by W. Eric Martin

• One of the first games I played when I dove deep into hobby games in 2003 was Reiner Knizia's Amun-Re. I was already familiar with Lost Cities, but like many people I connected that game more with the publisher (Rio Grande Games) than the designer. Despite being someone who scoured used book stores to find every title from an author I admired, at that time I hadn't yet grasped the concept of game designers being akin to book authors and having a catalog of works to explore.

No matter — Amun-Re opened my eyes, and the Guy Stuff Gamers group I played with then introduced me to many other Knizia designs, such as Ra, Circus Flohcati, Trendy, Money!, and Stephenson's Rocket, hooking me for good.

Non-final front cover
With the 20th anniversary of that design on the horizon, UK publisher Alley Cat Games plans to use crowdfunding to release the appropriately named Amun-Re: 20th Anniversary Edition, with this edition featuring new art by Vincent Dutrait, a player count of 2-5 instead of 3-5, and four expansions for which Alley Cat's Caezar Al-Jassar has passed along summaries:

—Statues: In each of the first three rounds, grand statues are added to certain provinces. These statues each grant unique powers to the player who controls the province in which they are built. This expansion adds extra interest to the auction phase and gives players their own player powers that may vary each time. The statues will be miniatures representing Egyptian gods.

—Afterlife: A fourth purchasable item is added to the market phase: afterlife tiles. These tiles are then placed using the rewards granted to players in the offerings phase or by discarding unwanted cards and tiles. Players place the tiles into their own personal pyramid shape, starting with a base of up to five tiles. Each placed tile gives the player a bonus, and this bonus is multiplied if the tile is placed on top of matching tiles within the pyramid. At the end of the game, each completed row of tiles is worth points.

—Pharaoh: This mini expansion adds tension to the auction phase by rewarding players for overbidding other players. The Pharaoh moves to each province that is overbid, and at the conclusion of the auctions the player who wins the province with the Pharaoh receives a token that grants extra rewards in the subsequent offerings phase.

—Viziers: Viziers are added to the auction phase. Each player now bids on both a province and a vizier using the same bidding mechanisms. With 3-5 players, these viziers are placed off the main board, and a player must work out which combination they want to pursue. A variant allows two or three players to place viziers in the provinces themselves, bidding for two provinces but choosing only one province and one vizier. Each vizier grants an instant bonus, and combining these with your provinces becomes a key to success.

• An even older Knizia title that acquired a new edition in 2021 is the card game Relationship Tightrope, which was first released in 1999 as Drahtseilakt. In the game, players each contribute one card to the table — either simultaneously or turn-by-turn — with the player of the highest card winning tokens of one color and the player of the lowest card winning tokens of another color. Your goal is to balance the two colors and have a score as close to 0 as possible.

Japanese publisher Korokorodou has released the game as Odd Socks, with the gameplay being the same and players now attempting to balance blue and red socks so that they can cover their feet evenly.


• Korokorodou has also released a new edition of a minimalist design from Taiki Shinzawa, a game first released in 2013 as バベルの塔 ("Tower of Babel"), but now titled TOPPEN. Here's an overview of this two-player game:

TOPPEN is played with ten tiles — five of one pattern and five of another — with each player owning one set of tiles. During set-up, the second player places the ten tiles face down randomly in a square grid so as to form a continuous shape of their choice. The tiles are flipped color-side up, then the game begins. Taking turns, players take one of their tiles and place it on top of a neighboring tile/stack. The following restrictions apply:

—You can take only one tile, the topmost of a stack.
—You cannot split the tiles into two separate groups.
—You cannot move a tile to an empty space.

If you cannot make a legal move, you must pass until a legal move is available to you again. You cannot pass if a move is available. The goal is to have your own tile at the top of the last pile remaining when the game ends.

• Yet another title getting a fresh look is Keith Ferguson's 2017 game Santa's Workshop, which first appeared from Rio Grande Games. Here's an overview of this 2-5 player game:

Santa's Workshop is a worker-placement game, taking place over nine rounds, in which players use their elves to collect materials in order to build gifts, and tend to the reindeer. Players may customize their workforce by sending elves to be trained in certain aspects of the game, which provide a benefit for the rest of the game. For some gifts, plastic may be substituted for the standard materials of fabric, wood or metal. This will cause those gifts to score fewer "Christmas Cookies", but may allow a player to build more gifts in a shorter amount of time. This can be helpful when Santa comes around three times during the game for an inspection to see which team has made the most gifts.

Players will have to decide when to visit the mail room in order to pick which gifts to build, and when to tend to the reindeer. The reindeer accumulate points the longer they go untended — and each of the eight reindeer provides a unique bonus to the player.

U.S. publisher Elf Creek Games is overhauling the look of the game thanks to Andrew Bosley and Jacqui Davis, and the new Santa's Workshop will include two game modes: a standard game for players as young as 7 and an advanced game for players aged 10 and up. Elf Creek Games anticipates releasing this edition of Santa's Workshop in November 2022.

Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

UK publisher Osprey Games has announced a new title in its Undaunted series of games from designers Trevor Benjamin and David Thompson — Undaunted: Stalingrad, with this game taking place on a scale unlike the first two standalone games.


Here's a blurb about the game from the designers:

We're digging deep into the storied Battle of Stalingrad, a key battle not only for the Eastern Front but the entire Second World War, and we're doing it with a massive box full of content unlike anything Undaunted fans have seen before. We're introducing new units, actions, and ways to interact with the environment. What we're most excited about, though, is that we've created an integrated campaign where the results of each scenario impact the rest of the campaign's rich narrative and will set the stage for scenarios to come.

And here's a bit more about the game, which is due out in the latter half of 2022:

Stalingrad, 1942. Before you awaits a grueling conflict in this cornerstone battleground. As the bullets and bombs tear the city asunder, only through wits and valor can you seize the cornerstone of the entire Eastern Front and change the course of history.

A heavy burden rests on your shoulders. Every casualty suffered in battle will weaken your forces for the entire campaign. Every bomb blast and mortar shell leaves the very ground for which you are fighting in further ruin. Every inch lost to the enemy brings you closer to the jaws of defeat. Over the course of up to fifteen branching scenarios, you will decide the fate of Stalingrad and, perhaps, the war itself. Even though the consequences of your actions will persist, the game itself can be fully reset and replayed, allowing you to explore every potential outcome.

Undaunted: Stalingrad is a monumental, platoon-level, standalone game that expands the series' scope and challenge beyond anything that's come before. Featuring more than 300 unique illustrations by Roland MacDonald and 150 evocative mission briefings written by acclaimed author Robbie MacNiven, immerse yourself in this campaign at the heart of the war.

Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

• Designer Shem Phillips of Garphill Games has included solitaire rules in nearly all of his releases dating back to 2016, but for 2022 he's going to release his first one-player-only game: Legacy of Yu.

Here's an overview of the game, which Phillips expects to bring to Kickstarter in mid-2022:

During the reign of Emperor Yao, the people of ancient China were constantly plagued by deadly floods along the Yellow River. Eager to put an end to the devastation, Yao selected Gun, one of his officials, to devise a plan. After nine years of failed attempts using dams and dikes, Gun's employment came to a questionable end. After his passing, Yu inherited his father's work. Learning from Gun's failures, Yu set out to construct a series of canals to direct the surging river into nearby fields and smaller waterways.

Legacy of Yu is a solo-only, fully-resettable, nonlinear campaign game in which you step into the role of the legendary hero of the Xia Dynasty, Yu the Great. It will be your job to build the canals ahead of the impending flood, while also defending your growing village against neighboring barbarian tribes. With each game, stories will be shared and new gameplay elements added. The campaign features a self-balancing system which adapts to how well you are doing. The campaign ends once you either win or lose seven games.

Sample barbarian cards
• U.S. publisher Renegade Game Studios has announced a second title in its "Solo Hero Series", with Wreckland Run from Scott Almes due to launch on Kickstarter on February 8, 2022.

The game's description is minimal, but the cover screams Mad Max: Fury Road, so you already have some idea of what you're in for with this design:

Load up your vehicle with supplies, strap on a few weapons, and prepare to make your wreckland run.

Wreckland Run takes place in a post-apocalyptic landscape known as the Wrecklands that's filled with marauders and other dangers. In this post-apocalyptic solitaire game of vehicular carnage, you choose a vehicle and driver to guide through a seven-chapter campaign, trying desperately to get supplies through to the last holdouts of civilization. Each chapter introduces new options and challenges, and the whole game can be replayed with different combinations of drivers and vehicles.

Renegade Game Studios notes that the KS campaign will feature an Anomaly expansion for Warp's Edge, another Scott Almes design and the first title in its Solo Hero Series.

• In Q4 2021, Barrett Publishing ran a Kickstarter campaign for three thematically-related games, two of which are solitaire-only designs, with the third being for 1-2 players.


In The Hand of Destiny from Joe Klipfel, you face waves of minions ahead of a final boss battle, with everything taking place in your hands and not on a table. From the BGG game description: "You use your hero's limited strength resources and unique abilities to vanquish foes and move through the deck. Manage your health, upgrade your hero, and play cards as efficiently as possible to win the day."


The Forgotten Road from company owner Gabe Barrett is set in a different part of the "Realm of Shadows", with you traveling down the road of the title, encountering threats on your way to rescue a fellow hero who has been placed in a dungeon. In more detail:

The Forgotten Road is a hand-management game in which you need to play your action cards and use your special abilities as efficiently as possible to take out monsters, pass skill checks, move to new locations, and defeat bosses of ever-increasing difficulty. The game ends when either you run out of action cards or health and lose — or you defeat the final boss at the end of the road/dungeon deck and win.

Barrett is also the design of The Last Stronghold, a co-operative design for 1-2 players that also has you trying to hold on until you can defeat the leader at game's end. In some detail:

The forces of darkness have pushed all the way south, destroying everything in their path. The city of Lux is all that stands in their way from completely overtaking the realm. A small group of heroes must work together to fend off the evil army long enough to take out its leader.

The Last Stronghold is a dice-driven siege game in which you must fend off monsters in the areas surrounding Lux and prevent them from overtaking the city. You use special abilities and magical artifacts to manipulate the dice and monsters, with the goal of eventually taking out the final boss...should you last long enough. On your turn, you add threats to the board, decide which threats you want to deal with, move to that location, roll dice and use hero abilities to get rid of those threats, and repeat until you either defeat the final boss OR all heroes are incapacitated OR the main city you're protecting takes too much damage.

All three "Realm of Shadows" titles are due out in mid-2022. Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

If you want to be reckless on the slopes no matter the weather, U.S. publisher Pandasaurus Games plans to satisfy those desires in 2022.

• Assuming shipping goes as planned, ha ha, April 13, 2022 will see the release of Skull Canyon: Ski Fest from first-time designers Jason Klinke and Kip Noschese.

Here's an overview of this 2-4 player game that carries a 45-60 minute playing time:

Prove you're the ultimate skier by taking on the most difficult runs, collecting the best gear, and earning the highest score!

To get your ski on in Skull Canyon: Ski Fest, you need to collect and turn in matching sets of slope cards. Each set you turn in lets you ski a run on the mountain, earning victory points, fame, and a spot on the run scoreboard that tracks who performed best on each run. The higher a run's difficulty rating, the more cards you need to collect to complete it — but you'll also score more points and earn more fame.

At the end of each day of skiing, you take a break at the Ski Village, where you can take bonus actions and acquire gear to prepare for the next day of skiing. At the end of the third day, players score for the number of easy, advanced, and expert runs they control, then whoever has the most victory points wins!

• This game will be followed in mid-2022 by Skate Summer from another first-time designer, Randy Reiman, with art by Pape Ink, who is new to working on games.


Note, though, that Skate Summer will precede Skull Canyon: Ski Fest in that the former game will be launched for funding on Kickstarter on January 18, 2022, with this 2-5 player game being released in two editions: a retail edition with limited stretch goals that will hit retail stores and special edition juiced with all stretch goals that will be available only through the crowdfunding campaign. As for what the game's about:

It's summer, and you're riding the sun-drenched half-pipes of Pelican Park. Locals know there's no ledge too high, no rail too long, and no ramp too dangerous for you and your crew. Nail rad trick combos and show off your skills, but be careful — the longer you stay on your board, the more likely you are to bail!

The object of Skate Summer is to score the most points by doing trick combos, collecting goal tokens, and visiting S-K-A-T-E-R locations. The game is played in rounds. Each round has the following phases:

1. COMBOS: Players simultaneously play trick cards, earn rewards, and roll dice to check their balance.
2. SKILLS & POINTS: Players simultaneously improve their skills and score points for combos.
3. MOVES: Players take turns navigating the park, picking up goals and gear.
4. ROUND END: Each player resets their board and draws up to their hand size, then the "Pro Skater" first player marker passes to the left.

If any player's score has hit or passed the endgame token at the end of the round, the game ends and players count up their endgame points. The player with the highest score wins!

Okay, graphic designer Matt Paquette should feel stoked over those player boards, which are simultaneously obvious and ingenious... Read more »

by Fabio Lopiano

I started working on the game that would become Zapotec in early 2019. March 31st was my last day of work that year, after which I took some time off so that I could focus on board games full time for a while. (This is still ongoing after over two years.)

I had just closed Merv, so I started playing around with some ideas for a new game. Following the theme from my two previous games, Ragusa and Merv, I was still thinking of some other way to use the "house placement" mechanism.

In this case, the idea was to have a map with house slots where each slot would have a few properties (e.g., type of building, neighborhood, etc.), and each turn you had constraints on which houses you would be able to place. Those same properties would also be relevant for endgame scoring.

The initial idea was about building a modern city in which each building slot had three properties: their type (residential, commercial, industrial), the neighborhood (with three on the map), and whether the building was next to a road, a railroad, or a water course. One of the first boards looked like this:


The action selection, at the time, was based on nine double-sided tiles, each one having one icon on each side, with the icons being the three types of buildings, the three neighborhoods, and the three resources.

Each player also had a player mat with nine houses sitting on the main grid at the start (covering all the "+1" spaces) and various discs covering the circles:


There would be a row of 5-7 tiles on the main board and one tile on each player mat. On your turn, you would flip the tile on your player mat (moving it from the left slot to the right slot), then get a tile from the main board and place it onto the left slot. Depending on where you took the tile from, you would gain or lose some coins (as indicated on the board).

You would then activate the two tiles:

• When activating a tile with a resource, you would gain that resource for each visible "+1" on the corresponding row, so if you already had built two houses from the "bricks" row, you would gain a total of 3 bricks.
• When activating a tile with a neighborhood shield, you would collect money along the corresponding column, so if you had built two houses in that neighborhood, you would gain three coins.
• When activating a tile with a building type, you would be able to build a house of that type (with each building type requiring a specific pair of resources), the house would go on the main board on a slot of the matching type and in the same neighborhood of the column from which you took the house.

Instead of placing a house, you could place one of your discs under one of your already built houses (thereby upgrading it) or place a disc on a special building slot on the map (with one for each main building aspect). The number of discs on those bigger building lots would determine how many points each house with the matching aspects would be worth at the end of the game for all players. For example, if at the end of the game, the wharf building had three discs, each house next to water would be worth 3 VP, while upgraded houses would count double. Removing discs from your board would also unlock various abilities that let you spend coins to activate various bonuses.

This initial prototype already had many of the ideas that would then become central to Zapotec, such as the resource grid, the house placement and costs, and some of the scoring principles.

The drafting of tiles, though, was not working very well as you often would end up taking the tiles you could afford rather than the ones you wanted, and especially at higher player counts, the tiles you needed might end up always being taken by some other player.

During that time I was able to playtest two or three times a week thanks to regular events with PlaytestUK and weekly tests with a few other designer friends at my place, with enough free time between them to let me iterate quickly and try new changes.

One of the first things that changed was swapping out tiles for cards. Each card would have both a resource and a building aspect, and players would have a hand of cards so that they could plan a few turns ahead instead of relying on which cards were available to draft on the next turn. Cards would also have a scoring multiplier that would apply to all of your buildings with a given feature.

Here is a picture from an actual playtest session:


In this version (from mid-April 2019), you would play a card in front of you, deciding which resource row to activate and which buildings you could build, either the type, the neighborhood, or whether it should be next to a railway, road or water. When placing the building, you would then get the tile from the same slot on the board, and place it on your player mat on the same slot from which you took the house. That tile then provided extra resources when collecting from the same row.

The card would also provide a score multiplier for your buildings with some other feature. For example, one card would let you build an office and score 1 VP for all your houses next to a river.

Upgrading a building by placing a disc underneath it would cost an additional coin over the cost of the building type, and now you would gain one of the tiles on the board that's tied to the type of building you boosted.

Finally, you could add a second disc to an already boosted building (turning it into a level-3 building) and at the same time add another disc to one of the nine main buildings on the left top corner of the board. These buildings will award a certain number of VP to each building with the given feature and even more VPs to boosted buildings of that type. (The slot in the top left corner, for example, awards each commercial building of level 1/2/3 with 1/2/4 VPs times the number of discs that have been placed on it at the end of the game.)

In early May 2019, I went to a playtest session at Dávid Turczi's place (as we both lived in London at the time). I tried his game Tawantinsuyu, then we played a game of Merv. (Although the main game was pretty much finalized by then, I was still working on the solo mode, and I was looking for some advice from the master.) At some point, Dávid half-jokingly said that if I ever made a game with a Mesoamerican theme, he would gladly show it to his friends at Board&Dice, so over the next few days, I did some research into whether I could somehow fit my city-building game into that setting.

I found the Zapotec civilization to be very well fitting because that civilization developed along three valleys around a central location. The three city neighborhoods naturally turned into the three valleys of Mitla, Etla, and Ocotlán; the three types of buildings turned into temples, villages, and corn fields, and instead of water/rail/roads I used three types of terrain: plains, forests, and hills, which emerged almost naturally from the setting.

Once I had those three specific types of buildings, it came naturally that each one would provide its own special resource: corn fields produce corn, temples produce priests, and villages produce trading opportunities (abstracted into gold).

The "capital" actions were then a way to spend these resources, so gold was now used to access trading tiles, which initially provided just some conversions, but which eventually evolved into more varied kinds of special abilities.

Corn was sacrificed in order to advance on a track, and priests were used, along with building resources, in order to build pyramids.


I changed the card play so that cards were reused; now cards played in a round would become the ones from which to draft in the next round. The cards were also played simultaneously, with the printed number determining the turn order for the round. The leftover card, after drafting, would become the scoring card for the next round, etc.

This new version introduced more tension between being early or late in turn order. Now if you are last in turn order, you will try to build houses that satisfy the scoring card for both the current round and the next round.

Also, by reusing cards, there's a good chance that the scoring cards for the last couple of rounds have already been used a few times, so they would have a bigger impact on scoring. Finally, players are presented with an interesting choice between whether to pick up a previously used card to play it again next round or leave it and possibly score from it.

I also tweaked the pyramid scoring to create an incentive to work together to build bigger pyramids. (Completed pyramids award way more points than incomplete ones, but you can build only one level per pyramid per turn.)

By early June 2019, I had a game that was in a good enough state, and I brought it to a playtesting session at Dávid's place. He kept the prototype so that he could bring it to a meet-up with Board&Dice a few days later.

I made another copy of the prototype, which I then brought to a lot of places. Around that time, I left my flat in London, spent a weekend in Melksham for a playtesting event, then while all my furniture was on a truck heading across Europe, I went on a trip to Germany where I stopped by, among other places, Göttingen for the big annual game designer meeting. Once settled in Milan, I went to a dozen or so gaming and playtesting events all over Italy between August and January, making more tweaks to the design here and there.

During that time I also received some great feedback from Board&Dice, which was happy to sign the game.

A few final tweaks were implemented: We removed one game round (going from six to five), introduced the palace (that counts as two houses for scoring purposes but doesn't provide resources), and started thinking about a few other ideas.

In February 2020, I flew to Warsaw for a week of full immersion with Board&Dice and a few other designers for their upcoming games. (We also playtested Tawantinsuyu, Tekhenu, Tabannusi, Origins, and Dark Ages with David, Daniele, Adam, and the lovely folks from Board&Dice.)

During that week, we finalized the last remaining details, improved the trade tiles, and introduced the ritual cards in order to provide even more variability in the game.


I am happy that the majority of the work on Zapotec was finalized before the emergence of the novel coronavirus. Even though the ongoing pandemic has certainly resulted in additional challenges, particularly when it comes to wider playtesting of the finished design, additional development, and the disruption to the global supply chain, I am happy knowing the game received all necessary attention and is, today, on its way to various worldwide warehouses for fulfillment and distribution.

Fabio Lopiano

Editor's note of a self-promotional nature: Zapotec is available for purchase via the BGG Store. —WEM Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

As I noted in my 2022 new year's resolution post, I'm trying to play, write about, and record videos about a wider spectrum of games than I would normally play. I know what I like, sure, but maybe I could like something else given that I'm not necessarily the same person now as I was a few years ago. (Cue thoughts on Theseus' paradox.)

I had received a review copy of Ankh: Gods of Egypt from CMON, for example, and while I normally avoid mini-on-a-map games that include direct conflict, I realized that aside from Marvel Dice Masters: Avengers vs. X-Men (review here), I had played no games by designer Eric M. Lang. I've interviewed Lang many times about new releases, and I love chatting with him at conventions, but his games didn't seem like my type of thing, so I never played his work.

