by Candice Harris

On September 30, 2022, BoardGameGeek officially joined — well, re-joined — the board game podcast club with an all-new BoardGameGeek podcast, featuring fortnightly casual conversations with passionate gamers who geek out about board games, the mechanisms behind them, and the people who create them. I'll host the BoardGameGeek podcast with a variety of folks from the BGG Team, in addition to other special guest board game enthusiasts and personalities.


The BoardGameGeek podcast is currently available on Spotify and Buzzsprout, and will be rolled out to all major podcast services within a week, so be sure to subscribe and check out new episodes every other Friday. The main topic of each episode will vary between game reviews, convention coverage, and discussions on different game mechanisms, themes, designers, artists, and types of games.

In episode 1, BoardGameGeek owner Scott Alden (a.k.a., Aldie) and I discuss what we've been playing recently, what SPIEL is all about, and the SPIEL '22 releases we're most excited about.




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by Heiko Günther

Most readers will probably remember how, a few years ago, a new game smashed all the records and constantly dominated the news*. Peak Oil had hit the scene like the landslide of boardgaming goodness that it is. It's not necessary to repeat any of that crazy hype here as you probably know all about it anyway, and really, we don't have nearly enough space.

In light of this remarkable monument to boardgaming history, an idea was born: What if there were an additional installment in this epic boardgame series? Another piece in the legendary Peak Oil saga? Was there any easier way to amass further fame and riches? (Rhetorical question: Nothing could be easier. Trust us.) And who better to design this new game than the original designers (us). Not surprising, therefore, that our greedy, Spaniard publishing team known as 2Tomatoes Games, otherwise a bit slow on the uptake, quickly latched onto this plan.

Thus, in the dark and stormy fall days of 2018 in the quaint German town of Essen, the 2Tomatoes approached us with a simple question: Can this be done? Is recreating such genius even possible? Immediately our brains set to work on this tricky task, and quickly, a conclusion formed: Yes, this is possible. So we did it.** And that is the story of how this game was made, how this shining beacon of hope in a sea of dross came to be.

The first priority was obvious. We needed a hex grid to move armies, nukular tanks, and little plastic pieces about on. Next, what should this game be about? "War" could work — but let's cut this introduction, already three paragraphs long, mainly silly, and without really a lot of content (very sorry about that), a bit short. The actual designers' diary begins below. Sorry for any inconveniences.

The guy on the left (not Travolta) also played in a lot of crappy movies
In the days before the oceans drank Atlantis...aargh. Sorry. Let's try again.

In case you have no idea about the original Peak Oil (which, contrary to above claims, might have been less of a smash hit), in that game, the players, representing big oil companies, drill for oil, ship oil, hire agents, and do various other things in various countries all over the world. However, it's never really spelled out what happens in detail when you take such action. This is, of course, nothing unusual for a board game at this level of abstraction, but we always felt that there were interesting stories to explore.

As a second aspect, somewhere along the many roads the development of Peak Oil took, it had been possible to trade in arms, to stabilize and destabilize countries. These things to us seem interesting, relevant, and wildly underrepresented in board games.

First, we tried to design a mini-game that could integrate with the original Peak Oil to play out the actions mentioned above, with the results carrying over back into the main game. Obviously and not surprisingly, this didn't really work out too well. It took away from Peak Oil's main focus, bloated the gameplay to unholy lengths, and generally was not really fun. So, after some to and fro, we settled on creating an entirely new game that only tied back to Peak Oil's theme, but not its mechanisms.

One of the early prototypes
Fortunately, our corporate overlords — the 2Tomatoes — didn't demand any specific design choices***, as long as there was a clear connection to Peak Oil. For this new game, we decided to zoom in on a country**** "affected" by the international oil trade and to play out the consequences of "Big Oil" taking an interest in the oil reserves there.

A few design choices didn't change. We were sure from the start that there would be armies moving over the map. The players — representing amoral Big Oil corporations — wouldn't have complete control over one faction each, but would be able to influence all factions and their armies to varying degrees over the course of the game. Each of the factions would get a number of leaders, which the players could bribe and take control of to steer the factions, increasing the corruption in the process. We wanted the game end to be triggered by the collapse of the country, that is, by achieving maximum corruption. To win, only your profit would count, with utter disregard of how you achieved it or what you did to the country to do so. Also, the smallest unit of money needed to be one million.

You want one of these
Other aspects changed considerably between the various versions. Tobias' harebrained idea of a hex-based map was abandoned as quickly as possible — wait: Writing this sentence and discussing it, we just made up a really cool movement system that might actually work better than the one used in the published game, one that would use a hex-map and that requires only another five or six custom dice to work. Okay, but on the upside, it would give each of the three armies their own, very unique movement profile — which, admittedly, would be nice, but not really make the game any better. Okay. Let's move on. So. All in all, the map got quite a heap of tweaks and adjustments, even after the switch away from hexes.

The pricing mechanism was introduced relatively early on, getting a few improvements and add-ons along the way. For a long time during development, influence over and corruption of leaders had a very strong narrative aspect to it, with little stories developing around all of them: where they would hang out, how you could blackmail (sorry, influence) them, and generally giving a very nice Junta vibe. Unfortunately, while absolutely charming, it was very clunky and fiddly to handle in practice, with a heap of cards and bookkeeping that we did not really care for a lot, so we removed all of it.

Of course, this rather broad description of the design process leaves out a huge number of tiny adjustments††. Game design, in practice, is an iterative process: implement a small change, play a number of test games, evaluate the results, and address the next tiny adjustment. Over and over. This seems like a good place to thank all of the people who had to play endless repeats of marginally different versions of Peak Oil: Profiteer with us. (You know who you are, and you have been paid well to keep shut, so better.)

Spot the difference
So, when after a few months of refining, we approached our publishers (you might remember them from above, the 2Tomatoes) with our "finished" game, we were quite confident that they would love it. And, of course, the first thing they asked was: Right. Does it play solo?. Hm. Yeah. That had been their only design specification, which we had conveniently "forgotten". The game we had designed was an awesome, highly interactive piece of mayhem, but it didn't have a solo mode, so we added a really good one — but why bore you with details?

Each of you, go out there and buy your own copy*†, so you can play it in the quietness of your peaceful abode by the lake, where none of your loud and meddlesome "friends" will interfere with your well-laid plans of how exactly to drive this poor country into total ruin and despair.†††† Enjoy!

Heiko Günther and Tobias Gohrbandt

Drain the oil before corruption ruins these lands
•••
Written by Tobias and Heiko together, or rather against each other. This probably did not become clear from the above, we are indeed a bit proud of this game.

† One of the few advantages (apart from the stellar pay, of course) of working for such a big corporate publisher is the total lack of any quality management. "You there, here is a big wad of money, write a designers' diary for your game, Rockodrommo, was it? Nah, just send it directly to print, no need for US to read it." Harhar. Here you go:
* Undeservedly eclipsing many other, far better games, also hitting the market in 2018: Just One, CuBirds, Tokyo Highway, First Contact, and Decrypto
** Please imagine this read in the voice of Arnold Schwarzenegger.
*** At least that was what we thought then...
**** Let's not try to narrow the location any further, shall we?
†† We could, of course, bore you with countless made-up anecdotes from the design process, bombard you with all the iterations and changes the game went through, explain why one of the consultants wears this really silly beanie, iterate all the nonsense we came up with, and luckily (for you), removed again, and and and, but why?
*† Or, if you are so inclined, download the free PnP and craft that.
†††Reading footnotes that are not referenced from anywhere in the text, are we? Terry Pratchett fan, eh? Who reads designer diaries anyway, and while we are at it, the really small print at the bottom, does anybody read that?
†††† Em, yeah, this sounds like the solo mode is easy to beat or lets you play out your "well-laid plans" undisturbed. This does not apply. Maybe your friends are easier to beat after all. Why not invite them to your cool hut by the lake, to play against you? Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

In 2018, Grail Games released Reiner Knizia's Yellow & Yangtze, a sister game to Knizia's classic Tigris & Euphrates that retained the same principle of gameplay — maintain balance in your growth — while changing the setting and many elements of gameplay.

That game is now off the market, but Polish publisher PHALANX is bringing it back to print as HUANG.

Front cover
As far as I understand based on my bare Google skills, the name is meant to represent both "yellow" (黄色, huángsè) and "emperor" (皇帝, huángdì).

As before, this 2-4 player game is set in ancient China during the time of the Warring States. You take control of one of these states, battling to unite the country under your dynasty.

Each player has five different leaders: Governor, Soldier, Farmer, Trader, and Artisan. Clever placement of these leaders and their corresponding tiles on the board is key to your growth, allowing you to build pagodas to score points, trigger or avoid wars, and instigate peasant revolts that bring down your enemies. At game's end, your score is the number of points in your weakest category, so failing to achieve success in one category means failure overall.


PHALANX plans to run a crowdfunding campaign for HUANG in early 2023, with standard and deluxe pledge options as well as three expansions. From the press release:

The Deluxe option will come with five sets of leader miniatures. These will be anthropomorphic representations of animals from the Chinese zodiac: the dragon, goat, rabbit, rat, and tiger. They will replace the leader tiles in the Standard version of the game.

Mock-up from PHALANX
The first expansion will be the Royal Palace, a large unique pagoda miniature that comes with its own ruleset, that will be free for all backers who follow the campaign before the launch. It will be unique to [this campaign] and not available in retail. Information about the other two expansions will be made available during the campaign.

HUANG will be previewed at SPIEL '22, which takes place October 6-9 in Essen, Germany. PHALANX notes that HUANG "will be available in English, French and Polish language versions. Due to licensing restrictions we will only be able to make the game available to backers from the USA, the UK, France, and Poland."

Mock-up pagodas from PHALANX
Game board background Read more »

by Shadi Torbey

From the Skies...

In Aerion's designer diary, I explained how I stumbled upon deck management largely by chance: I was looking to create a dice game in which you'd need to gather resources (cards) by rolling appropriate dice combinations, but with no free re-rolls to improve your result. Instead, you would pay for re-rolls by discarding the very resources you were trying to acquire with your rolls.

To avoid adding the randomness of drawing cards to the uncertainty of rolling dice, I divided the cards into decks whose content stayed the same from one game to the next, with open knowledge of the cards.

This had the expected result of drastically reducing the randomness in the availability of the cards, but it also added a new layer of decision-making: Knowing the composition of each deck meant choosing which card to discard was no longer determined simply by how useful the card in question still was, but also by the probabilities of revealing a card you actually needed in its place.

This deck-management aspect turned out to be an essential part of in-game decision-making.

...to the Stars

I started to wonder: What if I used deck management as the main mechanism of a game?

What about a game centered on a series of decks, with every decision directly related to manipulating those decks, and cards that could be discarded either to obtain a victory condition or to trigger a helpful effect?

The theme imposed itself. After the Garden and Aquarium of Onirim, it was time to take a closer look at the Observatory and the infinite skies that surround it.

In Stellarion, your goal is to launch voyages into four galaxies. A voyage needs four cards: a ship card (which is specific to this destination), plus the stars, nebula and planet cards of that galaxy (as if you were triangulating your co-ordinates). Once you have those four cards, you discard them and get closer to victory.


As in Aerion, the cards are distributed between pre-constructed decks (eight here instead of six). Their contents stay the same from one game to the next: four decks are specialized in one type of card (for instance, one deck will have only stars), and four decks are specialized in one galaxy (for instance, one deck will have ships, nebulas, stars, and planets belonging only to a single galaxy).

You can play only with the first (face-up) card of each deck, so your aim is to have the four cards needed to launch a voyage on display.


If you don't have the cards required for a launch, you must discard two cards of the same type, e.g., two ships, which will trigger a helpful effect.


The effects offer various options for manipulating the decks: a limited but certain search for one specific card, a broader but less certain search for several cards, the retrieving of discarded cards, and the option to set cards aside for later use (which expands the "pool" of available cards).

If both discarded cards are from the same galaxy (i.e., they are identical), the effect is doubled, adding an extra layer of dilemma.

Since each card can be used for a launch or to trigger an effect, this can make decisions rather tricky as all the cards are rather limited, with only four copies of each card being available.


The Oniverse Is in Expansion(s)

When it came to the expansions, there was a great deal of experimentation. Here I’ll name two options that failed to make the final cut:

The first version had several levels of difficulty, including an introductory level without any effects; discarding two identical cards served only to "unblock" situations in the search for the cards needed for a launch. This played like a very simple phone app, but was ultimately rejected for failing to offer enough challenge, even for an intro game. This "multi-level" system (similar to Castellion) was instead replaced by a system consisting of base game + modular expansions (similar to all the other games in the series).


The Glaucous Sun's pawn first traveled from one deck to another, wreaking havoc on your card combos. This version was fun but a bit too chaotic, and eventually the pawn got its own board (making Stellarion, when playing with the expansion, technically the first "board" game of the series).


Eventually the game stabilized around four expansions. Each adds extra voyage cards to the game, raising the number of these cards (and the victory condition) from 8 (base game) to 16 (when playing with all four expansions combined).

Each expansion allowed me to push the deck-management system further: black holes block the decks but yield a high reward; theories require more cards on display than needed for a launch, but without the need to discard them; the Glaucous Sun encourages the sacrifice of some effects to avoid defeat; and mirrors are useless for the launches but increase the number of effects triggered.

After this journey of discovery and in-depth exploration of deck management, I was ready to get back to the more familiar shores of hand management...or should I rather say hands management? But this will be the object of another diary, in one year from now (if everything goes to plan).

In the meantime, I hope you'll enjoy Stellarion!

Shadi Torbey
inPatience

P.S. If you're at SPIEL '22, you can come try it out at booth 5-I104. Read more »

by Randy Reiman

"Just one more trick..."

That's what I convinced myself as I took flight in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 during the summer of 2001. My best bud Gary had bested me in every competitive mode the video game offered. If I could nail just one last 360 Benihana over the Carlsbad Gap, my combo would take him down. I didn't even finish the thought before we both watched my digital Geoff Rowley face-plant straight into the pavement.


There's an undeniable thrill to pushing your luck. I often had more than enough points to defeat Gary, but lacked the discipline to cash out. It was simply too much fun to keep skating. The scuffed rails, graffiti beaches, and punk music all worked in tandem to create a world I never wanted to leave.

Fast forward: Years later, I'm holding a pen and some paper. I decided to take everything I loved about skateboarding and capture it in a board game. Of course that would prove easier said than done.


A few early design choices crept into my head. I wanted dice for the risk of bailing and skatepark paths in which to place them. I tested a dice system using several route-building games, but it didn't feel like skateboarding.

My initial resistance to cards held me back because skating is all about tricks and their unique names. I implemented a novel method to draft trick cards. It was inspired by the rondel mechanism from a game called Seeland in which you spend coins to draft further tiles. Instead of a circular arrangement, my cards would be curved along a halfpipe. A player would spend "momentum" to slide a skateboard and select their card, then roll dice to attempt that trick. Recharging momentum cost a die, so dice management was key to extending your combo.


The halfpipe rondel was an interesting foundation for many iterations. I sought assistance from my college friend, Tony, and we used our engineering backgrounds to design and print a 3D ramp that held the cards and sliding token. We also printed skater meeples to move around the board.

These physical components got me excited enough to take Skate Summer on the road. My first playtest at an Unpub Mini event provided invaluable feedback. The game had a "rich get richer" problem and bails felt devastating. Developing a satisfying bail mechanism would continue to haunt me for the next two years.


Constant playtesting opened up new ideas. My Gen Con 2019 prototype saw increased player interaction and dice manipulation. Trick paths were gone in favor of an open world skatepark, complete with a gear shop for upgrades. Player mats were designed with skill attributes and trick multipliers. Skills were spent to re-roll, and upgrading meters would unlock additional dice. This system worked fine, but often a new player would get stuck as their opponents grew way too powerful. Balancing the pace of upgrades became a top priority.


Trick multipliers also saw an evolution. Initially, you could multiply card values by attempting a higher roll. This changed into gear tiles that slotted under each completed trick. You earned gear by matching symbols on neighboring cards, thus giving more to consider when drafting.

I split the cards into three sliding halfpipes based on trick variety. For example, your dice had to beat the yellow value to draft a grind card. The pipe token then slid to your rolled number, making subsequent grind cards harder to draft. Player interaction was heightened because sliding the tokens changed your opponent's options.


As this iteration unfolded, more homages from Tony Hawk's Pro Skater were sprinkled in. Cards now had S-K-A-T-E on them for a collectible endgame bonus. Secret tapes were hidden under gap tokens. The card chaining system would activate one of three bonus paths: (1) special tricks, (2) gear multipliers, or (3) stat boosts.

Skate Summer was complete enough to bring to PAX Unplugged, where all my "clever" systems came together to produce one unfortunate conclusion: The game was slow.

Painfully slow.


Due to the pandemic, Tony and I worked with our friend George to recreate Skate Summer digitally. I commissioned a few pieces of concept art to give the game flavor.

The virtual Skate Summer was playtested at Gen Con 2020. I had added thematic goals like spraypaint and smashing boxes, but mostly it was the same lengthy experience. Each player took their slow turn and waited for the next player to take their slow turn. My frustration reached a boiling point, leading me to trash the whole design. It was time to take every lesson I learned and build Skate Summer for real.


Sliding a token back and forth was still fun, but skating is more about performing tricks than drafting them. I converted the sliding track into a personal balance meter. Staying balanced in Tony Hawk games was always exhilarating, so that became my primary focus.

Tavarua is a great surfing game with a balance mechanism. In Tavarua's system, ocean waves affect your balance through a deck of cards. I considered what felt unique to skate combos. I wanted your first few tricks to feel easy, then escalate in risk. I stuck with dice, but made them a universal balance roll affecting all skaters simultaneously. Each trick added another die to the pool which increased tension. Players would need clever cardplay to pull their meters back toward center.


The balance meter became the glue for each subsystem. Gear was moved to the skatepark and upgraded your meter for better combos. Trick values could score more points by raising your skill with flames. These flames were earned through balance arrows, adding extra consideration for which direction to choose. Simultaneous play felt compelling. Bailing made more sense since players had agency with their cards. Special tricks were earned on the player mat through long combos, offering greater rewards to risk-takers.


Using inspiration from Viticulture's wake up track, I developed the "landing track". Now when stopping your combo, you'd get first choice of a landing bonus. This proved a critical decision point because a flame-starved combo would make certain spots more tempting.

You also entered the movement phase based on landing position. Turn order mattered in the race for skatepark goals as they were scored for endgame majorities. Big Air, Revert Ramps, and Manuals added faster board movement. Skate Summer finally had action and energy.


Player scaling, upgrade balancing, and game length were the last screws to be tightened. Different player counts affected the landing track. Gear upgrades were tweaked to ensure they felt equally enticing. A score target marker was created for adjusting game length.

Finally, I was ready to show the game again. I pitched to several publishers during a virtual Unpub event and Pandasaurus Games clicked as a great fit for Skate Summer. Developer Alex Cutler and owners Nathan McNair and Molly Wardlaw had exciting ideas on how to merge my design with their top-tier production.


Since teaming with Pandasaurus, additional development elevated Skate Summer to incredible new heights. Alex cleaned up remaining rulebook issues and handed the game to Pape Ink for art design. Pape crafted a skate world so detailed it left my jaw on the floor. All the elements were in place to form the experience I had been chasing.

It had taken countless late nights cutting tokens on the floor to build Skate Summer. Whenever I got lost or frustrated, I tried to clear my mind and focus on one single goal at a time.

The key to moving forward was always just one more trick.

Randy Reiman Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

To celebrate ten years of Steffen Benndorf's Qwixx, German publisher Nürnberger-Spielkarten-Verlag is releasing Qwixx: 10 Jahre Limited-Edition, a special edition of the game that includes the Qwixx base game, as well as the Bonus and Gemixxt expansions and the components needed for the Qwixx Longo standalone game. All of the boards are erasable, and the game includes dry-erase markers.

NSV notes that this edition will consist of 10,000 copies, which seems large for a limited edition, but Qwixx has sold more than a million copies since its debut in 2013, so a print run of at most 1% of the existing market is likely a good call.


• Should you just want more Qwixx with a twist, NSV is happy to satisfy that desire with Qwixx: Double from Benndorf and Reinhard Staupe.

Each of the two scoresheets gives you a different way to double up on marks: one sheet allows for each number to be marked a second time (up to a maximum of 16 marks in a row), while the other gives you two marks only for particular numbers, giving you an incentive to hold off for just the right roll.


• As for a non-Qwixx release, NSV has Triggs from Karin Hetling, a 2-4 player game that seems right in line with the NSV model of quick tactical play:

In Triggs, the numbers 1-12 appear on your player sheet 2-5 times, and you want to cross them all off first in order to win.

On a turn, you either draw cards, discard cards, or tick off numbered boxes. When you draw, you take two cards from the face-down deck or the two face-up decks as you choose. You have a maximum hand size of ten cards, and when you discard, you can dump only cards of the same number.

To tick off numbered boxes, you name a value from 1-12, then play cards from your hand, whether a single card matching that value or a pair of cards that sum to that value. Tick off one space in that row for each card or pair of cards you play. When you cross off the final box in a row, you gain an extra cross, which (if you play cleverly) might earn you another cross, and so on.

After discarding or playing cards, if you have no cards in hand, draw five cards from the face-down pile.

The first player to cross off all of the squares on their player sheet wins.

Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

SPIEL '22 opens on October 6, and Stephen Cordell and I have been racing to put the finishing touches on BGG's SPIEL '22 Preview, although such things are never finished as much as done. At a certain point, updates no longer make sense, with that point being the end of this week, or perhaps the moment I step on the airplane to Germany, or perhaps once the show opens. We'll see!

At this moment, the SPIEL '22 Preview features:


And while I'm loathe to disturb that symmetry, we undoubtedly will, possibly within minutes of me posting this item.

I've created a short video about the SPIEL '22 Preview, how to use some of its features — namely (1) how to use the pulldown menu to sort the listed titles in various ways and (2) how to use the filters and priority tagging (Must Have, Not Interested, etc.) to better see what you want to see.

I also talk about my picks for SPIEL '22, which generally consists of card games, abstract strategy games, and co-operative party games. You can see all of my picks here.

