by W. Eric Martin

• Blue Orange Games plans to release Urtis Šulinskas' Planet in North America on April 22, 2019, a.k.a. Earth Day. The game debuted in Europe at SPIEL in October 2018, and you can check out an overview of this world-building game here.

• That same month Arcane Wonders will release the Necromancer Expansion for Mage Wars Academy so that someone can command the "legions of undeath" and sic plagues on their opponent.

• Village Pillage is a 2-5 player design from Peter C. Hayward, Tom Lang, and Jellybean Games in which players play one card in hand against each of their neighbors at the same time, after which those cards resolve: farmers produce turnips, walls block raiders, raiders steal turnips, and merchants either add new cards to your hand or help you purchase a relic. Cards then return to your hand, and you do it all over again until someone claims their third relic and wins.

• Core Connection: Rise of Atlantis is a deck-building game from Japanime Games in which you pilot and upgrade a giant mecha to "free society from the tyrannical reign of its oppressors". Seems like a worthy goal. Core Connection: Titans Unleashed, due out in June 2019 following the base game in April, adds more cards to the base game.

• Mary Flanagan and Max Seidman's Visitor in Blackwood Grove, which debuted in the U.S. from Resonym as a Target-exclusive title in mid-2018, reaches regular distribution channels in Q2 2019. This game is a two-vs.-all affair in which an alien visitor creates a rule for which items can pass through the forcefield around its ship and the child that's befriended the alien must figure out this rule before secret agents can do so. We recorded an overview of the game at Origins 2018, and it gives a good idea of how the game works.

• The next title from Flanagan, Seidman, and Resonym — with co-design credit for Emma Hobday — is Mechanica, a 1-4 player game in which you acquire puzzle pieces to upgrade your factory to create more and better Tidybots, which earns you money, with which you will further upgrade the factory to earn even more. Speaking of which, Mechanica is being funded on Kickstarter through March 3, 2019, with an expected delivery date of Nov. 2019.




• In March 2019, U.S. publisher R&R Games will release Hanabi Deluxe II, which like the original Hanabi Deluxe from 2013 will replace the cards from the original Antoine Bauza co-operative game with Mah Jhong-style tiles, but this edition also includes six unique tiles that comprise the "Master Artisan" expansion.

• Ringmaster: Welcome to the Big Top is a quick-playing card game from Justin Gary and Stone Blade Entertainment in which players lay down circus stars and attractions in front of themselves; sideshows in front of opponents; and events in the discard pile after carrying out their effect. Each player's winning condition is determined by the cards that they play, with opponents likely messing up your acts during play. Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

• On Feb. 15, 2019, Funko, Inc. — the world's largest manufacturer of pop-culture-based bobblehead figures — announced that it had acquired Seattle-based game design studio Forrest-Pruzan Creative. In recent years, FPC has been responsible for pop-culture-driven games such as Villainous, Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle, and Choose Your Own Adventure: House of Danger, which makes it seem like an ideal fit within the Funko brand. Here's part of the press release announcing this deal:

Funko believes that everyone is a fan of something, and this acquisition allows pop culture enthusiasts to display their fandom through multi-player interaction comprised by their favorite characters and introduces Funko to an entirely new demographic, ardent board gamers.

"We've always been incredibly impressed with FPC's portfolio and have witnessed the company make a name for itself on a global level," said Funko President Andrew Perlmutter. "As we expand our product portfolio, we believe this acquisition is in line with what we are doing with apparel, accessories and Funko Animation Studios. The games category is another avenue to deliver pop culture to our ever-growing fan base. FPC's nearly two decades of experience in developing high quality games will provide us added expertise as we leverage our existing IP and licensor portfolio into this category."

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, and the Company does not expect the acquisition to have a material impact on its financial performance in 2019.

Who doesn't love to display their fandom via multi-player interaction?!

• In late January 2019, Hachette Livre, the largest book publisher in France and the owner of the Hachette Book Group in the U.S. along with many other imprints, has "entered into exclusive negotiations with Jean-Christophe Gires and Stéphane Gires, the founders and directors of Gigamic, with a view to acquiring 100% of their company's share capital", according to a press release on the Hachette website.

Gigamic was founded in 1991, launching the company with the abstract strategy game Quarto, which I fondly recall demoing and selling at The Game Gallery in San Francisco. It was a different era then! Currently Gigamic publishes about fifteen new titles annually, with sales of more than €15 million. An excerpt from the press release:

Stéphane Gires, who is 56, will continue to manage the business that he has successfully built up with his brother.

For Hachette Livre, which already publishes party games (quiz games, etc.), and which added mobile games to its portfolio in 2016, this investment is part of a strategic decision to explore the leisure activity market that sits alongside publishing, in particular all the segments of the consumer gaming market.

"We are delighted to welcome Gigamic and its great team, whose skills are naturally closely aligned with our content creation activities for the consumer market. Like all the entities that have joined the Group in recent years, Gigamic will be able to pursue its development while retaining its creative autonomy", said Arnaud Nourry, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Hachette Livre.

"Our many discussions have confirmed that our companies share the same DNA in terms of ethics, innovation, management and trust in our existing personnel. Gigamic is becoming part of a major French group and a market leader, which delivers a strong message to our employees, our customers and our suppliers. We feel very confident and motivated for the future", added Stéphane Gires.

• Stepping back one month further, in mid-December 2018, Greater Than Games acquired Nevermore Games, stating in a press release that "The acquisition of Nevermore Games is the culmination of several months of conversations between Nevermore Games and Greater Than Games. As our companies undergo this transition, Greater Than Games looks forward to supporting the Nevermore Games product lines and fan base."

• For an industry move in the other direction, we have this statement from Dutch publisher White Goblin Games in January 2019:

During the previous year, we signed a deal with the Chinese company Yoka Games to produce a new localized edition of our game Bali in China.

At the time that we signed the deal, we were unaware of the previous and current history of Yoka Games, but it was recently brought to our attention that Yoka Games has been plagiarizing famous games such as BANG! and Lost Cities for many years.

Yoka Games has proven itself to be disrespectful of intellectual property rights and the work of other companies and designers. We firmly condemn this attitude, and for this reason we have decided to end our partnership with Yoka Games.

Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

Lincoln Damerst and I recorded about one hundred game preview videos at Spielwarenmesse 2019 — the annual toy fair in Nürnberg, Germany — and more than twenty of those videos are live for you now on our new BGG Express YouTube channel.

The most recent videos highlight several anticipated titles from Germany publisher Lookout Spiele, titles that you might not even have known were coming, such as Alexander Pfister's Newdale, which is a board game set in the world of Pfister's Oh My Goods! card game. This game is still in development, so it's hardly a thing of beauty right now, but you can at least learn the basics of the game (then update the placeholder game listing that I created in the BGG database earlier today):


Youtube Video

Mandala from Trevor Benjamin and Brett J. Gilbert sounds like a tricksy two-player card game in which you're trying to squeeze points from the opponent every chance you get:


Youtube Video

Grizzlies, monorails, and new scoring conditions comprise the Bärenpark: Die Grizzlies sind los! expansion coming from Phil Walker-Harding and Lookout in mid-2019.


Youtube Video

Foothills from Ben Bateson and Tony Boydell is a one- or two-person game set in the world of Boydell's Snowdonia. (Boydell has teased card artwork in a BGG blog post.)


Youtube Video Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

• NY Toy Fair opens on Saturday, Feb. 16, and that show — being aimed at mainstream retailers — typically coincides with game announcements connected to licensed properties.

Along those lines, Looney Labs has announced a partnership with Cardinal Industries that will allow them to release Marvel Fluxx and Jumanji Fluxx, new versions of Andrew Looney's long-lived Fluxx card game. Two different versions of these games will exist, with the Cardinal versions aimed at mass market retailing for $15 and being released in August 2019; the Looney Labs versions each include seven additional cards, retail for $20, and will debut in July 2019.




• U.S. publisher USAopoly has adopted a new logo (shown at left) for its 25th anniversary. In a press release accompanying the logo, USAopoly's president and CEO John M. Davis said, "This updated look and logo reflect our forward progress as well as capture our perseverance and unwavering pledge to deliver great gaming experiences that bring people together."

More relevant for this post, the publisher has also announced two titles bearing the Harry Potter license, while teasing a third. The first title is Scrabble: Harry Potter, which may or may not be the same item as Mattel's Scrabble: Harry Potter Edition, which appeared in 2016 in the UK. (Mattel holds the Scrabble trademark everywhere other than the U.S. and Canada.) In Scrabble: Harry Potter, you can score points for playing character names, locations, spells, and potion names in addition to, you know, normal non-magic words. Players also have challenge cards that they can complete for extra points.

Kami Mandell and Andrew Wolf's Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle – Defence Against the Dark Arts, originally announced as HP:HB – Dueling Club in 2018, is a two-player-only version of Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle that's competitive instead of co-operative. In this deck-building game, players learn offensive and defensive magic skills to protect themselves from dark creatures and dark arts, then eventually go after their opponent.

Aside from the these two titles, USAopoly said that it would release a "Wizarding World cooperative game" in 2019.


Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle – Defence Against the Dark Arts

• Captain Marvel: Secret Skrulls is another licensed title from USAoply, this being a hidden identity game for 4-7 players based on the gameplay of BANG! The player with the Captain Marvel role is the sheriff, and they must identify their allies while taking out the skrulls and not succumbing to the skrull defector, which is this game's version of the renegade.

• USAopoly has also signed a deal with Laika Entertainment, LLC to release products based upon the 2009 movie Coraline, including a Coraline-themed Monopoly game. All of the player tokens are thimbles because losers must replace their eyes with buttons. Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

Richard Garfield's KeyForge, the buzziest game of 2018, will have more than two hundred new cards added to the game system in May 2019 thanks to the release of KeyForge: Age of Ascension.

KeyForge: Age of Ascension follows the model of the original KeyForge: Call of the Archons: Each player has a unique deck of cards compiled via algorithms known only to the secretive forces housed in the nuclear-proof vault underneath the Fantasy Flight Games basement. Each deck contains a unique image and name, which means that cards cannot be swapped between decks to customize them. Decks are sold individually for $10 or in a two-player starter set (that contains two randomized decks as opposed to the fixed decks of Call of the Archons, along with tokens needed for play) for $25. Here's a summary of gameplay for those unfamiliar with the game:

KeyForge is played over a series of turns in which you, as the Archon leading your company, use the creatures, technology, artifacts, and skills of a chosen House to reap precious Æmber, hold off your enemy's forces, and forge enough keys to unlock the Crucible's Vaults. You begin your turn by declaring one of the three Houses within your deck, and for the remainder of the turn you may play and use cards only from that House. For example, if you take on the role of the Archon Radiant Argus the Supreme, you will find cards from Logos, Sanctum, and Untamed in your deck, but if you declare "Sanctum" at the start of your turn, you may use actions, artifacts, creatures, and upgrades only from Sanctum. Your allies from Logos and Untamed must wait.

Next, you must strive to gain the advantage with a series of tactical decisions, leveraging both the cards in your hand and those in play to race ahead of your opponent. If you wish to weaken your rival's forces, you may send out your allies to fight enemies on the opposing side, matching strength against strength. Otherwise, you may choose to use your followers to reap, adding more Æmber to your pool.

Notably, no card in KeyForge has a cost — choosing a House at the start of a turn allows you to play and use any number of cards from that House for free, leading turns to fly by with a wave of activity! Yet balance is key. If you simply reap more Æmber at every opportunity, your rival may quickly grow their team of minions and destroy yours, outpacing your collection and leaving your field barren. But if you focus on the thrill of the fight alone and neglect the collection of Æmber, you won't move any closer to your goal! If you succeed in finding a harmony within your team and have six Æmber at the start of your turn, you'll forge a key and move one step closer to victory. The first to forge three keys wins!

In its announcement for this set, FFG notes that the card pool for Age of Ascension contains 204 new cards as well as 166 cards that appeared in Call of the Archons, and that decks should be competitive across sets, with new decks not overpowering or replacing ones from the first release. Aside from the repeated cards:

Even cards that do not carry over from Call of the Archons to Age of Ascension have the chance to make an appearance as new Legacy cards. Like the player-favorite Mavericks (which continue to appear in Age of Ascension), Legacy cards are plucked from their normal settings and placed in new situations to unlock even stranger synergies. In KeyForge, any card that has existed in any previous set can be pulled forward to become a Legacy card included in a current Archon Deck.

Cracker Jack!


Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

The Spielwarenmesse toy fair in Nürnberg, Germany turned 70 in 2019, and after four days of recording game overview videos at the fair Lincoln Damerst and I felt seventy years old ourselves. So much walking! So little sleep! So many games seen and so few remembered!

Since we're already prepping for coverage of the Festival International des Jeux (FIJ) in Cannes, France — our livestream starts on Thursday, Feb. 21! — we're trying to publish the videos from Spielwarenmesse 2019 as quickly as possible in order to avoid getting backed up. What's more, for 2019 and beyond we plan to publish the convention overview videos on a new YouTube channel: BoardGameGeek Express. By doing so, we can present produced material such as GameNight! and The BGG Show on the existing BGG TV YouTube channel without flooding the zone with a hundred convention videos all at once, something we've done in the past to subscribers' regret. (When I tried to avoid flooding subscribers, I would end up spacing out the publication of videos for months, making that coverage less useful since it sometimes wouldn't appear until after a game was released.)

The first video on BGG Express is an overview of Era: Medieval Age, a game from Matt Leacock and eggertspiele that reworks the gameplay of Roll Through the Ages in a new 3D format. This title is the first in a trilogy, and company owner Sophie Gravel showed off a pre-production sample of the game ahead of its debut at Gen Con 2019:


Youtube Video


I've also published preview videos for Fired Up, a SPIEL '19 release from Giorgos Eleftheriadis, Theofilos Koutroubis, and Drawlab Entertainment, and Corinth, a Sébastien Pauchon design that Days of Wonder will debut at FIJ 2019 ahead of a March 2019 release in Europe and a May 2019 release in North America.

We recorded about a hundred videos at Spielwarenmesse 2019, and I'll publish as many of them as I can in the next few days before heading to NY Toy Fair 2019. Yes, that's yet another show on the schedule!


Youtube Video

Youtube Video Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

• This week I'm doing final preparation for both NY Toy Fair and FIJ in Cannes, France, with the GAMA Trade Show poking its head up in the background and also demanding attention. Avalanche!

One of the companies that unveils its entire line for the year at NY Toy Fair is U.S. publisher Gamewright, which features mostly mainstream-friendly titles along with a few games that will also make a splash with the BGG audience. The splashiest title in Gamewright's 2019 line-up is undoubtedly Sushi Roll, a dice-based version of Phil Walker-Harding's Sushi Go!. Here's a quick take on this 2-5 player game that plays in 20 minutes and bears a Q2 2019 release date:

Rice and dice! Roll with your favorite Sushi Go! characters in Sushi Roll. Load up the conveyor belts with savory sushi dice —­­­­ then pick one and pass the rest! Earn points for winning combos like two tempura or a set of sashimi. Grab a menu to re-roll your dice or use chopsticks to swap with an opponent. Be sure to save room for pudding at the end!

• Along similar lines, Gamewright is releasing Rat-a-Tat Roll in Q3 2019, this being a dice-based version of its long-lived Rat-a-Tat Cat card game, which is a souped-up version of the public domain card game Golf. An overview:

Roll around the world with Rat-a-Tat Roll. Move around the board trying to collect low cards (cats) while avoiding high cards (rats). Choose one, two, or three dice, keeping re-roll tokens handy in case you miss your mark. All along, look out for peeks, swaps, and especially the chancy "wild" spots where things could really get dicey! Get the lowest score and win!

• Gamewright typically releases one or two real-time pattern recognition games each year, and for 2019 there's Guju Guju from designer and artist Ariel Yi Chi Chang. We recorded an overview of this game at SPIEL '17 with the designer on the original version of the game, but if you want the description in words, here it is: Start with a number of fruit cards face up on the table, then divide the other cards equally among the players. On a turn, a player names one of the four types of fruit in the game, then flips over a card from their deck onto a face-up card of this type. If they reveal the same type of fruit that they named, everyone races to cover all of these fruits with cards from their personal deck. Whoever rids their hand of cards first wins!

Youtube Video

• Twin It! from designers Nathalie Saunier, Rémi Saunier, and Thomas Vuarchex is another real-time game, one that first appeared from Cocktail Games in 2017, with Gamewright having debuted its version at PAX Unplugged in November 2018.

Twin It! features 135 double-sided cards with 119 wild op art patterns on them, and with the front of a card never matching the back. You can play multiple games with the deck, and the basic one is a standard pattern-recognition twitch game. Divide the deck among all the players. Either taking turns or at whatever pace they wish, players flip cards into the center of the table. As soon as you spot a pair of matching images, race to place an index finger on each member of the pair to claim it.

