by W. Eric Martin

If you liked the sound of the co-operative dice and card game Thanos Rising: Avengers Infinity War, but didn't care whether Thanos snapped away a bunch of superheroes or not, perhaps you will instead find yourself drawn to Star Wars: Dark Side Rising, announced today by The OP for release in Q4 2019 — albeit only in Europe, Middle Eastern, and African regions due to licensing restrictions.

As for the game's setting, here's an overview:

Star Wars: Dark Side Rising is a co-operative card and dice game inspired by the events leading up to and through Star Wars: A New Hope.

In the game, players must work together to recruit rebels and prevent the construction of the ultimate weapon, the original Death Star. Each player starts with an individual board that indicates the Rebel cell they are leading: Intelligence, Leadership, Support or Tactical. The player boards depict the Base of Operations — Tatooine, Alderaan, Yavin 4, or Lothal — and team leader (starting character asset) for each player: Captain Cassian Andor, Leia Organa, Luke Skywalker, and Hera Syndulla.

Players must coordinate efforts to recruit iconic characters, such as C-3PO, R2-D2, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Admiral Raddus and Han Solo, and organize their cells to thwart the Empire's rise to galactic domination.

The main game board features a custom-sculpted 3D Darth Vader bust that commands the Imperial operatives and actions with orders to wipe out the Rebels and to make the Death Star operational. Meanwhile, in a race against time, players must be one with the Force as they direct their Rebel efforts across different locations in the galaxy, including Scarif, Eadu and Jedha. To restore freedom to the galaxy, the Rebels must defeat enough sinister agents before the Empire can either complete construction of the lethal space station or eliminate too many Rebel assets.

Star Wars: Dark Side Rising retails for US$50 (in whatever currency is appropriate for the regions in which it's sold), and The OP plans to demo the game at UK Game Expo in early June 2019.

Which franchise might rise next, do you think?

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by W. Eric Martin

Tokyo Game Market runs May 25-26, and if you plan to attend, you're probably already in Japan or on an airplane traveling there.

While BGG is missing out on TGM this time due to us hosting our own event — BGG.Spring, which opens the same day — I've been opening dozens of tabs with new games that will be featured at that show and sending myself link after link after link of new games to check out. It's overwhelming, especially since each page I open typically leads to still more pages as I discover a JP version of an existing game and want to create a version listing for that, then yet another new game that has a co-publisher which also needs a new page, etc.

All that said, here's a tiny sampling of what will be at TGM, much of it courtesy of Jon Power, who helps encourage submissions to the BGG database by JP game designers and publishers and whose initials are (coincidentally?) JP:

• なつめも (Natsumemo) is a roll-and-write game for 2-6 players from 宮野 華也 (Kaya Miyano) and cosaic that has the most delightful setting ever:

"なつめも" (pronounced "natsumemo") means "summer memo", and it's the practice of children keeping a summer holiday diary.

Natsumemo is a flip & write game with a summer vacation theme. Each player receives a special calendar sheet and a hidden sheet, pencils and dice. Each round, the active player flips the card of the week and declares the day on which the event will occur. All players choose to join or not join the event all at once, and if they join, write them on their calendars. Of course, you cannot take part in the events of the day if you already filled that date on your calendar.

The biggest feature is the special bond that grows between the characters who participated in the same event. Players plan the events in order to develop friendships and score more points. "Oh, only Hana and Vivian and I are free on Tuesday, so if I suggest going to swim in the sea on Tuesdays and Wednesday, maybe only I can deepen the bonds with the two girls ...!" This is how boys and girls develop serious feelings and judgments are born one after another. Furthermore, "I was the only one who went to the sea when I tried to open the lid!" These goofy developments, the emotions that come from them are the most enjoyable!

Another feature is homework. Players must balance having fun with friends, and getting their summer homework done, too. If you do not reach a certain number of pages by the end of the holidays, you get deducted points. You will end up cramming all alone the last week, instead of deepening your new friendships. This reality is unbearable.