With those thoughts in mind, I thought I'd try a modern Lang design and a mini-on-a-map game in one go. Turns out I was surprised by the core of Ankh, it being a Eurogame at heart with players taking two of four simple actions on a turn:

• Move each of your figures on the board 0-3 spaces to land on an unoccupied space.
• Summon a figure from your reserve adjacent to either a figure of yours on the board or a monument you control.
• Gain followers — the game's money — based on the number of neutral or owned monuments to which you are adjacent.
• Gain an ankh power by paying 1-3 followers.

Simple, right?


One wrinkle is that your second action must be on a lower level than your first, so if you gain followers, then you must gain an ankh power for your second action, whether you can afford to or not.

Another wrinkle is that each time you take an action, you move a marker on a central track for that action, and when the marker reaches the end of the track, you trigger an event. Most of the events are bonuses that help only one player — you gain control of a monument, or you use a camel caravan to split a region in two — so you want to be the one to trigger an event, but players are collectively moving markers on four tracks related to the four types of actions, which means that you can usually trigger an event only if another player moved the marker to the next-to-last space on the track. You don't want to set up an event bonus for someone else, but you must take two actions on your turn (unless you start by gaining an ankh power), so you're probably going to do so multiple times, just as another player will set you up.

Near game's end
These forced actions provide a timer for the game, yet it's an irregular timer since events will be triggered with a different rhythm from one game to the next. As with all the Reiner Knizia games that I adore, in Ankh: Gods of Egypt you want to take all the actions — especially since you need followers to gain ankh powers, yet to gain followers you need figures in the right places — but you can take only two at a time, and events keep rushing toward you, and before you know it, conflict has begun, conflict being the one event that involves everyone.

To resolve conflict, you look at each region on the game board. If only one player is in a region, they score 1 devotion — the game's scoring metric, players being (as the title says) gods in Egypt — along with 1 devotion for each of the three types of monuments (obelisks, pyramids, temples) for which they have a majority. That preceding phrase sounds both cumbersome and promising; in practice scoring is easy to resolve, yet not necessarily easy to obtain due to that constantly advancing clock. You'll be eyeing all the monuments, but you'll grab only a few, so make them count, especially since most of the level-2 ankh powers key off of monuments you control.

If no one is in a region, ignore it, but I've yet to see that happen in three games. If two or more players are in a region, then battle ensues, with each player choosing and revealing an action card from their hand. Some cards take effect immediately, then players in the region score for monument majorities, then you resolve battle — although it doesn't feel much like battle given that you can have towering gods and swole guardians on the board, yet each figure has a strength of 1, so the strength comparison is often 2-1, 3-2, or something similarly meager. (Some games inflate values by pointlessly having all numbers be tens or hundreds, but Ankh keeps it honest, so I'll give credit for that.)

When you boil it down, it's 2 vs. 2
In a battle, all non-god figures on the losing side are removed from play, which might be one reason why the battles have such low strength totals. Who's going to bring five figures into a region if they think they're going to lose them as you'll then need multiple summon actions to build up forces once again? (That said, two of the battle cards encourage grand efforts like that, with one of them giving you devotion for lost figures. So many sacrifices! You must be an awesome god indeed!)

More generally, it feels like you want to compete in as many regions as possible since you're picking up only a point or two at a time, so you need to squeeze out victories here, there, and everywhere instead of dogpiling one place and letting others score what you ignore. Besides, you have only seven figures (a god and six warriors), with the chance of getting up to three guardians, so you have little opportunity to swarm a region. The game keeps hustling along, and you're like, well, I have one figure in that region, so you're telling me there's a chance!

Aside from the battle cards, you have the aforementioned ankh powers that provide perks, with each guardian and god also having a unique power of their own. All of these extras feel tiny — you gain a few followers or a mummy respawns by your god instead of perishing in battle or a crocodile sits in water and provides its 1 strength to two, count 'em, TWO regions instead of one — so the simple core of the game becomes papered over with a multitude of details that feel almost inconsequential, yet they sometimes turn a battle, which then has knock-on effects in who exists in a region, which carries over into everything else. For the want of a nail and all that.

New region, who dis?
These tiny, yet significant details are strangely paired with large-scale, yet extraneous figures that can obscure the current game state unless you have a perfect memory of where every piece is or you're standing over the game board to ensure that a crucial monument or figure isn't overlooked — something that has happened in two of my three games. I have little experience playing games with miniatures, so perhaps one becomes accustomed to peering around game pieces to spot other game pieces, but if given a choice, I'd opt for large and small colored cubes to ensure clarity of what's where. That would probably sell a lot fewer copies of Ankh: Gods of Egypt, though.

One cool twist in the design is the midgame reset that shakes up everyone's holdings. After the third conflict, in games with three or more players, the two players with the lowest scores merge, becoming a single god to compete against everyone else as a team. This sounds mighty, like Atlas and Hercules combining to create a mythic figure twice as strong as either one individually, yet in practice the figures and monuments of the lowest scoring god are wiped away, so it's more like Atlercules is as powerful as before, but now he has two driver's licenses, so he can vote twice in the Greek elections. As with so many other things, the advantage for this new figure is tiny, yet a tiny wedge can split an opponent's hold on a region, so it's all about where you can place that wedge relative to what everyone else is doing.

For more thoughts on Ankh: Gods of Egypt, along with details of the ankh powers, god powers, and guardian powers, check out this video overview:

Youtube Video Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

• In December 2021, Inverse's Zeb Larson profiled designer Damon Stone and his game Liberation—Haiti, one of the Zenobia Award finalists for 2021 in an article titled "This Surprising New Game Wants to Fix the Worst Thing about Risk". Here's an overview of the game from the designer:

The French colony of Saint-Domingue produced more wealth than the rest of France's colonies combined. France chose to meet the demand for these labor-intensive crops by way of an explosive increase in slavery with nearly half a million enslaved West Africans working the Saint-Domingue plantations. The brutality and greed of the plantation owners and overseers, coupled with the extreme disregard for the enslaved Africans' humanity, set the stage for revolt. After months of hidden preparation, the signal was given following a secret Vodou ceremony. On the 21st of August, 1791, the fuse to the powder keg that was Saint-Domingue ignited with the flame of liberation.

In the cooperative deck-building and strategic war game Liberation—Haiti, the players each control a geographical faction of enslaved Africans or those who escaped enslavement living in the French colony of Saint-Domingue during the early period of the Haitian Revolution, 1791 to 1793. These factions seek both the abolition of their slavery and social equality.

Before rebelling and fighting for your liberty, you need to recruit people to your cause, gather information, develop maneuvers, and stockpile supplies, all while the game is opposing your actions. You have to face well-armed colonial militia and foreign armies, navigate fragile or fleeting alliances, and overcome both political and environmental challenges to win freedom for your people.

The game is played in two stages: the Planning Stage and the Revolution Stage. In the Planning Stage, you use a deck of cards specific to your faction to acquire planning cards that represent intelligence, people, and materiel. Cards added to your pool will in turn help accumulate more and stronger cards of these types. In the Revolution Stage, you use your acquired card pool to overthrow the colonial slave system by deploying units to raid plantations, defeat enemy forces, seize control of strategic locations, increase the morale of your people, and meet political challenges.

The article goes into detail about how and why Stone developed the concept behind the game. A few excerpts:

Stone sees Liberation—Haiti as an opportunity to set the record straight on both the realities of slavery and Haiti itself, which he says only gets acknowledged by the rest of the world "when there is a disaster or national tragedy."

"I was watching Hamilton for the third, fifth time, and the idea that people were learning about this particular period of American history because it was made in a very accessible format was just something I was fascinated by," he says.

"I thought it would be fascinating to display the only successful slave uprising that resulted in the abolition of slavery for its people as well as the formation of a country in which the revolutionaries were still in charge."

• In a highly informative November 2021 post on BGG, Andrei Novac of publisher Board&Dice broke down the costs involved with a Kickstarted game to demonstrate how a game that bears a $100 price on KS will (perhaps) net the publisher $18 per game...before taxes kick in, mind you.

• Ian Livingstone, co-founder of Games Workshop and co-creator of the Fighting Fantasy book series, has received the title "Knight Bachelor" from UK's Queen Elizabeth "[f]or services to the Online Gaming Industry", with him being one of 1,122 people on the New Year Honours List for 2022.

• Starting on January 21, 2022, gamers in Gloucester and Herefordshire plan to play the board game Dune from Gale Force Nine for no less than 85 hours continuously to land a spot in the Guinness World Records. The game(s) will be streamed on Facebook. Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

If you pay attention to game awards, you might recall that in 2018 Austrian designer Wolfgang Warsch took half of the Spiel and Kennerspiel des Jahres nominations thanks to The Mind, Ganz schön clever, and The Quacks of Quedlinburg.

In 2019, publisher NSV released a spinoff of Warsch's The Mind — The Mind Extreme — and in 2022 publisher Schmidt Spiele and Warsch will release spinoffs of his two other SdJ-nominated games, with both being aimed at players far younger than the original target audience.

Mit Quacks & Co. nach Quedlinburg ("With Quacks & Co. to Quedlinburg") is a racing game for players aged 6 and up, with you trying to dig the right food from your bag so that your mount will move forward instead of standing in place like a dope. Here's my summary of the German rules:

It's race day in Quedlinburg, and with the right combination of food and luck, you will ride your mount to victory and claim the golden cauldron.

Mit Quacks & Co. nach Quedlinburg features similar gameplay to The Quacks of Quedlinburg, with each player building their own bag of tokens over the course of play, then drawing those tokens to try to further themselves to victory.

Each player starts the game with their mount at the start of the racetrack and a bag that contains four dream tokens, a yellow 1 token, two red 1 tokens, and a red 2 token. On a turn, you draw a token from your bag, then place it on your animal board. If you draw a colored token, place the token on your animal board, advance your animal on the track as many spaces as the number on the token, then carry out the effect of that color: red tokens earn you 1-3 rubies, yellow tokens let you roll a die for a random bonus, green tokens let you take another turn or return a drawn token to your bag, and blue chips let you move extra or upgrade a token.

If you draw a dream token, place it on one of the clouds on your animal board. After you draw and place a third dream token, use all the rubies on your board to buy new tokens — no two being the same color, mind you — then place these new tokens and all previously drawn tokens in your bag. Keep taking turns until someone reaches the end of the track and wins!

Mit Quacks & Co. nach Quedlinburg includes a double-sided game board for a shorter or longer race; orange and purple tokens that provide new powers, such as advancing as many spaces as the number of rubies you have; and double-sided action boards for each type of colored token, allowing you to play with different sets of actions from game to game.

The other title due out from this designer/publisher combo in early 2022 is Auch schon clever ("Also clever"), with this game being targeted at players aged 5+. As such, your ability to combo in this design is vastly scaled down from the original game, but the same principles are at work here:

You want to get your hands on everything you can at the birthday party: balloons, gifts, candles, and mountains of sweets! Will you be able to grab more than all the other partygoers?

Auch schon clever features gameplay similar to Ganz schön clever, with one player rolling dice on their turn, then choosing what they want while everyone else gets something from what's left behind.

On your turn, roll the five dice. The faces of these dice show a joker symbol or an icon on one of four colored backgrounds. Choose all the dice of one background color, taking any jokers at the same time, then use the symbols on these die faces to mark off items in this colored area of your score sheet:

—Balloons are in the yellow area, for example, and you must mark them off left to right: red, blue, green, lilac, blue, etc.
—For the train of candles in the orange area, you must have as many candles as are on the next train car in order to mark it out.
—Gifts in the green area can be marked off in any order.
—Sweets in the blue area are depicted in pairs in rows — doughnuts, cake, cupcakes — and you mark spaces in a row left to right as long as you have a pair of matching sweets on the dice.

If you can't use a die that you took, e.g., you took red, blue and lilac balloons and could mark off only the first two, then you must return the unused dice to any others left behind. Each other player then chooses dice of a single background color — and players can choose the same or different colors — and marks off what they can.

If you mark off a circled item or a row of gifts next to a circle, you can immediately cross off an item in the section of the same color as that circle. Crossing off this item might give you another bonus!

When a player marks off all items in one area, the game ends at the conclusion of that turn. Various items or rows that you complete have rainbow stars connected to them, and whoever collects the most rainbow stars wins!

Read more »

by Candice Harris

• Flying Pig Games launched a Kickstarter campaign (KS link) on January 13, 2022 for Old School Tactical: Volume 1 - Second Edition, a new version of Shayne Logan's 2016, 2-player, tactical wargame hit, Old School Tactical: Volume 1 (OST).

The second edition of Old School Tactical: Volume 1 features new artwork illustrated by the game designer on soldier and vehicle counters, along with updated rules and player aids, and two new tutorial scenarios. With the second edition enhancements, it sounds like this is a great time to get check out the OST system if you've been wanting to try it out. If you're not familiar with Old School Tactical, here's a brief overview from the publisher:

Old School Tactical is the first in a dynamic series of fresh, tactical war games. OST simulates, through an easily-learned game system, small unit engagements on the Eastern Front during 1941-42.

Two players contest each scenario using counters representing the soldiers, guns, and vehicles that fought these desperate battles. On each turn play goes back and forth between the sides as Impulse Points are spent to enable a player's forces to act. When the battle is over, casualty and victory points are tallied and a victor is declared.

Infantry target other soft units and attack using their Firepower value against the target’s Defense value. The attack can be modified by Leadership, support weapons and terrain effects. And when things get intense, Assault moves into enemy hexes result in deadly Close Combat. Dice rolls are made using the Infantry Combat Table and results are implemented. Attacking armored vehicles requires a roll to Hit the vehicle at range. If a Hit is scored, the Firepower value of the attacker’s gun is used against the target’s front or flank Defense value. Dice rolls are made using the Vehicle Combat Table and results are enforced. Vehicles may also use their HE Firepower value and secondary armaments directly against soft targets using the Infantry Combat Table.

Also, let it be known that this is definitely not a straight-up reprint, if it wasn't evident from the box cover image above and Kickstarter title ("Old School Tactical Vol I NOT-A-REPRINT 2nd Edition").

• If you're interested in more maps and scenarios off the bat for the new, second edition of OST, you can snag a copy of the Red Blitz expansion, which is available as part of the Old School Tactical: Volume 1 – Second Edition Kickstarter campaign. Here's a taste of what you can expect from Red Blitz:

In the vein of Old School Tactical Vol 2's Phantom Division we present Red Blitz. To be sold during the Kickstarter for Old School Tactical Vol I 2nd Edition, this boxed expansion will add more scenarios that occur during the vicious fighting of Operation Bagration in the summer of 1944.

Specifically, there are 6 challenging new scenarios, and an extended battle to be gamed on Vol I's Map 1. The extended battle is a multi-part legacy scenario, where the day's gains remain in your hands and reinforcements are fed into the battle. A running score is kept and the winning side is determined at the end of all the rounds.

The "one-off" scenarios are fought on 4 new pocket maps, depicting summer and winter terrain. Additionally, Red Blitz presents new combatants, including the SU-76M, SU-85, OT-34, PT34, ISU-152, IS-2StuH-42 and the Nashorn.

• Clash of the Ardennes is a unique and accessible, 2-player, tile-laying, tactical wargame designed and self-published by Elwin Klappe. After a successfully funded Kickstarter campaign (KS link) in April 2021, it is now available for pre-order.

Clash of the Ardennes features wooden unit pieces, pits players against each other as the Allies (Americans) and the Axis (Germans) during the Battle of the Bulge, and plays in 30-90 minutes. Here's a brief description of how it works:

During one of the toughest battles fought in World War 2: the Battle of the Bulge, you face the difficult task to conquer important streets in the Belgian city of Bastogne.

In Clash of the Ardennes you have control over the Allied or Axis forces and you have to obtain your goal, which is described on your 'Objective card' (drawn at the beginning of the game).

Use all of your (special) units wisely, because you will run out of units very quickly. Place them strategically and tactically on 1 of the 7 streets, always think ahead and try to reach your objective a little bit sooner than your opponent.

• Tank Duel designer Mike Bertucelli created a new, 1-4 player solitaire/team, World War II submarine game called Wolfpack, which is currently available for P500 pre-order from GMT Games.

Wolfpack features a campaign system where players track the progress of their crews, linking multiple patrols together to gain as much experience as possible from sinking allied merchant ships. Here are some more details from the publisher on the setting and a tidbit on what you can expect gameplay wise:

Wolfpack is a tactical, historical game depicting the struggles between the German submarine Wolfpacks and the allied merchant convoys of WWII. Wolfpack is set in the vast North Atlantic from late 1941 to early 1943.

Wolfpack is a 1-4 player solitaire/team game. When playing solo, the player will command 2 - 4 submarines. In a team game, players will command 1 - 2 submarines depending on the number of players. The convoy merchant ships and escorts will be controlled by an AI system. In Wolfpack, players will assume the role of a German WWII submarine commander. Players will need to work together to achieve victory.

In a game of Wolfpack, players will start by approaching the Allied merchant ship convoy while trying to make it through the escort's screen undetected. If successful, your submarine will make an attack run on the convoy. As the commander, you will make many decisions like maneuvering your submarine to the best firing angle while making TDC (torpedo data computer) calculations for each of your torpedos, trying to achieve your best shot. You will issue orders to your crew to deal with any damage that your submarine may have sustained. Should we run silent? Do we press the attack? The decisions are up to you. Do all of this while trying to sink as much allied merchant ship tonnage as possible and avoid being detected and sent to the bottom by the allied escort ships.

I have had a blast with my handful of plays of Tank Duel: Enemy in the Crosshairs, so I'm eager to see what Bertucelli has cooked up for us with Wolfpack. Read more »

Publisher: PenguinComics

VTT BATTLE MAP - FANTASY TOWN: BREWERY & WINEYARD

A 40x30, three level, VTT Map with brewery, bar, winery and sampling area.

A three level beer brewery and wineyard. Harvest the barley and wine, brew it to beer and sample it in the wine-cellar - or why not at the bar? Large dining room and bedroom, plus a library for studies on the top floor.

This is a highly detailed map for any fantasy, or 1920/1930's-styled, tabletop games.

This is a 40x30 inch battle map for "any" system.

Included in this set:

• 300 DPI printable MAPS with and without GRID.
• 72 DPI MAPS with and without GRID, for use in your favourite online system.
• PDF-files with printable parts - 20 totally for each map - to layout on a huge table!
• TWO JPG-files (2x 72DPI and 2x 300DPI) included with each map - 12 totally!
  
  
• Totally 3 PDF files and 12 JPG images = Over 440Mb of material!
• This is part of the "Fantasy Town"-series of VTT Maps.

Check out all the other VTT Battle Maps here.

HAVE FUN!

Price: $1.95 Read more »

Publisher: Mongoose

The Spinward Extents are the border between the familiar and the unknown. Pioneering and adventurous Imperials, Zhodani, Aslan, even Vargr, have reached the Extents; some have dwelt there for centuries or millennia, but they are far from their ancestral homes. Native races have forged their own empires across these stars. In the Extents the daring can make their fortunes, gain fame or infamy, and influence the course of events for entire worlds or distant governments. Alien races, forgotten mysteries, bitter rivalries and great opportunities await under the light of inconstant, giant, and dead stars.

Spinward Extents presents two complete sectors near the edge of Charted Space: The Beyond and the Vanguard Reaches. The Beyond is a borderland between Aslan expansion and human pocket empires, both ancient and new. At the end of Imperial courier routes, it is home to the alien Sred*Ni, isolated worlds, and mysterious entities. The Storm Knights hold the line in an uneasy truce with Aslan clans, but other dangers and many opportunities await.

The Vanguard Reaches is the spinward edge of settled space, a sector of proxy states for the distant Third Imperium and Zhodani Consulate. The sector is home to the warlike-Eslyat and peaceful Murians, dying red giant stars and the Helix Nebula. Warfare, politics, piracy, and sparse starscapes challenge Travellers who live and work in this distant sector.

Includes two huge colour poster maps of The Beyond and Vanguard Reaches sectors.

Price: $34.99 Read more »

Publisher: Bozbat Games

‘Monthly Mysteries for Ancient Elements RPG, Issue 001’, is an ezine that introduces new material for Ancient Elements RPG and perhaps other sets of rules that are based upon Microlite20. Each issue attempts to introduce a theme with material that could be used in whole or in part for an adventure or campaign.

Price: $0.99 Read more »

Publisher: Far Horizons Co-op

HOT-BLOODED YOUTHS!

TENSE MELODRAMA!

SHONEN ACTION!

Join the fray in Friendship, Effort, Victory, a shonen battle manga tabletop roleplaying game. Inspired by works such as Bleach, One Piece, Naruto, My Hero Academia, and other battle manga, Friendship, Effort, Victory uses the acclaimed Powered By The Apocalypse Engine to deliver the flashy, dynamic battles and intense, climatic drama of those sensational works. 

• Choose from 10 classic archetypes to quickly and easily make your character. From the overly cheerful, friendmakers to the angsty, vengeful loners to the fiery, unpredictable rivals, your characters will feel like they would fit right into your favorite stories. 

• Friendship, Effort, Victory subtly guides players to the themes and key moments of classic battle manga by guiding conflict resolution with simple mechanics. 

• The dual health system keeps battles tense and emotional. Characters have the ability to buy off their physical damage by taking emotional damage in its place. Death only comes when a character chooses to accept its embrace. When that time comes, accepting death gives the character a burst of power and a second wind that ensures the hero goes out in a blaze of glory.

