by Yaniv Kahana

Kauchuk is both the first game that I developed together with my friend Oren Shainin and my first published game. The gist of the game is simple: Use rubber bands to enclose areas on a game board to collect energy and treasure. ("Каучук" is Russian for "rubber".)

The process of developing Kauchuk taught me many things about designing games. First, developing games with partners has many advantages. Each designer has a different blend of strengths, preferences, and experiences, and they balance each other out. The mutual brainstorming allowed me to take part in a creation that is completely different to what it would have been had I worked alone.

Second, I realized the great importance of having patient playtesters who are willing to play the same game over and over again and continuously give us meaningful and honest feedback.

At a very early stage of the development process, Oren and I knew that the hook of the game would be the rubber bands. Our muse was Ticket to Ride, a family game that gamers also enjoy playing as a medium filler.

Being the beginner designers that we were, it took us a few months to find the right theme and mechanism. We tried many different themes, like mining gold and colonizing galaxy planets, but the one we decided to use was fighting city crime, which was changed during our collaboration with eventual publisher Lifestyle Boardgames.




The first playtest I organized was a real learning experience. Our mechanisms, which worked nicely for two players, did not work for four. I had to change the rules on the spot so that we could continue playing.



First prototype vs. final design

After many more designing and playtesting sessions, we were ready to go public. We collaborated with the best board game shop in our area — The Kingdom — and organized a playtesting event there.




It was the first time we had tested the game with kids (as young as five years old!) and other non-gamers, and we got positive results. The kids loved the rubber band element, and the adults enjoyed the possibilities of area movement and enclosure that the rubber bands allowed on the board.


Celebrating with Kauchuk's old board design on a cake

We planned to present Kauchuk at our first visit to the Spielwarenmesse toy fair in Nürnberg, Germany in 2017. In preparation, we consulted with the designer Jeremie Kletzkine and made some quick additional changes before the fair. (That, of course, led me to playtest Kauchuk dozens more times to validate all the changes we had made.)

The fair was exciting as we met many publishers who were interested in checking out our game. Pretty soon after the fair, we signed a contract with Lifestyle and started working on the development of new levels for Kauchuk. One of the major issues we dealt with was finding a solution for the board; our original prototype, made of a wooden board and nails, was not such a user-friendly family game...

It took two years, and at Spielwarenmesse 2019 we met our new Kauchuk prototype for the first time. It was overwhelming! Alexander Peshkov and Maria Kravchenko from Lifestyle had done an amazing job in creating a board on which it's easy to both position rubber bands and replace the board levels (as the game now includes multiple double-sided boards to put players in different environments facing different challenges).


Kauchuk boards

During the fair, publishers talked with us about our prototype which they had seen, and during one of our meetings at the fair, the person we met even drew our game from his bag. He told us that he had taken it for evaluation. That was a very cool surprise!

Kauchuk was the game that paved the way for me as a game designer, and its creation wouldn't have been possible without my partner Oren Shainin, all of our amazing designers and playtesters at GravitiX Games, my editor Sally Halon, and the amazing work of Alexander Peshkov, Maria Kravchenko, and the entire team of Lifestyle.

After Kauchuk, I continued to work with partners (Oren, Izi Eshkenazi and others), then after five additional games, I decided it was time to do something alone. That was when I developed Super Farmer: The Card Game, which will also be released SPIEL '19!

May the Kauchukium be with you!

Yaniv Kahana Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

• Not to burst anyone's bubble, but in this PBS Space Time video, host Matt O'Dowd explains why Terraforming Mars should be moved from the "science fiction" category on BGG to "fantasy".

Okay, he doesn't say so in those exact words, but that's one conclusion you can draw from the material presented:

Youtube Video

• Game designer Cameron Browne was featured in an August 2019 Vice article by Matthew Gault that highlights Browne's work as "principal investigator of the Digital Ludeme Project, a research project based at Maastricht University in the Netherlands that's using computational techniques to recreate the rules of ancient board games". An excerpt:

Browne and his colleagues are working on a general-purpose system for modelling ancient games, as well as generating plausible rulesets and evaluating them. The system is called Ludii, and it implements computational techniques from the world of genetics research and artificial intelligence...

The first part of the process, Browne said, is to break games down into their constituent parts and codify them in terms of units called "ludemes" in a database. Ludemes can be any existing game pieces or rules that archaeologists know of. Once a game is described in terms of its ludemes, it becomes a bit more like a computer program that machines can understand and analyze for patterns. Cultural information, such as where the game was played, is also recorded to help evaluate the plausibility of new rulesets.

Using techniques from the world of algorithmic procedural generation, the team then uses the information in the database to infer and reconstruct rulesets of varying plausibility and playability for these ancient games.

In some ways, this work seems like a continuation of Browne's previous projects, which included creating a computer program that would create and evaluate new games by combining and altering rule sets of existing games. Browne wrote about this program, Ludi, and one of the games it created, Yavalath, on BGG News in June 2011.

• On his company blog, AEG owner John Zinser examines the results of their decision to publish fewer games than they have in year past, a decision apparently taken one year ago, albeit made public only in April 2019. An excerpt:

We are just a bit behind where we expected to be at this point in the process. We have not yet replaced the income from cutting back on the number of games we publish and [from] selling Love Letter, but almost all of our releases this year have out-performed our projections and are individually more profitable than past games.

The plan to give each game more attention at launch is working. From last year, Space Base and War Chest have continued to be strong sellers. From this year, Tiny Towns has been a mega hit, Point Salad is a treat that sold out in one day, and early buzz and pre-orders on Ecos: First Continent tells us that it will also be a winner.

One lesson learned:

Hitting your schedule is even more important when doing fewer games, especially with Kickstarter. We continue to learn the hard lesson that weeks matter. Our schedule slides have cost us more in cash flow than any other mistake this year...

• The retail store Cape Fear Games in Wilmington, North Carolina (by chance, about two hours from my home) has acquired a game, toy, and LEGO collection valued at more than $1 million, and it's selling tours of the collection to show off what's available to buyers. As [url=noted in Wilmington's PortCityDaily, "The collection comes from the estate of Darryl Rubin, who in the 1970s was a member of a Stanford Research Institute (SRI) team that developed the technology underlying the TCP/IP protocol". An excerpt from the article:

Perhaps the collection's most prized item is a chess set carved by renown ivory sculptor Oleg Raikis from 20,000-year-old mammoth ivory found in Siberia and heartwood ebony, valued at $27,000. When employee Connor Locklin first saw the set was made of ivory, he thought it'd be an issue — the commercial trade of elephant ivory has been banned in the United States since 2016.

"I looked it up and found its saving grace — it's mammoth ivory, not elephant ivory, which you can sell," Locklin said, pointing out that the mammoth elephant has long been extinct.

Photo by Mark Darrough from the Port City Daily Read more »

by Andrew Parks

Introduction

In January 2016, I received an introductory email from C. Courtney Joyner, a novelist and screenwriter who was interested in hiring our game design studio, Quixotic Games, to create a board game version of his latest project, Nemo Rising. Nemo Rising was an original screenplay that Courtney was now converting into a steampunk novel for Tor Books, and the book was scheduled for release sometime in 2017. Nothing about the game adaptation was concrete yet, and we didn't talk about the project much for the rest of the year. Towards the end of 2016, after plans for the novel's published release were more concrete, Courtney contacted me again and wanted to discuss the project at greater length.

My immediate response to myself was "Self, you can't do any new projects right now, or they will put you in the mental hospital." At the time, we were working night and day preparing for the imminent launch of our latest Kickstarter project, Dungeon Alliance. We were overseeing the creation of hundreds of pieces of art for the game, working on the graphic design, prepping the project video, and tracking lots of other details. In addition, we were in different stages of development for three different projects at WizKids: Assault of the Giants was on the verge of release; we were in the final development stages for the Return of Khan expansion for Star Trek: Frontiers; and we had just received approval to begin work on Marvel Strike Teams.

I was also teaching game design courses at Rutgers, so I knew there was no way I could add anything else to my life — but then I made the mistake of talking to Courtney about his project in detail. When Courtney described the world that he was building, incorporating different characters, locations, and stories from the works of Jules Verne into a unified series, I knew I couldn't pass up being a part of it.

But I was definitely going to need help.

I recruited one of my developers, Matthew Cattron, a former student of mine who had joined the Quixotic team to help out with the dozens of expansion packs that we had designed for WizKids' D&D Attack Wing back in 2015. Matt and I would now work together as co-designers on Nemo Rising: Robur the Conqueror. Although this would be Matt's first official game design, he had shown lots of talent, drive, and insight when working on D&D Attack Wing, so I knew this was the perfect opportunity for him. Matt would end up doing a tremendous amount of heavy lifting on the Nemo project and developed some of the game's most unique and attractive mechanisms.

Scope of the Game

Throughout 2017, Matt constructed the initial prototype based on our design meetings. The proposal approved by Courtney called for a game that would be accessible to casual gamers who were fans of the novel, yet would still provide strategic depth for experienced gamers. We envisioned a co-operative game for 2-4 players that would involve solving missions in the steampunk world of Captain Nemo and his companions from Nemo Rising. Based on the direction of the industry, we decided that including a solo version would be essential, so we started incorporating that into the design right away to ensure that few rule changes would be required when playing solo. It was equally important to us that the solo venture be a unique experience to be played with just one hero and not simply a way for one player to portray multiple heroes in order to simulate solo play.

One of my personal career challenges is that I tend to make games that are sprawling in table space and game time. We knew that would not work for Nemo Rising. One of the most simple but clever co-operative games on the market is Brian Yu's award-winning family game, Ghost Fightin' Treasure Hunters, a game whose deceptive surface design hides an intricate game system. For the past several years, I've played this game in class with my students to teach them the lessons of minimizing rules while maximizing decision points. Ghost Fightin' Treasure Hunters does a great job at this.

Even though we needed to make a game of higher complexity than Ghost Fightin' Treasure Hunters, I was inspired by Yu's game board and its use of rooms and spaces to make the game appear approachable to casual gamers right from the beginning. We therefore decided that we would make a game board with simple movement spaces that connected "rooms", but these rooms would hold large face-down adventure tiles that needed to be revealed during the game. The adventure tiles would also allow us to create different scenarios that would transform the board into variable settings from Verne's universe, whether the caverns of the deep sea, Robur's city in the sky, or the center of the earth.


Game in Progress

We didn't want to use a die for movement, so our initial concept was to have a row of action cards that provided action points used for movement and other activities. Players would attempt to complete a procedurally generated mission that could be solved in 30-60 minutes, allowing players to play a short game or multiple sessions in a row if they desired.

Streamlining the Arithmetic

One of Matt's earliest concerns was that the game was overly numerical. Action cards granted a specific number of attribute points that players could spend on tasks or combat, and a second pool of points for generic actions like moving and scouting. Threat cards caused each enemy token to move a large number of single spaces, and each player tracked the health pool for their own hero. Many of the game's mechanisms began to feel like tedious bookkeeping. It was important to Matt that people not feel overwhelmed by record keeping, so he agonized over ways to make the game more approachable while maintaining interesting, co-operative-driven gameplay.

We streamlined many mechanisms over time, like having players receive a set amount of action points each turn instead of deriving them from their chosen action card. One particular breakthrough involved the creation of a mission track that removed the need for individual hero health tracking. Whenever a hero fails to defend against an enemy's attack, the entire team loses points on the mission track. You also lose mission points for failing at important tasks or when choosing powerful action cards. The removal of individual health points not only streamlined the system, but ensured that all players felt the same sense of risk throughout the game. In the end, the constraint of creating a more streamlined design made the game more fun to play for everyone, regardless of their skill level.


The mission track

Another numerical system that we streamlined involved the difficulty of completing a task or defeating an enemy. Originally, each task and enemy had a "target number" that had to be overcome on a six-sided die, and the strategy of the game involved finding ways to increase your die roll to make these tasks easier — but trying to accumulate sets of bonuses to add to specific die rolls seemed a bit too thinky and old school. We moved instead to a symbol-based system involving the game's three attributes: Brains, Brawn, and Skill.


Attribute icons

The target number was changed into an attribute requirement. You can achieve the needed attribute(s) in several ways, either by drafting certain action cards, earning special gear cards, or, if all else fails, by rolling the attribute dice (custom dice that feature all three icons). Your strategic goal is to avoid rolling the dice whenever possible, but if you cannot find the correct attributes elsewhere, you can try to push your luck by rolling the dice. In this way, we were able to appeal to players who enjoy using dice to push their luck, but also maintained ways to avoid rolling altogether for those who don't like to rely on chance for success.


Each action card can be drafted in one of two ways;after drafting, you "twist" it to declare which ability you want to use

Formulating an Effective (and Dangerous) A.I. System

One of Matt's real breakthroughs involved the A.I. system for placing and moving enemy tokens on the game board. Originally the threat cards simply moved each enemy a large number of spaces in a row, which was tedious and also ineffective because players could predict enemy movement too easily and avoid encounters for most of the game. We needed to simultaneously reduce the level of predictability, increase the degree of peril, and minimize the amount of space-to-space movement for each individual enemy token.

We therefore developed a colored path system that moved certain enemies along either a blue or a red path, meaning that the players could not be sure which direction the enemies would turn at each particular intersection until the current turn's threat card was revealed. The players could prepare for certain possibilities, but they could never be certain exactly what was going to happen next.


Example of a threat card:—The first threat action commands all humanoid, bestial, and mechanical enemies to move two spaces along the blue paths.—The second threat action commands you to deploy a mechanical wasp at enemy entrance #1 on the game board.

Matt took this concept to a new level by having the enemies move only from doorway to doorway, skipping over the intervening spaces unless any heroes were in the way, in which case the enemies would stop and attack them. This meant the enemies were always moving to the same places that the heroes wanted to go. It also meant a lot less physical movement of enemy tokens on the game board since the tokens were moving from strategic point to strategic point rather than just one space at a time.


Robur's Foot Soldier moves four spaces along the blue paths

This had the effect of ensuring that enemies would always be in the way of players, continuously opening and blocking off paths around the map and forcing players to choose between confrontation and rerouting. Not only did this make enemies feel more meaningful and contribute heavily to the strategic aspect of the game, it also simplified the process of moving the enemies for players and reduced the visual clutter on the game board.

The result was even more than we had hoped for. Enemies now patrol the board in ways that make you hold your breath in anticipation. Over time, if lots of enemy tokens are on the game board, the tokens start skipping over each other for free, creating the appearance that the enemies are consciously starting to close in on the heroes. This system is the one that we are the most proud of developing for Nemo Rising.

Strategic Decision Making

It was important to us that the players' success or failure be based on their strategic choices. Players are constantly having to manage an ever-changing board. Should the active hero take out a few patrolling enemies to reduce clutter, or should they focus directly on the mission and risk the team being overwhelmed later in the game? Newly acquired gear cards open up ways to circumvent the rules of the game, so using them at the perfect moment is often the key to victory. In addition, each location that is revealed on the game board has to be secured in order for the players to gain its full benefits. Once a hero secures a face-up adventure tile, they are presented with a new way to use that location to solve problems elsewhere on the board.


Fulmer secures the hangar and can now perform a skill task to move to any space in the game

Reigning in the Type-A Player

As we neared the end of the development process in November 2017 (one month before the novel's release), we started showing the game to different publishers on Courtney's behalf. Since we had such a close relationship with WizKids, we took the opportunity to demo the game to Zev Shlasinger, the Director of Boardgames at WizKids, while we were at BGG.CON 2017. Zev gave me my start in the industry back in 2003 when his company Z-Man Games released Ideology: The War of Ideas, so after years of working together I knew he liked games with rich themes and story elements.

Zev enjoyed the game a lot and expressed an immediate interest in publishing it, but he had one major concern that bothered him about all co-operative games: We needed to reign in the Type-A player who tends to control the entire game by telling everyone else what to do. This is a common issue in co-op games, so Matt and I discussed ways to address it. We eventually came up with an optional variant for experienced players called "Stealth Mode" that severely restricts communication among the players during each individual player's turn. Players can still discuss strategies between turns, but once a hero starts moving around, revealing new tiles, and flipping over new cards, the current player has to decide what to do on their own.

To add even more flavor to this rule, we said that players whose heroes were adjacent to each other on the game board or who shared the same adventure tile could communicate freely as long as they were together and it was one of their turns. This created the situation in which a hero might actually spend a couple of action points to move next to another hero to get their take on a particular development during the course of the current turn.


Sara and Nemo team up against a mechanical sea spider; the heroes are close to each other, but not quite close enough to communicate during stealth mode

Zev was pleased with the variant, and pre-production for Nemo Rising: Robur the Conqueror began in early 2018, with the game hitting the U.S. market on September 18, 2019.

The Future

Part of our design process was to ensure the game would fit a variety of Vernesque settings. The base game comes with two settings: the Undersea Grotto and the City in the Sky, each with its own set of adventure tiles, mission cards, and threat cards. Courtney is excited by the possibility that as he adds new stories to the book series, we can add expansions to the game with new cards and tiles that transform the board into settings such as the Center of the Earth, or even the Moon!

Andrew Parks

Adventure tiles: generic sides and location side Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

• If someone had Coraline in the "which media property will next be licensed for a board game" pool, you can now collect as WizKids has announced a December 2019 release date for Coraline: Beware the Other Mother, a co-operative game for 1-4 players from Andrew Parks that bears this description:

Coraline tells the haunting tale of a young girl's journey to an alternate version of her life, and her heroic return to reality. Now, you can bring this iconic story to your tabletop!

In Coraline: Beware the Other Mother, players assume the roles of the Ghost Children who were captured by the Beldam (the Other Mother). Now they are trying to free Coraline and her parents from the Beldam's evil clutches. They will confront Mr. Bobinsky and his jumping mouse circus, fend off the Other Father on his mantis tractor, wrestle the pearl ring from Miss Spink and Miss Forcible, and steal the Skeleton Key and Snow Globe to ultimately set Coraline free. The players all win or lose the game together as a team! But be careful! The Beldam will thwart your plans at every turn. And be quick! When the button shadow eclipses the moon, the Beldam has won the game and Coraline is trapped in the Other World forever!

• A bit farther out from WizKids is Stampede, a 2-6 player card game from Jeroen Geenen that will be released in March 2020. An overview:

Stamp collectors: The most dangerous game. They're polite on the surface, but truly cunning strategists underneath.

Featuring colorful art and simple symbology, Stampede plays quickly and elegantly as players plan efficient moves to complete their stamp collection. You must fill your album with new stamps, search for the best trades at the exchange, and swap stamps with your opponents at just the right moment to complete your collection. Your goal is to collect five of the same animal or nine distinct animals to stamp out the competition!

• Continuing in the vein of lighter games, in 2020 Fisher Heaton Games plans to add two new titles to its line of "Analog Apps", quick-playing, single-mechanism games designed to feel like you're playing a phone app, with its 2017 title Intelle being retconned as the first title in the series.

Christopher Yoder's TANGL is a 1-6 player game in which players are given a mismatched set of heptamino and hexamino pieces, then race to build a rectangle-like shape with as few corners as possible. In David Abelson's WAYK, 1-2 players move robots through the stasis rooms on a spaceship to awaken as many passengers as possible and get them into escape pods before the ship is destroyed.

• In addition to releasing Underwater Cities: New Discoveries and Monster Baby Rescue! in English, as noted recently, Rio Grande Games has picked up two other SPIEL '19 titles for release in English: Uwe Rosenberg's Robin of Locksley, which is coming from new German publisher Wyrmgold GmbH, and Queenz from Bruno Cathala, Johannes Goupy, and Mandoo Games. (I recorded an overview video of Queenz in August 2019 should you want to know more about the game.)

