time:

• The Golden Age (1938–1950ish) ― Coming out of the Great Depression, America was looking for light entertainment and a diversion from reality and found it in Superman! The Kryptonian boy scout jump-started the age, surpassing his masked predecessors, and his success solidified the comic industry. The wave rode into World War II with heroes shifting to patriotic themes and providing moral support for troops and people back home. The superheroes frequently fought gangsters, supervillains, crooked politicians, and Fifth Columnists.
• The Silver Age (1956ish–1970) ― The Silver Age moved towards more science-based superheroes rather than magical ones of the previous age. The idea of superheroes on teams with constant bantering, bickering, and facing greater challenges sold in droves; such teams as the Justice League, the Fantastic Four, the Legion of Super-Heroes, and X-Men were hot items.
• The Bronze Age (1970–1985) ― Comics became more complex, lost the frivolity of the Silver Age, and evolved into what they were meant to be: a mirror for society. Comics became a voice to those without a voice, a chance to inspire as they did in the Golden Age but with more modern values and diversity. There were too many issues plaguing the world to ignore: street riots, the Vietnam War, a corrupt law and order system, and drugs. This exponentially increased minority superheroes with the likes of Luke Cage (the first black superhero to have his own comic book), Shang-Chi, and Storm.
• The Modern Age (1985–Now) ―  This could easily be broken down into two or three new ages; building on the concept of social issues and complexity led to a desire for grim and more adult-themed comics. Independent comic publishers were able to establish themselves as power players in the market, such as Image Comics, Milestone Comics, and Dark Horse Comics. These independent comics could do things that the larger companies couldn’t, as they did not need to hold a middle ground of ideas to keep their fanbase.

The Skinny Upfront

Black Lightning is one of the best DCTV superhero shows (heck, just any television series) airing, in my opinion, with Arrow as a distant second. There you go, I said and stand by it. Netflix/Marvel’s Luke Cage is excellent but a very different show with a different vision that is a different discussion. The characters are well developed, the story moves at a solid clip, and the cast is engaging. All of that makes it a great show and fertile ground for superhero roleplaying game ideas. It does not reinvent the superhero genre or even attempt to, and Black Lightning does something better…it elevates the bar.

One of the show’s primary focuses is on what superhero comics were meant to do ever since the first pages of Action Comics #1 in the Golden Age, and more solidly addressed in the Bronze age of comics: hold a mirror up to society exposing the ugly truths while holding us to a higher ideal through our superhero avatars.  This has been done to varying degrees of success since its inception and when it is done, it is frequently whitewashed. The X-Men are a perfect example of this, being an analogy of the civil rights movements with some people casting Professor X as Martin Luther King and Magneto as Malcolm X, and the mutants representing African Americans. And yet they are primarily all white, even in today’s incarnation. The analog has continued to evolve with the times to include those in the LGBTQ community and more, but the characters are still principally cis, white, and usually male.

Black Lightning’s creation had the other DCTV shows attempt to address social issues with baby steps. For instance, Super Girl’s Jimmy Olsen’s, a black hero, needing to decide if he should come forward to show a black man can be a hero. In those shows,  all of the people of color are sidekicks, their struggles barely acknowledged, and their stories are quickly wrapped up before the end of the episode. This show casts people of color as the primary protagonist and integrates the struggle into their daily lives making it a near-perfect superhero tale for television or the gaming table, balancing real life with the responsibility and repercussions of superheroics.

Relationship Diversity

The show focuses on community—on family and friends—by placing them all into the central plot of making their city a better place; they are pillars of the story.

The reason this show speaks to me so much: I am an educated black man of a certain age raising a daughter in our dangerous world.  I endure racism, being targeted by the police, and the crushing weight of depression from the current administration politics. To see a strong realistic African American family battling the same issues I do daily is uplifting and inspiring. At its core, that is what superheroes are supposed to do. They inspire us, make us want to be better, and are a reflection of our lives.

That spark of inspiration is something that can be reflected in a game. It may seem small but it establishes the player characters in the world and reinforces that their actions have positive consequences. So many games focus on the damage the superhero battle inflicts on the city, which should also be considered, but they don’t highlight the “civilians” cheering them on. For Black Lightning, they can be found in the random doorman that opens the door for him and praises his work before a battle. Those moments tie the supers more strongly into the world. They can even translate into a minor mechanical bonus to hit or dodge, or a Sanity bump.

Bringing it to the Gaming Table — A Template for Assessing your Superhero Game

How does any of this help you run a superhero game? How do you apply it? Here are a few questions to ask and things to consider as you prep for a great superhero game.

1.  What Comic Age Do You Set It In? Decide on what age the campaign will fall into. It doesn’t need to be a direct correlation but rather a general tone or vibe and it should set the values of the universe. Whatever the age, it can be modernized and interwoven into the game. This is something the players should know before making characters as it also lets them have a better sense of the type of game they are playing in. The Punisher blasting his way through a group of criminals doesn’t generally work in a more simple Golden Age Style game.
2.  Know Your Vision: You need to know the scope of the “world” for the first “season” of the game. The scope may change after contact or after a few sessions with the players and that’s fine. The initial setting may be focused on a single city block, neighborhood, or the entire city. By establishing that baseline it enables the game to expand naturally.
3.  Player Characters vs NPCs:  The players should know both the Comic Age and your Vision before creating characters. This lets them build a character that fits into the campaign mechanically.  If a player knows that the game has a Silver Age vibe and deals with keeping the city safe, they may decide to build a mechanical engineer working for a private company knowing they are more likely to encounter alien technology rather than magical power rings.
4. Backstory. Backstory. Backstory: Backstories are more vital in superhero games than in almost any other genre. The character is living dual existences. This conflict is fertile ground for drama, roleplaying, and enhancing player buy-in. This is the element that makes superhero games more than just punching a bad guy in the face.
5.  What Are The Key Relationships? With the world and superhero backstories established, relationships are going to need fleshed out. These relationships should feel natural by creating complications and moments of joy. My personal balance for this would account for this being 25-30% of the campaign’s focus. These relationships can be both as a superhero and within their secret identity.
6.  What System and Why? Picking a system is always tough. The game needs to feel super-heroic, allowing incredible feats, but not be too crunchy. There are many systems out there that tackle superheroics in different ways — choose the one that fits your play style best.

Lightning Strikes! Running Black Lightning With The Template

Let’s break down a few of the key elements of Black Lightning into the steps above so you can be ready to run a Black Lightning themed game.

1. Comic Age: Modern Age
2. Know Your Vision:  Protect Freeland. Much of a Black Lightning game revolves around keeping the city safe and stable.
3. Player Characters vs Key NPCs:
   Players: Jefferson, Jennifer, Anissa, Lynn, and Gambi
   Key NPCs: Tobias, Henderson, Lala, Syonide, and Kara
4. Backstory. Backstory. Backstory: I won’t delve in too deeply so there aren’t spoilers, but the backstories in Black Lightning are often about uncovering the past and finding out how those things hidden in history affect the future where the current story is being told.
5. Relationships: There are many relationships that interweave between the main characters, and some of the Key NPCs change throughout the show and in relation to the characters. I don’t want to spoil much, but in a Black Lightning game, relationships will change based on the choices the characters make  — where they put their efforts and what they leave behind to protect Freeland.
6. What System and Why:  My first thought would be Wild Talents. Wild Talents has the ability to create various powers; the Will mechanic dovetails with the character’s moral drive, and the ease of research. Black Lightning could also easily be run in my upcoming superheroes campaign for Chaosium. That allows for a number of powers, occupations, and sanity effects. An interesting take would be to run the game as a One-2-One. The player would choose one of the main cast, while having the other main cast members be sources, and tackling the series’ story.

Black Lightning as a show is great, and Black Lightning as a game played among friends brings the story to the people at your table. It takes the narrative and makes it a living thing. When you’re jonesing for a new superhero game, look to Black Lightning as something that might give your group a good narrative framework. Where’s the future? Right here.