• No one is ever left out of the fight. In a genre known for amazing one-on-one battles, players may worry they could be left out. The spectating mechanics allows non-combatants to offer support to any match, even if they aren’t present for the scene. At any time, non-combatant can introduce how their character is interpreting the fight, giving characters bonuses, buffs, and debuffs as makes sense. 

• The Arcs, General, and Villain systems keep the world dynamic and the threats serious. The Arcs system manages many different threats the world faces due to the Villains mechaniations. The General and Villain system ensures that Villains never fall easily and keep the Sagas from ending too soon. Through the plot armor the Villain system provides, Villains always feel like a major threat. By making the Generals key to removing that plot armor and making the Villains vulnerable, stories grow horizontally. Instead of a mad dash to the Villain, heroes focus on their own matchups, knowing that their victories against the Generals take the team closer to ultimate victory. 

Price: $15.00 Read more »

Publisher: VioletGames

Shidaiqu is a Kung Fu brawler RPG which features an unusual and original combat system specifically designed to model the rhythms and fun of movie Kung Fu, inspired by fight choreographers such as Sammo Hung, The Jackie Chan Stunt Team, Panna Rittikrai, Yuen Woo-Ping and Brad Allen.

A simple system, easy to learn, fun to play, and fast to bring to the table. Uses 3D6.

Welcome to the world of Shidaiqu RPG: the place is China, the era: 1920s...

The police have lost control of the cities, which have been carved up into territories run by organised criminal empires, constantly jostling for control of areas and income streams.

Those they can't win over with intimidation are seduced with bribery – blood-money flows through everything and everyone has an agenda.

Overlaid onto this powder keg are the many rival Kung Fu schools, eager to prove their style is best and preserve their honour. Conflicts are common and enmity runs deep.

The cities are rich environments to explore, with traditional medicine apothecaries, communal baths, laundrettes, tailors, dumpling shops, noodle places, clothes lines everywhere, and steam from outdoor baozi stalls adding to the atmosphere. The sound of erhu, guzheng and bamboo flute never far away, there is an intriguing mixture between traditional Chinese culture, and 1920s Western influence. Hand-painted adverts for health-giving tea and pure wine with smiling beauties in qipao dresses watch over the varied characters who call the cities home.

This is a world where riches are won, legends are born and underdogs overcome great odds to bring justice (or revenge) to themselves and others in the Chinese cities. the lives of the Chinese people.

Shidaiqu (Chinese: 時代曲) takes its name from a genre of Chinese popular music that is a fusion of Chinese folk, American jazz and Hollywood film music that originated in Shanghai, China in the 1920s.

Price: $4.76 Read more »

Publisher: Skirmisher Publishing

This very special bundle contains nine horror-oriented titles, including the bestselling LARP version of the Call of Cthulhu RPG, our "Code Z" zombie survival guide, some short fiction, a mini-comic, a self-standing murder mystery scenario, a system-free setting guide, two RPG supplements, and a guide to building props!

	Cthulhu Live 3rd Edition (LARP) Regular price: 0 Bundle price: 0 Format: PDF	This newest and best edition of Cthulhu Live includes a richly detailed and uniquely playable rules system that incorporates decades of best practices and refinements from hundreds of gamers worldwide. Features of this self-contained live-action roleplaying game include:  All-new rules for skills, combat, Sanity, Magic, and Psychic powers. Extensive information on organizing events, stagecraft and special effects. Guidelines on role-playing Outsiders tainted by the touch of the Mythos. New and improved photographs, graphics, and other images, including works by renowned Cthulhu Mythos artist Richard Alan Poppe. And much more! Other products in this line include: The Island Muerte al Chupacabras! Witchfinder Arcanum Imperii Sight Unseen The Green Fairy Mysteries of the Mythos: Murder at...
	Mythos Society Guide to New England Regular price: 0 Bundle price: 0 Format: PDF	The Mythos Society Guide to New England is an expansive universal sourcebook that can be used to enhance any horror, mystery, or adventure roleplaying scenarios set in New England. This fictional travel guide is intended to be a fun and provocative read for anyone interested in the esoteric history of New England, and a resource for stories or other projects that have horror or the weird as themes; are based on or inspired by the works of H.P. Lovecraft or other Cthulhu Mythos authors; or are set during the period between the two World Wars. It is also particularly well suited as a source of inspiration for Mythos-oriented games like Call of Cthulhu and Cthulhu Live.  The Mythos Guide to New England provides a record of the land and its inhabitants, its p...
	10 Reflections on Lovecraft (Pathfinder Roleplaying Game) Regular price: 0 Bundle price: 0 Format: PDF	Some time ago, author Michael O. Varhola acquired a comprehensive edition of H.P. Lovecraft’s works of fiction and set out to re-read everything he had previously, see what had slipped through the cracks for him, and gain a different perspective on the stories by reading them in the order in which they had been written. As part of this pursuit, he began selecting one element from each of his stories and putting them into game terms. "Identifying something fresh or interesting from each story to put into game terms was more of a challenge than one might have thought, especially as I wanted to capture the feel of the author’s stories, not just create more things that players could roll initiative against and then have their characters either hack up be devoured by," Varhola said ...
	Cthulhu Live’s Mysteries of the Mythos: Murder at Miskatonic Regular price: 0 Bundle price: 0 Format: PDF	Miskatonic University, that ivy league institution of higher learning that has produced many a fine young adult ready to shape the world the way they see fit. With diverse courses such as Peruvian Basket Weaving, Modern Occult Legends, and Ancient Languages, Miskatonic has a class for any student. And with the award-winning sports team, the Fighting Cephalopods, even the athletic scholar can find his path to a brighter future among these hallowed halls.  There is, however, a class not in the curriculum that one person on campus is about to earn a masters in. That class is Murder 101. This class has only one test, but the final is a real killer. Who will pass this course? Will it be the jock? What about the bookworm? And let us not forget about the professional rival! Only time and you...
	Six Spells: Mythos Regular price: 0 Bundle price: 0 Format: PDF	“Mythos” is a word that evokes a certain ilk of horror that emphasize humanity’s utter isolation and inconsequence in a monstrous, unforgiving universe, in which things do go bump in the night and humans are the food or playthings of terrible entities. Most of those initial stories came directly from author H.P. Lovecraft, but other writers of his era used the Mythos with his permission and put their own stamp on this subgenre of early 20th century horror. Accordingly, the spells that appear here were inspired not just by the tales Lovecraft, but also by the work of Clark Ashton Smith. They touch on the wrongness of reality, on the ability of cultists to bend and warp it, and on humanity’s blindness to these things. This mini-publication contains six Mythos spells — Awaken Ido...
	The Cthulhu Conspiracy Regular price: 0 Bundle price: 0 Format: PDF	“The time is drawing near … we have been reading the signs in the stars, tracking their progress for centuries … we must advance our plan to hold back the darkness … the Horror.”  In “The Cthulhu Conspiracy,” fantasy artist Amanda Kahl takes a whimsical look at the modern infatuation with the most famous of the Great Old Ones and one approach to battling the effects of his imminent awakening. ...
	The Prop Room Regular price: 0 Bundle price: 0 Format: PDF	This publication includes five how-to articles by LARPmeister William T. Thrasher on how to create a variety of fun props that can be used for LARPs, tabletop role-playing games, or decorations for your lair! They are: Treasure on the Cheap, which includes instructions on how to make prop coins, gems, chests, and more. Adding Some Bite To Your Game, a tutorial on how to create teeth and tusks of various sorts. Grimdark Costume Enhancers, a look at special talismans that can be used to breathe life into the livery, weapons, and equipment of your characters. The Allure of Innsmouth Gold, a guide to creating treasure evocative of that associated with aquatic humanoids in the Mythos works of authors like H.P. Lovecraft. Words Within Wheels, which includes co...
	Their Blood Is the Sea Regular price: 0 Bundle price: 0 Format: PDF	"North Sea, in the 22nd year of the reign of blessed Honorius, Imperator Romanorum ..." Set on the cusp of civilization during the final years of the Roman Empire and the onset of the Dark Ages, "Their Blood Is the Sea" explores the horrors encountered by the crew and passengers of a vessel that runs aground on a hostile shore. It was written by game developer and historian Clint Staples, who has extensively researched the period in which this story takes place and sailed through the waters where it is set. ...
	~ 'Code Z' Zombie Survival Field Guide ~ Regular price: 0 Bundle price: 0 Format: PDF	Our zombie survival field guide is a quick reference designed to provide tips that can help keep you eating, breathing, and sleeping safely throughout the duration of a zombie apocalypse and be one of those who survives it.  “Code Z” includes sections on Shelter, Weapons, Non-Zombie Dangers, Outside Safe Zones, Repopulation, and a Post-Zombie Future, along with striking imagery by artists Ahmadreza Heidaripoor and Curren.  Logic is life. Strategy is survival. ...

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Publisher: Tomoko's Paper Miniatures

3D paper models and 2D paper miniatures 28 mm for low Sci-Fi wargames. This set includes:

1. Lainkas - Alanian landing helicopter. Two versions: simple and advanced (helicopter interior). Four removable weapon modules: autocannons, unguided rocket launcher, guided missles, heavy missle. Two additional modules for advanced version: machine gunner and sitting paratroopers

2. Lainkas 2D miniature - Flat "lazy" version

3. Stand

Note: Alana paratroopers not included!

Price: $5.00 Read more »

Publisher: Skirmisher Publishing

This very special bundle contains both print and PDF versions of Skirmisher Publishing's bestselling Ragnarok: Age of Wolves miniatures game! We have also thrown in our "Viking Warriors" supplement for the game as a bonus item.

	Ragnarok: Age of Wolves Regular price: 0 Bundle price: 0 Format: PDF	Ragnarok: Age of Wolves is a skirmish-level game for novice and experienced tabletop players alike that emulates the desperate small-scale actions that might result during the unending winter that is the first stage of the Viking Apocalypse. As crops fail and food grows scarce, banditry becomes rife as formerly good folk are driven to extremes and bad men take advantage of chaos and hardship. Monsters haunt the wilds and prowl the outskirts of palisaded settlement and isolated steading alike. Huldrfolk, never easy neighbors, but generally peaceful if left undisturbed, now move to defend their sacred groves and to seize places once devoted to gods who now seem absent. Trolls and their ilk gather, marauders sweep brigands and more into their bands, and whispers abound of gaun...
	Ragnarok: Age of Wolves Regular price: 0 Bundle price: 0 Format: Softcover, Standard Color Book	Ragnarok: Age of Wolves is a skirmish-level game for novice and experienced tabletop players alike that emulates the desperate small-scale actions that might result during the unending winter that is the first stage of the Viking Apocalypse. As crops fail and food grows scarce, banditry becomes rife as formerly good folk are driven to extremes and bad men take advantage of chaos and hardship. Monsters haunt the wilds and prowl the outskirts of palisaded settlement and isolated steading alike. Huldrfolk, never easy neighbors, but generally peaceful if left undisturbed, now move to defend their sacred groves and to seize places once devoted to gods who now seem absent. Trolls and their ilk gather, marauders sweep brigands and more into their bands, and whispers abound of gaun...
	Viking Warriors (A Faction for 'Ragnarok: Age of Wolves’) Regular price: 0 Bundle price: 0 Format: PDF	“Viking Warriors” is a supplement for the Ragnarok: Age of Wolves miniatures game that includes 10 sets of statistics that can be used together as a complete new faction for the game or in conjunction with those for any other warriors and any sorts of scenarios. They include six named characters, among them those for a chieftain; five of his lieutenants, or thegns, including a rune-mage, a war-priestess, a bard, a woodsman, and a scout; and four different sorts of common warriors, or carls. It also includes backstories for the various characters and for their place in a Viking holding called the Hringsgard. This book is supported by a set of downloadable “Viking Warriors Cardstock CharactersTM"” miniatures that contains 10 different figures correspond...

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Publisher: Dyskami Publishing Company

This Anime 5E Art Pack #1 includes over 60 images that are licensed for use in products submitted to Dyskami Publishing's Anime 5E and Tri-Stat Emporium Community Content Programme. The included art is not licensed for any other use.

Be sure to also check out the free Anime 5E and Tri-Stat Emporium - Community Content Starter Kit as well.

Price: $0.00 Read more »

Join Ang, John, and Senda for a discussion about tips and tricks for keeping your NPCs varied and interesting. Can these gnomes come up with enough interesting NPCs to avoid the stew?

Download: Gnomecast #132 – NPC Variety

• Check out Short Order Heroes from Calico Games.
• Check out Masks: 1,000 Memorable NPCs for Any Roleplaying Game from Engine Publishing.

Follow John…wait, no. Don’t follow John.

Follow Senda at @IdellaMithlynnd on Twitter and @IdellaMithlynnd on TikTok, and check out her other podcast Panda’s Talking Games.

Follow Ang at @orikes13 on Twitter and see pictures of her cats at @orikes13 on Instagram.

Keep up with all the gnomes by visiting gnomestew.com, following @gnomestew on Twitter, or visiting the Gnome Stew Facebook Page. Subscribe to the Gnome Stew Twitch channel, check out Gnome Stew Merch, catch the Gnome Stew YouTube channel, and support Gnome Stew on Patreon!

For another great show on the Misdirected Mark network, check out Panda’s Talking Games!

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Since late summer, I have devoted a great deal of craft time to painting miniatures for fantasy roleplaying — getting back one of the hobby’s crafting aspects I so much enjoy.

It’s a subject I’ve touched on before. But with new people entering the hobby all the time, I thought it might be nice to share some info for beginners — whether they are players looking for a fig to represent their character or gamemasters building collections for their own games.

In this installment, we’ll provide some tips on buying and painting that first mini.

In an article coming next month, we’ll consider strategies gamemasters might take in assembling a useful stable of adversaries and monsters.

Buying that first fig

This one is easy: Acquire the fig that most interests you, the one that best represents your player character. 

Metal or plastic? Personally, I prefer painting on primed metal over resin. It’s how I got my start, one $4 fig at a time. But the fact is pewter figs today are far more costly than that. The quality of resin figs has blossomed in the last decade. Rather than make a huge investment in metal, I’d say start with resin.  

But from whom do you buy? When it comes to affordable resin minis in the fantasy sphere, figs from Reaper and WizKids are market leaders in the United States. Reaper produces several lines of pewter and plastic figs, but I think the resin Bones, Bones Black or Bones USA are great places to start with. WizKids produces excellent unpainted figs for Wizards of the Coast (Nolzur’s Marvelous Miniatures), Paizo Publishing (Pathfinder Battles Deep Cuts), Critical Role (Wildmount) and its generic in-house line (Deep Cuts).

There are other fine mini makers out there — some with amazing sculpts — so I wouldn’t want to limit anyone’s selection. But I think you’ll find the availability and affordability of Reaper or WizKids good places to start. 

First fig? I’d suggest that a novice painter might lean toward simpler sculpts, such as robed figures. (Reaper’s “Anirion the Elf Wizard” is a robed figure that can stand for any gender, race or class and is a great fig to learn painting technique on).  Intricate details can be cool, but a simple fig that’s well-painted is nice too.

Assemble a painting kit

For myself, I got started in this hobby by going to the craft store and snagging some crafting paint brushes (sizes 1 and 3/0 are recommended, though I prefer having a 5/0 or 10/0 in the collection, too) and about a dozen acrylic craft paints across the color spectrum. Some big box retailers and general stores also carry craft paint now.

This is the most inexpensive route — just be sure to apply thinner medium or water to craft acrylic craft paints. Craft paints have a thicker consistency than required for 28 mm figs.  

A lot of resin miniatures today don’t require priming. But, if you start with pewter miniatures, you will need primer for that initial layer.

I’m a big fan of Reaper’s Learn to Paint kits and its Starter Paint Set. Each usually sells for about $40. 

Firstly, they include enough quality “flow” acrylic paints you’ll need to get rolling. Flow acrylics are a finer quality and better suited to miniature application than ordinary crafting paint. The Learn to Paint kits usually include a pair of  brushes, a few minis, and “how to paint” instructions. Your local game store can help with ordering those if they don’t have them in stock. For the price of a rpg game book, you can get your feet wet in the hobby.

 

Painting advice

There are lots of good crafting videos for painters right now.  Here are just a few:

I think Lyla Mev – The Mini Witch, is a fun site, and worth checking out. She offers tips across a range of skill levels.  https://www.youtube.com/c/LylaMev

Black Craft Magic is mostly devoted to crafting terrain, which is interesting in its own right, but his advice on mini selection and painting is solid. tinyurl.com/y4enu9ap

Reaper, maker of both unpainted minis and a series of paints, has a huge selection of tutorials. https://www.youtube.com/user/ReaperMiniOfficial

I truly believe color selection for painting figs is a personal choice — and there are no “wrong” colors. (Goblins don’t have to be green.) But when painting any given fig, I’d suggest trying a limited palette, of five or fewer colors, to start with.

That said, here are two tips: 

1. Looking for  flesh tones? Match your acrylics to Crayola’s Colors of the World. https://tinyurl.com/2p8ahnvy
2. Color-coordinated outfits? I used to rely upon retail fashion catalogs when I needed color guides for painting clothing on figs. Well, print catalogs have gone away, but  Elle, Vogue and Cosmopolitan are still around online. Check there for inspiration.

 

Techniques

There is a whole glossary of painting terms to go with a variety of techniques: Layering, washes, base coats, glazing, lining, dry brushing, mixing and shadowing. The above online instruction can help in this regard.

The important thing, as far as I’m concerned, is to take the leap into painting. Dip that brush in a dab of paint and cover your fig. Skill will come with time and practice. 

Right now, just have fun putting some color to your little plastic person. 

 

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Welcome to Monster Combo, a series of articles in which we will create some backstory, encounters, variations, and a bit of lore for monsters from different games and genres. From Lovecraftian horror and medieval fantasy creatures to sci-fi cyborgs and weird entities. This series is to stay system neutral so you can grab these ideas and port them to any game of your liking. If there are stats for the monster we will reverse engineer what the creature is good at and use its lore or create our own to apply to our ideas. Steal all you wish from these and suggest your own ideas or combos in the comments!

Introduction

Today I wanted to try out a combo with a Lovecraftian horror, but one of those lesser ones. I did a bit of research and found pretty much the perfect fit! The Mi-go: a half crustacean, half fungi thing. I grab the monster manual and pick one random monster to pair it with: the svirfneblin (or deep gnomes if you are a coward and don’t want to name them the right way). Both would normally live underground I imagine, so that makes the job much easier.

Monster Description

Mi-go

The Mi-Go are large, pinkish, fungoid, crustacean-like entities the size of a man. In other words, they are terrifying. They cannot be recorded using ordinary photographic film, due to their bodies being formed from otherworldly matter. Mi-gos are known for seeking for human brains and sending them to other planets. What for? They are said to venerate some other ancient gods, but we can keep that detail vague if we like.

If we were to place them in our world, I would imagine them being underground creatures, or ones that come from the seas. As we also have underground gnomes to pair them with, why not have them originate (or at least seek refuge) from underground? I don’t imagine Mi-gos being easy creatures to ally with, so let’s have this monster combo be a rivalry between the two species; one that may sooner or later affect in one way or another the player character’s lives.

Svirfneblin

The deep gnomes are civilized groups of people. Being gnomes means they are magically adept, able to camouflage while underground. Deep gnomes are also seekers of gems, which puts them often into trouble, as they encounter other underground creatures that seek these precious rocks. It doesn’t say anything about gathering fungi, but we can throw that into the mix to easily create a conflict with the Mi-go.

Being known for seeking gemstones and now also fungi, deep gnomes have lately awakened many dangerous monstrous individuals. They now often receive attacks from Mi-go underground. These wars against the Lovecraftian monsters have begun to affect the surface dweller’s population. However, why wouldn’t the deep gnomes work with the surface dwellers against the monsters? Let’s have them be rivals as well! Maybe the svirfneblin don’t want to be found out, or compete with the surface dwellers to get the most valuable gems.

Building a Scenario

The svirfneblin have been hiding their underground existence for many years, but there is no way they can keep doing so much longer. Their gem-seeking excursions have awakened the Mi-gos, who began attacks against both the deep gnomes and the surface dwellers. Place the svirfneblin community below any civilization that might be living near mines. No matter the system or setting, from fantasy to super-hero, pulp Cthulhu or sci-fi, there’s always a place for mining villages.

The deep gnomes want to remain a secret to the surface-dwellers, while also keeping them from finding more of the gems the gnomes consider theirs. This has caused the svirfneblin to send groups that will make people disappear in the mines to scare them off. Nevertheless, the deep gnomes aren’t perfect, and while protecting their home from the Mi-gos, cracks are beginning to appear in the surface floor, from where Mi-gos find a way out. Some harmless mining and fungi-seeking excursions from the deep gnomes became a whole problem by awakening the Mi-gos. The deep gnomes have to protect their home while remaining undetected from the surface-dwellers and scaring off those who may want to get their gems. Meanwhile, those on the surface are getting attacked by Mi-gos, disappearing in the mines, and all seems to be due to the Lovecraftian monsters’ presence.