Many images are close to one another, but not identical, so don't be fooled! You can form matches with the top card of a player's deck, so keep your eye on those as well because a matching card can be flipped out of sight if the deck-holder plays it to the table. Some patterns appear three times instead of only two, so even if you've claimed a pair, you might find it snatched away from you if the third image turns up and someone else spots the match first. Whoever claims five pairs first wins.

I've played Twin It! a half-dozen times on a review copy from Gamewright, and the images from Vuarchex, co-designer of Jungle Speed, add a lot to the game. Your eyes start bugging out from the psychedelic visuals! The game also has a team version in which you win a pair only if you place a finger on one of the cards and your teammates places their finger on the other one.

• Other titles coming from Gamewright include This Games Goes to Eleven, in which you ditch cards to a central pile, trying to hit a sum of 11 to pass off cards to others and empty your hand; Bloom, a dice-rolling game in which you collect flowers and try not to pass good dice to others; Punto, in which players try to create lines of 4-5 cards but are restricted in how they can play them; Whozit?, a party game in which you try to get teammates to guess a celebrity target based on how well certain people would do certain tasks; and Hello My Name Is, a party game in which you play trait cards, then race to name someone (whether real or fictional) who fits those traits.

Note that This Games Goes to Eleven premiered in 2018 as a title exclusive to the U.S. retail chain Target and is now receiving a wide retail release. Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

In case you don't have enough Star Wars-related game options already available to you, Fantasy Flight Games has announced a new one for release in Q2 2019, one that might be viewed as the tabletop equivalent of FFG's Star Wars: Edge of the Empire role-playing game.

The game in question is Star Wars: Outer Rim from designers Corey Konieczka and Tony Fanchi, and it bears a 2-3 hour playing time and a $65 MSRP. Here's an overview of the game:

Take to the stars and become a living legend in Star Wars: Outer Rim, a game of bounty hunters, mercenaries, and smugglers for 1-4 players!

In Outer Rim, you take on the role of an underworld denizen, setting out to make your mark on the galaxy. You'll travel the outer rim in your personal ship, hire legendary Star Wars characters to join your crew, and try to become the most famous (or infamous) outlaw in the galaxy!

But it won't be easy since the warring factions of the galaxy roam the outer rim, hunting down the scum that have proven to be a thorn in their side, and other scoundrels looking to make their mark see you as the perfect target to bring down to bolster their own reputation. Do you have what it takes to survive in the outer rim and become a living legend?

In more detail, a game of Outer Rim takes place over a series of turns that sees players taking dangerous jobs, tracking down bounties, upgrading their ship, and more, all in service of gaining more and more fame. Regardless of the path you take to get there, your goal is to gain ten fame, which can come from a variety of sources, such as completing your character's personal goal, collecting on bounties and jobs, delivering illegal cargo, taking down patrols from the various factions struggling over the galaxy, and enjoying the finer things in life by purchasing luxury items with your hard-earned credits.

While the path to victory may be different for scoundrels finding their way in the Outer Rim, everyone starts from the bottom with a simple starship. Your player board not only tracks your fame progress, but also contains slots for your ship, your character card, gear, reputation, modifications, jobs, and bounties. Keep in mind that while doing a job for someone can earn you fame, it can also put a price on your head when a competing factions decides that you're causing them trouble — and one of the other players might try to collect that bounty!

Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

• Another month brings another four titles announced by WizKids — or at least that's how it feels sometimes. The company's director of board games, Zev Shlasinger, has wide-ranging tastes, which makes it hard to know what to expect from WizKids. You need to approach each game on its own terms to see whether they might be suitable for you.

The largest game in the batch is Nemo Rising: Robur the Conqueror, a 1-4 player design from Andrew Parks and Matthew Cattron that plays in 90 minutes and that bears this description:

Nemo Rising: Robur the Conqueror is a co-operative board game that follows the new adventures of Captain Nemo and the crew of the Nautilus, as reintroduced by C. Courtney Joyner in his novel Nemo Rising. The game allows 1-4 players to assume the roles of the protagonists of the series — Captain Nemo, Sara Duncan, Adam Fulmer, or Ulysses S. Grant — as they explore new worlds, overcome dangerous obstacles, and complete challenging missions.

As you and your fellow players work together, you can choose to explore one of two scenarios. The first scenario is the Undersea Grotto in which you must venture outside the Nautilus to gather supplies while avoiding sea hydras, deep sea scavengers, and the mechanical Kraken. The second scenario is the majestic City in the Sky in which you must thwart Robur the Conqueror and his army of foot soldiers, war dogs, and steam-powered creations. Special action cards and customized dice allow you to attempt dangerous tasks and overcome powerful enemies in order to save the world.

Nemo Rising: Robur the Conqueror bears a September 2019 release date.

• Europa Base Alpha, a 2-4 player game from Garrett Herdter, takes you from the world of pulp fiction to the world of pulp science fiction. Here's an overview of the game, which is due out in June 2019:

There is no Cold War that is more chilling or isolated than on the untouched surface of Jupiter's moon, Europa. The nations have broken apart and are now in a race to get defenses established on Europa before it is too late. Will you take control of Europa with the largest network of installations, or will you be left in lunar dust?

In Europa Base Alpha, players compete to build the grandest network of moon bases on Europa made up of missile silos, communication towers, global command centers, personnel bunkers, and intergalactic transports. Cards and dice are used to help you build your bases as well as hinder other players. Bases need certain icons rolled, and cards can be played to aid in getting those icons or to hinder an opponent by requiring more icons, having them roll fewer dice, etc. The player with the most points earned from built moon bases will take control of Europa and win!

Europa Base Alpha includes an "Invaders" expansion for more variability!

• Also due out in June 2019 is Palm Trees by Andrew J. Smith, which allows for 2-6 players with a playing time of 20 minutes as long as everyone avoids snacks during the game:

Palm Trees comes with 78 cards that represent fronds and coconuts. All of the cards have rules telling you the crazy ways you have to hold them: between thumb and pinky only, palm and index finger only, can't touch other cards, and more. Pick challenging cards for your opponents, and hope they drop their cards! The best tree wins! To add to the fun, Palm Trees includes trunk tattoo sleeves to wear on your tree-arm!

Palm Trees can also be played in teams of two. One player is growing palm trees in both their hands, while their partner places the cards into those trees. Be the first team to place six cards in each tree to win!

• Sovereign's Chain is due out in August 2019, and this 2-4 player game by Robert J. Hudecek will probably be a lot easier to imagine playing once we can see some of the cards. For now, though, we have this description:

Sovereign's Chain — a strategic, cutthroat card game — is so named due to the class cards played in front of players that form chains. You can play cards onto your own chain or those of your opponents. While most cards are played face up, which activates their abilities, some can be played face down to be activated later. Class cards come in two suits — stars and planets — and to win, you must have the highest difference in points between these two suits when someone's chain reaches seven cards. To add a wrinkle to the game, a small deck of event cards is included, with unique effects that change the game completely.

Read more »

Publisher: Magical RPG Games

This is a 25 x 25 battlemap optimized for use with roll20.net.  The cave map is set in a natural cave system carved out over centuries from water.  What will the party find in the cave?

Check out my other maps as well!

Price: $1.19 Read more »

Publisher: Magical RPG Games

This is a 40 x 30 battlemap optimized for use with roll20.net.  The swamp map is set in the thick of a swamp, with water dominating the landscape and small islands poking out of the water.  Tall trees grow well in the thick swamp, along with some small bushes and mosses.  What lurks in the swamp?

Check out my other maps as well!

Price: $1.09 Read more »

Publisher: Frog God Games

In Vino Gigantus

An introductory adventure by award winning author and designer James M. Spahn for Fifth Edition  fantasy roleplaying games!

Stormridge Sanctum was once home to the the an ancient and noble line of storm giants. It floated miles beyond the sight of mortal men, witnessing the birth and death of countless civilizations. But as time wore on and decadence laid hold to the Tempestas clan, both Stormridge Sanctum and its magnificent liege lords surrendered to the decay of time and decadence.

Now a single storm giant noble remains, the haughty dilettante sorcerer-prince Clovis Tempestas II. He concerns himself only with base pleasures and none more so than his beloved stock of family wine. But his beloved wine cellar has become flooded with a foul murk and strange creatures slither between bottles of his finest family vintage. He cannot be bothered to wade into such filth himself and he has no servants remaining in his household, so he has used what little magic his grape-addled mind can recall and summoned new servants: A troupe of unsuspecting adventures who will serve -- and if necessary, die -- to save his beloved wine.

This introductory adventure can be instantly inserted into any campaign without preamble, as it opens with the player characters being the unwitting targets of a Summon Monster spell! Once summoned into the very hands of a mad and drunken giant, the player characters will find themselves exploring a realm designed for creatures ten times their size as they fight all manner of strange creature, traverse larger than life obstacles and objects, encounter other adventurers who have fallen into the clutches of the mad prince Tempestas, and even risk plummeting to their death as the very foundation of the cloud castle of Stormridge Sanctum is crumbling beneath their boots!

Can the player characters placate the whims of a giant drunk on power and lost grace? Will they survive encounters with the strange animated objects that have become twisted by decades of neglected magic beneath a crumbling castle? And just what the hell is that echoing boom coming from the eastern part of the wine cellar?!

You’ve been granted the hospitality of the storm giant prince Clovis Tempestas II, and he’s always up for a little more...

Price: $7.99 Read more »

Publisher: Peter Saga

Stock art by Peter Saga depicting a stylized skull hero or villain in full color.

Bonus: Black and white line art included in Photoshop file! 

Line art specifics, 3.25" (w) 5" (h) inches @ 400dpi.

Purchase includes one of each file format - PSD (layers), PNG (no background). 
All art files enclosed in a ZIP file.

* License usage guidelines enclosed in the attached ZIP file allowing the purchaser to alter or modify any illustration in this set, in addition to rules on crediting, etc.

Price: $2.00 Read more »

Publisher: Frog God Games

In Vino Gigantus

An introductory adventure by award winning author and designer James M. Spahn for Swords & Wizardry and other old-school fantasy roleplaying games!

Stormridge Sanctum was once home to the the an ancient and noble line of storm giants. It floated miles beyond the sight of mortal men, witnessing the birth and death of countless civilizations. But as time wore on and decadence laid hold to the Tempestas clan, both Stormridge Sanctum and its magnificent liege lords surrendered to the decay of time and decadence.

Now a single storm giant noble remains, the haughty dilettante sorcerer-prince Clovis Tempestas II. He concerns himself only with base pleasures and none more so than his beloved stock of family wine. But his beloved wine cellar has become flooded with a foul murk and strange creatures slither between bottles of his finest family vintage. He cannot be bothered to wade into such filth himself and he has no servants remaining in his household, so he has used what little magic his grape-addled mind can recall and summoned new servants: A troupe of unsuspecting adventures who will serve -- and if necessary, die -- to save his beloved wine.

This introductory adventure can be instantly inserted into any campaign without preamble, as it opens with the player characters being the unwitting targets of a Summon Monster spell! Once summoned into the very hands of a mad and drunken giant, the player characters will find themselves exploring a realm designed for creatures ten times their size as they fight all manner of strange creature, traverse larger than life obstacles and objects, encounter other adventurers who have fallen into the clutches of the mad prince Tempestas, and even risk plummeting to their death as the very foundation of the cloud castle of Stormridge Sanctum is crumbling beneath their boots!

Can the player characters placate the whims of a giant drunk on power and lost grace? Will they survive encounters with the strange animated objects that have become twisted by decades of neglected magic beneath a crumbling castle? And just what the hell is that echoing boom coming from the eastern part of the wine cellar?!

You’ve been granted the hospitality of the storm giant prince Clovis Tempestas II, and he’s always up for a little more...

Price: $7.99 Read more »

Publisher: Frog God Games

In Vino Gigantus

An introductory adventure by award winning author and designer James M. Spahn for Pathfinder and other third edition OGL fantasy roleplaying games!

Stormridge Sanctum was once home to the the an ancient and noble line of storm giants. It floated miles beyond the sight of mortal men, witnessing the birth and death of countless civilizations. But as time wore on and decadence laid hold to the Tempestas clan, both Stormridge Sanctum and its magnificent liege lords surrendered to the decay of time and decadence.

Now a single storm giant noble remains, the haughty dilettante sorcerer-prince Clovis Tempestas II. He concerns himself only with base pleasures and none more so than his beloved stock of family wine. But his beloved wine cellar has become flooded with a foul murk and strange creatures slither between bottles of his finest family vintage. He cannot be bothered to wade into such filth himself and he has no servants remaining in his household, so he has used what little magic his grape-addled mind can recall and summoned new servants: A troupe of unsuspecting adventures who will serve -- and if necessary, die -- to save his beloved wine.

This introductory adventure can be instantly inserted into any campaign without preamble, as it opens with the player characters being the unwitting targets of a Summon Monster spell! Once summoned into the very hands of a mad and drunken giant, the player characters will find themselves exploring a realm designed for creatures ten times their size as they fight all manner of strange creature, traverse larger than life obstacles and objects, encounter other adventurers who have fallen into the clutches of the mad prince Tempestas, and even risk plummeting to their death as the very foundation of the cloud castle of Stormridge Sanctum is crumbling beneath their boots!

Can the player characters placate the whims of a giant drunk on power and lost grace? Will they survive encounters with the strange animated objects that have become twisted by decades of neglected magic beneath a crumbling castle? And just what the hell is that echoing boom coming from the eastern part of the wine cellar?!

You’ve been granted the hospitality of the storm giant prince Clovis Tempestas II, and he’s always up for a little more...

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Publisher: Fishwife Games

RANDOM TAVERN ROLLER

Multiple Charts on One Page Equals Hundreds Of Possible Taverns or Inns.

Perfect for quickly creating details about that tavern that the characters are destined to meet up in. Here’s how to use this product: First roll to see if the tavern has beds for rent. After that roll on Tavern Name charts A and B and combine for the tavern/inn name. Next roll for the tavern Condition descriptive and then on the charts for Most Popular Drinks and Food. Then roll on the Male or Female name for the Tavern Owner’s First Name. Then roll Surname Pt A and Pt B and combine for The Owner’s Surname. Then Roll for a notable detail. Finally, if desired, roll for a Notable Patron type and then roll for a first name and surname for that patron.

Sample Result: The Wandering Rabbit (Overpriced), Beds?: Yes (18 total), Most Popular Drink: Berry wine, Most Popular Food: Smoked salmon,
Tavern Owner: Osbert Snowforte (Reformed burglar), Notable Patron: Gelda Kegtimber (Lonely widow)

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Publisher: Misfit Studios

Eric Lofgren Presents: Mythos Invocation

This stock art image by Eric Lofgren depicts a dark sorcerer standing upon the remains of his sacrifice to cast a forbidden Mythos Invocation. Has his magic summoned the unknowable creatures in the woods? Is it seeking to control them for some dark bidding?

This color purchase includes one JPG and a TIFF version, both at 300 dpi. Dimensions are 8.25 x 12 inches.

All art files are bundled in a ZIP file.

Work from Eric Lofgren aside from Mythos Invocation

Eric Lofgren is a well-known industry professional whose talent has appeared in various projects, across numerous genres, for companies such as Paizo Publishing, White Wolf, Alderac Entertainment Group, Neca Online, Privateer Press, Monte Cook Games, Fantasy Flight Games, and Catalyst Labs are probably the biggest to date. He was also one of the first artists Misfit Studios worked with.

Eric Lofgren Stock Art License Summary

All stock art is licensed for use in professional publications. Eric Lofgren retains ownership of the work, meaning you cannot resell the art in your own art packs or the like, and may be required to post an artist credit. There are limits regarding how this art may be edited for use.

You must include the artist's copyright statement in all publications using the art under certain terms and conditions. You obtain a license to use the art, but do not own any rights to it beyond that.

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Publisher: Misfit Studios

Quico Vicens-Picatto Presents: Leviathan

This stock art piece by Quico Vicens-Picatto presents a Leviathan ready to coil about its prey. Just how large is this creature and what sort of environment does it dwell in? And, considering it's wide, many-fanged mouth is so wide with hunger, what does it eat?

This image is presented at 8.5 x 11 inches in size.

This color purchase includes one JPG and one TIFF version, each at 300 dpi.

All art files are bundled in a ZIP file.

Quico Vicens-Picatto Stock Art License Summary

All stock art is licensed for use in professional publications. Quico Vicens-Picatto retains ownership of the work, meaning you cannot resell the art in your own art packs or the like, and may be required to post an artist credit. There are limits regarding how this art may be edited for use.

You must include the artist's copyright statement in all publications using the art under certain terms and conditions. You obtain a license to use the art, but do not own any rights to it beyond that.