Saigo, who translates Game Market reports for BGG and who tweets about JP games, notes that a Chinese-language edition of the game is likely in the works, so perhaps someone will sign on for an English-language edition as well. We'll see!




• エレガンツ (Elegantu) is a Mao-like card game from Osamu Iijima and ボボン・ボン・ボジワーイ連邦 (The Bobon Bon Bojiwaai Union) in which players attempt to play cards and gain points, but they don't know the "rules for etiquette" that are in effect this game. They'll discover these rules only during play when someone stops them (based on a rules card in their hand) and penalizes the player for doing something wrong. You must remember and follow all of the rules in order to play well!

Elegantu is a second edition of the game, with some English on the cards, whereas the first edition in 2018 had only Japanese text.

• Leiden 1593: ライデン-チューリップ栽培の始まり- (Leiden 1593: The Beginning of Tulip Cultivation) is a speculation game from designer ハイライフ (high-life) and publisher Spieldisorder, which released the David Bowie-themed Across the Universe in 2017. Here's a summary of the gameplay:

As tulip merchants, players reclaim the garden, raise tulips, and ship them out. With the help of hired artisans, they aim to be the wealthiest merchant.

At the beginning of the game, several cards are laid on the table to form the tulip garden. Each card represents 2x3 squares of garden, which is single-colored or double-colored to represent species of tulip. Each turn, you may place a garden card, build your hut, or upgrade your hut into a house:

—When you place a garden card, you must partially overlay it on existing garden; the overlaid color of tulip becomes rare, so therefore its market value is raised.
—When you build a hut or a house, you discard several cards and place the building on the garden. You may hire an artisan when you have built a house. Each artisan has a special ability.

At the end of the game, for each color, you score victory points equal to the market value of that color multiplied by the number of squares your buildings occupy on that color. Then add some bonus depending on your buildings' location. The highest scorer wins.

• Moon Base is a two-player game from Naotaka Shimamoto and itten, with players placing ownership rings on the craters of the moon. Each crater you place eliminates the possible placement of other craters, although as you build up craters, you can place other ones on top of them in a second or third layer. You're trying to place residential zones and resource facilities to score points.




• At TGM in May 2019, itten will also release Tokyo Highway: Cars & Buildings, an expansion for either Tokyo Highway base game that allows you to add four new building obstacles to the playing area, while giving each player a set of ten vehicles that range from the tiny cars of the original game to buses and tractor trailers.

• Finally, for this post at least, is a game that seems tailor-made for my tastes: συνομιλία, a.k.a. シノミリア, a.k.a. Sinomilia by designer Kengo Ōtsuka and シノミリアプロジェクト (Shinomiria Project). "Sinomilia" is the Greek word for "conversation", and this two-player game exists as a conversation of sorts carried out via gameplay. Here's a summary of how it works:

Each player receives a set of cards numbered 0-9 and fifteen chips. At the start of a round, each player places one of their cards face down to predict how many chips will be played that round. Players then take turns, and on a turn you can either place a chip in the playing area or pass. Do you add chips to get closer to your prediction at the risk of losing more of your chips, or will you pass and let your opponent control the conversation?

Once either both players have passed or a total of nine chips have been played, the round ends and players reveal their cards. If your card is closer than your opponent's to the total number of chips played, you win and collect all the chips played, plus two additional chips from your opponent. If the two cards are equally close to the total, whoever last took an action loses and whoever passed first wins. Play multiple rounds to determine the winner.

From the description, Sinomilia sounds as minimalist as The Mind, sounds like something that shouldn't work — yet I can already imagine how a round might play out, with subsequent rounds building on what's already happened. I need the full rules to know for sure what's going on and how the rounds relate to one another and how someone wins, but I'm already in. Now I just need to figure out how to get a copy...