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The monster taming RPG Siralim 3 has been released: Siralim 3 The King of Siralim, tainted by an unknown force, has brought war to the lands of Rodia, capturing all of the country's kingdoms and slaughtering their people in the process. Now, only one kingdom remains that can stand against this unlikely adversary: Nex.... Read more »

HBS has announced the season pass roadmap for BattleTech which will be discounted 20 % until October 25th. Additionally the first expansion release date was announced for Flashpoint of November 27th. Start your engines and grasp your hatchets as we're thrilled to tell you that BATTLETECH - Flashpoint will arrive to Mechwarriors all over on November 27th! Pre-order TODAY! If that's not enough with got a brand new video for you in which Mitch gives you four pretty compelling reasons not to miss it! loading.... Read more »

The October update for Queen's Wish: The Conqueror announces that the engine is 'pretty much done'. Queen's Wish October 2018 Update! This is a pretty exciting update. The Queen’s Wish: The Conqueror engine is pretty much done. The base interface is in.... Read more »

A new gameplay trailer for Thronebreaker: The Withcer Tales has been made available. CD PROJEKT RED, creators of The Witcher series of games, have published today a brand new, gameplay-focused trailer for Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales - the upcoming RPG adventure set in the universe of professional monster slayer Geralt of Rivia.... Read more »

Indian Noob reviewed Vigilantes and think it is a love letter to turn-based strategy games with some well implemented RPG elements. Vigilantes can be summarised as the perfect amalgamation of Jagged Alliance, the classic XCOM and Fallout 1/2 with bits of Cyberknights thrown in the mix.... Read more »

Luck Day spotted that a new patch for the Enhanced Edition of Neverwinter Nights has been made available: Features: Three new player-selectable portraits; Heavyline, Skandii, and Lanteri Fixes: We fixed certain armor pads (specifically, belts and shoulder pads) disappearing when re-equipping a item We fixed a floating point inaccuracy that made the player character skew aside ever so slightly when WASDing.... Read more »

In a new video for Mutant year Zero, Funcom explains what the game is about. loading... Tactical adventure game, Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden fuses, XCOM-like turn-based combat with real-time stealth and exploration, arriving on PC, Xbox, PS4 on December 4th.... Read more »

Call of Cthulhu has gone gold and will be available on October 30th, 2018. Call of Cthulhu, the official videogame adaptation of Chaosium's pen-and-paper RPG, has gone Gold, ready for its release on October 30th for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.... Read more »

Veil of Crows has been released on Steam. loading... Veil of crows is a sandbox style real-time strategy game set in a chaotic medieval world. From violent, and overtly bloody battles, to completely destructible castles, RPG style hero development, and meaningful interactions with other factions.... Read more »

Note: This article has been updated since its original version published in November 2012.

Published in 1983, the classic D&D adventure I6 Ravenloft, was ranked in 2004 by Dungeon magazine as the second greatest adventure of all time. Five years before its publication, Tracy and Laura Hickman ran the classic D&D module every Halloween. Ravenloft contains one of the best open-ended randomly determined adventures produced for Dungeons & Dragons and it's perfect for a Halloween one-shot game.

With the release of Curse of Strahd, we have a fully updated 5th edition D&D version of Ravenloft. Though intended for a long campaign, we're going to strip Curse of Strahd down to a single five-hour game for 8th level characters perfect for us to run on or around Halloween every year.

Let's take a look at how to run Curse of Strahd in a single session Halloween-themed adventure.

The Party's Goals

We'll start by stripping down the goals of this adventure to one single goal: Kill Strahd. Expanding this a bit, we're killing Strahd to prevent him from enthralling Ireena Kolyana and making her his dark bride.

To help them kill Strahd, the characters must seek out three powerful artifacts hidden within the castle. These three artifacts include the Sun Sword, the Icon of Ravenloft, and the Tome of Strahd.

You'll notice that we replaced the Holy Symbol of Ravenkind with the Icon of Ravenloft because the Icon's abilities better fit with the theme of the game. A paralyzed Strahd isn't much fun. That means the Icon of Ravenloft does not sit on the altar in room K15. We can replace this with a large bowl of clear water suitable to restore the vitality of the party once, giving them the equivalent of a short or long rest depending on how hard a time the characters are having.

We're also going to add a trait the Tome of Strahd that helps streamline this adventure. If Strahd is defeated, the Tome of Strahd can be burned to destroy him within his coffin regardless of where the characters are when they set it ablaze. In truth, this is the only item the characters actually need assuming they can defeat Strahd without the Sun Sword or the Icon.

Ireena

Ireena accompanies the group into Ravenloft. She isn't putting up with his stalkerish ways and is taking the fight right to him. Ireena is a veteran and can be controlled by a volunteer player who is already running a simple character.

Alternatively one of the players can play Ireena. She is human but otherwise can be any class the players choose and is the same level as the rest of the party.

Ravenloft Character Bonds

We're going to keep the bonds between characters very simple. Instead of a whole slew of interconnecting bonds, every character has the following bond for this one-shot adventure:

By blood or by deed you and your companions are sworn to aid and protect Ireena from the devil Strahd.

Now every character has a built-in motivation to group together, go to Ravenloft with Ireena, and destroy the vampire once and for all.

Intro: The Carriage Ride to Ravenoft and the Drawing

When the characters begin the adventure, read or summarize the following:

The ornate black carriage roars along the narrow winding road that leads to Castle Ravenloft. As you peer out one window, you watch rocks from the road fall one thousand feet to the river below. Looking ahead you see the carriage master, his cowled face turned your way and staring at you with invisible eyes shrouded under his tattered leather tricorn hat. Reaching back impossibly far with an arm too long for his body, he gently pushes you back into the carriage and locks the door.

A raspy laughter rattles the glyphed coins that make up Madame Eva's veil. Sitting across from you, she draws an ancient worn deck of cards from her colored robes and begins to place them on the small table in the center of the inside of the carriage.

We will be using the simplified fortune drawing described in James Introcaso's Guide to Running Curse of Strahd as a one-shot adventure with one minor exception: we're going to skip the ally and just stick to the three artifacts and Strahd's location. Remove all but the following cards from the common cards in the Tarokka deck:

• Paladin (2 of Swords/Spades)
• Mercenary (4 of Swords/Spades)
• Berserker (6 of Swords/Spades)
• Dictator (8 of Swords/Spades)
• Warrior (Master of Swords/10 of Spades)
• Transmuter (1 of Stars/Ace of Clubs)
• Evoker (6 of Stars/Clubs)
• Necromancer (8 of Stars/Clubs)
• Swashbuckler (1 of Coins/Ace of Diamonds)
• Merchant (4 of Coins/Diamonds)
• Guild Member (5 of Coins/Diamonds)
• Miser (9 of Coins/Diamonds)
• Shepherd (4 of Glyphs/Hearts)
• Anarchist (6 of Glyphs/Hearts)
• Priest (Master of Glyphs/10 of Hearts)

Ireena places out four cards, three from the common deck (one for each artifact) and one from the high deck which represents Strahd's location. With those cards placed, the adventure is ready to begin.

Strahd's Invitation

The characters arrive at Castle Ravenloft under the invitation of Strahd as described in the book. Instead of an illusion of Strahd playing the grand organ, it is Strahd himself. As they dine, Strahd lays out the rules of his "game" which, in short is the following:

"Defeat me and you save Ireena. Perish and she is mine."

In his unfathomable cruelty he asks Ireena a simple question:

"Give yourself to me now, my love, and you can save their lives."

Ireena looks to the party for guidance. If she appears as though she will give herself to Strahd, he turns to them and asks:

"and you would allow this?".

Should they choose to hand her over, Strahd looks very disappointed.

"They are obviously not worth your affection. Let them rot in this castle. Let you walk with them and see the results of their cowardice first hand."

Strahd then departs from the dinner as the room grows cold.

Should the characters decide to confront Strahd there and then, Strahd is accompanied by two vampire spawns and has an additional spawn for every character above four. They're not likely to survive.

Recover the Three Artifacts Before Facing Strahd

The party must find all three artifacts before facing Strahd. 45 minutes before the end of the game, Strahd attacks the characters wherever they are and with whatever they have. If the party does not have the Tome of Strahd, they cannot defeat the vampire. Depending on how difficult you want the fight, he might come with his three brides, each a vampire spawn. One of these vampire brides has the casting capabilities of a mage. One has the fighting capabilities of a veteran, and one has the capabilities of an assassin without the poison.

Strahd's Interjections

Throughout the session, Strahd might decide to jump into a situation to harass the party if they have been having too easy a time. Strahd will arrive in his hybrid bat form or his hybrid wolf form, poke at the party, and then leave. Each time Strahd arrives, his entrance is foreshadowed by his children of the night.

Facing Strahd von Zarovich

45 minute before the end of the game, Strahd arrives and unleashes his full power. Take a few minutes to read Strahd's full entry in the book before the game to remember all of his intricacies.

If we want to run Strahd on "hard mode" if the characters have been having too easy a time of it, we can use our "nastier specials" from our Running Strahd article. This includes the following:

Use the following changes to increase Strahd's difficulty:

• 200 hit points
• 19 AC (mage armor from a scroll)
• Unarmed strike does 11 (2d10) bludgeoning and 21 (6d6) necrotic damage.
• Bite does 9 (2d8) piercing and 14 (4d6) necrotic.
• Switch out the following spells: shield instead of comprehend languages, counterspell instead of nondetection, lightning bolt instead of fireball, and dispel magic instead of nondetection.
• Add Beguiling Gaze.

Beguiling Gaze. As a bonus action, the vampire fixes its gaze on a creature it can see within 30 feet of it. If the target can see the vampire, the target must succeed on a DC 17 Wisdom saving throw or the vampire has advantage on attack rolls against the target. The effect lasts until the target takes damage or until the start of the vampires next turn. For that time, the affected creature is also a willing target for the vampires bite attack. A creature that cant be charmed is immune to this effect. A creature that successfully saves against the vampires gaze is immune to it for 1 hour.