Price: $10.00 Read more »

There are moments in time where you declare that you will hold a position no matter what. You will not fall back. You pick your hill to die on. These can be dramatic and important moments. But there are other times when it is just as important to look back and realize how you ended up standing on that hill, and why you need to defend it.

When someone is comfortable, it is too easy for them to ignore the danger that others find themselves facing. A lot of us in the RPG hobby have been very comfortable for a very long time, and that means that we have allowed others to be subjected to dangers that they should never have faced.

Many of us have heard about people in the industry that are a problem. They are abusive and destructive. They treat those that they dislike terribly and make them fear for their safety using online terrorism. They make the RPG hobby a place that holds nothing for the victims of this abuse but regret. When these same abusers have any kind of gravitas in the RPG hobby, this also includes ruining careers and smashing dreams. Those abusers pull strings to make sure the industry regards these people as “unstable” or more “troublesome.”

The Cycle

The abusers are terrible. But many of us in the RPG hobby have seen these tactics used. Many of us know the people involved. But when it doesn’t involve us, the problem goes away. If we never had the sights set upon us, we can go back to whatever corner we call our own and live our lives. Others dread any interaction online. They worry about when the next shoe will drop. Will someone get them fired from a project? Will hundreds of people send threats of physical violence or death? Is that strange person across the street someone that found out their address — someone that has decided that online persecution isn’t enough?

The damage that is done by abusers often isn’t defined as a single terrible incident. Often, it is a long term pattern that does not abate. It’s harm that is revisited every time that person looks at the things they used to love. Beyond the fear of violence and death, it is the theft of part of who they are, something they cannot revisit on their own terms any longer.

For those of us that have always been comfortable, it is very easy to point at the abusers when they come to our notice and say, “isn’t that awful,” and go about our business. It is much harder for us to look at ourselves in the mirror and say, “I let this happen.” When the evidence of the abuser’s actions is not in front of us, we forget the abused and their daily contention with the effects of that abuse. We can turn away when they cannot. We are complicit.

It sounds heroic to pick a hill to die on. It’s a grand gesture. It’s the heroic finale. But one hero dying on a hill doesn’t create change. Building a safe community that doesn’t let someone stand on that hill alone is what we need. Having a community that looks out for their own, so that no pack of predators can come for our own is what is needed. We need communities where we don’t need martyrs to remind us of the dangers that exist.

Staring Down the Mirror

We need to make sure that the companies that we support are hiring diverse employees that are in positions of authority, so that they can understand the perspective of the marginalized. We need to listen to marginalized voices and believe them. We need to stop reflexively assuming that everything is fine unless presented with overwhelming evidence. When we are the ones in the comfortable position, we need to stop thinking that we, the comfortable, get to determine what constitutes real danger for the people in harm’s way.

Privilege is watching a fight from a distance and deciding if you want to participate. Privilege is showing up for the fight and assuming you will take the lead. Progress is knowing they are all your fights, and your job is to support others when they want to lead.

Too often, those of us that are comfortable descend from on high, get involved in one specific issue, then spend months patting ourselves on the back, while just behind it, more people are being abused and marginalized. This must end. No one deserves praise for doing what they should be doing. They just deserve to be chastised when they abdicate their responsibilities.

This is a microcosm of the world we live in. It is far too easy to ignore the plight of the marginalized because it doesn’t directly affect the privileged. We can’t run to games to hide from the rest of the world. The world and its patterns of abuse and systemic problems come with us. The patterns of abuse are part of us. Games can help us cope. Games can help us relieve stress. Games are not, however, separate from the worlds that gave birth to them, and they carry with them the same seeds that every other item born from a society bears.

I have long believed that one of the greatest aspects of roleplaying games is the ability of these games to teach us empathy. We continually put ourselves in the place of people that are not who we are, in places we are not. If we cannot engage that fundamental skill to make the spaces where we play more inclusive and safer, we lose one of the most precious gifts that this hobby can give us.

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I love relationships in games. I’ve always been of the opinion that having relationships in your games adds depth, motivation, and to me, fun. I love playing family, friends, parents, children — and definitely romantic and ex-romantic partners. Adding romantic relationships to games gives them the same dimensionality, and also gives us a whole slew of tropes to play with. They’re an easy way to get investment and commitment from your players, and they can work as a great counterpoint to your main plot. In honor of Valentine’s Day tomorrow, I want to talk about my favorite ones, why they are entertaining to play, and tips for incorporating them in to your game!

Please note that using romance in games requires good communication and expectation setting with your fellow players. Never embark on a love relationship with another character without their player’s consent, even if you intend it to be one-sided. As the recipient of any sort of romantic interest, that player gets to decide what they are comfortable with and what will be fun for them in the game. If they aren’t interested, respect that. The tropes listed here can help you create shared story goals for playing through a relationship, both so that you are on the same page, and so that you can get informed consent. Got another idea? Go for it, of course! But talk it out.

My other note is that because these relationships have the potential to be very emotional, I believe that safety tools are important for any game that contains them. Use whichever tool you like, but please make sure you have a way to revoke consent or call a pause at any point in your game. Here is a list of some of the most commonly used tools, and I can also recommend the OK Check in as adjusted for Turning Point.

Hate Kissing

Hate kissing is the age old “we hate each other we hate each other we hate each other and we can’t keep our hands off each other” trope. It can work well for games where characters hold different belief sets — they’re always fighting, until that moment when passion takes over and suddenly they’re kissing instead. Don’t see how this works? It actually happened to me in college. A guy that found me very annoying at first (his own words) fell head over heels for me later. Strong feelings are strong feelings and the lines are closer than we like to think. Examples that work in play: characters who are at cross-purposes, like a notorious space pirate queen and bounty hunter etc. Characters on the same team with very different cultural values, like a paladin and the rogue. Cue emotional turmoil as your romantic leads (and the people around them) are faced with the conundrum of their budding relationship.

One-Sided

The object of your affections does not return your interest. You may pine, moon, make sad eyes at them, or pass them love poems at the table. Please note that stalking is really not cool unless that’s specifically the direction you both discuss — clear lines and boundaries about what is or is not acceptable are important with this one.

Will They Or Won’t They

The age old classic — they’re in love, probably! But so much dramatic tension! As the writers of this story, we know they’re probably going to get together, but this is the story of how they resisted it for as long as possible. To play this effectively at the table, you’ll need a strong reason they can’t get together, whether that’s some kind of personality trait, a strong belief, or outside circumstances. The key with this trope is that once they get together, there’s not tension left, really, so it should happen right near the end of the game in best dramatic conclusion, or at least in full Romeo and Juliet fashion where they can die in each other’s arms (also a very satisfying conclusion).

Old Flames

They had a thing, long ago, and for some reason it didn’t work out. Duty called them apart or they lost each other in a storm at sea. Whatever it was, it wasn’t their choice, but they both moved on. Now, in this new phase of their lives, with new responsibilities and possibly other relationships, they’ve re-discovered each other, and the chemistry is still here. The question is, what will they do about it? Will they make space in their lives for this relationship again, or will it remain a sad and distant ghost?

Exes

My last favorite relationship trope is exes. This is when we have tension in a different way — these two characters used to be in a relationship, but now they’re not. It might have been contentious. It might have been one-sided. There were probably hurt feelings. Now they have to work together again, and they’re probably not happy about it. They may have happy memories recalled with a twinge of sadness as well as fights that they fall into comfortably from long history.

I also have to call out some of my favorite games that create romantic relationships, many of these varieties, as the purpose of play. Star Crossed is a beautiful game of forbidden love from Alex Roberts. The Sky Is Gray and You Are Depressed is a story about a committed couple working through a difficult discussion and a secret from Josh Jordan. Yes is a forthcoming game from Wendelyn Reischl in which a nontraditional relationship succeeds. Shooting the Moon is a game of warring suitors and a beloved from Emily Care Boss in the Romance Trilogy. It Was A Mutual Decision is a game about the end of a relationship (and possibly were-rats) from Ron Edwards.

What is your favorite type of romantic relationship to play at the table? What are your best tips for playing characters in love? Have you had a famous love story at your table? What’s your favorite romantic game?

 

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There are a lot of areas that are a part of the Airy Peaks, twenty-three last time I counted but I might have lost some and added some along the way that I’m forgetting about. These aren’t twenty-three rooms — they are twenty-four adventure locations. It’s intended to be a massive place and I wanted it to feel like that. In doing that I needed to solve a couple of problems when drawing it up. The first was how do I connect all the areas of the Peaks? The second was how can the characters travel the Peaks without it feeling like a slog? So let’s solve them.

The Point Crawl

The point crawl is an alternative to the hex crawl and mapping out every continuous connection in a dungeon. It looks a lot like a mind map and connects larger areas to each other by lines. That’s how I initially drew up the Airy Peaks. In doing this I created some distinct areas as parts of individual mountains, but I wanted a way for characters to really get around so I created the Fire Tube Tunnels. These round tunnels are beneath the Peaks and connect all the lower and some of the higher area caverns. Within the Fire Tube Tunnels are also some larger caverns that aren’t in a mountain. I also had some of the areas outside of the mountains such as the Ever Burning Forest, The Remnants of the Great Forest, and The Vale of Bones. With that done I had connected the Peaks and had given a way for the characters to travel them, but the Fire Tube Tunnels created a new problem. There was never going to be a way to map them out. They just connected things. That meant I needed to decide how the characters would find their way around the Fire Tube Tunnels. My answer was the Town of Foot and a custom move.

Foot

I talked a bit about Foot in the first article. It’s a home base that matters. One of the reasons it matters is because adventurers flock to the location, explore the Peaks, make maps, sell those maps, and learn rumors. One of the ways I evolved the story of the Peaks was letting the characters have maps that would lead them to new locations in the mountain range. These maps were described as hand written and were annotated by different adventurers depending on how old they were. The other side of the equation were rumors. The rumors were heard and shared over drinks at the Red Scales Inn. These rumors often prompted the characters to go on adventures to find whatever the rumors were pointing them to.

With maps, rumors and a move called Carouse, I had a lot of tools at my disposal to drop story seeds and adventure hooks to the characters. It made it really easy to prompt the characters into action, since most of them were looking go in after treasure. Even if they weren’t they’d just go look for adventure. With the maps and moves I had it let me improvise a night of adventure anyways.

Moving about the Peaks

Now that I had a way for the characters to move around the mountain range and several ways to hook them into adventures, I needed to mechanize moving around the mountain range. So there were a couple of ways. I created a custom move for Navigating the Fire Tube Tunnels and I would also just let them get where they were going if they had a map that led them there. So maps were more valuable than rumors, and any place that was connected by the Fire Tube Tunnels that needed to be navigated had a mechanism.

In Dungeon World I used the move but in other games a random encounter mechanism could be used, such as roll a d6 and on a 6 you encounter trouble of the GMs choosing. That could even be modified to be roll a d6 and on a 3+ you encounter trouble of the GMs choosing. I had a lot of things that could cause trouble in the Fire Tube Tunnels. It could also be roll on a random table instead of the trouble being of the GMs choosing. That’s completely up to how a GM would handle it.

Here’s the custom move I used:

When Navigating the Fire Tube Tunnels have one person designated as the scout and roll + WIS.

• On a 10+ the party reaches the location without incident.
• On a 7-9 the party encounters something interesting. It could be trouble but it might just be interesting.
• On a 6- the party finds themselves in a difficult situation with the person who rolled choosing who gets the XP for the 6-. That member of the party is in a particularly difficult spot.

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A number of years ago, I decided to try something bold with a campaign of the Kult horror RPG that I was about to run. I wanted to play around with past lives and the theme of duality, so I decided to run a campaign with two story lines that would eventually merge into one. I had the players create two sets of characters: one set for the modern day story line, and another for a historical story line to take place during 1864 in the southern United States. We would play two or three sessions using one character set, then flip to the other for the next few sessions. It was an interesting and fairly successful experiment, so I thought I would take this opportunity to share some of the learning from it with you.

Avoid the Metagame Problem

If you want to try something like this, my first piece of advice is to allow the characters to be aware of what happens to their counterparts in the other time period. Whether it be through a dream, a flashback, a hallucination, or whatever, Character A-1 should know what Character A-2 is thinking, and what is going on. This allows you to neatly sidestep the problem of player meta-knowledge. When employing this method, things can get confusing for the players, and allowing them to not worry about what Character A-1 knows vs Character A-2 is a great help for them.

In order to do this successfully, you will need to have an in-game reason for why the characters are able to have this knowledge. Is one set of characters a figment of their others’ imaginations? Are they a collective hallucination? Perhaps the modern set are clones, created from the genetic material of the characters from the past. Is it a past lives situation? Are they really the same person? You have plenty of options, and though you don’t need to disclose the reason right away, you will need to eventually.

How to Switch

You will need to come up with a switching mechanism. I have actually performed this exercise a few times over the years, and have tried a variety of methods. For example, characters can go to sleep and dream of the other time period. If you use this method, then you need the characters to sleep in order to switch back and forth, which can lead to some awkward timing (and characters forcibly trying to stay awake in order to keep the story centered on them). I have used sudden waking visions that last a random amount of time. These have the benefit of happening whenever I like, but it can leave the characters in a vulnerable position as they are suddenly rendered comatose for a number of minutes or hours while they have their vision.

The point is that every time you switch back and forth, you need a mechanism with rules that work in your game environment. You also need to realize that the players may attempt to manipulate those rules in order to control the timing of the switch.

When to Switch

Two sessions? Three? Four? I have personally found 2-3 to be the sweet spot. You don’t want so much time to pass that the players have trouble remembering what was going on with a particular set of characters, but you don’t want to switch too often either, as players like a couple of sessions to “get into” their characters. I recommend that you start off by switching every 2 or 3 sessions and then asking your players for feedback. Do they want to switch more often? Less? Are they having trouble keeping things straight? Would they benefit from a better recap, perhaps?

The other thing to consider is the in-game point of the switch. If you have some control over this, a cliffhanger or the beginning of a fight is an excellent time to switch. Starting your session off with some action can be a big help to get things rolling and help your players get back into their characters.

A Rich Inner World

One of the unexpected benefits of the two time period structure turned out to be the rich inner world that the players created with their two characters. When a character was out of the spotlight for some reason or another, the player would often delve into the inner world of the characters, reflect on what they know about each other, their potentially conflicting motivations, etc. They can specifically “tell” their other characters things that they can act on in the other time period. Sometimes this would even lead to conflict between a player’s two characters.

Their Own Worst Enemy

Another unexpected delight was that some players will choose to have their two characters actively work against each other, while others will have them cooperate. When they work against each other, it is pure gaming gold. They will try to deliberately exclude themselves from conversations so that their counterpart won’t be privy to important information. They will cooperate with enemies in order to sabotage the other character. They will ask other characters to arrange for their counterparts to betray the character. It can get pretty crazy, but this is a great way for a player to exercise some agency and work against the other group. When their plans are stymied, they have only themselves to blame!

Crossing the Streams

Eventually your story lines need to converge in order to provide a satisfying ending. This can happen in a number of ways, but the real question is this – do the two sets of characters get to meet? In order to decide if you will allow this, you need to consider the following:

• Your players will want this to happen.
• Your players will feel confused and overwhelmed when this does happen.
• It can be an excellent idea.
• It is a terrible idea.

I don’t know the right answer to this one. One thing that I do know is that when it happens, you need to be well prepared, your players should see it coming so that they can be well prepared, and you need to keep it short (one session or less). Two sets of characters is almost as bad as doubling the number of players in your game, and it can really bog down a game. Players have trouble keeping track of which character is talking, so use props or name cards to help indicate which character is speaking. Be sure that you, as the game master, have a tight control mechanism for ensuring that the encounter will come to an end because you don’t want it to go on for too long.

You also need to consider what purpose the cross-over serves. I have done this a couple of times now with a few different purposes:

• The two sets of characters meet and merge into one being, with one of the two becoming the “dominant” personality.
• The two sets of characters meet to confront each other, with only one set able to survive.
• The two sets of characters meet to confront an external threat and save the world, but some will have to sacrifice themselves.

You get the idea.

I am always looking for interesting ways to play with the structure of campaigns, and this is one of the more successful methods that I have found. It works particularly well for one of my favorite games, Kult, which really encourages playing with memories of past lives. What do you think of this idea? Have you tried something similar? Do you have any other radical ideas for different campaign structures? If so, I would love to hear about them!

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Join Ang, Camdon, and Jared for a discussion on different initiative systems and different ways to manage initiative in your games. Will these gnomes act soon enough to keep them out of the stew?

About Jabari in their own words: Jabari Weathers is an illustrator and game designer who currently resides in Baltimore, Maryland. They also are (apparently) under suspicion of being a goblin princet from beyond the veil. In order to keep up their glamor, they make art and narrative games for themselves.