Youtube Video Read more »

by Vladimir Suchy

After the publication of Underwater Cities, I was gratified by the players' positive reaction to the game, which was the first product of our new little game company, Delicious Games.

Seeing the positive reception and reading players' various opinions soon inspired me to create an expansion that would respond to fans' thoughts on the game and bring new possibilities. Because Underwater Cities is already a complex game with a long playing time, I avoided a sprawling expansion that would make the game more complex and longer. Instead, the expansion — Underwater Cities: New Discoveries — is made of several independent modules that add a variety of aspects to the game, such as greater variability, asymmetric starting conditions, and more interaction.

Some aspects of the expansion tie into ideas I had during the playtesting of the original game. I had left these out because they would make the game more complex and longer, such as the race to connect to particular metropolises or the asymmetric assistant powers, two ideas that we had tried in some of our earlier playtests.

The Modules

New Cards
Fifty new cards have been added to spice up the game for players who have already played it a lot. I designed them to be usable in all variants of the expansion and in the base game. None of the cards are dependent on a particular module as I didn't want players to have to add or remove cards when they added or subtracted the different modules. Some cards are designed to make certain actions more attractive. For example, there are cards that interact with the always-available action slot and cards that make laboratories stronger.

New cards can be found in every deck, including the special cards and the three-credit special cards deck. Some of these special cards were inspired by thoughts from Underwater Cities fan Henrik Larsson.




Assistants and Asymmetric Start
As I have already mentioned, the expansion gives players the chance to have different assistants. First, we tested various assistants with different actions. This led to the idea that every assistant would also have a second ability.

I combined the idea of strengthening the assistants with the idea of more-individualized starting conditions in which players start with some resources and structures. Players can now choose their starting conditions from a hand of set-up cards. This variant — getting more during set-up — makes it possible to shorten the game by one round without diminishing the interesting decisions. And it does not really prolong the time you spend choosing assistants and starting cards at the beginning of the game.




Metropolises
I added ten green metropolises as an interactive element, replacing the randomness of drawing blue metropolises in the base game. In this variant, blue metropolises are not placed on the player board. Instead, blue and green metropolises are placed by the game board, and players choose their metropolis when they connect to it.

The positive reception this received during playtesting gave me the idea of using green metropolises on new player boards. These were designed with the idea that every board would be dramatically different and would require a different style of play. The new boards have a partially altered network structure and especially different starting metropolises, as shown below. On top of that, every player gets to choose metropolises to place on their boards.

Some players were asking for new brown metropolises. These turned out to be troublesome to develop because nearly every game element is already scored by a special card. Adding similar scoring mechanisms to brown metropolises would give a random advantage to players who received a metropolis matching one of the available special cards, so in the end the tested brown metropolis was not added.


Prototype, with the final version being a three-layer game board

The Museum
The idea here was to add more interactive elements to the game. By building on certain areas of their player boards, players make discoveries, which they can add to the museum. Essentially, it's a race to build on certain spaces of your board. It's similar to the original "government contracts" idea — build something faster than the other players — although that was much more open-ended than a race to build on specific sites on your board. The module adds more strategy to your choices of where to build.

The original idea was based on an area-control mechanism in the museum, but that didn't work as well, so I replaced it with a race mechanism, giving higher bonuses to players who make a certain discovery earlier.


Test and final version of the Museum

•••

In 2018 in this space, I shared my thoughts on Eurogames and game design, saying that I develop the mechanisms first, and the theme grows as I explore the mechanisms during development — but Monster Baby Rescue! was quite different.

First came the theme. Inspired by playing with my daughters, I decided to make a family game that also had the potential to work as a filler for players who like more challenging games. The original idea was a game about caring for household pets, and that was what I worked with during development. In the prototype, it was rescue dogs and rescue cats, with players finding stray pets they must care for. They clean them up and buy them toys and beds. That version of the game is where I started using the time track mechanism and created the majority of the cards that allow one to care for pets, bathe them, and make them happy.

Gameplay is quick and simple. (The decisions aren't simple, but the gameplay is.) The player chooses a tile from a row of tiles that cost various amounts of time. Tiles slide in to fill the empty slot, thus becoming cheaper, and a new tile is dealt to the most expensive slot. The player pays for the chosen tile by advancing a certain number of spaces on the time track. The player farthest behind has used up the least time so far, and thus is the next one to play.

The chosen tiles are scored at the end of the game according to multiple criteria, while during the game, players can compete to fulfill various tasks — and because the tasks differ in each game, the relative values of the tiles will also differ in each game.


Time track: final prototype and earlier prototype

There weren't any major changes after the first prototype. After the initial testing, I adjusted the costs, which were initially 1-2-3, when players told me that the cheapest cards were too advantageous. I replaced this with 2-3-4 so that the ratio between cheap cards and medium-cost cards was 2:3 instead of 1:2. There weren't any other substantial changes. I adjusted the scoring system and made it variable from game to game.

Because every player could have a different pet, it seemed logical that they would have different abilities or different goals — but when we tried it out, completing individual goals did not lead to interesting situations or interesting strategies. Instead, it just added more components and rules without improving gameplay.

Before deciding to publish this as a Delicious Games title, we decided to re-theme the game. Recently, there have been several cat-themed games, so we decided to use a fantasy theme, with the idea that various fantastical creatures have suddenly appeared in our world and the players need to take care of the babies.


Prototype and final prototype

During the course of changing the theme and making the graphics, something occurred that I don't recall happening in any of my other games: I adjusted some mechanisms based on the game's new look.

The pet toys — represented by ball icons — were changed to diamonds (based on the assumption that dragons and other fantasy beasts like diamonds). This led to the idea of enlivening the appearance of the diamonds by representing them as a component instead of a tile. This allowed us to use a new scoring mechanism, adding diamonds to a tile to unlock its points (because the baby monsters like to decorate their playgrounds and sleeping places).

The game board was designed to hold the tiles in rows, which led to the idea that it made sense to award points for completed rows.


Final prototype of the game board

Underwater Cities: New Discoveries and Monster Baby Rescue! will debut at SPIEL '19, and Rio Grande Games has licensed both titles for release.

Vladimír Suchý Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

• On Monday, Sept. 16, SPIEL organizer Friedhelm Merz Verlag announced the results of the 2019 Deutscher SpielePreis, an annual award in which gamers vote on the titles they've most liked over the preceding twelve months. Voting takes place in the middle of the year, with titles released between July of the previous year and June of the current year being eligible.

Based on the votes tallied, the winner of the 2019 DSP is Elizabeth Hargrave's Wingspan from Stonemaier Games and (in Germany) Feuerland Spiele. (Yes, Wingspan appears in a second BGG News post today.) Here are the other vote-getters in the top ten, with their originating publisher listed instead of their German-specific one:

2. The Taverns of Tiefenthal, by Wolfgang Warsch (Schmidt Spiele)
3. Teotihuacan: City of Gods, by Daniele Tascini and Dávid Turczi (Board&Dice)
4. Spirit Island, by R. Eric Reuss (Greater Than Games)
5. Architects of the West Kingdom, by Shem Phillips and S.J. Macdonald (Garphill Games)
6. Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game, by Ignacy Trzewiczek, Przemysław Rymer, and Jakub Łapot (Portal Games)
7. Underwater Cities, by Vladimír Suchý (Delicious Games)
8. Newton, by Nestore Mangone and Simone Luciani (Cranio Creations)
9. Just One, by Ludovic Roudy and Bruno Sautter (Repos Production)
10. Gloomhaven, by Isaac Childres (Cephalophair Games)

Concept Kids from Gaëtan Beaujannot, Alain Rivollet, and Repos Production won the 2019 Deutscher KinderspielePreis.

• That same day saw the debut of The American Tabletop Awards (ATTA), a new annual award founded by a committee of ten — Brittanie Boe, Nicole Brady, Amber Cook, Ruel Gaviola, Jonathan Liu, Becca Scott, Suzanne Sheldon, Theo Strempel, Annette Villa, and Eric Yurko — with all the committee members being based in the United States and being involved in the gaming industry in various ways.

The ATTAs will name winners in four categories — early gamers, casual games, strategy games, and complex games — with winners being announced in June in future years, but in September for 2019 to kick things off now rather than waiting another nine months. Each category will have a winning title, two recommended titles, and two nominated titles. (The format seems to be that the top five titles in a category are nominated, with committee members then voting on those to determine the winning and recommended titles.)

For 2019, the ATTA winners are:

• Early gamers: Catch the Moon, by Fabien Riffaud and Juan Rodriguez (Studio Bombyx)
• Casual games: The Quacks of Quedlinburg, by Wolfgang Warsch (Schmidt Spiele)
• Strategy games: Chronicles of Crime, by David Cicurel (Lucky Duck Games)
• Complex games: Root, by Cole Wehrle (Leder Games)

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by W. Eric Martin

• I'm sure that you've been eager to hear more about what I'm looking forward to at SPIEL '19, and if that is indeed the case, here's an overview of the second title on my "must have" list: Marco Teubner's No Return: Es gibt kein Zurück! from German publisher moses. Verlag

No Return: Es gibt kein Zurück! ("There's No Turning Back!") is played in two phases, with players collecting tiles in phase one, then scoring their tiles in phase two. People move into phase two at their own pace, and once you go in, you're there for the rest of the game — which might not be long!

The game includes 132 tiles, specifically two sets of tiles in six colors, with the tiles being numbered 1-11 in each color. Each player starts with eight tiles in hand, and you can discard and redraw once before the game begins. On a turn, you either (1) discard up to four tiles in the your hand from the game, then draw that many tiles from the bag or (2) play one or more tiles from your hand to a color on your board, then draw that many tiles. You can play tiles of only one color, and all the tiles played must be equal to or less than any tiles of that color you already have in play. You place these tiles in descending order, and you can build at most six rows during the game, one of each color.

Whenever you want, you can switch to phase two. Once you do this, on a turn you either (1) discard up to four tiles in the your hand from the game, then draw that many tiles from the bag or (2) clear tiles from your play area to score them. To do this, choose one or more tiles in your play area of only a single color, starting with the lowest valued tile (or tiles), then sum the tiles you want to score. You must then "pay" to score these tiles by discarding tiles of one color from your hand that sum to this same amount or higher. The tiles you discard from your hand don't have to be the same color as the color of the tiles you're scoring. Remove the tiles you paid from the game, and place the tiles you've cleared face down in a score pile. Refill your hand to eight tiles at the end of your turn.

As soon as someone draws the final tile from the bag, you complete the round so that everyone has had the same number of turns, then the game ends. A player's score equals the sum of the tiles that they've cleared minus the sum of the tiles they still have in play. (Tiles in a player's hand are discarded.) Whoever has the highest score wins!

Chunky tiles + simple rules + somewhat controllable randomness + press-your-luck elements + a shared pool of resources that will likely lead to drastically different styles of play with different player counts = a "must have" title for me. We'll see whether my expectations hold up once it's actually on the table!




• In 2018, German publisher PD-Verlag released Concordia: Venus as both a standalone game and an expansion, with one of the maps differing depending on what you purchased. PD-Verlag had promised that in 2019 buyers would be able to acquire the map they didn't get, and now it's making good on that promise with the release of Concordia: Balearica / Cyprus (for those who purchased the Venus expansion) and Concordia: Balearica / Italia (for those who purchased the Venus base game).

This expansion features the Balearic Islands off the coast of eastern Spain, with players starting the game with no capital city and two ships at sea. It also includes a fish market that can be used as a variant with any other Concordia map. An explanation:

As a new commodity, fish replaces the ordinary bonus units you usually collect when playing your Prefect. The bonus is doubled up to two fish in provinces that have failed to produce in the last round. Sell your fish on a separate fish market where you can get either goods, cash, or special actions in return. The fish market offers an extra layer of planning ahead, and new challenges for the experienced Concordia player.

Designer Mac Gerdts shows off Balearica at the Modena game fair

• French publisher Matagot has informed me that it will have the French (and English) versions of Stonemaier Games' Tapestry for sale at SPIEL '19, whereas German publisher Feuerland Spiele — which has been Stonemaier's partner on German versions of Wingspan, Scythe, and other titles — won't have the German edition of Tapestry available until July 2020.

Why the difference? Blame Wingspan, which won Kennerspiel des Jahres in July 2019. In a Sept. 12, 2019 Facebook post, Feuerland notes that (in my translation) "Due to the success of Wingspan, we currently have high investments in production, which will be paid off only in the Christmas season." As a result, Feuerland Spiele has launched a preorder campaign for Tapestry since production for that game needs to take place prior to Christmas. Those who preorder will receive a discount on the price and are promised the game six weeks ahead of its arrival at retail.

In other Feuerland Spiele news, Frank Heeren was interviewed by Würfelmagier.de in September 2019, and he revealed that Feuerland will release a German version of Barrage in 2020. Heeren also mentions that details on what's in the Wingspan expansion will be revealed on October 2, 2019, and if production and shipping goes as planned, he hopes to have a small Wingspan promo item at SPIEL '19. Oh, and another mini-expansion for A Feast for Odin featuring a new island. Details on the SPIEL '19 news starts about 21:00 minutes into the video. (H/T: Christoph Post of Brettspielbox) Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

My SPIEL '19 previews continue, this time with a look at Wayfinders, a 2-4 player from Thomas Dagenais-Lespérance and Pandasaurus Games.

Wayfinders will likely remind you of pick-up-and-deliver games with which you are familiar or possibly collect-resources-then-build-stuff games that you know as it blends those two game genres into one tiki-fuelled, island-hopping environment.

On most turns of the game, you'll place one of your five workers in the one of the resource hangars, possibly segregated from your fellow players as in the image below and possibly in the same ones. Resources come in five colors, with those colors matching the five colors of islands. How convenient that all is! It's almost like you're playing a game instead of actually managing an inventory of resources ahead of a Polynesian excursion...


On the right, two turntables and a microphone pair of headphones

On your non-worker placement turns, you collect goods from the hangars equal to the number of your workers in that hangar, specifically the good (or goods) closest to the exit, no matter your place in line. You slide those goods out into your collection of stuff on the table, then you move your plane around the islands — orthogonally only, mind you, due to airspace restrictions — with you needing to pay a resource matching the color of the island if no one has established an airstrip there. (If anyone has established an airstrip on an island, which is indicated by a player's hangar being present, then all players can move onto this island at no cost.)

If you want to place one of your hangars on an island, you must pay the 1-4 resources depicted at the bottom of the tile, after which you place a hangar in the lowest empty slot. If you establish a hangar after someone else did earlier, you pay these resources to them because you're a follower who must pay tribute to trendsetters; if you're the first to establish a hangar, then you pay the bank and hope that someone else will follow in your path.


The dark green player color is somewhat absorbed by the surroundings

Some islands give an immediate bonus of 1-3 random resources from the bag, some provide a permanent bonus, e.g., using green resources as whichever color you wish, and some grant you a special way to score points at game's end — and these are the ones you need to focus on should you want to win the game instead of simply moving a tiny airplane across cardboard squares for 20-30 minutes.

Those first two types of islands earn points, but they're worth 1-5 points with a fixed value; the latter type of island scores based on how well you meet the condition on it, such as placing your hangars in a horizontal line or on blue islands or on islands surrounding this island. They're limited in value only based on the random layout of the tiles and how well you can abuse them over the course of the game. If this game has only two blue islands, you might want to skip that blue-multiplier to focus on something else; if six blue islands are present, well, how close are they and what does it cost to establish hangars on them and are those goods available.


Place tiles adjacent to one another only if you want to make gameplay difficult

You can always use two matching goods as a joker for a missing color, but anyone who does that consistently is simply moving a tiny airplane across cardboard squares for 20-30 minutes instead of trying to win.

I've played Wayfinders three times on an advance production copy from Pandasaurus Games, one with two players and twice with three, and I quickly learned that my typical approach to game-playing is less than optimal for this design. You can't simply wing it and see what happens, but instead need to figure out from the get-go which islands might provide the most points and what path you might follow to place hangars on them and which permanent bonuses might help you along the way and where you might place hangars instead should you not want to hand over four resources to an opponent who will then use them to fuel their own growth in the future.

The resource market isn't huge, so you can't plan long-term there, but instead need to have an overall island-hopping plan that you then adjust on the fly based on what other players take and what gets dropped into the troughs as replacement resources. The final round of the game begins as soon as someone places their eighth hangar on the board, so you don't have a long time in which to make things happen, so get moving!


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by Rob Heinsoo

Games from Other Worlds

The first time I encountered a playable game from another world, it was the game of Jetan, the Barsoomian version of chess at the center of The Chessmen of Mars, the fifth book in Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter of Mars series. In Burroughs' novel, originally published in 1922, Jetan was mostly a vehicle for showing just how broken combat-chess becomes when you throw a hero like John Carter into the role of a supposedly easily-captured pawn! The story was great, but even better, in my mind, was that the appendix of my paperback copy had rules for the game of Jetan and advice for creating its 10x10 orange and black board.

In fifth grade, a couple months after I had started playing D&D, I made a Jetan board out of craft paper, with disks cut from milk cartons and labeled with magic marker as the pieces. For a couple of years, my friends and I alternated between four games: Monopoly, Jetan, Napoleonic miniatures games using a book my dad had bought me called The War Game, and graph-paper crawls using our home-brew interpretation of the original brown box of Dungeons & Dragons.

I've been thinking about games played in fictional worlds almost as long as I've been thinking about D&D. It probably wasn't a question of whether I was going to make up a game played by D&D characters; it was a question of which game and when.

Born in Water

The answer turned out to be Three-Dragon Ante (3DA) in 2004.

I came up with Three-Dragon Ante while snorkeling around a green rock in Hawaii. At the time, 2004, I worked at Wizards of the Coast as the lead designer of the D&D Miniatures game. On vacation, completely relaxed and happy, I found myself thinking about what I was going to be doing in the days immediately after returning home.

The first thing that occurred to me was that I was going to run a Wednesday-night session of D&D. These were the days of D&D 3.5, and I was running a wild campaign influenced by Dave Hargrave's Arduin Grimoire. Before I left on vacation, the player characters had learned that the information they needed on the threatened resurrection of a many-armed Chaos god might be available through the semi-estranged family of the adventuring party's very own half-orc fighter. The fighter had been an interstellar marine ("I fought orcs...in space"), but his family appeared to be simple tavern-keepers. The player characters (PCs) were headed to the first tavern adventure of the campaign, and I realized I wanted to keep them entertained with a tavern subplot. Neither brawling or carousing seemed right for this group of PCs as they were more about taking control than losing control. What about a card game, something to put their shiny gold to use? What card game would they play?

Poker was my first thought, but the idea of pushing our world's gambling card game into a D&D world struck me as both wrong and depressing. In fact, I'd seen it done! There had been a card game sold as part of the Arduin game line that turned out to be poker with a few dragon cards. (The fact that I haven't been able to remember the game's name while working on this article, well, that's a sign of how much it irritated me.)

The 52-card deck that eventually gave birth to poker, in our world, has its own peculiar history, born in tarot and fortune-telling. Even if a fantasy world had the same tarot-and-divination origins for its card sets, the results would be different. Surely a magical world of dragons and wizards would have created its own card games!

Kicking around the green rock, I realized that poker is a great game, but it was the wrong type of game for me to build my D&D campaign's tavern adventure around. When you're running a role-playing game, you want to keep as many players engaged as possible. If the PCs in an RPG session are playing a card game in character, you don't want players folding out of hands; you want them engaged even in losing hands.

Okay, I needed to do something other than poker. Maybe the Arduin game had started with a good idea, and I needed to do something involving dragons? D&D had great dragons that could easily be the suits, and to keep players involved, I'd make high cards the cards you play when you're competing for the main stakes, but low cards would help you by triggering powers as long as you played lower (or at least not higher) than your opponent had just played. After the ten most fruitful minutes of game design in my life, I swam away from the rock, back to shore, having figured out 3DA's core mechanism and already thinking up powers for D&D's five metallic and five chromatic dragons.