A Halloween Tradition

With Curse of Strahd in hand and our streamlined plans in place, we can make Castle Ravenloft our very own Halloween tradition. Give it a try!

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Note: This article is reposed with permission from the original posted to D&D Beyond on March 2018. It is the sixth in a six-part series of articles focused on helping new D&D DMs put together and run great games. The full list of articles includes:

• Finding and Maintaining a D&D Group
• Starting Strong at your First D&D Game
• Tools for the New D&D Dungeon Master
• Improvisation in D&D for New Dungeon Masters
• A New Dungeon Master's Guide to Miniatures
• A New DM's Guide For Building Combat Encounters (this article)

In this article we're going to dig deep into one of the most challenging aspects of running a D&D game: building combat encounters.

This article goes hand-in-hand with my original article on Building Encounters in Fifth Edition Dungeons & Dragons. That article contains charts and tables to help you choose the right number of monsters for a given situation.

Here's a quick summary of this article's approach towards encounter building:

• Let encounters develop from the story, the situation, and the actions of the characters. We don't have to pre-define encounters as "combat", "roleplaying", or "exploration". We only have to set up the situations and let the players decide how to interact with them.
• Choose the type and number of monsters that make sense given the situation. Sometimes this might be two sleepy guards at a cave entrance. Other times it might be an entire hobgoblin warband. Give the characters openings to take different approaches towards the scene.
• Keep an eye out for unexpectedly deadly encounters. Understand the loose relationship between monster challenge ratings and character levels. Remember that fewer monsters are generally easier than lots of monsters. Use a tool like the tables in Xanathar's Guide to Everything if you're not sure. In particular, be nice to level 1 characters. They're really squishy.
• Adjust the encounter as needed during the game. Vary hit points within the hit-dice range. Increase or decrease damage. Add or remove monsters.
• Mix up encounters to keep things fresh. Add interesting terrain or fantastic features. Throw a mixture of easy and hard encounters at the characters. Use waves of monsters.

We're going to dig into all of these things throughout the article.

Develop Encounters from the Story

Dungeons & Dragons breaks down scenes into three different types of gameplay: NPC interaction and roleplaying, exploration, and combat. In the vernacular of D&D, all of these types of scenes are considered "encounters".

We don't have to define any scene as being a roleplay scene, an exploration scene, or a combat scene ahead of time. Instead, we can set up the situation and let the players choose how to approach it. Maybe they attack the bugbear leader of the goblins directly. Maybe they try to bargain with them. Maybe they sneak up the garbage chute and try to listen in to the bugbear's plans. We don't necessarily know what choices the players will make when they leap into an encounter and not knowing is half the fun.

It's common to break up our game into a set number of roleplay encounters, exploration encounters, and combat encounters but consider setting those categories aside and simply developing situations. These situations have interesting things going on in them that the characters can get involved with, but we don't have to know how they will interact with it. Sure, some scenes lean one way or another. When a horde of goblins attacks a wagon filled with friendly farming families (FFFs), the player characters are not going to go investigate rocks. Many times, however, we DMs can simply set the stage and let the players act within the scene as they want. That's a big part of the fun of D&D.

Choose Monsters that Fit the Situation

As we described earlier, the story and situation drives what encounters takes place. The same is true when we select monsters. Choose the monsters that fit the situation. A hobgoblin war camp might realistically have twenty-five hobgoblins and fifty goblins in it. They might not all charge the characters at once but that's the size of the war camp. A single hobgoblin patrol might consist of six hobgoblins and a captain. A war party might consist of twenty goblins, twelve hobgoblins, two hobgoblin captains, and a hobgoblin warlord.

We don't try to balance this war camp with the characters. This is the size of the war camp, the patrol, and the war party regardless of the characters. How the characters decide to deal with a small patrol or approach the war party is up to them.

Sometimes the characters might corner off two hobgoblins who went to examine an old dwarven statue. Other times the characters might find themselves overwhelmed with two dozen hobgoblins and two captains riding on scarred worgs. The story drives the encounter.

Determining Deadly Encounters

Most DMs want to have a vague idea of how difficult an encounter will be. A group of level 17 characters won't have much of a problem blowing this war camp off the face of Faerun but a group of level 4 characters running up against an entire war party at once could be deadly.

Before an encounter turns to combat, it helps if we know it's rough potential difficulty. Doing so helps us steer the situation and offer other options to the players before it becomes a surprise total-party-kill (TPKs). Understanding encounter difficulty is tricky and can cause real problems for new DMs. Most commonly, a new DM will pit the characters against monsters that are way too hard and inadvertently kill the characters.

Accidental TPKs are much more likely to happen at level 1 than any other level in D&D. Anyone who thinks a battle between a group of level 18 characters against Tiamat will be rough hasn't seen what happens when level 1 characters fight too many rat swarms.

Above all else, be gentle with level 1 characters. However squishy you think they are, they're squishier. If you want to throw some monsters at your level 1 characters, choose fewer monsters than characters (maybe one for every two characters) and make sure they have a challenge of 1/4 or less. Even two or three challenge 1/2 thugs can wipe the floor with level 1 characters. Be nice to these poor young adventurers and you'll have 19 more levels of delightful pain to inflict.

The Dungeon Master's Guide has detailed instructions for building encounters at various difficulties. These are the guidelines that Wizards of the Coast themselves use to design monsters and balance combat encounters. I suggest that you ignore these guidelines. They're too complicated, take a lot of time, and don't usually give us the results we're after anyway.

In a wonderful episode of Dragon Talk, lead D&D Designer and rules sage Jeremy Crawford goes into detail on these rules and explains that the main goal isn't to "balance" encounters but to help DMs gauge the difficulty of a combat encounter, particularly if it's deadly. The math in the Dungeon Master's Guide can give us this rough gauge but so can a number of other easier methods. I'm going to offer three different methods for determining whether an encounter is deadly or not and you are free to choose the method you like the best. Two of these methods use the same underlying math of the Dungeon Master's Guide but are easier to use.

First, Xanathar's Guide to Everything includes a much-improved set of guidelines and tables for determining encounter difficulty. Instead of attempting to calculate encounter balance based on experience budgets, difficulty, and the number of monsters, Xanathar's Guide includes charts we can reference to determine the equivalent number of monsters to characters at a given character level and monster challenge rating.

Second, I'll offer some rules-of-thumb you can keep in your head to give you a rough idea of whether an encounter is deadly or not. This takes a little work to memorize but once it's wired into your head, you'll need no other tool or chart to gauge an encounter's difficulty. This method compares the challenge rating of monsters to the levels of characters.

Third, you can just wing it. The more experienced you get with D&D; the monsters, the mechanics, and the capabilities of the characters; the easier it will be for you to judge the difficulty of an encounter on your own. There is, of course, a lot of variance during a fight, but as you run games you'll become better at judging the difficulty without any sort of forumlas or tables. Many experienced DMs ignore any sort of encounter balance rules and take an estimated guess at the difficulty of any given encounter.

Comparing Challenge Rating to Character Level

It's important that we understand what the challenge rating of a monster represents. According to the Monster Manual, a group of four characters should be able to defeat a monster with a challenge rating equal to the level of the characters. Thus, a group of level 2 characters should be able to defeat a challenge 2 ogre.

If we reverse-engineer the encounter building math used in the Dungeon Master's Guide, we can figure out a few other relationships between challenge rating and character level. These comparisons assume a fight that is not quite deadly, but close.

A single monster is roughly equal in power to a single character if its challenge rating is roughly 1/4 of the character's level. This increases to 1/2 if the character is above level 4.

A single monster is roughly equal in power to two characters if its challenge rating is 1/2 of the character's level. This increases to 3/4 if the character is above level 4.

Two monsters are roughly equal in power to a single character if the monsters' challenge rating is roughly equal to 1/10 of the character's level. This increases to 1/4 if the character is above level 4.

Here's a small table that might help. This comes from the upcoming Lazy DM's Workook, the Kickstarter stretch goal for Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master

Any encounters above these amounts, in the quantity of monsters and the challenge ratings of monsters compared to the level of the characters, will be potentially deadly.

This system can't give you a perfectly accurate view of how a battle will go, however. Too many variables determine the difficulty of a combat encounter. These variables include the experience of the players, the synergy of the character classes, how many battles the characters have already encountered, what spells the characters have, what magic items the characters have, the environment they're fighting in, and, of course, the roll of the dice.

Thus, any guidelines you decide to use to help you understand encounter difficulty won't be perfectly accurate. Instead, you'll have to judge for yourself by seeing how the characters fair against various types of fights throughout an adventure or a campaign. Sometimes you'll need to ease back and make battles easier. Other times you'll need to increase the number of monsters to challenge the characters.