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by W. Eric Martin

In just three weeks on June 12, BoardGameGeek will launch its livestream broadcast from the 2019 Origins Game Fair, so if you can't make it to that show, you can turn to the BGG channel on Twitch.tv and watch the new and upcoming games being presented on camera by their designers and publishers.

To check out which games we aim to feature on camera, you can peruse BGG's Origins 2019 Preview, which now tops two hundred listings and which should grow quite a bit longer over the next 2.5 weeks as I'm poking and re-poking publishers who haven't yet responded to my requests for info. I want to ensure that those going to Origins 2019 will know about as many games that will be there as possible, while also getting folks scheduled for demo slots ahead of time.

If you will be at Origins, you might consider preordering games via our Origins 2019 Preview for pick-up at the show. As I noted in early May 2019, BGG has implemented a convention preview preorder pick-up system starting with this preview, and we intend to make this same system available in the Gen Con 2019 Preview, the SPIEL '19 Preview, the BGG.CON 2019 Preview (yes, we'll have one this year), and pretty much every con preview to come. How does this system work for you the user? Chaz Marler, who developed much of the preorder system, explains in this video:


Youtube Video

For those who want the text version, scan the Origins 2019 Preview for titles available for preorder, click on them to add them to your cart, pay for the stuff, receive a confirmed order in your GeekMarket account, then bring proof of purchase to Origins 2019 and show it to the publisher to pick up your stuff. Specific pick-up details might vary depending on the conditions that publishers set up when they establish preorders. No one has yet demanded that you hand over a jar of Nutella upon pick-up, but I can imagine it happening at some point.

If you want to see only those items available for preorder on our Origins 2019 Preview, you can do so here. By preordering, you know the item will be there waiting for you, the publisher gets a better idea of how many copies to bring to the show, and BGG earns a 5% commission on the sale. It's a virtuous circle in which everyone wins!

In a thread posted by BGG owner Scott Alden about this preorder system, people asked whether we would use this system for items sold through the BGG Store, especially for items being sold at SPIEL '19. The answer right now is maybe.

Since I started creating con previews on BGG in 2011, I've focused on them including only new releases and games being demoed. Some publishers have asked about being able to list everything in their back catalog, especially when they have older material that might be appropriate for clearance, but I'm hesitant to add all of those games because it would be difficult to differentiate new titles from old. Ideally we can create a second type of convention preview listing that can be hidden by users who don't want to see such things, but available to those who do. I can see lots of uses for such a system as long as it doesn't detract from the previews main purpose — letting people see what will be at a show.

One improvement we are definitely doing, though, is adding a second type of preorder to the SPIEL '19 Preview. In addition to being able to preorder games for pick up at the publisher's booth in Essen, you will be able to preorder games for pick up at BGG.CON 2019 in November. To do this, we are partnering with Funagain Games, which used to provide this service through its website. Funagain will handle fulfillment of these orders and as with publisher preorders, BGG provides the conduit through which the sale happens.

All of these preorders are up to the publishers, mind you. They can sign up to place preorders in our convention previews or not as they desire. Ideally this system provides a benefit for them, both in terms of having a better prediction of sales and in handling less cash at shows. If publishers aren't handling thousands of Euros at SPIEL '19 but are instead fulfilling orders completed and paid for ahead of time, then that reduces their potential losses to theft during the show — and given the multiple thefts that took place at SPIEL '18, that might be all the incentive they need. We'll see what happens in the months ahead, including whether we can expand the convention listings beyond only what's new. Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

It would be time-intensive to carry out this challenge, but at a future convention, I'd like to see someone set up a gauntlet of mystery games, then invite people to play these games and guess the designers.

To do this challenge properly, you'd have to choose somewhat obscure games from famous designers, not to mention making your own versions of these games with handmade components or public domain art so that someone couldn't recognize a title they've seen in passing; alternatively, you could liberate prototype games from the designers' homes so that no one would play something they've possibly played before. Conducting this challenge might take hours, given the number of games on hand and their playing time, but I'd be curious to discover whether game fans could find a Pfister or recognize a Rosenberg in a crowded field.