You can help them maintain their human facade by checking out their artwork at jmwillustration.com and their game design work at lunarveil.press. If you wish to follow along with their more anecdotal adventures, they can be found on instagram (jmwillustration) and twitter (JabariWeathers).

Tell us a little bit about yourself and your work? What project are you most proud of?

Hi Tracy, thanks for inviting me to do this with you! I’m a black, nonbinary scifi fantasy illustrator by day, and tabletop rpg/narrative game designer by night. I live in Baltimore and attended art school here (at MICA). Soon after I found myself making so many tarot cards for roleplaying game publishers. The work I’m most proud of in that regard is, in fact, split between making the 7th Sea Sortè deck art, and the Bluebeard’s Bride Tarot of Servants art. Both projects put together took 8 months for me to make the art for, which kind of scares me. As far as my game design work, I’m working on an epistolary game called A Dire Situation, which is essentially a really perverse game of telephone inspired by Dangerous Liaisons and other acidic period piece dramas. It’s a good time. You can follow my artwork at jmwillustration.com, my (announced) game design work at lunarveil.press, and me at twitter.com/JabariWeathers and instagram.com/jmwillustration~

What themes do you like to emphasize in game work?

Existential tension, often the questions of identity and knowing who you are. I’m in a few different professional and creative circles that I simultaneously feel indebted to as far as my taste in media and interests, and feel not immediately welcome in, having to have carved a niche for myself within scifi/fantasy illustration and game design. I often try to find ways to take the kind of performative tension I feel as a POC in both circles and fold that into game design terms. It’s sort of like journaling. There’s a mechanic in A Dire Situation where everyone chooses a secret for another person’s character, but you don’t know what secret has been chosen for you specifically, even though your *character* is understood to be aware of the secret and you as a player get to see all of the available secrets that are in play at the table. The result is nobody is quite who they themselves think they are, and you end up having to question a lot about the entity you’re stepping into for the evening. I like trying to get people to question their fictional personas, anyway!

How did you get into games? Who did you try to emulate in your career?

Actually I got into games through my mom, who played DnD when she was younger and never stopped consuming speculative fiction. She kinda just passed the genre interest on to me. I also grew up with cousins who played a LOT of video games with me, and eventually made my way toward titles that valued a kind of emergent design that tabletop RPGs are especially well suited for (for example, Thief, Deus Ex [I grew up with Invisible War and Deadly Shadows and played the earlier games in late high school and early college], Morrowind). In high school, my religion teacher (I went to an all boys Catholic high school), was really my first longstanding GM with 3.5, but I had been reading the books for a solid amount of time before that point. I don’t know if I tried to emulate any one person in my game design upon starting, but I did try to chase the same kind of player choice that Looking Glass Studios baked into their digital work (which they pulled from tabletop games in a lot of ways), as well as their interdisciplinary approach to game design. Look at Thief: The Dark Project against it’s contemporaries and you can tell that it was made by people interested in things outside of the industry that it was making an impact on. I love how Looking glass trusts it’s players and doesn’t hold their hand, instead giving them tools to let the experience emerge. I also love how their games had such odd and idiosyncratic approaches that really challenged the player. I still chase both things in the social landscape that tabletop RPGs create, and I really hope I make something that’s half as inspiring as that Looking Glass ethos was for me!

More recently, I’ve been owing a lot of the recent game design lessons learned to Marissa Kelly, Sarah Richardson and Whitney Beltran from Bluebeard’s Bride, and John Harper’s work on Blades in the Dark. The former is such an amazing study in how to get horror and tension to emerge, and how to bake unusual ceremony into a game. A lot of people are intimidated by it when they are used to simulationist style games, and many admirers of Bluebeard’s Bride also label it as “simple” mechanically, but there is *so* much happening in the social and emotional landscape of that game, so much that gets mechanized so eloquently. Every piece of vocabulary that the players (including the Groundskeeper) use is calibrated perfectly to the theme and discussions Bluebeard’s is meant to provoke. Blades does a wondrous amount of things with a swashbuckling setup by letting players pick the details of their abilities and tools on the fly, but making *everything* a resource management game. When some of those resources aren’t just ‘coin’ or ‘inventory’ but are ‘stress’, it becomes evocative in a game that I wish a lot of other action/adventure RPGs would be. Both also have a remarkable relationship to violence that ends up more nuanced than what I think the common examples of games present show to those not entrenched in the game community. I’ve been studying these both *very* closely, and trying to digest the things they’ve brought to my game brain rather deeply.

Do you have any advice for others getting into the industry?

Don’t be afraid to put yourself out there, and do so in person! I try to go to events because I meet people and make fast friends when in the flesh, and those are friendships I really cherish and feel enriched by. Also, don’t underestimate how much you as (not a designer) are valuable to game design! A lot of my best game design ideas come from me essentially abstracting the anxieties of my day to day life doing freelance and being worried about the world into game mechanics and procedures, or finding the particular joys of the media I consume and turning that into a game. A Dire Situation started as an attempt to capture the unique feeling of watching people read things they shouldn’t have access to, which I always enjoy seeing in films. Get weird with your ideas, someone will cherish it and you’ll get to know yourself better through that, and don’t be afraid to share yourself before you’re ‘polished enough’. This industry is so young, and I think a lot of people curtail the considerable wisdom they can bring to it because they aren’t established, but that’s the way that communities grow best, when people exert the best of themselves in the truest way they know.

What do you think the most important things in gaming are right now?

That’s a huge question, and I’m afraid of my answer being too succinct to pin down a lot of the things that I think are valuable and important that are shifting in this medium and the community that fosters it. Right now, there’s a generation of designers and gamers that are pushing to be *way* more inclusive in this medium, which is amazing because it’s such an empathy builder. With that, we’re seeing a lot of games that are reflecting that wider spectrum of experiences and needs at a higher frequency, and seeing that it’s getting good and wide reception. Games like Bluebeard’s Bride, Star Crossed, Mutants in the Night, and BFF:Best Friends Forever are challenging questions of who’s stories are told, who’s perspectives are shared and what kind of exchange do we expect from such a social medium. As things move forward, I think that kind of willingness and encouragement to lean into new experiences without apologizing to established patterns of play and design is going to only help this community grow faster and stronger, even with the anticipated challenges. This medium is showing very explicitly that Joy isn’t just killing goblins, and Pain isn’t just the threat of being killed by goblins, and that kind of emotional honesty is pulling the industry into it’s teenage years.

This also comes with a greater call for accountability in our community as far as social safety. There’s a lot more discussion of missing stairs, safe tables, and supportive gatherings than I felt just a decade ago as a teenager. A lot of conduct has been pulled rather painfully into the light, a lot of social patterns are under intense scrutiny at our tables and in this industry, and I think that’s rightly so. Being in this world, much as I love it, can be so quietly, exhaustively bracing, and the people that make up this industry should feel able to assert what makes them feel safe and when they are threatened. People are actively doing this in games and in the community, and that’s amazing.

What’s your most meaningful gaming experience?

Generally, one that has enough trust to get uncomfortable. One where I can lean into the vulnerabilities of characters, and embolden fellow players to do the same. I look for kind of emotionally intense, bracing media, and I love feeling that way (or provoking that feeling) in a game. I want my assumptions shaken up a little bit, and, assuming it’s navigated compassionately and safely, I value going to dark places in games. It pulls a lot of the horror and strife of my actual world into perspective. I generally like my fantasy to reflect my reality and give me the vocabulary and process to make it better, or at least see it more clearly. There’s nothing wrong with lighter fare, but this is what will get my attention reliably.

What’s the most important change you could see occurring in the industry?

More than a few, but paying freelancers livable wages (even if it means shrinking the density of content) is the big one. There’s tons of ways to unpack this, and tons of reasons that workloads are overweighed and underpaid, many being unintentional for the majority of the market. In some ways, that’s made it even harder to check. The flipside is that I’ve had ADs in the industry say things along the lines of “artists take (RPG work) on as a hobby, nobody is doing this for full time work” and that sentiment really blew my mind. So many really talented artists spending so much time, money and effort perfecting craft and that’s a sentiment that’s we might be competing against when trying to navigate to a workable and healthy architecture of work. I think there’s a lot of wanting to do better on the business end, especially in indie RPGs, but the whole industry needs to (and is trying to) go through that learning process. The continued challenge to stick with those better principles I think is an instrumental change to the community’s sustainability.

Anything else you want to add?

When practicing magic, make sure to add salt!

And thank you for your time, Tracy!

 

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While it is by no means an element unique to me, my earliest gaming memories are deeply intertwined with 80s media, given the time when I grew up. Freddy Krueger showed up in my Ghostbusters campaign, our group fought a Terminator when we played Mechwarrior, and I remember running to the basement to make up characters for a Top Secret S.I. game after watching a Rambo movie.

Shadow of the Century is a Fate Core supplement that moves the Spirit of the Century setting into the 1980s. It attempts to add all your 80s action movie and TV series tropes into a tabletop roleplaying game. I’ll admit up front, as much as I enjoy playing Fate based games, I never fully invested in Spirit of the Century. I am familiar, and have played with, a lot of pulp tropes, but I never felt confident enough to fully embrace the setting to run a game using the material.

How well does Shadow of the Century address the idea of running games in an 80s action movie setting? How well does it integrate these ideas into the existing Spirit of the Century setting? Let’s dive in and find out.

The Fate Core Manuscript

 This review is based on the PDF of the product. The PDF is 214 pages long, with a page for the character sheet, and an Evil Hat ad, and a six-page index at the end.

The book has similar formatting to other Fate Core books, and the interior line art is full color. The style almost reminds me of the John Buscema/Tom Palmer artwork in the 80s Avengers comics, with less weight to the lines, but more lines for details in the art.

There is a clever tweaking to the standard Fate Core formatting, as the color choices and page numbers in the book are a nod to 80s design conventions, while the headers and structure still follow the established trade dress for Evil Hat.

The World We Live In

The opening chapter of the book has a brief summary of the established Spirit of the Century setting, then introduces the differences in the setting moving into the 80s, with elements that have changed between the original material and Shadow of the Century. All the broad elements mentioned in this introduction are further expanded upon later in the book, but it’s a good, quick explanation of the setting and how it relates to the earlier era.

In broad terms, the setting has moved from a handful of people born at the turn of the century to embody certain zeitgeist, with their own organization that opposes the World Crime League, to a setting where the old Spirits are hunted criminals, and the heroes come from all walks of life (expanding walks of life to accommodate for 80s action movie walks of life like wandering martial artists or lost time travelers).

Evil doesn’t all belong to the same over the top organization but is broken up across several (slightly less) over the top organizations that are deeply entrenched into politics and business across the world.

Also, it really sets the tone of the setting to know that Variable Hyperdimensional Simultaneity (VHS) is a term used to measure how much mathemagic has caused time and space to be warped.

The Pitch Session

 Something that is often a strength of Fate products is that the themes and structures of the campaign are often explicitly spelled out at the beginning of the campaign. While many games will have sections that discuss setting expectations and getting buy-in, Fate products often mechanize this step in a very specific way, and Shadow of the Century continues this tradition.

In Shadow of the Century, the group will be making decisions on what kind of structure the campaign has, following the structure of a movie or a series. This will create a different feeling and will trigger different advice. There are actually a few rules presented in the game that differ based on this decision as well.

The group will then collaboratively decide on “the Man,” which is one of the entrenched group of villains that their story will involve. The group will come up with issues (which have different guidelines based on series versus movies), cast members, and villains. It is important to note that all of this happens before the players make their characters.

Phase Six: Heroes I’m calling this section out specifically, because there are a few differences between how you create Shadow of the Century characters and Fate Core characters. While it doesn’t use the 1 for 1 stress boxes that some more recent Fate releases have used, extra stress boxes aren’t granted for skills, but can be purchased during character creation. While characters have a Trouble, a Call to Action, a War Story, and a Team-Up aspect, the last two aspects are called out as aspects that can be created in play later. This addresses some of the aspect overload that Fate Core introduces with its default character creation.

It’s also worth noting that there is a full-page discussion on 80s characters and the overreliance on cis white male heroes. It’s a call to action to keep the fun, crazy things from all the 80s stories you are emulating, but to do a better job of including marginalized people in important, and starring, roles.

Who Are You, And What Do You Do?

 Shadow of the Century also introduces roles for characters. Those roles all have specific stunts that play into the overall theme of that role. The roles introduced in this chapter include the following:

• The Brain
• The Brawler
• The Cop
• The Detective
• The Dilettante
• The Face
• The Hacker
• The Inventor
• The Leader
• The Ninja
• The Saboteur
• The Soldier
• The Spy
• The Thief
• The Warrior
• The Wheelman

Cue Hair Metal Anthem

This is the section of the book that introduces the rules that surround montages. The Ad-Mon-Tage, the Challenge Montage, and the Milestone Montage all have separate rules.

An Ad-Mon-Tage is a montage used to generate a bunch of free invokes on aspects that revolve around getting ready for a specific known threat. The Challenge Montage is similar to some of the group check rules in Fate Core, where characters are trying to do “something” narratively, and the number of successes from the PCs engaging in their montage determines how well that “thing” gets resolved.

The Milestone Montage involves punching beef so that you can borrow the benefits of your next milestone to use for a confrontation. Figuratively speaking. Or maybe literally. I’m not going to tell you how to montage.

Going Gonzo

This chapter introduces the Gonzometer, the Gonzometer level, and Gonzo feats. It also touches on creating a Centurion, the special characters that have previously existed in the setting, and who operate on a special level no matter what the Gonzometer is in the current scene.

The Gonzometer can be set from 1 to 3, with 1 being the over the top, but not quite supernatural level that a lot of 80s action movies and TV series portray. You might have a talking car (which is totally justifiable by science, if you think about it), but aliens and magic may not be an element. At 2, more fantasy and sci-fi elements may show up, but those elements are noteworthy. At Gonzometer 3, everything is crazy.

Characters can be Gonzo characters and spend their feats to build Gonzo feats to play into that theme. Gonzo feats have different levels, and if the Gonzometer of the current scene is lower than the tier of effects that you are attempting to use from your Gonzo feat, you must spend Fate points to make up the difference to trigger the effect.

Gonzo feats and how they interact with characters showcase one of the biggest strengths and biggest challenges of Fate based games. There is an example Gonzo feat, and a lot of advice on how to build Gonzo feats, but a lot is left up to the player and the GM to custom build for the character concept. That is both great, from a character customization standpoint, and challenging for people that don’t feel they have system mastery of Fate enough to “balance” the tiers of their stunt.

Your Character Goes to 11

 The next chapter of the book addresses character advancement. This involves the standard Fate concept of Milestones, but exactly what can change will vary, and there are different sets of Milestones for episodes, movies, crescendo milestones, season finales, rising action, and confrontation. There are also milestones introduced for villains and Methuselah Fragments.

That all probably sounds more complicated that it is. The episode milestones are generally minor milestones. Crescendo milestones are important, goal-based milestones. Season finale milestones are important milestones that are triggered by closing out a season arc, while rising action and confrontation only come up in movies, being triggered when characters realize who they are fighting, and when they get ready to bear down on their final fight.

Villain milestones track how the organization’s goals are progressing, and if one of their goals is no longer attainable. Depending on how things progress for the organization, it may change in scale, and if it’s low enough when the villains drop in scale, the villain organization disperses.

Methuselah Fragments go into one of my favorite aspects of the setting. Doctor Methuselah is a character that has rewritten reality multiple times to maintain his immortality. This has resulted in fragments from other realities that he has overwritten to appear from time to time, causing weird rifts and changes, and it also means that there are multiple versions of Doctor Methuselah in the setting. The Methuselah Fragment milestones are only used if this plot element is a major part of the campaign and tracks how reality is warping and changing based on who has interacted with one of these fragments.

Say Hello to Our Little Friends

The next chapter of the book addresses how to stat out extras, mooks, mobs, lieutenants, shadows, NPC Spirits and New Wave Heroes, and monsters. In addition to the descriptions on how to stat these different style characters, there is advice on the actual purpose of the different types of characters and how they should be used.

One of my favorite parts of this chapter is the roles for the Shadows. The Shadows are the leaders of the evil organizations in the setting. The Shadows all have the following roles instead of individual skills:

• Assassin
• Authority
• Criminal
• Mastermind
• Scientist
• Soldier

It’s a nod to an 80s trope where supervillains are almost always omnicompetent. If you are awesome enough to run an evil villain organization, you are at least moderately competent at all these roles. Business leaders know what their scientists are talking about and know how to shoot people in the head. Ninja masters know super science. Mega-criminals know how do use military grade hardware. It’s so 80s.

Bringing the ‘80s to the Max!

This chapter touches base on 80s-based themes and what exactly from the 80s the game is trying to capture. I like this, because it is very easy to think that your nostalgia or knowledge of an existing period is going to carry you through portraying an era. It is much better to make sure that everyone is on the same page about the tropes and themes that are specifically being addressed.