The more experience you get under your belt running combat in D&D and the better you understand the capabilities of the characters, the easier it becomes to see what the characters can handle and adjust accordingly.

Adjusting Encounter Difficulty on the Fly

There's a dirty secret among DMs. We're all cheats and liars. We do, however, cheat and lie for the fun of the game and the enjoyment of the players. We can, for example, vary the hit points of a monster depending on how the battle is going. If the battle is becoming a slog or is simply too hard, we can reduce the number of hit points a monster has. If the characters are carving through monsters too easily, we might increase them to add to the challenge. As long as we're varying hit points within the hit dice range of a monster, we're technically not cheating.

For example, an ogre has an average of 59 hit points and its hit dice are 7d10 + 21. Thus, any ogre could have between 28 and 91 hit points. A bigger brute might have 90 hit points but the weaker ones might only have 40. We don't have to make these changes ahead of time. We can change their hit points during the battle to keep up the high energy pace of the game.

We can likewise tweak the damage of a monster. Like hit points, we're given an average amount of damage and a damage equation. If we want, we can increase the damage the monster inflicts up to the maximum of that dice range and still be within the rules. Likewise, a hit might be less if we find that the monsters are inflicting way more damage than we expected.

Finally, we can add or remove monsters to tune a fight. Maybe six more hobgoblins rush in when they hear their fellow soldiers being attacked. Maybe two of the hobgoblins flee to get help or become distracted by a third party.

All three of these techniques give us dials we can turn to change the difficulty of a fight while it's happening. We don't want to do this sort of thing all the time, but the options are there if things aren't going well and the game's fun factor is dropping.

Add Interesting Terrain and Fantastic Features

Six hobgoblins in an open field isn't that interesting. Four hobgoblins and their four worg mounts camping out around an ancient dwarven archway is more interesting, particularly if that archway is swirling with eldritch energy.

When we're developing the scenes in our adventure, we can add texture by throwing in interesting terrain or fantastic features. Chapter 5 of the Dungeon Master's Guide includes two tables of monuments and weird locales we can use as inspiration for some fantastic features to include in our combat encounters. Appendix A of the Dungeon Master's Guide also includes similar tables for dungeon features. Describing them can give our players ideas about how to use these features in combat which makes the whole battle more dynamic and exciting.

Features like this add an element of exploration and mystery to our scenes.

Final Thoughts on Building Great Encounters

Building great encounters is a skill, like improvisation, that gets better the more we do it. It's a skill we can improve on for the rest of our lives. By keeping some general guidelines in mind and experimenting from scene to scene, we can learn what works well, what does not, and what things we want to try out in the future.

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Dungeons & Dragons is a game full of choices. From running campaigns to running characters, from steering world-shaking events to choosing an approach while having a conversation with a merchant, players and DMs make all sorts of choices when playing D&D.

Choices are also the root of what makes D&D fun. How should the characters interact with an NPC? How will they accomplish their goal? Who gets the fancy new magic sword? All of these choices, and the consequences of them, bring life to the game.

Sometimes, though, the best choices aren't easily made. Sometimes all of the options are reasonable and other times, all of them are fraught with consequences. Today we're going to look at these hard choices and see how we can make the most of them in our D&D games.

Which Front to Face

In the campaign building advice in Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master, I recommend using Fronts from Dungeon World as a way to see what major movers and shakers are changing the face of the world. When these fronts all become visible to the characters, the characters will have to make a hard choice about which front they want to stop.

For example, in the D&D adventure Legacy of the Crystal Shard, the characters have three potential factions they have to deal with: the ice witch Hedrun, Akar Kessel the undead mage, and Valish Gant the schemer of the Arcane Brotherhood. When the characters navigate this adventure, they must decide which of these three villains they wish to thwart knowing that the other paths will move forward unhindered.

If we're not careful, these always-moving fronts can be frustrating for players. While focusing on one villain, the characters find they're two steps back with the other two. If the players begin to feel screwed no matter which direction they go, perhaps slow down on the progression of the other fronts.

Making Deals

"You can hit four enemies with your fireball, or eight if you're willing to hit the fighter and rogue..."

One of the fun design elements of the excellent RPG 13th Age is how it includes deals made between players and the GM. A fireball in 13th Age can hit 1d3 enemies in a group or, if you cast it recklessly, an extra 1d3 enemies, but it will hit any of your friends engaged with those enemies. That's a great way to get fireballs to work well without a grid.

Making deals are a great way to put hard choices in front of players. Do you want advantage on your next attack? All you have to do is swing from that chandelier up above? A failure, of course, could result in a nasty fall.

Advantage, disadvantage, and inspiration are three currencies we DMs always have on hand to sweeten deals and put hard choices in front of the characters. Waving an inspiration token at a player is a great way to get them to accept some risk when things would otherwise feel too safe.

Here are some example deals we can put in front of our players:

• Turn a failed ability check into a success but at a cost.
• Give the character advantage on their next check by putting themselves in a risky position.
• Give a character additional targets in a spell's area but only by putting something else in that area at risk.
• Giving a single-use ability or power but with a chance of corruption, damage, or arcane feedback.
• Give a character some vital information but only by guaranteeing the safety of someone the characters desperately want to slay.

The Curse You Don't Want to Get Rid Of

What if a fungus-cursed hydra bites one of the characters and that character contracts some sort of hideous disease? That's not a hard choice. Go find the nearest caster of cure disease or greater restoration and get that thing cleaned up!

But what if this infection did something to the character, something interesting. What if this character could start to see through other plants? What if it gave them access to new powers they could cultivate such as entangle, spike growth, and grasping vine? What if the strange infected would knit itself closed with tendrils of vines and roots? What if, on their death, they are returned in their original form but inside they're all plant stuff, a physical vessel sworn to Zuggtmoy?

Simple curses are easy. Characters certainly want to get rid of them and will do so. If we turn those curses into hard choices, though, maybe they'll live with the curse.

Maybe an abolith is willing to impart the vast knowledge of the abolithic sovereignty to your character, giving them a history as old as the millennia and current intelligence all over the Sword Coast? What if all it cost was the character's own mental independence? Hmmm.

Choosing Villainous Factions

Often, when we're prepping our D&D games, it's hard for us to see villainous organizations as anything other than a big pile of monsters for the characters to kill. If the characters go into a thieves' den, it might end up being room after room of bandits getting slaughtered.

One way we can turn monstrous lairs into opportunities for roleplaying and hard choices is to ensure there are multiple factions within the band of monsters or among the villainous organization. This way the characters can work within or against these factions. If both factions are purely hostile to the characters then it might end up as a slaughterfest anyway so we'll need to ensure the factions have reason to talk to the characters and vice versa.

For example, in Tomb of Annihilation, the characters can go into the Fane of the Night Serpent. There are two factions in there; those loyal to Ras Nsi and those loyal to Fenthasa. Ras Nsi has no intent at going into the Tomb of the Nine Gods to stop the Soul Monger so he has a reason to talk to the party: convince them to go into the tomb itself and stop the Soul Monger. Fenthasa might have another goal. She wants Ras Nsi dead and the obsidian dagger from the Tomb returned to her. She might aid a party willing to end Ras Nsi and return to her the dagger within the tomb.

Now, instead of the characters just going in and slaughtering all the yuan-ti, they might get involved in the rift between two factions and have to choose which faction they want to support.

These factions might be rivals within a group or subordinates who no longer want to work with their superior. Any rift like this is an opportunity for the characters to get involved and a hard choice for them to make. Which faction, if any, will they support?

Here are some examples of factions within villainous groups:

• Each of two rival factions want to usurp the other.
• A subordinate secretly plots against their master.
• Two monstrous groups are separated by a valley and neither group can get the upper hand on the other without the characters' help.
• A powerful leader actually wants to leave the gang they're in.
• A spy for a rival group has infiltrated a villainous group.
• The characters possess an item that makes a faction in a villainous group covet and worship them.

What Would Make Them Choose Differently?

Whenever we want to throw a hard choice in front of the characters, we can, when the choice in front of the characters seems inevitable, we can ask ourselves "what would make them choose differently?"

For example, if the yuan-ti want to open a huge door into the realm of the Night Serpent and they need one of the characters to actually open the door, what would convince them to do so? How could the yuan-ti convince the characters that opening the door is the better option? Maybe only the Night Serpent can stop the horror Acererak feeds in the depth of the Tomb of the Nine Gods. Maybe the only way to stop the Night Serpent is to face it. Maybe something the character loves more than mortal life lies beyond those gates.

When a choice seems too easy, what might steer the characters to choose a different way?

A Game of Choices

D&D is a game full of choices, some of them small and some as big as the multiverse. One of our jobs as dungeon masters is to put meaningful and interesting choice in front of the characters whenever the pace of the adventure calls for it. Without putting too much decision fatigue on them, we can insert hard choices so the players can see the true impact of the choices they make. Use hard choices to make your game unique and fun.