Iconic Dragons

Being handed ten iconic dragons as the suits for a card game was almost too good to be true!

In D&D, the five chromatic dragons are evil. Red, Blue, Green, Black, and White — these are the dragons you have to watch out for because they'll eat you, take your treasure, and maybe track down and eat the last few people you talked with in case they have treasure, too.

In Three-Dragon Ante, the evil dragons have to feel evil. When their powers trigger, they steal gold either from the stakes or from opponents, and sometimes they even steal cards. They don't share, and they never help an opponent. They also don't draw lots of cards. If you play only evil dragons, you're not going to be able to maintain your hand size. On the plus side, if Tiamat the evil Dragon God is in the game, she counts as every color of evil dragon, making it more likely that you'll be able to create a color flight of three evil dragons of the same color.




D&D's five traditional metallic dragons are good. Gold, Silver, Bronze, Brass, and Copper — these are the dragons you have to think twice about fighting because a) they're probably more or less on your side, and b) they're often even tougher than evil dragons!

In 3DA, we had to reflect that the good dragons are more likely to help you rather than actively hurting your opponents. Several of the good dragons let you draw cards. Playing many good dragons, and occasionally triggering their powers, makes it more likely you won't have to buy more cards in the middle of a gambit. The drawback, if you choose to see it that way, is that some of the good dragons, like the Silver Dragon and the Gold Monarch, can also help your opponents. The good Dragon God, Bahamut, is the exception. Unlike Tiamat, Bahamut won't help you create a color flight; instead he punishes opponents who have mixed good and evil.




It's Not Dragon Poker

Some people call 3DA "dragon poker". I understand the comparison, but as mentioned above 3DA is in many ways the deliberate opposite of poker.

Poker is a game about knowing when to fold. When you'd rather not fold, it's about knowing how to bet in ways that confuse opponents into folding when they should stay in the hand. If you play poker well, you fold out of most hands.

My goal with 3DA was to keep everyone involved. Ergo, no folding. The trick is to offer potential rewards to players who don't appear capable of winning the full stakes. The game's core mechanism offers both macro-rewards and micro-rewards: playing high cards helps you compete directly against the other players to win the stakes; playing low cards helps you trigger card powers that can set you up for later success.

Play a Gold Dragon that's equal strength or lower strength than the card that the opponent to your right just played, and you can draw a card for each good dragon you've played in this flight. Play a Red Dragon that's equal or lower strength than the card played by the opponent to your right, and you can steal 1 gold and a random card from the hand of the opponent who has played the highest strength cards this gambit. Unlike poker, you hold onto your cards, so you're not just playing the current gambit; you can use your cards in the next gambit or even the one after that.




What It Was, and What It Is Now

The original Three-Dragon Ante, published in 2005, contains seventy cards. Sixty of the cards are from ten suits based on the iconic dragons of D&D. Each suit has a single triggered power that appears on cards of different strengths. Unlike identically ranked clubs and diamonds in our world's 52-card decks, the strengths of the 3DA suits differ to match the toughness of D&D's dragons. In the original set, the other ten cards — seven mortals, two dragon gods, and a Dracolich — are each unique.

The one hundred cards in the new Three Dragon Ante: Legendary Edition, which debuts from WizKids in the U.S. on Sept. 18, 2019, include all seventy cards from the original set, with some of these cards having slightly improved mechanisms. The thirty new cards come from three new categories:

1. Ten new standard dragons, one for each color. Each game now starts with seventy standard dragons, with seven per color instead of six.


2. Ten new legendary dragons, one per suit. These color-specific legendary dragons aren't the strongest dragons in their suit, but they have powers that are greatly improved versions of their color's standard power.


3. The Chromatic Wyrmling and Metallic Wyrmling as new legendary dragons that enable you to play and trigger the power of a stronger evil or good dragon whose power you would have otherwise have missed out on. These bring the total number of legendary dragons to 15.


4. Six new mortals, including the Dragonrider, Prophet, and Illusionist, along with three mortals reprinted (with one slight change) from the Emperor's Gambit expansion set. The Queen, The Sorcerer, and Wyrmpriest bring the total number of mortals to 15. As you could probably tell by the card art above, all the new images are by the original 3DA artist, Craig Phillips!

Customizing Each Game

Instead of playing with all one hundred cards, the new edition is meant to be played with eighty cards. Use the seventy standard dragons each game, then choose ten cards from the mix of mortals and legendary dragons. You can choose cards at random or build your favorite mix. The rules include a page of advice and slang about how people set up games in D&D worlds.

One small advantage of the new card mix is that adding ten extra standard dragons helps reduce the number of times you have to shuffle, especially when playing games with five or six players.

Of course, the bigger advantage of the new card mix is that playing with different combinations of mortals and legendary dragons should help keep the game fresh. I'm curious whether there will be decks that people enjoy playing most or whether people will set games up at random.

Many of the new mortals and legendary dragons have powers I'm excited about having added to the game, but I'm waiting to write more about the mortals' new powers when people have had a chance to play with them! Spoilers from the rulebook are one thing, but I don't feel right telling you what I think the new mortals accomplish. Better for people to enjoy finding out in their own games.

Strengthening the Evil

On the other hand, I feel fine talking about weak pieces of the game that have improved in the new edition!

The main issue is that evil was weak. Since the good dragons tended to be slightly stronger than evil dragons and helped you draw more cards, the evil dragon cards were more likely to be chosen as cards to be thrown into the ante. I even played off this in the Three-Dragon Ante: Emperor's Gambit set with several dragon powers that relied on having evil dragons in the ante.

This time around I confronted the problem directly. Of the original five colors of evil dragons, Green Dragons and Red Dragons had reliable powers that didn't need changing, while the other three colors have improved!

White Dragon
The White Dragon originally allowed you to steal two gold from the stakes only if a mortal was in play. Perhaps I was attempting to design a somewhat weak ability? Unfortunately, teaming up with a mortal turned out to have very little effect on strategy. Since White Dragons are the weakest dragon, their power frequently triggered, but more often than not it had no effect. It was rarely optimal play to lead with a mortal in order to enable your White Dragons, so White Dragon powers triggered so randomly that players sometimes forgot about them.

The new White Dragon power skips the requirement to team up with a mortal; now the White Dragon forces your weakest opponent to pay you two gold. This works better in D&D terms since there isn't anything about White Dragons that makes them more likely to team up with humanoids. If White Dragons are going to be capable of bullying anyone, it's going to be someone weak!

In terms of game dynamics, a card that picks on the weakest opponent is a good counterpoint to the Red Dragon that targets the strongest opponent. The Red Dragon's power is still definitely better, but players now think twice before throwing the White Dragon into the ante.

The new Legendary Dragon: The White Hunter bullies all the weaklings in the gambit. It's a 7-strength white dragon that reads "Each weaker opponent pays you 3 gold." If your opponents aren't taking the gambit seriously, the White Hunter can wake them up, particularly if you play it as the clincher in a white color flight.

Black Dragon
It used to steal two gold from the stakes; now it steals three. The improvement seems to be enough to make players seriously consider playing the Black Dragon instead of automatically tossing it towards the ante.

The new Legendary Dragon: The Black Raider is an 8-strength black dragon that reads "Steal 1 gold from the stakes, then take 2 gold from the opponent to your left, 3 gold from the opponent to their left, and so on until you have taken gold from everyone." The idea with the Black Raider is to push gold theft as far as it can go with a mechanism that stings different opponents to different degrees. The raid gets richer for every player in the game. A Black Raider in a three-player game ends up stealing six gold; in a six-player game it steals 28!

I see this as a feature. Unlike some card games, 3DA glories in playing differently with different numbers of players. For example, the value of scoring a color flight changes dramatically based on the number of players. Similarly, in a 3-player game, triggering your Black Raider's power is no big deal, while in a 5 or 6-player game it could be your main priority.

Blue Dragon
That's the new version of the power at left. The card in original 3DA counted only evil dragons in your flight, making it less advantageous to choose the version of the power that forced each opponent to add to the stakes. People usually chose the safe "give me a gold piece" option since it was hard to arrange to play all-evil. If you're going to choose the dramatically interesting option and push the stakes higher, it's correct to reward your daring, so the Blue Dragon now works on how many cards you've played this flight, not the number of evil dragons you've played.

The new Legendary Dragon: The Blue Overlord isn't subtle. It's a 10-strength blue dragon built on the premise that if the Blue Dragon's power is interesting, doubling the power is more interesting. Yes, the Blue Overlord reads like the Blue Dragon and replaces "1 gold" with "2 gold". Play it as the third card in your flight and trigger its power to force each opponent to add six gold to the stakes, which will be either awesome when you win the gambit...or hilarious when someone else snatches the stakes away from you!

Playing in Character

This is the third time I've made rules for playing Three-Dragon Ante as your D&D character. The third time is the charm! I believe these new rules for using a couple of your character's abilities while playing 3DA are an improvement over how I handled D&D abilities in 3e and 4e.

The problem with the earlier versions was that they supplied many abilities that were "always on". The earlier versions supplied advantages you had to think about the entire game, which feels intrusive to me now. Three-Dragon Ante doesn't need to be tweaked with power-ups that can affect multiple actions every gambit. Therefore, the Legendary Edition pivots around character abilities that don't get used often but which may have a big impact when they do come up.

Three-Dragon Ante: Legendary Edition comes with cardboard coins for six players as well as 3DA ability disks. Before the game, you can choose one or more abilities that your D&D character meets the pre-requisites for. Some 3DA abilities have a lot of impact, while others are just a bit of flavor; it depends on how good a card player your character is.

During play, you'll keep your ability disk on its "Ready" side and wait for events to trigger one of your abilities. When you notice a trigger and use one of your 3DA abilities, you flip your ability disk to its grey side. You can't use any of your abilities again until you earn the right to flip your ability disk to its "Ready" side by scoring a special flight, whether a color flight or a strength flight.

Once you've used an ability, you can just play the game and role-play normally, without having to think about your 3DA abilities again until after you score a special flight. Maybe you'll try extra hard to score a special flight, maybe you won't, but either way it's a natural enough decision. I like the way that opponents react when you score a special flight and can ready your 3DA ability. There's a feeling of "Oh no, here they come again", and I think that captures how the game might feel when being played against dangerous characters in wild places!

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Publisher: Night Owl Workshop

Tower of the Moon

A classic style adventure of Gothic Horror for three to five 4th-6th level adventurers.

A tall tower stands like a fang on a stark hill, silhouetted against the moon. The old folk say this hill was always sacred to the moon goddess Lukariel Sherikira, the Howling Huntress, patron of love, hunting, dance, and wolves. A generation ago, upon becoming high priestess of Lukariel, the cleric Artesia dedicated a great chapel on this holy site, the Tower of the Moon. Artesia began taming the borderlands around it in her goddess’s name, with the help of her trusted henchman Mordark, a powerful magic user, and the aid of the pack of werewolves the goddess granted her. For a decade, Artesia ruled from the Tower of the Moon, and many youths and maidens were taken to serve in the temple as acolytes or transformed into wolves for her guardian pack.

But the minstrels sing that Mordark grew jealous of his mistress, and asked to rule as an equal, or sought her hand in marriage. When she refused both advances, the mage instead created a simulacrum of snow and magic in her shape, to replace her with it, and rule her domain with an icy puppet at his side. However, Artesia discovered his plot, and in her wrath sentenced Mordark to be torn apart by her werewolves. But Mordark had drunk a potion of silver dust and wolfsbane. The feasting werewolves, maddened by this poison, went berserk, turning against their mistress and her acolytes. The tower filled with howls and screams. Tales say that all perished in the struggle, the frenzied wolves even turning against their pack mates and devouring one another; only a few servants escaped to tell the tale, and recall Mordark’s dying words to Artesia before he was eaten alive: “if I could not share the Tower of the Moon beside you in life, I do so in death...”

Today, the Tower of the Moon is a monster-haunted ruin, its shadow falling over dark forest and desolate wilderness. Only the brave or foolish dare its secrets.

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Publisher: Seafoot Games

This special bundle product contains the following titles.

	Seafoot Games - Dragon Lord’s Crumbling Throne | 20x30 Battlemap Regular price: $2.99 Bundle price: $1.00 Format: PDF	Dragon Lord’s Crumbling Throne This ancient crumbling hall once belonged to the giants of old, but more recently has been taken over by a bandit king. He calls himself the Dragon Lord due to use his of dragons in his raiding conquests. The inner sanctum holds the treasures from his raiding expeditions among the crumbling rocks and hundreds of wooden crates. Quarters for his two lieutenants lie side by side off the main hallway which once served as the entrance to this place. One carries weapons of war. Armor, swords and axes. While the other carries knowledge of the occult and magics of the world. The main hall contains the throne above a set of stairs so that the Dragon Lord may look out on his subordinates, around him are thousands of gold coins and chests containing ...
	Seafoot Games - Dragon Lord’s Temple | 20x30 Battlemap Regular price: $2.99 Bundle price: $1.00 Format: PDF	Dragon Lord’s Temple This ancient crumbling temple once belonged to the giants of old, but more recently has been taken over by a bandit king. He calls himself the Dragon Lord due to use his of dragons in his raiding conquests. The inner sanctum holds the treasures from his raiding expeditions among the crumbling rocks and hundreds of wooden crates. Quarters for his two lieutenants lie side by side off the main hallway. One carries weapons of war. Armor, swords and axes. While the other carries knowledge of the occult and magics of the world. The main hall contains the throne above a set of stairs so that the Dragon Lord may look out on his subordinates. Around him are thousands of gold coins and chests containing his favorite spoils. Six stone statues watch over the ha...
	Seafoot Games - Dragon Lord’s Throne | 20x30 Battlemap Regular price: $2.99 Bundle price: $1.00 Format: PDF	Dragon Lord’s Throne This ancient crumbling hall once belonged to the giants of old, but more recently has been taken over by a bandit king. He calls himself the Dragon Lord due to use his of dragons in his raiding conquests. The inner sanctum holds the treasures from his raiding expeditions among the crumbling rocks and hundreds of wooden crates. Quarters for his two lieutenants lie side by side off the main hallway. One carries weapons of war. Armor, swords and axes. While the other carries knowledge of the occult and magics of the world. The main hall contains the throne above a set of stairs so that the Dragon Lord may look out on his subordinates. Around him are thousands of gold coins and chests containing his favorite spoils. Six stone statues watch over the hall...
	Seafoot Games - Mausoleum of the Dragon Lord | 20x30 Battlemap Regular price: $2.99 Bundle price: $1.00 Format: PDF	Mausoleum of the Dragon Lord This ancient crumbling mausoleum was created by the giants of old, a gift to the mortal men that lost their lives fighting in the war of the stone, over a hundreds of years ago. It is said that the mortal men would ride great scaled beasts through the skies. And that the Dragon Lord was the king of the human realms and the rider of the great dragon Veross, who stories say still lives onto this day in the deep woods of this vary forest. The inner sanctum holds the tomb of the Dragon Lord and six of his commanders, as well as other important human figures from the war, their bodies placed in well crafted sarcophagi that have over time been damaged by the crumbling ceilings. Six stone statues watch over the hall, holding swords carved in the style of ...
	Seafoot Games - Tomb of the Dragon Lord | 20x30 Battlemap Regular price: $2.99 Bundle price: $0.99 Format: PDF	Tomb of the Dragon Lord This ancient crumbling tomb was created by the giants of old, a gift to the mortal men that lost their lives fighting in the war of the stone, over a hundreds of years ago. It is said that the mortal men would ride great scaled beasts through the skies. And that the Dragon Lord was the king of the human realms and the rider of the great dragon Veross, who stories say still lives onto this day in the deep woods of Arlak. The inner sanctum holds the tomb of the Dragon Lord and six of his commanders, as well as other important human figures from the war, their bodies placed in well crafted sarcophagi that have over time been damaged by the crumbling ceilings. Six stone statues watch over the hall, holding swords carved in the style of the ancient giants. ...

Total value:	$14.95
Special bundle price:	$4.99
Savings of:	$9.96 (67%)

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Publisher: Raging Swan Press

A System Neutral Edition GM's Resource by Steve Hood

This book is compatible with every edition of the world's most popular role-playing game.

This product is a Dual Format PDF. The downloadable ZIP file contains two versions, one optimised for printing and use on a normal computer and one optimised for use on a mobile device such as an iPad.

For a free sample, visit Raging Swan Press's website.

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Publisher: Raging Swan Press

About Dungeon Dressing

Tired of dungeons lacking in verisimilitude? Want to add cool little features of interest to your creations but don't have the time to come up with non-essential details? Want to make your dungeons feel more realistic? Then Dungeon Dressing is for you! Each instalment focuses on a common dungeon fixture such as stairs, pillars or pools and gives the harried GM the tools to bring such features to life with interesting and cool noteworthy features.

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Publisher: Raging Swan Press

About Dungeon Dressing

Tired of dungeons lacking in verisimilitude? Want to add cool little features of interest to your creations but don't have the time to come up with non-essential details? Want to make your dungeons feel more realistic? Then Dungeon Dressing is for you! Each instalment focuses on a common dungeon fixture such as stairs, pillars or pools and gives the harried GM the tools to bring such features to life with interesting and cool noteworthy features.

Price: $3.45 Read more »

Publisher: Raging Swan Press

About Dungeon Dressing

Tired of dungeons lacking in verisimilitude? Want to add cool little features of interest to your creations but don't have the time to come up with non-essential details? Want to make your dungeons feel more realistic? Then Dungeon Dressing is for you! Each instalment focuses on a common dungeon fixture such as stairs, pillars or pools and gives the harried GM the tools to bring such features to life with interesting and cool noteworthy features.

Price: $3.45 Read more »

Publisher: Raging Swan Press

About Dungeon Dressing

Tired of dungeons lacking in verisimilitude? Want to add cool little features of interest to your creations but don't have the time to come up with non-essential details? Want to make your dungeons feel more realistic? Then Dungeon Dressing is for you! Each instalment focuses on a common dungeon fixture such as stairs, pillars or pools and gives the harried GM the tools to bring such features to life with interesting and cool noteworthy features.

Price: $3.45 Read more »

Publisher: Shades of Vengeance

A hundred years ago, a biological weapon was set off... or did a parasite evolve? Who cares, really? It was airborne, infectious and attacked Humans – that’s the point.

There is no chance to save our species here... there is just a chance to live to tomorrow.

Step into the world of Gaia and try to survive its harsh environment, the Infected "shamblers" as well as the much more deadly "mutants", while navigating the complex areas of control which the thirteen different factions claim.

Gather Brass empty cases to buy food and equipment, head out as a Vault Hunter seeking the lost treasures from before the Cataclysm, or just run odd jobs for the people who need them.

This book contains a full introduction to the world of Gaia, a complete guide to character creation, a huge list of weapons, equipment and vehicles which might be found, the rules – complete with worked examples – plus a section for the GM which contains everything from sample campaigns to premade characters. It’s everything you need to play hundreds of games of Era: Survival!

This Definitive Edition rulebook contains two expansions said to be "vital to gameplay" by reviewers:

The Infected Manual offers 100 different modifications for the Infected, allowing a huge variations in what you might encounter.

Tales of the Outlands offers information about what happens beyond the immediate control of Humanity, where the Defenders are not protecting people from the stronger - and stranger - creatures of Gaia... along with equipment to survive it!

Price: $21.99 Read more »

Publisher: Skirmisher Publishing

An extraterrestrial presence is real. They watch us strip-mine the planet to fuel the growth of populations and economies. Will they intervene to help us avert disaster? 

And what's with all the anal probes? 