You can generate a list like this yourself! Once you prioritize titles as "must have" or anything else, you'll have a link like this in the bottom right of the black info box at the top of the page:


Click that link, and you open a separate window showing all of your picks. This link even shows undecided and "not interested" picks, so if you don't want to show those, open the filters, uncheck undecided and not interested, then click APPLY. Voilà!

Feel free to share your link in a comment below or on social media. Maybe you'll find others with similar tastes, or just introduce someone else to a game that excites you that they haven't heard about. You're probably not lacking for interesting-sounding games, of course, but I just like seeing what others are excited about, even if we don't share the same tastes. Excitement equals hope, something you're looking forward to, something you want to share with others.

Youtube Video Read more »

by Mal Rempen

The Inciting Incident

In August 2017 I launched the Kickstarter campaign for Itchy Feet: The Travel Game, a card game based on my web comic, fully believing that to be the beginning and end of my flirtation with the world of tabletop games. I figured if I were lucky, I'd raise $15k, break even, have a neat bit of merch for the comic's followers, and that would be that. Instead, the campaign raised over $113,000, to my utter disbelief and astonishment, not to mention that of my friends and family! After printing and fulfillment was complete, my wife encouraged me to make another game. "You'd be stupid not to", were her exact words. The gears started turning in my head.

My career and passion was filmmaking. Since I was ten years old, I'd been directing movies. I went to film school in LA, worked in Hollywood, freelanced in Europe, and helped build and lead a film school in Berlin. The web comic was just a fun side thing; I was a filmmaker. Then, in December 2018, I was in the Berlin metro on my way to a Christmas party, listening to an episode of the Imaginary Worlds podcast about indie board games, when the host began talking about the explosion in the variety of themes that modern board games were experiencing. And it suddenly struck me: What about a board game about making a movie?

It was so obvious! Shooting a film has so many parallels with playing a co-operative board game: You work together, each with a specific role that has "special abilities", moving people and things around in a defined physical area under specified rules, motivated by ever-dwindling resources while challenges escalate. I mean, come on, storyboard scenes are already the shape of playing cards! This thing designs itself!

It seemed SO obvious that I was sure it had been done before, but I found that most "movie-making" games, like Dream Factory or Hollywood, were from a studio executive's perspective — matching actor types with scripts, that sort of thing — and they were all competitive. That didn't interest me. I wanted a game that captured my own indie filmmaking experience: what it's like to work together under the pressure of time, budget, and everything going wrong, toward that strange intangible artistic goal of cinema. THAT is real movie magic and something worth sharing, so that Christmas in my in-law's house, I got to work.

The First Few Takes

My first attempt at the design was the most literal: Players had roles that made decisions on what to do and could "veto" each other in ways that mirrored actual film team hierarchy. The board was a movie set with a hex grid on which you placed crew and equipment. And that was pretty much it.


I played one game of this version with my brother, who said in his politest voice possible, "Well...it isn't very fun." I realized I had gone TOO literal. The simulationist approach wouldn't work; I needed at least one level of abstraction that would allow players to get into the world of the game.

Being relatively new to this industry, I didn't know of many board games at the time, and I didn't really know BGG too well either, so I asked my board gamer friend whether he knew of any games that featured a crew. He suggested I borrow his copy of Tony Go's excellent Deep Space D-6. This game was a revelation: The crew are dice, and their roles are different faces on a set of custom d6s. You assign them to areas of the ship based on which faces you roll, and one face is a (!), which accumulate to spawn enemies. It's like Faster Than Light: the solo board game. It's awesome — and it was exactly what I needed, so I borrowed this core mechanism wholesale to see if it provided the abstraction I needed.

Later on, when it became clear that the crew dice placement mechanism was here to stay, I reached out and asked Tony whether he was okay with me using the idea. He graciously gave the project his blessing. I didn't technically need it, of course, but I felt better with it. I wanted him to feel not that something had been taken away from him, but rather that his work had inspired something new. Credit where credit is due! Thanks, Tony.


Now, although this first dice-based version was of course riddled with early-design issues like over-complication — two types of custom dice, one for crew and another for equipment, a checklist for shooting a scene?? — and imbalance, it was almost immediately fun to play. Most of the fundamental elements of the final game's design are in that image above: a rolling market of shot cards to shoot, problems that crop up, the steady downward march of budget and schedule, and the tension of the limited die faces pulling you in different directions — classic dice placement at its best. Although the crew dice was (and remains) the least directly thematic thing about the game — on a real film set you obviously don't just get a random assortment of crew each day — it delivered that dead accurate filmmaking feeling of having to do too much all at once with very little, as well as the uncertainty of what each new shooting day will bring. Overall, I was delighted. The game was working!

And best of all, right at this point the game's title smacked me in the face at about 100 miles an hour. I was reading about Roll Player, thinking about that pun and what variant might work for filmmaking given the dice mechanism, when — WHAM, there it was: Roll Camera! It was just too perfect.

The Kuleshov Effect

But the game still had these many design issues to iron out. Chief among them, the film set area was wayyyyy too static. It just felt really stiff to assign actors, lights, and other equipment to these fixed spaces on the set area. Real filmmaking is incredibly dynamic; you are always moving around into different formations and patterns as required by the scene. The hex grid on my first iteration let you really place anything anywhere you wanted, which was great. I still had all these individual pieces for crew and equipment. But now they were cubes. Hmm. What if...A-HA!


Once again, this set grid was a step toward abstraction and away from simulation — and yet, once again it far more accurately captured the real-world filmmaking process. Weird!

I was learning a LOT at this point about the relationship between theme and mechanisms in board game design, especially about the inverse relationship between fidelity and authenticity. I wouldn't have been able to put it into words for you at the time, but I was realizing that very often, the more a game component LOOKED like the thing it was trying to represent, the less it actually FELT like that same thing when engaged with — and the reverse was also true, to a point.

It was still early 2019, over a year before I discovered Pax Pamir: Second Edition, still today my go-to example of this idea made perfect. Give me resin blocks over high-detail minis any day of the week. I would argue that this relates to the old filmmaking rule of thumb that the monster is scarier if you DON'T see it (see: Jaws, Alien), or that old true but useless writing tip: "Show, don't tell." Your imagination filling in the blanks is far more fertile and emotionally engaging than anything that could be detailed for you by someone else. In fact, the more you detail, the less relatable it becomes. Cinema is at the height of its powers when it suggests, and so, I now believe, are board games.

Anyway, if you scroll back up to that image, you'll notice another new addition to the game's design: the dual-sided quality track under the set area and above the budget. Initially my idea was to try to be funny and suggest that you couldn't make a film that was both good and popular; you had to choose one of the two, a sort of meta-commentary on my part. So, some scenes when shot would push the meter up in popularity, while others would push it toward awards. Popularity would gain you money, awards would gain you bonuses.

It's a fun idea that made it pretty far down the line until later on a filmmaker friend of mine played a prototype and immediately said, "So you can't make Gladiator?" I don't really like Gladiator, but I took his point. I could foresee this smart-alecky comment coming at me over and over after publication, so I later changed this meter to overall quality, if only to save myself the annoyance. It managed to maintain its dual-sided nature; in the final design you have to make a film that's either "Not Bad" or better, or "So Bad It's Great", but nothing mediocre, which still today manages to get a laugh whenever I teach the game the first time.

Places, People! Picture's Up!

Around this point the design was stable enough that I thought I should start prototyping a physical prototype of the game with a wider group of people.


Hoo baby, that's ugly. Yes, it's literally scrapped together with tape and a cardboard box. I did try consciously to be spartan with the layout at this point. I didn't want to do more artwork and graphic design than was absolutely necessary (for some reason I felt the shot card artwork WAS necessary), mostly to save myself the hassle of redoing it later, and which I now know is the rule of thumb in game design.

But, I learned, withholding graphic design does come at a UX cost. I figured I could just cram everything together like a condensed wireframe and it would be at its easiest to playtest — but it wasn't. In fact, despite its minimalism, players found this version of the game confusing. Eventually I realized this wasn't due to the gameplay itself, but rather how the gameplay presented itself through its "interface" on the board and cards.

This was a really valuable lesson: Graphic design, artwork, and gameplay are intimately fused, at least for me. I honestly have no idea how other publishers can manage to put a game together taking design, art, and graphic design from separate places. I get that these people usually work together, but I doubt they can afford the continuous sort of iterative back-and-forth between the three areas that I did on Roll Camera. I guess that's what more experience will earn you.

Playing with the first physical prototype inspired me to give shot cards — later renamed "scene" cards to avoid confusing "shoot a shot" type language in the rulebook — two sides: a "before" side and an "after" side. This cleared up an annoyance I had early on that scenes in the editing room, after being "shot", still looked like storyboard sketches; now they could have a colorful "cinematic" side to show they're "in the can", as they say. This change also allowed me to put different information on each side of the card. This, in turn, gave me an opportunity to make the "editing" part of the game a bit more interesting.


Above are some scene cards that have been "shot" and are in the editing room side of the board. On the right side of the cards you'll see their bonus (movie tickets = popularity, laurel wreaths = awards, as described earlier), as well as numbers and arrows pointing down. Until now I was finding in my testing that there was no reason to put the scene cards in any particular order after the film had been shot, which again didn't feel very thematic; of course editing can dramatically alter your final film. So the idea here was that adjacency would matter; certain scenes would impact other scenes above and below them. It would be a little efficiency puzzle to try to maximize your film's output based on the arrangement of the scenes.

Personally, I really liked this puzzle as it was tense and many of the modifying numbers were high enough to make editing a central part of gameplay, but players ultimately found it confusing to read. Around this time I read about Isle of Skye, in which at set-up, four scoring tiles (out of many) are revealed to determine which tile patterns will award victory points. I loved the replayability that this offered, so inspired by this, I created "script" cards that were set out anew each game, then assigned the scene cards different colors. The adjacency of colors in the editing room provided the patterns that would score variously according to the script.

This was the best kind of design choice because it killed a flock of birds with one stone: Editing was important again, space on the scene cards was freed up, and I got the thematic one-two punch of adding a movie script PLUS giving scenes colors, which corresponded to their "emotional content", informed by the artwork. It all just came together so well.

I'll Be In My Trailer

There's one more mechanism present in this iteration that I really loved, but which had to get cut, that this gives me the chance to talk about: the crew mood.


I wanted a dynamic way for idea cards (the helpful kind of card) and problem cards (the unhelpful kind) to enter the game. Deep Space D-6 has an "alert" system in which one face of each crew die is a (!) that must be slotted into an alert area; three alerts draws a new enemy. I also had this in early versions, but pretty quickly I needed the real estate on the dice and abandoned it. Instead, I came up with this mechanism in which the game's bonuses and penalties would be meted out by how the crew is feeling, represented by a big "crew mood" die. At the start of your turn, you'd roll the die, then place it on the corresponding area on the mood track and get the bonus or penalty. You could then later use various cards and/or dice placement slots to impact the crew's mood, mitigating the randomness.

On paper, I loved this system for two reasons. First, that big chunky fun crew mood die would have made a great component (just look at that thing!), and second, I loved what it said about the theme. The reality of filmmaking (or any kind of group work really) is that morale is absolutely critical. The difference between crappy sodium-heavy snacks and healthy ones, for example, can quite literally make or break a shooting day in the real world. It's important to take care of your crew and think about their well-being. I liked that this mechanism gave a face to these otherwise poor abstracted dice-people working for you. They are people, too, you know! It seemed only fair that their mood should have some power to swing your film's production.

But the problems with it were pretty glaring. You can probably already tell it's not very interesting, gameplay-wise. It's also awkward to have your turn involve first rolling a die, then rolling more, different dice. Even if you can mitigate the crew mood roll to your advantage, between the mood and crew dice it just felt very arbitrary to have so many game systems connected to random dice chucks.

And if you DO get the mitigation under control, then problems don't come up at all, which is also not fun, even though you're technically playing well. Too much was tied up into one roll of the die, so the crew mood was scrapped, and nobody missed it but me. Maybe this thematic idea will find its way into one of my future games, but with a stronger design to back it up.

Dramatic Arc

Playtesting continued through 2019. I iterated quickly. I knew I was on to something here because players were always fully engaged with the game's puzzle, and almost always the tension increased as budget and schedule dwindled and came down to the wire near the final turns. Players seemed to win the game more often than not, but at the same time almost always expressed at least once during the game, "Oh no, we're going to lose!" in desperation. I felt this was a strong feature. If the game could always feel like it COULD have tipped into failure near the end, it didn't matter if there were more wins than losses. This would later be tweaked with difficulty levels, of course.

The best feedback I got, however, which encouraged me to stay the course, came from my fellow filmmaking friends and colleagues, who almost without fail would say after playing: "This feels exactly like making a movie." In fact, even today I hear reports of people from the film industry avoiding Roll Camera because it's "Too much like work!" I love that.

Expanding the Call Sheet

There were still two major final pieces of the game's design, both of which came into place after the playtest pictured below. My extended family and I were vacationing together in a castle in Ireland. (Hence the tapestry — castles are actually super reasonable on Airbnb, believe it or not!) It rained often because Ireland, so we played Roll Camera quite a bit. After this specific playtest with my brother and his girlfriend, she looked at me and said, "It's fun, but why is this a game for more than one person?"


Oof.

But she was right. At the time, the game had no individual player roles or player boards and no hand of idea cards. It was quite literally multi-player solitaire; you just all worked together doing what one person could do by themselves. Not great.

Being new to the world of board games gave me some critical advantages in the design, development, and publishing of Roll Camera. As an outsider, I did not carry much baggage about what a board game "should" be, or (apart from my research of every dice-placement game in existence during design) what had been done before, or what the industry's pulse was, or indeed care much what most people thought, so I was free to do pretty much whatever I liked without really feeling tied to anything in particular. I think that made Roll Camera feel in many ways that it "came out of nowhere," mostly for the better.

But the flip side of this blissful ignorance was that I was not really part of the conversation about alpha players / quarterbacking in co-operative games, which meant I reinvented that particular wheel from SCRATCH. I'm really pleased with how positive the reception of the game has been on that point in particular, considering how little I knew going in. It could have gone really wrong. Ignorance is a dangerous bedfellow!

In the end, I was happy about my brother's girlfriend's critique because it gave me the opportunity to bring something back that hadn't found a place in the design since the very first iteration: player roles!


Again, as with any satisfying design choice, the addition of player boards accomplished a few things. First, it let players feel that a part of the game was "theirs", which I learned is psychologically important, especially for co-operation. Ironically, it's harder to feel like you're contributing if ownership over everything is shared. (There's a political argument in there somewhere for someone cleverer than me.) It also gave them a "person" they could be, a role they could inhabit, and thematic games thrive on this role-playability. Plus it allowed me to fulfill on that final part of the filmmaking fantasy: being a named head of department. I'm the director! Do as I say! No, I'm the producer! I'm your boss! It's just good fun.

This change also offered new dice-worker placement possibilities, which would vary depending on which player boards were in play. This was needed because the main board actions became kinda rote after a while. It didn't take much effort to nerf those enough to make looking at your player board or other players' boards a necessity to get out of a tough spot. Finally, individual player boards gave a reason for the players to suggest to each other what they could do on their turn or what others could do to contribute, making the game far more interactive. Home run!

Have Your People Call My People

The idea cards were the second system to get an overhaul, and the production meeting mechanism is one of the places where players and reviewers have said that the game offers something novel to the co-operative experience.

Well, I have to come clean: It wasn't my idea. I mean sure, the idea cards were my idea, but they were fairly straightforward; if you played the production meeting action, any player could play an idea card from hand if they wanted to, then you decided how to use them. It was fine, but muddy. When I allowed anyone to pitch, it was almost never done by players when it wasn't their turn. If I forced everyone to pitch, inevitably the other players used it to dump their "bad" idea cards because they didn't want to overrule the active player.


I now, of course, can't find it for the life of me, but I posted here on the BGG forums that I was stuck on this idea card system, and some intrepid user suggested that three idea cards would always be played: one to be activated immediately, one saved for later, and one discarded. The "saved for later" really brought the idea cards to life, because you knew that even if yours wasn't picked, you could pitch something to be useful for the future — but there was always the risk it'd be discarded. Either way, none of the cards pitched could be returned to hand. This change just made the decision space around idea cards SO much more interesting. (Editor's note: Josh Ellis suggested this idea here in Nov. 2019. —WEM)

Best of all, this change suddenly made players say things like "I have a GREAT idea!" or ask, "Does anyone have any ideas?" or suggest puckishly, "I have a terrible idea", all of which work toward making the production meeting feel like a real meeting — because it is one.

This taught me a lot about strong language in game design. In many games, you hear players say something like, "I can pay two story points to activate that blue tile, so if you play that sword card we can gain that movement buff." Hard to tell what that's supposed to mean outside of the game's systems. In Roll Camera, most of the components and actions are named such that during the game, players are speaking in the language of the theme. They will commonly say things like, "We're running out of time, we have to shoot!" or "Let's not resolve that problem now, let's hold a production meeting!" or "Our film's quality is terrible! You're the director, can't you compromise on the budget a bit?" All of which make you sound like you're actually on a film set making a movie — or at least, what you THINK it actually sounds like on a film set making a movie, which is good enough!

This sort of naming wasn't done consciously here; it just came naturally as a result of my goals with the design, but it made such an impression on me that it will be at the front of my mind in any future designs, that's for sure.

Cheap, Fast, Good: Pick Two

The final bit of design worth mentioning involves what used to be called the clipboard:


Ooh, cinema-y. This component made it so far that it's in the Kickstarter campaign video! I really liked the clipboard because it felt right to hold in your hands, just like actual important production paperwork for a film's budget and schedule.

The intention was to print it on thick board and use clips for trackers so that it would be a REAL CLIP BOARD, get it? It just worked. But in the end, I couldn't find good clips. Any existing clips the manufacturer had were made for card stock, and I didn't want it to be flimsy card. I knew the clips would fray the edges, and anyway it's not supposed to be flimsy. A clipboard is sturdy! But board-sized clips were either so tight they scraped the printed art or so loose they slid all over the place. It just wasn't going to work.

Someone suggested I take a look at the Gloomhaven dials, and I did, but I wasn't all that excited at first. I still wanted that clipboard. Eventually though, on a whim I threw together a sketch and the manufacturer made a prototype, and you know what? I was sold.


They felt good, I could give them a "film reel" look to at least keep things in the film theme, and best of all, I was able to print the difficulty levels on the back side of the dials, which is something I was having trouble with on the clipboard. To set up, flip the dials over to the back, set the difficulty according to your choice and player count, and on the front it's ready to go. As usual, I'm most satisfied when a design choice can impact multiple areas and solve multiple problems at once — much like a good film scene, which ideally should be able to deliver information about characterization, background, plot, and setting, all at the same time.


The Martini

So there's an overview of the design and development of Roll Camera! The game was originally published in 2021, but sold out quickly and the reprint is now available, along with editions in many languages and, of course, the anticipated B-Movie Expansion. I'll say a bit about the design and development of that here as well.

The Cutting Room Floor

During Roll Camera's design I had a few ideas that didn't make the cut (appropriately enough). When the base game's Kickstarter campaign did well, I figured it was worth exploring an expansion utilizing these leftover elements, and I did some initial design work.


I've got to be honest, I rediscovered these genre scene cards when I was rooting through my old Roll Camera box o' prototypes for this diary. I had completely forgotten about them. You can tell they're from a very early point in the design process because they have the little film reel icon, which dates the design to when the quality track was still popular vs awards, so the idea to incorporate genre scenes was there from very early on, but I never found a good place for them.

After Roll Camera! hit people's tables, one of the most oft-repeated comments was the desire for "more scene cards!" This was a great way to find a new home for an old idea, and just like these initial genre card designs had their own little mini-mechanism (as indicated by the ghost and cowboy boot icons), so does the B-Movie Genre mechanism provide a new layer of challenge for players.

The second element was something I had planned until very late in the design: a semi-cooperative mode. My idea was, thematically, players could compete for "credit" on the film. Each action you took would earn you points, and the player with the most points won — IF the film was successfully completed on time, under budget, and of appropriate quality! If not, then the player with the FEWEST points would win. They could find another job unscathed, employing plausible deniability; it wasn't THEIR fault the film had tanked!


Thematically I found this idea delightful, and I was sure it could work somehow. I turned out to be sorely mistaken. The game mode was cut entirely after months of trying and failing to make it work. It's probably for the best.

At this point, I have to admit, I was pretty Roll Camera'd out. I was delighted that Roll Camera was getting such a warm reception, but I wanted to focus my design efforts on new games, ideas completely different than Roll Camera — and yet I knew it was time to strike with an expansion while the Roll Camera iron was hot, so I brought on development studio John Brieger Creative and co-designer John Velgus to help me bring my B-Movie Expansion ideas over the finish line. You can read all about the development of the genre mechanisms, a new equipment system, and the exorcism of the semi-coop mode on their excellent project debrief.

Post-Credits Sequence

After the successful Roll Camera and B-Movie campaigns, I found myself at something of a crossroads. Filmmaking has been my dream career since I was ten years old, and I was lucky to work in and around film for 25 years after that...and yet, here was a new (to me) medium — board games — that seemed to be extending its hand, offering a lesser-trodden path with a commercial potential and full creative control — every auteur's dream.

The end result is that I have strayed from my filmmaking path to explore this new realm full-time. I can't say I expected that turn of events, but I am so, so happy to be here. To anyone who has or will get Roll Camera or any of my games, thank you for helping make it possible.

I have many untold stories to tell and unexplored worlds to share, and the tabletop could just be the perfect place for them. See you there!

Malachi Ray Rempen
Keen Bean Studio Read more »

by Dave Chircop

This post includes two diaries: one from David Chircop, the designer of Hamlet: The Village Building Game, and one from Johnathan Harrington, the game's developer. The goal here is to give two different perspectives and approaches towards a design.

Throughout the post, we have scattered in photographs of prototypes of Hamlet in a somewhat chronological order, so that you can see how everything changed as the game grew and bumped around in the cauldron. Enjoy!

Last-minute update: Copies have started to ship to Kickstarter backers, so Hamlet: Founders' Deluxe Edition will be available for purchase at SPIEL '22 in limited quantities for 65€.