In addition to discussing the tropes that are at play in the setting, I enjoyed the idea that it examines lots of these tropes both from a generally positive side, and from a more destructive, problematic direction.

Something Strange in the Neighborhood

 I tend to like when core rulebooks or setting books have a sample adventure, because I like the example of how the designers expect the game to work. One place where Fate products often shine is that, instead of having a sample adventure, they often have adventure ideas and described campaign arcs. While not as fleshed out as a sample adventure, getting more of these outlines provides more of an idea what types of one-shots and campaigns play to the intended design of the setting.

In Shadow of the Century, we get about nine different paragraph-long ideas for one-shot adventures, as well as three campaign frames — general ideas for who the PCs are and what they would do over time. The example campaigns are:

• Team Black (with a general A-Team vibe)
• The Sentinels of Science (with strong Buckaroo Banzai overtones)
• Anna and the Kareninas (Sort of Jem/Josie and the Pussycats with Robin Hood overtones)

The campaign frames provide sample characters as well, so it’s possible to just take the pre-generated characters and run with it. They are a few examples of Gonzo stunts with some of the sample characters, and kudos for using the term “synergy” on the character sheet for one of the Anna and the Kareninas characters.

The Greater Universe

 This chapter dives much deeper into the lore of the setting, how it connects with Spirit of the Century, and how various moving pieces fit together with other moving pieces. It provides a lot of inspiration, but given the assumed campaign structures, it’s not mandatory that anyone fully engage all the deep lore and interplay going on in this chapter.

One thing I will say up front — given the idea of Doctor Methuselah and the multiple alternate realities and reality fragments, I love the idea that you can’t have continuity errors. I mean, you can, but you can also just say “Methuselah Fragment” and get on with your day.

Overall, the villains belong to one of the following broad groups:

• The Kroll’X (aliens from another dimension)
• The Gentlemen’s Agreement (various crime organizations that don’t exactly work together, but agree to not get in one another’s way)
• The New Science Party (Evil politicians—It’s not always redundant to say it that way)
• The Board (Mega-corporations with agreements to carve up global markets and control everything through commerce and consumerism)

This chapter also introduces the Golden Seeds, organizations that might be helpful to the PCs, and carry on some of the legacies of the Centurions but may also serve as rivals or opponents if the PCs don’t oppose The Man the way their organization would prefer.

In addition to introducing the broad elements of all these groups, there are individual crime families, corporations, and sub-groups discussed, which can help to point GMs towards which elements of that faction are the most useful for their campaigns, and to hint at inter-group rivalries that can be played up in longer form series.

Pick Your Poison 

This chapter is filled with example characters that can be used as pre-generated PCs for a Shadow of the Century game. Beyond their skills and stunts, they only have a High Concept and a Trouble, leaving several aspects to be filled in, and none of a specific history or name assigned to them. The archetypes presented are:

• Army of One
• Coolest Kid in School
• Earthbound Alien
• Fugitive Android
• Loose Canon
• Martial Artist
• Sorcerer for Hire
• Teenage Werewolf
• Time Rider
• Unlikely Chosen One

The Earthbound Alien, Fugitive Android, Sorcerer for Hire, Teenage Werewolf, Time Rider, and Unlikely Chosen One include a few more examples of Gonzo stunts, for people that want them. It’s also easy to mix and match these pregens with the more fleshed out characters in the campaign frames, to have a good range of pregens to jump in and play with the setting, necessitating less work on the front end.

Be Excellent to One Another

Shadow of the Century does a great job, not only with invoking nostalgia, but with defining what the setting is about, and what tropes are at play. It provides villains and organizations that are both suitably 80s, and iconically vile.

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Shadow of the Century does a great job, not only with invoking nostalgia, but with defining what the setting is about, and what tropes are at play. It provides villains and organizations that are both suitably 80s, and iconically vile. It does the work of helping the table set up the overall campaign and provides tweaks to Fate Core to play to the pacing and themes present in the setting.

I Know You Are, But What Am I?

 While I don’t think these things are bad, overall, Shadow of the Century still retains some elements that I have seen beginning Fate players struggle with, such as custom-building stunts, and retaining different value stress boxes. While it specifically calls out the less inclusive elements of 80s media and entreats the table to avoid these, there isn’t a specific safety section in the book, and for the era where R rated cinema was deeply entrenched in the cultural zeitgeist, that may have been a worthwhile section to include.

Recommended — If the product fits in your broad area of gaming interests, you are likely to be happy with this purchase.

I freely admit that this might be due to the circumstances of my birth, but I am way more invested in this period of the setting than Spirit of the Century. I generally enjoy pulp tropes, but I think the idea of passing the torch from the golden age to a more jaded “modern” era really resonates.

I think this is a solid, broadly appealing Fate supplement, but in addition to that, it is a great overall sourcebook for a general 80s action setting, which even non-Fate players may enjoy reading. Unless you have no use for any 80s based campaign elements, or more modern action-based roleplaying, I think this purchase is going to have value for anyone picking it up.

What eras do you think would make for great gaming? What tropes define those eras, and what kind of campaigns would you picture for those timeframes? We’d love to hear from you in the comments below!

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Last time I introduced the Airy Peaks, talked about the premise of this megadungeon, and the way I found to have a successful campaign around a megadungeon that lasted. Check that out here:Welcome to the Airy Peaks. Today I want to dive into the Dragon’s Plot and how that can help inform the story of the megadungeon known as the Airy Peaks.

The Dragon’s Plot

From last time, we know the fearsome dragon Eyetog is trying to become a death god – some dragons just have ambition after all – and he already has a plan for how to do it.

• Consume a god of death
• Collect enough energy to ascend
• Fashion himself a body that can hold the energy of a god and infuse that energy into the body over time

Each of these tasks has its own complications or if it’s already been done, has left an aftermath of some sort in its wake.

Consume a God of Death

Gods are no joke, even to mighty dragons. I knew this when I started planning it out so I just decided it had already happened and the gods of this world weren’t super important, only that a death god wasn’t around anymore. It could possibly be a clue later in figuring out what Eyetog was up to, and maybe a clue in determining how to stop him. In the end the Dead Gods of the world of the Airy Peaks became a living breathing part of the campaign, inspired and created by one of the players at the table because of a move on their playbook. I took that inspiration and we went pretty crazy with it. That led to the story of a god of death of a mostly forgotten pantheon of gods having been summoned by Eyetog and then consumed in a great battle within the Airy Peaks.

I didn’t have that when the campaign started. I did have an idea that magic was weird in the Airy Peaks and that the barriers of existence were thinner. What I didn’t have was a why for that. I like having whys. It helps when players ask questions that need answers. It means I have something I can improvise on. The death of a death god and the fight this god and Eyetog had were a perfect reason for the oddness of the magic in the Airy Peaks, at least the reason the barriers of existence were thinner. There is another reason magic is so bizarre in the Airy Peaks and I’ll get to that right now.

Collect Enough Energy to Ascend

Energy is not the easiest thing to come by and when you need enough energy to become a god we’re talking about over-the-top amounts. I also didn’t really want it to be a timer or anything in this campaign. When the characters finally got to the dragon I wanted it to be a throw down with the worst thing they’ve ever run into in this game, not something they could really thwart without having to fight it. This meant the collection of energy had to be a story beat and an oddity of the Peaks.

I also had this vision of the caverns of the Peaks all being suffused with a low level of light radiating from the very stone of the surfaces, casting the characters in an orange glow. With that imagery and the idea of needing a ton of energy I came up with this:

The Airy Peaks are a giant soul battery. Anything that dies within the mountain and it’s nearby outskirts has its soul drawn into the stone of the Peaks for Eyetog to consume as he grows.

Deciding this made two things make sense for the setting.

• Magic is weird because there’s so much ambient energy around, so wild effects can occur pretty regularly.
• There’s always this low level glow in most of the caverns. If there’s not it’s because some other magic is suppressing it or that part of the mountain has died for some other reason.

Fashion a Body and Infuse it with Energy

I needed Eyetog to not be involved right away – at least not his dragon form – so I decided he was sleeping on his giant horde of treasure somewhere in the mountain. I decided he was doing this because to become a death god you can’t just suck up a bunch of energy in five or six minutes. If you did that you’d explode. I mean someone else could just decide that is how it is but it didn’t work for my personal head-canon or for the playability of my setting, so I decided to go that way.

Once I decided this I asked myself, “Well, what happens if a party of adventurers finds his lair? Do they just stab him in his sleep?” Probably not. If this dragon was smart enough to come up with this idea, he’s probably smart enough to protect himself.

Now I get to where the rest of the monsters in the complex come in. Eyetog needed help, so I gave him assistants and guardians. A lot of them actually. Then I wanted a story for why these guardians would even come here and help Eyetog. I also needed a way for more monsters to replace the ones who were killed by adventurers. I mean part of the plan is to feed souls to the soul battery of a mountain. So how to solve this problem? The White Fangs and Many Eyes.

The White Fangs and Many Eyes

The White Fangs are one of the aspects of Eyetog’s personality that he learned how to split off and give a semblance of sentience. These White Fangs are a spiritual entity. They can communicate, grant power, and invade the dreams of creatures of a less savory morality. This is the way Eyetog can reach out into the world to recruit creatures for his plan. He invades their dreams, finds out what they desire, and offers it to them in exchange for service. He’s essentially making Faustian deals with many creatures, luring them to the Peaks — one such creature is Many Eyes.

Many Eyes is actually a decrepit entity that’s lost the use of their body, has become feeble, bitter, and yet, they can see everything. This creature has a power to manifest some eyes and control the eyes of any creature it kills. These eyes that float about – often in a swirling mass or flock – allow Many Eyes to see everywhere, can fire eye beams with a large variety of effects, and can phase through solid objects as if they weren’t there at all.

Eyetog promised Many Eyes a functioning body as soon as Eyetog achieved his goal of godhood, in exchange for helping keep an eye over his Airy Peaks. Many Eyes serves as spymaster, informant, general, and horrible adversary to any who would oppose the dragon. The worst part is no one knows that Many Eyes’ true form is that of a feeble old body hidden deep within the Airy Peaks. There, behind a metal monstrosity of gears, fire, and magic, Many Eyes watches, plans, and moves the machinations of the White Fangs forward — all while hoping to someday soon have personal autonomy once again.

Two of Many

The White Fangs and Many Eyes are just two of the many creatures which exist in the Peaks, but all of them have reasons for being there. This is just giving creatures reasons to exist in places. It can help with improvising a game or having interactions when you’ve decided you need a different beat in your game since you just had four fights in a row. Then again you can just dispense with all the reasoning and just put those monsters in the way for your players to bash and let the story come from there.

Next time I wanna talk a little about the Airy Peaks’ overall map, and the numerous caverns that exist within. Until then I hope you find a little adventure in your lives and let me know what you think of the Airy Peaks so far.

The header art is by Drew Smith

 

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Hey folks. This will be a series of articles that shows off the Airy Peaks, a fantasy setting. Over the course of several articles with the Airy Peaks tag, you’ll find a bunch of stuff you can use in your fantasy games, including but not limited to a town called Foot, maps of the areas of the peaks, NPCs, magic items, stories of the peaks, adventure seeds, rumors about Eyetog – the great red dragon that once ruled over this small mountain range, adventure hooks, and interesting things you can use for your games.

To begin let’s start with a story.

The Legend of Eyetog & The Airy Peaks

Eyetog the terrible is the most fearsome dragon that has ever existed. For thousands of years he’s been known as the ender of ages, the taker of treasures, the eater of heroes. It was pay tribute to the dragon or have your nation destroyed by fire. As of today no one has seen the dragon for 50 years.

Some thought the dragon might have died, others believed he just retreated to his lair in the small mountain range to the north known as The Airy Peaks. After 30 years, adventurer’s became curious and made their way to The Peaks to find out for themselves. Inside they found the mountain range had been hollowed out. There were miles of caverns and tunnels of smooth stone that glowed with energy. The stone looked as if it had been shaped and melted by dragon’s fire. There was also treasure in those caverns and it was guarded by all manner of monster and horror. It became a siren call to adventurers.

Soon after a small town called Foot was established and it became a haven and base for adventurers to make their forays into the mountains. Many died. Some became rich. Stories and legends were born. This is the Airy Peaks. What legend will you leave?

The Premise

The Airy Peaks is a massive dungeon complex. It was created to run Dungeon World, which is a game I very much adore. I’ve used it to run a number of one shots, Long Cons – convention games where two or more consecutive sessions tell a longer story with the same characters and players, and several campaigns. This means you can use it to run games in a variety of situations, but it’s dungeon crawling at its core. There’s a town. There’s a dungeon. You’re supposed to go into the dungeons, explore, find treasure, return to town, spend your coin, go into the dungeon, and now you see the cycle.

How to do this effectively

I’ve been fascinated with dungeon crawls my entire life and especially the mega-dungeon. My problem has always been how do you tell a compelling story around the idea of these dungeon crawls? My answer was the Peaks.

• Step 1. Variety
  To start I wanted to make sure the dungeon was compelling and had a number of areas. When I started, the Airy Peaks had eighteen different cavern complexes for adventures to explore. These were not all highly detailed. A lot of them were just the name of the cavern complex, like The Dragon Fire Forges or The Mushroom Cavern. Some were drawn out and more detailed to begin with, like the Wild Caverns and the High Halls. In either case I had a lot of places the characters could explore and travel when we started. 
• Step 2. Evolving Ecology
  I also decided that each of these cavern complexes wouldn’t just be stagnant. They’d have evolving situations based on the things that happened around them or too them. So if adventurer’s went into a cavern and cleaned it out, the cavern would eventually be repopulated by different monsters. For example there’s the High Halls. 

  The High Halls have a very tall ceiling and when my Airy Peaks Campaign started it was inhabited by a tribe of Hill Giants. Once those giants were dealt with, a tribe of Cyclops moved in and took the place over. The High Halls are adjacent to a huge cave area called The Wild Caverns. When the giants were there the characters could encounter giants in The Wild Caverns. When the Cyclops moved in they were up for random encounters in The Wild Caverns. This made the ecology of The Peaks an evolving thing. 

• Step 3. A Home Base that Matters
  The next step was to make the town of Foot a living, breathing place that had a purpose. It’s an adventurer’s town and is there to service adventurers. It’s sort of like a resort town and tourist trap for adventurers. It’s a place for adventurer’s to bring their gold to and spend it on carousing, getting into trouble, gear, the bath house, the pleasure boat, bribes, information, and whatever else an adventurer can think of. 

  The place was also filled with a number of NPCs that had their own agendas and desires in the town. Some of them even belonged to the Cult of the White Fangs, which worshiped a spirit aspect of Eyetog. To go along with those NPCs who lived in Foot, I also had a bunch of adventurers who were also delving into the mountains. They would have their own stories of exploits in the Peaks and sometimes they wouldn’t come out. This helped to show that the Peaks weren’t a kind or forgiving place.

• Step 4. The Dragon’s Plot
  Here’s the spoiler about the Peaks. Eyetog is trying to become a god — a god of death to be precise. The first thing he needed to do was discover the way to become a god of death. He already has when the campaign began and set up his situation for this plan to succeed. Here’s what else he’s already done or needs to do:
  • Consume a god of death
  • Collect enough energy to ascend
  • Fashion himself a body that can hold the energy of a god and infuse that energy into the body over time

Next time I’ll talk about how the dragon’s plot helped shape the Airy Peaks and gave me the flexibility of steps one and two. I hope you enjoyed this and if you have any questions I’ll do my best to answer them in the comments below.

Header art is by Drew Smith

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RPGamer interviewed the devs of the upcoming strategy RPG Heretic Operative: Heretic Operative Interview C Prompt Games is a new studio founded by industry veterans Ian Fischer and Robert Fermier, who previous worked together at Ensemble Studios and Robot Entertainment.... Read more »

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PCGamesN reports that Arkane Lyon is looking to hire a monetization designer. The posting might not be too surprising within the wider industry, but it does mark part of a significant change in Arkane Lyon’s strategy. Until October, sister studio Arkane Austin had been explicitly hiring for multiplayer projects , but that changed when Arkane Lyon started hiring QA testers with “experience in […] GAaS [games as a service].... Read more »

Hazardous Space is a Roguelike 2D turn-based action game with RPG elements and has recently reached version 1.0. loading...A dangerous survival adventure in space station labirynths. Turn-based combat, character progression, the atmosphere of impending threat.... Read more »

The developers of Outward were interviewed by the XBOX Hub. Are there any benefits to passing things down to the next generation of your family? Or is it simply a way of introducing a new-game+ type affair to the game? The legacy system is not something we are detailing much at the moment as I want to see how quickly the players will get it and start using it, but I can say that essentially yes, it serves the purpose of a New Game + type of experience.... Read more »

TheGG reports that Mad Princess: The Great Gladiators is now available on DLSite. The game is described as a gladiator role-playing game. January 11th, 2019, Tokyo – The English translated version of independent developer Atorasoft’s gladiator role-playing game “Mad Princess: The Great Gladiators” is now available for sale on DLsite and is planned to be released on Steam.... Read more »

GameInformer talked with Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarksy about how The Outer Worlds lets you play your way. While the story does have choices and characters at different places along the good/evil spectrum, The Outer Worlds isn’t necessarily about picking a moral alignment and sticking to it.... Read more »

Great DMs are always refining their craft. We are not static beings. We learn. We adapt. We don't throw away our decades of past experiences when a new idea comes along. We use those experiences as our baseline understanding about what makes this game fun for ourselves and our players. We then gather new experiences and modify our baseline based on what we see and learn.