If there is a plan to avert disaster, the aliens operating out of a subterranean base in Antarctica didn't get the memo. As much as they'd like to help, that's not their job. Instead, they go through the motions at work and do what they can to find a hint of meaning in their otherwise monotonous lives. 

Price: $0.30 Read more »

Want to write better adventures?

Want to prep more efficiently?

Sick of players skipping all of your best content?

Prep Smarter, Not Harder, with Encounter Theory

Encounter Theory: The Adventure Design Workbook is a fresh way to look at adventure design by Ben Riggs, the voice of the Ennie-Nominated Plot Points podcast. Using his background in teaching and adventure review, he dissects what we think of as an adventure and helps us get to the core of what makes a one great—the encounter.

Adventure Craft and You

How did you learn to write tabletop adventures for your players? You’ve had creative writing assignments in English, maybe even taken a course in creative writing. Perhaps, you started by delving into old D&D modules or stared at the cloudlike white space of a sheet of paper until a story began to form. But, what are the steps? Where are the instructions on how to do this? Could it be, that we don’t really know how to write an RPG adventure?

But Pete, I’ve run many great adventures!

Sure, but how did you do it? How do you write a good adventure, can you explain it? Better yet, can you show me how? A good GM can make the best of a badly written adventure just as they can homebrew their favorite system to work for any setting. It doesn’t have to be perfect to pass for fun. As GMs, we get SO good at improvising, that we can work with “good enough”. But, do you really want to settle for “good enough” adventures?

Principles to Adventure By

Why the encounter, because the encounter is the core experience of play and our most quantifiable unit. As Ben says, the encounter is where design meets play.

Each encounter or scene feeds the player a description of the setting and the characters, something for the players to mentally chew on. Then, narrative control shifts as players are free to act on that description, often begging the question, what do you do? That’s the moment all of this work goes from prep to play.

Description is the BIG word there. Adventure writing is hard, mostly because we drown the reader in it or offer too little, too generic, to capture the mood. Arguably, the greatest feature of Encounter Theory is that it can help a GM narrow down just how much description we should apply in adventure design.

Guiding Principles of Encounter Theory Design:

• Face the Player and Free the Player
• Present Problems Not Solutions
• Use the Dungeon as Adventure Structure
• Give Playable, Specific, Sensory, and Short Description

Encounter Theory is a method of efficiently focusing GMs on creating adventure plans that are ONLY player facing and that maximize player agency. Unlike other mediums of fiction, tabletop roleplaying is collaborative. So, providing any description that is not actionable for a player at the table is a waste of your prep time, as it doesn’t fit how the content is used (excess location history or long NPC backstories). Players need specific descriptive information that is short and sensory. They need to be provided description in a way that their characters can interpret (smell, sight, touch, hear, feel). Anything that does not help a player understand a situation through their character is more to read, more to say, and ultimately, more to delay play. Players come to play!

Unlike writing short stories, the narrative of where play goes should be decided by the players, not the Game Master. A GM should present problems but avoid presenting solutions. That’s not to say that you can’t help players if they get stuck in the fog. It is to say that players should be free to create solutions and find their own way to the next encounter, their own way through the adventure. We have the freedom to explore endless options to solving problems, why limit ourselves to a few dialogue options like some sort of a video game.

What Does This Look Like

Imagine the model of a dungeon for your game session, plot plan, or campaign storyline. Players begin their adventure at its start with a call to action. As the GM, you set the scene, describing where they are, what’s going on, and a problem for them to fix. No matter how they go about solving their problem, there is a clue, a lead, to have them visit the next room, the next encounter. A series of encounters act as rooms leading to the climax, boss fight, or final revelation.

Encounter Theory helps a GM create only as much information as is necessary, minimizing prep, and helping players to get to play faster. It trims down the size of adventures, so that we as GMs can get to running them faster. It helps to focus GMs on player facing information that is immersive (five senses) and to the point. When writing RPG adventures you shouldn’t be writing novels. We’ve learned how to write short stories, maybe even written books, but writing adventures isn’t the same. They are imaginary sandboxes put out for our players to play with, and for the GM to revel in. Save time and focus on your players. Give them what they need to find their fun!

Want to Know More

For more on Encounter Theory: The Adventure Design Handbook, pick up a copy at DriveThruRPG. The book offers a variety of playplans (as seen in images throughout) to help you put these principles into practice for a variety of settings and situations. Use the Adventure Starter to develop adventure ideas, the Opponent Starter to create worthy adversaries, the list goes on and on. Ben even includes a 5E adventure laid out as an example or for your use at the table. For more on Ben Riggs, adventure design, and his work chronicling TSR, download an episode of Plot Points.

What did Ben miss?

How would you add to Encounter Theory?

How did you learn adventure design? 

Read more »

One day, a few weeks ago, I received a message from the incomparable Camdon Wright. Camdon asked me if I would be interested in looking at Thousand Year Old Vampire, a single player “journaling” RPG by Tim Hutchings, Kickstarted in November of 2018.

When I started reading through the PDF, I was seized with a cold and compelling thought. My greatest regret is that I cannot always playtest the games I am reviewing. This thought clouded my brain, burrowing deep into my consciousness, and caused me to focus on a singular aspiration—I could play this game!

This is when I realized that I was doomed. Camdon had turned me into a vampire.

Content Warnings

I’m not planning on spending too much time on the potentially problematic aspects of the questions in this game, but I did want to issue a warning up front. The game intentionally asks you some hard questions, and puts you in bad situations where your vampire is likely to do terrible things.

Because the prompts ask you pointed questions to determine your skills, resources, and contacts, when they reference these items that you have generated, you must resolve questions through the lens of the skills and resources you have. This often means that when all you have is a hammer, every mortal looks like a nail.

While I’m not planning on making the choices too detailed, the game does funnel you towards the consequences of immortality and losing touch with humanity, so it may touch on some issues like the cheapening of human life, resolving threats through violence, and other events in the vampire’s history.

How Does it Work?

The game asks you a number of questions to establish your character, including the generation of skills, resources, memories, mortals, and immortals in the story.

You can only have five total memories, with three experiences under each memory. Your experiences are essentially the answers to the questions that you generate from the prompts. Eventually, you start to lose memories. You can start a journal to save memories, but the journal is a physical object that you can lose, and those memories, once saved, aren’t really “part” of you anymore.

Various prompts will ask you to spend resources or check off skills to resolve a situation. That means that if you only have a specific skill to resolve something, you need to answer the prompt in a manner that incorporates that skill.

You roll d10 and subtract d6 from this, and this tells you how many prompts to jump ahead. The further forward in the prompts that you move, the closer you get to a question that essentially draws an end to the story of your vampire.

Inspiration

How did I come up with my starting point? If you know me, if you give me infinite options, I will spend infinite time trying to narrow down my options. To break this loop, I looked up an event exactly a thousand years from the date I was generating my vampire.

The event I found in 1019 was Yaroslav I becoming the Grand Prince of Kiev with the help of the Novgorodians and Varangian mercenaries. This particular event jumped out at me for one reason—Godbrand, the Viking vampire from the Castlevania animated series on Netflix (voiced by Peter Stormare) was one of my favorite characters in the series. Viking vampire it is!

Our Vampire

We’re going to wrap things up by summarizing the vampire I created from the initial prompts in the game. As I answered questions, here is what developed:

Skills

• Killing with heavy weapons
• Enduring hardships on the road
• Knowing what business partners to trust

Resources

• My loyal troops
• My hoard of gold
• The goodwill of other Varangian mercenaries

Mortals

• Ranssi—the broker that found our band and made us wealthy as mercenaries
• Anichka—the woman I have fallen in love with in Kiev, that my friends fear has made me soft
• Konstantin—the Novgorodian soldier that causes trouble and hates my men as outsiders

Immortal

• The Black Wolf—a supernaturally large wolf that savaged me in the woods, and left me for dead. It is part of the local legends that all of us assumed was but a story to scare children.

Marks

• My fangs are always present

Memory #1

• Experience #1

  I am Jorgrimr, son of Julfir, come to Kiev to help the Great Prince secure his throne, for the promise of gold.

Memory #2

• Experience #1

  When my gold is delivered, I buy a lavish home in Kiev for Anichka, and possibly for myself.

Memory #3

• Experience #1

  After the city is secured, Konstantin’s troops threaten us, but Ranssi calms everyone with his words.

Memory #4

• Experience #1

  The mercenaries we saved last month come to our aid, and there is great friendship after the battle

Memory #5

• Experience #1

  I travel into the wilderness to duel with Konstantin, to rid myself of him. Instead, a huge black wolf savages me, and I inherit its fangs.

Future Installments

I am already worried that the prompts are going to tear my heart out as I deal with my bonds to my fellow mercenaries and Anichka.

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In this first article, I wanted to focus on just the creation of my vampire. I am already worried that the prompts are going to tear my heart out as I deal with my bonds to my fellow mercenaries and Anichka. I’m already hoping the people closest to me end up just . . . drifting away, rather than facing what I have become, and what that means for them. Tragedy right from the start!

Journaling Games

While we’re talking about journaling games, have you ever played one before? Which one? Did you feel like sharing that journal, or was it something that felt deeply personal when you finished? Has playing a journaling game every given you ideas for other games that you might be playing or running?

As always, we would love to hear about this in the comments below. I’ll be looking for your responses. From the shadows. Hungrily. Are my teeth growing?

Camdon!

Read more »

Join Ang as she continues the “Get to Know an Old Gnome” series with one of the original gnomes, Phil Vecchione. Learn Phil’s gaming and blogging origins, his current projects, and his plans for the future. Will this founding gnome keep from finding himself in the stew this week?

Welcome to The Indie Game Shelf! Each article in this series will highlight a different small press roleplaying game to showcase the wide variety of games available. Whether you’re new to the hobby and looking to see what’s out there or you’re a veteran gamer looking for something new, I hope The Indie Game Shelf always holds something fun and new for you to enjoy!

Unity

Unity by Anson Tran and Zensara Studios is a GMed fantasy roleplaying game designed for 3 or more players (including a Game Master) to experience adventure in an apocalyptic fantasy setting. The game book contains not only plenty of setting history, but also a generous portion of short fiction to help communicate the feel of the world. The book also features plenty of beautiful full color artwork by Nguyen Dang Hoang Tri and Raph Lomotan and is worth flipping through for that alone.

The rules structure of the game evokes the traditional school of RPG design, but it also makes use of some modern elements and streamlining techniques for a more cinematic feel. Though not, strictly speaking, a d20-based system, the rules are nonetheless built around the traditional polyhedral dice set, and the mechanisms will be familiar enough to anyone versed in d20-based games.

The Story

Rather than the game being narrowly focused on telling a particular story, Unity instead presents a detailed setting with a rich history. The text provides some recommendations for tone and theme, but the game otherwise offers an open invitation for a variety of play styles and narratives.

The setting of the game is the titular world of Unity, known to its denizens as a single continent bracketed by two oceans, themselves bordered by a (thus far) impenetrable wall of storms and whirlpools. In addition, the world of Unity shares space with the Drift, a spiritual plane fed by the psychic and emotional experiences of the inhabitants of Unity. The history of Unity is one largely punctuated by the primary gods of the world (the Skyfather and the Ivory Queen) screwing up the world by creating intelligent life on it. Get ready for a tale.

The gods first created the Valla, long-lived collectivists psychically linked together by Spirit Stones embedded in their foreheads. Unsatisfied with the Valla’s eventual lack of ambition to spread across the world, however, the gods then created the Furians, volcano-born craftspeople and warriors. Once the Valla and the Furians settled into peaceful trade relations, the gods tried again to create people who would finish the job of populating the world. The third attempt, the Humans, were made short-lived and vulnerable in an attempt to motivate them to thrive, which seemed to do the trick. Lacking the elder races’ divine physiological blessings, Humans learned to harness resources and develop technology, which put them on more equal footing with the others. Eventually, as happens, everyone went to war with each other.

The two gods, displeased by this development, reacted in different ways. The Skyfather disappeared and headed off to parts unknown. The Ivory Queen, encouraged by a whispered voice from somewhere beyond the void, decided to populate the world with horrible monsters to give all three races a common enemy to fight against. At first, this enemy, the Crimson Horde, did too good a job, nearly finishing off each of the earlier peoples. But in the end the Valla, Furians, and Humans banded together and drove the Horde out of civilized lands. This unification finally seemed like what the gods wanted, as it led to a Golden Age. However, the Children of Unity eventually turned their might against the gods themselves and killed the Ivory Queen.

This act of deicide caused the Skyfather to return…and return angry. Raging at what the Children of Unity had done, he smote the world and broke it. The spiritual realm of the Drift, which had been amassing terrible psychic energies not only from the people warring among each other, but now also against the Horde, cracked open and spilled onto the world of Unity in what came to be known as the Great Calamity. Demons poured forth from the Drift, the dead on Unity rose from their graves, the technological automata the Humans had created as labor-saving devices awakened to sentience and revolted, and the world filled with corruption and blight. In addition, all three Children of Unity were divinely cursed: the Valla lost their collective psychic link, the inner strength of the Furians was twisted into uncontrollable rage, and a number of Humans inherited a supernatural disease called the Phage which ultimately resulted in the formation of an additional subrace, the Afflicted.

It is into this world that the characters are thrust to begin their story. The world has been torn apart, literally and figuratively, by the Great Calamity. I call this apocalyptic rather than post-apocalyptic because the protagonists, like the societies of the world at large, are still trying to find their way in this new and dangerous situation. The world is wounded, but not dead. Dangers abound, but the people trying to survive still have access to martial might, mystical powers, and magical technology. A lot has gone poorly for the world, but a lot of hope remains. The game can be played to focus on the struggle of physical survival, but it also makes room for the quest for an exploration of better lands as well as the examination of moral thought and quandaries.

In terms of genre markers and tropes, the game draws from a variety of traditions. The way the game is presented makes it seem based primarily on familiar fantasy ideas: fantastic peoples and creatures, gods and magic, epic tales of good and evil, and the like. There are, however, also strong elements of horror presented, particularly cosmic horror, existential horror, and body horror. I stop just short of calling the game dark fantasy or fantasy horror…though only just. The elements are present, but it doesn’t feel like the action-oriented game is strongly pushing a fear-based tone that I associate with the horror genre. In addition, the Afflicted feature mechanical body part replacements or augmentations reminiscent of a game revolving around cybernetics, and some of the magical technology available includes gigantic war engines known as Titan Rigs for that dash of mecha aesthetic. There’s a lot going on in this game!

The Game

The rules and structure of mechanics in Unity are at minimum reminiscent of traditional design. Characters are defined by the combination of several elements: Race (one of the three Children of Unity races or the Afflicted), Class, four Attributes (Might, Agility, Mind, and Presence), and three Core Paths (fairly freeform backgrounds that take the place of a skill list). In addition, a character’s Class confers Features, Perks, and Powers which are the primary pieces that differentiate Classes from one another and which let characters engage with the rules with more than the core resolution rolls.

The primary resolution mechanic is a 2d10 + modifiers roll vs. a target number. The modifiers involve an Attack Rating and/or Defense Rating for combat rolls or Attribute and Core Path modifiers for skill checks. There is also a Benefit/Hindrance mechanic which includes an additional die to the pool which will either help (keep highest) or hinder (keep lowest) the result of the roll, as appropriate. Rolling doubles in combat introduces extra benefits, and rolling double tens is the equivalent of a critical hit (resulting in extra damage). The target number is generally an opponents Defense or Attack Rating (in combat) or a number based on the difficulty of the challenge (for skill checks).

Combat is based on rounds, as in many traditional designs, but the turns within the rounds are team-based such that all the player characters act together, and then the GM-controlled characters act together. Initiative is primarily decided narratively, though under certain circumstances it can be altered in the first round by skill checks. There is a familiar action economy per turn, with one each of different categories of actions available (Standard, Movement, Quick, and the like).

Departing from a more familiar trad structure, Class Powers are mostly fueled by an economy of power points specifically flavored to each Class. For example, Dreadnought Powers are fueled by Might, while Phantom Powers are fueled by Guile. The points are flavored differently for each Class, but the mechanics are mostly the same. Some Classes even use two different power point economies, and this is only one type of economy used in the game.

Equipment is highly abstracted, divided into Necessities (which are spent during rest and recovery periods) and Gear (which represent the items of adventuring tools and similar available to the characters). There is a player-facing narrative currency called Spark Points (which are earned for descriptive prose and spent on mechanical bonuses to rolls) as well as a GM-controlled narrative currency called Ruin (accumulated by the passage of time and various character actions and spent by the GM on complications or to power opponent powers). Distance and position in combat are abstracted as well for a more fluid and cinematic approach than offered by grid-based maps. There is a traditional hit point track, and loss of all hit points leads to a death save mechanic called Fading.

There are many other game mechanics, some of a more traditional bent and some more indie. There is a whole rules section for piloting a Titan Rig, which is a cooperative success-collecting exercise for the entire party. A session zero (pre-story collaborative character creation session) is explicitly recommended in the game. The “failing forward” technique is also explicit in the rules, as a failed combat roll results in the player choosing whether the attack misses or deals some damage while opening up the character to a counter-attack.

Finally, I’d like to note that this game is best enjoyed with plenty of pre-game discussion about tone and content, and (as with all games) I cannot recommend enough the use of safety tools in play. There is much in the setting that can easily lead to problematic content at your table, and it’s worth taking that under advisement before diving in with both feet. The Afflicted in particular can easily strike notes of ableism if not handled with care. In addition, there may be troubling cultural elements present in, not just the history, but the present day of the playable peoples, like slavery and ritual suicide. It is explicit that part of the game is the examination of moral decisions and thought, but the game offers some ideas that players may not be willing to take on in play, and there are no warnings in the text to let you know. Proceed with understanding and care for your fellow players.

The Shelf

Unity is available for purchase in print and PDF from the Zensara Studios online store. Mechanically, this game is not only reminiscent of mid-to-late editions of Dungeons & Dragons, but some design elements (like Core Paths) also remind me strongly of 13th Age (one of my personal favorites in the fantasy d20-based space). Thematically, Unity falls somewhere for me in the neighborhood between Shadow of the Demon Lord and Numenera, a kind of mashup of fantasy horror and science fantasy.

If you’ve got something on your shelf you want to recommend as well, let us know in the comments section below. Let’s fill our shelves together!

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Generally speaking, I don’t usually review short-form products on Gnome Stew. Additionally, I often don’t do formal reviews for products that are free. I also try very hard not to do reviews for the same company in back to back review articles. This week’s review is going to be a special case. This week, I’m going to look at Consent in Gaming by Monte Cook Games, a free product released last week.

If you have read a wide range of my reviews, you may have noticed that I am especially concerned with the roleplaying game industry providing better safety guidelines and content warnings in products. It is something I strongly believe in, and I hope it is the direction in which more game companies move.

Online Storms

One thing I wanted to address in this review is that this product was met with a lot of negative commentaries online the day it was released. Many people ridiculed the concept of a document that provides guidelines for consent at the game table. Other people made the case that concern for the boundaries of others at the game table would ruin a gaming group or the hobby as a whole.

The Thing Itself

The product is a 13 page PDF, including a cover, 12 pages of guidelines, and a Consent Checklist on the final page. The product features pieces from MCG’s impressive art library, and is formatted like other MCG products, with double column layout and additional space for sidebars worked into the page design.

Structure

In the 12 pages of discussion on consent, eight sidebars are summarizing the information presented in the text, or reprinting relevant portions of Your Best Game Ever. The sidebar format is also used to provide a side note to various topics brought up in the text, without interrupting the flow of the discussion.