Designer Diary: The Thing About Sense of Space

Ever since I started dabbling with making games, a village builder was always a fascinating prospect for me to model. My formative experiences with games in general were deeply rooted in the RTS genre — games like The Settlers, Age of Empires, and WarCraft. I absolutely adored those games, but the thing I loved the most about them was not the battles or tech trees; it was that opening twenty minutes when you are presented with a town hall and a few peasants, and you start forming, shaping a thing from scratch.

I enjoyed the management of the workers, the movement of the workers, the placing of the woodcutter close to a forest so that the workers don't have to walk too far. I enjoyed the fact that without much thought and almost out of necessity, my village starts organizing itself: houses next to each other, the wood production area, the mining area, the farms placed in a location where I know I can expand it later. All of this, the necessities of the mechanics, combined with the randomness of the map, the sense of distance between areas, their segregation, and a touch of my own desire for pretty organized things eventually allowed a "place" to emerge, a place that I later gave a name — often funny, ridiculous, or childishly lewd, knowing tween David.

And then I zoomed out a bit and just watched my village be alive. The villagers walking, from one cute building to another, carrying things.

This was my favorite part. The other arcs that often accompanied games like these — discovering other villages, the race for building a stronger army, the defense and the opportunistic counter offense — were all secondary for me. I often would bring the village to its operating state, then abandon that save and start over, just to do the build-up again and see what will emerge this time.


This, at its core, is the biggest inspiration for Hamlet. In March 2021, after four years of on-and-off development, through grueling AAA video game work, I had the Hamlet I wanted to publish. By October 2021, I had what I thought was a "finished" version of this game. The game was balanced, smooth, streamlined, short, competitive, easy to explain — it looked pretty. It had the elements that made a good village builder... Yes, of course there is a "but".

In November 2021, we delayed the Kickstarter for Hamlet. We wanted to re-do some art, we wanted to work a bit longer on the video, we wanted to refine the page. I found myself with a game that I had written off as finished, but also a game that was in some way not fully satisfying me. With a few extra months of time bought thanks to the Kickstarter, I sat down to figure out why.

In David Lynch's "Catching The Big Fish", I remember his insistence on servicing the original idea. Making not always the "best" decisions, but ones that service the original idea the most. In media that require a creative process that involves reduction or distillation — like games or film — this adherence to the inspiration becomes both more important as well as harder to achieve.

With the extra time the Kickstarter delay granted me, I locked myself in the "Hamlet" room at the Mighty Boards office and sat for a few weeks. It was a strange time as I barely spoke to anyone, and I think people were afraid to interrupt me. After thought and a few discussions with the people who had access to the game at the time, and a few deep discussions with my dear friend and fellow designer Gordon, I pinpointed the issue: At some point in its streamlining and fat trimming, Hamlet had become a better game, but it had stopped creating "places" — you know, places I can give names to.


A Place with a Name

Why this was happening was not so difficult to figure out. In the process of streamlining the game, we had cut the majority of distance restrictions that the game had, which removed a lot of clunk. This meant that all workers could go pretty much anywhere rather easily, downplaying the importance of buildings that need to be close to each other to be effective. If where you place something does not matter, then even with the engaging spatial puzzle, the different tiles and buildings and their multitudes of effects, they all become mostly symbolic. A sense of place emerges from questioning the "where". Where will I place this? Where is the timber? If the "where" does not matter, then there is no place.

Movement is likely one of the oldest or most basic of mechanisms in board games. It's also one of the most rhetorically efficient — I move a piece from one place to another. It is a clear image generator, one that anyone can relate to. It is also, rather unfortunately, sometimes the most annoying, especially in Eurogames.

Since in board games we often abstract our spaces into segments, moving pieces frequently devolves into an exercise in counting. This is fine when limited to a few spaces — "You can move one or two spaces" — and mapped to a timeframe and space that is thematically resonant, perhaps market stall to market stall in Istanbul, or room to room in a mansion in Mansions of Madness. It also makes sense in much larger spaces, say, city-to-city or area-to-area in an area-control game.

But what about that middle ground?

What follows is my thought process.


Worker Placement Is Traversal without Movement

I always imagined worker placement to be the natural response to this movement problem. Most of the early classics of worker placement mapped out spaces that are around the size of the places I wanted Hamlet to generate. I'm thinking Stone Age, Caylus, Agricola. They showed us traversal, while skipping the movement, shifting the restriction instead to the "occupation" of a space rather than the distance between places. Hamlet needs distance — in fact, it needs distance more than it needs movement itself. What else?

Then there are rondel and mancala games, which are worker-placement games re-introducing a touch of movement, with restrictions that dodge the abacuses of counting spaces. These games are a nice middle ground and are usually clever ways of mapping distance with restriction. They are, however, heavily designed, tight systems in which the sequence and distance between possible actions are carefully calculated. Hamlet is largely a sandbox game in which every village is completely different, and the locations of the buildings are all based on the emergent economy and the players' decisions of placement.

These types of games also usually have an issue with opacity of plan, where one needs to make significant effort to plan a series of actions correctly, resulting in the movement/action-selection mechanism being quite forward and focused-on. In Hamlet, movement is important but cannot interfere with opacity of plan as there are already quite a few moving parts: emergent economies, organic and grid-less village building, spatial puzzles, roads.

At this point I turned my attention to less directly "active" modes of restricting space. Perhaps something that's slowly built, something that's a bit clearer to plan. Something that makes sense for medium-sized spaces. My attention turned to train games and network builders.

Games such as Brass and Steam achieve a sense of place not through the movement of their "active" element — in the case of Hamlet, the worker — but through the slow development of their networks, and consequently the movement of goods through said networks.


Enter the Donkey

The solution in the very specific case of Hamlet was to separate the active element from the movement, as many great designers have done in the past when they came up with worker placement. Then introduce the sense of place and movement in a more passive, slow-building manner.

Hamlet now has two different workers: the villager and the donkey. The villager is the fast and active action taker, giving all the good things that come from reducing clunk and restrictions: speed, agility, and clarity of choice. The donkey is the slow network builder and mover of resources, giving all the great things that come with that: slower long-term planning, a sense of distance.

The synergy of the two then constructs the rhetoric in the mind as well as the strategy in Hamlet. The direct actions of the villagers rely on the donkey network for delivery of the resources needed to build, refine, and fulfill deliveries, and the growth of the donkey network relies on the efficient action planning of the villagers to fund their expansion. This forms a satisfying incremental cycle of growth, and suddenly our arrangement of tiles comes alive into a bustling living village — one I can give a name! Perhaps a more creative one this time.

"DAVIDTOWN!"" — ahhh, the creativity.

I'll pass on the baton to John now. My approach to design and this diary has been very much experiential, so I asked John to chime in with a more technical breakdown of process of how the experience I created was slowly refined to what it has become today.

David Chircop
•••

Developer Diary: OSHA Approved — A Hamlet in Working Order

Do not let David's light tone fool you. He put a lot of sweat and blood into Hamlet. He chiseled the game's marble into something very complex, yet elegant. Eventually, when it was time for me to involve myself in the project, all we had to do was polish the marble and make it shine. In this part, that is what I'd like to talk about, sharing my playtesting process and discussing what I felt went well — and perhaps less well — during the Hamlet development process.

There is a lot that goes into developing a game, and external playtesting is definitely a significant part of it. It's tempting to just over-playtest, cross your fingers, and hope for the best. However, I often find this to be under-productive. I think what's more important is that each playtest is asking an answerable question; make the question small (so that other people can also help you answer it) and trackable / documentable (if you can't record an answer because it's too vague / speculative / grandiose, then there is probably a better question to ask). In this post, I hope to show you how I (and Mighty Boards in general) try to make the most of our playtests.


Introduction

We divided our Hamlet external playtests into three waves. Dividing tests into waves accomplishes quite a few things. First, it makes the workload manageable; saying "We need to just test, test, test" is daunting because it's unachievable – there's no final test in sight! Second, it allows us to make each wave have its own unique question. Now, not only do we have a goal (answer the question), but we also have an end in sight. (The tests are over when the question has been sufficiently answered.) Third, it allows us to push major changes in bulk. This is important as each change will affect both questions and answers; it also allows us to process any testers' suggestions and concerns appropriately (by placing feedback in their correct development version), it helps give natural deadlines (next changes need to be done by the time this round of tests are over), and consequently it makes the project more manageable as it sets milestones both for testing and its dependencies (such as design changes, production, graphic design + art, and so on).

We're not as organized as this post might make us seem, so these waves aren't set in stone, but they're reasonably accurate representations. Additionally, I am including only external tests. I played the game (a lot) by myself, as did David (the designer) and Nick Shaw (the solo version designer). Additionally, by now everyone at Mighty Boards (and our friends and family at other adjacent companies) has played some version of Hamlet. Some takeaways from this post will stand for these internal playtests, but the marketing manager asked me to keep this post under a 15-minute read, so I am going to talk only about external playtests.

So, we divvied it all up into three core waves (with each wave having its own little tides):

• Focus Group Wave
— Feeling tide
— Balance tide

• Mass Wave
- Concept tide
- Break tide

• Blind Wave
- Rulebook tide
- Ease of play tide


Focus Group Playtests

Once we got through the internal playtests, it was time to start reaching out to players outside of the company circle. We kept the sphere of influence small because Hamlet was still in its early stages: the art was largely not there, the written rules were tentative, and so on. We didn't want a large group of people to get a bad impression of our game just because it was unfinished, so we stuck to groups we know and trust, with two large questions we wanted to answer:

The first question was "Does the game feel balanced?", which we sectioned into more manageable questions about individual parts, such as "Does the church give too many / too few points?", or "Which flag buildings score the most points on average?" We had an Excel sheet that we used in real time during the playtests. (We never played in these sessions; we just observed, filled out cells, and nodded our heads pensively.)

The Excel sheet recorded each worker action in each round, how many points that action made, and how many times each action was taken. From a balance perspective, I am really glad we set this sheet up as it allowed me to calculate point efficiency across players, point efficiency across actions, opportunity costs gained through early worker investments, and many other metrics. A lot of numbers changed here, which would not have been obvious had we been playing the game only internally. Each player tends to be set in their ways, so having a few extra hands moving the pieces around showed which numbers needed to be bumped up or down.

It also allowed us to start shipping minor updates during the same wave. If a flag building is too good in the first playtest, we can up the cost a bit or reduce the final point tally a bit, then see what happens. An individual flag building won't muddy the overall results, but these small changes still gave us the opportunity to figure out the little things before we went to larger groups. This said, each individual change was still marked in our internal change log and feedback forms, so we still kept track. If something broke, we'd know.

The second question was "How does the game feel to play?", again sectioned into more manageable questions such as "How did you feel about the donkeys?" or "How did you feel about connections?", or "Was the game length good?" The Excel sheet helped here, too. For example, there was a clear correlation between the actions that felt good / felt intuitive and the number of actions that were taken. This sounds obvious at face value. If making buildings feels good, players will do it more. However, there is always value from having numbers because it allows us to see whether an action is starting to feel better in subsequent tests because the number of times it is taken increases.

We also gathered feedback from the playtesters through Google forms as well as focus group discussions after the playtest. Honestly, we were quite floored by the reception. Usually there is a gigantic hiccup for the playtesting process at this point as there's often a mismatch between internal playtest feelings and external ones. Internal tests have people you know very well, so the teach is much easier as you can cater to people, not groups. Moreover, people in board game companies are often quite proficient at playing board games, so the weight-tolerance range isn't as wide as it would be for an external test. Finally, internally, people get you, which gives a larger communication tolerance. External playtesters won't always understand your intentions for the game.

Hamlet had one big thing going for it: We had already shown an early internal version at SPIEL. I will let someone else discuss whether this was a good thing or a bad thing. One good thing it did was that during the demos we ran for people, we had already quite a bit of information on how the game felt (although not as much about the numbers). However, the bones of contention for player feelings were clear, and before we started these focus groups, we already had a good idea of what worked and what did not.


Mass Playtests

In this wave, the first question we looked at was "Are players getting the Hamlet experience?" I know this question seems quite vague, but I'm going to explain.

At the time, Hamlet was the first game David and I had worked on together. He's a very talented designer, and I think I'm decent at the whole development thing. However, we still came to frequent impasses on the project. He would give me a design, which was interesting, but clearly had something a little off. In one iteration, I overhauled the economy injection; in another version, I suggested a different bag-building mechanism; another time, we played on and off with the idea of individual player boards; and so on.

After the nth iteration of me removing something and him adding something else, it became clear that our issue was a concept issue. As a developer, I want Hamlet to be a functional game: fair, clean, simple to learn, no rule overhangs, etc. However, as a designer, David had a vision for Hamlet; he wanted to make a game about sharing, about a sprawling town where logistics become harder as the town grows, about organic growth where everything happens because it is time for it to happen. I think we got a version that we were both happy with only when he managed to communicate this vision. From then on, development really started to go smoother, and I could focus on easier things like numbers and game flow.

So, the first question was a very clear one. I finally got David's intentions, but when external players finally started getting their hands on Hamlet, would they get his intentions, too? Had we cleaned and directed the experience well enough that, while each player might have their own direction (donkeys, roads, refining, building, or something else), all of them will feel the joy of a shared communal board, while managing the burden imposed by a sprawling town. It was tricky getting feedback on this at first, but we were ultimately able to gather some very useful data.

The second question we focused on was "Can the game break in any way?" Games can break in really drastic but also more subtle ways. Sometimes, the game state can become unplayable; an earlier version of Hamlet had a game state in which getting money was impossible if players were playing antisocially. This is an undesirable state, which we thankfully spotted quite quickly.

However, sometimes a game state can simply become less enjoyable to play: is the game dragging on too long, does it ramp up too slowly, are we injecting resources into the game at the right pace, does adding more workers add mental load in an undesirable way, and so on. All these cause cracks in the game, but if having no way of making money is the equivalent of a flat tire, then these latter conditions are more like a slow puncture: air's going out, but you'll notice only after the tire has been used for much longer. The best way (maybe even the only way) to find out whether a game is slowly letting out air is through stress testing — playing as many games as possible with as wide a variety of people as possible until the tire goes flat! That's what we were trying to accomplish with our external tests, and we were very successful in this regard.

Blind Playtests

There are two main questions we look to ask during our blind playtests. The first question is "Is the rulebook understandable?" We think Hamlet is at its core a really simple game that is complicated by players' interplay as well as an unconventional mechanism. A good rulebook is paramount for Hamlet especially; it can make a 3-weight game feel like a 2. If we manage to communicate the core experience to the players in a clear and efficient manner, then we truly believe that any player can hold their own.

The second question we want to ask during the blind playtesting is "Is there information that players need to be reminded of during gameplay?" This is already something we have kept an eye on, but only within the context of us being there (so questions can be answered easily and concisely). What happens when we're not there? Will players be able to answer the questions as easily? While we feel the rule overhang is light to non-existent, it'll be good to gauge whether others feel the same way. Board games are at their core about communication; blind playtests are there to help us make sure that we can communicate our designs even when we're not physically present in your living rooms (yet).

For both these questions, we met new focus groups and did the hardest thing for us as designers: Shut up and let them play. For the first tide, we have to zip it from the moment they get the box. Let them pick up the rulebook, read it, then time their learning process. We looked at whether they got anything in the rulebook wrong and tried to figure out (after the playtest through questionnaires) what phrasing caused the misunderstanding. For the second tide, we let them read the rulebook themselves, but we clarified any misunderstandings that arose. Then, we stay silent during the playtest to see which rules fall through the cracks during the gameplay.

As opposed to the previous waves, these two tides ebbed and flowed with each other. Board games, especially closer to their release, end up in a lot of people's hands, whether reviewers or publishers, other designers and developers, and even distributors. Each of these parties want to deal with our game in different ways. Some want to have a pure unadulterated experience (and so, we ask whether we can at least watch), while others want to get a grip by themselves, but also not spend too much time on something unfinished (in this case, the rulebook). Denying ourselves any rules feedback (whether clarity or retention) because the tide has gone definitely felt like folly.

To this day, we are still getting feedback from blind tests, whether we are physically there or not. After all, as soon as players get the game into their living rooms or leave nice comments on BGG, that is another informal blind test under our belt. As recently as last week, a good friend of our company and an even better designer played the game and gave blind rulebook feedback, even though the games are on boats on the world's seven seas (or at least two of them). This feedback won't make it into the first copies, but we believe in Hamlet, so we will keep updating both the rolling online rulebook, as well as the rulebook in future copies (perhaps ahead of exciting expansions in the future?). Even so, our most recent changes to the printed copy still feel very definitive. Thanks to our blind testers as well as the great people on our Discord, there are so many QOL changes to not only the rulebook, but also the graphic design, that hopefully your experience with the box will feel smooth like butter made from high-quality milk.


Conclusions

Playtesting could be a book chapter, if not an entire book, so I didn't go into too much detail here. However, this post hopefully provided some key takeaways:

• Every playtest needs a question (but not every playtest will necessarily give a good answer)
• Help people give you the answer (Guide them, but don't lead them. Good questions are open questions, with necessarily closed answers!)
• Playtest in waves, and keep your big changes for the end of these waves (minor changes are often fine – if a Sharpie stroke solves it, then it's probably not a big deal)
• Time your playtests to match with any dependencies
• A game that takes long is an expensive game (your time is an expense too, fellow designers)
• Make your development workloads manageable
• Have easy questions
• Have multiple questions
• Have recordable questions (waves and tides, waves and tides)

That's it from my end. If you would like to help us playtest our games, you can join our Discord to get in touch with our current testing coordinator. We're always looking for feedback as well, especially from the sort of people who enjoy reading long BGG posts about playtesting.

Johnathan Harrington

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Publisher: Point of Insanity Game Studio

This special bundle product contains the following titles.

All profit from the sale of this bundle will be donated to the Red Cross to assist with their efforts to aid the victims of Hurrican Ian.

	Afterpeak Oceania Regular price: 0 Bundle price: 0 Format: Watermarked PDF	Are you looking for a relaxing trip to a tropical paradise? Looking forward to kicking back on a beautiful white sand beach with a cool beverage under a palm tree? Well, too bad because you won't find that here! Welcome to the Pacific Ocean, Afterpeak style. Pirates roam the seas and horrible creatures lurk in the ocean depths. Even the sight of land doesn’t promise safety, for you never know when you’ll stumble upon a stronghold of the Servants of Chaos, a pirate base, or an island inhabited by cannibals eager to invite you to dinner! Afterpeak Atlas: Oceania presents several of the islands and nations on the Pacific Ocean in the year 2045. It also includes new Light and Dark Lore abilities, new magic items, and new monsters to add flavor to your campaign....
	Afterpeak Systemless Setting Regular price: 0 Bundle price: 0 Format: Watermarked PDF	The naysayers were right...oil wells the world over have gone dry and civilization has collapsed into chaos. But from the ruins of war a new world is born. Magic is now humanity's ally as he seeks to rebuild the world that technology destroyed. Afterpeak is a Systemless Setting designed for use with any role playing game. It combines aspects of Fantasy, Science Fiction, and the Post Apocalypse genres without being confined by the stereotypes of these styles of play. Afterpeak includes information on gaming in this new world, a new system of magic to integrate into your campaign, and dozens of new monsters to throw at your players. Do you dare enter the World of Afterpeak?...
	Modern Monks Player's Guide Regular price: 0 Bundle price: 0 Format: PDF	Modern Monks is a retro-clone inspired role playing game with a focus on martial arts in the preset day. The rules of this game are designed to emulate the second edition of one of the world's most well known fantasy games. It can be used for campaigns focusing on gritty realism or the over the top super moves found in video games and anime. The Modern Monks Player's Guide contains rules for characters level 1-20. Inside you'll find: -Six character classes: the versitle martial artist who can focus on power, defense, or quick strikes, the tough soldier, the sneaky rogue, and the civilian. -Skills and Techniques to customize your character -Armor, weapons, and equipment -Guidelines for economics -11 character specialties like the rugged survivalist, the wise sensei, the daring ...
	Monsters of Afterpeak Regular price: 0 Bundle price: 0 Format: PDF	This supplement for the Modern Monks role playing game contains game statistics for all of the monsters listed in the Afterpeak setting book as well as nine new creatures....
	Monsters of Afterpeak 2 Regular price: 0 Bundle price: 0 Format: Watermarked PDF	This supplement for the Modern Monks role playing game contains game statistics for 40 antagonists for your Afterpeak campaign. Monsters of Afterpeak 2 contains monsters from the Oceania supplement, human NPCs, and a few new creatures....

Total value:	0
Special bundle price:	0
Savings of:	0 (40%)

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Publisher: Starry Knight Press

THE FALL OF FATE KEEP

An Introductory Level Fantasy Adventure
Intended for Player Characters Levels 1 to 3

When resting around a campfire after a long day in the saddle,
the last thing anyone wants to deal with is unexpected guests.
Especially when they bring along angry, sword wielding friends!
But this is exactly what happens on a cool summer night when a
young woman, chased by skeletons, runs up seeking your help.
Will your players answer the hero’s call?

Greetings adventurers and Game Masters! 

I am very happy to release the nineteenth book in my Old School Series of adventures, THE FALL OF FATE KEEP. In this scenario your players will come to the aid of a band of fellow heroes who have gotten in over their head when they invaded the dungeon below a ruined keep. These youngsters were searching for hidden treasure and a fabled magic pool, purported to grant wishes to those who sample its waters! This introductory adventure is intended for 4 to 6 players of levels 1 to 3, and it offers GM's a great way to begin a new campaign.

Synopsis: While travelling between quests, the players are camped on the side of the road, near an an old ruined keep, in a small patch of swampland along the western coast of the province of Magus, in the nation of The Imperium. The excitement begins when a pair of adventurers come running out of the ruined keep across the road and right into the party’s camp. Chased by a group of foul undead, the pair stumbles and falls, bleeding and afraid, right beside the party’s campfire, begging for their aid. The players will have little choice in the matter as the mindless undead set about attacking all living beings in their path, including the players. After the battle the players discover one of the new arrivals has died, and the other begs for the players’ aid in rescuing her comrades from the dungeon beneath the nearby ruins.

Will your players answer the hero’s call?

Maps of Arx Fatum and the Dungeon Below

  

Cartography by Louis "sirlou" Kahn, all rights reserved.