Encounter ideas

While gnomes are often very tied to the fantasy games, you can have them appear in other systems as magical creatures, or change them altogether by another alien species if you are running a sci-fi game. Let’s say a group of human miners live in the mine settlement of Brightlake, due to the proximity to a lake. In the past few days, the water level in the lake rises for no reason and floods the whole mining settlement. Cracks appear on the ground and weird fungi-crustacean creatures come out from it grabbing the miners from the head and pulling them underground. The humans never encountered these creatures, and have both begun to find out miners who went explore disappear, as well as some corpses of miners begun to appear floating in the lake with their heads torn open, showing no brain in their skulls.

The human settlement will shortly seek help from the party to investigate and solve the problem. The svirfneblin will keep causing problems because they are in need of help, but won’t accept their human rivals to come to their aid. Even though the party may try to find the deep gnomes, they should be difficult to encounter due to the gnomes’ camouflaging magic. Leaving some mining equipment that is not human-sized in the caves as clues can make for an interesting mystery. If the players are taking long in finding out about the gnomes, you can always have one of the abducted humans escape from the gnomes’ captivity. Alternatively, the player characters may decide to eradicate both the deep gnomes and the Mi-go. Both these groups of individuals should be used to fighting underground, giving them a great advantage over the player characters.

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What do you think of this Mi-go + deep gnomes combo? Are you planning on using it in your games? Would you do some changes to the monsters, or have a particular idea on how to run this monster combo in a specific system? Make sure to share all about it in the comments below!

 

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There’s a meme (or three) going around social media about tattooing your spells onto your body as a wizard so you “can never lose your spell book.” I actually like this idea. I don’t think I’d do it as a player, but as a GM, I’m on board. However, there are some limitations. Let’s dive into the idea deeper!

Quick Author Note: I’m using humans in my math and examples below, so some adjustments might need to be made for larger (half orc) or smaller (halfling) fantasy species. I’ll let you house rule things based on what I have to say here.

Pages In A Book

In past (pre-fifth edition) the standard spell consumed one page of your spellbook per level of the spell. This meant a first-level spell was a measly one page, and those super powerful ninth-level spells consumed nine pages. The standard size of spellbooks has varied over the ages between 50 and 100 pages, so the really high level wizards would often have multiple volumes to contain their entire selection. This gave rise to the “traveling spellbook” which only contained the wizard’s typical spell selections with a few extras thrown in if they would fit.

While fifth edition doesn’t specify (that I could find in the rules) how many pages a spell takes up, I’m sticking with the ruling of previous editions for this mathematical exercise. I also like the rule, so it works for my campaign.

Pages On The Skin

I did a quick bit of research and discovered that it takes somewhere between 36 and 53 skins from sheep calves to produce a single volume of the Rhymed Bible (source: https://www.kbr.be/en/sheep/). This particular book was 436 pages long. It was hard to pin down the “average weight” of the sheep calves used for books way back then, but I’m going out on a limb to say that a full-grown human is roughly twice as large as a sheep calf.

Going back to the bible, two pages combine into a “folio.” According to the link I used above, a single sheep can produce 4 to 6 folios. Going with “humans are twice the size of a calf” then human skin can be used for 8 to 12 folios. Since I’m a nice GM, I err on the side of the players in these situations. So that’s 12 folios worth of skin. In other words, 24 pages.

Going with my rule that one spell level consumes a single page, there is room on the human body for 24 levels worth of spells to be tattooed on the human body.

Studying The Pages

But wait! Wizards have to read and study those pages each morning to refresh or change your spells. I don’t know about you, but I can’t see my face or back or backside without the use of a mirror. There are also some more sensitive areas where I would not want to have a tattoo. This reduces the surface area that can be legitimately used as “pages” in the tattooed spellbook.

Yes, mirrors and mirrored text can come into play, but good luck studying your back with a steel mirror while adventuring and making sense of everything inscribed on your back. The face is a different matter, but I’d extend the time necessary for the character to study any spells inscribed on the face.

Given this limitation, I’d say this cuts down the number of “pages” you can see/study on your own body to about 16 levels worth of spells. That’s really impressive, actually. Low-level mages could easily carry their entire portfolio of spells on their body without fearing the loss or destruction of their precious spellbook. Once higher levels are reached, then the space will become a serious consideration.

Of course, if your adventuring group is especially generous with their skin (and appearance), I would allow a wizard to have their spells tattooed on a party member. This can expand the number of “pages” available, but good luck allowing the barbarian to let magical ink get hammered into his skin with a needle. Also, it’s going to be really ookie and inconvenient to read the barbarian’s back if he dies in a horrible battle.

Tattoos Are Expensive

The going rate for scribing a new spell into a spellbook is 50 GP per level of the spell. This is because the ink, materials, and quill are rare and expensive. However, we’re talking about tattoos here, not simple ink on parchment.

A wizard wanting to go down this path is going to have to find a wizard capable of scribing (casting) the spell, has the right equipment to tattoo, has the necessary special inks, and that has the time to carefully inscribe the spell into the wizard’s skin.

Given the limitations of everything above, I can see a tattooed wizard being especially rare, but I’d still allow it. However, the character is going to have to cough up 500 GP per level of the spell to get the tattoo put on their body. I might even go so far as to requiring a “favor” to the wizardly tattoo artist for the rare or super high level spells. This is not to mention that the wizardly tattoo artist is going to be an extreme rarity (unless it’s a strong aspect of a culture of wizards, which I think might be a cool aspect of a society.)

Skin Damage

As we all know, adventuring is not a peaceful undertaking. Honestly, it’s downright dangerous and can be deadly. This means the wizard is going to be, at some point, in harm’s way. Sword slashes, arrow piercings, acid traps, magical fire, dragon breath, and so on can easily damage the wizard. This damage, of course, has to go through the skin to get to the vital bits. This means the tattoos are at risk.

However, I’m not one to take away a very cool thing from the player capriciously. If magical healing is applied, I’d allow the tattoos to remain intact and legible. However, if the damage is healed naturally, I’d probably have the wizard make a DC 13 constitution saving throw for any damage over 10 points or scar tissue will mar the magical tattooed inscription. This will render the spell illegible which will prevent the wizard from studying that spell. I think a random die roll to determine which spell they lose a page from is appropriate.

Of course, I’d also allow fresh tattoos to be placed over the scar tissue to “repair the damaged page” at a cost of 250 GP per page requiring repairs. I think that’s more than fair.

Conclusion

I’ve seen all sorts of chatter on social media. There are folks that think the idea is stupid. There are GMs out there that wouldn’t allow it at all. There are also people on the other end of the spectrum that thinks this is so cool, they might encourage their wizard PC to do it. What are your thoughts on this?

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Back in April 2021, Coyote and Crow funded on Kickstarter. This was a roleplaying game that didn’t look much like other games that were funding at the time. The concept behind Coyote and Crow was a future science fiction setting where the Americas were never colonized by Europeans, and the societies being explored are all extrapolated from Indigenous cultures.

Because we haven’t seen a setting like this in the past, and because it is not based on an existing game system, I’m going to approach this post as a First Impression article. I’ll look at the RPG, the mechanics, and the setting, ask some questions, and think about where I’d like to see the line develop.

Disclaimer

I backed this game on my own, and I am not working from a review copy. I have not had the opportunity to get this game to the table, so I have not had the opportunity to play or run the game.

What Are We Looking At?

This review is based on the PDF version of the game. This is currently the only version available, although print books are coming soon, as of the time of this article. The PDF is 484 pages long. This includes a title page, a credits page, a three-page table of contents, an eleven-page glossary (which includes both game terms and terms in the language created for the setting), a two-page index, and a two-page example character sheet. There are also six included pre-generated characters included.

Pages are white, with blue, purple, and gold highlights in the borders and headers of the book. The book is set up in two-column formats, with clear headers and purple and blue sidebars for supplementary information. Each of the main sections of the book have a full-page, full-color illustration introducing the chapter. While the interior of the book is full color, the smaller half and quarter-page art pieces are both in color and black and white.

There will be official dice sets, with white and black d12s, and there is also a dice rolling app available for the game as well. The app has links to the company’s YouTube channel, a feed for game-related news, and of course, the dice.

What’s the Structure?

The book is broken into four different sections, with chapters falling under those main sections. They are as follows:

• Section 1 (Introductory Information)
  • Waya’s Lesson
  • A Message to Players
  • A Brief Introduction to Roleplaying
  • Roleplaying in the World of Coyote & Crow
  • Makasing and the World Beyond
  • Language and Communication
  • The Adanadi
  • Technology
• Section 2 (Character Creation and Character Facing Rules)
  • Characters
  • Equipment
  • Goals and Progress
• Section Three (The Game System)
  • The D12 System
  • Playing Coyote & Crow
  • Damage, Death, & Healing
• Section 4 (Storyguide Material)
  • Getting Started
  • Forging Your Saga
  • The Three Path Concept
  • Interpreting the Rules
  • Icons and Legends
  • Encounter at Station 54

There are a few places where this structure houses aspects of other sections within it. For example, while most of the setting information is in Section One, Section Three and Section Four both contain more details on the setting. The full context of some of the abilities isn’t revealed entirely in Section Two, as more game rules are explained in Section 3, etc.

What’s the Setting?

The point of divergence for this reality is the arrival of a comet that crashed into the Earth. This caused a climate disaster that devastated the world for centuries. It also brought the Adanadi, a strange purple radiance that began to naturally occur in plants and animals after the comet crashed.

The climate disaster caused various nations to band together with other nations, meaning that many of the modern-day nations of the Americas are brand new entities. As the worse aspects of rapid climate change have subsided, the people have learned to harness the Adanadi, introducing it via genetics to people in their adolescence. About 20% of the people who receive this genetic modification gain extraordinary abilities.

The technology of the setting is beyond what we are capable of in our world, but it’s also tailored to the cultures that developed that technology. Flying vehicles usually only carry a handful of passengers. Advanced 3-D printers make components for many devices, but tools, clothing, and weapons are usually built of components that allow for craftspeople to customize the items being produced.

This book spends most of its time detailing Cahokia, the primary city of The Free Lands, a collection of various city-states that work together to interact with the other four nations of the setting. While none of the nations are currently in conflict, tensions are starting to rise, with all the nations increasingly able to turn their attention away from just rebuilding from the environmental disaster.

The council that rules Cahokia has a special organization that acts as their agents, the Suyata. While there are other campaign models touched on in the book, this is the suggested organization for getting the PCs working together and receiving missions. Each of the nations is given a handful of factions and groups, and there are additional factions detailed within Cahokia itself.

In addition to political maneuvering and faction interactions, there are several non-human creatures detailed as well. As presented, none of these are “canon,” and they may or may not exist. Even if they do exist, they may or may not be spiritual or supernatural creatures, or just undefined scientific phenomenon ascribed motives and histories that match various legends.

Characters and Rules

When creating a character, players pick a motivation, an archetype, and a path, and then assign numbers to stats, skills, gifts, and burdens. Archetypes grant a bonus to an ability score based on what the character has been trained to accomplish. Path is tied to the ceremony where the character gained their Adanadi, which boosts some abilities as well, and determines a free ability that the character will gain.

Characters will have derived stats for body, mind, and soul. Body determines how healthy the character is, and gets marked down when a character is injured. Mind can be spent to push a near miss into a success, and soul can be spent to trigger some abilities, in addition to being the “damage” pool in certain types of encounters, or from certain kinds of attacks.

The resolution system won’t be too alien to anyone that has played a World of Darkness game, but there are a few twists. Your stat plus your skills determine a pool of d12s to roll when making a check. By default, an 8 or higher is a success, and a 12 lets you roll a critical die, which can be worth 1 or 2 successes. However, the target number for success on an individual die can vary. Someone may have defenses that push that success number up to 10 or 11, for example, and burdens and gifts, if they apply, may increase or decrease this target number.

I’m a fan of the d12, so I’m here for a system based on it. But there is also a nice in-setting reason for rolling d12s, because the mathematical system used by the Five Nations is a base 12 system. You must appreciate building setting details into the mechanics.

Short-term and long-term goals are rewards that the players are working towards, and at different times (for example, the end of a game session), the character marks themselves closer to their goal, and when the goal has been achieved, they gain the reward. Short-term goals are usually for things like gear or skills, while long-term goals allow you to change things like gifts, burdens, or abilities.

What Will You Encounter?

In addition to various NPC stat blocks, the Icons and Legends section includes the name, type, and category of various entries, as well as what skill the player characters would most likely use to find out more information about that creature. Types are broken up into Fifth Worlders, Icons, and Legends. Icons are notable NPCs, while legends are some of those creatures that may or may not exist.

Categories include humans, spirits, and creatures. Humans and creatures are what you can surmise. While many creatures are animals that you might recognize, there are a few creatures that have developed or been unearthed after centuries of environmental upheaval. Sprits are those beings that don’t fall into the other categories, and often have some powers, as well as a history of where and when they show up. This section also presents some members of extremist or criminal organizations that may serve as the opposition to the player characters.

The Mazozoog, or Those Who Take Apart, are one of my favorites in this section. Some characters can shift to another reality known as The Black. The Mazozoog may be inhabitants of The Black that follow humans that travel there back to the Earthly plane, and then they, well, disassemble human beings they encounter. I think these are one of the best examples of a creature that could spawn origin stories that cross between the scientific and the spiritual.

What Does A Game Look Like?

The book mentions that future expansions will look at the other nations in the setting, which will open more adventuring opportunities. It suggests that a good way to start a campaign with the core rulebook is to have the PCs working as agents of the Suyata, working for the council of Cahokia. This gives them a reason to be working together at the beginning, and a way for story guides to pass on adventure hooks.

There are several adventure types mentioned in Section 4, each one of which includes entries for setting, themes, tone, and sample story prompts. The adventure types detailed include the following:

• Protection
• Exploration
• Espionage
• War
• Horror

This section also details the Three Path Concept for building encounters. This approach suggests that any encounter the story guide designs should have three solutions. Story guides are encouraged to come up with at least one path that is less orthodox than the situation may suggest.

The book also addresses what some science fiction tropes look like in this setting, and how different skills and talents are regarded. For example, robots are almost never anthropomorphized, and almost never have any kind of AI associated with them. Prosthetics are usually made to look more like artistically designed tools rather than mimicking human body parts. This section also discusses mental powers and how they are regarded in the setting, as well as touching on safety concerns and player consent when using these game elements.

The sample adventure puts PCs into an action situation immediately, and then assigns them a mission. Characters are given a list of various bits of information they can find from doing research and investigating before setting off on the job. Eventually, the PCs will be sent off to investigate events in a remote station maintained by the Free Lands to find out the nature of the local disturbances.

Final Thoughts

In the closing of the book, the lead developer mentions that they don’t want to answer every question, so that people that engage with the work with ask and explore various questions that come up. I can understand this desire. I’ve got my own questions, but I’ll share a few other thoughts before I get to them.

While I can’t speak to how the probabilities will work out, I like the d12 much better for a dice pool system that is going to be modifying the target number for a success. I’m really interested to see how the short-term and long-term goals work (as well as some of the other advancement details that I didn’t dive into as deeply). There are a few instances where you may need to refigure derived stats, and while it isn’t difficult math, anything that causes a recalculation can trip up players in the moment, so I’m very curious to see how cumbersome this is in action.

I love the world, and especially the details of Cahokia as a society. I enjoy the details that we get about how transportation, production, and craftwork look in light of how this world developed. I love the idea of the comet bringing with it the potential for reaching beyond normal human boundaries. I appreciate any setting that is going to give me factions and organizations to play with. I think details like that are much closer to where the game is played than the high-level details of a nation or a continent.

While I appreciate the factions and the details of various locations, I have the same desire I often have when reading setting information. I wish there were more specific story hooks tied to the factions and the locations, with a little bit more “you don’t have to only use it this way, but this is how we envision this being utilized at the table.”

My biggest question is about the existence of spirit creatures and magic. These are left as open-ended questions in the setting, in part because characters in the world may encounter things that they attribute to their faith or things that they define as a scientific phenomenon.

It is also mentioned that in many cases, people in the setting don’t presume that something spiritual doesn’t also have a scientific explanation. I understand that, but as a story guide, it feels tricky to walk that line between deciding to give the ceremony skill magical trappings, or to include or not include spirit creatures. If nothing else, I would have liked a longer discussion of how campaigns may look different if some of those aspects are implicit in the campaign.

This may be a place where I’m deficient in my imagination, and it may not be a problem. It’s something I want to think about.

Future Wishes

I would love to see a book of adventures, a campaign book, or even just a whole slew of adventure hooks for various locations. I am looking forward to other books detailing nations, and I think it will be fascinating to see the setting from a perspective that isn’t using The Free Lands and Cahokia as a touchstone. I’d also love to see a “faction book” that details what operatives of the various groups do, what their current plans are, and what the potential repercussions of those plans might be for the setting.

Back to You

What settings would you like to see explored that haven’t yet been introduced? What settings have expanded your horizons once you interreacted with them? We want to hear from you in the comments below.

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I grew up in a time where it was unfortunately common to see various real-world cultures added to a fantasy setting, written by white men. In fantasy worlds where reality was formed around the myths and folklore of Europe, there were some unfortunately common tendencies when adding cultures that didn’t share that origin. Often, these other cultures were presented in a manner that was overly dismissive of real cultural differences that existed. They were often presented as being somehow deficient in comparison to the baseline, European-derived cultures of the setting.

Weapons and armor? We need rules to show how deficient their technology was. Magic? We need to make a caricature of their beliefs to create a magic system that may be real but is clearly inferior to the cultures we used as a baseline for this setting. Beliefs about the supernatural? In a world where wizards, dragons, and elves are real, we need to make sure that somehow their metaphysical belief system is presented as being superstitious and demonstrably wrong compared to the baseline we established.

In the end, not only did these supplements misrepresent the cultures that they were stereotyping, they also tended to make them boring and dry compared to the baseline cultures that had European roots. All too often, these cultures were also framed as being subject to the same colonialism in the fantasy world as they were in the real world. Nations based on ancient Greece, dark ages England, and renaissance era France could all co-exist at the same time, but once the culture of a colonized people appeared in the game, they couldn’t be framed by themselves, but only in contrast to their colonizers.

There are still mistakes made today, with white game developers taking on the task of telling the stories of cultures they only know from stories and media, but there are also a growing number of settings that are being approached by marginalized people, bringing a unique and invested perspective in reframing these settings through a lens other than that of the retrospective gaze of white descendants of colonizers. That brings us to today’s review, The Islands of Sina Una, a fifth edition OGL supplement for Dungeons & Dragons featuring the pre-colonial legends and cultures of the Philippines.

Disclaimer

I picked up this copy of The Islands of Sina Una on my own and was not provided with a review copy. I have not had the opportunity to use any of the material in this book, but I have extensively played and run games of Dungeons & Dragons fifth edition.

Content Warning

Some sections of this book contain descriptions of harm being done to animals, including using them in fighting sports against one another or being sacrificed as part of rituals. Various monsters engage in acts of cannibalism, and some have graphic descriptions of their appearances, which include exposed internal organs. Some monsters include body horror elements of transformation, and there are also monsters based on unborn children.

Approaching The Island of Sina Una

 This review is based on the PDF version of the product. The PDF is 337 pages long, and includes a credits page, a table of contents, a page of dedications, a glossary, a pronunciation guide, and a full-page OGL statement. The book itself has similar formatting to other Dungeons & Dragons products when it comes to the use of headers, sidebars, tables, and stat blocks, although the color scheme and font is unique to this book. The edge of each page has its own decorative border as well. This book is in full color.

There are a lot of talented artists working in RPG circles today, and often I don’t know what to say about the art in a book, even when it is well done. The artwork in this book is stunning. There are a variety of artists and styles, but the overall variety doesn’t feel discordant. The art matches the topics and provides more detail and depth to what is being presented. In addition to quarter and half page images, there are several full-page images, including the depictions of various deities.

Geography (Of the Book)

The book is broken up into four chapters and appendices. Those sections cover the following:

• Chapter One (People, history, adventuring, animism, the afterlife, and the gods)
• Chapter Two (The world, details on the seven islands in the setting, the ocean, and beyond the horizon)
• Chapter Three (Character ancestries, classes, subclasses, backgrounds, feats, equipment, magic items, and spells)
• Chapter Four (Monsters, including The Celestial Eaters, which exist beyond statistics)
• Appendices (The creation process, glossary, and pronunciation guide)

Cosmology and the Supernatural

The supernatural world in The Islands of Sina Una is predicated on animism, that all things have spirits associated with them. Those spirits aren’t just associated with things, but are the spiritual, supernatural side of the physical thing. The greatest, ascended spirits are the gods, but in many places the line between powerful spirit and god is blurred.

In this cosmology, the god of the sky has two families. His original wife remarried after they ended their relationship, and his second wife was a mortal woman, from which his children, the sun and the moon, were born. The younger siblings take turns impersonating their sibling, the Moon, as the various Celestial Eaters wish to devour the moon and bring about the end of the world.

The Goddess of Lost Things, the original wife of the sky god, married the God of Mountains, and their children include the gods of lovers and childbirth, death and mortality, harvest and fertility, and the transition between life and death. Outside of these families, there are the gods of soil, forests, waves, fire, volcanoes, storms, lightning and thunder, and hunters.

Mortal spirits travel down the Black River to the afterlife, which is the flip side of the mortal “half” of the cosmological shell. Some ancestors are allowed to return during very specific festivals, often inhabiting the bodies of reptiles in order to observe and interact with those they have left behind. Spirits that don’t want to make the journey can be dangerous, but those that swim upriver against the flow might be reincarnated as dragonborn, which in this setting look more crocodilian or serpentine in nature.