In addition to the initial presentation of the topic, which stresses that no one but you can set your boundaries, and how the default assumption without informed consent is “no,” the PDF dives into several other topics, such as:

• Important Consent Highlights
• No Words and Go Words
• The X-Card
• Recovering from Consent Mistakes
• Aftercare & Checking In
• Using the Consent Checklist
• How Not to Use the Consent Checklist
• Additional Resources

The document covers a lot of ground in 12 pages. While I was expecting a general description of consent, and an explanation of the consent checklist and how to use it, I wasn’t expecting the broader range of topics like recovering from consent mistakes or the importance of aftercare and check-ins.

What is noteworthy is that while consent is integral to a safe table, it also acknowledges that in some instances, people make mistakes, and discussing the proper way to mitigate those mistakes is as important as having a resolve to not make the mistakes in the first place. It’s very easy to decide to follow a procedure, then give up on that procedure when making a mistake. This stresses the importance of a sincere apology and desire to rectify any harm that has been done.

I am also thrilled to see an examination of how not to use the safety checklist, that even with consent, topics that are agreed upon for game content don’t need to be the predominant element.

While I think this document presents a very solid outline for consent in games, I am also glad that the final page lists additional resources on the topic of safety at the game table, rather than trying to be the final word on the subject. Anyone with this document in their campaign toolkit is going to be well prepared for a safe and enjoyable campaign, but it never hurts to expand knowledge of safety and consent issues.

RPG Consent Checklist

The checklist itself provides areas to record the planned theme of the campaign, the “rating” of the campaign and then provides some potential sample content that players can rate as red, yellow or green. Red ratings are those that the player does not want in the game, yellow ratings are those items that the player doesn’t want detailed heavily in the campaign, or used very carefully or sparingly, and green items are those that the player is fine having in the game.

The sample sections include topics grouped under the following headings:

• Horror
• Relationships
• Social and Cultural Issues
• Mental and Physical Health
• Additional Topics

There are also lines to write in any topics that aren’t mentioned on the list, as well as a section that allows the player to provide feedback on their concerns for the GM. I appreciate the utility of this checklist as a handout for tabletop groups.

Making it Personal

A lot of discussion that has surrounded this document has revolved around the need for it, especially in established gaming groups and communities. I thought I might share a few of my personal experiences, experiences that I feel would have been much easier to navigate if safety and consent had been a greater priority in the hobby.

Personal Mistakes

A few years after I started running RPGs for my friends, I was running a session where the party was deep in a series of caves. I provided a very detailed, very specific description of the giant spider that the party encountered. One of my friends was very uncomfortable with this description.

Because I was very bad at empathy and had a lot to learn about being a good friend and a good human being, seeing his discomfort, I layered on even more disturbing descriptive elements. He left the table. After several years of being part of the gaming group, he never came back. It took me far too long to realize that he quit showing up for game night after I pushed him past his breaking point. We were all still friends, and we still spent time together, but I lost a player and some valuable time with a friend, sharing something we both enjoyed.

Personal Experiences

I won’t go into details, but I had a moment with a character in a campaign, where I described my character putting herself in a vulnerable position. I was playing with people I had played with for years. Another player crossed a major boundary in the narrative between his character and mine. I was too stunned to react. When I reflected on the situation, the first thought was not to bring up the problem, because it was my fault for putting my character in that situation. Then I realized how much that sounded like the guilt and recriminations that far too many people face in real life. I could never play that character again.

I was in a convention game, with a GM that was well regarded by most convention-goers. The game was marked “for mature players,” but I had assumed this would be because of the flurry of F-bombs I usually heard emanating from the table. In the session, our characters were whimsical superheroes fighting Greek gods run amuck. In one scene, we came dangerously close to being compelled to perform actions that I’m not comfortable having a character commit against their will. The only thing that derailed this was player action, not GM discretion.

Finally, a regular player that I considered a friend was in several games with me, at a point in time when I was having some serious turmoil over my religious convictions. He had no way of knowing this without me mentioning it, but he was continually making jokes about religion, and it became especially stressful for me to be at a table with him, even though I generally enjoyed his company. I eventually wrote him an email, directly, but instead of discussing the issue, he dropped out of any games with me. I wish we had a better framework in place to have set up the discussion on the topic of religion at the table.

These are just a few of the mistakes that I have made, and the uncomfortable positions I have been in, as a gamer. I’m a cis white male, and I’ve run into these issues. The potential feeling of power imbalance and concern about upsetting established group dynamics becomes even worse for anyone from a marginalized community.

Go Words

 Even if you don’t use this exact set of tools, it’s a free and well-written examination of the topic that also gives you a jumping-off point to look at other safety tools and practices that you should be using at your table. 

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This is a great document. I normally don’t factor price into reviews, but the fact of the matter is, it’s hard to argue with free. This covers a wide range of topics and more broadly than I would have expected for a free product. The consent checklist is a wonderful addition for any campaign toolkit, and is something that should see lots of use at session zeroes across the gaming hobby. Additionally, not only does this address its premise well, it gives resources for even more research on an important topic.

No Words

There isn’t much I can say to detract from this product. The closest thing I can come up with is that I wish this text was included specifically in various game products, as well as being a separate download. As a slight accessibility note, the red/yellow/green rankings for topics might not be as friendly to some disabilities as it could be, but this is partially addressed by also providing shapes unique to each color as well as color-coding them.

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.

This is something everyone should be downloading. Even if you don’t use this exact set of tools, it’s a free and well-written examination of the topic that also gives you a jumping-off point to look at other safety tools and practices that you should be using at your table.

What are some of the things you have done to make your game tables more welcoming? What kind of check-in procedures do you have in place? What are your favorite safety tools? We would love to hear about it in the comments below.

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Image taken by Mike Sinko and used via Creative Commons Attribution license.

I recently had the pleasure of playing Bad Horse at the gaming table. Yes, that Bad Horse. Leader of the Evil League of Evil. The Thoroughbred of Sin. Occasional Neigh Sayer. Actual horse. With some handy dandy Monty Python coconuts, what I hoped was a long nosed expression, and some whuffs and whinnies, off we went! For an entire scene I shifted on my hooves (coconuts), whuffed disgruntledly, and occasionally neighed definitively, but not a word past my lips as I alternately threatened, terrified, and rewarded the evil overlords who made up my league — and I had a blast. 

Let me start by saying, up front, that this piece does not discuss playing with or playing people who are disabled in such a way that they are nonverbal, and none of the advice here should be taken as such. In fact, I would apply this advice to characters who are nonhuman, like muppets, horses, or magical furniture. This is not meant to be an excuse for you to treat other humans badly at your table, so don’t. 

Firstly, the assumption for this type of character is that while we as players may not understand them, the other characters do. This works especially well for characters like Bad Horse or droids. If you have a talking animal, you have a decision — are they a talking animal like Rocket or Mr. Ed, or are they a talking animal like Lassie? If you have a droid, is it C3PO or R2D2? In either case, this can be very interesting for NPCs like a wizard’s familiar or ranger’s animal companion, non-human (but not key plot introducing) NPCs, or non-human PCs in one shots or single scene settings. I wouldn’t recommend this as a PC trick for long games or campaigns because it might be difficult to remain involved in the game when you are never directly expressing yourself in scene. 

Playing this kind of character means leaving the interpretation of your actions and sounds up to the rest of the table. They can decide what that particular whinny meant, and they’ll make it understood in how they react to you or what they say in response. When I made an angry whinny, they cowered before my threats to trample them, apologized profusely and backed away to safety.

When I whuffed at them they responded as if I’d asked them a particular question — think “Of course I am, Brain, but what would we do with all the marshmallows?” It’s also worth discussing if everyone in this game world understands this character, or only specific people. If only specific people, who are they and why can they understand? 

Leaving the interpretation of your character and their actions up to the rest of your table can be incredibly fun, but is also something you should save for game spaces in which you feel comfortable with the other players, and I would highly recommend (as always) that you are playing with some kind of tool to revoke consent. You are literally allowing other players to put words in your mouth, so it’s important to have trust and a way to remove content that’s not okay with you. It’s also important to have the involved players’ agreement in these shenanigans, since you are relying on them to fill in your part of the conversation and shifting that part of the gaming cognitive load to them. As always, it’s worth having a conversation in advance, whether that’s just checking in at your convention one shot as you build characters or part of your session zero. 

For your part, it’s important to make sure that you can make noises that express the tone you’re trying to convey to the other players, so that they can riff appropriately. If you think about the noises you get from R2D2, for example, there are very clear upbeat sounds, curious sounds, annoyed sounds, and so on. As the audience, even though we don’t understand the words, we definitely pick up on the emotional tone. It’s key to give that tone to your fellow players because that will drive their responses to you and give them something to play off of. It’s also important that you can make these sounds without breaking the tone and genre of the game — silly cartoon noises in a serious space mystery will break the tone for everyone, and may drag the game off course. Be aware and respectful of the intended feel. 

So the next time you’re looking at adding an animal companion or an astro mech to your game, give some thought to how you’ll manage their communication and who can understand them. Give your fellow players a little more power over this world. You never know when not saying anything at all means you’ll say the thing that is so good you never would have thought of it! 

Have you ever played a non-verbal character at a game? Are there some other good times to use them or good stories about when they’ve worked out beautifully?

 

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With this being Friday the 13th, I figured I’d roll with a post about curses. There are a multitude of reasons (some with more legitimacy than others) on why we’re so afraid of Friday the 13th. The historical event that I think makes the most sense is the capture and eventual downfall of the Knights Templar. The dawn raids on various Templar holdings and strongholds throughout France occurred on Friday, October the 13th in 1307 and were carried out under the orders of King Philip IV of France with approval by Pope Clement V. When the Templar Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, was finally executed nearly seven years later, it is rumored he threw forth a curse from his execution pyre before he slowly roasted to death.

The curse was aimed at King Philip IV and his descendants as well as Pope Clement V. Of course, the veracity of claims of a man speaking forth a curse while his lungs filled with smoke is in question, but the following events are clearly documented in history books. Pope Clement V died of a long-running illness within a year. Also within that same year, King Philip IV died suddenly of a stroke. Following Philip’s death, four Capetians (Philip’s long-standing noble family) sat on and died in the throne of France. All of them were direct descendants of Philip. This took roughly fourteen years to transpire, but after the fourth death, the centuries-old House of Capet suffered from an absolute collapse and faded out of power.

That’s a potent curse there! Jacques de Molay took down a pope and an entire French royal line with his final utterances. (Assuming, of course, curses are real and you buy this story.) It’s all of the above that led me to traverse the mental map from Friday the 13th to how we can be more creative in our use of curses within roleplaying games.

Now, let’s jump into RPGs now, shall we? That’s where curses exist and are real to our characters.

I’ve taken a bit of a historical trip into the “Bestow Curse” spell from D&D through the ages. The spell, quite honestly, hasn’t changed much from its early days to the modern incarnation of the game. I won’t bore you with yet another history lesson to demonstrate the subtle shifts of the spell. The effects of the spell include some options where the caster can choose to make ability checks more difficult, or attack/skill checks more difficult, or forcing the target to lose their ability to act 50% of the time.

I’m going to talk about the last option before the other two. I flat-out don’t allow it in my game. It’s off the table. No PC, no NPC, no monster, no Boss Bad Guy, no one, is allowed to pick it. It just doesn’t exist as a house rule of mine. Here’s why: I will not take an option that requires a single die roll (the saving throw) that will effectively negate the existence and purpose of a character half the time on a permanent basis. That’s right. The Bestow Curse spell is permanent. Yeah. Yeah. I know that a Remove Curse spell will remove the curse, but I’ve been that player with a cursed character and the nearest available temple for a Remove Curse was a two-week (now a four-week because I can only move 50% of the time) walk away. It’s crippling and frustrating and all-around not fun. Of course, if I won’t do this to a player via any means, I need to level out the playing field by not allowing them to do it to my critters or NPCs. That’s why it’s completely off the table.

Now, let’s talk about the first two options. They need some flavor! As it stands, it’s a (*yawn* boring) mechanical effect. I’m good with the various mechanical effects that exist for the different versions of D&D throughout the ages. They’re well-balanced, fair, and have an appropriate impact on the game without completely removing a character (thus removing the player) from the game’s main action and high points.

However, I want some spice to my descriptors. I want some evocative descriptions to be thrown across the table when the caster drops a curse on some unlucky person. I need something that will tell me why a particular character or NPC can’t walk more than ten feet without stumbling and almost falling. That’s where creative curses come into play. Let’s drop some examples, shall we?

• May your boot laces always come undone.
• You will always be hungry (or thirsty).
• May your sword’s grip become as slick as a slug’s backside.
• The buckles on your armor will let loose at the worst possible moment.
• A pox upon your face.
• This is taken from Timur’s tomb and may be more appropriate for a plot hook than an individual curse:
  • “Whomsoever opens my tomb shall unleash an invader more terrible than I.”
• That back left molar? It’s now in constant pain.
• You will carry the stench of a thousand dung beetles.

And I’ll leave one that (supposedly) comes from China and is entirely appropriate to a roleplaying campaign (for good or ill).

May you live in interesting times.

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I’m not the kind of person who gets sappy over poetry. But there’s this handful of lines from Ezra Pound that always make me feel like there’s a fist beneath my breastplate, pressing into the wet pink walls of my chest. They go like this:

A day when the historians left blanks in their writings
I mean, for things they didn’t know,
But that time seems to be passing.

These four lines come from Canto XIII, from a poem cycle usually called the China Cantos. They offer the famously Sinophile poet’s fractured, free versey take on imperial Chinese history, from the mythical, deep-BC sage-emperors to a century into the final dynasty. There are blanks in the narrative — presumably for the things they didn’t know: both Pound and his source, the Jesuit scholar Joseph-Anne-Marie de Moyriac de Mailla, whose name was as long as the 12-volume history he wrote from the mission field in Beijing.

The poem’s speaker, who remembers historians leaving blanks? That was Confucius.

I don’t know why this bit of poetry always gets me, but the fact that they do feels overdetermined. The lines act on me like the mechanical dip of a switch, that makes the circuitry in my nerves and muscles dance just right. It’s this automatic sparking of feeling, like an electric current — so easy it feels cheap.

I’m a historian of China, a PhD candidate trying to ink over with citations and cleverness all the blanks of what I still don’t know. And I’m a Sinophile, like Pound. Maybe more reasonably, since I was born in China — though I’ve spent far less of my life there than De Mailla, who read better classical Chinese, I’m sure.

I’ve got this sense of unease that I’m really just an Orientalist of the old school, given to flights of irresponsible lyricism over the Middle Kingdom. Despite my blood and all my historical training, I can’t help but be moved when white, Anglophone poets write about Confucius. We all have our guilty pleasures, I guess.

Dungeons & Dragons & Poets

My favorite cheat sheet for the western canon was this webcomic called Dungeons & Dragons & Philosophers: Simone de Beauvoir running a game for Foucault, Derrida, Kant, and her real-life partner Jean-Paul Sartre. I started reading it because, in undergrad, a lot of my friends were people who all met in a Great Books program, without me. When I was trying to get my Mandarin up to speed, they were mainlining canonical texts — the white people kind, from Plato to Foucault. Acting on FOMO, I assigned myself some extra reading: a little bit of Aristotle — in Chinese translation, so it felt virtuous. For most of the major critical theorists, I stooped to Wikipedia. But there was nothing better than D&D&P.

In a hypothetical spin-off called Dungeons & Dragons & Poets, I can picture Pound playing Oriental Adventures. It’d be the first edition, released in 1985, and he’d march his, say, chaotic evil wu jen — a lawlessly eccentric spellcaster— across the exoticizing fever dream of Kara-Tur. But I think he’d feel more at home with Yoon-Suin: The Purple Land, the blurb for which promises “ancient mysteries, opium smoke, great luxury and opulent cruelty.” Pound wouldn’t play through a campaign in Yoon-Suin— he’d be the one to run it, railroading his players through the smoke-wreathed landscape the way his China Cantos marched us through millennia of Chinese history.

That’s the thing about these OA-style sourcebooks: they trade in generalities, in dense, spidery webs of silken stereotype. If given the chance to page through one, my grad school professors would wrinkle their mouths in contempt, then lean forward and start pontificating about the distorted shape of East Asia in the western cultural imaginary.

It’s true that these games are ahistorical, to the point of hilarity: they flatten out Chinese and Japanese elements, 13th-century and 17th-century circumstances, into a single, tea-stained image of an exotic East. And it’s true that the leitmotifs of family and honor play out with all the subtlety of a hundred-strong trombone corps. Tellingly, tabletop gaming is virtually the only space where North Americans toss out words like “Oriental” with a total lack of irony.

Despite these flaws, there’s still something seductive about these games. They feel like translations that read well even when you know they got it wrong, and I’m drawn to them like I’m drawn to Pound’s Confucius. The defense lies in the fantasy. The OA aesthetic — like the Legend of the Five Rings aesthetic or the Bushido aesthetic, they’re all one aesthetic, really — is grounded not in history but film, Hong Kong action flicks and Akira Kurosawa. As they interpret Asian-made movies at one remove, it becomes clear they were never about a real Asia but an imagined Orient. It’s a Kara-Tur-like country that exists only in the minds of Asian auteurs and fantasists, and white poets and missionaries, shimmering in the cultural record like an opium-smoke mirage.

“A More Cosmopolitan Outlook”

The danger comes in when someone takes the fantasy for reality. It seems like a ridiculous mistake, like doggedly citing poetry as history. But a reviewer promised that 1979’s Bushido — set in a mythical, Kurosawa-inspired Nippon — would be “worth the price for the person interested in developing a more cosmopolitan outlook”. As if playing a gangster or priest in fake Japan would help someone understand the nuances of life in real Japan. Strikingly, the reviewer who made this claim was himself of Japanese descent, surnamed Okada. As a China Cantos fan surnamed Tang, I can’t help but relate.

I don’t want to condemn Asian campaign settings as bad historiography — for the simple reason that they’re not historiography. I don’t even want to dismiss them as mere guilty pleasure, as if playing them will gnaw away at your capacity for critical thought, the way endless cheeseburgers gum up overtaxed arteries. Like all departures from the Tolkienesque sword and sorcery, OA-style games diversify the tabletop, opening up other ways of contextualizing heroism and adventure, risk and right.

Actually, I’m tempted to read the tabletop’s transformation of themes and tropes from Asian media as a good sign. It’s an indication that the texts I study — and in some ways embody — are as durable and capacious as the western canon. After all, Hamlet, Satan, and the Lady of Shalott are constantly being stirred into new narratives, some transcendent and some bizarre.

We’re fortunate that, in the decades since OA 1e first appeared, game designers have started turning out Asian-inspired settings animated by nuance. Instead of building up a catch-all East Asia — an Orient — new-generation games home in on particular regions and eras with distinct textures, using them as scaffolding to build fully realized settings.

The French-made Qin: The Warring States, for instance, focuses on the contentious lead-up to imperial unification, while Wandering Heroes of the Ogre Gates centers on the Southern Song, a shrinking empire teetering on the edge of collapse. Qin unification happened in 221 BCE. while the fall of the Song wasn’t till 1279 CE. It makes sense that these two worlds would be markedly different in texture and affect.

7th Sea: Khitai, meanwhile, revisits the premise of a mythic pan-Asian setting — but pitches it as an internally heterogeneous region animated by historical flux. Hearts of Wulin, a Kickstarter-backed wuxia game I’m personally excited about, seems — in its elegant approach to both romance and combat — to draw heavily on the late imperial fiction that informed my love of premodern China in the first place. Its creators include Agatha Cheng, of Asians Represent fame, as both co-author and cultural consultant.

There’s also Filipino-American designer James Mendez Hodes’ Kurosawa-inflected samurai fantasy Thousand Arrows, now live on Kickstarter, which promises to subvert “stereotypes and misconceptions about Asians which appear most commonly in gaming culture whenever a samurai or monk shows up”. Hodes’ Asian-American identity alone doesn’t promise that his work will be more rigorously researched, more attentive to detail, than the L5Rs of yore. What does is his graduate training in Eastern classics and his experience as a sensitivity reader for materials featuring Asian and African cultures.