This adventure was written for use with the OSRIC/1E rulesets, but it is sufficiently generic to be compatible with most fantasy role-playing games (FRPG). Minimal statistics are included in the text of the adventure, and the Game Master is encouraged to use their ruleset of choice. This scenario also features new magic items, including a rare and wonderous suit of blessed alligator armour, which allows the player to transform into one of these powerful predators!

PLUS with this purchase you also get a free copy of my 2022 Starry Knight Press Catalog, which has information on all of my modules and supplements, as well as maps of the known portions of my campaign world of Terrans, and bonus content (new monsters and magic items for OSR/5E rules) from my published books!

Louis “sirlou” Kahn
Starry Knight Press
September 2022

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Publisher: Minish Cartography

This pack contains a collection of isometric assets to use in your own maps. The theme of the pack and some of the assets were chosen by my Patreon community. All the assets have transparent shadows to allow layering over any ground material on the base map. The pack contains the following.

- 3 ships

- 2 large boats

- 2 collections of small boats

- 6 dock and pier sections

- 1 dock section with warehouse

- 1 lighthouse

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Publisher: Adventures in Filbar

You never know what you may come across on a trek thru the frontier. A wide river needs forded but fortunately an old, abandoned mill offers you a chance to stay dry...

This adventure setting was designed for 5th Edition AD&D for the Filbar Campaign, for a pair of first level PCs. This one page offering was designed as a 5th edition offering but can easily be adjusted for other formats. Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter @FilbarRPG for news and offers!

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Publisher: White Wolf

The Contagion Chronicle introduced a world reeling from sickness. The God-Machine itself is overwhelmed with illness manifesting as a variety of plagues upon the world. The Sworn collaborate to eradicate this Contagion, while the False seek to manipulate it to their own ends. Yet, there are other worlds, shards of a shattered Mirror that can also be touched by the Contagion. These places could provide refuge for Sworn fleeing from a dying world, resources for the False to plunder in their greed — perhaps even the key to stopping the Contagion once and for all.

Perhaps one of these worlds is the very source of the Contagion.

Shards of Contagion includes:

• Guidelines for incorporating Mirrors: Gabriel’s Horn, Mirrors: Bleeding Edge 2.0 and Mirrors: Fantasy Folk into the Contagion Chronicle.
• Two new locations: Lyndon Station, Wisconsin, home to Contagion as Remorse and Vancouver, home to Contagion as Dread.
• Notes on introducing the Contagion to Woundgate as presented in Mirrors.

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Publisher: Old School Role Playing

This is an adventure for Cepheus Engine.

The Path of the Shining Sky is a relatively new religious organization in the Sonora sector. Some might call this organization a cult. It's members are seen frequently at star ports across the sector wearing flowing robes and handing out literature about their religion.

Recently "The Path," as they are known across the sector, has made accusations about local authorities on several worlds persecuting their membership about their religious views. The Path has decided to send their members forth in pilgrim ships to unexplored worlds in the nearest sector to the Sonora. The leadership of the Path believes that is the duty of their members to colonize other worlds and spread their faith even to alien races.

One of these ships has recently gone missing. There has been no word from it in some time. A pair of wealthy concerned parents want this ship located. They want their son returned to them if possible. There are others, however, who would prefer that this ship never be heard from again.

Price: $3.00 Read more »

Publisher: White Wolf

Day into Night, Night into Day...
With Glamour ever scarcer in the Autumn World, changelings need to look for every source they can to survive. The commemorations and festivals that fill their calendar are not only for passing the days, but also to encourage joy and inspiration in their Dreamers. Around the world, from month to month and season to season, the fae will find any excuse they can to gather, celebrate, and give a bit of brightness back to the people, for every day is potentially precious....

...and the Wheel Keeps on Turning
This book contains:
•    A daily compendium of events observed by the fae worldwide
•    Essays on seemings, milestones, and ways that changelings measure their lives
•    Information about the returning popularity of the mysterious Seasonal Courts
•    Systems and mechanics for dealing with interactions between time, the Dreaming, and fae nature
•    Seasonal Merits & Flaws, chimera, Lycians, and Treasures
...and more!

Price: $12.99 Read more »

Publisher: Ethan H. Reynolds

“Ready for the road trip of your life? Head on down’ta reilleysroadtrip.jc/business to catch a ride today! Happy trailin’!” -Reilley Rodriguez, Founder and CEO of Reilley’s Road Trips

In the terrifying and barren landscape of the Great Wastes outside of Jeriko City, dangers surround you at every second. Whether it be monstrous mutants, ruthless raiders, or the scorching sun, the Great Wastes are an inhospitable place to travel…

UNTIL NOW!

Introducing Reilley’s Road Trips, an expansion to the hit cyberpunk tabletop roleplaying game Neon Nights: 1^st Edition! In this expansion, you’ll explore…

• -The town of Rim’s Edge, the citadel for the heroic Waste Rangers who vow to protect the Great Wastes with either writ or revolver!
• -The Reclaimer Clan’s camp, a raider clan seeking to inherit the Great Wastes for their god, the very Sun itself!
• -The prolific Sharon’s Scrap Shop, filled with vehicles, items, and informational guides on repairing all items!
• -An abandoned battlefield fought between the armies of Jeriko City and Lin-Shei, and the peculiar faces found there!
• -The Old World, the supposed location of the nuclear apocalypse, housing the most terrifying creatures seen!
• -Reilley’s own shop!

In these locations, you’ll find exciting perks, powerful weapons, unique vehicles, a robust item modification system, and fascinating lore!

64 pages of AMAZING content all for FREE await you! Explore the Great Wastes with your friends today!

NOTE: This is an expansion for Neon Nights: 1st Edition. In order to use this expansion, you will need the base handbook to enjoy the game fully. 

Price: $14.99 Read more »

Publisher: GameScape3D

The First Instalment of "The Witch of Haunt Wood Mine" Available on Tribes as a split release during September and October. This is a All models are designed to stand alone but obviously you would miss out on a lot of versitility with just one part. This month includes:

• Mine Elevator
• Miners Barracks
• Witch House
• 3 Mountains (with caves)
• 2 Foot+ Plateau  (30+ inch footprint)

All of this is set up for Support free FDM Printing on 8x8 inch beds. Some smaller parts have optional resin set ups.

Price: $26.00 Read more »

A few weeks ago I was running my Night’s Black Agents (NBA) game, and the agents had just come off of one kinetic op, and right into another (because the timing was critical). They were banged up and their skill pools were somewhat depleted. Their opposition at the other site was not overwhelming but was going to be tough. Fast Forward. They are in the middle of the fight, and several of them are rolling poorly, and the tough encounter is now getting much harder. I have three vampires bottled up in a lab, and if they break out, they will overwhelm the agents. So rather than just crushing them, I task two of them to secure samples, taking them out of the fight, and I take one vampire and steer them at the agents, making for tense combat, but one that is winnable. In the end, the agents did defeat all the vampires but also got pretty banged up, and it made for a very exciting session. 

Afterward, I reflected on exactly what I had done – that is, I made in-game adjustments to the difficulty of the encounter in order to make the encounter exciting. I could have easily overwhelmed them if I had wanted to, but rather I chose to adjust the difficulty of the encounter to better match the players. Was I going to flat out let them win? No. There need to be chances of failure to keep tension, but at the same time just overwhelming them would not seem fun.

I realized that those adjustments are things I have done for years, in nearly every game I have played. It is not something that the rulebook taught me to do, and it is not a thing that any game codified in its rules. Despite all that, it is a skill that I have, one that I use, and when I talked to some other GMs they have it too. So let’s talk more about this skill/technique.

The Little Adjustments We Do

As the GM, we are the main interface to the rest of the game world. We possess knowledge beyond what the players know in the game, which extends to things like stat blocks and the contents of encounters. We are also, in most cases, the arbitrator of the rules of the game, and in many games empowered to determine the difficulty of a given task or opposition. It is within all of these abilities that lies our ability to make adjustments to the game on the fly. A task that was DC 15 can become DC 13 if we want, or vice versa. We can be arbitrary about it, or we can wrap it in some narrative dressing, but when it comes down to it, we have the ability to adjust the difficulty of the game as it is played. 

Why Would We Adjust? 

There are a number of reasons why we might make adjustments. From my own tenure as GM, here are some of the reasons I have done it: 

• Cooling off or Heating up a Combat – the combat encounter has become too easy or too hard, and adjustments are made to get it into that sweet middle spot. 
• Prep Mistake – This one often ties to the one above, but when you prepped the session you set the encounter to one difficulty, but in play realize it needs to be adjusted up or down. 
• The player is having a bad night – The player is not rolling well and can’t catch a break. They have become frustrated and they are not having fun – and potentially it’s impacting everyone else. (Note – I don’t adjust things if a player is on a roll. If they are doing well, I don’t knock them down). 
• Narrative Positioning – The players have described action or some part of the environment in a creative way that would make things easier. I will make an adjustment to reward creativity. 

In most cases, I am making adjustments to fine-tune combat, be it to correct a prep mistake or to dial in the tension of the combat scene. 

Ways to make Adjustments

How you make your adjustments will have a lot to do with the game you are playing. The best adjustments operate within the rules system, in the places where we have some latitude. Here is a list of some of the more popular ways I have made adjustments. 

Hit Point Adjustments

This one is easy and works in any game that has a point system for taking damage. You can give or take away points from NPCs to make combat go longer or shorter, respectively. Sometimes, I just add some points to an NPC, sometimes I just give the PCs the kill if the creature is a point or two away from zero, etc. 

Difficulty Adjustments

This one is also straightforward. You can adjust the difficulty of a check up or down to make it harder or easier (depending on how your system works). This is true for things like skill checks, but it is also true for the difficulty of hitting an NPC in combat. Sometimes, I will give a narrative explanation, other times I just simply will say if a challenge passes or fails. 

Narrative Positioning Bonuses

This one is giving a reward or penalty based on some description of the task or attack. The bonus is never anything too powerful in either direction, but enough to make it meaningful. This one is good in Powered by the Apocalypse games where I can give a +1 Forward for something good that the player has come up with. 

Motivation/Action

This is my favorite adjustment technique. You give the NPCs motivations beyond “kill all characters”. Then you have the narrative latitude to decide if an NPC is going to press an attack or follow their other motivation. That motivation might be that they don’t want to die and that they may run or surrender. They may have another objective like to get something or someone to safety, so they would rather escape combat rather than stay and fight. This achieves the same goal as the next item, but it allows you to have the NPC change their mind and re-engage the combat if you need to dial it back up.

Reducing opponents

Another technique I often use is waves of opponents. I will prep 2-3 waves of opponents, with the first wave clearly visible when the encounter starts and the other waves arriving mid-combat. If the players clear that first wave easily, then the second wave engages at once, if the first wave turns out to give them problems, then I delay the second wave, or I reduce the second wave’s numbers, etc. Because they are not visible to the players, they don’t see me making NPCs vanish before their eyes.

Banking for Future Use (Offscreen)

This is a favorite of mine in PbtA games. If I need to cool off an encounter that is starting to overwhelm the players, then when I get to take a move, I will always pick the one that happens offscreen. This then takes some immediate pressure off the players, while at the same time, keeping some tension, as they know something else is going to happen. 

Those are just a handful of the techniques I have used. There are many other ones, and I suspect you know a bunch for the games that you are well versed in. 

Do you Do This All The Time?

It is worth saying that I don’t do this with every encounter. Failure in games is important, and sometimes it’s fine to let characters get overrun and have to retreat. These techniques are a tool – one that I use when I feel that the play of the game is not aligned with the feel of the game I am going for. Then I will use one of these tools to put those into closer alignment. 

Should We Talk About This?

In most games, this is not explicitly defined as a GM role, and yet, for many of us, we are using these techniques to make our games more enjoyable for us and our players. Should we talk about this with our players? 

At Session Zero

If there is a time for having this discussion I think it is during Session Zero when it is more of a theoretical discussion and used to set expectations. Telling the players that these are techniques you use, and asking if they are ok with them, is a good way to get some consent, as well as perhaps to set some boundaries on when you will use it, or certain techniques you will or won’t use.

During The Session

Personally, I never do this. This to me is “making the sausage”, which is the thing the players do not want to see, because it may ruin the experience of play. When I do these things, I just do them at the table and move along. 

After The Session

I don’t always tell my players if I have made any adjustments about a session, but if I did, it would be after – but even then, I am not inclined to tell them. My one exception is that if the explanation will help teach a newer GM, then I am fine pulling back the curtain and explaining to them how some of these things work. 

You Made Your Point Hans

RPGs are not always predictable, in a good way. On any given night an encounter can be spectacular or a flop. You can, and there is nothing wrong with it, leave everything to chance, let the dice fall where they may. But for many GMs, we are looking to create a certain kind of experience, and sometimes that means making some adjustments to encounters to tune them to the desired effect. In order to do that, we can employ a number of tools, based on the games we are playing. When done well, and for the right reasons, you can help craft memorable experiences. 

What about you? Do you make in-game adjustments? What is the most common reason you do it? What are the techniques you like to employ? 

 

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Today we’re going to take a little bit of a break from diving through rulebooks and take a look at a tool for running games at the table. As more games have provided additional tactical options, it has become increasingly important to have a way to represent position, usually on a grid. Even in games that don’t use a precise grid, it is often important to be able to track if characters are engaged with other characters.

Miniatures are absolutely wonderful, but they aren’t always the best solution, especially when the cost is factored into the equation. Sometimes it might be worthwhile to have miniatures of your player characters or the major campaign challenges, but all of those creatures in between can be difficult to find and expensive to collect.

Disclaimer

I haven’t had a chance to use this product at the table, but that’s mainly because I don’t have any current face-to-face games. I did have the opportunity to take them out and use the various clings. I was not sent this set as a review copy, and I have not only used tactical miniatures before, but I have also written reviews that look at other non-miniature solutions for tactical placement in games.

Dimensional Monsters

The Campaign Case itself is 2.21 x 9.21 x 12.09 inches and weighs about four and a half pounds. There are 64 total tokens in three different sizes and four different colors. There are five sheets of creature clings to adhere to the disks, and a folder to hold the sheets.

The case itself is really striking. The artwork on the individual clings is taken from various D&D 5e publications, sometimes utilizing artwork from adventures in lieu of using the artwork from the Monster Manual. For example, the Frost Giant and Hill Giant images appear to come from Storm King’s Thunder.

Presentation

Not only is the case attractive, but it also feels solid. It has a rope handle and a magnetic closure. Inside the case, there is room for two individual containers with clear plastic lids, each one housing two colors of disks. In the center of the case, there is a recess that has the folder which holds the clings for this set. This section is deeper than it needs to be in order to hold the folder, which I’m assuming is an intentional nod towards expanded sets being stored within the case.

There are four different colors of disks, red, blue, white, and black. I like having the option of having multiple colors, although I would have almost rather had three colors, assuming “allied,” “neutral,” and “adversary” colors. That’s just my own preference, however.

When the product description says that the disks are weighted, they aren’t kidding. These are solid pieces of plastic, and they have a nice, pleasant weight to them. These don’t feel like they are going to accidentally slide across a surface with minor bumps or jostling. The colors are also bright and pleasant, and the disks themselves are nice and shiny.

The Numbers Game

So exactly how many of each item is included in the case?

Tokens

• Huge Tokens: 4 (1 of each color)
• Large Tokens: 20 (5 of each color)
• Medium Tokens: 40 (10 of each color)

Clings

A through F letters: 2 sets	Earth Elemental: 1	Human Archer: 1	Pit Fiend: 1
Aaracocra: 1	Efreet: 1	Human Bard: 1	Purple Worm: 1
Adult Black Dragon: 1	Elf Bard: 1	Human Cleric: 1	Red Slaad: 1
Adult Black Dragon: 1	Elf Warrior: 2	Human Fighter: 1	Red Wizard of Thay: 1
Adult Blue Dragon: 1	Ettin: 1	Human Paladin: 1	Roper: 1
Adult Green Dragon: 1	Fire Elemental: 1	Human Rogue: 2	Rust Monster: 1
Adult Red Dragon: 1	Fire Giant: 1	Human Sorcerer: 1	Shambling Mound: 1
Adult White Dragon: 1	Flameskull: 1	Human Warrior: 2	Shreiker: 1
Air Elemental: 1	Flesh Golem: 1	Human Wizard: 1	Skeletons, Archers: 2
Balor: 1	Frost Giant: 1	Imp: 1	Skeletons, Melee: 4
Banshee: 1	Gelatinous Cube: 1	Intellect Devourer: 1	Spectator: 1
Bar-Lgura: 1	Ghouls: 2	Iron Golem: 1	Stars: 6
Barghest: 1	Giant Spider: 1	Kobolds: 6	Stone Golem: 1
Basilisk: 1	Gnolls: 2	Lich: 1	Strahd: 1
Beholder: 1	Gnome Rogue: 1	Manticore: 1	Tiefling Warlock: 1
Blink Dog: 1	Gnome Wizard: 1	Mimic: 1	Treant: 1
Bugbears: 2	Goblins: 6	Mind Flayers: 2	Troll: 1
Bulette: 1	Grick: 1	Minotaur: 1	Umber Hulk: 1
Bullywug: 2	Griffon: 1	Mummy: 1	Unicorn: 1
Carrion Crawler: 1	Half-orc Bard: 1	Myconid: 1	Vampire Spawn: 1
Centaur: 1	Half-orc Fighter: 1	Nightmare: 1	Water Elemental: 1
Changeling Rogue: 1	Halfling Druid: 1	Nothic: 1	Werewolf: 1
Chimera: 1	Halfling Wizard: 1	Numbers 1 through 6: 2 sets	Wolves: 2
Displacer Beast: 1	Halfling: 1	Ochre Jelly: 1	Wraith: 1
Dragonborn Paladin: 1	Hell Hound: 1	Ogres: 2	Young Blue Dragon: 1
Dragonborn Wizard: 1	Hezrou: 1	Oni: 1	Young Green Dragon: 1
Drider: 1	Hill Giant: 1	Orcs: 6	Young Red Dragon: 1
Drow Matron Mother: 1	Hippogriff: 1	Otyugh: 1	Young White Dragon: 1
Drow Rogue: 2	Hobgoblins: 2	Owlbear: 1	Yuan-Ti Abomination: 1
Dwarves: 2	Hook Horror: 1	Pegasus: 1	Zombies: 6

 

I feel like there is always a bit of a trade-off when coming up with large-scale token offerings. There is a decision that has to be made between the breadth of creatures offered, and the number offered. For example, you rarely need more than one dragon for an encounter, but having run Storm King’s Thunder, it would be hard to come up with some of the giant encounters from that book with this set, given that there are only single example of the giants included. There is also a decent selection of “PC-ish” clings, but there are still gaps, and we definitely don’t touch on many of the newer player ancestries introduced to the game.

While I feel like there are plenty of medium and large tokens for most encounters, at higher levels you may need a few more than four huge tokens, especially if the PCs get up to summoning or shape-changing shenanigans. And then there is the gargantuan Tarrasque in the room. Or rather, the gargantuan Tarrasque that isn’t in the room, or the case.

Playing in a tier 1 or 2 game, you probably aren’t going to need a gargantuan token or clings. But the higher level you get, the more likely you are going to need that really big token, and maybe some clings to represent those Tarrasques and Great Wyrms. I can see gargantuan tokens being offered later on, after WotC sees how successful this idea is, but given that the case is built for future expansion, with the extra room for more folders, there isn’t a good place to store gargantuan tokens if they are produced.

Final Thoughts

 I don’t think anyone that likes the feel of a nice, heavy token on a map is going to be disappointed. It’s just that one case isn’t going to solve all of your problems in one shot. 

I love these tokens. I want to state that upfront. They look great and they feel great. However, if we’re looking at just this kit, and not the concept of the tokens and clings, this set may not have the longevity that a DM may desire, unless they are supplementing some of their representational needs with minis or other solutions.

It’s a great broad selection, but it’s not a great deep selection, and I feel like any kind of solution of this nature is going to run into that problem at some point in the production process. I don’t think anyone that likes the feel of a nice, heavy token on a map is going to be disappointed. It’s just that one case isn’t going to solve all of your problems in one shot.

Future Wishes

I would love to see future sets sold tied to releases. For example, a set of hypothetical Dragonlance clings that contain all of the clings needed to run that adventure. I’m not sure if that’s the way these will be sold, but it’s what I would love to see.

That said, we still need some additional sets to fill in the creatures that could use some additional support. I’m not sure if I would rather that be based on a broad or a narrow theme. For example, would it be better to see a set of giants, with all different kinds of true giants, ogres, trolls, etc. included?

It is also interesting to see that this is a solution that has a lot of competition. I don’t think this product is designed to replace miniatures. At best, I think a lot of groups that like miniatures might still get this as a supplement to them. However, the 2D acrylic miniatures produced by WizKids might be competing for the same space. This solution, of course, is an in-house solution, but does that make it more likely to be supported?

If you have the discretionary funds, or you are someone that has started down the accursed path of an RPG reviewer, I don’t think this is a bad purchase, but if this is still a bit of a squeeze on your budget, I would wait to see what kind of additional support this line is going to get, and how other creatures are released.

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When searching for words of wisdom for all things tabletop, there’s lots of resources for how to be a good Game Master – but few for being a good player. The GM facilitates the game, but everyone at the table is responsible for cooperation and fun. For those of us who care deeply about making our GMs (and other players) feel valued and appreciated, these tips are a love song to you. 

Know the rules and your character sheet

Nobody should expect you to have all the rules memorized immediately, but get a general sense of what they are and know where to find them in a pinch, and you should strive to know the ones that impact your character the most. During combat, try to figure out what you want to do before it’s your turn – giving yourself a few options in case you need a sudden change of plans.

Why it matters to your GM: Between building the world, characters, story, and encounters, your GM has enough on their plate. Though they are the final arbiter of the rules, you can help make the process a lot easier by understanding the rules that apply to you – including your character’s abilities.

Why it matters to your fellow players: Interruptions break up the immersion and momentum of the game. If you have to interrupt the story to look up a rule you should know, or hold everyone up during combat when it’s your turn, then the other players will disengage at best, and get annoyed at worst.

Set expectations with yourself, your players, and the GM

Learn about what type of game your GM wants to have – whether it’s a romantic comedy, grimdark, or traditional fantasy adventure – and share what you’d love to be brought to the table. If they haven’t already, suggest they host a Session Zero.