Various other spirits are more focused on locations, and often interact with mortals, asking tasks from them and bargaining with them to help with local matters, or to live in harmony when they are in proximity with one another. While many of these spirits don’t quite reach the full grandeur of gods, they can be massive sea serpents, giant turtles, or towering spirits of individual volcanoes.

The Celestial Eaters include the following apocalyptic creatures:

• Arimaonga (The lion, who has no malice for the gods, but only playfully wants to eat the moon)
• Bakunawa (The serpent, jealous of the gods of the sky and hungry to devour their beauty)
• Minokawa (The eagle, who like Arimaonga, hunts the moon by nature, and not animosity)
• Tambanokano (The crab, abandoned child of the moon seeking revenge)
• Tambanokua (The spider, that wishes to see what will happen when the moon is gone)

In addition to the spirits and the Celestial Eaters, there are also several named giants who had a hand at forming, intentionally or not, the shape of the islands early on. These giants were tasked with helping to protect mortals from the aswangs in the earliest of days, but Angngalo, the patriarch of these giants, failed in his duties, and the giants are often solitary and sullen.

The aswangs are monsters born of cursed families. They embody various aspects of life that should not be performed by mortals, one of the worst examples being cannibalism, but also representing excesses and repudiation of other important aspects of society. There are many kinds of aswangs, but most of them are supernaturally powerful and resistant to harm from anything other than salt.

In the appendices, there is a discussion of how certain decisions were made in the creation of the book. This includes how certain similar myths from different cultures on the island were consolidated into a single myth, and under what circumstances that happened. There is also some discussion on how reconstructing different myths was complicated by records that were discarded or altered by colonizers.

What Is This World?

The book presents the setting in a manner where you can use just the setting, with minimal connection to a greater world, or as part of an existing campaign world. Each of the islands is introduced by a narrator that is traveling to each of the islands, and within the individual chapters, the passages are often directed specifically towards the reader, telling the reader what they should and shouldn’t avoid and why.

Each one of the islands has entries for demographics, geography, climate and lifestyle, major settlements, and spirits. Demographics will let you know what ancestries are most likely to be found here (from the standard D&D offerings, with a few twists). Geography, climate, and lifestyle work together to give a broader picture of the islands, and how different the weather and environment can make each island from one another. Geography also often introduces some of the more wondrous or supernatural locations on each island. Settlements provide more detail on who lives on the island and what they do, and often provides more context on the history of the island. The section on spirits doesn’t just explain what general types of spirits are present, but the unique spirits on the island, and whatever bargains might have been made with them to promote peace and coexistence. Often, festivals that are associated with the spirit are listed here as well.

The story of these spirits will vary. In some cases, the spirits have long ago grown accustomed to mortals living on their island. In other cases, there is ongoing strife. For example, on Adlawadto, the termite spirits and the people of the island are in conflict due to a misunderstood historical event. The people of Kotabalon rely on Dalagan Balaon to keep the great spider Tambanokua from rising from the pit, and in doing so, they promise not to harm any spiders on the island. The Stone Spirit of Pagtuga is invoked in the Ritual of Forgiveness to help people from Talunan to forget their regrets.

The cosmology of the setting presents the world as a sort of clamshell. The domain of the gods and the sky is the top, and the ocean is the bottom. Where the two join is the horizon. At the horizon, the Black River, which takes the spirits of the dead to the afterlife, terminates, but there is something beyond the edge, which leads to another place, the eyrie of one of the Celestial Eaters, the great eagle.

There are also those that are born on ships and only ever live on the ocean. Parts of the ocean, near the grave of an ancient sea serpent, allow surface dwellers to breathe, but with the danger that they might become poisoned by the anger of the fallen serpent. In addition to these aspects of the ocean floor, another of the Celestial Eaters, the giant crab Tambanokano, lives in a massive basin here.

As with those elements of folklore and mythology, the appendices talk about the decision-making process that went into detailing the islands, and how it was important that individual islands felt different from one another, and had different cultural aspects, so that the pre-colonial islands were not treated as a monoculture that all conformed to the same general standards.

While the larger aspects of the setting, such as the family of gods, underwent some streamlining, the importance of local spirits still makes each island unique in terms of their ceremonies and interactions with the supernatural, beyond just the geography and realities of living on islands with different requirements for day-to-day survival.

Gamification, Part One, Player Options

Anyone that knows me knows that I love to dive into player options like classes and subclasses, and when it comes to reviewing a larger work like this, it takes an incredible act of will to not write hundreds of words on each and every option, so I’m going to dive in and hope I can walk that line between useful analysis and explosive wordcount.

Ancestries

While there isn’t a strong tradition including all the D&D races to the cultures being explored, there have been some changes made to include all the Player’s Handbook races in the setting.  While this section applies standard ability score increases to specific abilities in these write-ups, they also reference newer game design that allows for ability score bonuses to be assigned to any score as an option as well.

Humans are unchanged in the setting, mechanically, and elves, dwarves, halflings, and gnomes get unique subraces. Elves are spirits incarnated in mortal form, tied to balete trees, trees that have a natural connection to the afterlife. Half-elves are not human and elf children, but incarnate spirits that come from the flowers of the islands. The dwarf subrace presented are volcano dwarves, with the ability to form molten armor for themselves. Gold gnomes can give equipment gilded with gold special properties, and halflings are incarnate spirits that come from mangroves, and bear the same markings as those trees.

Tieflings are not associated with fiends but have family ties to fire spirits. Half-orcs are not the children of orcs and humans, but descended from those touched by the deity Haliya, who possesses a tusked mask. Dragonborn, as mentioned in the cosmology section, are ancestral spirits that attempted to swim upstream against the Black River and have been reincarnated as albino humanoid crocodiles or serpents.

The Classes

The Babaylan has a full spellcasting progression and its own specific spell list. The spells run towards what might be more divine or nature based. Their abayan, or spirit guide, is their spellcasting focus, and a spellcasting “node” that can deliver touch spells or serve as the origin point of spells that would normally originate from the caster. They gain a pool of spirit dice, which are d4s that can be added to the spell attack roll, difficulty, damage, or healing of a spell. There are three subclasses, referred to as callings. One focuses on divination, one on healing, and one on boosting melee combat abilities.

Multiple editions of D&D have attempted a spirit-based spellcaster, with varying results. I really like this one, with a few reservations. The spirit guide can communicate telepathically with the caster, and has truesight, from 1st level. Not only is this effectively access to a 6th level spell from the start of the game, but a later ability of one of the subclasses lets the spirit guide merge with the babaylan and share its truesight. That ability doesn’t bother me, but unless the DM just rules that the spirit guide is cagey about what it sees with truesight, this might subvert some low-level gameplay assumptions. Since save-based spells often have very dramatic effects, and 5e is very concerned with bounded accuracy, I’m also a little concerned with adding spirit dice to the DC of a spell. Hitting a creature or adding damage or healing to a spell effect feels within the range of other boons that character classes hand out, but we don’t often see easily accessed boosts to save DCs.

With all of that said, I really like the feel of this class, from having an NPC to interact with to playing with extra resources like dice, to having a “divine” intelligence caster. This all seems like a lot of fun. From reading it, it feels like it would provide a unique spellcasting experience while still allowing for the typical spellcasting competencies.

The Headhunter is a class that is all about delivering judgment. When someone is wronged, or when someone goes against the natural order, it’s the headhunter’s job to serve judgment on the wrongdoer. In some ways, it’s an amalgam of paladin and ranger, but with the focus of the “oath” being offenses that call for death. Unlike the paladin or the ranger, however, it’s not a half-caster class. Only one of its subclasses grants a spellcasting progression, like the Eldritch Knight or Arcane Trickster.

The core concept of the class is that you can call on your ancestors to provide you extra conviction damage, no more than once per round (so no double-dipping on an attack of opportunity, the way rogues can). You eventually gain the ability to call on your ancestors to ask questions about your quarry, and you gain the standard martial class ability to gain a fighting style. One of those styles, pursuant, gives you a bonus based on the quarry you pick with Rite of Ancestors, which feels like a fighting style that rangers would have liked to have had, if only they had the proper class feature with which to associate it.

At third level, the Headhunter’s subclass is the Hunter’s Omen, which can be either the Omen of Knowledge, the Omen of Strife, or the Omen of Swiftness (which grants spellcasting). Each of these subclasses keys on a different non-physical ability score, which means you will probably want to have an idea of your subclass from level one, even if you don’t take it until level three.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from a headhunter class, but I really like what the “story” of the class is, and that it does create a unique playstyle. It feels less explosive than the ability to smite, and it’s also less substantive than the rogue’s sneak attack, but less situational as well. I like having a warrior option that can commune with their ancestors for help, and while it gets access to the cleric spell list with its spellcasting subclass, it feels like the same paradigm of paladin to cleric, and ranger to druid, with this being the “spirit-based” association of a martial class with babaylan.

The Subclasses

The other subclasses presented for existing classes are the following:

• Path of the Black River (Barbarian subclass that tracks down renegade souls)
• College of Siday (Bard class that inspires with stories of ancestors)
• Volcano Domain (Cleric)
• Circle of Tides (Druid)
• Kawal (Fighter, a solid bodyguard subclass)
• Way of Kaluluwa (Monk subclass that lets you spend ki to manifest a spirit form that helps you)
• Oath of Blood (Paladin subclass about protecting those in danger)
• Manganwayaw (Ranger subclass about mobility and wearing down an opponent)
• Graverobber (Rogue subclass about learning to use a curse gained while robbing a grave)
• Diwata Bloodline (Sorcerer subclass that is not unlike a druidic version of Divine Soul)
• Moon Eater Patron (Warlock subclass that has one of the Celestial Eaters as a patron)
• Mentala (Wizard subclass that carves scrolls from bamboo and creates expendable scrolls to modify effects of magic on opponents)

I could spend as much time on these as I have the entire review so far, but I’ll summarize with this: these all have fun toys for players to use that are distinct from other core D&D options, and the majority of them do exactly what I want a subclass to do . . . establish a unique story for the subclass with its earliest features.

Other Character Features

I’m not sure if I’ve seen this enough outside of third-party D&D books to say it’s a trend, but this book does something with backgrounds that I prefer to earlier examples. Background features technically (according to the DMG) shouldn’t give specific mechanical benefits, but that vagueness also means that PCs are less likely to reference that feature. These backgrounds present several examples of “in this very specific case you get advantage,” or “once per day, you can do this thing,” and I think that’s easier for a player to reference and interject into gameplay.

There are five new feats. One is the “dip into babaylan abilities” feat, allowing others to gain a babaylan cantrip, a bump to intelligence, and access to spirit dice. Cannoneer lets you learn how to use the setting’s native gunpowder weapons. Headhunting master gives you some extra abilities with a signature weapon. Oceanborn warrior gives you the ability to fight underwater unhindered by giving you a swim speed, and unrelenting hunter gives you a physical boost and the ability to apply a substance to your weapon as a bonus action. The last one dovetails with the poisoner feat from Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything, but swaps out an ASI for ignoring resistance, and swaps out the tool proficiency and guaranteed poison supply.

Gear and Equipment

Equipment-wise, I’m not sure there is a ton to dwell on. There isn’t much heavy armor in the setting, so if you love your heavy armor, learn to love chain mail. There are a lot of interesting new weapons, and not a few of them include features that let you disassemble them to be used as smaller weapons for less damage in certain circumstances.

There are several pages devoted to boats of different sizes, as you might expect from a setting that takes place among several different islands. The statistics for these boats match how vehicles are presented in the Dungeon Master’s Guide but doesn’t reverse engineer the presentation used in Ghosts of Saltmarsh in the same way that, for example, Seas of Vodari did.

What The Islands of Sina Una does that is unique, however, is to create some modular properties for boats that can be applied to a base stat block to customize a boat. For example, a combat-ready boat lets you ignore the loading property of certain weapons mounted on the boat, and the shelter’s rest boat lets you remove two levels of exhaustion when you rest on a boat designed to be used as a home.

Magic

There are six pages of setting specific magic items, many of which are tied to the gods, spirits, and monsters already mentioned in other parts of the book. Other items are tied to the class abilities of the newly introduced classes of the setting. My favorite is the golden death mask, which can be placed on the body of someone that has passed away and will transmit 1d4 of the person’s most powerful memories to a living person that wears the mask after is has been placed on the deceased’s face.

There are also six pages of new spells. Many of these are about summoning spirits or the powers of spirits. There are spells to adapt characters to moving in the water, and for various lava-based attacks. There are also spells to utilize moonlight, coral, or colors for different uses. One of my favorites (I’m a simple creature) is celestial chaos, which is a 9th level spell that causes cataclysmic solar flares and moonbeams to erupt all over the place. It’s like giving clerics and druids their very own scary version of meteor swarm that will also convince people the world may be ending. On the other hand, tropical paradise sounds nice, and is a cheaper, more relaxing, slightly less over-the-top version of heroes’ feast.

Gamification Part Two, The Monsters

While you can do a lot of adventuring by exploring the wilds and poking around lost ships on the ocean floor, monsters do say a lot about a setting. Some of these stat blocks quantify creatures mentioned elsewhere in the book. From a D&D standpoint, while these are unique creatures that have their own place in the setting in context, you can still expect to see plant creatures, amalgams of multiple animals, undead, shapeshifters, hags, giants, dragons, merfolk, fey, magical versions of normal animals, and also flying sharks.

Name	Type	Subtype	Challenge Rating
Aghoy	Plant	N/A	3
Alawig	Elemental	N/A	1/2
Amomongo	Monstrosity	N/A	3
Angngalo	Giant	Unique	15
Aran	Giant	Unique	15
Balbal	Aswang	Shapechanger	3
Bangungot	Fey	N/A	6
Berbalang	Aswang	Shapechanger	10
Binturong	Beast	N/A	1/8
Binturong, Giant	Beast	N/A	1/2
Bird, Small	Beast	N/A	0
Bird, Tiny	Beast	N/A	0
Boroka	Aswang	Shapechanger	1
Bungisngis	Giant	N/A	12
Burinkantada	Giant	Unique	19
Busaw	Giant	N/A	1
Coconut Crab	Beast	N/A	1/4
Coconut Crab, Giant	Beast	N/A	3
Dire Eagle	Beast	N/A	3
Flying Fox	Beast	N/A	1/8
Fowl	Beast	N/A	0
Fowl, Giant	Beast	N/A	1
Gabunan	Aswang	N/A	15
Gawigawen	Giant	Unique	17
Ibingan, Lake	Dragon	N/A	10
Ibingan, Waterfall	Dragon	N/A	4
Kibaan	Fey	Shapechanger	1
Malakat	Aswang	Shapechanger	2
Mambabarang	Humanoid	Shapechanger	5
Mameleu	Dragon	N/A	13
Mameleu Hatching	Dragon	N/A	8
Manananggal	Aswang	Shapechanger	9
Mandarangkal	Monstrosity	Shapechanger	4
Mandurugo	Aswang	N/A	5
Mangkukulam	Aswang	N/A	6
Manta Ray	Beast	N/A	1
Maranhig	Undead	N/A	2
Markupo	Dragon	N/A	11
Merfolk, Amanbuti	Humanoid	Merfolk	1
Merfolk, Kataw	Fey	Merfolk	5
Merfolk, Magindara	Aswang	Merfolk	2
Merfolk, Mambubuno	Humanoid	Merfolk	4
Monitor Lizard	Beast	N/A	1/8
Mousedeer	Beast	N/A	0
Musang	Beast	N/A	0
Red Headed Centipede	Beast	N/A	0
Sigbin	Monstrosity	N/A	1/2
Spirit, Aspect of Desire	Celestial	Unique	Special (CR 18)
Spirit, Aspect of Poison	Fey	Unique	Special (CR 18)
Spirit, Aspect of War	Fiend	Unique	Special (CR 18)
Spirit, Boar	Fey	N/A	2
Spirit, Crocodile	Fey	N/A	5
Spirit, Danang	Celestial	N/A	11
Spirit, Diwata	Fey	N/A	12
Spirit, Kalanget	Elemental	N/A	3
Spirit, Lampong	Fey	N/A	1/2
Spirit, Lumawig	Celestial	Unique	20
Spirit, Pamahandi	Fey	N/A	5
Spirit, Sarimanok	Celestial	N/A	1
Sprit, Hukluban	Fey	Unique	18
Sprit, Kumakatok	Fiend	N/A	3
Sprit, Litao	Fey	N/A	2
Sprit, Tamawo	Fey	N/A	6
Tamaraw, Giant	Beast	N/A	3
Tarsier	Beast	N/A	0
Tiburones	Monstrosity	N/A	7
Tiburones Pup	Monstrosity	N/A	3
Tigbalan	Fey	N/A	6
Tinyak	Undead	N/A	1/4
Tinyak, Swarm	Undead	N/A	2
Water Buffalo	Beast	N/A	1/4

There are so many new creatures presented in this section, but I specifically wanted to point out that all the spirits are given a trait, ideal, bond, and flaw. I really like this, as it reinforces the idea that the spirits are creatures that can be petitioned, bargained with, or otherwise interacted with, and that their desires and personality will make an encounter unique. I like that this informs at least part of the expected play in the setting.

Cautious Reflection

 I love exploring the design process and having such an open and transparent part of the book that breaks down the decisions made. It was a joy to read. 

I love a lot of the mechanical options in this book, and there are great monsters, spells, and magic items. Often when I look at D&D 5e material, I’m looking at what I can borrow for other settings as much as the setting itself. In this case, however, I would ask people to be really careful how you borrow material from a book like this. Taking something out of context goes a long way towards appropriating a culture, and at the very least, understanding the context and introducing as much of that as possible when using this in another campaign is called for.

Favorable Tides

I had a lot of fun with this review. The book is gorgeous, the setting is engaging, and the mechanics for 5e are fun. I liked the new widgets that got introduced with the babaylan, and I liked how the game rules reinforced story with things like the subclasses or the presentation of the spirits in the monster section. My absolute favorite part of this review, however, was reading through Appendix A: Research, History, and Our Adaptation. I love exploring the design process and having such an open and transparent part of the book that breaks down the decisions made. It was a joy to read.

Whirlpool

While I liked the uniform entries in the setting section, and I think they covered all the important bases, from a usability at the table standpoint, I would have loved to have had a separate story hook/adventure outline section for each of the islands. Given some of the paradigm shifts for adventurers from baseline D&D, this is also the kind of setting where I would love to see a full example adventure, and even a broad campaign outline. If there is ever a follow-up adventure for the setting, I will be picking it up.

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

There are a lot of reasons to recommend this product. It looks great. It has fun D&D 5e mechanics in it. It has engaging cultural information in it. It has an appendix that fills in any of the gaps in your curiosity by explaining the process by which the book was made. If you are interested in D&D as a game, D&D from a design perspective, or pre-colonial Filipino legends, you aren’t going to be disappointed with this book.

What are some of the cultures you would most like to see envisioned through the eyes of people from that culture, and for what games and genres? What are the games and supplements currently in production from marginalized communities that you are most excited about? We want to hear from you in the comments below!

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The holidays are just around the corner, and with them come the usual festive-themed one-shots or sessions from a campaign. It’s a given and a lot of people do it, especially for Halloween. But why is it that so many people do it? And why should you try it out if you haven’t yet?

Running a One-shot

There are so many things about running a one-shot every once in a while that I would a whole article for it. If you are playing an ongoing campaign, it can be used as a way to try out new stuff. Pull out one of those adventures you collected for free last year and have everyone at your table create a character for it. Because it is Holiday themed, you can surely find many of those adventures on sale on sites such as the DM’s Guild, some with their own unique twist, such as holiday-themed subclasses. Trying out new things gives a bit of freedom to those players who have been playing the same character for a year and a half, as well as those DMs who might have become tired of exploring the jungles of Chult and might want a change of air.

Opportunity for other people to GM

We all know those forever GMs in our group (I’m the one in mine), and it can be tiresome for them to be constantly running games for you players. Why not take these holidays as the perfect moment to allow them to play as a player for once? Maybe use your GM’s world and run an adventure in which the players are all elves helping Santa on his journey, or create your own condensed world for holiday-themed one-shots that the whole group can keep playing every holiday! I’m sure that GM will be very thankful for being able to play for once, which can in a way be considered a great holiday gift?

Run other games

Your gaming group all show up to play as always, but it’s New Year’s Eve today. That’s when you can maybe pick up a board game and give your weekly game a break. I’m pretty sure you can find a way to make it holiday themed! (maybe you all have to show up with ugly sweaters?). If you plan on playing a roleplaying game, why not try other stuff different from your usual game? Grab Tales from the Loop and have an adventure in which you play as kids investigating why is it not snowing for Christmas this year in your little home town. A Dread game in which you have to escape from Krampus can be a lot of fun as well. Solving the mystery of the Holiday assassin can be quite some fun as well. Be inventive! Use the holidays as an excuse to play and invent a different story from the ones you are used to!

Perfect Time to Introduce new people

Is that cousin you haven’t seen in a long time coming for the holidays? Maybe it’s time for them to learn how to become a ranger in the wilds. What about that grandpa that always asks what it is you do weekly with your friends? Grab an easy TTRPG to introduce them to the hobby. The fewer rules they have to memorize, the easier it will be to have them understand what is going on and jump right in. Is that friend still looking forward to know what those horror games you play with dice are all about? Have them come and play a session with your gaming group or family. Many people have their loved ones come together during holidays! That’s the perfect time to create new gaming groups or have them discover how fun these games can actually be.