Of course, you don’t need a master’s degree to play — or run — a game in an Asian setting “respectfully,” an ask this GM took to the gaming sages of Reddit. What you do need is the empathy and imagination to craft a compelling story, and the research to flesh it out with the details that make it ring true.

Isn’t that the fun part anyway?

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At some point,  I realized that I enjoyed reading about how games work and why, as much as I enjoyed reading and learning new games themselves. While I have gone out of my way, in the past,  to find new books about the process of running and managing RPG campaigns, even if I wasn’t looking, it would be hard to miss Your Best Game Ever, a book about various aspects of learning, playing, and running roleplaying games from Monte Cook Games.

Dimensional Analysis

This review is based on the PDF version of Your Best Game Ever, which is 242 pages long. The book is full color, and features a greatest hits collection of artwork from other Monte Cook Games products. If you have seen any of the MCG books, you know these are impressive pieces.

Chapters have clearly outlined headings, with sub-headings and bullet pointed lists to emphasize material that has been presented in the text. There are sidebars that introduce various related topics and summarize them, as well as several full page interludes by various gaming personalities on a number of different topics. There is a single page index, which also includes an index of the contributor pages (21 separate short essays that generally appear at the end of various chapters).

Contributions 

While these are scattered throughout the text, I thought I would address them first, as they appear at the end of various chapters, are from a variety of writers, and touch on a wide range of topics. The contributors include:

• Susan J. Morris
• Matthew Mercer
• Bear Weiter
• Ajit George
• Tom Lommel
• Bruce R. Cordell
• Alina Pete
• Charles M. Ryan
• Stacy Dellorfano
• Shanna Germain
• Matt Colville
• Jennell Jaquays
• Sean K. Reynolds
• John Rogers
• Luke Crane
• Tammie Webb Ryan
• Monica Valentinelli
• Eric Campbell
• Tanya DePass
• Darcy L. Ross
• Eloy Lasanta

I wanted to specifically start this review addressing the contributions because when the Kickstarter for this product was live, I misunderstood the structure of this book. I was expecting an anthology of essays by the guest writers as the primary content of the book. As it stands, I think the book is stronger for having a cohesive voice, and then adding these single page, focused essays.

In addition to these sidebars, there are comic strips from DnDoggos, John Kovalic, Aviv Or, Brian Patterson, Len Peralta, Alina Pete, and Stan!, often emphasizing the point being made in the previous section of the book.

Part 1: Roleplaying Games

This section includes chapters called So You Want to Play an RPG and Understanding RPGs. Right from the start, it is interesting to see that the opening section of this book is written to people that are assumed not to have played or read an RPG first. Most game advice books are, for lack of a better term, 200 level treatments of the topic. They assume you know what an RPG is, have probably run at least a few sessions, and want to get better at doing that. In this case, the book is starting from the ground up, assuming you have heard of, but not fully engaged with, the concept of tabletop RPGs.

So You Want to Play an RPG is aimed at explaining what the experience of reading an RPG book may be like, getting a wider view of how RPGs function. It also addresses engaging with online content and exploring local game stores. There is a section on what people that have been playing RPGs over the long term may forget or take for granted that new players should know, as well.

Understanding RPGs introduces more of the structure and procedure of RPGs. It introduces the concept of the Three Entities, the game master, the players, and the rules, and discusses how these interact in play. Then the chapter delves into styles of RPG games (discussing topics like fun first or story first), including complexity and genre. The chapter also explores the differences between longer campaigns and one shots.

The chapter touches on communities that surround games, such as online communities, local game stores, and conventions. Perhaps most importantly for a section aimed at new gamers, it talks about the importance of being comfortable and safe at the table with the other people, and how to determine if it is time to move on from the game.

As an important note, this chapter also introduces its own form of safety tool, The Pause Button, which, as described, functions much like an X-Card. I like that this gets the idea of safety tools into the discussion of RPGs early on for a potentially new member of the RPG audience.

If there is a general downside to this section of the book, it’s that most of this is written from a more traditional RPG point of view. While it ranges from games with different tones, genres, and levels of complexity, it generally assumes traditional aspects of games like the split between GM and player responsibility, and doesn’t touch much on games that may not even have a GM. This is understandable, given that many new players will be entering via games with more traditional structures, but it’s worth noting.

Part 2: Being a Great Player

This section is comprised of chapters on Player Basics, Creating Characters, Playing Your Character, Everyone’s Favorite Player, and Character Arcs and Bonds.

The first section, Player Basics, emphasizes that a player needs to learn varying degrees of creativity, problem solving, roleplaying, and teamwork. It’s a relatively short chapter, but I think it summarizes the broad strokes really well.

Creating Characters is a general advice chapter, so it doesn’t go into what individual games may have in their character creation rules. It does emphasize several things that a player should be doing. As an example, it points out the importance of understanding genre, setting, and tropes, and creating a character that works in that context. It introduces some broad character types, as well as the decisions a player may need to make involving mechanical choices, such as being focused on key tasks versus having a broad range of abilities. There are tips and strategies for developing a personality, goals, and a backstory, and different reasons for choosing how detailed your backstory should be at the beginning of the game.

Playing Your Character largely deals with the relationship that the player has with other players and the GM, and how that plays out at the table. The chapter delves into concepts like spotlight time, metagame knowledge, and the degree to which the player is adding story details to the campaign narrative.

Everyone’s Favorite Player goes beyond best practices for a player, and moves into “above and beyond” practices. Most of this revolves around how to help the GM and other players with creative solutions, being a good guest in general, and looking for ways to be a supportive friend to others in the game group.

Character Arcs and Player Bonds introduce established character arcs and relationships that a player could have as a goal, or as an established connection with another character. The section on character arcs presents the broad concept of the arc, and has sections for the Opening, Steps, Climax, and Resolution of the arc. The bonds include a broad description of the bond, a suggested benefit, and a suggested drawback for the bond.

The Character Arcs and Bonds chapter is one of my favorites in this book. I really enjoy how it clearly gives examples of various tropes and how they could play out at the table. Even if a player doesn’t rigidly follow the structure outlined, they are a great tool for players to visualize directions their characters might take. If there is a downside to them, it may be that the section tries to give advice on using arcs and bonds as character advancement or to provide mechanical benefits or penalties, and I think that’s a little beyond the scope of the player section of the book and hard to encapsulate in a book giving general RPG advice, divorced of a particular game system.

Part 3: Being a Great Game Master

This section includes chapters on Game Master Basics, Building a World, Creating Adventures, Running the Game, The GM and the Rules, and Being a Dynamic GM.

Game Master Basics starts by explaining that it may be easier to GM if you have played in a game before, but that situation may not work for everyone. It then moves into what to do first to get a game going, how to start a session, as well as the responsibilities and skills that a GM will need to develop. A particular point that I appreciated in this section is that while you may be Running the Game, it is the entire groups responsibility to deal with table issues.

Building a World discusses how GMs need to plan out the world that the game they are running will exist within. This talks about creating new worlds, using established game products, or adapting existing properties to your game. There is a lot of advice on starting small, hammering out details, and only building what the players are likely to interact with. There are sections giving advice on verisimilitude and adapting real world historical events, cultures, and religion for use in a game setting. There is a final section on getting player input on collaborative worldbuilding.

The section on using real world religions or historical cultures with a twist is a little thin, and given the topic, a lot can go wrong in that direction. I do appreciate that the text calls for people to be thoughtful and respectful when doing so, I just wish there were more pages and a few more examples of doing it “the right way.” I also feel like there are a few places, like discussing a campaign map or some of the items on the verisimilitude chart, that lean more towards a more traditional RPG approach. I really wish the collaborative world building section had been expanded.

Creating Adventures looks at broad categories of adventures, like location, event, or time based adventures, and then explores different goals and means of resolving adventures that might be considered. There are discussions on act structure, side plots, and potential pitfalls of different adventure styles, and the chapter concludes with a page of sample RPG plots. This is a solid section for examining the structure of adventures, and it is a great introduction to anyone trying to learn the moving parts of an adventure and how to manipulate those parts to potentially elicit a different effect.

Running the Game tackles topics like how to convey information, the importance of asking questions, pacing within a session and within a campaign, player agency, and NPC interactions. There are sections on best practices for maintaining session notes, how to vary adventure styles, NPC traits, and the best ways to end campaigns.

The GM and the Rules examines how the GM interacts with the rules of a game. It discusses rules mastery, house rules, game balance and what it actually means at the table, fairness, and resolving difficulties. There is a section on how to determine if two disparate rules are balanced, and goes into a detailed way of determining this by assigning values, then after the example is finished, the section recommends you don’t try to balance anything in this manner—I love that it illustrates this by going through the steps. There is also a section that jumped out at me that details not calling for anything to be randomly resolved if you aren’t prepared for any possibilities that the random resolution may indicate.

Being a Dynamic GM details concepts like using a session zero, checking in with your players, setting and communicating tone, learning about your players, and advancing your descriptive skills. Beyond these topics, the end of the chapter looks at different campaign or GM styles, including running intertwined campaigns with multiple groups in the same setting, or having multiple GMs for the same campaign.

Part 4: Getting the Most out of RPGs

This section includes chapters on The Game Group, Hosting the Game, Playing Games Online, and Solving Game Group Problems.

The Game Group examines topics like the right size group for the game that you are running, finding schedules that everyone can work around, communicating between sessions, rotating GMs, table rules, and bonding with your group. In addition to practical topics like when and how you are going to game, this section looks at topics like learning what members of the group don’t want in their games, and making the game comfortable for everyone. It also suggests some activities that the group can participate in to get to know one another and become more comfortable.

Hosting the Game looks at where the game will be run, if it is public or private, if the GM and the host will be one and the same, how to organize the play space, and considerations for snacks and meals during the session. It also addresses what the end of the night should look like, depending on how the session unfolds.

Playing Games Online looks at the benefits of running a game online, and balances these against a traditional face to face group. It also looks at the enhanced potential for communication and technological use in game, and talks about best practices for an online game that may not be as important face to face. The biggest weakness of this chapter, from my point of view, is that it deals very broadly with the topic, but without going into details on specific forms of technology that might be used, it can’t address some of the pitfalls of those technologies. On the other hand, I can understand the reticence of tying this chapter too closely to the “known” means of online gaming available when the book was written.

Solving Game Group Problems goes through a list of potential issues that might come up at the table, and how some of those behaviors can be addressed in a positive manner. While this touches on all kinds of “known” RPG group issues, it also touches on a few topics that aren’t always addressed in sections on game related issues. It talks about the importance of discussing how death works in the game beforehand, how this relates to player agency, and if the group will deviate from the game rules on the topic. It also brings up an issue I’ve seen at tables before, but have never seen addressed in a “game problems” chapter before, in this case, commenting on the rules of a game during a session, and how rules critique in the moment makes it difficult to play the game.

Back Matter

The main thing I wanted to address about this section is that it contains several recipes, including genre thematic recipes, and then concludes with an index. I wasn’t expecting a recipe section, but I’m pretty amused by it. There are even a few adult beverages outlined in this section.

High Roll

 I would love it if a large number of new roleplayers had this resource as their foundational knowledge of the hobby. It touches on so many important topics, and covers many things I would have like to have known when I was just getting started. 

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I love books that discuss the hobby of tabletop roleplaying, and I really like that this book approaches the topic not from the standpoint of refining skills you already started to develop, but from the very beginning, for anyone joining the hobby. There are many important topics that are introduced to an RPG newcomer, while adding valuable information to people already participating that may never have examined a topic from that direction. In particular, I love the idea of introducing safety tools, the structure of character arcs, the overall elements of adventures, and the potential issues at the game table in a manner that new players can see, and established players can internalize.

Low Roll

Some of the advice definitely assumes a more traditional GM/Player structure to roleplaying games, as well as a more traditional narrative dynamic where the GM is the principal world/plot driver, and the player characters provide input by interacting with that structure. Some of the broad topics go a little too far afield, such as the suggestion of alternate advancement rules in the player’s section, and the book doesn’t have time to make that side trek pay off. While I think there is excellent material for new roleplayers in the book (as well as established roleplayers), 242 pages might be a huge investment for learning about the hobby for someone that may not even have read their first rulebook yet.

Qualified Recommendation—A product with lots of positive aspects, but buyers may want to understand the context of the product and what it contains before moving it ahead of other purchases.

I think if you know someone that is interested in roleplaying and is the kind of person that throws themselves into a topic, this is definitely a book for them. If you know someone that is an established roleplayer that loves meta-discussion of the hobby, there is going to be a lot of great material in this book for them as well. For someone that is interested, but less likely to invest heavily in a new hobby, the sheer size of this book plus the potential size of any other game books may be more intimidating than inviting.

With that disclaimer in place, I would love it if a large number of new roleplayers had this resource as their foundational knowledge of the hobby. It touches on so many important topics, and covers many things I would have like to have known when I was just getting started.

What was the first book you ever read about the RPG hobby, that wasn’t a game book? Have you read any books that are about tabletop gaming, but aren’t part of an RPG line? What makes you want to pick up books about the hobby, and what do you want them to address? We would love to hear from you below!

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Forgottenlor checks out the dungeon crawler Vaporum. Since the success of The Legend of Grimrock in 2012, many indie developers have tried their hand at making a first-person grid based dungeon crawler with varied success. While Vaporum might look like a Grimrock clone at first glance, it does enough different to stand on its own feet.... Read more »

Gamerant has reviewed Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch Remaster: Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch Remaster Review Despite having a bit of a disappointing sequel, Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch is a JRPG that has already established itself as a classic in the genre.... Read more »

COG checked out Borderlands 3: Borderlands 3 Review – Bombastic Badasses Blowing up Bandits Developed by Gearbox Studios, the highly anticipated next step in the franchise which defined the very notion of looter shooters, Borderlands 3 is finally here and it kicks off with a bang.... Read more »

The XBox Hub has reviewed the Director's Cut of The Bard's Tale IV: The Bard’s Tale IV: Director’s Cut Review Whenever I have to choose a class or character in a role-playing game I always have a dilemma. My standard go-to role is that of a fighter or a tank, but if I feel brave you may see me heading to the world of an archer or ranger-styled character, firing arrows in from the side of the party.... Read more »

Fextralife previewed Stygian: Reign of the Old Ones. loading... Stygian: Reign Of The Old Ones Preview. we took a look at Stygian: Reign Of The Old Ones a Lovecraftian Turn-based RPG developed by Cultic Games and published by 1C Entertainment. ... Read more »

Retcon Raider plays the Alpha for Wasteland 3. loading... The time has come! After almost 3 years, the Wasteland 3 alpha has finally arrived, so it's time to take our first proper look at it! What does InXile have for us this time? Was it worth the wait? Well, I'll let you be the judge of that.... Read more »

GVMERS looks at the rise of fall of the Dungeon Siege series. loading... In the realm of action-oriented video games, few are as zen as dungeon crawlers. Even at their most complex, demolishing and looting enemies in the likes of Diablo or Torchlight is as hypnotic as it is satisfying; their gameplay loops providing a perfect mixture of habitual repetition, and utter excitement.... Read more »

Solasta: Crown of the Magister got a license to use the D&D SRD 5.1 Ruleset: Wizards of the Coast granted us a license to use the Dungeons and Dragons SRD 5.1 Ruleset! Great news everyone! We've now officially received the license to use the System Reference Document 5.... Read more »

Shaneplays interviewed the devs of Solasta: Crown of the Magister. You can find the podcast here. loading... Highlights: Solasta: Crown of the Magister is a party-based, tactical turn-based CRPG built on the Fifth Edition game system and currently in development by France-based Tactical Adventures.... Read more »

Most of our Dungeons & Dragons games focus on exploration, roleplaying, and combat. We typically describe time in minutes and hours for exploration and roleplaying and seconds during combat. Sometimes, though, our characters find themselves with a lot more time on their hands. After recovering a damaged ship, the characters find themselves with a week in Saltmarsh to investigate leads, run errands, talk to NPCs, and engage in other activities.

Sessions like these, called Breather Episodes in TV tropes, extend the scope of our game from minute and hours to days and weeks. They're not the typical sort of D&D game we're used to running. They can be, however, an interesting change of pace in our games and bring a lot to the story we're sharing around the table.

Here are some quick tips for running great downtime sessions:

• Let your players know ahead of time that a downtime scene or session is going to take place so they can prepare for it.
• Suggest to the players that they read about downtime activities in chapter 8 of the Player's Handbook and chapter 2 of Xanathar's Guide to Everything.
• Read up on downtime activities yourself in the above chapters and in chapter 6 of the Dungeon Master's Guide.
• Write down a handful of custom downtime activities for the characters' current location and place in the story.
• Prepare some secrets and clues to fuel your downtime activities.

Suggestions from Twitter

In preparation for this article I asked folks on Twitter for their best tips for running downtime sessions. You can read the whole D&D downtime twitter thread here. There were a lot of responses to this query and they tended to fall in a few different groups:

• Let the players know ahead of time that downtime is coming.
• Feel free to run some downtime events away from the table.
• Hand the world over to the players.
• Define downtime options.
• Frame events.
• Clarify hooks.
• If you and your group isn't into them, skip them completely.

We'll dig into a few of these as we discuss how to make the most of downtime sessions in our D&D game.

Reviewing the Core Books

When considering a topic like this it always helps to go back to the core books and see what they have to say on the subject.

Chapter 8 of the Dungeons & Dragons Player's Handbook includes descriptions of various downtime activities characters can perform when they've returned to town, immediate threats have subsided, and time in our game's world stretches out. We can recommend to our players that they read up on downtime activities in the Player's Handbook if we think we're going to be running a downtime session in the near future.

Chapter 6 of the Dungeon Master's Guide likewise gets into this topic, offering advice for DMs on how to run such sessions. This is a good section for us DMs to review before we run downtime sessions.

Finally, Xanathar's Guide to Everything extends these downtime activities in Chapter 2 with optional downtime rules for rivals, selling magic items, crafting, carousing, pit fighting, and more.

These are all excellent sections of the core book to review before we run our own downtime sessions. These books really are packed with a lot of the information we need.

Let Players Know Ahead of Time

I recently ran an eleven-session campaign of Shadow of the Demon Lord. One of the interesting things I did was to run every session as a full adventure, beginning with at least two days of downtime since the previous. Thus, when we began each session, we'd go around the table and figure out what the characters did in the time between sessions. The players all knew this structure ahead of time so they had time to think about what their characters might be doing. These sessions also tended to focus on the profession of the character instead of their classes or focused on how the character advanced since the last session.

This format worked well throughout the entire campaign and I believe it did so because the players knew we were having a downtime scene at the beginning of every session.

Players probably expect traditional adventures when they sit down at our table. They're ready to hear about the quest they're going to go on and then get into the action. They're not likely thinking about what their character might do if they had a week off. Probably the best thing we can do to run a smooth downtime session is to let players know ahead of time that a downtime session or scene is coming. This gives the players ample time to think about what their character might do if they had a week to themselves. If they have any personal goals or activities tied to their backgrounds, this is the time to bring it up. If they expect they're heading down into a dungeon, they're not likely to worry about visiting their mother or commissioning a new suit of armor.

Define Downtime Activities

We love D&D because it's generally open ended. We don't know what is going to happen and we don't know what twists and turns the story may take. Players have many options when it comes to the actions of their characters. These options can sometimes be paralyzing which is why we're comfortable with a bunch of characters in a dungeon. Those halls and doorways give us a nice finite number of options.

Those options fall away in downtime sessions taking place in towns or cities. The number of options are generally endless and that can be completely paralyzing.