Special thanks to Taylor on Twitter for the suggestion to write this article.

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Note: This article is reposed with permission from the original posted to D&D Beyond on March 2018. It is the fifth of a series of articles focused on helping new D&D DMs put together and run great games. The full list of articles includes:

• Finding and Maintaining a D&D Group
• Starting Strong at your First D&D Game
• Tools for the New D&D Dungeon Master
• Improvisation in D&D for New Dungeon Masters
• A New Dungeon Master's Guide to Miniatures (this article)
• A New DM's Guide For Building Combat Encounters

In a previous article we talked about the tools we need to run our D&D games. We glossed over one giant topic, however, the topic of miniatures.

When we say "miniatures" we're really talking about the physical objects we use to represent the characters and monsters in our D&D games. The options are vast.

Groups don't actually need to use anything to represent monsters or characters in Dungeons & Dragons. We can use a gameplay style known as the "theater of the mind". When running D&D in the theater of the mind, the DM describes the situation, clarifies it from the questions of the players, listens to what the players want their characters to do, and describes the outcome. It is the same for combat as it is for exploration or roleplay.

Ever since D&D game out forty years ago, however, players and DMs have often used some sort of miniature to represent their characters or monsters. Back then it was often lead or pewter war game miniatures, sometimes painted and sometimes not. The use of miniatures has evolved in the four decades since, but even today there is no perfect solution for representing monsters and characters at the table. We have a wide range of options, from no cost at all to thousands of dollars, but none of these options are perfect.

No matter which of the paths we take or products we buy for D&D miniatures, we'll always make tradeoffs. Sometimes it's money, sometimes it's time, sometimes it's physical space, sometimes it's the flexibility of our game. Even if we spend thousands of dollars on miniatures, as some veteran DMs have, finding the right miniature can take too long to make it useful when running a game. No matter how many miniatures we own, we still will not have exactly the right one or exactly the right number for every battle. While no perfect solution exists, we can mix and match a few ideas together to design our own personal best-case solution for representing characters and monsters in combat.

The Free Options and the Theater of the Mind

As mentioned, we can describe combat and use the occasional paper sketch to help players visualize what is going on. This method is fast, free, and doesn't break the flow of the game from scene to scene.

Running combat in the theater of the mind means we can run any sort of battle we want. With a zero cost comes infinite flexibility. We can run a battle atop a massive titan's skull surrounded by a thousand screaming ghouls if we want to. We can run a ship battle in the depths of the astral sea fighting against a pair of githyanki warships. Whatever sort of battle we can imagine, we can run. Even if we do choose to use miniatures, keeping this gameplay style in our toolkit gives us the option when we want it.

Combat in the theater of the mind isn't for everyone. When battles get complicated, some representation of the characters and monsters helps. We can start by representing them with whatever we have on hand. Game pieces from other games, dice, coins, glass beads, LEGOs, and a any roughly one-inch-square object can serve as tokens for characters and monsters. This is a fine option when starting to play D&D that may serve you well for your entire D&D career. Even if you do end up getting more miniatures and better representations, keeping some generic tokens on hand can help set up an improvised battle and save you a lot of time.

Low Cost Do-It-Yourself Options

Some crafty DMs learned how to print paper versions their own miniatures either as tokens or as stand-ups. This is a low-cost solution but does take time to build them out. Enrique Bertran, the Newbie DM, wrote a popular guide to making tokens with print-outs, a one-inch hole punch, a washer, and some glue. More recently he posted a great trick of making one token per monster type and then using generic tokens to represent the rest of those monsters. These hand-made tokens are a wonderful and scalable solution that won't break the bank.

The folks over at Alea Tools have a wonderful suggestion for making tokens out of old Magic the Gathering cards. They suggest punching out the card art you like with a one-inch punch, and sticking adhesive one-inch epoxy stickers to the top to make it feel like a hard plastic token. I spent a weekend making about one hundred such tokens and the look and feel great. The epoxy stickers, originally designed for bottle cap necklaces, work just as well on printed artwork like in NewbieDM's solution above. The one-inch punch and epoxy stickers can make just about anything into a great usable D&D token for pennies. A few generic tokens made this way can also augment our miniatures collection by representing additional monsters whose miniatures we don't own.

Many other creators have published PDFs of tokens and stand-up paper miniatures. Trash Mob Minis and Printable Heroes are two such creators. These print-out miniatures require your time and the right equipment, which can get expensive if you don't already have it, but offer a nice pocketbook-friendly solution that gives you the exact type and number of miniatures you want.

Pawns and Flat Plastic Miniatures

For those who would rather save time and are willing to spend more money, we come to cardboard pawns. The most popular of these are the Pathfinder Pawns Bestiary collection which offers a large number of cardboard stand-up monster tokens for a low price. Though designed for Pathfinder, these tokens work just as well for D&D.

Other producers like Arcknight Games have come up with flat plastic miniatures that cost more but, in my opinion, look much better on a table and pack light since they're considerably flatter than cardboard stand-ups (full disclosure, I have a curated set of Flat Plastic Miniatures available through Arcknight Games).

These flat stand-up miniatures are a great way to build a large collection of monster representations without breaking the bank.

The Wide World of Plastic Miniatures

We now come to the large topic of plastic miniatures which come both painted and unpainted. Pre-painted miniatures often come in random booster boxes while specific unpainted miniatures can usually be purchased in non-random blister packs. Some sets of individual painted miniatures exist for heroes which is a great way to build up a small collection of hero miniatures without resorting to random selections.

Unpainted miniatures can be used as-is or painted. Painting miniatures, of course, adds the cost of paints, brushes, and other painting accessories on top of the time it takes to paint them. Painting miniatures is a fun hobby all on its own but it isn't for everyone. Backing the occasional Kickstarter by Reaper for unpainted "Bones" miniatures is one way to get a large collection of miniatures for a relatively low cost-per-mini.

Pre-painted plastic miniatures are, by far, the most common solution. Wizards of the Coast and their partner, WizKids, released thousands of miniatures over the past fifteen years. They've almost always been in randomly assorted packs but the price per miniature has changed dramatically over the years, and not in the direction we'd hope for. DMs collecting for many years might have large collections but building one today costs more than it did ten to fifteen years ago. If random boosters aren't your bag, you can buy miniatures on the secondary market but the cost per mini will be about $3 to $4 per mini on the low-end. Miniatures for our heroes and boss monsters might be worth it but it's probably not worth getting a warband of twelve orcs together for $36.

An Evolving Marketplace

The world of tokens, stand-ups, and miniatures continually changes. New ideas, like printable paper stand-up miniatures, pop up quickly and become very popular while older solutions like cardboard tokens or cheap pre-painted miniatures tend to fall out of production. Sometimes one can buy cardboard stand-ups easily and other times they're out of print and selling for four times the cost. This all points to the same core truth of miniatures: no miniature solution is perfect.

Terrain

If you thought miniatures were the end of the D&D money sink, you are mistaken. The top of the line D&D accessories include 3D terrain to go with all of those miniatures. These fantasy terrain arrangements look absolutely stunning, showing off full three-dimensional maps and areas including dungeons, cities, towns, and castles. The most popular vendor for these accessories is the venerable Dwarven Forge and their creator Stefan Pokorny. These are the setups that everyone drools over on Pinterest and Twitter. Matt Mercer uses Dwarven Forge on Critical Role.

The costs for these elements of terrain are as high as the sets are beautiful. A table-sized representation of a complicated castle or dungeon can run thousands of dollars.

There is also a hidden cost with this terrain. The time to set up such an arrangement leaves little flexibility for the game to go anywhere else. If you set up a castle, the characters are definitely going to that castle. Likewise, the terrain takes up a lot of space to store and time to set up. I am a huge fan of Dwarven Forge and own many sets myself, but it is not a requirement to run a great D&D game.

For now, admire the pictures people put on the web but stick to your blank battle-mat for a lightweight, cost-effective, and flexible alternative.

Some Final Recommendations

Given the imperfection of the D&D miniature market, I have no clear solution but a few recommendations.

First of all, even if we don't use it all the time, running combat using the "theater of the mind" offers us infinite flexibility and no cost. Even if we do have a collection of miniatures, we don't have to use them all the time. Keeping this style of play in our DM toolbox keeps our game fast and flexible.

Players love to have nice miniatures for their characters. Character miniatures can show their marching order when heading down a hallway, who is on watch, and a variety of other non-combat situations on top of their obvious representation in combat. They're also just plain fun to play with. Investing in a good set of character miniatures, either as full miniatures or stand-up tokens, can help bring the characters to life.

As far as monsters go, sticking with cheap representations of monsters with whatever objects you have on hand is just fine. Hand-made tokens are fast, flexible, easy to transport, and cheap. Plastic and card-board stand-up miniatures give us a large collection of monsters for a reasonable cost. Painted or unpainted miniatures look great at the table but the costs are high. Choose which ever of these options best fits your budget and the type of game you want to run.