This thought experiment came to mind after playing Wolfgang Warsch's Die Tavernen im Tiefen Thal, a big box game for 2-4 players that German publisher Schmidt Spiele released in March 2019, and finding it similar in spirit to Warsch's 2018 The Quacks of Quedlinburg (and more distantly his games The Mind, Illusion, Brikks, and Ganz schön clever/Doppelt so clever), despite not sharing any game mechanisms with those designs.

When playing any of these Warsch designs, you'll experience huge highs and lows driven by large doses of luck, whether it's rolling exactly the dice you need in Brikks or GSC/DSC, flopping sequential cards in just the right order in The Mind, pulling all the right tokens from your ingredient bag in Quacks, or filling your tavern with the perfect combination of cards in Die Tavernen im Tiefen Thal, which translates as "The Taverns of the Deep Valley" and which will be released in English in Q4 2019 by North Star Games.




In the game, each player has their own tavern, which includes three tables, small storage areas for money and beer, a barrel of your custom house brew, a cashbox, a monk at the bar, and a beer supplier outside your door. You each have a deck of cards that consists of seven regular customers, a waitress, an extra table, and another beer supplier.

At the start of a round, you receive a bonus associated with that round — a treasured guest, your choice of a dish washer or a waitress, etc. — then you each flip over cards from your deck until all the tables of your tavern are full. The guests, sad and introspective, all want to sit on their own, so you might flip only three cards and be done; alternatively you might reveal and place all the cards in your deck other than guests, then finally fill the tables afterward. Mostly you'll fall between these extremes, just you do in Quacks when drawing ingredients from your personal bag.

After each player fills their tables, you each roll four white dice, place them on a serving platter in front of you, take turns drafting one die from your platter, then pass the platters to the left before you each draft another die, and so on until you've drafted four dice to accompany any additional colored dice brought to you by the waitresses. You use these dice to serve beer to guests (which requires placing a 1 or 2 for your deck's initial guests), get beer from beer suppliers (placing a 1 or 6), get advice from the monk (placing a 5), or dipping into your cashbox or drawing a beer from your house supply (placing any one die for each).

By drawing beer or getting beer from passing merchants and suppliers, you can attract new guests to your tavern, whether one of the slightly better guests from a fixed stack or one of four random guests in a drafting line. These guests have beer costs from 3-8, and you can acquire at most one guest a round — but any guest you do get is placed on top of your deck, which means they will visit your tavern next turn. Be ready for them!


For mint lemonade, you must come to my house instead of a tavern

By serving guests or dipping into the cashbox, you get doubloons, with which you can improve your tavern — whether by hiring beer merchants or dish washers, acquiring another table, or upgrading your tavern permanently. Most of these improvements are on cards that (like guests) you'll place on top of your deck so that you can first use them in the next round.

Permanent upgrades are what you're aiming for in the long term as they are not cards that you'll use once, then place in your discard pile, not knowing when you'll see them again. You can add an extra table, which means you'll seat one more guest, which means you'll likely place even more cards in your tavern and therefore do more stuff overall. You can upgrade the beer supplier so that you receive two beer for each die you place instead of only one or you can enlarge your safe so that you can store up to five doubloons from one round to the next instead of only two (and you want to store doubloons so that you can purchase other upgrades more easily).

What's equally important to improving your tavern for future rounds is that each upgrade attracts a noble in town, with you placing that noble card on top of your deck. I'm not sure why a noble would care that you hired a dish washer permanently instead of having only temp help, or that you have a larger cashbox that will allow you take three doubloons from it instead of only one, but we'll assume they're all simple-minded and move on.
Most cards that you add to your deck are worth 1-4 points, but a noble is worth 10 points, so you want to attract as many of them as possible. Nobles function as guests, so you can serve them beer in the future and make money from them, but mostly you care about them only for points — and as in Quacks, you can have giant turns in Tavernen in which you upgrade three things at once and add three nobles (and 30 points) to your deck or in which you serve twenty beers, with you being able to attract 1-3 nobles directly with 9-18 beer. As I said, simple-minded.