We can help our players out by defining some clear options. These don't need to be the only options; players are free to choose their own; but a handful of default choices can help players who might not otherwise have ideas in mind.

We can stick to five to seven options, some general and some tailored to the adventure, location, or even the character themselves.

Custom downtime activities can help tie characters to the story. Beyond the suggestions in the Player's Handbook we can add a handful of new ones and offer them up as suggestions. Here are some example activities for my [Ghosts of Saltmarsh] game:

• Research the Black Hunger (an ink-black whale that sunk many ships).
• Meet the local wizard Keledek.
• Pick up rumors at the Empty Net.
• Hunting for Ned Shakeshaft, the elusive spy.
• Conduct ceremonies at the druid's grove or the temple of Procan.
• Research the Endless Nadir.

The players are, of course, free to come up with their own activities beyond these. Our goal is to offer some structure when players might not otherwise have something in mind.

Secrets and Clues: Your Fuel for Meaningful Downtime

A lot of options for downtime lead to the discovery of new information. As they can in many areas of our D&D games, listing out a number of secrets and clues can help you drop in useful bits of information in many different contexts during a downtime session. Carousing, meeting local contacts, or conducting research can all serve as vehicles for secrets and clues.

If you're running a downtime session, you may want to use more than the standard ten secrets and clues recommended in Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master. Since a good piece of the session may revolve around learning such secrets and clues, you want to have a lot of secrets ready.

Adding Small Adventures

Even when running a downtime session adventure may find the characters. Perhaps they hear about someone lost in the sewers beneath the city. Maybe they heard about bandits lurking around the burnt-out ruins of the waystation outside of town. Maybe there's an ancient crypt beneath an old knotted tree behind the crabshack, one from which madmen hear voices begging them for release. Even in the middle of a downtime session our players may want their characters to switch back to adventure mode and engage in one of these small adventures and who are we to say no?

Keep a handful of maps to small lairs handy to support such small adventures. Dyson's maps, the maps in the back of the Dungeon Master's Guide, and the lazy lairs in the Lazy DM's Workbook can help you improvise such small adventures in the middle of your downtime sessions.

A Different Type of D&D

Both players and DMs tend to think about D&D within the context of exploration, roleplaying, and combat. Downtime scenes are their own kind of scene; different from the others. The extended amount of time in such scenes and the nearly unlimited options of activities set them apart from our typical group-based adventures. Running downtime scenes without the proper preparation can lead to slow, boring, and frustrating sessions. With some preparation, however, downtime scenes can end up defining the characters and building the story more than any other scene in our game.

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This article has been updated from the original written in November 2015.

The Dungeons & Dragons fifth edition Monster Manual includes static damage as the default in every monsters' stat block and yet 90% of us still roll for damage. The 40 year tradition of rolling for monster damage is a hard habit to break and many have no intention of doing so. This is, of course, perfectly fine. In this article, however, I'll make the case for using static damage values for monster attacks.

Static Damage Speeds Up Combat

Combat speed isn't a critical factor in the fifth edition of D&D like it was with the fourth edition but we can always trim out parts of our game that aren't as vital to the story unfolding at our table. Rolling for monster damage may be one of those parts. Rolling only attack rolls, even when compared to rolling attacks and damage together, is much faster than rolling both attack and damage rolls. It isn't just about the roll, it's also about the math. Some of us are really good at doing quick addition in our head but its still not as fast as reciting a number we already have in front of us.

Other independent RPGs such as 13th Age and Numenera have moved to static monster damage not only as the default but as the only method of quantifying monster damage. Those of us who have played these games have seen it work well.

There's also an advantage in needing less dice. I've carried a small set of Easy Roller metal dice in my on-the-go DM bag for a while now and I've never need more dice than the seven in that little box (I replaced the percentile die with another d20 for advantage and disadvantage). A simple kit means I can spend more time thinking about the world and less time fumbling around with a giant bag of dice. Blasphemy for some, I am sure, but sometimes we must let old gods die.

While combat length is no longer the problem it once was, using static monster damage is a quick and easy way to speed up our game and put our minds where it belongs—in the story.

It's Within the Rules

Take a look at Monster Manual stat block and you'll notice that the static damage is outside the parentheses with the dice equation on the inside of the parentheses. The implication is that the static damage number is the default rule but, of course, you can roll the equation if you want. Most do. You'll notice that hit points are the same way. How many people roll for a monster's hit points? I'd bet hardly any. How many roll for monster damage? Nine in ten. Why? Because it's what we're used to.

If you think using average monster damage is against the rules, it isn't. It's right there on the page. If you think it goes against the spirit of the game, you might consider that the spirit has changed across editions. Rolling for monster damage isn't as important as it used to be.

No One Cares

The easiest argument to make for using static monster damage is that, generally, no one really cares. Players love to see the variance in their own damage but they tend not to pay much attention to how well a monster's damage roll went. If things are really down to the wire they might pay attention to how many hits they have left but unless its right on the edge, it still doesn't matter.

"My players will metagame" is a common argument I've heard as I proselytize the use of static monster damage but I don't think it happens that often and, when it does, I don't think it matters that much. If you do see your players continually metagaming monster damage, ask yourself if it really matters that much. They can guess the average amount of damage anyway if they're already paying attention. If the metagaming gets bad, you might have a bigger problem going on. Why aren't the players drawn into the story? And, of course, you can always switch back to dice damage if you want to.

Rolling attack rolls matters a lot. There's a whole lot of variance in that 1d20 roll. There's far less variance in that 6d6 + 7 that a fire giant rolls for damage. Make your life easier and stick to the 28. Focus more of your attention on the story going in on the game and the descriptions of the world as it unfolds and less on the math.

Handling Crits

How do you handle critical hits when using static damage? Given its infrequency, this isn't a bad time to pull out the dice. If a monster has a static damage score of "9 (1d8 + 4)" and rolls a critical hit, just roll the extra 1d8 you would have rolled on a hit. On a crit, roll whatever dice are listed in the equation. If you happen to know the average of each die (rounded down), you can use that instead but only if it is actually faster than rolling. It's probably easiest is just to roll the die.

-3 + 1d6

If you want to add a little bit of variance to your damage rolls, you can use the Chris Perkins trick of subtracting 3 from the static damage amount and adding the results of a single 1d6 roll. A fire giant's attack might do 25 + 1d6 instead of the static 27. Honestly, I'm not sure that matters very much and at that point we're back to rolling dice which defeats much of the advantage we had with static damage in the first place. Its one option, however, if we're worried about too little variance.

Tune Monster Damage On the Fly

One other huge advantage of static damage is that we can tune monster damage on the fly based on the story and pacing. We can use the listed average but we don't have to. When I spoke with Jeremy Crawford on the DM's Deep Dive he mentioned that we are free to tune monster damage within the listed dice range, including maxing it out if we desire. This lets us tune monsters as we're running the game to hit the right level of danger when needed. That fire giant's 27 points of damage seems scary. You know what's scarier? A fire giant hitting for 43 damage every hit. That's scary.

In my experience, many of the higher challenge rating monsters don't hit nearly hard enough to threaten higher level characters. Maxing out their damage is an easy trick to increase their threat where it should be.

Sure, you can add more dice to a damage roll to get the same effect but players will notice and the swing is going to change a lot. Adding another 6d6 onto a fire giant's attack gives you the same general average damage but now the fire giant is hitting for 12d6 + 7 and that might have too high an upper threshold.

Give It A Try

Even after reading this you might still be apprehensive about using static damage for monsters. It might not feel right to you after all those years rolling monster damage. If you really don't want to use it, you certainly don't have to. You might give it a try. Maybe use it on a battle with a lot of enemies whose damage variance is largely inconsequential. See how it feels.

Like me, and like many others who have since switched over to static monster damage, you just might start to like it.

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Warning: This article contains spoilers for the adventure Ghosts of Saltmarsh.

Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh is the first adventure in the Ghosts of Saltmarsh campaign adventure book. In this article we offer some tweaks and advice to make this 37 year old adventure as fun as it can be.

We began this Ghosts of Saltmarsh campaign with a Ghosts of Saltmarsh session zero.

A New Hook

Our adventure begins with the characters traveling to a supposedly haunted mansion. The adventure itself, however, doesn't offer very strong hooks to get there. In fact, more than one NPC has a goal to ensure the characters don't to go the mansion.

Thus, we can help this adventure out by offering a stronger hook. For example, the body of a woman can wash up on shore. This woman was last seen with her brother, both of whom were adventurers that planned to go to the haunted mansion and recover the alchemist's gold. Instead, he never returned and she washes up on shore drowned and wearing prisoner's garb with binding markings on her wrists and ankles.

The body causes great concern among the council members. The traditionalists believe it has something to do with the recent rise of the king's forces in the area while the loyalists believe it is a clear sign of the return of the Sea Princes. Only Anders Solmor acts as the balance between the two, bringing together the characters to investigate the situation as outside advisors to the council.

This creates a stronger hook than those proposed in the adventure itself. Your own hooks may work better than any others, of course.

The Sinister Secret in Saltmarsh

There is a sinister secret in Saltmarsh that we can begin to put into play with this hook. You see, Anders Solmor isn't acting on his own in this. He is being fed information and advice from his family's longtime advisor, Skerrin Wavechaser, a secret agent of the Scarlet Brotherhood. We need not introduce Skerrin to the characters (players have a nose for secret villains like a bloodhound) but he is working in the background none the less. His goal is to destabilize the council of Saltmarsh and take it over with members he can control, just as he controls Anders.

Skerrin has sent another agent to the haunted mansion, Ned Shakeshaft. Skerrin sent Ned to find out what the smugglers are doing there so Skerrin can figure out how to use it to the advantage of the Brotherhood.

Ned, however, doesn't know who Skerrin is. Ned was sent from a nearby city and met his contact in Saltmarsh who appeared cloaked and masked. The masked man had a strange affectation, however. He often told jokes and, after doing so, would clear his throat as though punctuating the joke.

This is a ruse, however. The loyalist council member and smuggler Gellan Primewater himself has such an affectation and Skerrin knows it so he uses it to steer attention away from him and towards the corrupt council member who he plans to either turn to the Brotherhood or remove from the council.

This is our sinister scarlet secret in Saltmarsh and we can play it out between all of the adventures we run in this book.

When to Level Characters

Looking back at the actual Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh adventure itself, we need to pay special attention to the characters' first level.

This tends to come up as advice in every article I write for 1st level adventures and it's still just as important when running Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh.

1st level characters are really squishy. No other level in D&D is nearly as dangerous as 1st. Four 16th level characters facing an ancient blue dragon archmage and her simulacrum isn't nearly as deadly as four 1st level characters facing four giant centipedes.

1st level D&D adventures are their own special game and these games should be treated differently than every other D&D game we run.

The low hit points of 1st level characters is the main reason things are so hard. Characters can drop very easily, especially when they're hit by creatures like giant poisonous snakes (16 damage on a hit and failed save) and giant centipedes (14 damage on a hit and with a failed save).

Chapter 2 of Ghosts of Saltmarsh doesn't describe when to level characters. I recommend leveling characters to 2nd level when they have cleared the first and second floors of the mansion and 3rd level by the time they have cleared out the smugglers in the caves below the mansion. Level the characters to 4th level once they have dealt with the Sea Ghost and reported to the council of Saltmarsh that the smuggled weapons are going to the lizardfolk at Dunwater river.

Running the Cellar

Most of the upper two floors of the mansion in chapter 2 of Ghosts of Saltmarsh runs smoothly and requires little modification from the book. The cellars, however, are a great example of how we build situations and let the players navigate that situation. The smugglers in the basement don't break down into perfectly balanced little combat encounter groups. They're a dynamic bunch. Among them are three scouts, five bandits, two hobgoblins, and Sanbalet the wizard. How they split up, group up, and face the characters will depend on how the characters act. If the characters triggered the screaming magic mouths, the smugglers know they're coming. That doesn't mean they'll act perfectly, however. These are simple bandits. They're not very bright, not that easy to control, and prone to either acting stupidly or running away.

Thus, when the characters come down the stairs in area 20, the smugglers are likely to hear them. The smugglers enjoying dinner in area 21 are likely to grab Sanbalet in area 22 and they all go back down into the tunnels in areas 25 through 29. When the characters are done dealing with the skeletons and the alchemist (a really fun encounter so hopefully the characters don't skip it), they will face split groups of scouts and bandits throughout the caves.

This can be a really hard fight at 2nd level so be nice to the characters. Bandits may flee if they take a hit. They may provoke opportunity attacks. They may have less than average hit points. If the characters are having some bad luck you can tweak things on the other side so the bandits luck isn't so great either.

Hopefully it's a fun epic battle in which the characters struggle but prevail.

Failing Forward

What if they lose? This is a good chance to fail forward. Sanbalet can capture the characters and stick them in area 27 under guard. The characters might escape or might be transported to the Sea Ghost when it comes back in. From there you'll have to decide how things might turn out given how the characters react to the situation. Luckily, as hard as the situations can be in the caves and on the Sea Ghost, capture is a realistic option and escape is a fun approach to get out of it.

The Weapons of King Skotti

For a fun twist, we can add a secret and clue to our game that the smuggled weapons found by the characters are actual weapons of King Skotti's armies. This adds a potential conspiracy theory that somehow the King's forces are behind the arming of the lizardfolk against Saltmarsh. This works right into the hands of the Scarlet Brotherhood and adds pressure in the opposite direction from the rumor that the dead woman shows that the Sea Princes are returning. Who actually is selling the king's weapons to the smugglers? An agent of the Scarlet Brotherhood of course! This particular agent, however, will end up dead if the council (and thus Skerrin) finds out that the characters know who it is.

Running a Downtime Session

Between clearing out the haunted mansion and taking on the Sea Ghost, we might have a downtime scene or session. In this session the characters can spend a few days reconnecting with Saltmarsh, tying back in with their backgrounds, investigating leads they might have come across, or anything else they might want to do. Running downtime sessions, which we'll talk about in detail in another article, are a different type of D&D scene. In particular, when running downtime sessions you'll want to do the following:

• Let your players know there will be a downtime scene or session ahead of the game so they can think about what their characters might do.
• Ask your players to review the downtime activities in chapter 2 of the Player's Handbook.
• Review the downtime activities in the Player's Handbook, the Dungeon Master's Guide, Xanathar's Guide to Everything, and the downtime activities listed in the Ghosts of Saltmarsh adventure book.
• Write down a handful of possible downtime activities given their location, the current point in the story, and the backgrounds of the characters.
• During the session ask the players to describe what they want to do within the week-long period while the council figures out what they want to do about the smuggling ship.
• Pay special attention to the time and make sure every player gets a chance to talk about what they want to do.

Once their downtime activities have concluded, it's time to jump to the next part of this adventure.

Running the Sea Ghost

Just like the cellar encounter, the Sea Ghost is another big and dynamic situation. To make things a little easier on the characters, consider leveling them to 3rd once they have cleared out the smugglers under the house so they have more resources to take on the crew of the Sea Ghost. As written, it's a tough situation.

When the characters return to Saltmarsh, the council asks them to go back out to the mansion and infiltrate the Sea Ghost to learn where the pirates on the Sea Ghost are bringing those weapons. If the characters already learned that the weapons are going to the lizardfolk, the council wants them to learn where exactly these lizardfolk are.

Open Situations, Focused Quests

When we're setting up a big scene like the infiltration of the Sea Ghost, we want to keep potential approaches open but also focus the required quests so the players know what they're supposed to do and can choose how they want to do it. When it comes to the infiltration of the Sea Ghost, the council of Saltmarsh gives the characters the following quests:

• Learn where the smugglers are bringing the weapons.
• Neutralize the crew of the Sea Ghost.

These quests are important otherwise the characters will be floundering around on the ship itself, unsure how to deal with it and unsure why they're there in the first place. This can lead to a lot of frustration if the quests aren't clarified.

Beyond clarifying their goals, we can also help guide the conversations the players are having about their approach towards the Sea Ghost by steering it towards realistic options. Will it be possible that they sneak on disguised as the smugglers from the haunted mansion? Do we think they can realistically row up and challenge the whole crew at once? We can offer some guidance in the form of levels of difficulty.

Offer clear goals and leave the approaches open.

If things go straight into combat on the Sea Ghost, spread things out so the characters aren't facing all of the crew at once. Some crew might be sleeping. Some might be afraid to run up on deck. Some might need a couple of rounds to get their pants on and find their sabers. Let them attack in waves and don't be afraid to tweak their hit points for the flow of the story. When it works well, a fight on the Sea Ghost can feel like the one of the best action adventure movies we've seen.

With the Sea Ghost taken down, our characters return to Saltmarsh with the information they need to head into Ghosts of Saltmarsh Chapter 3: The Danger in Dunwater.

Stretching our DM Muscles

The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh is a wonderful adventure that helps us stretch a lot of DM muscles that we often talk about on this website and in Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master. This adventure is full of dynamic situations, intrigue, and potential downtime activities. It's hard to run some of these situations. We really have to be comfortable thinking on our feet. When they run well, however, such adventures can feel like magic.

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In July 2019 I had the pleasure of speaking with David Chris on the DM's Deep Dive. David Christ is the owner of Baldman Games, the company that runs D&D organized play events at a half-dozen of conventions every year. At Gencon alone he runs 8,000 players through about 1,200 games. He's run over fifty shows at this point and manages over 2,500 DMs over the years. He also runs surveys of all of these DMs, receiving feedback on what worked well and what has not.

This gives David a unique perspective on Dungeons & Dragons dungeon mastering. David has DM feedback on thousands of games. Though these views are limited to convention games, which don't always correlate well to how DMs run home games, it's still a huge amount of experience we were able to tap into during this interview.

You can watch the full interview in the video below, directly on YouTube, or listen to the podcast on the Don't Split the Podcast Network.

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The rest of this article contains notes from our discussion.

David Christ's Top Three Tips

Running a D&D game is about the group, not you. D&D is a collaborative story. The players have as much control over that story as the DM. Bring the group into the story.

Have fun. Smile. Laugh. You don't have to know all of the rules. If you're running a fun game it will make up for other defficiencies. Everything else takes care of itself. Hiccups are easier to take care of when everyone's laughing about it.

Nothing goes as planned but disasters are fun. If you roll with the punches things turn out well.

Top Traits of High-Scoring DMs

Preparation. Lack of preparation shows. If you've read, re-read, and taken notes on your material you're in a much better place to handle the strange things that happen. You don't want to have to worry about what the next encounter is. A good DM prepares. A good DM is ready to improvise. If you don't prepare it's hard to improvise.

Smile. It's a game. Have fun. If you start stressing out it leaks through the rest of the game. It's a bad cycle when you're stressed out and the players see it. Take a ten minute break and regroup.

One of the easiest ways to get a low rating as a DM is for the DM to say "I'm telling the story, you're just along for the ride". The DM who is so certain that their way is the right way is the one who is going to get crappy ratings. If a DM thinks their way is the best, that's a sure sign that they're taking in feedback from their table.

Mike compares this to the Dunning Krueger effect. Someone who thinks they're really good many not be as good as they think while those who realize they have much to learn are on the path towards greatness.

Some of the newest DMs are the best DMs because they're not encumbered by historical baggage. DMs who think they're great DMs will ignore the results and then select themselves out of the program.

Not being prepared is a sure sign of a low rating game. Your numbers fall if you stop at the beginning the game to read the module. This is a particular problem at convention organized play games. People paid for these games and don't want to sit there watch someone read a module.

David's Preparation Tips

Read the adventure and take notes. Write down NPC names. Pronounce them ahead of time. Put monster stat blocks on cards. Use an initiative tracker. Preroll initiative.

Players who see a DM with their shit together will feel more confident in the game and their DM. It's contagious.

DMs at conventions talk to other DMs in their tier and with those running the same adventures. Sometimes they're even talking to the authors of the adventures. How do we replicate this at home?