Have special events in your campaigns

Something I’ve also heard people do is use the holidays as an excuse to run your Holiday special session from your campaign. It’s possible Santa comes visit the famous group of adventurers because he needs help with something. What if a cult leader of Cthulhu dresses up and invites people to an event to create one big sacrifice in your Trails of Cthulhu game?

Wanna keep it simple? Maybe it’s just a special event and you tell your players to do an invisible friend game in which every party member has to gift each other a present their character would create or gift them. If you want to take it a step further, you can have the players create or buy that thing in real life and gift it to the player of that character while roleplaying the gifting scene.

There’s also the chance a carnival or special event is held in some cities during the holidays in your game setting, meaning the Player Characters might want to stop fighting the hordes from the BBEG for a few days to relax and have a fun time at those places. Create something special, unique! There are tons of ideas on the internet you can steal, or content you can buy and port into your own games!

Conclusion

The holidays, and particularly any kind of special event from our world can serve as the perfect opportunity to give a slight or harsh twist to your usual gaming sessions. Why not give it a try? Attempting to do something different this way can create very unique experiences you might not forget anytime soon! What’s more, the player group might end up looking forward to that same time next year to do it again.

Most people are cheerier during these events, meaning they’ll be looking forward to having fun, and will do their best to improve the experience. Players might give their all in usual sessions, but these rare special occasions usually stand out!

What’s your most memorable holiday memory? Be it from any sort of celebration! Make sure to let me know in the comments below!

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Ever since we started podcasting together, Senda and I have always talked about doing a one-on-one campaign. We even tried doing it as part of Panda’s Talking Games, but it did not work out. I have for some time been curious about GMing a one-on-one campaign, as it is one of the few things I have not done as a GM. I was so curious about it, that I created a supplement for Dungeon World called the Legacy Weapon in order to try it out, but even then it was just one-shots. Finally, the stars aligned, and Senda and I found a campaign that we were interested to try playing one-on-one. So now I have a chance to learn as I go, and in the spirit of the season, I am going to share what I am learning with you. 

One-on-One Games

For the most part, the “typical” RPG consists of several players (2, 3, or a bunch more) playing characters and one player acting as the GM. In a one-on-one game, there is one player who is playing a character and one player who is the GM. While this configuration is a scaled-down version of the “typical” RPG, it does present some unique challenges.

Challenges with One-on-One Games

Unless the game in question is made for one-on-one play, there are a few challenges that come up when you run one-on-one. 

Access to All Abilities

The average RPG assumes 3-4 players and thus characters are designed to be able to access only a portion of the character abilities and options. In class-based games, like D&D, that means that a single player cannot be all the classes that make up a typical party. In other systems, such as point-buy systems, the character won’t have any restrictions in terms of abilities, but will likely not have the points to buy everything they need at a competent level. Other games, such as superhero games, will turn out to be pretty tolerant to having a single character. 

In the games where it is an issue, the solo character has the challenge of how to have access to abilities needed in order to thrive in the game. If we look at D&D, a solo rogue is playable but they lack access to both arcane magic (often useful against more powerful creatures and overcoming various challenges) as well as divine magic (healing). Without that access, the GM will have to do a lot of work to overcome the design of the game to allow the character to thrive. 

There are solutions for this issue. The Legacy Weapon does this for Dungeon World. You can do this with some multiclassing and house rules for some games. You can solve it with magical items (rod of healing) or technology (AI hacker). You can also solve it with NPCs (see below).

Scaling Challenges

Another challenge that a GM has when making an RPG into a one-on-one game is getting the scaling of encounters correct. While this is a challenge in many games, with a one-on-one game you have very little room for error. When you have more players there is some buffering for bad rolls among the players. One player could be rolling badly that day, but another is rolling well and things work out in the end. With a solo character, if they are rolling badly, things do not go well. This puts a bit of a challenge on the GM for how to make this work. 

In games that have a lot of combat, this is a challenge. A poor rolling solo character is on their own, and through attrition can be killed. In games where the GM has some input on failure, such as games that are Powered by the Apocalypse, the GM has options on how to translate failures – giving them options beyond just doing damage – which can help buffer those bad rolls, to a point.

Support

A party of characters is its own support system. They often have what they need to get into trouble and recover afterward. In a solo game, the character is on their own, which means they will need some NPCs for support. If the game is centered in a location, then the NPCs can just be part of the location, and the solo character can come and visit when they are in need of support. 

If the character is doing something like delving into dungeons far from town, then that support needs to be closer. That may mean an NPC who travels with the character, or some way that the support can help remotely. In a fantasy game that may mean having a cleric who travels with the solo character as they explore ruins. In a cyberpunk game, it may mean having a hacker friend who is held up in a secret location but shares a comm channel with the character. 

Single Spotlight

This last issue is something that happens with any one-on-one game regardless of whether it was made for solo play or not, meaning the spotlight of the story remains on that player for the entire session. Consider that in a four-player game with a GM, the spotlight is on a given player around 20% of the time. In a solo game that percentage goes up to 50% or more. 

This means that the player will have to speak more, make more decisions, take more actions, make more checks/rolls, etc. That can lead to fatigue. For the GM this is also true. They also have more spotlight time as there are no character-character interactions occurring. 

This means that session length and pacing may be different than in more typical group play. You may find that you tire in a shorter amount of time or need more breaks. You may also progress through stories faster. 

Long Live The Queen

The campaign Senda and I decided to play was one that we created while developing a Fate game that never really worked the way we wanted it to. We liked the setting but not what we were doing with the rules (not Fate’s fault, just the way we were trying to implement it). We both really liked the setting so we decided to use it.

Borrowing from Jason Pitre’s Four Structures here is what we are planning to play.

Setting

Based on a short story called Motzart in Mirrorshades, by Bruce Sterling and Lewis Shiner, this is Musketeer France that has been visited by a time-traveling Corporation, called Chronos. Chronos makes a deal with the King to trade technology and science for unused natural resources (which Chronos sends forward in time). While the King and his court are enamored with their new friends, Queen Anne and her Musketeers are suspicious. 

System

Rather than doing this in Fate, this time we decided that we wanted to try the setting out in Thirsty Sword Lesbians. We went with this for a few reasons. The first was that we liked the idea of female musketeers crossing swords with futuristic security guards, in a background of a queer and progressive Paris. TSL seemed like a perfect fit. 

In addition, TSL is a Powered by the Apocalypse game, meaning that failure is narrated by the GM, which, as mentioned above, gives some latitude for dealing with failures. In addition, the playbooks for TSL are not really niche classes so having a single character would not be lacking any critical abilities. Finally, there are some optional rules for solo play in the Advanced Lovers & Lesbian supplement, meaning that there were some rules for how to handle the parts of the game that relied on having other players (the Emotional Support move). 

Situation

The situation is that Senda’s character will be a Musketeer in service to the Queen. She will undertake missions for the Queen, France, and the Timeline. This will help with the start of the campaign, as the Queen can assign missions. I expect that over time we will still have missions, but as the game takes on a life of its own, Senda will direct more of how the game will go through what she does with her Musketeer. 

Subtext

With our setting we have some subtext about colonization and its evils, and TSL has some subtext about queerness, both of which we are very comfortable with and are looking to explore. I suspect that as the game develops we will discover other subtexts as well. 

Getting Started but Finishing This Article

At this point, Senda and I have finished our Session Zero and are going to be starting our first session in 2022. If you want to hear how our Session Zero went, you can check our December 13th podcast episode. 

In my next article, I will talk about some of the things we modified to make TSL work for our solo game, as well as hopefully have some info on how the game ran.

Until then, have you run many solo games? What systems do you like for solo games? What challenges have you encountered in running solo games? What are your favorite things about running solo games? 

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Stop me if you’ve heard this. I like monster hunting media. I like the idea of following clues and finding lairs. I like finding specific weaknesses and exploiting them to stop a supernatural threat. In addition to all of this, I like seeing this same process with different backdrops. In my never-ending quest to find more and more of this genre that I love, expressed in RPG terms, today I’m going to be looking at The Between.

The Between is a game that borrows mechanics from Apocalypse World, as well as some of the conventions introduced in Brindlewood Bay, to create a game about finding clues, reaching thresholds, and uncovering dark secrets, only some of which may belong to the monsters and masterminds the player characters are opposing. The setting is a supernatural Victorian-era London inspired by Penny Dreadful, Sherlock Holmes, and the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. I can neither confirm nor deny that I bought this to console myself that The Irregulars isn’t getting a second season on Netflix.

Disclaimer

I did not receive a review copy of The Between, and I purchased it on my own for purposes of my review. Although I have a lot of experience with Powered by the Apocalypse games as well as the monster-hunting genre, I have not played this game, and the review is based on reading and analyzing the contents of the game.

Content Warning

The game itself doesn’t contain much in the way of gory details, but it does express what is likely to happen in a game. The playbooks and the mysteries touch on violence, graverobbing, horror tropes, threats to innocents, and potentially some sexual content. Most of these details exist in the Threats presented with the game, or in the potential execution of some of the moves on the playbooks. There is an extensive discussion of safety, lines and veils, and ways to express moves that utilize sexual situations in non-sexual ways.

In the Beginning

The primary rulebook for The Between is a PDF that is 129 pages long. This includes a credits page, a table of contents, a three-page FAQ, and a page of Inspirational Material. The front cover is full color, and the book has original black and white artwork, usually full-page pieces that introduce individual chapters. Most of the layout is organized into single columns.

The supplementary materials included with the game are as follows:

• Playbooks (14 pages, 7 playbooks)
• The Mastermind (2 pages, Theodora Brathwaite)
• The Reference Sheet (1 page)
• Threats (18 pages, 10 threats)
• London at Night (The Unscene)

Between the Covers

The book is divided up into the following sections:

• Gameplay Basics
• Play Structure
• The Keeper Basics
• The Keeper Advanced
• Mastermind
• Session One

This means that the first part of the book is more about general play procedure (Introduction, Gameplay Basics, Play Structure), and the last portion of the book is geared towards the game facilitator, in this case referred to as the Keeper (The Keeper Basics, The Keeper Advanced, Mastermind, Session One).

Playing the Game

The Between has fewer moves than many similar games. You roll 2d6 + a trait, and the game has an advantage or disadvantage mechanic. In this case, you would roll 3d6 and either take the highest two or lowest two results. Moves are broad and contextual. If you are familiar with Powered by the Apocalypse and similar game systems, the primary move is going to be similar to a “Defy Danger,” where players explain what they want to accomplish, and what they fear the outcome of the action may be.

As you might expect, there are results for rolls at 6-, 7-9, and 10+, but there is also a 12+ category. This often allows characters to get a glimpse at even wider plans that may be going on, beyond the immediate mystery.

The playbooks are discussed in the core book, but in terms of what they represent and who might enjoy playing them, along with potential modifications to how they work in different circumstances. The core rules don’t provide the actual playbooks, which are included as supplementary material. The playbooks are:

• The American
• The Explorer
• The Factotum
• The Mother
• The Orphan
• The Undeniable
• The Vessel

The Orphan is only unlocked under certain circumstances linked to The Mother playbook. Like many other aspects of the game, there is a tightly woven structure to when and where game elements appear. In this case, the playbook inspired by Victor Frankenstein can progress to opening the monster for play.

Each playbook has a list of Masks, either Masks of the Past, or Masks of the Future. Masks of the Past, when checked, prompt a character to relate some aspect of their past. Masks of the Future progress a character towards a specific fate. Masks of the Past can be marked to remove conditions, while Masks of the Future can be marked to avoid an immediate fate, by bringing a more distant one closer.

Characters who are suffering from a condition roll with disadvantage when the condition applies, and these conditions are only cleared when the character has time to share a part of their past with their companions.

Characters gather clues to solve mysteries and resolve threats, but the Keeper doesn’t fully define what the characters learn from their clues. Mysteries have thresholds, meaning a certain number of clues must be gathered. Once that number is gathered, characters can create their own hypothesis, and roll to see if it is correct.

The Keeper and The Game In-Play

The game is divided up into several separate phases, and certain actions can only take place during the appropriate time of day. The phases that are laid out for play are:

• Dawn
• Day
• Dusk
• Night

Dawn and Dusk are preparatory phases that are used to resolve some moves and set up others. These are the phases where start of session moves will be resolved, and where the organization that the player characters work for, Hargrave House, will be detailed.

During the day, characters find out about the current threat, but threats can only be resolved at night. Because the night move has higher stakes than the day move, this means that threats only resolve when there are higher stakes involved.

A unique aspect of the game structure is the Unscene. This is an ongoing scene that details what the game’s version of London will look like. At various points in the night, the players will be provided with prompts about how the scene is progressing, in between the action of the players investigating and resolving the mysteries surrounding threats.

The Between is designed to be an ongoing, interconnected story, which means that multiple threats will be active at the same time. Player characters can focus on one threat, but other threats may be advancing, and eventually, a threat may end up working for the Mastermind.

The Mastermind is the campaign or season arc of the story. They have big plans with wide-ranging effects, and investigating a regular mystery gives the player characters the ability to stumble onto clues that lead to the Mastermind’s larger plan. Until they find their first Mastermind clue, they don’t know that anyone is sitting at the center of the web.

During this time, the Keeper will be noting NPCs that have stood out in different scenes for later use and will start to leak information on the Mastermind to the player characters, once they become known. While the Keeper doesn’t create the entire story wholesale, and the player characters are building connections between clues as they attempt to resolve mysteries, the Keeper still needs to make all of that connection on the backend seem like it was always meant to be.

Threats and Masterminds

Because of the precise nature of the day/night cycle, thresholds, and hypothesis, threats and Masterminds aren’t open-ended constructs in the game. While the game has a section on creating new threats (in part assuming that people may want to publish them), there isn’t as much emphasis placed on creating new Masterminds. Even the threats are exacting enough that I doubt people will want to create new threats until they have a chance to get a feel for the existing ones in play.

Threats include Questions and Opportunities that frame what needs to happen to progress towards resolving the mystery. Depending on how the Questions and Opportunities are framed, the characters will know upfront if they need to discover if the threat really is supernatural, or if there is some obfuscation about the nature of the threat. There is a description of the threat, specific moments, dangers, and locations that are keyed to the threat. There are also specific side characters, clues, and rewards that are all unique to that threat.

Some of the threats, like The Coven, The Orphan, or The Pinkerton, are tied to specific aspects of different playbooks, meaning they only trigger once characters with specific playbooks perform certain actions.

The Mastermind included, Theodora Brathwaite, has their own sheet. This sheet has the five phases of the Mastermind’s conspiracy detailed, and what clue threshold triggers each phase of the plan. There are specific details that become obvious to the player characters beyond the clues once they hit a specific threshold. Servants and specific Mastermind clues are included on the sheet.

Exactly what the Mastermind is doing isn’t detailed. That’s determined by the interplay of the player characters resolving mysteries, and the Keeper developing the conspiracy as it advances. The Keeper is given several spots on the sheet where they are prompted to recontextualize the conspiracy to make sure it still feels in tune with what has been revealed to this point.

Eureka!

 As someone that not only likes monster-hunting stories, but also enjoys media like The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, The Irregulars, and Carnival Row, the widgets, interplay, and story elements of this game do a very good job of building and reinforcing the setting. 

As someone that not only likes monster-hunting stories, but also enjoys media like The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, The Irregulars, and Carnival Row, the widgets, interplay, and story elements of this game do a very good job of building and reinforcing the setting. I love the Unscene as a means of setting building, without the concerns of trying to tie the scene directly to the current action. I also appreciate all the places where the rules specifically spell out that the Keeper or the players need to take certain actions or reassess the current situation. This kind of break built into the structure makes it much easier to follow procedures in a game that heavily depends on that procedure.

Wheels Within Wheels

While I don’t think it’s a strike against the game, I do think that the exacting procedure and the emphasis on tying together clues on the backend make this a potentially tricky game to use to introduce mechanics such as those found in Apocalypse World. It’s also easy to feel that you will be using this for a specific campaign if you regularly play with the same group, because of the single Mastermind and relatively small range of threats to pick once you remove the playbook adjacent threats from the mix. This is obviously going to be less of a problem if you run this game with multiple gaming groups.

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

If you are a fan of the inspirational media, as I am, I think you will be happy with this purchase. However, I also think that this will be a better game to get to the table for gaming groups that are even better at improv than the standard Apocalypse World-derived game assumes.

Many games like this are released and go unsupported, but this product specifically mentions an open publishing policy and future Mastermind releases. Since Brindlewood Bay–a game by the same team–has received a support product after its initial release, I expect this game to also get that expected support, and I think it will be worth checking back in to see what future threats and Masterminds do for the feel of the game.

What are your favorite eras for historical games? Are there other Victorian-era settings you would like to see explored? We want to hear from you in the comments below!

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Destructoid reported the announcement of an indie adventure RPG, Songs of Glimmerwick, by Eastshade Studios (Eastshade, Leaving Lyndow). Songs of Glimmerwick is an upcoming school-life RPG where music is magical A spellbound RPG where your songs can shape the world Eastshade Studios have announced their next project, this time headed into the world of both magic and music.... Read more »

RPG Fan posted their first impressions of the upcoming expansion of Guild Wars 2. A Hands-On Look at Guild Wars 2: End of Dragons Guild Wars 2 is my favorite MMO of all time, and after a guided preview of the upcoming End of Dragons expansion, I’m happy to say that the future looks bright for fans of ArenaNet’s MMO.... Read more »

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The party-based RPG The Waylanders will leave Early Access soon: January Update - Launch is Nearly Here! Hi everyone! Happy New Year! In under a month, you’ll be jumping into the full release of The Waylanders and we can’t wait to see how you like the continuation of the story.... Read more »

IGN has reviewed the PC version of Rainbow Six Extraction. Rainbow Six Extraction Review [...] Verdict Rainbow Six Extraction is one of the boldest games in recent Ubisoft history. Not only does it exchange the series' staid military realism for a wonderfully grotesque universe of oozing, parasitic incursion, it also introduces a slew of mechanics determined to make us fear death.... Read more »

Wccf Tech has reported that new gameplay footage was being shared online by Xolara; there are currently 11 new short videos to peek at. Elden Ring New Footage Showcases New NPCs and More New Elden Ring footage has been shared online, showcasing some new NPCs and more.... Read more »

New to Sly Flourish? Start Here!

This is one of a series of articles covering the Wizards of the Coast hardcover D&D adventure Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden. The other articles include:

• Rime of the Frostmaiden Session Zero
• Running Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden Chapter 1
• Running Rime of the Frostmaiden Chapter 2
• Running Frostmaiden Chapter 3 & 4: Sunblight and Destructions Light

You can also watch my YouTube playlist of Frostmaiden Lazy DM Prep videos.

This article contains spoilers for Rime of the Frostmaiden.

A Conclusion in the Middle of the Adventure

Rime of the Frostmaiden has a problem with closure. It's an adventure with two separate and independent "final areas", Grimskalle and Ythrin, and it isn't clear why you should care about the latter if the characters' goal becomes ending the endless night.

Luckily we can make a few changes to tie these two locations together and build a conclusion supporting both areas. We'll talk about these changes here and in the writeup for chapter 7.

Summary of Potential Changes

Here's a quick summary of the changes we can make to chapter 5.

• Build a pointcrawl for Solstice. Let the characters learn more about the island as they explore interesting locations before reaching Grimskalle.
• Tie the endless night to two objects: the Codicil of the White in Grimskalle and the power of the mythallar held within the city of Ythrin in chapter 7. Both must be dealt with to end the Endless Night.
• Ignore the idea that Auril needs Iskra the roc to cast her spell. The characters shouldn't be able to end the entire endless night by killing a big bird.
• Replace the Tests of the Frostmaiden with tests tailored to the individual characters based on their own backgrounds and own fears.
• Choose when Auril attacks and tweak her stat blocks.

Exploring the Pointcrawl of Solstice

When the characters arrive on Solstice, we can offer a number of locations and interconnected paths to take them from the docks to Grimskalle. Here's one example pointcrawl we can run but I encourage you to build your own.

For more on pointcrawls, see Pointcrawls for Overland Travel.

This pointcrawl can contain a number of interesting locations including:

• Pirate shipwrecks crawling with ghoulish cannibal sailors.
• A druid's circle with frozen dead druids.
• A series of hot springs that lure would-be acolytes to their boiling deaths.
• A cave containing the frozen bones of an ancient dragon entombed by the frost giants.
• The hidden effigy of an elder evil feared even more than Auril.
• The frozen tombs of frost giant heroes.
• Auril's garden of ice sculptures.
• The lair of the abominable yeti and its offspring.

These locations can be connected with a range of natural pathways:

• Narrow hidden ice tunnels.
• Cracked walkways along a deep rift.
• Icy switchback paths.
• Natural game trails.
• Underground rivers.

Such locations and pathways offer some fun exploration to the otherwise relatively barren island of Solstice.

Tie the Fates of Ythrin and Grimskalle Together

Instead of keeping Grimskalle and Ythrin separated in the story, connect the two together by tying the endless night to both locations. One cannot simply kill Iskra the roc to stop Auril's spell. One cannot even stop it if they have the Codicil of the White in hand. The spell is required, yes, but so is containing the power that fuels it — power from the Netherese city of Ythrin. This gives the characters reasons to go to both locations to stop the endless night. This power can come from the mythallar contained in Ythryn or to something else of your choosing.