Why it matters to your GM: They need to know what type of game is going to be interesting for everyone at the table, as well as what elements are the most engaging. Most importantly, everyone needs to be aligned in order to have a mutually good time. What if you’re playing the game like it’s a lighthearted romp, but another player acts like it’s a gritty realism, and meanwhile the GM is running the game like it’s a political intrigue? Getting on the same page is helpful for a mutual experience.

Why it matters to the players: Most newer players don’t think on the meta-level of what themes or tone they want to explore, and so sparking this conversation and sharing what you personally enjoy will help to get others to think about what they would enjoy most out of a game.

A note for when the table can’t agree: No matter whether you’re playing with friends or randoms online, the group might not be the one for you. If you find that people aren’t on the same page, are crossing boundaries, etc, you may want to keep looking until you find the players you enjoy playing with. As the saying often goes, no D&D is often better than bad D&D.

Make a character that wants to engage in the story and with the other characters

You are in charge of your character, so create a character that wants to be an adventurer and has a reason for being with the party. When your GM dangles a cue or plot hook in front of you, take it! If they’re setting you up to start one quest, try not to go in the opposite direction.

Take this example: Shifty Pete the swashbuckler rogue is a loner (doesn’t participate in role play with others); steals from the party; goes off to do their own thing; and if they find loot, they take it for themselves and hide it from the party. This type of character is playing a single-player mindset in a multiplayer game. In-game, the other players don’t necessarily have a reason to stick around with them.

Instead, you can rewrite: Shifty Pete has a hard time opening up, but is working on it; steals for the party; volunteers for scouting missions, but usually takes a buddy; shares loot with everyone, even if they seem reluctant.

After you’ve figured out why your character wants to adventure and be with the party, you can explore some other ways of engaging with your fellow player characters. Check out Roles For Social Encounters for useful roles you can take to move your GM’s story forward.

Why it matters to the GM: Your GM generally puts a lot of effort into their game and wants to tell an entertaining story with a group. If they’ve spent a lot of time planning interesting plot hooks and adventures, and your character takes no interest in it, then their hard work would be for naught.

Why it matters to the players: If your character doesn’t want to participate, then the party would have to either leave your character behind, or spend a lot of time trying to convince your character to participate so everyone can get to the story they came there to play.

Share the spotlight with your fellow PCs

Try to notice when other characters are having a moment in the spotlight, such as a confrontation with an NPC from their backstory, or a return to their homeland. When you see this happening, give them the space for their character to shine. Don’t worry, you’ll have your moments, too! You can ask their character questions, and have your own quips, but try to avoid becoming the main character of the scene.

Why it matters to the GM: One of the unwritten rules of GMing is to tell a story where each player can be the hero (or the villain). To that end, they all deserve their moments to feel like a main character just as much as everyone else at the table.

Why it matters to the players: When it’s their chance to have a main character moment, it can feel bad to be pushed back to supporting cast. 

Engage throughout the game

Put your phone down, avoid browsing other tabs, and be an active listener. If you are someone who needs to multitask in order to focus, consider getting a stim toy or taking careful notes during the session.

Think about key moments that will be useful to remember, and make sure to jot them down. Keep track of NPC names, locations, plot hooks, major story beats, etc – anything that feels important. If you find that you have too hard a time taking notes during the session, set aside 5-10 minutes after the session to jot down a summary while the memories are still fresh in your head.

Why it matters to the GM: The GM probably spent a lot of time crafting the world and the story, and so it would probably feel bad if the players were too distracted and didn’t remember any of it..

Why it matters to players: Seeing that one person is distracted gives others an indirect permission statement to also distract themselves, throwing the focus away from the game. On the flip side, engaged players foster engaged players – inspiring participation and, sometimes, more notetaking! More notes means more comparison and completion of information, which can lead to better party decision making.

Offer to help wherever possible

Ask your GM directly about any tasks that you could offer to take over, like being in charge of rescheduling games or tracking initiative. Make yourself available to do the task whenever needed and be proactive – don’t wait for the GM to ask you to do it each time. 

It’s also helpful to be responsive when the GM requests something from the players, such as answering a question out-of-game or coordinating the next course of action in-game. 

Why it matters to the GM: Creating a campaign is tough enough without also worrying about scheduling, rules arbitration, and initiative tracking. Offering to help — even if the GM doesn’t need it – can show that you’re supportive and willing to carry your own weight.

Why it matters to players: Helping out makes the game play out more efficiently, and encourages others to step up to offer their help as well. 

Respect consent and autonomy

Don’t remove the autonomy of another character, such as attempting to mind control or kidnap them, unless everyone at the table is on board (another aspect of setting expectations!). If your GM hasn’t already, it’s also good to offer Safety Tools to make sure everyone knows which topics are greenlit and which are off limits.

If Safety Tools are in play, you can enforce them by speaking up when a boundary may be breached. This can help the group feel encouraged to take them seriously.

Why it matters to the GM: Safety is not just the responsibility of the GM; it’s everyone at the table’s job. By bringing it up at the beginning of the session or campaign (and enforcing those boundaries throughout the game) you help everyone. 

If you have your own favorite safety tools, you could be teaching the GM about ones they haven’t heard of before, giving you the opportunity to improve the overall safety of the game. 

Why it matters to players: Making something happen to a player character against their will without any ability to prevent it takes away their agency. Frankly, it feels bad – especially if they’re playing the game as a manner of escapism from the real world. Uncomfortable story beats can also bring people out of the game and into a reality they may not be comfortable with. Safety Tools help ensure everyone at the table has psychological safety, which will help lead to mutually-assured fun.

 

These tips can boil down to a few themes: respect and enthusiasm for the game, the players, and the GM. Whether you’ve already done some or none of these before, you can try them out in your games going forward. Your friends at the table may appreciate it, and you may find yourself having more connection with them than you did before.

Do you have any other tips to be a better player? Let us know!

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Dr. Lisa Su states that “Gaming brings people together.”

There are benefits and drawbacks of playing RPGs with people we know versus people we don’t. There are advantages and disadvantages to gaming with the people we are closest to, and the people we’ve never met. This article discusses playing RPGs with friends, family, and strangers.

RPGs with Friends

Playing with your besties is usually the easiest way to go. There’s a standing Friday or Saturday night game at your favorite bar or basement, so no one must think of where to go or what to do that night. It’s already pre-planned!  Here are the pros and cons of playing RPGs with your friends.

Advantages to RPGs with Friends

• I know this firsthand. RPGs have brought me closer to friends, especially during difficult times. RPGs can build relationships within a campaign.
• A cohesive group is stress-relieving and a lot of fun to play.
• Having an establish playing time (weekly, monthly, etc.) will keep players in touch with each other.

Disadvantages to RPGs with Friends

• Conflicts can happen and players can have hurt feelings. It’s worse if players take sides.
• Gaming only with friends prevents others from joining the RPG circles.
• It can be awkward and affect the friendship if one or more of the players leave the group.

RPGs with Family

At a family gathering, especially if members are stuck inside due to inclement weather, RPGs can be a lifesaver. Here are some advantages and disadvantages of gaming with beloved family members.

Advantages to RPGs with Family

• A good RPG session can replace awkward conversations, steer away from sensitive topics, and avert unnecessary family drama.
• The rules in RPGs use a lot of math, which is a great review for all participants.
• A good storyline is a good opportunity for bonding with family members. Nothing keeps the family together quite like a good RPG battle!
• This is a great multiage activity, as 9-year-olds can play along with grand and great-grandparents! Both tweens/teens and seniors can be hard to entertain, so it’s a great time to introduce them to RPGs.

Disadvantages to RPGs with Family 

• Time constraints can prevent a good gaming session.
• Figuring out who will be the DM and which game and version to play could be problematic.
• If there are too many players, it could be difficult for the DM to handle.
• Unless characters are created in advance, learning the game can be challenging.
• Some family members are hesitant/reticent to use technology like D&D Beyond, so, you may want to team up a non-techie person with someone who is comfortable and patient.

RPGs with Strangers

            This one is a tough one for me, but recently I’ve had a change of heart. A couple of people who I didn’t know previously joined one of my groups. It turned out to be a great experience! Here are the good and the bad when gaming with strangers.

Advantages to RPGs with Strangers 

• Gaming with strangers livens up a session and a potentially stagnant campaign.
• Strangers in RPGs can quickly become friends.
• Unless one of the strangers is a rules lawyer, strangers are usually easy to play with, as they want to fit in.
• If you are gaming with strangers at a Con, if the game is not going well, you can always leave.

Disadvantages to RPGs with Strangers 

• When bringing a new player into the group, the dynamic changes, and not always for the better.
• If the player does not fit in well with the group, it can be an uncomfortable experience.
• If you are gaming with strangers at a Con, it’s four hours of your life you won’t get back.

Do you prefer to play with family, friends, or strangers? Please share your experiences!

 

 

 

 

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On this episode we’re going to talk about that GM skill of knowing when to ask for dice rolls and went to not. As the saying goes, “Y’gotta know when to roll ‘em, y’gotta know when to hold ‘em…”

Download Gnomecast 148 Here

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In the 90s, when the World of Darkness became the hottest thing in RPGs, I was on the outside looking in. My friends went off to college, and our gaming got more and more sporadic. That meant that I didn’t really want to spend time learning a new system and exploring what all of this was about. In addition, the “hot new thing” that my friends brought back home from college was Shadowrun.

When I got back into RPGs in the early 2000s, all of the people that played in World of Darkness games were very into the lore. It was intimidating to me, because it wasn’t just about “knowing” things, it was about “doing it right.” It felt like there was some special vibe that you had to understand, and that intimidated me more than reading twenty to thirty books just to know what was going on.

I mention that, because Hunter the Reckoning is something that should have been right up my alley. I love modern urban fantasy, and I really love monster hunting stories. But I was afraid it was tangled up in this vibe that I just might not get if I wasn’t on the inside of the World of Darkness. But now, more than a decade later, I’m much less likely to get put off by the “vibe” at the FLGS, and much more interested in forming my own opinions. And we just happen to have a new edition of Hunter the Reckoning on the shelves.

Disclaimer

I purchased my own copy of the Hunter the Reckoning RPG for this review, and was not provided a review copy. I have not had the opportunity to play the game, but I have experience playing Chronicles of Darkness and Storyteller System games, which have some similar touchstones. I have also played in games run by one of the playtesters listed in the credits, but not with this particular material.

Hunter the Reckoning

Written by Justin Achilli, Daniel Braga, Johnathan Byerly, Edward Austin Hall, Karim Muammar, Mario Ortegón, Pam Punzalan, and Erin Roberts

Advice for Considerate Play appendix by Jacqueline Bryk

Editing and Indexing by Ronni Radner

Concept Diversity Consultancy and Diversity Reading by Maple Intersectionality Consulting

Art Director: Tomas Arfert

Cover Art: Mark Kelly, Paulina Westerling, Tomas Arfert

Interior Art and Illustration: Tomas Arfert, Krzysztof Bieniawski, Lloyd Drake-Brockman, Raquel Cornejo, Mirko Failoni, Per Gradin, Mark Kelly, Ronja Melin, Anders Muammar, Paulina Westerling

Graphic Design and Layout: Tomas Arfert

Proofreading: Jason Carl, Dhaunae De Vir, Sean Greaney, Karim Muammar, Amanda “Huddy” Huddleston, Martyna “Outstar” Zych

Pages in the Journal

This review is based on the PDF version of the book, which is 288 pages. These pages include a credits page, a table of contents, two pages of opening fiction, a two-page index, a two-page character sheet, two pages of blank stationary from organizations in the setting, and a two-page spread of live models in lighting that matches the color scheme of the book.

The book itself is primarily laid out in a two-column layout. I’m happy to see this change from the Vampire 5e core rulebook, because I’ll freely admit that I’m biased. Three column layout makes it really hard for me to follow text. The book is laid out in black, white, and orange themes. Much of the artwork is black and white with orange color splashes for emphasis.

On the Inside

The book has the following sections:

• Introduction
• Chapter One: A Coming Reckoning
• Chapter Two: Characters
• Chapter Three: Edges and Equipment
• Chapter Four: Rules
• Chapter Five: Storytelling
• Chapter Six: Supernatural Threats
• Chapter Seven: Rival Organizations
• Appendix: Advice for Considerate Play

Past and Present

One thing that I wanted to address right off the top is the change in focus for this version of Hunter the Reckoning. While I didn’t play previous versions of the game, I knew a little bit about the core concepts, and I have seen some of the online discussions about the game. If you are a fan of the previous material, you may want to be aware of one of the changes to the game.

In this version of Hunter the Reckoning, you are playing mortal hunters. There are some edges that might give you abilities that touch on supernatural powers, but without taking any of those, you are playing human beings caught up in a supernatural world and driven to hunt the monsters that you know exist.

This differs from the original version of the game, where characters would come in contact with Heralds and become Imbued, basically meaning that hunters were their own flavor of supernatural being. Because I like to wear my biases on my sleeve, I’ll say that I like this change, and I prefer to have a little more distance between the supernatural and the Hunters that this game assumes. You may want to keep all of that in mind as you read on.

Mechanics

For anyone familiar with the World of Darkness games, I doubt you would be shocked to find out that this is a d10 dice pool-based game. Characters have Attributes and Skills. When making tests, characters add together a relevant Attribute with a relevant Skill, and roll that many d10s. Each of them that comes up six or higher is a success. If the player rolls a number of successes equal to the difficulty of a task, they succeed.

Advantages and Flaws are ranked just like Attributes and Skills. Unlike Attributes and Skills, Advantages and Flaws aren’t often used to roll dice pools (although they are in some cases), but instead, at different rankings, they grant different benefits or disadvantages.

Edges and Perks are sort of one-off abilities. Edges grant access to Perks, so a character that has an Edge can then pick up multiple Perks associated with that Edge. Edges and Perks might grant a Hunter more reliable access to weapons, vehicles, or gear, a better chance to gain relevant information when researching, or even the ability to work with natural animals.

Endowments are Edges and Perks that skirt into the supernatural. This involves sensing supernatural creatures, the ability to ward against the presences of the supernatural, or even the ownership of an artifact with supernatural ability. There are multiple ways that these abilities can manifest. For example, a character with strong faith may ward against the supernatural by presenting a holy symbol, which is an extension of their Endowment, not necessarily a weakness native to a supernatural creature.

Weapons and armor are fairly simple to express. Weapon damage adds damage after an opposed roll between an attacker and a defender, and armor reduces damage that the wearer takes. The game also presents some upgrades, like incendiary rounds that cause fire damage whenever a round hits a target, which can be pretty useful against monsters that are flammable (including vampires).

The equipment chapter also gives you a brief glimpse of the state-of-the-art monster detecting equipment used by larger organizations, which can detect creatures with no heartbeat and things with excessive extra dimensional energy.

Characters have Health and Willpower, which measures their physical and mental ability to keep going, respectively. Standard damage heals quickly, while Aggravated damage takes more time, and may even require special steps that need to be taken before healing can happen. While most edged, heavy, or ballistic weapons are going to do Aggravated damage to humans, finding out a monster’s weakness is part of the process of learning how to deal with a threat, as those weaknesses often allow Hunters to deal Aggravated damage to the supernatural threat in question. Willpower can be spent to allow for rerolls, but it can also be spent when monsters do things like causing fear or dominating a character, so they can ignore the effects of those conditions.

Bonus points awarded by me for referencing a George Carlin bit when it comes to the section on flamethrowers.

Hunter’s Signature Rules

Much as Vampire the Masquerade 5th Edition introduces Hunger Dice to represent the unique threat of a vampire losing control of their Hunger, Hunter the Reckoning uses Desperation Dice to represent the growing chaos of dangerous situations Hunters may find themselves within.

The Desperation pool may go up at the end of a scene based on a number of questions about what happened in that scene. For example, Hunters taking serious harm, allowing their quarry to escape, or failing to stop the quarry from harming innocents may cause the Desperation pool to go up. But Desperation can work in the Hunter’s favor. If a Hunter can explain why their Drive is pushing them to take an action, they may add the Desperation dice to their die pool. If they do this, any 1s add to the Danger pool, and two or more 1s cause the Hunter to fall into Despair. Characters in Despair can’t use their drive to access the Desperation pool until they have taken a specific action that essentially clears their head and reinvigorates them.

The Danger Pool can be added to the difficulty of some situations. For example, it might be harder to gather information as the Danger Pool goes up, or at different Danger levels, different events might trigger, like an antagonist adding bodyguards to their retinue, or the antagonist being moved to put a Hunter’s ally or contact in danger.

The Setting (and the Perspective)

The setting is, not surprisingly, the World of Darkness. That means that this game takes place in the same world where Vampire the Masquerade 5th Edition is set, as well as the same world where the upcoming new version of Werewolf the Apocalypse will take place. That said, the perspective of the characters is decidedly mortal, and they are more likely to know about the Organizations or Orgs that also hunt, detail, or regulate monsters than they are the deep underpinnings of vampire or werewolf society.

The supernatural is a secret that is just barely under the surface of the world. There are airport scanners that can detect vampires and alert federal agencies when they get off an airplane. There are international collaborative efforts to share information about monsters between the agencies of various nations, and Homeland Security has vampires listed as terrorists.

There are branches of the FBI dedicated to handling vampire threats, and an organization that nominally answers to the DoD that might recruit hunters or even the supernatural to protect American interests against other supernatural threats. We also get some glimpses of the government anti-monster forces from Brazil, Mexico, and the Philippines. There is a long-established Vatican affiliated monster hunting order, as well as a cult of purity that seeks to not only rid the world of monsters, but also of any actions that lead to disharmony. Corporations don’t get left out either, as there are private security firms that specialize in monster hunting, companies that develop mass produced weapons and gear for monster hunting groups, and even a company using a gig based app to help people get revenge on the monsters that may have harmed them or their loved ones.

The game assumes that your Hunters will not belong to an org, although they may have in the past. The focus is on individual cells trying to hunt monsters while also threading the needle between the interests of the various orgs, that may help, hinder, or complicate the lives of the hunters. It’s made clear that the orgs all have something going against them that makes them less than desirable employers. Some of them may only seek to gain information about monsters, but not eliminate them. Others may be only working to control the supernatural rather than eliminate it. Still others are very narrow about how humanity itself should be living their lives.

Hunters come from various creeds. Essentially, the creeds are the general mindset and approach a Hunter uses when adopting the lifestyle, including the following:

• Entrepreneurial
• Faithful
• Inquisitive
• Martial
• Underground

There are nuances to all of these creeds. The Entrepreneurial may not just be about monetizing their monster hunting, but about making sure the cell can pay its bills and afford to do research on how to hunt monsters more efficiently. The Faithful may have a complicated relationship with orgs that have similar beliefs. The Inquisitive might get in trouble because they are looking for the “big picture,” while threats right in front of them may be endangering them. The Martial is less likely to do long term planning if they feel they have the tools they need and can act right now. The Underground may be in so much trouble that they can only reach out to others that are on the wrong side of the law, but this can also provide cells with more resources than they might otherwise have.

The difference between Hunters and hunters isn’t a supernatural ability to hunt monsters, but the fact that Hunters have a Drive. The hunters that work for orgs might not like monsters, or they may like the paycheck they get for fighting them. They might feel like they are doing the right thing in fighting creatures of the night. But Hunters have a Drive that pushes them to fight monsters, which ties in with The Reckoning. The Reckoning is the belief that the world is at a pivotal moment, and the darker side of the supernatural has to be opposed now, or else it may be too late to avert a disaster.

Much of what differentiates Hunter the Reckoning from monster hunting games without a built-in setting is the relationship of the Hunters with the orgs. You can use the rules to hunt a different monster each session, but that misses some of what makes the setting unique. Orgs might hire the cell as temporary freelancers, only to hang them out to dry. The cell might have a dedicated org team as recurring rivals, or they may even steal some of the toys that have been developed by the bigger orgs with the big budgets when they really need the upper hand.

Supernatural Threats

The example threats help to shape the narrative of Hunter. There are general stats for things like vampires and werewolves, but there are also named, unique threats from a variety of locations. Vampires and werewolves aren’t framed in terms of what clan or tribe they are from, and they don’t reference the politics of their social structure. Hunters work hard just to learn about the weaknesses of various monsters, let alone find out about deep social structures.

Monsters have simplified expressions for their statistics. Rather than having specific Attributes and Skills, they have Standard Dice Pools for Physical, Social, and Mental tasks. They also have Abilities and Weaknesses. These include Regenerate (recover X amount of health per turn), or Vulnerability (Damage from this source is Aggravated and can’t be Regenerated), as well as other Abilities and Weaknesses.

Most of the example vampires and werewolves presented are loners that have broken off from wider organizations. You might find a loner vampire running a criminal empire, or one that is a bizarre mutated experiment. A werewolf might be an old creature ready to go down in a blaze of glory, that has learned to become invisible in the shadows, or a vigilante werewolf that takes offense when they see Confederate flags or belligerently jingoistic folk.

There are also sorcerers, people using magic they don’t understand, ghosts with unique stories, science experiments, and fey adjacent predators. The main unifying factor is that the Hunters will need to do research to learn about who is getting harmed, by what, and how to stop it. Not every monster needs to be destroyed. For example, some ghosts really just need to know that some loose end from their life will be addressed.

This section of the book is great from an expectation setting standpoint, and also one of the roughest parts of the ruleset. Mechanically, monsters use a simplified version of the rules used for the game itself, which makes them easy to reskin and relatively easy to run. Where the difficulty comes is the narrative elements.

On the up side, this section doesn’t present the United States as the center of the universe, with plot hooks from various places like Mexico and the Philippines as well. The downside is that some narratives can be much more fraught depending on the context in which they are presented.

Out of context, some of the scenarios can make other countries seem more prone to corruption than America, frame immigrants as victims, use transplant recipients as victims, and presents a handsome male presenting creature that is pansexual as a dangerous individual that takes out their frustration about not knowing what they want in a mate as the motive for their supernatural assaults.

As an example, many of the narratives present supernatural events happening in economically disadvantaged areas. The plot hooks around the Philippines and Mexico introduce a lot of government corruption, and there are a few recurring situations where migrants attempting to reach the US are put in danger, or are flat out murdered. In at least one of these situations, there is almost a whimsical aspect to the supernatural threat that is in stark contrast to how characters are introduced to the existence of the threat, that being a migrant woman dying in childbirth.