Putting Opinions to the Side

The more we play D&D and run D&D games, the more we know and the more we think we know. This can actually get in the way. While our experiences are not to be discounted, they are also not walls to block us from new ideas. We might hear some crazy new idea that another DM is trying. It might sound like madness to us. It might even be madness. But it's still worth considering and evaluating with our previous experiences. It might even be worth trying at our table—and that's where we're most likely to really understand the idea. Experimenting at the table tells us much more than just pondering what might happen.

Often, however, we're too quick to judge. We have ways that work for us and we're more likely to hang on to those ways unless something really shocks us out of our groove. It takes a LOT of evidence to push us out of our previous opinions—more than it should.

So, as we see ideas and feel our instinct to dismiss them, give them another look. Spend some time understanding them, visualizing them, and maybe even trying them out before throwing them away.

We don't have to completely throw away everything we've learned every time something new comes along but we're more likely to discount good ideas than to grab on to bad ones so give new ideas more weight than you might normally apply.

Side Note: Impostor Syndrome and the Dunning Kruger Effect

The results of the evolution of our brains has implanted many weird cognitive biases and quite a few of these can come up in our growth as dungeon masters. Two in particular pull us in different directions which can hurt our ability to grow as DMs.

Impostor syndrome occurs when we assume that we're terrible DMs when matched up against the rest. We feel like we have no real skill or background to justify us sitting in the DMs seat. We find ourselves in this position if we compare ourselves to other DMs that we might meet or see or even if we base our assumptions on our skill around some perceived master dungeon master that our players expect us to be.

Fear of being found out as an impostor can push us away from the DM's seat or make us overly nervous when we find ourselves in it.

One easy way to avoid the paralysis of impostor syndrome is to remember that almost everyone feels this way. We're all just pretending to be good at what we do all the time and, most of the time, that's all we need. It's also nice to remember that, given no other evidence to the contrary, we're statistically likely to be in the middle of the pack if ranked with other DMs.

The Dunning Kruger effect is almost the opposite of impostor syndrome. The Dunning Kruger effect occurs when we're just starting out at a particular skill and believe that we're way better at that skill than we actually are. It only comes to us later, as we get more experienced, that we realize how little we actually know. The Dunning Kruger effect is, simply, false confidence based on inexperience. We don't know enough to realize how little we really know.

When we consider both of these, there's a nice summary we can keep in our minds as we evaluate our skills as DMs:

We are neither as good nor as bad as we think we are.

Running Small Experiments

Once we've figured out what ideas we might want to actually try, we can run small experiments to see how they work at our table. The key is to try it out in an environment where we can see how something works but not leap into a big commitment if we end up not liking it.

For example, Mike Mearls put out a playtest for a new type of initiative he calls "Greyhawk Initiative". It got a lot of reactions when it came out but many of these reactions didn't come from people who actually tried it out. Trying out a new type of initiative has a very small impact. We simply describe how it works and use it for one or two combat encounters to see what it feels like. With something like Greyhawk initiative we probably want to try it more than once to see how it works instead of just doing it for a single combat. Our first time is likely to focus on learning the system instead of actually using the system.

We can run the same sorts of experiments for all sorts of things like adding a 13th Age style escalation die to a combat encounter, trying a new approach for skill-based exploration, or running a battle with hundreds of enemies.

Just as we must push back our instinct to reject ideas we're not already using, we must remember that trying out an idea isn't the same as fully adopting an idea. Trying things out is cheap and can let us really see how something works instead of just basing our opinion on theory.

The next time you see a new approach towards something in D&D, don't judge it until you've tried it.

"Head clear. Mouth shut. See much. Say little."

- Roland Deschain, Wolves of the Calla

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I often receive questions both from readers of Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master and those watching my Lazy DM Prep videos regarding throwing away secrets from session to session. For many people, this doesn't make much sense. If we write down ten secrets and reveal only five, what do we do with the other five? If you're asking me? We throw them away. Today I'll explain why.

Revealing Secrets

One of the interesting side benefits of recording my game prep sessions is that I'm able to see what secrets I wrote down and then analyze what secrets came to pass in the game itself. I've generally found that, of the ten secrets I prepare for a game, about half get revealed in a session. That's perfectly acceptable to me. The whole point of having ten secrets is to make sure I have interesting bits of information to drop in when I need them. I certainly don't have to use all ten.

So what do we do with the five that don't get used?

Throw Them Away

We DMs probably love our work a little too much. A few years back I posted a tweet in which I recommended that we need not write down every good idea. If it's good, a good idea will come back. Originally I stole this idea from Stephen King.

"I never write ideas down. Because all you do when you write ideas down is kind of immortalize something that should go away. If they're bad ideas, they go away on their own."

I got a lot of flack for that particular tip but I still stand by it.

We don't want some big database or Excel spreadsheet of lost secrets. First, it's a pain in the ass to manage such things and, remember, we're lazy. We want to put our minds on the world and the situation, not worrying about whether some trite bit of trivia got revealed or not.

We lazy DMs want to keep our whole system loose. This means not having a giant book worth of stuff behind us to remember. We focus on the next game. We focus on how that game is going to start. The stuff we should probably write down and remember are interesting things that go on with the characters because our players remember that stuff. The rest of the world? No one really cares. If we have to keep track of it in a big pile of secrets, its probably not that important to us either.

So, instead of keeping track of secrets, let them go and see which ones come flying back on their own.

Good Ideas Come Back

The reality is that good secrets come back. You'll remember them. Each secret isn't a beautiful butterfly that flitters away on the winds while you chase it down with a net. Your good ideas will come back to you. The important secrets will stay on your lists week after week until it gets revealed. I loved the idea that Acererak's Tomb of the Nine Gods was powered by a chain from Mechanus, thus giving it the full weight of an entire realm to power his dungeon. That image is awesome to me so it stayed on my list of secrets for months until it got revealed one day.

Your important secrets will end up back on your list and those that do not will disappear into the ether.

It Isn't True Until It's Revealed

Our worlds are ethereal until the character's eyes fall upon it. Our stories don't come true until they're lived through. The secrets we write down aren't facts until they get revealed during the game. One good reason to let them go is that they're simply not true yet. The world can change. You might have better ideas later. Events might shift and things go in a new direction you didn't expect. If we keep our secrets they become links in a chain that anchor us down to a world that need not be.

The big advantage of being a lazy dungeon master is that we aren't anchored by anything. We have the tools we need to run our next game and we've loaded our heads with outstanding fiction and RPG materials so that we can build the world in front of us as it happens.

If we keep our old secrets, we're chaining ourselves down to something that isn't yet true.

A Powerful Source of Creativity That Need Not Stay Recorded

Secrets are seriously powerful magic. We create single lines of fantastic fiction that can fuel entire worlds. The power of secrets is the whole reason I wrote a new lazy dungeon master book. Secrets are small, they're packed with interesting things, and they do not burden us. If we were to worry about keeping our old secrets and managing them, their simplicity and flexibility becomes lost.

Throw away old secrets. Good ones will come back.

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This article has been updated since the original published in April 2014.

Back in 2013, Teos Abadia, Scott Fitzgerald Gray, and I all worked on the adventure Vault of the Dracolich. This adventure was designed as an in-store multi-table event using the D&D Next rules (the playtest that eventually became the fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons). During this adventure bands of heroes infiltrate a temple of the Cult of the Dragon to recover an ancient elven staff from the dracolich, Detchroyaster.

Vault of the Dracolich is now available on the DM's Guild in both PDF and print. While this adventure was originally intended as a multi-table single-session adventure, the components of it can be stripped, twisted, and reformed to use at your game in many different ways.

As mentioned, we built Vault of the Dracolich around the D&D Next playtest rules and many things changed when these rules made their way into the fifth edition of D&D. In this article we'll go over how to convert Vault of the Dracolich to the fifth edition of D&D. We'll also look at how to run it for a single group of adventurers instead of many groups running it simultaneously.

The original adventure was designed for fourth level characters. It will be particularly deadly for characters of that level. When we convert it, the adventure is probably a better challenge for characters of fifth to eighth level. The characters may have an easier time fighting less powerful monsters such as bandits, cultists, troglodytes, and lizardfolk. Still, an adult green dracolich is a tremendous challenge for any characters below twelfth level. If anyone tries to directly face Dretchroyaster, they may end up dead after a single breath weapon.

Converting Monsters in Vault of the Dracolich

When converting Vault of the Dracolich to fifth edition, we can start by converting the monsters in the adventure with their fifth edition equivalents. Here's a list of creatures in Vault of the Dracolich and their equivalent monsters in the Monster Manual. If no monster is listed, you can use the same monster in the Monster Manual as the one listed in the adventure.

• Use cultists instead of dark adepts.
• Use bandits instead of human warriors.
• Use cult fanatics instead of dark priests.
• For Silakul use the priest NPC stat block.
• Use giant poisonous snakes for amphibious giant snakes in room 14.
• Reduce the two ropers to just one in room 19.
• The hydra in room 15 is potentially deadly for a lower level group. Give them some warning of the danger and options to escape if they need it.
• Reduce the gargoyles in room 29 to two.
• Use spectres instead of wraiths in room 30.
• Reduce the number of vrocks in chamber 31 to one. This could also be a hard fight if the characters don't have magic weapons.
• Dretchroyaster is an adult green dragon with the dracolich template and is very likely lethal if faced.
• Dretchroyaster's simulacra are young green dragons with the dracolich template that cannot use their breath weapons.
• In the final battle, Dretchroyaster will avoid using his breath weapon so as not to kill his priests. If he feels at all threatened, however, he will use it.

Add Some Potions of Resistance

Somewhere in the adventure it might help if the characters discover a trove of potions of poison resistance to give them a shot at fighting Dretchroyaster without getting their asses kicked. If you're feeling generous, you might bless them with a scroll of hero's feast that can give them immunity to his breath weapon. This gives even a lower-level group of adventurers a chance at surviving a fight against Dretchroyaster.

Stripping the Dungeon For Parts

Instead of running Vault of the Dracolich as a single adventure, you can instead strip it down into individual components to use in your own adventures. The dungeon in Vault of the Dracolich actually contains four smaller dungeons mashed together including a troglodyte lair, an ancient dragon's vault, a former Bhaalite temple, and an underground lake and river.

Each of these dungeon pieces can be taken out and used on their own either as part of another adventure or as a quick area to explore. You can tie off connections if you only want to use one part of the dungeon, such as sealing off the sewer entrance from the temple's prison to the underground river. Such a conversion won't take much time.

Your own adventure may only focus on one of the seeds in the adventure such as an item protected by the hydra, an artifact in the dragon's vault, the ancient elven spelljammer stuck in the rock, or the evil head of the local chapter of the Dragon Cult. You might keep the rest of the dungeon as is so your group has opportunities to explore other areas even if they aren't directly tied to their quest at hand.

Chambers below the chasms and rifts found in the dungeon might lead to a series of lower levels, making the current Vault of the Dracolich only the upper-most level of a multi-level megadungeon.

Like all published adventures, you should feel free to hack, slice, and steal any part of it to fit the adventure you're running for your own table.

A Sandbox and Tool Kit For Your Own Adventures

Though written for a different version of D&D, Vault of the Dracolich can still bring high adventure to your group, either as a stand-alone action-packed run against the dracolich Dretchroyaster or as a toolbox of locations you can use in your own adventure. I hope you'll give it a try.

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Warning, this article contains spoilers for Tomb of Annihilation.

Tomb of Annihilation is a fantastic D&D adventure. It's an adventure of high fantasy in an interesting environment (the jungles of Chult). It has awesome locations to explore, cool NPCs to meet, a powerhouse villain, and the deadliest dungeon published in the fifth edition hardback D&D adventures to date.

Tomb of Annihilation isn't without its problems. For the most part, these problems are manageable. Let's take a moment to review two of these problems.

First, as written, the death curse (the main driver of the adventure) has too much urgency tied to it. If this urgency isn't tweaked by the DM, the best course of action the characters can take is to run as fast as they can to the Tomb of the Nine Gods to stop the curse from quickly killing off oodles of rich and powerful people all over Faerun (hmmm). Luckily, this problem is easy to deal with. We discussed a few options for managing the death curse in the Urgency of the Death Curse by using it as an urgency dial instead of a fixed countdown timer. Simply forgo the hit point loss-per-day and describe the progression of the curse in a way that better fits the pacing of the game you want at the moment. If you want the characters to feel free to explore Chult, mention that the curse is little more than a concern at the moment. A rash, really. If you want them to laser in on Omu and the tomb beneath, explain how the powerful curse has escalated.

The second problem comes with the many NPCs that can join the characters throughout the adventure. In most cases, these NPCs are just fine but in a few they can either overshadow the characters with their raw power (I'm looking at you Artus Cimber and Dragonbait) or they can end up steering the characters too far away and waste a lot of valuable time on errands that have nothing to do with the plot. We've discussed this problem in the article Handling Tag-Along NPCs. The best solution here is to be careful when introducing these NPCs, ensuring you have an exit plan for them, or skip them all together.

Both of those problems are easily managed. There is a third problem, however, and one not so easily fixed. When the characters actually enter the Tomb of the Nine Gods, the whole atmosphere of the adventure changes. Instead of being a character-driven narrative story of exploration and intrigue, this adventure becomes a puzzle and deathtrap killfest. That's the problem we're going to talk about today.

The Atmospheric Shift of the Tomb of the Nine Gods

It surprises no one that this adventure's dungeon is actually deadly. We all knew it. It says so right in the beginning and if our players are paying attention at all, they'll know it's deadly too. But we say that a lot when it comes to challenges the characters face and most of the time they can pull out of the danger and survive anyway. If you're a soft DM like me, you can probably count on one hand the number of times characters have died in your D&D games. If you're harsher, actually killing characters often, and your players don't mind, maybe this isn't a problem for you.

For some of us though this shift is a big problem. Here at Sly Flourish we take a "character first" approach to our D&D games. It's the first step in the preparation checklist in Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master. We follow the guidelines of Dungeon World and become fans of the characters. These characters have histories. They have arcs. We love them and we love watching them go on adventures. We don't love it when they get in a black box, a friend hits a button, and they're turned into dust. Literally. Well, I didn't love it.

Death sometimes comes to characters in our character-driven games but often it's part of their character's arc. In this dungeon, though, their arcs can come crashing down with no warning at all. Again, maybe you're cool with this. Maybe so are your players. If that's the case, you need not change a thing.

For many of us, though, it's a big change in the style of the game and one we need to manage.

Telling Them Isn't Enough

We might think that telling the players how deadly the dungeon is will be enough. We think they'll be ready for their characters to die. Sometimes this is the case. Sometimes they're even upset when they don't die. Often, however, the warning isn't enough. Hearing that a dungeon is deadly and actually watching your ninth level character get disintegrated are two very different things. Seeing a character actually die will feel very different to the player. Players might even say how much they love hard D&D adventures and love the threat of death—until it actually happens. At that point none of us know what to do.

When I ran Tomb of Annihilation and my groups got to the Tomb of the Nine Gods, I had everyone roll up secondary characters whose backgrounds had brought them to the tomb over the past century. Making them former members of the Knights of the Yellow Banner gave them a connection to other dead Banner members throughout the adventure.

Still, this wasn't enough. Even having secondary characters doesn't mean that shock and hurt will come when a beloved character gets cut in half by a giant grinning stone skull door.

Many players just aren't prepared for a character's death. I know I'm not.

Solution 1: Send in the B-Team

One way to potentially fix this problem in the adventure is to send in two separate teams of characters. The first characters aren't given the job to stop the death curse, their job is to open the Tomb of the Nine Gods. When the tomb is open, it's up to another group of dungeon delvers to go inside. The nearby wreck of the Star Goddess could be one way that a bunch of dungeon delvers have come to the tomb. The Red Wizards might also have their own group of dungeon delvers ready to go into the tomb. Even Ras Nsi might send his own Yuan-ti Pureblood characters in there as part of a team intending to stop the death curse.