In my own game, this was a powerful elder evil named Thruun based on Father Llymic from the older D&D book Elder Evils. In my game, elves drew the elder evil into the world thousands of years ago and then Netherese wizards encased it in a huge sarcophagus in the bottom of Ythryn so the Netherese wizards could harness its power. With the city collapsed, Thruun's essence has leaked from its sarcophagus and caused all sorts of problems.

You can, of course, choose your own source of power in Ythryn based on the characters' story and the story that evolves at the table. If nothing else comes to mind, the mythallar described in the book may be just the thing.

Replace the Tests with Character-Focused Hard Choices

If you're not feeling the tests as written in Rime of the Frostmaiden, here's an alternative.

Instead of the existing tests, we can replace them with tests of the actual characters. How far will they go when facing Auril's tests — tests intended to show the loyalty of would-be anointed druids in Auril's service?

Before the characters get to the tests, or even to Grimskalle, make sure you pay particular attention to the character's backgrounds. What do they want? What are they almost completely unwilling to give up? What do they fear? What will happen to them if they become lost?

Then we have the tests themselves. Tests that focus on isolation, cruelty, endurance, and preservation.

When the characters enter area G10 they see the four doors. When one of them touches a door, they are tested. They find themselves put in a position where they must make a hard choice, an impossible choice, and one that proves to Auril that they are willing to give up everything to join with her. Will they let loved ones freeze to death? Will they give up their family name and dynasty? Will they let their body become destroyed by a parasite living within them? Will they turn their back on the people of Ten Towns?

This is where we grab those knives the players have been giving us and stab them in the heart (with careful reason and clear safety tools in place). The idea here is that they prove their willingness to give up everything they love to join Auril's anointed. Even if the choice wasn't real, the characters will be forever changed by their choices. They know, deep down, what they are willing to give up.

Or maybe they don't. Maybe when facing the tests they give the finger to Auril and show they will not give up who they are. If the characters fail these tests, the third form of Auril arrives and gives them what-for. When they defeat the form, the Codicil is unprotected and they can grab it up and go.

This can be a real fun series of roleplay scenes to see how the characters act given the tests in front of them. Some may accept the test. Some may reject it. Regardless, they will be forever changed by facing them and learn who they really are.

Choose when Auril Attacks

You choose when, how, and with which form Auril attacks the characters. Perhaps her third form guards the Codicil of the White itself. Perhaps when they take the Codicil they find her first form in the chamber behind them or face her outside of Grimskalle.

We can test our boss here by letting them face the one to three forms of Auril before we unleash all of them on the characters at once in a final multi-phase boss fight if we choose.

You may need to tweak the stat blocks of Auril's forms. The crystalline form, for example, is seriously hindered by having only ranged attacks and no good way to escape from being pinned down. Instead, give it a legendary action to misty step. The other forms too need some work. Give them access to spells like Cone of Cold and make her ice darts more like ice lances, throwing around 36 cold damage a shot instead of 3.

One of Two End-Zones for Frostmaiden

With some tweaking, the island of Solstice and Grimskalle can be excellent end-game location worthy locations for our characters to explore. Use these tips and your own ideas to customize the island to suit you and your group.

Related Articles

• Running Frostmaiden Chapter 3 & 4: Sunblight and Destructions Light
• Running Rime of the Frostmaiden Chapter 2
• Rime of the Frostmaiden Session Zero
• Running Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden Chapter 1
• Reinforce Cooperative Character Motivations

Want More from Sly Flourish?

• Read more Sly Flourish articles
• Subscribe to the Sly Flourish newsletter
• Watch Sly Flourish's YouTube videos
• Support Sly Flourish on Patreon

Check Out Sly Flourish's Books

• Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master
• Lazy DM's Workbook
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• Fantastic Adventures

Send feedback to mike@mikeshea.net.

Article copyright 2021 by Mike Shea of Sly Flourish.

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New to Sly Flourish? Start Here!

Previous articles describe troublesome quest models and how the Seven Samurai quest model fits well into our D&D games. The heist is another useful quest model fitting well with the style of our D&D games. Today we're going to look at running great heists.

Patrons of Sly Flourish can watch a video in which Johnn Four and I talk about running great heists in D&D as well as three other videos on running situations and the five room dungeon, running mysteries, and thoughts on RPG map designs. Find out more at the Mike Shea and Johnn Four video collaboration page.

Great Situational D&D

Heists follow a general model of D&D that often works very well — building situations. Instead of building adventures room by room and encounter by encounter, we consider a whole location with multiple entrances, multiple paths, and multiple ways to engage with the location and the inhabitants moving within it.

The heist is one such situation built from a number of components:

• The target. What are the characters trying to acquire or accomplish at the location?
• The location. Where is the target held? What surrounds it?
• The inhabitants. Who guards the target? What bystanders happen to inhabit the area?
• Complications. What complications might occur in the situation? These might be planned or improvised.

Heists also work well by running our game in two phases: the plan and the execution.

The Target

The target can be just about anything in our heist scenario. It might be a physical object. It might be a piece of information. It might be a person, willing or unwilling. It might be a dream or a memory. The movie Inception is an example of a heist involving dreams.

When running heists, it's important to declare what the characters seek up front and not to change it during the execution or it can feel frustrating. No, Mario, your princess is not in another castle.

The Location

The target sits in a location and certain locations lend themselves to great heist adventures. Locations work best for heists when they have the following criteria:

• They have multiple potential entrances.
• They have multiple paths within the location.
• They have secret paths and shortcuts to discover.

Justin Alexander's descriptions of Jaquay-style locations often work well for heists and many of Dyson Logos's maps fit this style.

In particular, manors, keeps, and castles work well for heists, especially those with underground tunnels, cellars, and other interesting ways in. The haunted manor in Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh from Ghosts of Saltmarsh is a good example of a great heist location, as is Vanthampur Manor in chapter 1 of Descent into Avernus and Gralhund Villa from chapter 3 of Waterdeep Dragon Heist.

Inhabitants

Instead of populating locations room by room, consider the total force that occupies the location. Who are the guards? How many are there? What is their typical behavior? What monsters guard the secret locations or underground passageways? When we think about the overall force protecting the target at the location we can recognize how they act and react as the characters infiltrate the location.

We can also populate our location with non-combatants. Who populates the location that isn't really involved with protecting the target? They can add fun complications and roleplay opportunities while the characters move through the location. This is a great tip I picked up from Johnn Four at Roleplaying Tips.

Phases of Play

When running a heist, consider breaking down gameplay into two phases: the plan and the execution.

We want to give the players ample time to look at the situation, maybe even giving them a copy of the map of the location if it makes sense that they'd have it or give them a mixture of reliable and unreliable information. They might spend time reconnoitering the location, learning what they can and using this to aid in their plans.

We likely want to limit how much time the players spend on this or they'll get caught in decision cycles that go on forever. Limit the amount of time they spend on it to 30 minutes or so. It's an out-of-game limitation but one that helps move the game forward.

The second phase is execution in which the characters conduct their heist. This plays out like a traditional situational D&D game. The characters do what they do and the world reacts.

Avoiding Single-Roll Failures

When running heists, we don't want the whole heist to rely on a single roll for success or failure. Instead, each roll moves the situation forward either positively or negatively. Complications can still occur even if every ability check succeeds and success can still occur even if every ability check fails.

The excellent RPG Blades in the Dark is built around running heists and uses "progress clocks" to manage multiple successes and failures as situations evolve. A progress clock might require a number of successes before a full success occurs or might create two opposing clocks, one for the characters and one for those guarding the target. Instead of establishing progress clocks ahead of time, we can improvise progress clocks as we think about the approach the characters are taking and as the situation evolves.

Here's a YouTube Video on using progress clocks in D&D.

Complications

Complications are a fun way to change up the nature of a heist as it's happening. We don't want to drop in too many complications or include complications so big that the entire plan falls apart. Here are some example complications that might occur during the heist:

• The target is moved within the location.
• A powerful enemy arrives at the location.
• Another group tries to steal the target.
• An external event changes up the situation.
• War erupts around the location.
• Extra non-combatants arrive at the location.
• The guardians of the target change their behavior.
• The target changes in some way. An egg hatches, a magic item wakes up.
• An accident or disaster occurs at the location.
• A dark force at the location wakes up.

A Powerful and Flexible Quest Model

Heists are an excellent and flexible quest model for our D&D games. By changing up targets, locations, and inhabitants we can re-use this quest model for many different games, each resulting in a unique story we can share with our players. Add the heist model to your bag of tricks and you have a flexible model for some awesome D&D games.

Related Articles

• Waterdeep Dragon Heist Chapter 5: The Heist
• Session Zero of Waterdeep Dragon Heist
• Running Waterdeep Dragon Heist Chapter 3: Fireball
• Troublesome Quest Models
• Running Waterdeep Dragon Heist Chapter 2: Trollskull Alley

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• Subscribe to the Sly Flourish newsletter
• Watch Sly Flourish's YouTube videos
• Support Sly Flourish on Patreon

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

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Article copyright 2021 by Mike Shea of Sly Flourish.

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New to Sly Flourish? Start Here!

What if no heroes had come to save the Sword Coast?

What if all of the events from Tyranny of Dragons, Princes of the Apocalypse, Out of the Abyss, Tomb of Annihilation, Descent into Avernus, and Rime of the Frostmaiden took place but no heroes were around to stop them?

What if Tiamat's rise wasn't stopped and the queen of dragons now ruled over the Sword Coast from a golden ziggurat floating over Waterdeep?

What if none thwarted the demon princes summoned to the underdark and now Demogorgon rules Menzoberranzan against Orcus's undead illithids?

What if the Cult of Eternal Flame defeated the three other cults of elemental evil and now Imix sits upon a throne of molten iron in the center of the scorched remains of the Dessarin Valley?

What if Acererak's atropal devoured the souls of millions and became a new dark god nestled in the island of Chult?

What if Elturel was never saved, leaving a bleeding wound in the earth leading down to the hellscape of Avernus while the corruption of devils devours neighboring Baldur's Gate?

What if Auril turned everything north of the Spine of the World into a lifeless glacier slowly making its way south?

What if all of these things happened at once?

That is the seed for this campaign outline I call "A World Without Heroes". This is one of a number of campaign outlines I've written including the following:

• The Hunger, a 1st to 20th level gnoll campaign.
• Harvester of Worlds, a 1st to 20th level Githyanki / Mindflayer campaign.
• Demogorgon Must Die, a 1st to 20th level adventure caught between Demogorgon's warring heads.

The Truths of the World Without Heroes.

• Tiamat rules the Sword Coast. Having ascended from Avernus, the queen of dragons rules from a huge ziggurat floating above the city of Waterdeep as the Sword Coast's god-queen.
• The demon lords now rule the underdark. Demogorgon rules Menzoberranzan, its people now driven insane by the demon prince's chaos while Orcus has built an army of undead illithids.
• In a bloody battle between the cults elemental evil, the cult of Eternal Flame destroyed the other three and now Imix sits upon a throne of molten iron in the scorched land once known as the Dessarin valley.
• The archlich Acererak birthed a dark god fed on a million lost souls. The twisted horror lies in its creche from the dead city of Omu in the heart of the poisoned land of Chult.
• A hell-hole now sits where the city of Elturel once stood. Scheming devils led by the corrupt High Duke Thalamra Vanthampur and the pit fiend Gargauth overran the city of Baldur's Gate.
• The Frostmaiden's rime destroyed everything north of the Spine of the World and now makes its way south of the mountains threatening Mirabar and Luskan.

Starting Locations

This campaign could start in a number of adventure-filled locations. Choosing a location to start may be an important consideration in your session zero. Each starting location brings a very different theme to the campaign, particularly in the lower tiers.

These locations include:

• Mirabar. The characters reside with the dwarves of Miribar crushed between Auril's terrible mile-high glacier slowly destroying the spine of the world and the scorched lands of the Dessarin valley and its elemental prince, Imix, to the south.
• Waterdeep. The characters scrape by, surviving in the ruins of the once mighty city of Waterdeep. The corrupted masked lords hunt down any sign of disobedience against Tiamat while criminal gangs rule the ten neighborhoods of the massive city, all of which sit under the shadow of Tiamat's golden ziggurat.
• Baldur's Gate. The characters hide in the hovels of Baldur's Gate fighting alongside the city's survivors and rebels against the devilish influences now ruling the city. They struggle against High Duke Vanthampur and her pit-fiend ally, Gargauth, as the fiendish duo crushes what little good remains in Baldur's Gate.
• Port Nyanzaru. The once lush lands of Chult now lie dead and diseased as Acererak's newly born god devours all life on the island. Undead hordes smash against the city gates of the once mighty port city while the people left inside fight for their meager existence and try to sail the poisoned seas to the Sword Coast seeking a peace they will not find.
• Blingdenstone. Travelers of the underdark hidden away from the chaos of the Rage of Demons make their way to the hidden city of Blingdenstone. There they keep the city hidden from the eyes of the warring demon princes raging through the Underdark.

Secrets of the Land

These hidden secrets help fuel the GM's imgination when running a campaign in this grim setting:

• Lord Neverember, ruler of Neverwinter and the last survivor of the Lord's Alliance, now swears fealty to Tiamat.
• The demon princes Jubilex and Zuggtmoy have wed and now rule side by side in the Neverlight Grove in the Underdark.
• Szass Tam has forged a truce with the dragon queen, although he recognizes that such a truce can never hold Tiamat back should her eyes fall upon Thay. He could be a powerful ally for those strong enough to threaten the queen.
• Imix's fire and Auril's glacier will one day crash together in a catacalysmic war. It's quite possible the minions of the two could be used against one another.
• The power of Acererak's newborn god competes with the undead nation of Thay. Szass Tam wishes to destroy the god, or perhaps capture it for himself.
• Orcus has corrupted an elder brain of the illithids and now rules over an army of undead mindflayers.
• The twin heads of Demogorgon war with one another across the city of Menzoberranzan, setting half of the city's drow against the other half. A hidden cabal of drow priestesses, still loyal to Lolth, seeks every option to destroy the prince of chaos.
• High Duke Thalamra Vanthampur completed a pact with the pit-fiend Gargauth to serve the souls of Baldur's Gate to Avernus. This pact, however, goes against the wishes of the archdevil Zariel who sees it as a betrayal.

Unlikely Allies

Part of the fun of running a twisted campaign like this is bringing in unlikely allies and quest NPCs. Here are a few we might consider:

• Szass Tam. The lich ruler of Thay may not like all these new big players in his sandbox (ahem). Once the characters show their quality, the lich may recruit them and offer them powerful weapons to defeat the new rulers of the Sword Coast. Of course, he may just as likely betray them if it serves his interest.
• Acererak. Perhaps the archlich got more than he bargained for with the birth of a new god. Parenthood isn't for everyone it seems. Maybe the being outstripped Acererak's own power and now the archlich seeks the god's end.
• Manshoon. The former lord of the Zhentarim may have changed his position now that the other rulers of the Sword Coast are gone. Perhaps the Zhentarim are the new Harpers and one of the remaining clones of Manshoon serves as their leader, hoping to return order to the chaotic Sword Coast.
• Iymrith. The ancient blue dragon sorceress may have found her loyalty to Tiamat waning as she sees the dragon queen's results first hand. Like Brutus to Caesar, betrayal may be inevitable and the characters may be just the knife she needs to slide into Tiamat's back.
• The Xanathar. The crime lord of Skullport may not appreciate the new leadership floating above Waterdeep and seeks heroes willing to make life harder for the dragon queen and her corrupt masked lords.
• Halaster Blackcloak. The once mad mage of Undermountain may be one of the few beings left who possesses the power to push back the gods, demon lords, and elder evils that now walk the Sword Coast.
• Lolth. Sure, having the demon princes battling each other in the underdark has been fun. The twin heads of Demogoron have done their jobs of culling the weak and raising the strong, but enough is enough. It's time for this to end. And who better to end it than these new heroes who seem to be making a name for themselves.
• Zariel. Seated upon a throne on the dead city of Elturl floating in the river Styx in Avernus, the archdevil of Avernus does not like the growth of power she sees with the fiend Gargauth. Deep within her, a spark of good still hopes the heroes can overcome the fiends devouring the souls of those she once served.

As you can see, many of the once former villains in the Sword Coast could become fun allies as the titans walk the land.

Quests and Adventures from 1st to 20th Level

Rather than list out individual quests for each tier, considering that a group could start in numerous areas, I'll describe instead the types of quests characters might go on at each tier.

One great advantage of a campaign like this is that we can use a lot of material from existing published adventures including Princes of the Apocalypse, Out of the Abyss, Tyranny of Dragons, Tomb of Annihilation, Descent into Avernus, and Rime of the Frostmaiden. We can pilfer a great deal of locations, maps, artwork, and NPCs from these adventures for use in our own dreadful campaign. Players who have played these adventures can enjoy returning to these people and places with this new spin.

1st through 4th Level: Facing Local Problems

At the first tier of play the characters likely face problems local to their starting location. They may battle invading forces from one or two of the titans now ruling over the Sword Coast but at this level, they cannot hope to face one of the beings. Instead, their goal is to help those who remain survive under the iron grip of the beings who now rule the land.

Quests in this tier might include rescue missions, reconnaissance missions against enemy strongholds, defeating local tyrants, defending local strongholds, and saving those who cannot withstand the terror of the titans now ruling the Sword Coast.

5th through 10th Level: Breaking Regional Barriers

At the second tier of play, the characters will begin to break into new areas, seeing the effects of more than one of the titans ruling over the Sword Coast. They may begin small revolutions against local lords allying with these mighty rulers. The initial stages of plans to push back, maybe even defeat, the lords might begin to take place.

Quests in this tier might include aiding refugees leaving one area for another, bringing important messages to new lands, bringing together networks of resistance across the lands, disrupting the plans of mid-level leaders of the arch-villains, seeking forgotten secrets of the Sword Coast, and finding lost artifacts that can aid in the war against the titans.

11th through 16th Level: Dethroning the Elder Evils

Once the characters hit tier three they're ready to begin taking on some of the less powerful elder evils such as Imix or the demon princes in the Underdark. They might pit one elder evil against another, perhaps even allying with one to defeat another before betraying the first. This whole part of the campaign may play out like Fistful of Dollars, with the characters pitting one great evil against another. In the latter part of this tier, they should be powerful enough to fight and even defeat a number of the titans. Doing so, however, creates a vacuum other titans soon fill, making it that much harder.

Quests in this tier might involve retrieving the weapons needed to defeat the titans in long-forgotten vaults, secret missions to pit one arch villain against another, infiltration into the lairs of the lower titans, and the assassination of generals.

17th through 20th level: Godslayers

Finally the characters reach the level of power to face the gods who have taken over the Sword Coast including Auril, Acererak's atropal, and, of course, Tiamat.

Many of the quests and adventures in this tier involve infiltrations of the lairs of the gods, defeating their last lieutenants, and facing off against the gods themselves.

A Dark "What If"

Campaigns like this are a fun way to take the common understandings of the published adventures within the Sword Coast and turn it on its head. It makes those who know the Realms open their eyes and mouths wide as their head spins with the implications of so many elder evils ruling over the Sword Coast at once. It likewise shakes up our own imaginations, opening up tremendous possibilities for powerful campaigns.

Use the ideas in this article to fuel your own "what if" scenarios and let your imagination run wild!

Related Articles

• Session Zero of Storm King's Thunder
• A Guide to WOTC D&D Published Adventures
• Demogorgon Must Die: A Twenty Level D&D Campaign Outline
• Adding Depth to Storm King's Thunder
• Running Chapter 1 of Descent into Avernus

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• Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master
• Lazy DM's Workbook
• Fantastic Lairs
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• Fantastic Adventures

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Article copyright 2021 by Mike Shea of Sly Flourish.

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New to Sly Flourish? Start Here!

Richard B. a Sly Flourish patron, asks:

Do you have any advice for a fairly new DM about going through a published adventure and making alterations to make it work for the group. I sometimes hear about things needing a fix but have no idea how to do that.

For experienced DMs, it's easy to forget how we go about customizing published adventures. There's a method to our chaotic hacking and slashing of a published adventure, however, and it's worth diving into the details.

This article focuses on larger campaign adventures, like the published hardcover adventures from Wizards of the Coast. Most of this advice is likely overkill for customizing a single-session or short adventure, though some of it still stands.

My friend Sharon offers three great pieces of advice for customizing shorter-run adventures:

1. Are there mutliple quest-givers before your players reach the heart of the adventure? Cut one of those. You'll never miss 'em.
2. Cut things that won't make sense for your players: puzzles, riddles, language, ideas, or lore from other adventures. Replace them with stuff your players care about.
3. Review the loot! There's almost always something you can include that means more to your players than the stuff in the published adventure.

These ideas can work well for longer-run campaign adventures as well.

Nothing Is Sacred

Change anything in a published adventure to suit it to your group. Nothing is sacred. If you generate your own adventure from the inspiration of the cover art alone, you're still doing it right. Whether you only change a few NPCs or a touch of the flow of the adventure or hack it down to a root and rebuild it into a new forest, there's no wrong way if it works for you and your group. There is no honor in running an adventure as written at the expense of the fun of your game.