I don’t doubt that the designers adding these story hooks were trying to diversify the range of possible stories. The problem I have is that if you have Hunters from outside of the communities being presented resolving these situations, it’s really easy to devolve into a White Savior narrative. While I think you can create a satisfying narrative about opposing monsters that prey on the disenfranchised and vulnerable, there are a lot of narratives that revolve around that assumption, and I feel like there needs to be a little more in the way of guidance to avoid the pitfalls of those narrative elements.

I want to be clear in saying that I don’t think any of these story hooks are automatically bad, just that with the current state of the modern world, it would be very easy to fall into harmful tropes if the Storyteller isn’t careful about how they use these hooks.

Setting Expectations

There are a few sections in the book that deal with setting expectations. The first section that deals with this is in the Storytelling section, under Chronicle Tenets. There are four examples of these tenets in this section, and they set the expectations for the campaign. For example, is it just known to all of the Hunters that you don’t endanger innocents? Is the story going to feature redemption arcs? Is the story going to explore the vices that the Hunters indulge to make their lives more bearable, in light of the horrific supernatural events they have seen?

The next section that deals with this is the Advice for Considerate Play Appendix, which is six pages long, and deals with topics like safety tools at the table, what is and isn’t acceptable as part of the story, and how to talk about uncomfortable situations that come up in play. In addition to presenting calibration techniques and active safety tools for play, there is also a section for additional reading.

Given the tone of the setting, and the general horror genre, I think these are both important sections to include, and both sections are well done. Because they focus on empathy and player driven calibration, I do think they still fall a little short of addressing some of the potential context issues in the Supernatural Threats chapter, but paying close attention to this section and having an open play environment will definitely help to de-escalate situations that might arise from mismatched expectations and context.

Closing In

 I like the way that the Desperation system is similar to, but distinct from, the Hunger dice in Vampire, and I’m thrilled that the Orgs presented help to frame a very distinct monster hunting setting within a genre that has a lot of different options. 

I have to admit, other games that are connected to World of Darkness properties feel like they sometimes present relatively simple rules in ways that make them feel less transparent. This text does a good job of avoiding that pitfall, and making the systems and subsystems very clear. I like the way that the Desperation system is similar to, but distinct from, the Hunger dice in Vampire, and I’m thrilled that the Orgs presented help to frame a very distinct monster hunting setting within a genre that has a lot of different options.

Lost Opportunity

I think the Supernatural Threats chapter is extremely ambitious when it comes to providing deeper, meaningful story hooks, but a little more discussion about what context could be harmful would help immensely. While I think this is very player friendly when it comes to people’s first contact with World of Darkness games, it’s really easy to establish some truths in a Hunter game that may not line up with the greater World of Darkness, if those new players engage with the wider product line.

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.

If you are a fan of modern urban fantasy and monster hunting, I think this will be an easy recommendation, although it’s important to understand the potential tone of the setting before picking up the game. Even if you don’t employ the story elements involved, some of the content can be heavy to engage. I’m also interested to see how well people will transition from what is essentially a “lighter touch” regarding lore as they transition from this game to Vampire, if they choose to do so.

What kind of urban fantasy do you enjoy? If you enjoy monster hunting, what are your favorite examples of media that involves monster hunters? We want to hear from you in the comments below!

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Like any vacation, Gen Con is a mixed bag of mostly fun and minor frustration. Sometimes you roll a 20 and occasionally you roll a 1. This year was a mixed dice bag, but I’m grateful to have the opportunity to visit Indy, enjoy the Con, and hang out with my gaming fam. In this article, I will be addressing the good and the bad parts of the adventure.

The Good

There were a lot of good moments at Gen Con 2022, but for brevity’s sake I’d like to highlight three memorable events: one features an author, another a game store, and the third is the hotel stay.

Elevator Fan Girl

Steve and I are in the elevator going down to breakfast and there’s a sweet, shy man holding a sign that has the Slaying the Dragon book cover. (This book was referenced in an earlier Gnome Stew article-check it out!) I exclaimed and said, “Hey, I’m reading that book!” The man quips, “Hey, I wrote that book!” Ben Riggs probably wanted to fetch his coffee and escape from this elevator fan girl, but he was gracious. Steve and I stopped by his booth several times to have our copy signed, but the elusive Ben was away, so we ended up with a signed book card. That would suffice.

Good Games Indianapolis

We strolled down South Meridian Street, people-watched (lots of cosplay here), and ventured to Good Games Indianapolis. It’s a nifty shop that is much bigger inside than it looks from the outside. I can’t say enough good things about the staff and the merch, as they were friendly and helpful. I left the store with a Bard miniature for a new 5e character, a jumbo D20 die, and a game called Cat Lady.

Hotel

We were lucky in the lottery this year and ended up staying at our favorite place, The Hilton. The staff was also gracious to us and allowed us to commandeer a table and play our annual Saturday night game in their bar area. Check-in and check-out were seamless, and the discounted breakfast was tasty. Also, I had a new haircut, hot stone massage (highly recommend!), and a pedicure.

The Bad

I like to focus on the positive without being too Pollyanna about it. There were only a few blips this con. For us, the bad was due to limited mobility, schedules, and weather.

Limited Mobility

Unfortunately, I am currently experiencing post-op complications which limits my mobility to walk long distances without pain.  So, I couldn’t visit the Con as often as I would have liked. But I made my own fun by getting a new haircut, a massage, and a pedicure. (The spa at the Hilton is terrific! I made new friends there.)

Schedules

  This is the one bad instance that we can control, and moving forward, will do. Steve GMs four games for the Con, and that is awesome and all, but we hardly saw each other. Next year, Steve will either limit the number of games to run, or we will coordinate schedules better, so we have some time to spend together.

Weather

  Luckily, except for the Food Trucks, the Con is held indoors, so we’re not stuck inside on a tropical island. However, it rained most of the weekend, and it made travelling a little more difficult. Other than that, it wasn’t a big deal.

 Did you visit any conventions this year? How were your experiences?

 

 

 

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I’m currently running a D&D game in the Final Fantasy XIV world setting using a modified version of the excellent FFXIV x DND homebrew. At its core, it’s still D&D 5e, but I’ve been taking the opportunities the setting gives me to tweak and open up some of the systems to fit the more modular and open gaming style I tend to enjoy. I already wrote one article about the Point Buy Feats system I created to give my players more diverse options. Today I want to drop my setup for removing a ton of complexity from the D&D item system.

Why Change Things?

I’ve always had a few personal issues with the way money and currency are handled in D&D games. I played way back when, in the days of 2e, and I get where the system has its historical roots. It works fine, but it always feels off. Whether it’s bribing a guard with what would be a year’s salary or realizing that the prices this “poor blacksmith” is selling their goods for should result in them living in opulent wealth, it just never seems to add up in a way that is quite understandable. If the tech level differs a bit or there are more advanced options in the world, the system feels even more off balance. Sure, you just handwave and move along so you can get to the fun parts of the game, but I’ve always felt there are better ways.

I’ve tried using skill and resource based systems like in old World of Darkness games, and I’ve dipped into not bothering with it at all and just pushing those elements to the narrative. The issue always comes back to the players wanting to have that ‘gaining money’ experience, and it’s hard to do that without some quantification of the resource. It’s rarely satisfying to say “The quest giver offers you a ‘good amount of money’ to do this job” and then move on. Would the characters be motivated beyond the danger? Would they want more? How much more should they negotiate for? Would they scoff and not take the danger on for that paltry sum? So, from a narrative perspective, money needs at least a little definition to create the experience that fits the scope of D&D games. Really, all games in any setting need some sort of conceptualization of money if it is at all a part of the tropes. Would the elite merc group take on the deadly mission for $500? Would the tramp freighter group try to run the imperial blockade for 4,000 credits? Without some concept of relative worth, some of the verisimilitude breaks down, but the super detailed and accurate item accounting can cause it’s own issues and be a pain to keep track of. So, what’s the solution?

Relative Costs

I’ve played around with lots of ways to get around the issues I find in the D&D currency system, but the one that resonates and seems to fix most of my issues is figuring out the relative costs for some important categories and providing an adequate range for items of that type. Making a kind of matrix of value in the game world. Having the range of costs for a basic category gives you enough flexibility to quickly figure out a price for almost anything, while also allowing you to vary up things based on market conditions.

Here are my relative costs for my FFXIVxDND game. Everything is converted to GIL for my world, but if you wanted to convert this back to stock D&D quickly consider using the silver standard. You could just change Gil to Silver and tweak as needed to fit your own pricing desires. The “Silver Standard” paradigm is a popular way to re-conceptualize and make the D&D prices feel more understandable. It dovetails nicely enough with the Gil. I’m always a fan of a named currency rather than currency being a standardized piece of a precious metal.

 

Basic Goods (In Gil)

Cost Range (Gil)	Mundane Item	Ammunition (Per piece)	Adventuring Gear	Apothecary / Herbalism Item
Cheap	1 – 10 Gil	1 Gil	1 – 20 Gil	10 – 30 Gil
Moderate	10 – 30 Gil	1 – 2 Gil	30 – 75 Gil	30 – 150 Gil
Expensive	30 – 75 Gil	3 – 5 Gil	75 – 300 Gil	150 – 500 Gil
Very Expensive	75 – 150 Gil	6 – 40 Gil	300 – 1,000 Gil	500 – 2,000 Gil
Extravagant	150 – 1,000 Gil	40 – 100 Gil	1,000 – 5,000 Gil	2,000 – 5,000 Gil

 

Lifestyle (In Gil)

Cost Range (Gil)	Food and Drink (Full Meal)	Food and Drink (Single Item)	Lodging (Inn Stay)	Lifestyle / Pay (Day)	Lifestyle / Salary (Month)
Cheap	5 – 15 Gil	2 – 4 Gil	20 – 40 Gil	10 – 30 Gil	300 – 900 Gil
Moderate	15 – 30 Gil	6 – 12 Gil	40 – 80 Gil	30 – 80 Gil	900 – 2,400 Gil
Expensive	30 – 60 Gil	12 – 20 Gil	80 – 150 Gil	80 – 120 Gil	2,400 – 3,600 Gil
Very Expensive	60 – 100 Gil	20 – 40 Gil	150 – 300 Gil	120 – 200 Gil	3,600 – 6,000 Gil
Extravagant	100 – 200 Gil	40 – 60 Gil	300 – 500 Gil	200 – 500 Gil	6,000 – 15,000 Gil

 

Travel (In Gil, Per person)

Distance	Cart / Mount	Boat	Airship	Aetheryte
Short	10 – 30 Gil	30 – 60 Gil	80 – 100 Gil	150 – 300 Gil
Moderate	30 – 50 Gil	60 – 100 Gil	100 – 300 Gil	300 – 600 Gil
Far	50 – 200 Gil	100 – 250 Gil	300 – 500 Gil	600 – 900 Gil
Very Far	200 – 400 Gil	250 – 500 Gil	500 – 900 Gil	900 – 1500 Gil
Extreme	400 – 1000 Gil	500 – 900 Gil	900 – 1,200+ Gil	1,500+ Gil

 

Special / Magic Item General Price

Modified from the DMG chart, magic item prices will vary greatly depending on usage. This chart is for general consideration only.

Rarity	Char Level	Bonus	Value
Common	1st or higher	–	100 – 500 Gil
Uncommon	1st or higher	–	500 -5,000 Gil
Rare	5th or higher	+1	5,000 – 50,000 Gil
Very rare	11th or higher	+2	50,00 – 250,000 Gil
Legendary	17th or higher	+3	250,000+ Gil

 

The Breakdown – Or what’s so great about this?

What I love about this setup is that I can instantly ditch set item prices. I have converted a lot of the D&D items to Gil within this paradigm, but when it comes down to figuring out how much some item should cost that isn’t listed, I’ve got some lines I can color within. Maybe a player gets a very smart idea to bribe the librarian for the arcanum they need access to with a super nice journal or a rare book. All I have to do is consider what category it is within – let’s say low range of extravagant – and give the player some options. Perhaps give them a choice between a journal bound in rare leather and transported from a far away land for about 180 gil or a tome of Ben Hur 1860, third edition with the erratum on page 116 for only 376 gil. Both rare books, simple enough to figure out a price without referencing the item lists and then trying to determine how much it might be based off of standard D&D.

Book prices aren’t written up anywhere I know of in the stock D&D setting, and their value may change depending on setting and the rarity. With the relative system in place, all I have to do is decide if they are common or extravagant and decide how much this area may have one available for. Take a common item such as a set of blacksmith’s tools. I could determine that it is cheaper in a more populous area (say 65 gil for a hammer and tongs) while in a frontier outpost it costs more (125 gil) because of lack of supply and demand. I just have to target what I want the cost to represent for the item. Working with ranges lets you be flexible.

As you can see from the breakdowns I wrote up, you can also create ranges for many different types of sellable items or services. Modifying lifestyle options lets you get a general idea of how much a good bribe might be or how much fancy meals would cost within the range. With travel I can make the categories representative rather than 3 gil per mile and have to figure out the math. I can also break out of the ranges for special circumstances. Sure, it’s only a short travel by airship or boat but the island is supposed to be haunted and the captain requires triple the pay per person.

The Real Handwave – Real World Pricing

One more thing I like to do to ease things even more is make things equivalent to common scope of real world items. Matching what you and your players understand as real world value in USD, CAD, Euro, Rands, Yen, etc. and building the categories based off of that will let you just come up with prices immediately. You could even shift your money system by an amount if you wanted to make it feel unique but still match a common understanding of value. If something would cost 20 dollars USD you could decide it is around 200 gil in the game setting because everything is about 10x real world prices in gil. Something that wouldn’t be mass manufactured may accommodate the hand crafting cost, but  – if you match to real world money paradigms, much easier to figure things out. if you don’t, and you set up your relative price ranges well you can still easily grok general costs. You may look up hand made soap on Etsy and see people sell it for around 4 to 6 bucks per piece. Great – that’s 4 gil to 6 gil or 400 gil to 600 gil if you are shifting prices for a unique feeling.

Final Thoughts

This is not a system based in realism, except where it is. Maybe it’s more true to say it isn’t a system based in exacts, but neither are real world money systems. Look almost anything up on amazon or any similar marketplace and you’ll see pricing varies greatly for goods that are made by multiple different manufacturers. The same goods also cost different prices in different locations. Anything on an island is usually more expensive because of supply chain costs and buying something from an open air market compared to an established shop will see great variation in the costs. This is a system more about defining the value than the exacts, and that can be incredibly freeing. The paradigm works across many settings and it becomes easy to shift and move when the current game situation requires it.

What do you think about relative money systems like this? Do you see yourself using something like this to ease some bookkeeping? What other categories would you create to accommodate your in-game needs?

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Felipe Pepe (RPG historian) looks back at the old MMO Tibia: How a 25-year-old German MMO became a Pokémon fangame AKA Brazilians strikes again When talking about the pioneer MMORPGs of the 90s — Meridian 59, Ultima Online, EverQuest, etc — there is a name that is often overlooked: Tibia, a German free-to-play MMO first released in 1997.... Read more »

Destructoid checked out The DioField Chronicle: Review: The DioField Chronicle You thought it was turn based, but it was me, DioField The DioField Chronicle is an odd one among the cavalcade of tactics we’ve seen this year. It’s real-time, rather than turn-based; it’s about tight, compact skirmishes rather than drawn-out battles.... Read more »

Vallun reviewed Cyberpunk 2077: Cyberpunk 2077 No Spoiler Review in 2022 Read more »

WolfheartFPS looks back at Kingdom Come Deliverance: This RPG is a Masterpiece in 2022.. (Kingdom Come Deliverance Review)   Read more »

Skyrim is now available on GOG with both Special Edition and Anniversary Edition variants. Currently the Anniversary Edition is 50% off with the Special Edition also discounted for 67% off. Winner of more than 200 Game of the Year Awards, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim celebrates 10 years of adventuring in stunning detail.... Read more »

Valheim is now available through the Xbox Game Pass according to the Twitter account. Gather all of your viking friends and get ready for adventure! #Valheim is now available with @XboxGamePassPC Read more »

SureAI's Dreadful River will be released on February 23, 2023 -> Tweet. Read more »

IGN checked out The DioField Chronicle: The Diofield Chronicles Review Read more »

Tactical Adventures posted a dev update for Solasta, in which they present the dragonborn race: ev Update #30 - Back with the Dragonborn! Hey there folks! It's been more than a year since our last proper Dev Update (which marked the end of our Early Access!), with Solasta gradually growing larger and larger with new classes, races, improvements, a higher level cap and even another campaign.... Read more »

With thousands of adventures written before the release of the 5th edition of D&D, we have a huge legacy of content we can use in our games. All it needs is some conversion.

Luckily, converting adventures to 5th edition is easy enough to do. It mostly come down to replacing the monsters in the adventure with monster from the Monster Manual. Choose the one closest to the one described in the adventure and you're done. If a monster in the adventure doesn't have a 5th edition equivalent (and I'd be surprised, there are literally thousands of 5e monsters these days), take the mechanically closest monster you can find in 5e and reskin it into the one described in the adventure.

1st and 2nd edition D&D adventures are likely easiest to convert over to 5th edition. They're style aligns closely to the adventure style found in 5th edition. If you're worried that battles are too hard once you've done the conversion, use the lazy encounter benchmark to check what a deadly encounter might look like. If things are easy, you may want to beef up boss battles, but you can likely leave the rest of it alone.

What about scaling adventures up or down in level? This is a little tricker. Again, using the lazy encounter benchmark and monster dials, you can do a lot to change up the difficulty of an adventure.

There's one area where leveling an adventure up or down can be a problem though, and it has nothing to do with mechanics, it has to do with theme.

The Right Theme for the Right Tier

In Tier Appropriate Adventure Locations I offer a list of the types of locations that make sense for characters of a given tier. When I describe choosing the monsters that makes sense for the situation, we don't choose monsters based on the level of the characters. Instead we choose quests, locations, and overall situations that make sense for the current status (level) of the characters. You don't ask 1st level characters to drop into Thanatos and kill Orcus. Nor do you ask 18th level characters to go down into Uncle Ed's cellars to take care of his giant rat problem. (I've often considered a quest in which Uncle Ed sends 18th level characters into his basement to take care of his Orcus problem.) Quests should match the character's capabilities and station in the world (often represented by level) and this all has to do with story, not mechanics. Here's a quick breakdown of what that looks like:

• 1st level (tier 0). Small problems. Rats in the basement of the local inn.
• 2nd to 4th level (tier 1). Local problems. Bandits, thieves, local evil mercenaries.
• 5th to 10th level (tier 2). Regional problems. Evil kingdoms. Rampaging dragons. Invading undead armies.
• 11th to 16th level (tier 3). Global problems. World-ending magic. Lichs. Ancient dragons. Invading planar beings. Evil moons.
• 17th to 20th level (tier 4). Multiverse problems. Planar doomsday weapons. Demon princes. Archdevils. Archlichs. Invasions of the Nine Hells. Abyssal apocalypses.

When you're scaling an adventure for the characters, ask if the theme of the adventure fits the level of the characters using the breakdown above. Is this the kind of job they should be doing? Are they too powerful and important to deal with such things? Are they too weak to take on a big job? Matching the theme of an adventure to the power of the characters matters.

Can you change the entire theme of an adventure to fit the characters? Maybe, but that's probably not worth the effort. Better is to find an adventure that makes sense for the characters.

Last Week's Lazy D&D Talk Show Topics

Each week I record an episode of the Lazy D&D Talk Show in which I talk about all things D&D. Here are last week's topics with timestamped links to the YouTube video:

• Amazing Encounters and Places by CZRPG
• Apocalypse Keys by Evil Hat Games
• D&D Beyond, Limiting Character Options, and Third Party Products
• The Sly Flourish Stream Bingo Card
• Running the Same Campaign for Multiple Groups
• D&D Plots and Inspiration from Westerns
• Conflicting Secrets and Clues? No Thanks!
• Describing Your DM Style to New Players

Related Articles

• Tier Appropriate Adventure Locations
• Building 1st Level Combat Encounters
• Choose Monsters Based on the Story
• Running Dragon of Icespire Peak from the D&D Essentials Kit
• Scaling the Story to the Level of the Characters

Get More from Sly Flourish

• Read more Sly Flourish articles
• Buy Sly Flourish's Books
• Watch Sly Flourish's YouTube videos
• Subscribe to Sly Flourish's Podcast
• Support Sly Flourish on Patreon

Buy Sly Flourish's Books

• Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master
• The Lazy DM's Companion
• Lazy DM's Workbook
• Fantastic Lairs
• Fantastic Adventures: Ruins of the Grendleroot
• Fantastic Adventures

Read more »

Sometimes we need a way to quickly break character and check in with the players. This might be part of a set of safety tools to make sure everyone's ok with the content of our game at any given point or it might be a way to arbitrate the results of a decision by speaking to the players instead of the characters.

The X-Card by John Stavropoulos is one of the more popular safety tools often used to indicate one's discomfort with a given situation in a non-confrontational way. It's popular enough that Roll20 integrated it directly into their game platform.

The X-card is an excellent tool but it's not the easiest thing to incorporate in an online game. Instead, we can look to one of the elements of Beau Sheldon's script change. In particular the element of "pause". I call this "Pause for a Minute" and here's how it works:

• At any point, any player or the DM can say "pause for a minute". All in-character and out-of-character conversations stop.
• Whoever paused can either talk about their current thought, ask for a break, or ask to talk to the DM privately.
• When the situation is resolved, the DM can say "game on" and the game returns.

Players or DMs can call for a pause for any of the following reasons:

• They're uncomfortable with something going on in-game.
• They're not happy with a decision getting made by the characters.
• They want to clarify that everyone else is ok with what they're doing.
• The DM wants to ensure everyone's ok with the direction things are going.
• They want to figure out where everyone is in the story or catch up after losing track.

During a session zero DMs can discuss how to use "pause for a minute" and what it means for the DM and the players.