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The Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition Starter Set includes an adventure that exemplifies the pace and feeling of the 5th edition of Dungeons & Dragons.

As the introductory adventure to the fifth edition of D&D, Lost Mine of Phandelver is likely the most-played adventure of D&D 5e. It's also one of the best. In this article we'll discuss tips and tricks for getting the most out of running this wonderful D&D adventure.

If this is your first time running Dungeons & Dragons, you may want Starting Strong at your First D&D Game.

Use the Pregen Backgrounds

The backgrounds included with the pre-generated characters in Phandelver are written to hook characters into this adventure. Even if your players bring custom-built characters from the Player's Handbook, you may want to recommend that they choose backgrounds from the Starter Set pre-generated characters to better tie them to the story. You can email these pre-generated characters to your players before your game so they can use them as the seeds when building their own custom characters.

When your players have chosen backgrounds, read them over and write them down, perhaps on a campaign worksheet. These backgrounds can help you choose which hooks to highlight in the rest of the adventure. The town of Phandalin is packed with quests, many of which are tied to these character backgrounds. Instead of piling quests on them that may or may not be relevant, only expose the hooks that tie to the backgrounds of the characters.

Start Strong

Lost Mine of Phandelver begins with a goblin ambush against a caravan protected by the characters. Before the battle begins, this is a good chance to help you tie the characters together, if they aren't already with some loaded questions:

• Athrund, how did Celvak save your life previously?
• Teraman, who among the Red Brand bandits do you and Yeshta hunt and why?
• Gormun, what debt do you and Uthar owe to the Rockbottom brothers?

Questions like this help tie charaters together early and move some of the storytelling over to the players. You can use Fiasco-style relationships to get all the characters tied together if you have the time. You might also have all of the characters tied to a single faction such as the Harpers, Lord's Alliance, Zhentarim, Order of the Gauntlet, or Emerald Enclave. This is a built-in group connection and ties them to a specific NPC in the town of Phandalin when they arrive.

Now on to the battle!

The first thing to remember in this battle is that level 1 characters are extremely fragile. It would suck for new D&D players to start their D&D experience with a total-party kill (TPK) so be careful.

This first battle is a great chance to try your hand at Theater of the Mind combat instead of using maps and minis. It will get both you and your players used to battles that don't use a grid or miniatures. It's good practice and will help you with many of the other battles in this adventure.

You'll also want to stick to the static damage output of goblins at level 1 to ensure you avoid any major damage spikes that drop characters in a single hit. Dropping on the first shot is a lousy way to experience a new edition of D&D.

If you want to complicate the battle, add an NPC driver of the cart the party can protect. Use your handy random name generator and whip up a character archetype from your most recent favorite movie or TV show. Have the goblins harass this poor soul to give the characters something else to protect than their own hides.

Get Them to Level 2 Fast

Level 1 is brutal in the fifth edition of D&D. You may want to get your characters to second level as soon as you can, even as early as the middle of the Cragmaw Hideout. There's also nothing stopping you from starting them at second level. Those extra hit points and hit dice of healing will help them significantly when facing off against the foes in the first chapter of this adventure. You can level them to third level when the story dictates it normally and everything works out well after that.

Hone Your Lazy Dungeon Master Skills

Lost Mine of Phandelver is a series of small sandboxes stacked together. This is a fantastic opportunity to practice the art of the lazy dungeon master. Part 1, the Cragmaw Hideout, is a great dungeon sandbox with multiple paths and multiple ways to defeat its enemies. Instead of pushing the players down one particular path, relish in their discussions about which way to go and improvise as they take their chosen path.

You'll likely want to avoid any elaborate battle maps for this dungeon and instead use a blank flip mat to draw out rough locations as the players choose a direction. If you pre-build parts of the dungeon, you're more likely to consciously or subconsciously lead them that way. Instead, relax and let them choose whatever path they want.

You will also want to consider how the goblins react to the approach taken by the characters. It's a great time to see through the eyes of the goblins. As the characters invade their secret headquarters, the goblins act as they would in reaction to this.

Part 2 and part 3 of the adventure expand the sandbox considerably. There are tons of things to do both inside and outside Phandalin. Feel free to let the group decide whether to stay inside the town and deal with the Redbrands or to leave the city and deal with some of the interesting locations found in part 3. The characters should be free to leave and return to Phandalin as they choose, though the plots of the Redbrands may escalate if not taken care of.

Part 4 returns us to a sandbox dungeon delve. Again, give your players the freedom to choose whatever path they want to explore the dungeon. Wave Echo Cave is big so don't feel like the characters have to explore every nook and cranny. If it starts to get stale, cut off certain passages or remove redundant monsters to keep the pace moving well. If they happen to go straight to the boss, let them do so.

Weave In the Dopplegangers

There are two dopplegangers in this adventure, Vhalak and Vyerith. Both of them work for the Black Spider and are written in at specific locations in the adventure. Both of these, however, make for fantastic reoccurring villains you might bring on early in the adventure. Give characters the feeling of being watched. Let them see shifting shadowy figures lurking in the background. Maybe one of them actually attacks the characters if the timing is right. These two foes should be smart villains who won't engage if they don't have an escape plan, so don't let them simply walk in and get killed. If the characters do manage to kill one of them early, they might see them again as the second doppleganger changes its shape to match the first one.

These two dopplegangers are your chance to add in a whole new variable to the villains in the adventure. Make use of them.

Watch Out for Venomfang

There is one single villain in Phandelver that stands a significant chance of wiping out the characters—the green dragon Venomfang. When you introduce Venomfang, make it clear that the characters face a significant foe. Give them plenty of chances to realize that a simple stand-up fight might not be the right way to go. There are also many opportunities available to aim Venomfang at other enemies than the characters through subtle manipulation of Venomfang and the cult who courts him.

A Useful D&D Kit

Beyond the adventure itself, the books in the D&D Starter Set are extremely useful. They're a perfect companion to your DM kit, containing maps, rules, adventures, and monster stat blocks to run many adventures outside of the pages. The pre-gen character sheets are also extremely useful, mainly for their ability to level up from 1 to 5 right on the sheet. The various maps of the locations in Phandelver also fit very common locations in many adventures such as ruined castles, rogue dens, ruined villages, monster-infested caves, and dwarven mines. We can easily repurpose these locations to fit our own adventures. While this Starter Set gives us roughly a 12 hour adventure, we could make adventures for hundreds of hours with the materials we have inside.

At $20 MSRP, the Starter Set is a real bargain.

A Fantastic Adventure to Start your D&D Campaign

Phandelver is a great adventure full of opportunities for you to relax, play loose, and let the story evolve from the choices of the players and the actions of the characters. Take your time, understand the material, go with the flow, and get ready to spend a bunch of hours having fun with your friends.

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Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master, the spiritual successor to the Lazy Dungeon Master is now available for purchase! Currently you can buy the ebook package which includes the PDF and ePub version of the book. The softcover and hardcover versions of the book are due for release in early October 2018.

It's been five years since the release of the Lazy Dungeon Master. Back then, D&D was transitioning between fourth and the fifth edition. Even written during this transition the book did extremely well and the ideas in it still resonate with GMs today.

After Fantastic Adventures, I went back through the original book to see what worked well, what fell short, and what needed to be refined. I studied dozens of gamemaster books for many different fantasy roleplaying games and books of advice for running great fantasy RPGs. I watched tons of Youtube videos by folks like Matt Mercer, Matt Colville, and others. I poured over forums and websites and blogs that talk about how to run great D&D games. I went back over the six thousand responses to the 2016 Dungeon Master Survey and dozens of Facebook and Twitter polls. I dug deep to see how we actually prepare and run our games.

Then I took a month off from everything and wrote the first draft of the Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master. In February I launched the Kickstarter for the Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master and the support blew the doors off of any of my expectations. I was able to finance not just the full production of Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master but a full Lazy DM's Workbook to go even deeper into helping GMs run great fifth edition games. That book is due out in late fall or early winter 2018.

I kept the price of Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master low—$8 for the ebook package—to help as many GMs as possible get it into their hands. The smashing success of the Kickstarter let me bring on industry titans like Scott Fitzgerald Gray for editing, Marc Radle for art direction and layout, Jack Kaiser for two incredible covers, and Pedro Potier for the internal artwork.

There's a two-chapter sample of Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master so you can see what you're getting and this sample also acts as a crash course in the new lazy DM's checklist so it's usable on its own. Give it a look and see if it's the style for you.

I've also recently taken to Twitch to broadcast myself preparing for my weekly Tomb of Annihilation game using the new Lazy DM's checklist. If you want to see the steps in action, take a look at the Youtube archive of previous Lazy DM prep videos.

I've poured decades of experiences running D&D games into Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master. I poured centuries of experiences from other GMs into this book as well. Everything that I've focused on when helping GMs run great roleplaying games I polished and put into this book. If you like what I've been doing on this site over the past ten years, this book is the refined culmination of everything I have to offer.