David believes people get a score bump for using candy for monsters. A timeless classic. In Dave's opinion Reece's Peanut Butter cups are more well-liked than miniatures.

The people with terrain and minis can make a great experience. A DM with the maps and minis, however, can be too tied into their own story to forget about all of the important stuff. The guy with the empty table might be running a great game. Minis and terrain are no indicator of how good a game it will be although it does show a DM who has prepared.

The Difference Between Home and Convention Games

According to David, convention games don't have the same flexibility as a home game. Side quests are a feature in home games but a bug in convention games. There's much better food at home games. Home games have a much greater sense of flexibility than convention games.

A really good convention DM knows how to railroad characters back into the plot of an adventure without the players knowing its happening.

The Growth of D&D

Theres been an explosive growth in D&D over the past three years and David is seeing this in the convention games he manages in the following ways:

• The average age is going down.
• Players are typically looking for shorter games.
• New players want shorter campaign arcs.
• Everyone likes rolling dice.
• Many more women and better diversity.
• Not as much about the wargame mentality versus story.

On the Importance of Rules Knowledge

Rules knowledge is the least important trait of the four traits on which Baldman Games scores DMs. In order the importance of traits are:

• Prepared
• Friendly
• Fun
• Rules knowledge

If prepared numbers are low, all the rest of the numbers are usually low. If rules knowledge is low, it doesn't correlate to lower scores in the other categories. Friendly is more important than fun but the two are often tied together.

A lack of rules knowledge can actually help break past an adversarial relationship when the DM asks the players to help with rules.

Other Notes

There were fifty new DMs at Gencon.

The internet has done many terrible things but it gives us a wide range of DMs with whom we can share experiences.

We have a huge online D&D community with tremendous interconnection between DMs sharing experiences but then each of us goes home and runs a game in isolation for our four to six players. What happens at that table doesn't have any effect on the rest of the world. It's a very different sort of hobby. Some really great DMs in home play cannot work well in organized play.

Thanks again to David Christ for letting us squeeze his brain and get his experience running so many D&D games over the years.

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Over the past ten years, I've been posting a single D&D dungeon master tip each day to Twitter. I've collected these over the years and released them in a single big archive so anyone who wants to use them, can do so.

I also wrote a Twitter bot that randomly selects one of the older tweets and posts it to Twitter each day. That bot is called dndtweets. It's a fun one to follow if you like what you find on Sly Flourish. You'll see daily tips, top retweeted #dnd hashtagged tweets, and article reposts twice a week.

Lately I've become fascinated by randomness and creativity and also by Brian Eno and his deck of cards for breaking out of creative ruts called Oblique Strategies. You can see his Oblique Straties in action on the web. They're a set of random concepts intended to break creative people out of a jam. Like rolling a d20 and letting it change our D&D games, these cards force us to think about problems in a new way.

The D&D Tip Generator

Recently I combined these ideas into a new D&D dm tip generator backed by 1,700 tweets from about the past four and a half years. I selected this time period to avoid a whole bunch of largely outdated 4th edition D&D tips. I also cleaned them up a bit.

The generator posts a single tip on a clean and fast HTML page. It's suitable for mobile or desktop. You can click on the tip to load a new one if you want to go through a few.

You can bookmark the site or stick it on the home screen of your phone if you want. Anytime you're preparing for a D&D game or thinking about your game you can pull it up, take a look at the tip, and see if it inspires you to think a little differently about your game.

Hopefully you find it a fun little tool.

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Chapter 17 of Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master describes the value of running a "session zero" for a new campaign. In a session zero, our players can build their characters together while also discussing the story of the campaign. It's a great time to reinforce the main themes of the campaign, integrate the characters together into a group, and discuss any sensative issues anyone might have with these themes.

With our Waterdeep Dragon Heist campaign complete, my two groups both began their adventures in Ghosts of Saltmarsh. This was the perfect time to start fresh, take a deep breath, get together with our friends, and learn about the world and the characters who will sit in its center.

The Ghosts of Saltmarsh Player's Guide

Download the Ghosts of Saltmarsh Player's Guide

For this session zero I wrote a Ghosts of Saltmarsh Player's Guide. This one-page guide, influenced heavily by Matt Coleville's video on the value of player guides, is intended to give the players everything they need to understand where the campaign is going and how their character might fit into it. It offers some history of the region; the notable details of Saltmarsh such as inns, taverns, and other landmarks; their potential backgrounds; and, most importantly, the central theme for their characters:

Above all you are companions who, together, seek to bring safety and prosperity to the village of Saltmarsh.

Such a refined and focused drive for the characters helps ensure the players bring characters to the table who will work well together and fit the theme of the campaign. This avoids the oddball character who comes in with a clearly different motive and drive that never quite fits either the group or the adventure.

Getting to Know Saltmarsh

Session Zeros are a great time to relax with our friends before the adventure begins. We don't need eye-popping strong starts at the beginning of the session. We can describe the locations of Saltmarsh, letting players jump in when they hear of a place about which they want to know more.

It's a great time to introduce notable NPCs such as the council members, Wellgar Brinehanded the cleric of Procan, and Ferrin Kastilar the druid with his pet bullfrog Lorys. The characters can learn of the tension between the traditionalists and the loyalists. They can pick up some rumors at the docks.

Session zeros are great times to let the characters explore Saltmarsh and learn what it has to offer before they go out with swords drawn into the dangers surrounding the seaside town.

Some Session Zero Props

Props can help make the ethereal ghosts of our campaign begin to feel solid and real. I recommend both a color map of the village of Saltmarsh and a black-and-white map of the Saltmarsh region. The D&D Beyond version of Ghosts of Saltmarsh includes high resolution versions of both of these maps along with high-resolution maps of all of the locations in the whole book. The Saltmarsh village and regional maps can be printed on 17x24 for about $3 each at your local Staples or Fedex print center and they look great on the table when you're running your session zero and describing the locations. Players can fill in the blank regional map as they discover new locations throughout their adventure.

What Sources to Allow

We're getting to the point where there are quite a few books containing a wide assortment of races. In some campaigns this doesn't matter too much but it's hard to figure out why a githyanki or yuan-ti might be involved in the issues surrounding a fishing village. You might either select a specific list of allowed races that fit the theme of the campaign or allow certain books such as Xanathar's Guide to Everything, Volo's Guide to Monsters, and the Elemental Evil Player's Companion. You could also let the players know that anything in the Player's Handbook is fine but they should bring up any other options with you before they pick it so together you can decide if it fits what's going on.

You also might be the sort of DM who lets players choose anything and come what may. That's a fine option too but you might have to do some story-yoga to figure out why a githzeri makes sense in Saltmarsh.

The Body on the Beach

As a fun way to get the story started, you might have a body wash up on the beach. A woman, drowned, clearly looking as though she was recently bound and died trying to swim away. The state of her clothing shows her as a potential prisoner. Are the slavers back? Where did she come from? Someone might recognize her as one of two adventurers, brother and sister, who came to town with dreams of finding the alchemist's gold at the haunted mansion only to never be found again.

The loyalists see the body as a sign that the town needs more protection and a heavier hand. The traditionalists see it as meddling by the outside iron gauntlet of the king. Both groups, through the council, want to send the characters to the haunted mansion to see if they can find her brother and uncover the woman's mysterious death.

Thus our adventure begins.

A Time to Build the World

Session zeros give us a chance to spend time with our players and watch the world come together. With a whole session dedicated to understanding the town, the region, the themes of the campaign, the characters, and their relationships we have a much better start to a nice long campaign. The next time you're getting ready to start a new campaign, start it off with a session zero and watch the world come together.

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The first step for Dungeon & Dragons game prep recommended in Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master is to review the characters. The characters are the primary interface between the players and the world. For each player, their character is the most important aspect of the game. Thus, it behooves us DMs to not only do our best to understand the characters, but help the other players understand them as well.

Before we begin any other preparation activity we can spend some time reviewing the characters. This helps us get their backgrounds into our minds before we start building out the rest of the adventure for our next session.

During the session, however, we can do some things to elicit more details of the characters so us DMs and the rest of the players can better understand each of the characters in our story.

Today we're going to look at a few ways we can learn more about the characters in the games we play.

What's Their One Unique Thing

If we want to make our characters truly unique in the world we can steal an idea from the excellent roleplaying game 13th Age. Beyond being a wonderful d20-based superheroic fantasy game, 13th Age includes a ton material to steal and throw into our existing Dungeons & Dragons game. "One Unique Thing" is one such example. In 13th Age, each character chooses one unique thing about their character; one thing, often fantastic, that makes them unique in the world. For example, in one such game I had a paladin who was actually guided by the ghosts of three hags only I could see.

We can bring this idea right into our D&D games if we want. We can ask, often during our session zero, what makes a player's character unique in the world. We can keep this somewhat mundane or make it as fantastic as the world allows depending on the theme we're shooting for in the campaign.

Tales Around a Campfire

The game Savage Worlds includes an interesting mechanic for players to talk about the backgrounds of their characters. At some point in the adventure, when the characters are around a campfire or the like, a randomly-selected player can pull a card from a deck. Depending on the pull they can share a story of love (hearts), victory (diamonds), tragedy (clubs), or loss and defeat (spades). This rewards the character with some sort of boon. In our D&D games we might reward inspiration, for example, or some other interesting effect to that character, maybe even a boon from the Dungeon Master's Guide that lasts for the day.

Ask Guiding Questions

Aother option is to write down one question for each character during the character review in our game prep and then ask it at our next game. We don't have to do this every session but it might be fun once in a while. Our questions can be specific, with a veto option by the player if they have some other aspects of the character they want to discuss. Here are some examples:

"Shelby, what made you leave Ahoyhoy?"

"Stone, what happened on the ship when all those civilians died?"

"Feski, how did you learn about your ancestor, Fausto the Reluctant?"

"Truth, when did you decide to end the source of the Death Curse?"

"Fromash, when did you find your true connection with the preservation of the natural cycle of death?"

Write down the answers when you get them and add them to your game notes for your next prep session. Doing this every few sessions can define interesting details of the characters we would otherwise never know and gives those details to the other players as well as us.

Downtime Activities

If the story of our game offers some in-game time between sessions, we can ask the players what their characters did during that time. At the beginning of the session, even before our strong start, we can ask for a volunteer to tell us what their character did during this downtime. Maybe they conducted some research in a library. Maybe they spent some time with an old flame. Maybe they talked to some seedy contacts in the rough bar in the docks district. Sometimes these descriptions might lead to a skill check to see what they learn. It's a perfect opportunity to drop in some secrets and clues depending on what they do and how well they do it.

These independent montages may help us learn about the character while they get something done. The players are filling out a piece of the world right in front of our eyes, while, at the same time, telling us more about their character than we otherwise know. Sometimes these events might completely change a session, which is perfectly fine for us flexible DMs.

A Little Bit At a Time

It helps us when we learn about a character a little bit at a time. We might often start D&D games with large backstories for characters (when we do them at all) but the most interesting characters evolve over the course of the game. We don't need huge backstories. A little bit each session lets us all watch characters grow and evolve as we play.

This is particularly true in convention games. Our friend DM David talks about this his article with the pithy title How to Get D&D Players to Make Unforgettable Character Introductions That Take a Minute or Less. We can ask for more than a race and class, instead asking for a line or two that describes the character. Even in one-shot games this helps us add some flavor to the overall adventure.

A Greater Understanding of the Characters

All of this is intended to help us, and the other players, get a better understanding of the characters in our story. The more we know about them, the more they can interweave into that story. We don't need a novel's worth of material, sometimes just a line or two can do it. Spend time next game getting to know a thing or two about the characters in your world.

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Here at Sly Flourish we're big on setting up situations in our Dungeons & Dragons games instead of building pre-determined encounters. Instead of deciding that there are three bandits and two scouts in a chamber underneath the haunted mansion, we know that there are roughly six bandits, two scouts, two hobgoblins, and an evil wizard hanging out in the whole cave complex down there. Depending on what they're up to and whether they hear of the characters, they could be in various places; eating, checking on their fine stolen wares, or looking longingly over the sea. Which bandits, scouts, hobgoblins, or wizards the characters will encounter first depends on how they approach the situation. If they're sneaky, maybe they can catch two of them unaware playing dice or sharing a bottle. If they're loud, the whole hideout might prepare for their imminent attack, choosing which corridors to defend or which rooms to reinforce.

We set up situations so our players can interact with them any way they wish. They can sneak around, they can talk their way through it, they can rush in and attack; whatever way they choose, the situation will adapt. We don't have to build scenes around one of the three styles of play: roleplaying, exploration, or combat. Instead we can build out a situation and let the players choose how to approach it.

Not all situations have to be this complicated. Sometimes simple situation can offer many potential options while also teaching us something about our players and bringing a lot of fun to our game.

Two Thugs in the Woods

Let's say the characters are on an island trying to find the site of a dark ritual going on in the woods. While sneaking through the woods the characters come upon two thugs hanging around slacking at their job of looking for intruders.

We don't have to build a big set-piece battle for a situation like this. We don't have to pull up Kobold Fight Club and see how hard the fight is going to be. We don't have to ensure there's all sorts of special terrain to keep people busy or write up two pages of history on these two thugs and their issues with their troubled childhoods.

It's two thugs in the woods. That's the situation.

And yet there are many ways to deal with this situation. Will the characters try to sneak up and listen to their conversation? Will the characters try to trick the thugs into thinking they're with the cultists performing the ritual? Will they sneak around them? Will they jump them and beat them into the dirt? A situation of two thugs in the woods has a lot of potential for many different styles of play.

Two thugs in the woods is an excellent way to gauge the interests of your players as well. Listen to the conversation your players are having while planning it. Watch their body language. Who is looking to have a conversation? Who is looking to listen in? Who wants to kick their asses? You'll learn a lot about your players when they choose their approach towards the two thugs in the woods.

Such simple situations aren't the whole picture. Sometimes we want a great boss battle. Sometimes we want the characters to run into a whole army of bandits or a ship full of pirates instead of just a couple of thugs. Sometimes we do need to consider how an entire hobgoblin war party occupies the ruined castle.

Sometimes, though, two thugs in the woods is all we need to build an interesting encounter, give our players the freedom to choose their approach, and help us learn more about our players' desires.

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Back in July 2018 I had the great honor to talk with Jeremy Crawford on the DM's Deep Dive. I had neglected to write up the notes for this interview and seek to remedy that problem right now.

You can watch the video below or watch it directly on Youtube.

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Here are some notes from the interview.

Jeremy's Top Three Tips to Get the Most Out of D&D Monsters:

A monster is more than a sack of hit points. Monsters are characters. They're a roleplaying opportunities and story building blocks. Jeremy will flip through Volo's Guide to Monsters or Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes and look for a monster that sparks his imagination. Look for a way to make a monster funny or scary. Monsters can dispense story information in the midsts of combat.

Use monsters as the seeds of adventure design.

Monsters imply an environment. Monster choices can have a ripple effect for your adventure design, campaign design, and roleplaying.

Adjust numbers on the fly. Your players don't see what's behind the screen. Hit points are the average and can fall anywhere within a monster's hit dice range. Adjust on the fly to make combats memorable and appropriate for the moment in the story. Adjust the numbers to hit the appropriate emotional beats. If a battle is dragging on too long, drop the hit points and let the monster die sooner. The hit dice number is a tool for DMs to know the range of hit points.

You can do the same thing with damage. The average is listed but so is the range. As a DM you can go anywhere within that range. If you want your monsters to do minimum damage or maximum damage, go for it; although maximum damage is really scary. Imagine fire giants hitting for 86 damage!

The DM is the adjudicator of the threat and can tune the numbers appropriately.

Monsters have bad days too. DMs, be kind to yourself. Sometimes you'll forget an ability of a monster and realize after the game that things would have been much different if you remembered. Don't beat yourself up. It happens to everyone. Use this as an opportunity for a second chance. Perhaps Bob the minotaur's sister, Charlotte, shows up.

D&D has endless opportunities for DMs to get better.

Mike's tip: when running boss monsters, find ways to run a boss monster twice so you can try it out once and then run it for real the second time. Lichs, vampires, and spellcasters with simulacrums have built-in ways to die and come back later.

How Does WOTC Make Monsters?

The process WOTC uses to build monsters varies depending on the book. If they're building monsters for an adventure, they know they'll need monsters of a particular challenge rating. For a monster book, their origins are more vague. They'll start with concepts, then abilities, then the CR calculator, and then reality-check the monster. Where do they fit within the range of existing monsters?

A monster's design says something about the broader world. New monsters impact the world and older monsters define the world in a way that matters in the process of creating new ones.

Wizards of the Coast uses their own internal challenge rating calculator when designing any official D&D monster. The guidelines in the Dungeon Master's Guide are a loose extrapolation of this internal challenge rating calculator. The internal one has much more atomicity than the DMG guidelines. The calculator adjusts challenge on the fly every time a monster gains a new feature.

Sometimes monsters are tweaked based on the art, which explains the Winter Eladrin and its sad bow attack. Man, it's been a year and, looking back, that Winter Eladrin is really really sad.

The DMG monster design rules tend to lead to monsters with higher hit points and more damage than monsters designed with the internal challenge rating calculator Wizards of the Coast uses.

Since the design of the Monster Manual, Wizards of the Coast is willing to let a monster's challenge rating change based on their capabilities other than hit points and damage.

How Do We Run High-End Boss Monsters?

A boss isn't designed to be encountered in a white room. They should be encountered in the battlefield they chose. If you're going into their throne room, you will arrive tuckered out from traps and previous encounters. If you're fighting the boss fresh after a night's rest, that is very different than fighting through eight waves of guards.

There are three ways to tune the difficulty of a boss monster.

• Encounter sequencing. What encounters took place ahead of time?
• The setting of the battle. Where does it take place?
• Bosses don't appear alone. What monsters will protect the boss?

When we talk about encounter difficulty, boss battles should be on the "hard" level. It's ok even to make them "deadly".

Bosses have ways to escape. Vampires and lichs have built-in ways to escape defeat.

Jeremy has run vampires for the entire life of fifth edition and has yet had a group defeat one. He plays them as geniuses. They don't stick around in a fight they're not going to win.

Night hags can planeshift. They're not going to stick around if they're getting their asses kicked.

Questions from the Audience

What considerations are made for bosses that aren't legendary?

Monsters without legendary traits are expected to be with other creatures. A really high CR monster might be a threat for a single group. If a single non-legendary monster faces a group of characters with a CR equal to level, it's going to get squashed.

What are some of your most favorite and terrifying monster abilities?

Jeremy is able to terrify within the roleplaying sphere but nothing scares players more than hit point drain or mind control, especially long-term mind control. Mike's tip: make hit point drain require a lesser or greater restoration instead of just a long rest to cure. Now it's REALLY scary.

Mike thinks young kruthiks are very scary. CR 1/8 and it has pack tactics. Jeremy mentions that pack tactics makes low challenge monsters a good threat to high challenge creatures. Thugs are always dangerous.

What are some favorite combat systems in non-D&D RPGs?

Jeremy was fascinated by the combat system in Ryuutama. Jeremy likes the abstract combat system based on zones instead of concrete measurements. Jeremy likes more abstracted combat systems than the measured concrete system in D&D.

Mike likes Numenera's combat system because of the simplicity of its challenge rating. Monsters are just a single number which makes it really easy to build things on the fly. Mike also likes the abstract distances in 13th Age.

None of the Wizards design team uses miniatures anymore. Chris Perkins got rid of his huge vat of miniatures he used to wheel around. He gave them away as gifts.

Jeremy rarely ever builds his own monsters for his own game. He'll just reskin existing NPC stat blocks. There's almost always some stat block he can already use.

Thanks to Jeremy Crawford for taking the time to share his wisdom!

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