For more on this topic, see the following:

• SF Video on Safety Tools
• SF Article on Safety Tools
• 60 Seconds on Pause for a Minute

Not Just For Safety

The most important use of "pause for a minute" is to make sure players and the DM are ok with the content or situations going on in a game. It gives everyone a way to say "hang on, I'm not digging this" and stop it before it cascades into something worse.

But another use for "pause for a minute" is to ensure everyone's having a good time and on the same page. This is a great way to break out of the dreaded "it's what my character would do" situations. Pausing for a minute doesn't have to be matter of emotional safety; it can just be a way for the players to break away from the drives of their characters and make sure those drives align with the other characters and the game itself.

"Pause for a minute" helps us deal with in-character conflicts like rogues stealing from the group or wizards fireballing their allies.

"Pause for a minute. Rex, are you ok if Elfuel fireballs you to kill all the skeletons around you? Yes? Cool! Game on."

Use It Frequently

Because "pause for a minute" can be used for a wide range of situations, DMs should regularly use it to get players comfortable with using it themselves and to make sure players are good with the game.

"Pause for a minute. Is everyone ok with Gor using animate dead on the dead drow warriors? Oh yeah, I forget you all had a zombie ogre carting around your loot for the last eleven months. Game on!"

The more comfortable everyone is using "pause for a minute", the easier it becomes for someone to use it when it is a matter of emotional safety. As long as it's always respected — everyone breaks character and stops conversations to hear what the pausing player has to say — using it frequently only makes games better.

Try It Out

Some DMs find the whole concept of safety tools strange or somehow insulting. I urge you to keep an open mind. I didn't often use or integrate safety tools into my games and I regret it. It doesn't have to be a group of players you don't know. Someone you've known and gamed with for 20 years could be affected by something happening in-game and be upset by it. Do you really not want to offer an opportunity for someone to avoid feeling bad?

Beyond that, a tool like "pause for a minute" just helps a game run smoother. It's a great way to step away from the characters and talk to your players. It's a great way to re-baseline and move forward with the awesome adventures to come.

Add "pause for a minute" to your session zero or even talk about it with your players in the middle of the campaign. Tell them how to use it. Tell them what it's for. Use it to help steer your game in the right direction, and enjoy the tales you all share around the table.

Last Week's Lazy D&D Talk Show Topics

Each week I record an episode of the Lazy D&D Talk Show in which I talk about all things D&D. Here are last week's topics with timestamped links to the YouTube video:

• Wastes of Chaos by Kobold Press
• New Lazy D&D Talk Show Topic Database for Patrons
• Anatomy of an Adventure by MT Black
• Path of the Planebreaker by Monte Cook Games
• Dealing with Secret Truths of a Campaign World
• AI-generated Art and the Lazy DM

Related Articles

• D&D Safety Tools
• Facilitating Choices
• Talking To Your Players
• Dealing with D&D Pre-Game Nervousness
• Take a Break

Get More from Sly Flourish

• Read more Sly Flourish articles
• Buy Sly Flourish's Books
• Watch Sly Flourish's YouTube videos
• Subscribe to Sly Flourish's Podcast
• Support Sly Flourish on Patreon

Buy Sly Flourish's Books

• Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master
• The Lazy DM's Companion
• Lazy DM's Workbook
• Fantastic Lairs
• Fantastic Adventures: Ruins of the Grendleroot
• Fantastic Adventures

Read more »

From this moment forward, consider yourself given the freedom to change monsters as you see fit for the fun of your game.

You, of course, had this freedom all along but I suspect some DMs feel like modifying monster stat blocks, particularly in the middle of a session, is "cheating".

It's not.

It takes experience to know what to add to a monster to make it interesting in the moment. It's not something a new DM can likely do without breaking something. But eventually we run enough monsters to have some back-pocket special abilities we can add to a monster. Maybe it's as simple as an extra attack. Maybe it's some elemental damage. Maybe it's a spell effect. I loved adding spell effects to armored flesh golems in my Tomb of Annihilation game. Every flesh golem was a unique horror.

When should we consider such changes? Sometimes we want a monster to act more appropriately dangerous mechanically to fit its story. Sometimes we want to change up a monster the players are already used to seeing. Sometimes we want to change a boring encounter into a nail-biter. Sometimes we want to make a monster unique.

What are some simple ways you can modify existing stat blocks? Here are a few. For DCs, make the DC 12 + 1/2 the CR of the monster.

• Strength save or be knocked prone.
• Strength save or be pushed back.
• Super-fast movement that doesn't provoke opportunity attacks.
• A ranged attack if they don't have one (use one of its melee attack stats but reflavor it).
• An extra attack if they could use another.
• Pack tactics.
• A whirlwind or ground stomp attack that attacks adjacent enemies.
• Constitution save or be poisoned until the end of the monster's next tur.
• Elemental damage based on the monster's story to its weapon attack. Consider 3 (1d6) damage up to CR 5, 7 (2d6) at CR 5 to 10, 14 (4d6) at CR 11 to 16, 28 (8d6) at CR 17+.
• A fire shield like damaging shield. Consider 4 (1d8) damage up to CR 4, 9 (2d8) at CR 5 to 10, 13 (3d8) at CR 11 to 16, 18 (4d8) at CR 17+. Flavor the damage based on the monster's story.
• A spirit guardians like damage aura in which those who start within or enter it take damage. Consider 9 (2d8) damage up to CR 4, 13 (3d8) at CR 5 to 10, 18 (4d8) at CR 11 to 16, 27 (6d8) at CR 17+. Flavor the damage based on the monster's story.

Of course, these new abilities should make sense for the monster and for the situation. Flavor these abilities in the fiction of the game. Telegraph them so players can see the monster's doing something different. Show the fire giant who sets its blade ablaze. Describe flails dripping with acid or assassins surrounded by the screaming spirits of their slain victims. Show the vampiric-touched ghoul who moves faster than the eye can see. Wrap your mechanical changes in interesting flavorful descriptions.

Add these abilities when they make combat more interesting or tell a more interesting story. Don't add them to punish players, particularly to punish players for good ideas or good luck. And don't go overboard. One modification per monster is often enough. Bosses might have lots of things to do but a normal monster might just have a kicker effect on its normal attack.

Become comfortable enough with the mechanics of D&D to be confident adding these sorts of changes. Once you start to get comfortable, once you see your players enjoying the change in tactics and mechanics, you'll know you're in the right place.

Last Week's Lazy D&D Talk Show Topics

Each week I record an episode of the Lazy D&D Talk Show in which I talk about all things D&D. Here are last week's topics with timestamped links to the YouTube video:

• One D&D Origins Playtest Survey
• Mastering Dungeons on the Origins One D&D Playtest
• World of Dead Temples and Secrets of Summervine Villa
• Spelljammer Errata
• Dungeon Delver's Guide
• Planegea
• I don't Review Third Party Products I Don't Like
• 5e Isn't 5e Compatible - We're On Our Own
• Strongest Criticism of Lazy DM Advice
• Adding a New Player Mid Campaign
• Spelljammer for New Players
• Adventure Anthologies and Heists
• Awarding Gold with the Lazy DM's Companion
• Tips for Reaching a Satisfying Campaign Conclusion

Related Articles

• Instant NPCs for Fifth Edition D&D
• Add Necrotic Damage
• Making Monsters Interesting
• Customizing Monsters
• D&D's Nastier Specials

Get More from Sly Flourish

• Read more Sly Flourish articles
• Buy Sly Flourish's Books
• Watch Sly Flourish's YouTube videos
• Subscribe to Sly Flourish's Podcast
• Support Sly Flourish on Patreon

Buy Sly Flourish's Books

• Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master
• The Lazy DM's Companion
• Lazy DM's Workbook
• Fantastic Lairs
• Fantastic Adventures: Ruins of the Grendleroot
• Fantastic Adventures

Read more »

Give cool titles to your villains.

This is a trick I picked up from an excellent post on Reddit about stealing tricks from WWE and from playing Dark Souls and Elden Ring (the From Software developers absolutely nailed names)

• Bertana, Singer of Souls
• Avelyn, The Viper's Kiss
• Thoas, Heroes' Fall
• Thornheart, The King's Sword
• Tiberius, The Black Blade
• Adala, Winter's Touch
• Vorug, The Poison Bloom
• Gorzum, Chaos Born
• Rydel, The Red Whisper
• Zenoch, Spawn of the Black Pit

Giving a villain a title defines them in your campaign, both for you and your players. While proper names are easily forgotten (by both you and your players), a name with a title sticks in our minds.

Titles like these make villains important in the mind of players. They are someone. You're not just facing the troll Venog. You're facing Venog the Blight Bringer. You can almost feel the epic music queue up when they appear in the game.

Generating names like this often starts with a good fantasy name generator. This Dark Souls Name Generator gets the creative juices going. You can also draw titles from your mind when you write them down. What would others know them by? What deeds have they committed? What interesting effects do they bring to combat?

When you say it out loud, does the name sound cool? Feel free to enjoy the campy nature of the name. As Clarksvillain DM on Twitter says, channel your inner five-year-old. Would you buy the action figure?

A truly powerful villain may be known by many names. Their reputation might expand into multiple groups who give them multiple names. Endelyn Moongrave, one of the three hags of the Hourglass Coven in Wild Beyond the Witchlight has many titles including Bitter End, Creeping Lyn, and the Dame of Unhappy Endings. Players can enjoy drawing connections, tying multiple names and multiple reputations down to just one single villain. The more powerful a villain, the more titles they likely hold.

Give your villains titles. Write those titles down in your prep notes. Watch their importance grow in the stories you share.

Last Week's Lazy D&D Talk Show Topics

Each week I record an episode of the Lazy D&D Talk Show in which I talk about all things D&D. Here are last week's topics with timestamped links to the YouTube video:

• WOTC Offering Refunds for Dragonlance Pre-Orders
• Horror at Devil's Run
• Sebastian Crowe's Guide to Drakkenheim
• Spelljammer - Adventure's In Space Boxed Set
• Is Witchlight Still Great Without Dreadful Incursions?
• How Well Does Numenera's Stat Point Spend and Roll Negotiation Work?
• How Much Character Background for New Players?
• Making a Dungeon Feel Like a Megadungeon
• Actionable and Relevant Secrets and Clues

Related Articles

• Build Resilient and Evolving Villainous Plots
• Dealing with D&D Pre-Game Nervousness
• Add Dreadful Incursions to Wild Beyond the Witchlight
• Music for D&D
• Build Resilient Campaigns

Get More from Sly Flourish

• Read more Sly Flourish articles
• Buy Sly Flourish's Books
• Watch Sly Flourish's YouTube videos
• Subscribe to Sly Flourish's Podcast
• Support Sly Flourish on Patreon

Buy Sly Flourish's Books

• Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master
• The Lazy DM's Companion
• Lazy DM's Workbook
• Fantastic Lairs
• Fantastic Adventures: Ruins of the Grendleroot
• Fantastic Adventures

Read more »

Playing a D&D game is a magical experience. Where else do we get to sit together with our friends and all share in an imaginary world of fantasy and wonder?

This experience becomes stronger the more we immerse ourselves in the world.

What helps immerse you in the D&D games you share with your friends?

I took the question to Twitter, asking what most immersed players in the world of D&D. You can read the thread here.

Common Trends for Immersion

Common themes across the roughly 130 replies to the tweet including:

• Music
• Art
• Maps
• Props
• No Phones
• Character Agency
• Clear Goals
• Living Worlds
• Senses; Smell, Taste, Touch
• Using miniatures
• Evocative in-world details
• Closing one's eyes and thinking about the world in the first person
• Good roleplay

Yes, pot was also on the list but that's a topic for some other blog.

Think First Person

"If you want to view paradise, simply look around and view it."

• Willy Wonka

If I was to offer the single best way for DMs and players to both get into D&D, it would be this:

Close your eyes and imagine the world through the eyes of the characters.

You can do this anywhere, anytime, and use it to think about your world as part of prep or to get deeper into your character. You can do it before bed. You can do it in a boring meeting. You can do it during a walk. Spend a moment to imagine the world, not from the clouds but as though you were standing right there.

You can, of course, do this in-game as well. As a DM, you're probably not actually going to close your eyes, but you can do so during your prep and capture the details you note in your mind's eye.

If you're a player and the DM begins to describe something. Stop for a minute, close your eyes, and let their voice build the image in your head. What does it look like? What does it feel like? What grabs your attention?

Let yourself go there.

Capture the Senses

Many of the replies to my query surround one core concept: capturing the senses. We might do this with music, art, maps, and props.

[Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master] covers these ideas in Chapter 13: Other High Value Preparation Activities. They're not critical to run a good game, thus not covered in the core eight steps of game prep in Return, but they came up often as ways to stay immersed in D&D.

Want to immerse your players deeper into the world of your game?

• Find good music.
• Share great representative artwork.
• Share overland maps, dungeon maps, and encounter maps with your players.
• Use props to give players a physical tactile object to bind them to the world.

A Topic Worth Pondering

As a DM, thinking about how we can better immerse our players in the world is a topic worth thinking about. It's easy to get caught up in our own story, spend lots of time tuning combat encounters, or spend hours writing histories and theologies. Instead, think about how you can better immerse your players in the world itself.

Come with me and you'll be in a world of pure imagination.

Last Week's Lazy D&D Talk Show: One D&D

Each week I record an episode of the Lazy D&D Talk Show in which I talk about all things D&D. Last week I talked all about the latest Wizards of the Coast announcements including diving into the first playtest for the next D&D core books. Here's the episode!

Related Articles

• Spending a Whole Day Preparing a D&D Game
• 2016 D&D 5th Edition Dungeon Master Questionnaire
• Going There
• Making Great Handouts
• Dealing with D&D Pre-Game Nervousness

Get More from Sly Flourish

• Read more Sly Flourish articles
• Buy Sly Flourish's Books
• Watch Sly Flourish's YouTube videos
• Subscribe to Sly Flourish's Podcast
• Support Sly Flourish on Patreon

Buy Sly Flourish's Books

• Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master
• The Lazy DM's Companion
• Lazy DM's Workbook
• Fantastic Lairs
• Fantastic Adventures: Ruins of the Grendleroot
• Fantastic Adventures

Read more »

I love dungeons. Whenever I find the story of my campaigns leading to a dungeon, I feel a great sense of relief. Not everyone feels this way. Some DMs dread running dungeons.

Different DMs approach dungeons differently. Some prefer a procedural turn-driven approach focusing on resource management such as food, lighting, encumbrance, and rests. Some see running dungeons as a fundamentally different experience than running other parts of the game like wilderness exploration, city investigations, or other types of scenes. I don't.

To me, dungeon adventures are location-based situations like any other in D&D. They're not that different from infiltrating a lord's manor to steal a relic or tracking down a murderer in a city. The in-fiction situation drives the gameplay.

That said, there are some common traits when running a dungeon worth considering. They include:

• A dungeon is a focused location with fixed boundaries and meaningful choices.
• A dungeon is a hostile place filled with traps and monsters.

These differentiate a dungeon from walking through a city or traveling through safe woods.

Define Your Dungeon

When preparing a dungeon, we can ask ourselves a few questions:

• What does the dungeon look like? What's the layout? I love using one of the thousand Dyson Logos maps to grab a map for nearly any situation.
• Why are the characters going there? What's the goal? Dungeons are dangerous. You'd only go into one if you had a good reason.
• Who's there? What creatures inhabit the dungeon? Are there multiple factions? Consider populating different sections with a mix of intelligent creatures wild monsters.
• What is the dungeon's purpose? Who built it and why? What is it used for now? These questions bring richness and depth to our dungeons. Reveal the dungeon's history through secrets and clues the characters discover while exploring the dungeon.
• What entrances does the dungeon have? Consider starting a dungeon with a choice right away. Do you want to try to get past the front guards or sneak in through the old sewers underneath? Multiple entrances, each with their own advantages and disadvantages, give players agency over their approach.
• What's the situation in the dungeon? Are the intelligent inhabitants preparing for war? Are they sending out hunting parties? Do they wall off the monster-filled sewers below? Are they all hammered from festivities? What's happening in there? Make the dungeon a living place.

Design Your Dungeon

I love using pre-made maps from established cartographers like Dyson Logos but if you're interested in designing your own dungeon maps, check out Justin Alexander's articles on Jaquaying the Dungeon. The second article in particular gets into the juicy details of what makes great map design. These include:

• Multiple entrances
• Loopbacks
• Secret doors, passages, and rooms
• An asymmetric design that rewards exploration
• Elevation changes
• If it's multi-level, multiple ways to reach those levels

Justin goes into more features of these fun dungeon designs in the articles linked above.

Fill Out Your Dungeon

Now it's time to fill in the details of the various rooms. This might be a list of interesting features we can drop into rooms while the characters explore, or we might key features to particular rooms. The overall purpose (both past and present) often define the individual rooms we drop in.

When stuck for ideas, use Appendix A: Random Dungeons in the Dungeon Master's Guide for inspiration. It has tables of rooms tied to many dungeon types. You can also generate monuments when you're stuck for ideas or use the tables in the Lazy DM's Workbook and Lazy DM's Companion to fill things out.

Ensure your dungeon has a number of secret doors, secret tunnels, and secret rooms to discover. Finding a secret door and a hallway that bypasses the main halls is always fun. Finding secrets are powerful upward beats in dungeon adventures.

We don't have to tie individual creatures to each chamber. Instead, improvise which creatures inhabit which rooms based on the evolving situation in the dungeon and the pacing of the game.

Run easy encounters when the characters have had a hard go of it.

Add Discoverable Traps

Fun traps are discovered traps. While certainly characters might trigger traps, it's more fun to find, understand, and disarm traps than it is to get shot in the eye with a poison dart.

Add traps that make sense for the situation but don't be afraid to have the characters find, disarm, and avoid many of these. Justin Alexander recommends that, for every ten single-fire traps, the characters should discover nine of them.

For some fun trap ideas, see the traps page in the Lazy DM's Workbook.

For more on finding, investigating, and disarming traps, see the Flow of Trap Detection.

Running the Dungeon Crawl

When it comes time to actually run a dungeon, a few steps help define how characters approach the dungeon. These include:

• Clarify the goal. Why are the characters going into this dungeon?
• Choose an entrance. How will the characters get into the dungeon? Which path will they take and why?
• Choose a marching order. Who goes first? Clarify that the front two characters can use their passive Perceptions but not the back rows.
• Choose an approach. Do the characters want to try to sneak in? Are they going to kick in the front door?
• Choose lighting. Is the dungeon completely dark or well-lit? If its dark, do the characters want to use light? Remember that characters with darkvision are still are at disadvantage on Perception checks in total darkness.

With those choices clarified, it's time to delve into the dark. And how do we run that dungeon? The same way we run the rest of D&D:

• The DM describes the situation.
• The players describes what they want their characters to do.
• The DM determines if this is challenging. If so, they ask for an ability check against a DC determined by the DM.
• The DM adjudicates and describes the results.

See Our Ability Check Toolbox for more information on how to run all the different types of ability checks that can happen in a dungeon (and everywhere else).

Mapping the Dungeon

How do you show the characters' progress through a dungeon? If you're running online, sharing screenshots of your dungeon map or using a virtual tabletop like Owlbear Rodeo works well even if combat isn't the focus.

For in-person play there's no perfect solution but many different options. Here are some in-person options for drawing or displaying dungeon maps:

• Project images or a virtual tabletop to a screen everyone can see.
• Draw the map ahead of time on 1 inch square poster paper or the gridded back side of cheap wrapping paper.
• Make a rough sketch of the map on a sheet of paper.
• Print out a big map as a blueprint at a local printer (often for very cheap).
• Print individual sections of a dungeon on paper and show them in sequence.
• Draw out the map on a wet-erase or dry-erase poster map.

Timing, Turns, and Resources

Some DMs, when they run dungeon crawls, want to focus more on timing, turns, and resources. Time should be carefully tracked. Moving through a dungeon should require turns. Resources should be spent as the characters travel through the dungeon. That's a fine way to play if you and your players want to play that way. This style isn't for me, though. I prefer to focus on the bigger story taking place in the dungeon.

For timing, consider flexing the time in and out as the story demands. Focus on timing when it matters and skip over it when it doesn't.

Cantrips like light and the many class features and spells producing food and water mean we don't typically need to track such resources. D&D 5e does support weight and encumbrance but I argue this isn't the most exciting part of the story we share. In games like Out of the Abyss tracking resource and encumbrance might be fun for the initial survival-aspect of the campaign but soon, when it becomes trivial for the characters to manage resources like this, we can widen our focus to the bigger problems surround the characters.

You may disagree, of course. If you have a style of grittier turn-based dungeon crawling that you and your players prefer, go with the gods. If you're looking for such systems, consider looking at Old School Essentials or Five Torches Deep. Both have systems you can modify and bring into your D&D 5e games if you desire.

Managing Rests

Managing rests in a dungeon is a resource worth paying attention to. Rests, both short and long, are big deals. Where can characters make these rests? Can they make them at all?

I suggest that the characters can rest when it makes sense for the story and situation (as in everything else in D&D). If they find a room they can safely secure, staying out of the eyes of the monsters wandering around, they can likely rest. If they try to take a rest in a four-way intersection in the middle of a well-populated dungeon, some villain is going to notice. Consider reinforcing the following general principal of dungeon delving to players before they enter the dungeon:

Rests are difficult in this dungeon. Short rests are easier than long rests. Be careful with your resources, you don't know where you'll be able to find a long rest in this place. Plan accordingly.

This leaves me the option to determine when and where rests can occur safely. As a DM, I don't want to be handcuffed by hard rules about resting in dungeons. If it improves the fun of the game to give the characters an option for a long rest, I want the freedom to add it.

How can we improvise safe locations to rest? Here are some examples.

• A collapsed wall reveals a healing font.
• A glyphed urn contains a magical portal to a restful demiplane.
• An empty section of the dungeon hasn't been touched in centuries.
• The characters fall into a fresco depicting a restful room.
• The characters find a scroll with a tiny hut spell on it.
• A cracked stopwatch allows an eight-hour time stop before breaking.
• A trickster faerie invites the characters for a quick stay in the feywild.
• An enterprising goblin takes the characters to a hidden safe chamber for a price.
• A chalice filled with blue liquid offers the equivalent of eight hours of rest when ingested.
• The characters find a long-hidden saferoom beneath the tiles of the floor.

Short and long rests are part of the pacing and upward and downward beats of our game. Don't limit yourself out of these tools.