I hope you love it as much as I do and I thank you for your support.

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Hags may be the perfect low-level boss monster and they run best when we focus less on their stat block and more on how they'll make the lives of the characters miserable over the course of a low-level campaign. The more we think about hags as the ageless, plotting, and manipulating villains they are, the more our players will enjoy hunting them down and killing them.

The Hags as Low Level Bosses

D&D is defined by huge boss monsters. The Dungeon Master's Guide has Acererak the arch-lich on the cover, the Monster Manual has a beholder on it's cover, and the Player's Handbook has King Snurre the fire giant lord on it's cover. D&D, of course, even includes "dragon" in the title and when we think of that, we're likely not thinking about the famous Larry Elmore Dragon Slayers art. We're thinking about big dragons. Maybe sorcerer dragons like Iymrith.

Low level characters don't often get to face bosses like that. They're worried about wererats, decaying skeletons, and hobgoblins. We often save our really interesting bosses for high level campaigns.

Enter the hag. Hags are ageless villains. The depth of their black hearts are only matched by the long centuries of their lives. They are cunning and devious. Many DMs probably run hags like any other encounter, the characters burst into a den with one or more hags and, after a fight, down the hags go.

But hags can be so much more. Volo's Guide to Monsters includes eleven pages on hags and it's well worth the read. Volo's also has numerous hag allies and minions including boggarts, redcaps, yeth hounds, quicklings, catoblepases, and banderhobbs. These are the monsters the characters can fight, and fight often. If the characters actually go toe-to-toe with the hag, however, likely the hag has already lost.

To really understand the depth of the hag, give the chapter on hags in Volo's Guide a solid read before running them as a villain.

Thinking Beyond the Stat Block

Monsters are more than just stat blocks. As we move towards the story focus of D&D and away from thinking mostly about tactical combat, this lesson is an important one to keep in mind.

Villains are living breathing entities in our story. Villains in this world don't just face off against characters and fight them in well-prepared battle arenas. Villains do lots of things off screen that affect the lives characters. They manipulate the world around them. They send minions to harass. They pull on strings and set up situations. They kidnap and murder loved-ones. A good villain may never face off against the characters if they can help it.

Statistically, hags, particularly green hags, aren't very powerful. They're challenge 3 and have decent hit points and damage but, if ganged up on, they'll go down quickly. A green hag might be a good threat for a level two or three party party, but not a party of level six or seven characters.

And yet these hags are ancient. They are master manipulators. They've murdered for centuries without getting caught. How can such a creature only be a challenge 3 monster with 78 hit points? How do we make such a monster a threat?

As strange as it sounds, a hag might never fight the characters head on. She might send waves of boggles, red caps, and banderhobbs. She would figure out how to get the town guards to think the characters are murderers themselves. She'll haunt their dreams and taunt them with illusions. She would twist what the characters love into something horrible. Hags aren't going to run up and hack them with their claws, they're going to spend ten years twisting their minds into knots.

Running hags this way can be new for some of us. We know that monsters have a place in the story but we're still used to throwing them out there in front of the characters in combat encounter three and having a big old scrape. Not all of the monsters work well that way. Hags are the prime example.

Hags make much better villains than monsters. Instead of worrying about encounter balance with hags, we should be think about what they're thinking, what they're feeling, and what they're doing. Fighting a hag might be more about gathering information, uncovering clues, and working the hag's ego against herself to find out where she is.

When the characters finally do face a hag, it might be a quick fight. The hag might even find a way to make it even worse for the characters if she dies. Perhaps the hag has vital information the characters will lose if she dies. Perhaps the characters have made a deal with her that they cannot break. Perhaps her life force is bound to an innocent, one loved by the characters. Perhaps her death will result in releasing a necrotic poison that will flood the city's aquafurs.

Of course, if we want to beef up our hag in the actual fight, maxing her hit points and doubling her attacks can often do the trick. Maybe she wears a grizzly amulet that lets her distribute damage to her banderhobb bodyguard. Beefing her up, though, isn't the point. The point is how she deals with the characters before combat begins.

We can also give the hag access to all sorts of spells that can screw with the characters from afar. Running a hag isn't about dropping fireballs on the characters, its about manipulating their thoughts and the reality around them. Spells like phantasmal force, dissonant whispers, hallucinatory terrain, friends, charm person, dream, sending, phantasmal killer, insect plague, mass suggestion, and simulacrum can help the hag terrorize the party, particularly if we cheat and let the hag cast spells from afar, like through scrying. The hag's tremendous experience likely lets them break the rules of spells. They can know spells well outside their challenge level and maybe even break the rules of concentration. A hag might use multiple simulacrums to terrorize the characters without them actually being able to kill her. It's nice for the players to be able to recognize the spells that the hag casts but also see that the hag's version is quite a bit different at the same time; strange and powerful.

The Nearly Omnipotent Hag

We DMs aren't as smart as the combined intellects of our players. They'll nearly always outsmart us. If we're in the minds of our villains, how can our villians not be outsmarted by them as well?

We cheat.

Our hag might not know exactly what the characters are up to at any given time, but we are and maybe we can leak some of that information into the actions of the hag. Maybe the hag knows more than the charaters think. Maybe there is a spy among them. Do we trust that sentient sword wielded by the ranger?

If we're going to play a smart villain, we have to give it superhuman intellect that only we creators of the game can give them. It's the only way we can keep up with the four to six brains working against our dastardly foe.

Hags may not be ancient red dragons, lichs, or vampire lords. Yet they can be as cunning as any of those. Low level adventures deserve strong villains just as high-level ones do. For your level 1 to 5 adventures, the hag can make an excellent villain. Think through her eyes, keep her out of harms way, send in her minions, and let her tug on the strings of the characters as her plot unweaves around them.

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Running mysteries in D&D is exceedingly difficult. Unlike great mystery stories, we have no idea how the characters will navigate the situation. On top of this, it's likely our players may uncover the root of the mystery well before we expected them to.

Some DMs likely map out all of the threads of a story when they sit down to prepare it. They'll start with a murder, for example, and map out all of the key components like a giant FBI crime board full of push pins and yarn. That approach may work for some but we're going to look at a different approach today: focusing on the situation and developing your clues.

Focus on the Situation and Clues

Instead of trying to build out detailed plots and mysteries with the expectation that the players will go from step A to step B, we might instead focus on the situation. In a murder mystery, instead of worrying about how the characters will discover the murderer, we can focus on the situation of the murder itself. Where did it take place? Who was there? What does the crime scene look like?

Each of these questions can be filled out in our list of ten secrets and clues. Our lazy method of writing down a number of secrets and clues without worrying about how the characters will discover them is perfect for mysteries like this. No matter what path the characters take to investigate the murder, they can eventually uncover the clues they need to come up with the answer.

Some of these secrets offer only small clues while others tell us everything. For example, in the adventure Gloom in Fantastic Adventures (spoilers ahead!), we have the mystery of an elven assassin going after the nephew of the local lord for peeing in the local holy elven pool. Here are a few of the secrets for this mystery:

• The Temple of Light was recently defiled, with a large statue broken and someone urinating in the holy pool of light. Witnesses saw two youths fleeing the scene.

• Meira, a priest of light, is a quiet, introspective person. She came to the Temple of Light two decades ago, not speaking of her past but seeking to serve the light for the rest of her days.

• For over a century, a master assassin named Gloom upset the power base of numerous lands by assassinating nobles and rulers on all sides.

• Gloom went missing decades ago, and most presume her dead.

• Meira confessed her true identity to one of the other priests at the Temple of Light, as well as her vow to atone for the murders she committed.

• An old shrine to a dead god is said to be hidden in a bog outside Whitesparrow.

• Assassins and thieves once worshiped a god known as the Blood King, but the faith dedicated to that mysterious figure died out decades ago.

• After the defilement of the Temple of Light, Meira was seen cutting off all her hair and painting a black stripe across her eyes with oily mud.

• More than one person has seen Meira wandering in the vicinity of a huge outcrop known as the magnetic rock in a bog near Whitesparrow. Those who saw her know the area as one of treacherous terrain, making it an odd location for a casual walk.

In this adventure, there's actually only one vital clue to move the adventure forward and that's where Gloom is hiding. The rest of it can build up interesting backstory for the assassin but it's not vital.

When running the game, we improvise how the characters end up learning each of these secrets. We don't need to know this ahead of time.

You might also add some red herrings if you don't mind the characters following a false trail. This can get frustrating if they go too far so better for them to see that some evidence is contradictory so they know something isn't right.

Justin Alexander at The Alexandrian recommends adding three clues for each major step in the mystery so the characters are sure to find it. If we're keeping our secrets flexible, we might not need three but having enough secrets to get to the end is vital.

Focusing your prep around ten secrets and clues the characters may discover works well for any D&D game but it works particularly well for mysteries.