These new dungeon delvers are the expendables. Our players know they might not last and that's ok. They've only had them since the beginning of the Tomb of the Nine Gods. If the die, they die.

Still, it can be hard to put aside characters the players love. Opening the tomb doesn't feel like the end of the adventure. They want to stay with their main character and send them into the tomb. From a story perspective, why should the characters who traveled all this way send some other poor saps into the death trap? If they're heroic at all, sacrifice is part of that heroism. That won't matter to the player when their character is crushed under a big door but it makes sense and it would be disappointing to do it any other way. Thus, switching to new characters at the tomb's door isn't a perfect solution.

Solution 2: Build the B-Team Switch In Early

One way to ensure your players don't get stuck on the decision to send in their main characters or switch to an alt is to wire in that choice from the beginning. Instead of giving the characters the quest to seek the source of the death curse and end it. The quest can be to seek the Tomb of Annihilation and open it. Those who send the characters into the jungle will know that the heroes who find the tomb aren't the same ones who will enter the tomb. Those who enter the tomb are better suited for tomb-delving, not jungle explorations. The main characters can become patrons of these tomb-delvers instead of the tomb delvers themselves.

If this switch is wired in from the beginning, players will feel less like they're abandoning their characters halfway through an adventure and understand that a character switch is built into the story. They'll know their other characters will be stepping out of the spotlight.

This too is not an ideal solution but it might be the best way to make the transition from a deep character-driven exploration adventure to a deathtrap dungeon.

Solution 3: Shaving Off the Sharp Edges

Here's a solution many DMs will hate: shave off the rough edges. Much of what makes the Tomb of the Nine Gods deadly are the situations where characters who drop to zero hit points are outright killed instead of simply rolling death saves and requiring a heal.

We can likely shave off the rough edges in a few different parts of the tomb to keep the characters alive, at least a little bit more alive, than they might be otherwise. We can still run a dangerous adventure where the players must make hard choices to stay alive without the direct threat of the one-button deaths that can be found in a lot of these chambers. The four elemental chambers are known to be quite deadly but they can be a little less so if we make it easier for players to navigate the puzzels as the characters flounder about.

Some of the more deadly rooms and traps to watch include:

• The onyx chest in Wongo's Tomb (room 16). Consider removing the instant death from the onyx chest.
• The elemental cells before Shagambi's Tomb (rooms 47A-D). Give plenty of clues about how to navigate the cells.
• Belchorzh the beholder (room 44). Play him sub-optimally. He's more interested in tormenting the characters than killing them. Get rid of the instant-deaths on his finger-of-death ray and his disintegrate ray. He wants to have fun, not turn them to ash. Maybe have those spells inflict permanent injuries instead of outright deaths.
• The gargoyle guardians (room 45). Give the characters a chance to flee from the room or lower the gargoyle's hit points. Like the beholder, play them sub-optimally.
• Any of the "if this damage reduces a character to 0 hit points, they die" effects. Ignore that line or add a permanent injury instead.
• The devil onslaught in the Hall of the Golden Mastodon (room 67). Put in fewer devils, lower their hit points, or play them sub-optimally. Embrace it when the characters cast save-or-suck spells on them. The deal the Erinyes offers doesn't have to kill a character outright. Instead, they could sign a contract for their soul when they die, after the threat of the tomb is defeated.

Frankly, this is my recommended method. People just don't like to see their characters instantly killed in my games. Maybe some do, but I haven't seen them.

Solution 4: Run As Intended and Come What May

Finally, you can ignore all of this and run the adventure as it is. I've seen a lot of discussions from DMs who have run the Tomb of the Nine Gods and described the dramatic shift in lethality. They talked a lot about how it hurt peoples' enjoyment of the game. That was the case in the two groups I ran it for as well.

Tomb of Annihilation is close to the best D&D hardback adventure Wizards has released. This tonal shift from fantasy exploration to deathtrap hurts it. Otherwise, this is a nearly perfect adventure. The exploration is awesome. The setting is fantastic. The story is solid. The tomb, setting aside its lethality, is incredibly well designed. This adventure hits the exact level of focus I love in published adventures. I can deal with the warts regarding the urgency of the death curse and the issues bringing in problematic NPCs but the deadly shift of the adventure can kill a lot of fun after months of play if we're not careful. That's a hard problem to get past. Hopefully this article has given you some ideas how to deal with this shift so you and your players can get the most out of this otherwise fantastic adventure.

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In the beginning of Hoard of the Dragon Queen the characters face off against Lennithon, an adult blue dragon, when the characters are likely level 1. It doesn't take any powerful encounter building to realize this isn't a fight the characters can win.

The same thing occurs in Tomb of Annihilation when the characters come into contact with Valindra Shadowmantle, a lich in service to Szass Tam of the Red Wizards of Thay. The characters are likely around level six at this point.

Putting the characters in the presence of powerful villains is common in a lot of adventures, published or not. Sometimes it's fun for the characters to actually face the true villain of the adventure early on, such as meeting Strahd in the beginning of Curse of Strahd. Other times, like when Demogorgon steps out of the Dark Lake in Out of the Abyss it serves as a powerful backdrop for the plot of the adventure.

There's a big problem with scenes like this, though: facing insurmountable foes removes player agency.

(Cover to Volo's Guide to Monsters by Tyler Jacobson)

When our characters face off against foes they can't beat, we've removed one of their options—combat. For some players, this is simply unfair. D&D games shouldn't pit characters against foes they can't beat. Many DMs who focus more on the story of D&D than the balance of encounters know that yes, sometimes the characters will face foes they can't beat. It depends on how things go.

However they got there, when the characters face these foes and combat is off the table, the players might find themselves limited in the options from which they can choose. Sure, they can negotiate, but how good is the negotiation when one side can completely obliterate the other? How well has it worked out for the goblin the characters captured after slaughtering fifteen of its friends? That goblin doesn't have a lot of options to choose from.

Neither do the characters when facing an adult blue dragon at level 1.

So we come to an easy high-level piece of advice for situations like this: give the players options when facing insurmountable foes. If the story has worked itself into a position where the characters face an insurmountable foe, it's up to us DMs to make the options clear. It's up to us to return agency to the characters so they can actually make some meaningful choices.

Agency Returned

What agency we can give depends on the story, as does the encounter in the first place. Perhaps the characters have some information the villains need but do not have. Perhaps the characters know where something is that the villains must have. For example, maybe the characters know of the location of a number of puzzle cubes in Tomb of Annihilation that the villains desire.

Perhaps the villains have a weakness the characters are aware of. For example, what if the characters know about a lich's phylactery or a vampire's coffin. Maybe they even have control of it, putting the two opposing sides on more even ground.

We can also expand the options for the characters in a few other ways. Maybe the characters learn of a traitor in the enemy's forces that they can exploit. Maybe they learn how they can steal what they want instead of needing to negotiate for it directly. Maybe they learn that, buried deep within that ancient black obelisk, is a nalfeshnee just waiting to burst forth. Should something go terribly wrong, a good crack on the obelisk will complicate things for the villains.

Example Character Angles

So what sort of angles might the characters have when facing an insurmountable foe? Here are some general examples:

• The characters have information the villain needs.
• The characters have possession of something the villain wants.
• The characters are aware of a traitor or weakness in the villain's forces.
• The characters have something vital to the villain's well being.
• The characters have a weapon that greatly threatens the villain.
• The characters have a powerful ally that the villain fears.
• The characters can bring the house down on top of the villain.
• Disrupting the characters or their actions would throw the villain's own plans in disarray.
• The villain needs the characters to perform some task that no one else is capable of doing.
• The villain has enemies worse than the characters and need their help to defeat it.
• The characters are able to steal what they need from the villain.
• The villain isn't aware of the characters' presence.
• The characters discover a weakness of their insurmountable enemy.

If a villain is on the horizon in our games; if we think they're going to come into play and there will be a stand-off between the insurmountable villain and the characters; it helps if we lay out perhaps three angles the characters can capitalize on when that confrontation occurs.

Bending the Story to Our Will

When we're building out a D&D game from the story that unfolds, sometimes these situations appear and we don't have a good or easy approach to give that agency back. If we're letting scenes unfold how they unfold, we might not have any options prepared ahead of time. It might turn out, as the course of events takes place, that the characters find themselves face to face with an insurmountable foe.

In cases like these, we have to remember that fun comes first, even before staying true to the continuity of a story. Stephen King fully expected to kill off Paul Sheldon in Misery until he realized that no one wants to read a novel only to have the main character killed off at the end. He must not have read No Country for Old Men yet (spoilers!). In any case, when it comes to our D&D game, no one will care if you stay true to the direction of the story if it's not fun for the players.

Therefore, moments like this give us license to alter the world. This is a good time to stop for a minute and think about how we can give agency back to the players when they face an insurmountable foe. We can manipulate the world to give them an edge. We can reveal a weakness. We can reveal a nearby doomsday device. We can have the villain realize that an ally of the characters is too important to anger. This is one of those times where tweaking the reality of the story is ok because we're doing it specifically to make the game more fun. Like adding hit points to a boss monster that's dying too fast we can bend space and time for the sake of the fun of the game.

Giving Characters Fair Warning

If we're used to previous versions of Dungeons & Dragons, particularly third and fourth editions; we're probably used to focusing on balanced combat encounters. It is hard for us to break away from clear encounter-focused D&D adventures and letting the story take us in directions we weren't used to. As we get used to letting the story go where it goes, situations like facing an insurmountable foe can become more likely.

As hard as it is for us to change our thought process when running fifth edition D&D games, so to might it be hard for our players. When the characters end up facing an insurmountable foe, it's up to us to telegraph the danger. We have to let them know that we don't expect they'll go toe to toe with a villain like this and kill it. They might very well die if they try. It's possible, even likely, that players will think they're getting manipulated. They'll think that it isn't fair that they're facing such powerful monsters. If there isn't a good story reason why they're facing such a foe, they might be right. The adult blue dragon in the first chapter of Hoard of the Dragon Queen felt like this to me. Why would an adult dragon need to go poke around at a village? Why not leave that to the cultists?

When the story does support a confrontation against an insurmountable foe, we have to make it clear to the players that the foe is indeed insurmountable and also telegraph the other options available to them. If they're a combat focused group of players, we may really need to make it clear what other angles they have available. If we took combat away as an option, what was that option replaced with? If the answer is nothing, we've probably railroaded the story too much. The characters really don't have a choice other than 100% capitulation. That's not our job. Our job is always to put fun choices in front of the players.

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This is the first in a new series of articles that focuses on how particular spells in D&D can tell stories all by themselves. The core D&D books are full of fantastic ideas for stories but sometimes its easy for us DMs to focus too much on the mechanics to think about what they mean in the worlds we share.

Each spell has its own particular story to it, it's own way that it alters the universe in some way that might have effects both small and profound. Consider the humble prestidigitation spell, a cantrip that keeps things clean. Imagine a whole business built by hedge mages, failed wizards, and sorcerer outcasts who make a living keeping things clean with this spell on its own. It's the world's best dry cleaning service. This simple spell can lead to a whole place ("Percy's Palace of Prestidigitation") that might find its way as a storefront in a game we run. We might even tie another story into it. Maybe that aged wizard who supposedly failed out of the academy isn't as frail as he appears, he's just been in hiding for the last two hundred years.

Spells can each tell an interesting story and we're going to explore this idea in articles to come where we look at a particular spell and the stories that might evolve from it when we look at them under a new lens.

Today we'll do so with the spell fireball.

Fireball is an incredibly common and popular spell. It's been in every edition of D&D since the 1970s. Fireball is one of the most basic spells we can imagine too. Players love it because it's so simple. You point a finger and things explode. But there's a story in there too. A story with many facets.

A Story Driven by a Fireball

The D&D adventure Waterdeep Dragon Heist has a whole chapter built around a fireball. The chapter is actually called "Fireball". Things are perfectly smooth in Trollskull alley, everyone's going about their business, and then boom. The world is in chaos.

We don't think much about a fireball but such an explosive spell can change lives in a city setting. A fireball in a crowded street is an event of great note, as it is in this adventure. It begins a great mystery. Who cast it? Who was in it? What did people see? Will it happen again? A single fireball like this can drive a whole story forward, bringing danger and mystery to an otherwise peaceful day.

Imagine a royal ball in which the characters are trying to uncover the assassin who plots to kill the local lord. What if that very assassin, to cover her escape, draws a bead from her necklace of fireballs and blows up half of the ball. Now the characters have to make a hard choice of chasing their quarry or saving the people who remain alive in the burning ballroom.

The Sign of a True Wizard

We can use fireballs in other ways in our story as well. If the characters are exploring a chamber and find a room with singed walls and dozens of dead charred goblins, they'll know what might have done it and they know what sort of being they might face. Not everyone can cast a fireball in the first place. Such a sign is a clear indicator that a wizard is near, and not just an apprentice but a seasoned mage.

The fact that fireballs are third-level spells cast by fifth-level NPCs means something important on its own. If we assume a rarity to wizards the higher they go up in level, fireball-casting wizards are not all that common. Even cult fanatics can't typically cast them. These are the spells of true and powerful villains.

Environment-Changing Spells

Fireballs can also do more than just blow up rooms full of kobolds too. We often forget how these spells can change the environment. A fireball cast inside a building or tavern will likely set it ablaze or blow it apart. We might watch buildings explode outward from a mage battle taking place within it. A fireball in a sealed area might suck out all of the oxygen and make the whole area difficult to breathe in or difficult to see through. In the right environment, fireballs can completely change a situation.

We can't forget about the noise either. Fireballs aren't quiet. Spellcasters who cast it are going to be heard and those who hear it may come running or might run away. The noise created by a fireball can dramatically change a situation in many ways.

An Explosive Shift in the World

Though a common, popular, and relatively simple spell, when used as a vehicle for the story, a fireball can cause a dramatic shift in a campaign. As we saw in Dragon Heist, it can be the catalyst for an entire arc of a campaign. The more we think beyond the mechanics; the more we look at how spells affect the world, the more those stories can drive the direction of our shared stories.

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One of the interesting things about Dungeons & Dragons is the incredibly wide range for its potential costs. The cost to play D&D can go anywhere from free to potentially thousands of dollars (look at Joe Magenello's dungeon if you don't believe me).

I expect most people spend one to two hundred bucks for the three core books including the Player's Handbook, the Monster Manual, and the Dungeon Master's Guide and maybe some secondary books like Xanathar's Guide to Everything, Volo's Guide to Monsters, and published adventures such as Curse of Strahd or Tomb of Annihilation. Some probably spend a few bucks on dice and a flip mat.

Then there are areas where the D&D hobby can get really pricey. The first is miniatures. We might drop $50 for a good set of player character miniatures at first but if we start to fill out our set of monsters, we're looking at hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars until we have a "full collection". Secret tip: there IS no full collection of miniatures. No one ever has enough of that one monster they need at the time.

Pathfinder Pawns, Arcknight's Flat Plastic Miniatures, Printable Heroes, and Trash Mob Minis can save us from this financial runaway train by giving us a lot of two dimensional miniatures for a lot less than it would cost us to get fully 3d plastic minis. The occasional Reaper Bones Kickstarters can get us a large pile of unpainted miniatures for less than we'd pay for them individually but even then we're going to be missing out on a few. They've been running these Kickstarters roughly once a year.

Another area where the sky is the limit when it comes to costs is in three dimensional terrain. My favorite is Dwarven Forge, the Ferrari of D&D terrain. Having quite an investment in it myself, I can attest to its incredible quality and "wow" factor. There are other terrain options as well such as card board 3d terrain, 3d printed terrain, and other options. As I mentioned, the price of this stuff knows no bounds. The average pledge for the latest Dwarven Forge Kickstarter was $1,000.

Luckily, the true joy of D&D is in sharing stories with our friends. Miniatures and terrain are really cool but they're not necessary for us to run some fantastic adventures. In fact, the more accessories we have, the more they can sometimes get in the way of that story. We'll talk about this more later.

Playing D&D For Free

How could someone go about playing D&D for free? There's actually an answer to that question. While Wizards of the Coast sells the core D&D books, they also give away D&D rules online. This includes a D&D Basic Rules and the Dungeons & Dragons System Reference Document. While these PDFs omit much of what you can find in the actual core books, they have enough to run a D&D game. The D&D Beyond website also offers these rules for free in the same interface used for the digital version of all of the other D&D books. One need not spend a dime to use these rules.

Online Resources for Campaigns and Adventures

What about campaigns and adventures? According to our 2016 Dungeon Master Survey, most DMs run their own campaigns in their own worlds and with their own adventures. If we follow these folks, we too don't need to buy expensive adventures and campaign worlds. We can spend some time thinking about our world and writing down what works.