For more on this topic see Upward and Downward Beats of a Dungeon Crawl.

Principles of the Dungeon Crawl

With these details out of the way, let's consider some opinionated principles for running dungeon crawls. Many of these are in response to replies to a Tweet asking for the hardest parts of running dungeons.

Focus on the fun parts. Choose what parts of a dungeon crawl work for you and your group. Focus on the parts that bring the most fun to the game. Agree on these things with your players. If some part of the process stops being interesting, skip it and move on.

Avoid "gotchas". Avoid unpleasant surprises the characters would have seen but players did not. The players are not their characters. They don't see the situation in front of them the same way their characters would. Work with your players to help them understand the challenges in front of the characters. If a player makes a mistake they'd have avoided in the world, let them roll it back.

Plan some upward beats. Dungeons in particular seem like a hard place to add upward beats. Plan out some potential upward beats and add them when they're useful. Here are ten example upward beats for dungeon exploration:

• Finding an abandoned pack with useful items.
• Discovering a secret on a moss-covered mural.
• Finding a blessed spring healing the equivalent of a potion of greater healing.
• Finding a hollow statue filled with treasure.
• Getting the drop on unaware enemies.
• Finding a secret passage filled with sprung traps and bones.
• Finding a map to the dungeon.
• Facing weak yet overconfident foes.
• Finding a portal leading to a nearby friendly town.
• Discovering a passage shortcutting a huge swath of the dungeon.
• Finding a fortified location the characters can use as an internal home base.

Add friendly encounters. The most obvious upward beat is to meet friendly NPCs. Even if you happen to be trudging through an ancient dungeon there are opportunities to meet NPCs. Here are ten ways to introduce a friendly NPC in a dungeon:

• A friendly ghost
• An intelligent magic item
• A talking statue
• A petrified adventurer holding a scroll of stone to flesh.
• An awakened animal
• A possessed spellbook
• An escaped prisoner
• A magic mouth
• A dreamscape angel
• A turncoat monster

Mix easy and hard encounters. Oscillate between upward and downward beats by adding or removing monsters from encounters. An encounter with only one or two monsters is far easier than one with six to eight (depending on the monsters of course). The number of monsters in an encounter is an easy dial for upward or downward beats, even in published adventures. You are never bound to run the exact monsters you planned or found written in a published adventure.

Don't Worry About Puzzles. If you're a fan of puzzles, find them easy to incorporate, and your players love them — enjoy. If you struggle with puzzles, don't worry about them. Think of the whole dungeon as a puzzle. The overall situation in the dungeon is it's own puzzle.

Let Checks Fail Incrementally. Don't let a single failed skill check blow a whole dungeon delve. Just because the characters blow a stealth check doesn't mean everything in the dungeon heard them. Give the characters degrees of failure before the dungeon's inhabitants become aware of them. Perhaps it takes four failures before the guards become fully aware of the characters' infiltration.

On Megadungeons

I have little advice to offer for running megadungeons. For many, dungeon crawls themselves are megadungeons — big multi-floor dungeons with hundreds to thousands of rooms.

My only advice is to clarify the goals, change up the environments, and shift the inhabitants to make each level or section of the dungeon unique and interesting enough. At some point, a mega-dungeon becomes its own world in the campaign of your adventure. Give characters a home base from which they explore and to which they return. Let them travel through familiar sections to reach the un-familiar. Let them enter and exit the dungeon as they need. Keep the drives and directions clear.

Enjoying Dungeon Adventures

Whether it's two rooms connected by an overt and secret hall or a sprawling multi-leveled megadungeon buried beneath the city, dungeons offer DMs a fixed focused setting and yet still provides options and agency to the characters exploring them. Find your favorite system and tools for building and running dungeons and enjoy the stories they bring to the table.

Last Week's Lazy D&D Talk Show Topics

Each week I record an episode of the Lazy D&D Talk Show in which I talk about all things D&D. Here are last week's topics with timestamped links to the YouTube video:

• New 13th Age in 2023
• A New D&D Ability Score Standard Array
• Dungeons of Drakkenheim
• Distinct Racial Characteristics for NPCs
• Making Prophecies Come True Without Railroading
• Inspiration for City of Arches
• "Milestone" Event-Based Leveling Without Removing Player Agency
• Running Zero Prep One-Hour Games

Related Articles

• Seven Tips for Better Dungeons
• The Beats of a Dungeon Crawl
• Making Awesome Dungeons
• I, Dungeon
• Upward and Downward Beats

Get More from Sly Flourish

• Read more Sly Flourish articles
• Buy Sly Flourish's Books
• Watch Sly Flourish's YouTube videos
• Subscribe to Sly Flourish's Podcast
• Support Sly Flourish on Patreon

Buy Sly Flourish's Books

• Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master
• The Lazy DM's Companion
• Lazy DM's Workbook
• Fantastic Lairs
• Fantastic Adventures: Ruins of the Grendleroot
• Fantastic Adventures

Read more »

I love 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons. Many have complaints, some justified, and some making mountains out of mole hills. But none can ignore how successful D&D 5th edition has been over the past eight years. This, no doubt, is due to many factors but the solidity of 5th edition as a ruleset certainly made it both accessible and continually interesting for millions of players all over the world. 5th edition hits the sweet spot of being both easy enough to learn and offers enough interesting options to keep people playing for years.

It is from my love of this game that I offer these desires for the next iteration of D&D. I recognize that my own desires come from just one of millions of people who love this game. I make no sweeping statements that my opinions are any more valid than any other fan of this game.

I humbly offer my requests none the less.

Make 5.5 Fully 5e Compatible

I want the next iteration to be as fully compatible with 5th edition as it can. There are millions of 5th edition books in the world — more than any other version of D&D. What an incredible waste it would be if those books become obsolete. I want Monsters of the Multiverse to work with the new version of D&D. I want Tasha's Cauldron of Everything to work with it. I want Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel to work with it. Keep 5.5 fully backward compatible. When an adventure calls for a veteran, I want a compatible veteran coming out of the new Monster Manual and know it still works just fine.

Include Easier Encounter Building

Encounter building in the current 5th edition Dungeon Master's Guide is both complex and inaccurate. The two-table system of experience point values and multipliers for the number of monsters creates a constantly tweaking system that doesn't provide an accurate measure of an easy, medium, hard, or deadly encounter when done and is simply too hard to do.

Xanathar's Guide to Everything includes a much improved chart-based system but still one too complex to easily figure out and one that doesn't provide a clear picture of combat difficulty.

Better, faster, easier, and looser encounter building guidelines could help DMs quickly measure encounters built either before or during the game. Building a reasonably balanced encounter should be easy and fun.

Include "Theater of the Mind" Guidelines for Combat

The Dungeon Master's Guide and Xanathar's Guide to Everything includes pages of optional rules for gridded play and hardly any guidelines for running games using the theater of the mind or an abstract map for combat. Yet some of the most popular streaming game DMs, including games run by Wizards of the Coast dungeon masters run combat the "theater of the mind". While shared experiences among DMs in the community can help, clear guidance and suggestions in the core books could offer DMs a wider range of ways to run combat.

I certainly don't see this as a replacement to gridded play but instead an alternative option — a widening of the options to support lots of styles of play. Including guidelines for both gridded combat and theater of the mind combat further improves the accessibility of the game for both those with trouble visualizing combat in their heads (aphantasia) and those who physically cannot see a battle map (sight-limited or blindness).

Strengthen High-CR Monsters

High CR monsters are often weak for their challenge rating when compared to lower CR monsters. They often don't do enough damage to threaten high level characters.

WOTC's CR calculations overweight abilities high CR monsters require to challenge high level characters. This ends up reducing their effective damage at their CR.

A wolf at level 1 is significantly more dangerous than a balor at level 19. Recent attempts to increase the threat of higher CR monsters in Monsters of the Multiverse wasn't enough. While mid-CR monsters in MotM often increased their damage output, this didn't keep up at higher CRs.

Make balors as deadly as wolves.

Fix Certain Spells and Abilities

Certain spells and abilities prove problematic in play. Spells like force cage circumvent a legendary monster's ability to hold its own against high level characters. Spells like banish and polymorph can instantly remove most non-legendary threats from the game with a single casting, resulting in the equivalent of hundreds of points of damage with a single cast. The poison immunity of Heroes feast reduces the effective difficulty of a huge swath of monsters for everyone in a group for a whole day. Replace spells like conjure animals with the much-improved summon spells from Tasha's Cauldron of Everything so such spells don't give one player nine turns in a round.

Rebalance spells and abilities to ensure no single one changes how a DM needs to run the game.

Include Tasha Upgrades

Tasha's Cauldron of Everything includes many excellent quality-of-life changes such as flexibile attribute allocation, replacing abilities on level-ups, and more. I hope and expect many of these changes make their way into 5.5.

Provide Less Problematic Race Descriptions

It wouldn't surprise me if one of the main reasons for a refresh of 5th edition is to cover problematic race descriptions like the racial essentialism of goblins and orcs in the Monster Manual. Other fans offer much better advice on this than I and I support such changes for a wider, richer, more interesting, and more inclusive game.

Update the System Resource Document under the Open Gaming License

As a producer of 5th edition material, the Open Gaming License helps me publish material any DM can use to make their game better. While I can still publish under the current 5th edition System Resource Document (SRD) (and will do so should it not be updated), a new SRD would help further connect the widespread community of 5th edition publishers to this new edition of D&D. The OGL and SRD helps bring D&D to the whole community and ensure it lasts the ages. Please update the SRD with new changes and continue to support third party publishers who love this game as much as you do.

Leave the Rest Be

I see posts all the time asking for radical changes. No classes! No more ability scores! No spells! No vancian casting! It goes on and on. A game trying to meet these big changes isn't D&D. Such desires are fine — there are so many awesome RPGs out there, but D&D isn't D&D if you strip everything out of it that made it D&D.

Whatever changes you make to D&D, remember its core roots and embrace how successful 5th edition has been so far. Very little needs changing to make the game enjoyable and successful for another ten years as it has for the past eight.

Last Week's Lazy D&D Talk Show Topics

Each week I record an episode of the Lazy D&D Talk Show in which I talk about all things D&D. Here are last week's topics with timestamped links to the YouTube video:

• Sly Flourish Wins Two ENNIES!
• Wizards Presents Announcements 18 August
• Final Spelljammer Academy Adventure
• Dragons of Stormwreck Isle Character Sheet PDFs
• Face Folio by M Blake
• Encounter Building by Dragna Carta
• Best Adventure for New Players
• Choosing Your Next Campaign With Your Players
• Building a Quest Board
• Not Enjoying Game Prep

Related Articles

• Thoughts on Unearthed Arcana's Encounter Building Guidelines
• Building Encounters in Fifth Edition Dungeons & Dragons
• What I Learned Running D&D 5e from Level 1 to 20
• A D&D 4th Edition DM's Guide to 5th Edition
• Improvise D&D Monster Abilities

Get More from Sly Flourish

• Read more Sly Flourish articles
• Buy Sly Flourish's Books
• Watch Sly Flourish's YouTube videos
• Subscribe to Sly Flourish's Podcast
• Support Sly Flourish on Patreon

Buy Sly Flourish's Books

• Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master
• The Lazy DM's Companion
• Lazy DM's Workbook
• Fantastic Lairs
• Fantastic Adventures: Ruins of the Grendleroot
• Fantastic Adventures

Read more »

What if your campaign jumped 14 months into the future in the middle of a session? Would you be able to keep going or would your campaign shatter under such a change?

This happened to me in my Numenera game. In the middle of a fight, one of the characters activated a "mystery box" and, on a random roll, teleported himself and all of his companions 14 months into the future.

Did I panic? On yeah. But I also loved the idea. I had to make it work.

Luckily, the way I structure my campaigns supports such wild jumps. I don't build campaigns from the expected actions of the characters. I think of the world as an organic and evolving place. I build campaigns from the villains outward — from their goals and the quests they undertake to accomplish those goals. I knew who these villains were. I knew what they wanted. I knew where they were going to go.

So I moved those agendas ahead 14 months. In ten minutes I jotted down the big changes occurring over the past 14 months. The whole campaign changed. And it was awesome.

What Is a Resilient Campaign?

A resilient campaign can shift, evolve, and continue on even when major changes occur based on the actions of the characters and the reactions of the world around them.

We build resilient campaigns by ensuring we don't have too tight a grip on the longer story of the campaign. We don't write out detailed plans for future adventures. We don't build the campaign arc assuming one path or set of choices the characters make. The characters can make lots of big choices leading in many potential directions.

We might write out a rough outline for the campaign. We might have some big ideas for things we want to run in the future, but we don't fill them out because we don't know if they'll happen or, if they do, that they'll happen the way we think. We leave ourselves room to change things depending on how they go.

Instead of building big campaign arcs focus your attention on other areas:

Villains. Focus on the three big villains of the campaign. What are their goals? What do they want? Where do they think they're going? What steps are they or their minions undertaking to accomplish those goals.

The Next Adventure. After that, focus on your very next adventure. Where does it start? In what locations will it take place? What NPCs and monsters might be there? What secrets and clues might the characters uncover? What treasure might they acquire? And what adventures might our next session lead to next? This comes right out of Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master.

Test Your Campaign's Resilience

How do we know if our campaign is resilient? We can test it. Ask yourself the following questions:

• If the characters jumped one year in the future, what would the campaign look like?
• Can your campaign accept a major random change? If you rolled up a new villain from some random tables like those found in the Lazy DM's Companion, how easily could they be integrated?
• Could your campaign move smoothly if the characters discovered a major secret early? Does your campaign hinge on keeping information out of the characters' hands?
• If the characters suddenly faced the main villain and killed them, where would your campaign go then?

Set Opportunities for Big Changes

What if, instead of just ensuring the resilience of our campaign, you actually built in potential big changes you can't control? What if you give your characters the equivalent of a nuclear bomb without defining when or where they use it? What if you set up a scene where the characters meet the main villain without knowing if it turns into a fight or a conversation? What if the characters find a powerful relic able to teleport them to an alternate plane of existence or shift forward or backward in time? What if the characters face an opportunity to either forge an alliance or make a new enemy with a super-powerful entity like a trapped demon, a jailed vampire, a forgotten lich, or a fallen celestial?

Asking ourselves "what if" is a tremendously powerful question for testing the resilience of our campaigns or even pushing them in new directions.

Building Stories No One Can Predict

Resilient campaigns offer tremendous opportunity to share stories with our players with no defined expectations. It's scary, but it's also awesome. Resilient campaigns build fertile ground for epic campaigns everyone's sure to remember for years to come.

Last Week's Lazy D&D Talk Show Topics

Each week I record an episode of the Lazy D&D Talk Show in which I talk about all things D&D. Here are last week's topics with timestamped links to the YouTube video:

• D&D Starter Set Dragons of Stormwreck Isle
• The Sly Flourish Bookstore is Open!
• DM David On Monster Roles
• ENWorld's Review of Radiant Citadel
• Banning and Limiting Material In Your Game
• Dealing with Tag-Along NPCs
• How Many Monster Types in a Battle?
• Players Catching On to Film Homage
• Stealing Ideas for Homebrew Campaign Setting
• Checklist for Building Situations
• Lazy Dungeon Mastering and the Quantum Ogreb
• Ranking Wild Beyond the Witchlight
• Dealing with Prisoners
• Pre-Gen Story Hooks for One-Shot Games

Related Articles

• 14 Months Later
• Build Resilient and Evolving Villainous Plots
• Running Session Zeros
• Writing a One-Page Campaign Guide
• Running Episodic Games

Get More from Sly Flourish

• Read more Sly Flourish articles
• Buy Sly Flourish's Books
• Watch Sly Flourish's YouTube videos
• Subscribe to Sly Flourish's Podcast
• Support Sly Flourish on Patreon

Buy Sly Flourish's Books

• Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master
• The Lazy DM's Companion
• Lazy DM's Workbook
• Fantastic Lairs
• Fantastic Adventures: Ruins of the Grendleroot
• Fantastic Adventures

Read more »

Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft is one of my favorite 5th edition D&D books. I think it's really well put together and it packs tons of setting material for many different worlds all in one book. You can watch my spotlight on Van Richten's Guide on the Lazy D&D Talk Show for a deeper look.

When I decided to run Wild Beyond the Witchlight I was intrigued by the idea that characters can get through the whole adventure without engaging in any combat but I also thought — what fun is that?

Then I had an idea. How could I mix in the cool Domains of Dread from Van Richten's Guide into Wild Beyond the Witchlight? Thus, the idea of Dreadful Incursions tore itself open.

Note, this article contains spoilers for Wild Beyond the Witchlight.

If you want to watch a bunch of videos where I talk about mashing up Dreadful Incursions from Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft with Wild Beyond the Witchlight check out my Wild Beyond the Witchlight YouTube Video Playlist.

So how does this idea work in the story of the campaign?

From Wild Beyond the Witchlight we know the freezing of Zybilna caused instability in Prismeer. The land is tearing itself apart, split in three lands separated by an uncrossable mist. Sound a lot like the mists of the Domains of Dread!

What if Zybilna's influence didn't just keep Prismeer together but also kept the Domains of Dread at bay? If you know Zybilna's true origin, it makes sense that one of her former jobs might have been keeping the Domains of Dread intact and aligned perhaps in some ancient pact with the Dark Powers. With her disappearance, these worlds get disjointed and start to bleed into Prismeer.

What Is a Dreadful Incursion

With Zybilna's inaction, various Domains of Dread collide with Prismeer. When they collide, rifts tear open between these domains and Prismeer. Sometimes these incursions might be small, a portal opened for only a few seconds (say 18 to 24 seconds — three rounds of combat) while some horror or horrors crawls out from its world into Prismeer where the characters must beat it back.

Other incursions might be larger. A twisted dungeon from Hazlan might bleed into Prismeer, where arcane runoff and swarms of gremishkas prowl in the shadows. The characters might pass through the haunted House of Griffin Hill to make their way through a blocked passageway beneath the mountains of Yon.

When the characters travel through the mists between the three domains of Prismeer they might walk through or fly over a Domain of Dread.

Dreadful incursions give us a chance to run fun dark combat encounters with the flavor of one of the worlds from Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft. And we can do so guilt free. Our players won't feel like they're picking the worst solution fighting a bunch of zombie plague spreaders.

When adding incursions, roll on the "Domain of Dread" table at the beginning of the "Other Domains of Dread" section in chapter 3 of Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft to choose a random domain. Use the result to flavor an encounter, a dungeon, or a whole adventure; adding rich details to push the imaginations of our players.

Anchors

Objects from these other domains might connect a Domain of Dread to Prismeer, chaining the two together, and need to be destroyed or modified to break the connection and close the incursion. This anchor might be an object from the domain in question or an object from Prismeer lost in a Domain of Dread.

You can use the "Horror Trinkets" from the end of chapter 1 in Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft or the "Feywild Trinkets" in the beginning of Wild Beyond the Witchlight to pick such an item. Consider adding a random powerful spell to the item the characters can use one time.

Other more powerful magic items might also bleed through from a Domain of Dread into Prismeer. More powerful anchors, permanent magic items the characters recover, might require a quest to break the connection but one that still lets them keep their cool loot.

The unicorn horn, an important key on Wild Beyond the Witchlight might get lost in a domain itself, say the nightmare scape Bluetspur where it rests in the hand of a mind flayer vampire with little understanding of this strange object.

A Dark Lord Sees an Escape

To take things further, one of the dread lords of a Domain of Dread may become aware of these incursions and seek it to escape their torment. Perhaps Vladeska Drakov of Falkovnia becomes aware of the incursions and plots her escape, sending her blood raven knights into Prismeer to find a stable incursion so she can escape the torment of her zombie-infested lands. In the end, the characters might face her on the very throne of Zybilna where the dark lord of Falkovnia nearly turns all of Prismeer into a new Domain of Dread.

A Contrast Dial of Light and Dark

The whimsy and wonder of Wild Beyond the Witchlight is joyous to behold. Adding the Domains of Dread from Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft creates a wonderful contrast. On one side you have bullywugs in frocks and top hats rowing small boats in a calm pond saying "good day to you fine folk". On the other you have the howling winds of Klorr where a dead world tears itself apart. Adding Domains of Dread to Wild Beyond the Witchlght creates a fun juxtaposition and a great way to shake up the atmosphere of both corners of the multiverse.

You also have great control over how such incursions affect the theme of your campaign. You decide if and when to drop in an incursion into Prismeer. You decide if it's a big incursion or a small one. You decide whether the darkness is too dark for the whimsy and wonder of Witchlight and turn it off. You decide if you want to add a new arch villain making their way into the lands of Prismeer. You decide how hard and how often to collide the Domains of Dread with Prismeer. It's a wonderful dial to have on the campaign.

If you want to add a fun combat-filled contrast of horror and dread to the whimsy and wonder of Wild Beyond the Witchlight, give Dread Incursions a try.

Last Week's Lazy D&D Talk Show Topics

Each week I record an episode of the Lazy D&D Talk Show in which I talk about all things D&D. Here are last week's topics with timestamped links to the YouTube video:

• Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel
• Wonders of the Multiverse Unearthed Arcana
• Adding Reactions to the Resolution Stack
• New Spelljammer Academy Adventure Released
• Teos Abadia's Spelljammer Dispatch on Roll20
• Ben Riggs's TSR D&D Sales Stats
• Running Multiple Games a Week
• Meaningful Choices in Adventure Design
• Running Too Many Different RPGs
• Running Streaming, Live Play, or Actual Play Games
• Players Drawing Other Players Into the Spotlight

Related Articles

• Isle of Dread for the Lazy Dungeon Master
• One Page Dungeon: Chambers of the Dread Titan
• Villainous Titles
• Adventure Seeds: The Night of the Decimation
• Build Resilient Campaigns

Get More from Sly Flourish

• Read more Sly Flourish articles
• Buy Sly Flourish's Books
• Watch Sly Flourish's YouTube videos
• Subscribe to Sly Flourish's Podcast
• Support Sly Flourish on Patreon

Buy Sly Flourish's Books

• Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master
• The Lazy DM's Companion
• Lazy DM's Workbook
• Fantastic Lairs
• Fantastic Adventures: Ruins of the Grendleroot
• Fantastic Adventures

Read more »