Change anything in a published adventure to suit you and your group.

Customize the Adventure Around the Characters

One of the most effective ways to customize a campaign adventure is to thoroughly connect it to the characters. There are two ways we can do this:

First, ensure players build characters suited to the campaign during our [session zero]. A good one-page campaign guide like this one for Rime of the Frostmaiden helps players build characters focused on the themes of the campaign.

Second, modify the campaign to suit the characters. We can do this through NPC connections, historical connections, location-based connections and others. Here's a list of ten ways to tie characters to published campaigns:

• A character has a history with a villain.
• The character's heritage connects them to a major location in the adventure.
• The character owes an NPC a debt.
• The character is related to an NPC or villain.
• A character has visited or has knowledge of a location.
• A character's relative has a history tied to a location or villain.
• An NPC is a rival of one or more of the characters.
• A character once served a villain or sub-boss but broke free.
• A character worships a god interwoven into the adventure's story.
• A character underwent a ritual connecting them to a villain either in a bond or as an enemy.

Sharon's idea of customizing loot is another fantastic way to tie characters to the adventure.

Connecting the characters to the adventure goes a long way to engaging players with the story of a campaign.

Tune Encounters for Pacing and Beats

Published adventures have no idea how the pacing or beats of your game are going to go. You usually have no idea either until you're running it. Regardless of what the published adventure describes, change the number and type of monsters in any given location based on what's fun at the moment.

If the characters just had a big fight against some monsters and the next room has six more of them, feel free to cut them down to one. Oscillate between hard and easy encounters as you see fit. Mix up gameplay types as well. Maybe what appears like a fight is actually a conversation or some other way to bypass the situation.

Always have your hands on the dials.

Add Subquests & Cut What You Don't Like

As you run a published adventure, you're likely to get ideas of your own. Maybe one small throwaway location really grabs you and you want to add a whole subquest around it. Go crazy. Add your own small adventure in the middle if it feels cool to you. This might make the overall adventure longer but, just as we add our own quests, we can cut the parts of the published adventure that we don't dig. Move the MacGuffins around to change up the nature of the campaign if we need. Maybe that vital clue left in the published Medusa's garden fits better in the crypt of the forgotten king we decided to add ourselves.

Adding our Own Stories

As we read the plot of a published campaign, our own mind might wander off and start playing "what if". What if the mind flayers of the Id Ascendent traveled into the Underdark with they're dying elder brain and allied with Orcus to save it? What if the power of the endless night in Icewind Dale was actually caused by a crack in an elven sarcophagus that encased the elder evil Thruun in the bowels of the lost city of Ythryn? What if a githyanki armada was soon headed to Faerun to rid the land of its mind flayer influence?

Sometimes we read a published adventure and are disappointed it isn't something else. Make it something else. Go with your ideas. The adventure is yours now.

Mashup Multiple Adventures

My friend Jeff at the Tome Show loves to take multiple adventures and mash them together. What if you took Waterdeep Dragon Heist, Curse of Strahd, and Out of the Abyss and put their events into one campaign? Now your players have big choices they can make with big changes in the story depending on the path they follow. We needn't mash up whole adventures either. Instead we can take dungeons we like from one adventure, story elements we like from another, and an overland map we like from a third. We can shuffle all sorts of things from multiple adventures together. I wrote more about this in how to mash up Dragon of Icespire Peak and Lost Mine of Phandelver together.

Customized published adventures let us capitalize off of the tremendous investment publishers have put into these published adventures and still run campaigns that are all our own.

Related Articles

• The Case For Published Adventures
• Using Published Adventures
• Reading Published Adventures
• Choosing the Right Steps from the Lazy DM Checklist
• Converting Older D&D Adventures and Sourcebooks

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• Subscribe to the Sly Flourish newsletter
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• Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master
• Lazy DM's Workbook
• Fantastic Lairs
• Fantastic Adventures: Ruins of the Grendleroot
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Article copyright 2021 by Mike Shea of Sly Flourish.

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New to Sly Flourish? Start Here!

Sly Flourish Patron MonsterVTpilot asks "What is your ratio of preparation time vs. play time for your games personally? For every hour of play do you think we spend 3 hours to prepare? What do you think is a normal ratio."

Three hours per hour?? I certainly hope not.

For a video on this topic, see my YouTube video "How Long Does it Take to Prep a D&D Game?".

In April 2020 I posted a Twitter poll asking DMs how long they prepared for a roughly four-hour D&D game. Here are the results from 3,663 responses:

Response	% of total
About 30 minutes or less	10%
About an hour	33%
About two hours	28%
About three hours or more	29%

Just about a third of surveyed DMs spend three hours or more preparing on a four hour game. A little less than half spend an hour or less. Another quarter spend about two hours.

Personally, it takes me about 30 minutes to an hour to prepare for a 3 hour game using the eight steps from Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master and that feels about right to me. When I'm on my own and not livestreaming my preparation it usually takes about 30 minutes. That's assuming I'm in the middle of a published adventure I'm already running. This amount of prep-time changes depending on the type of game I'm running, where we are in that campaign, and what I've already prepared. If I'm running a single-session game from scratch, it could take one to two hours to get everything ready.

How Long Do YOU Need?

We each likely need a different amount of time to prep our games. There's no single right answer. Sometimes the platform on which we play takes more or less time. I whip things up quickly in Owlbear Rodeo but others love to build big multimedia experiences in Roll20 or Foundry and that takes a lot of time. If I want to set up a nice Dwarven Forge setup, I'm not whipping that up in 30 minutes. It's going to take a couple of hours.

There are, however, diminishing returns. I experimented by taking a full day preparing for a Ghosts of Saltmarsh campaign and saw these diminishing returns in action. Some things had a big impact on the game including reading the whole adventure and considering connections between the characters and the story of the adventure. Other things, like setting up music playlists and printing out big poster maps, offered little value for the time spent.

Regardless of how much time we spend prepping on our games, it behooves us to look at each part of our prep and ask ourselves how much better our game will be because of it. Often we're driven to prep more than we need. Sometimes what we prep doesn't help at all. Sometimes it makes the game worse — it gets in the way.

Which Steps are the Right Steps?

We each decide what most benefits our game. Of course, I believe in and use the eight steps from Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master and focus on the next game I'm going to run instead of what may happen in future sessions. Those steps work for me and seem to work for a lot of people. But each of us can ask ourselves what preparation makes for a great game and what does not to determine how long it takes us to prep our game.

Related Articles

• Spending a Whole Day Preparing a D&D Game
• 2016 D&D 5th Edition Dungeon Master Questionnaire
• Prepare a D&D Game in 15 Minutes
• Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition Facebook and Twitter Survey Results
• Choosing the Right Steps from the Lazy DM Checklist

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• Read more Sly Flourish articles
• Subscribe to the Sly Flourish newsletter
• Watch Sly Flourish's YouTube videos
• Support Sly Flourish on Patreon

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

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Article copyright 2021 by Mike Shea of Sly Flourish.

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New to Sly Flourish? Start Here!

When you're getting ready to run a new campaign, write up a single-page guide for your players to get them on board with the campaign and steer your campaign in the right direction.

For a video on this topic, see my Writing a Single Page D&D Campaign Guide YouTube video.

This single-page guide has many advantages:

• It helps players understand the world and the campaign in which they're going to play.
• It helps you focus on the most important parts of the campaign.
• It builds an agreement between you and the players about the type of game you're going to run.
• It gives the players information to help them build characters around the theme and focus of the campaign.

This article breaks down the details of a single-page campaign guide and goes hand-in-hand with the idea of running a session zero. Here are a handful of one-page campaign guide examples:

• Descent into Avernus Campaign One-pager
• Ghosts of Saltmarsh Campaign One-pager
• Eberron Second Mourning Campaign One-pager
• Rime of the Frostmaiden Campaign One-pager

Patrons of Sly Flourish get access to the Word template used to format these one-page campaign guides.

Keep It to One Page

We're going to be tempted to write out a big campaign bible for our game. Avoid that temptation. We're all busy. Our players are busy. The longer the guide, the less likely players read it. Even if you must include supplemental information, write up a single page guide covering everything the players should understand about the campaign. Keeping it down to a single page makes it far more digestable than a longer campaign guide.

The Campaign's Pitch

Hook the players with an evocative pitch. What is the single-sentence or short paragraph drawing them into the world? Make the pitch specific enough that the players understand the role of their characters in the campaign. As much as we don't want to reveal surprises, avoid being so vague that no one understands what it's actually about.

Examples from the WOTC hardcover adventures include:

• Draconic cults rise on the Sword Coast threatening to bring their goddess, Tiamat, into the world.
• You and your fellow adventures find yourself trapped in the gothic lands of Barovia under the watchful eye of the vampire lord Strahd.
• Typically secluded giants now threaten the villages and cities of the Sword Coast.
• Hellish cults rise in the lands surrounding the city of Elturel.
• An endless night has overtaken Icewind Dale isolating Ten Towns from the rest of Faerun and threatening its people with a frozen death.

What is the single-sentense hook grabbing onto your players' imaginations and drawing them into your campaign? Write that down first in your one-page campaign guide and then fill in a short paragraph on the theme of the campaign.

The Truths of the Campaign

What are the six truths of your campaign setting it apart from all other campaigns and worlds the players have played? These truths are known to the characters in the world. They're not secrets. These six truths help players understand how this campaign differs from others and helps them begin to scope out their characters.

You don't always need six. Shorter campaigns might only have two or three. You get to choose how many but don't go beyond six.

Here are five example truths for my Rime of the Frostmaiden campaign:

• The sun hasn't risen in Icewind Dale for two years.
• The two-year night has cut off the frozen north from the rest of the Sword Coast.
• The Children of Auril demand sacrifices from the people of Ten Towns in the Frostmaiden's name.
• Ancient and powerful secrets lie under the ice.
• Shadowy figures lurk in the mountains hammering upon strange black metal.

These truths refine the concept of the campaign in the players' minds. It shows them what matters, what's important, and what sort of character fits best.

Potential Factions or Patrons

If you enjoy starting your campaign focused around a patron or faction, offer up to three choices for potential patrons or factions. These patrons or factions connect the characters together and give them a clear source for the quests that drive the rest of the campaign. Being able to choose which patron or faction they prefer gives the players agency over the campaign. These choices come out in your session zero with the agreement that the group together determines one primary patron or faction.

Character Creation Guidelines & Houserules

Offer guidelines for character creation. What sources are allowed? What ability score generation method do you use? Do you have any important houserules the players should know about?

Most important, what key theme or bond should players wire into their character to connect them together and focus them on the campaign's theme?

Here's an example from my Eberron Second Mourning Campaign One-pager:

"You seek to travel with your band of companions, in cooperation, to prevent the second Mourning."

Note the reinforcement of cooperation. No loner edge-lords thank you very much.

Safety Tools and Themes

As part of our contract with our players we can describe our campaign's safety tools. I prefer a mix of "lines and veils" with descriptions of some expected lines and veils for this campaign along with a version of the X card I call "pause for a minute". The discussion of safety tools is an open conversation piece, of course, and can get further refined during your session zero. Update the guide with the players' described lines and veils as well and resend it out to the group so everyone is clear.

A Single Page to Steer the Campaign

One-page campaign guides help steer your entire campaign. Mixed with a solid session zero, they ensure players play characters focused on the campaign's themes, are built with the right drivers in their backgrounds, and join together in cooperation to engage in high adventures.

Related Articles

• Running Session Zeros
• Reinforce Cooperative Character Motivations
• Rime of the Frostmaiden Session Zero
• Session Zero of Storm King's Thunder
• Wolfgang Baur on Worldbuilding

Want More from Sly Flourish?

• Read more Sly Flourish articles
• Subscribe to the Sly Flourish newsletter
• Watch Sly Flourish's YouTube videos
• Support Sly Flourish on Patreon

Check Out Sly Flourish's Books

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

Send feedback to mike@mikeshea.net.

Article copyright 2021 by Mike Shea of Sly Flourish.

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New to Sly Flourish? Start Here!

Justin Alexander at the Alexandrian had an awesome article on Non-Focal Random Encounters. Justin defines these as random encounters that don't necessarily happen to the characters but to things the characters care about. Justin uses the jawa attack on Mando's ship in the Mandolorian as an example of a non-focal encounter.

Justin recommends building a list of the people or places the characters care about and rolling on that list to see if something happens there while the characters are elsewhere. It's another great way to make the world feel like a living breathing place.

There are lots of ways to use random encounters in different ways to make the world feel real. Here are some others I've enjoyed.

Past or Future Encounters

Instead of rolling random encounters for what happens to the characters right now, we can roll to see what sort of encounter previously happened along the path the characters travel. As the characters travel along a wild game trail, they might come to signs that a huge reptile crashed through the underbrush, smashing trees two-feet thick.

We can also indicate encounters that may happen in the future. The characters may hear the guttural calls of giants in the distance getting closer.

Using random encounters to show what has already happened and what may happen in the future gives the characters choices they don't otherwise typically get. Do they follow the huge lizard or leave it be? Do they set up an ambush for the coming giants or do they move along out of their path?

Joining Two Encounters

Instead of running into a single encounter, we can roll twice and have the characters arrive to witness two encounters already engaged with one another. A pack of ravenous ghouls may be swarming over a pair of cyclopses. A bunch of goblins may be on the losing side of a skirmish with some giant spiders currently cocooning them up high in the trees. Encounters like this give the characters an interesting situation and interesting choices. Do they save the goblins? Do they circle around the ghoul and giant frenzy?

Fixed + Random Encounters

Other times we may have an encounter we know is going to happen. The characters meet up with a vital NPC out near the elven ruins. When they arrive, however, perhaps that NPC's already awoke a tomb full of specters. Adding a random encounter to a fixed encounter changes the variables in ways even we didn't expect.

Squeezing More Value out of Random Tables

Random encounter tables have been part of D&D for half a century. Justin's idea of non-focal random encounters and the concepts of past, future, or combined random encounters give us tons of new ways to use these simple tables to make the world come alive for us and our players. We're squeezing ever more value out of the tables we've had in our hands for years. Give it a try.

Related Articles

• Run Meaningful Random Encounters
• Exploring Chult
• Three Things to Do While Traveling
• Random Creativity in Dungeons & Dragons
• Breaking Conventional Thought with Random Tables

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Article copyright 2021 by Mike Shea of Sly Flourish.

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New to Sly Flourish? Start Here!

This article is one of a series of articles covering the Wizards of the Coast hardcover D&D adventure Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden. The other articles include:

• Rime of the Frostmaiden Session Zero
• Running Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden Chapter 1
• Running Rime of the Frostmaiden Chapter 2

Like these articles, this article contains spoilers for Rime of the Frostmaiden.

Quick Checklist of Changes

Here's a quick checklist of the changes I recommend for chapters 3 and 4 of Rime of the Frostmaiden.

• Have Xardorok Sunblight launch the chardalyn dragon when the characters are soon to face him in the citadel instead of as soon as they arrive.
• Offer an alternative access path to enter Sunblight Fortress through the underdark.
• Connect Xardorok's madness with Auril instead of Asmodeus.
• Ignore the timeline of the chardalyn dragon's attack against Ten Towns. Choose yourself which towns get destroyed and which can be saved.
• If the characters ignore Sunblight Fortress, let them return to Ten Towns as its being attacked by the chardalyn dragon.

Narrowing the Focus

Chapter 3 and 4 of Rime of the Frostmaiden narrows the focus of the adventure from the wide range of areas and quests in chapters 1 and 2. Chapter 3 focuses on one location, Sunblight Citadel, while chapter 4 focuses on the attack of the chardalyn dragon on Ten Towns. Because the two chapters are so intertwined, I'm covering both of them in this single article.

Much of the Sunblight chapter can be run as-is. The whole complications of Grandolpha's attempt to usurp the power from Xardorok can be great fun and go in lots of different ways. In my own game, Grandolpha was convinced to marry one of Xardorok's sons to restart the dynasty without Xardorok himself involved.

In my other game, the characters never made it to Sunblight themselves, instead returning from Solstice island to find the dragon already attacking Ten Towns.

Underdark Access

The single access point to Sunblight Fortress is a narrow switchback path easily guarded and protected by a single dwarf with a snowball if they wanted to. Even though the guards are on Grandopha's side and let the characters in without trouble, the characters and players don't know this. Any reasonable adventurer would never walk up a switchback path at the base of a huge defended tower. Instead, they'd take a different path.

There is an alternate path to get into the citadel but it isn't included in the book: the underdark access. With a little help from other adventures or your own bit of homebrew, you can set up a pointcrawl journey through the underdark to reach this less-well-defended back door. You might even start the journey from the big shaft in the mines of Termalaine.

"I Did It 35 Minutes Ago"

Instead of having the chardalyn dragon fly off as soon as the characters arrive at the fortress, consider having it launch while the characters are still in the fortress. Maybe they hear the sounds of something huge moving as the duergar lift the dragon to the roof and let it free. Maybe not. Either way, when the characters face Xardorok atop the roof of Sunblight Fortress, he lets them know they are too late. The dragon has been unleashed and there's nothing they can do about it.

This gives the players a chance to crawl Sunblight without feeling like they have to turn right around again as soon as they just got to the front doors which feels like a lame bit of back-and-forth travel.

Also, instead of Xardorok being duped by Asmodeus, have him be duped by Auril, the cult of Auril, or some other powerful villain or entity you already have in your Frostmaiden campaign. This way you're not introducing an entirely disconnected entity into the story. In my own game, because I dropped an elder evil named Thruun in a huge sarcophagus in the lowest reaches of Ythryn, I connected Xardorok to this elder evil through a twisted priest of Thruun feeding Xardorok bad information.

Choose Your Own Chardalyn Attack

The book has a big complicated timeline for how long it takes the chardalyn dragon to reach Ten Towns and how fast the characters can arrive. Ignore this. Choose which towns can be saved and which are destroyed by the time the characters arrive. Give the characters the agency to come up with creative ways to get back to the city. Maybe their ghostly friends are the ones to call on Velynne Harpell's aid and maybe her undead-direwolf-led sleds can make tremendous time across the frozen plains.

Likewise, if the characters travel off in other directions after a fair number of warnings that the duergar are building some kind of war machine, let the characters return to Ten Towns with it under attack by the chardalyn dragon. The world doesn't wait for their arrival. If, for example, you put all three main paths in front of the characters; exploring Grimskalle, exploring the Caves of Hunger, and exploring Sunblight Fortress; and they choose one of the other two, that's enough time for the duergar to launch their war machine. It makes the world feel more alive — maybe except for the people of Dougan's Hole.

Tuning the Chardalyn Dragon

Depending on your intent, you may want to tune the statistics for the chardalyn dragon. In my case, I turned it into a legendary monster by giving it legendary resistance and letting it make claw attacks as a legendary action. For two legendary actions it could bat its wings and attempt to push characters away before taking flight and landing nearby. Customize your chardalyn dragon to suit your game.

Fine Tuning an Otherwise Fine Chapter

These changes are relatively easy to implement and, overall, the chapter isn't too difficult to wrangle into shape. With a few changes to how the characters arrive, when the dragon departs, and a few other bits of fine tuning, chapters 3 and 4 can be a lot of fun for you and your players.

Related Articles

• Frostmaiden Chapter 5: Auril's Abode
• Running Rime of the Frostmaiden Chapter 2
• Running Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden Chapter 1
• Rime of the Frostmaiden Session Zero
• A Guide to WOTC D&D Published Adventures

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Article copyright 2021 by Mike Shea of Sly Flourish.

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New to Sly Flourish? Start Here!

Matt A., a Sly Flourish patron, asks:

"What motivational advice would you give a DM five minutes before their game starts? What's your pep talk?"

Ok, here it goes.

It's five minutes to game time. You've done your prep. You've got your materials. Or maybe you don't, but eff it, you're doing it live.

You're about to engage in an amazing experience no other creature in the known universe can do. You're about to sit with your friends (online or in real life) and build a universe together. It may be a small universe, or a piece of a universe you and your friends already started creating, but it doesn't exist now and in a few hours it will.

You can do anything in this universe. You can explore crashed planar vessels or explore ancient cities buried under miles of ice. You get to save entire nations from the tyranny of the dragon queen. There are no limits to what might happen.

And you get to do this with your friends. You get to be kids again! You get to fight monsters and explore cobwebbed dungeons and save the world from hideous mutated giant rats. You get to do that together and share the stories for the rest of your life.

Don't lose yourself peering into the vastness of these yet-to-be universes. Start small. Start strong. Hook them into adventure. Think about the characters. Give them interesting people to meet, places to explore, secrets to discover, monsters to fight, and treasure to acquire.

Lean on your friends around the table. They love you. They want to have a good time. They're not there to judge you or criticize you. They want to get lost for a while. They want to see their characters do awesome stuff. Be fans of their characters. Listen to the players. Smile. Laugh.

You're going to do great.

Related Articles

• Creative Mind Exercises for D&D
• Getting Started with Dungeons & Dragons
• Your Most Important Game
• Going There
• The Emotional Investment of Dungeon Mastering

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• Read more Sly Flourish articles
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• Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master
• Lazy DM's Workbook
• Fantastic Lairs
• Fantastic Adventures: Ruins of the Grendleroot
• Fantastic Adventures

Send feedback to mike@mikeshea.net.

Article copyright 2021 by Mike Shea of Sly Flourish.

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