If we do want to play in a world like the Forgotten Realms, we can use the excellent Forgotten Realms Wiki as our own sourcebook complete with a search and hyperlinks to connect it all together better than a big book.

There are numerous free resources for DMs to run great games beyond campaign specific material. The suite of Donjon tools gives us a host of dynamically created material including names, treasure, monster encounters, dungeons, adventure seeds, and more. It's a great place to spark ideas in our minds as we build out our own adventures. A nearly infinite supply of dungeon maps and artwork are just a Google search away. They work well for both inspiration for DMs as well as visuals to show players.

Wizards of the Coast has released a couple of adventures for free as well. Death House is one of my personal favorites, though themed specifically for Ravenloft and the Curse of Strahd published adventure. Wizards also released the first part of Princes of the Apocalypse for free which contains enough material to get characters to level 5 including a fight against some cultists of the elemental prince of air. It's more universal than Death House and easier to plop into your own campaign world. A Great Upheaval, the first chapter of Storm King's Thunder is likewise available for free.

Accessories

We're going to assume of the sake of this article that one can acquire something to write with and something to write on. Go raid a horsetrack for small pencils and a library for scrap paper if you need. For drawing out maps and descriptions of combat, we can use Theater of the Mind combat to save us a ton of money on miniatures and maps. According to the 2016 survey we mentioned earlier, about 40% of dungeon masters use either abstract maps or theater of the mind when running D&D combat so you won't be alone. Not only is it much cheaper than maps, minis, and terrain but it also gives us nearly infinite flexibility in our descriptions and in letting the game take turns we didn't expect when preparing for our game.

There are a number of online dice roller apps that can save us a few bucks buying dice but this probably isn't realistic. Instead, for the $12 of a D&D Starter Set we can get a set of dice, a set of pregens, a solid rulebook, and a wonderful D&D adventure. Sure, it isn't free, but its a low cost investment for the best entrypoint into D&D available. The maps and monsters contained in the starter set can keep a campaign going for months.

I'm a huge fan of the Pathfinder Flip Mat. It's cheap, lightweight, and super-usable in our gaming kit. That and a couple of dry-erase markers can build just about anything we can imagine for under $20. It's a great investment for our DM kit.

If you want to play D&D online, you can play for free at Roll20. They have the entire 5e D&D SRD rules in place there and access to lots of official D&D sourcebooks and adventures if you do eventually want to pay for it.

Pooling Resources with D&D Beyond

"My rule of thumb is that in a group of 6, 3-4 don't spend any money. But they enable a group to form & play. Free players enable spenders. Even if no one at a table is spending, there's huge benefits in simply making more D&D players and DMs."

- Mike Mearls, D&D Design and Development Lead

Being a game focused on a group of players, it makes more sense that the players might pool their resources together to get what they need. For example, a group can pool together to pick up a subscription to D&D Beyond and the core books through the D&D Beyond Marketplace. A single DM subscription can share all of its books with up to eighteen players in three campaigns. These digital books are often on sale and, when the cost is split up, they can be very cheap for each player.

A Focus on the Fun

There's another big advantage to keeping our D&D kits small: flexibility. The less stuff we have to run our games, the more we can focus on the game itself and the fun to be had with our players. Maps, terrain, miniatures, and all sorts of accessories look great but there's an overhead with them beyond money. They take up physical and mental space. They take up time. Instead, we can keep our materials down to the thinnest possible and focus on the fun of the game.

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In an interview on D&D Beyond, legendary adventure writer Chris Perkins describes the requirements for a solid adventure:

• Good villains and monsters.
• A location for the adventure to take place.
• A clear reason for the characters to take part.

It's this last one we're going to talk about today. Getting the characters involved in the adventure is likely the most important part. Why do they care? Why put themselves at risk? When running Tomb of Annihilation recently, I threw in a dream sequence so horrible that the whole group nearly abandoned the idea of stopping the death curse to return to the safety of Port Nyanzaru and leave the world's woes to someone else. That's not a great way to motivate them.

There are many possible motivations that drive characters to adventure. Chapter 3 of the Dungeon Master's Guide includes three tables full of adventure hooks for both overland adventures, dungeon adventures, and general adventures as well. They're worth a read. In fact, I'd recommend going back and flipping through the Dungeon Master's Guide every couple of months just to remember all of the awesome stuff that's in it.

I also culled a number of potential motivations from a Twitter discussion on the topic which you can see below.

• Recover lost artifact
• Stop a villains evil plot
• Rescue someone
• Hunt someone down
• Recover lost lore
• Prevent someone else from finding lost lore
• Release someone imprisoned
• Keep someone imprisoned
• Imprison someone
• Recover a powerful weapon
• Clear out monsters
• Destroy dangerous artifact
• Sanctify unholy site
• Escape
• Prevent war
• Uncover treachery
• Riches
• Fame
• Protect someone
• Cure someone
• Uncover mystery
• Solve murder
• Prevent apocalypse
• Restore artifact
• Fulfill prophecy
• Get gold
• Return gold to owners
• Give gold to needy
• Prevent gold going to villany
• Get rid of gold
• Hide gold
• Prove innocence
• Peculiar inheritance
• Missing friend or relative
• Trailblaze a new trade route
• Escort settlers
• Survive another day
• Save the lands ruler
• Murder the lands ruler
• Owe someone a favor
• Castaways
• Research
• On the lam
• Stop a terrible ritual
• Lift curse
• Researching an invention
• Overthrow a corrupt power structure
• Help a new ruler come to power
• Negotiate a trade deal
• Exchange prisoners
• Change the past
• Find a way home

These are all just models for the motivation an adventure might contain. We'll have to tune these for our particuar adventure and the characters within it. In fact, let's talk about characters for a moment.

Character-Driven Adventure Hooks

One of the easiest ways to sink in an adventure hook is to make it part of the character. There are a couple of ways to do this. The easiest is to tie in the hook during character creation. For single-session D&D games, like convention games, we can tie in adventure hooks right into the pregenerated characters. If players are making their own characters, we can give them a list of potential character hooks that tie them into the adventure or campaign as well. The earlier we tie in these hooks into character creation, the more these hooks will matter to the players.

We need look no further than the pregenerated characters for the D&D Starter Set. These characters have ties right into Lost Mine of Phandelver that give each of them a reason to care about what is going on in the town of Phandalin.

We can also flip this whole idea around and build an adventure from the backgrounds of the characters. Likely you'll still want to bring up a theme from your campaign's session zero but the players might build in interesting hooks into their characters that you didn't expect. You can use these hooks to build out connections to existing adventures or build entirely new adventures from those hooks alone.

The important part is ensuring that the characters have a reason to go on this adventure.

Anytime you're pondering the adventure you're going to run, ask yourself "why the characters care?"

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The fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons adventure Tomb of Annihilation has an interesting and wonderous structure. It begins as a city adventure in Port Nyanzaru, expands out into a large overland exploration sandbox as the characters travel through Chult, narrows down to the exploration of the city of Omu and a potential trek into the Fane of the Night Serpent, and then drills down deep into the dungeon crawl to beat all dungeon crawls, the Tomb of the Nine Gods.

In today's article we're going to focus on the characters' exploration of the city of Omu. How can we dungeon masters get the most out of running this section of the book? Let's find out.

A Refined Sandbox

When the characters journey to Omu they will be going from a large sandbox—the journey through Chult—into a more refined sandbox style adventure. Like Chult itself, Omu has a nice defined boundary to it but multiple ways characters can travel within and through it. To begin with, they can enter from either the south-west corner (a grand staircase) or the north east (down a large waterfall) so even their entry into Omu is their own.

Side tip: When creating sandbox adventures, include two entrances. If you, as the DM, don't know how the characters will enter a dungeon or other area, you're a lot less likely to railroad them overall.

Design two entrances.

Once in the city, the characters can choose how they want to approach the city and accomplish their goals. They won't be the only ones.

The Fronts of Omu

Here at Sly Flourish we like to steal the concept of "fronts" from the game Dungeon World. A front is a driver of the story of our game. It's an actor, often a creature but sometimes an environment or even a whole planet, that has its own goals and leaves indicators to the characters. These indicators are called grim portents. They show the progression of a front as it heads towards its goal.

In the city of Omu, we have two main fronts working alongside the characters. The first is the Red Wizards of Thay. Like the characters, they are trying to acquire the puzzle cubes from the nine trickster gods to get access to the tomb of the nine gods. The Red Wizards might be sending mercenary forces out to the various tombs to collect what cubes they can.

The second front are the yuan-ti from the Fane of the Night Serpent. Their leader, Ras Nsi, seeks the cubes as well because the death curse is eating away at him. His second, a nightmare speaker named Fenthasa, might not have the same goal as Ras Nsi and this can become a fun complication for the characters to explore.

Both of these factions offer opportunities for conflict within Omu but they offer something more interesting too. Their goals are not necessarily in opposition to the characters. The Red Wizards, led by Valindra Shadowmantle, seek to end the death curse but they also want to learn about the Soul Monger. It is possible the characters can work out a deal with them instead of just fighting them.

Likewise, Ras Nsi might be willing to work out a deal with the characters since he too wants to stop the death curse. Of course, Fenthasa might not like that idea which gives us multiple factions within the yuan-ti to work through. If the characters are willing to kill Ras Nsi, Fenthasa might be more willing to work with them.

This offers up an interesting observation for our D&D games. When we have fronts with motivations that can be potentially turned to fit the motivations of the characters, we can build in ways that the characters can use all three pillars to interact with these fronts. In this case, we can see how the characters might use subterfuge, stealth, careful conversations, or violence to work with these fronts. The characters have lots of potential paths and options to take when dealing with this front that aren't just combat. That's awesome.

Give players the option to interact with fronts using roleplaying, exploration, and combat.

The Other Actors in Omu

Beyond the Red Wizards and the yuan-ti, there are other actors in Omu that can come into play and bring some fun with them. The big one, both figuratively and literally, is the King of Feathers. This epic t-rex can be a continuing threat in Omu for the characters. In my game, I modified him a bit. First, I gave him legendary actions so he can have one action between characters' turns. I also gave him legendary resistances as well. I increased his hit points to 200. Finally, I gave him some psionic abilities unique in Chult. He had misty step and invisibility as actions he could take. This let him disappear from combat, shift to a new spot, and attack with advantage. As the characters traveled through Omu they learned more about his abilities and how dangerous he was. When finally faced, he was a real powerhouse villain.

Other actors include the three tabaxi hunters: Bag of Nails, Copper Bell, and Hooded Lantern. These are wonderful NPCs whose history, backgrounds, and motivations you can change for your own game. In one of the two Tomb of Annihilation games I ran, Bag of Nails was a fellow assassin to one of the characters who served Prince Jessamine in Port Nyanzaru. In another, the three taxabi were former companions of the taxabi rogue player character. Reskinning NPCs like these is a great way to bring some relevant stories to the characters as they explore Omu.

There are lots of other actors in Omu worth bringing up such as the kobolds in service of Acererak and the strange vegepigmies conducting a grung sacrifice at the lava pit. Read fully through the chapter and highlight the encounters you want to bring up in your game.

Gathering the Cubes

The primary goal of the characters in Omu is to acquire the nine cubes required to open up the doorway to the Tomb of the Nine Gods. Each of the nine cubes rest in one of the nine shrines to each of the Trickster Gods.

As the adventure states, the characters need not be the ones to collect all nine cubes. The Red Wizards may have recovered some. The yuan-ti might have some. Other random adventurers may have some.

This is a great opportunity to ensure that the characters interact with these other groups and they get to choose how. Maybe it's negotiation. Maybe it's theft. Maybe it's blinding violence.

You can choose how many of the cubes have already been recovered or decide that, as the characters uncover one cube the other fronts acquire another. One good way to choose this is to read through each of the shrines in the adventure and if any of them don't resonate with you as a DM, you can make that one a shrine whose cube has already been pilfered. How may cubes have been recovered also shortens the time spent in Omu so it's a nice dial to turn if you want things to move forward faster. You'll have to ensure the characters learn that the cubes have been recovered before they waste a lot of time trying to get them.

The Ruins of Omu

As the characters travel through Omu, it's likely they'll want to explore some of the notable ruins of Omu, either to take a rest, escape a pursuer, or just take in some of the dead culture of Omu.

Here is a list of twenty notable ruins the characters might encounter while exploring Omu. If you're not running Tomb of Annihilation, you can use this same list for other ruined cities as well.

The Collapsed Cellar. A floor of one of the buildings has collapsed into a strange cellar. The cellar contains a small shrine to a trickster god (roll to randomly determine the trickster god), a sacrificial stone, and scrawlings in old Omuan begging for the life of a sick child.

The Ashen Family. This ruin contains bodies of ash still standing with looks of horror on their face. An ashen body of a mother cradles her doomed child. All of them appear to have been hit with a disintegrate spell.

The Noble Treasure Vault. A house of nobility has trapped bronze door in the cellar guarded by two animated armors. The door has two DC 15 glyphs of warding including a fear glyph and another glyph that animates the statues. If the trap is defeated, the adventurers find the noble house's treasury. The treasury includes 832 cp, 3490 sp, 2087 gp, 28 pp, 2 x Chalcedony (50 gp), Citrine (50 gp), Jasper (50 gp), 3 x Moonstone (50 gp), 5 x Sardonyx (50 gp), 3 x Zircon (50 gp), Potion of Resistance (thunder) (uncommon, dmg 188), Spell Scroll (Sleet Storm) (uncommon, dmg 200), Potion of Water Breathing (uncommon, dmg 188), and a Rope of Climbing (uncommon, dmg 197) Use the treasure tables in the Dungeon Master's Guide to determine the treasure instead if you prefer.

Desecrated Shrine to Ubtao. This ruin contains a shrine to the god Ubtao. The statue's head has been removed and lies in the corner covered in rubbish. Dark sigils have been etched into the statue's surface. Examining the glyphs begins to fill the examiner's visions with the people of Omu destroying effigies of Ubtao after he turned his back on them two centuries ago. The cacophony of blasphemy fills the investigator's head with madness. The character must make a DC 14 Wisdom saving throw or suffer a short-term madness effect.

The Crystal of Calling. The basement of this ruined building contains an arcane circle. In the center of the circle is a large violet cracked crystal. A DC 14 Intelligence (Arcana) check reveals that the crystal was used by arcane spellcasters to call across the multiverse to help find a god who would save them from their downfall. Any creature that touches the crystal can see visions of the Omuians using the crystal to call out across the Astral Sea and then later witnessing the arrival of Acererak.

Access to Underground Sewers. Deep cracks in the basement of one of the ruins reveals access to narrow sewer passages that lead to various areas of Omu including the palace, the flooded rivers to the east, the amphitheater, and the enclave to the south-west. Traveling through the sewers has a chance to encounter monsters. Use the random encounter table for level 1 to 4 swamp monsters in [Xanathar's Guide to Everything] re-rolling if the monsters make no sense for Omu.

Altar to Dendar the Night Serpent. The ruins of this building contain a carving depicting a massive serpent eating its own tail surrounding a globe that looks like Toril. The rotting remains of a female dwarf lie on a bloody stone altar, her ritually dissected innards in a series of clay pots surrounding the altar.

Abandoned Red Wizard Refuge. This ruin contains the remnants of a campsite for roughly one dozen people. The signs of a conflict litter the area including the bodies of Thayan mercenaries, mercenaries of Port Nyanzaru, and dead yuan-ti purebloods. A cracked silver mirror with arcane glyphs surrounding its edge used for scrying remains in the area. The broken mirror is worth 200 gold pieces.

Ruin of Grasping Vines. Thick yellow throned vines fill this ruined house seeming to come from a central stalk in the center that throbs like a heartbeat. The stalk itself (a yellow musk creeper with double the normal hit points and a reach of 15 feet) grows from the ruins of the basement below and only there can it be truly destroyed. The remains of a dead adventuring party lay within the ruins possessing a Philter of Love (uncommon, dmg 184), a Potion of Animal Friendship (uncommon, dmg 187), and two Potions of Growth (uncommon, dmg 187). 1d2+1 yellow musk zombies rise from the thick vines when someone enters.

The Trapped Incubus. The characters fall into a ruined pleasure den where an incubus has been trapped for nearly a century within a summoning circle. The incubus begs for its release and will give the characters a clue about Acererak's arrival and the building of the Tomb of the Nine Gods in return for his freedom.

Your Own Mini-Campaign

Tomb of Annihilation is an amazing adventure for a bunch of reasons but one of them is because it contains all sorts of sandboxes within sandboxes. Omu is itself a full sandbox adventure packed within Chult, a much larger sandbox adventure. And, of course, Omu leads to the Tomb of the Nine Gods which is its own evil sandbox.

Above all, keep the options open and let the characters interact with the forbidden city however they wish.

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