Assume They'll Figure It Out Early

We can also make the assumption that the players will figure out the mystery early. They might only have one clue but they might jump to the right conclusion right away. They might use speak with dead, commune, zone of truth, or detect thoughts to find out answers we hadn't expected them to ask. What will we do if that happens? How can the game go on if the characters figure out the big reveal with a single spell? That's probably worth preparing for before it happens. A mystery can turn into a manhunt instead of an investigation.

Many great movies tell us up front who the villain is but still end up as great stories. No Country for Old Men fits this idea well. We have a cop, a opportunist, and an assassin all trying to piece together a drug deal gone wrong. We know who they all are. We know what the situation was, but unraveling the story is still a great deal of fun. The characters might cast speak with dead on the nearly decapitated guard only to find out that it was a huge and amazingly dexterous half-orc he had picked up earlier as a suspect in another crime.

Reveal Plot Twists Spontaneously

Instead of planning plot twists ahead of time, we might simply ignore them until the twist comes up on its own. This is more of a Stephen King's On Writing style of DMing. We just start the story and see where it leads. Sometimes it leads into a plot twist. Sometimes it just moves forward to its inevitable end. Sometimes the plot twists surprise us just as much as the other players. That's a pure joy when it happens and it's a sure fire way the players won't figure it out early. Hell, even we didn't know what was going to happen.

All of this leads to the conclusion that we might be best letting go of our bigger ideas for plots and mysteries. Instead, we let the story play out based on the initial situation, the characters, their actions, and the reactions of the world. Like everything else in these evolving games, the mysteries and plot-twists become organic. They happen when they happen.

We might even let go of the idea that we're running a mystery at all. Why define the type of adventure we're running? Why not just let the story play out how it plays out without trying to model it after a detective novel? Maybe it ends up as a mystery but we don't need to necessarily start it there.

Thinking Through the Eyes of the Villain

Instead of plotting out our mystery scene-by-scene, worrying about what the characters will do, we might step back and see through the eyes of the antagonist in the story. This antagonist can change direction as the characters move forward. I had no idea Strahd would turn into a quest NPC for the characters because I had no idea the characters would release the Ancient One vampire from the Amber Temple in Curse of Strahd. Until Strahd saw the characters release that Ancient One, he never would have guessed he would ally with them, even if it was a brief alliance, to defeat the Ancient One. At a certain point, Strahd realized he would lose in a stand-up fight with the characters so he moved forward with new plans knowing this risk.

The plot of my Curse of Strahd game definitely twisted but not in a direction anyone would have guessed.

Strahd is, of course, one of the best villains whose eyes we might see through.

Trusting Improvisation

When we think about a mystery in D&D we might compare it to great mysteries in fiction. There's a big difference, though, and that's the players. Unlike the great detectives, our players won't follow the plot of the book. They won't find the right clue at just the right time. We don't know what they'll do and that's a great deal of fun. We can't map out our mysteries as though we're going to write a novel. We have to start with the situation at the center of the mystery and then scatter clues in circles all around it. The characters can pick up these clues and, when they have enough, the mystery reveals itself.

This means we must trust our ability to improvise the story as it unfolds at the table. It means leaving blanks in our game. It means that the story isn't a static map but continually evolves as the world reacts to the players.

The best mysteries are the ones that surprise even us.

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On June 2018 episode of the DM's Deep Dive, I had the great pleasure to talk with Paige Leitman, organizer for Dragon Con D&D games, writers of con-created content for the Adventurers League, and moderator of the 126,000 member D&D Facebook group. Paige had some wonderful insights into the differences between Adventurers League organized play groups and groups who have come to the game through online streams such as Critical Role. In this episode Paige and I talk about this difference, what it means, and what we can do about it.

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Here are some notes from this episode.

Paige's two posts (requires being part of the D&D Adventurers League Facebook group):

• Streaming Play vs Typical AL Play: How do we cross the streams?

• Why should we care how Matt Mercer DMs?

• Previous DM's Deep Dive with Grant Ellis on How Streaming is Changing D&D.

Paige's Top Three Tips for DMs and D&D AL DMs

• Wake up! Our hobby is changing and growing. It's a new golden age of D&D. Experience it. Go to a convention and see how the demographics are changing. Talk to people online. Find out what brings people to D&D. Watch streaming shows. Even if it's not your thing, please do it and gain an appreciation for it because it's driving the hobby.

• Get out of your rut. If you've been playing D&D the same way for 30 years, learn new tricks. Learn from other DMs and newer DMs. Be open to change.

• Go watch or listen to Critical Role, Girls Guts Glory, Adventure Zone, Venture Maidens. Yeah, maybe you don't want to, do it anyway. It will give you critical insight into what's going on with our hobby right now.

Paige uses her commute to catch up on streaming games.

Finding times to slide in streaming D&D shows can give us a chance to learn from a lot of DMs.

Paige will take the Broadswords over the news every morning.

Play different games with different players at conventions and it will do wonders for your own game. Even in bad games, we can learn a ton by playing in other groups, watching other players, and watching other DMs. Mike mentions Truman Capote who said that, when interviewing a boring person, he asked "what makes this person so boring? What drove this person's life to this spot?".

The idea of learning more from DMs doesn't mean we DMs have to throw away all of our experiences. Instead, we can think like a Bayesian and take in new evidence to update our prior understanding of the game.

"Dude, no one is asking you to be Matt Mercer. No one is Matt Mercer except Matt."

According to Mike's flawed analysis of comments on Paige's post about learning from Critical Role, 60% were positively inclined towards learning tips from Matt Mercer.

There is resistance to the idea that we can learn from streaming. "I'm not Matt Mercer and if people are looking for that, they should find another table." This is said often and, frankly, shuts the door on learning from an excellent DM.

When we look at streaming from the position of organized play, what do we see?

Paige describes a continuum of tactical play on one side and story focused gaming on the other. Streaming leans more towards story and organized play leans more towards tactical but there is an overlap between the two of them. There is a bell curve for both types of gamers with each leaning one way or the other.

In streaming games there is a bigger focus on the characters and might spend a lot of time doing things like shopping at a store. This would drive con coordinators crazy. Adventurers League games have fixed time frames and can't spend a lot of time focused on individual characters. Instead AL adventures focus on the story of the adventure itself and a clear out line of scenes including refined combat encounters.

How can Adventurers League nudge things towards this greater story focus? How do we create an environment where people who have learned about D&D through streaming will enjoy playing D&D Adventurers League games?

Paige's gut feeling is that WOTC is pushing towards more story-focused adventures. Paige brings up Rrakkma as an example adventure that focuses on a more narrative arc. The upcoming Season 8 adventurers seem to fit this model as well.

Paige and Mike discussed the Red War, a player-generated storyline in Mulmaster. Mike thinks that the fact that a bunch of players got focused on the narrative of the story instead of some mechanics-focused thing was pretty awesome.

Newer rewards in Organized Play also focus on stories such as homes, keeps, business, pets, boats, titles, estates. These non-mechanical rewards are exciting for D&D AL players and that's a good move towards story-focused characters.

Mike's Note. The D&D Open at Origins was a wonderful narrative-focused adventure that was heavily timed but still gave players a rich and full story with lots of options and excitement. I played it for about 9 hours and we had one battle against one foe that lasted maybe 5 minutes. The game still had us on the edge of our seats.

Paige describes how recent con-created adventures give the DMs tools to handle it when characters subvert or bypass combat encounters with improvised skill check situations. This is a good way of giving DMs the tools they need to handle improvised situations as they pop up.

Is audience participation in streaming a negative?

Paige thinks its nice that people give money to a stream and good on them for getting it. Mike's philosophy is "never get in the way of someone else's hustle". If they can make money from it, go with the gods.

Is there some way in AL to make better matches betweens DMs and players between tactical and RP?

Paige says they've tried that in their local conventions and it can work at conventions or game stores. When looking for players, Mike described his game as a "story focused game that uses a lot of Theater of the Mind" and that helped players select his game based on that style. In organized play games, Mike saw tactical players come unglued when they suddenly found themselves in narrative combat.

How do The D&D AL Epics shape people's views on Organized Play games?

People love the combined group and high epic scope of epics and opens and the bigger multi-table games. Shameless plug, Mike wrote Vault of the Dracolich as a multi-table event between editions.

Paige believes that a good home game is likely better than a typical Adventurers League game but no home game can do what an Epic or Open does. Mike got to mention how his paladin was the first character whose soul was eaten by the Soul Monger during the D&D Open at Origins 2017. They announced his death from the balcony of the ballroom and Mike got a unique certificate from Shawn Merwin and Teos Abadia themselves.

Final Words

Paige believes that integrating these new cultures into the Adventurers League and that it resides with the DDAL admins who can reach out to streamers and start to think about how to bring these groups together. Adventures can be written differently to support more narrative games.

Paige's last piece of advice is go out there and talk to five new D&D players to hear their experiences and drives for the game. Try to spend time understanding this new group of people coming to D&D.

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