Using the first two expansions

At other times, your turn might be largely a bust. You place only a few guests, pull only one beer merchant (who supplies only a single beer and can take no dice), and...nothing else. You have a 4 guest and 5 guest who would place lots of coins in hand if you could supply them beer — but no 4s and 5s are rolled that round (and you lack the dish washers needed to increase the number on a die). Again, this sensation mirrors Quacks as in that game sometimes you draw all the wrong ingredient tokens and bust for the round, which sets you back against everyone else who is landing both points and money instead of only one of those.

You can mitigate bad luck in a few ways — having the aforementioned dish washers; using one of the three treasured guests you receive to clear your tavern and start placing cards anew — but you can't eliminate bad luck completely, and you won't necessarily know when to use a guest until you've played the game through and see what can happen when over the course of its eight rounds. You want to buy additions to your tavern each round and attract a new guest each round so that all of your growth compounds over time, but you can't be sure that any of your many, many decisions will be correct until things play out in the future, and maybe the luck of the dice does you in anyway, even though your choices seem ideal.

To live out the game's high highs — in this case the thrill of putting together a huge turn — you need to risk having low lows as well, just as sometimes you lose lives repeatedly in The Mind by sequential card plays not going your way or you fail in Illusion by cards being only one percentage point off. This high luck/high thrill combination seems evident across Warsch's designs, and ideally you as a player experience enough of those unpredictable highs that you can shrug off the lows and still feel like playing again.

I've played Die Tavernen im Tiefen Thal four times on a review copy from Schmidt Spiele: twice with the base game, once with the first expansion, and once with the first two expansions. The game comes with four expansions in all — called "modules 2-5", with the base game being "module 1" for some reason — and you must use all earlier expansions when adding one to play.

These expansions add new twists to gameplay, with the first expansion adding schnapps to your menu and giving you new guests in the first five rounds that you can use each in one of two ways by serving them schnapps. The second expansion lets you earn reputation points based on the lower amount of the beer or money you earn in a round, with reputation earning you schnapps and nobles; bards become another tavern improvement option, with their performances increasing your reputation. The third expansion gives you variable starting decks, and the fourth expansion gives each player a signature book that newly arriving guests "sign", which gives you a variety of bonuses.

All of these expansions add rules and fiddliness to the game, and the base game already has a dense twelve-page rulebook, which can be a lot to absorb, despite the gameplay itself being simple. Tavernen is an ideal game to learn by playing, preferably from someone who already knows the game so that you can skip the long rule descriptions and get right into the game, but of course that won't be possible for most people. Perhaps my video overview, which goes into more detail than what I described above, will be enough to kickstart your game-playing experience...


Youtube Video Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

The Spiel des Jahres — Germany's "game of the year" award — turns forty in 2019, the award having first come into existence in 1979 with a list of nominees that included Sid Sackson's Acquire and Sly, Alex Randolph's Twixt, the electronic games Simon by Ralph Baer and Merlin by Bob and Holly Doyle, and eventual winner Hare & Tortoise by David Parlett.

For its first few awards, despite the "Jahres" in the award's name, the jury of journalists who ran the SdJ selected nominees that had been released within the past few years rather than only the year immediately preceding — a practice that makes sense given that the award was meant to shine a spotlight on modern games for an audience of casual players that might not have been paying attention to everything that was being released.

These days the purpose of the award remains the same — highlight and suggest games appropriate for an audience of casual players — but the jury focuses solely on games released in Germany within the past twelve months. From my understanding, a game needs to be available in a German edition prior to the end of March to be considered. This cutoff date gives the jury members enough time to play potential nominees and consider them against one another before settling on three nominees in what is now three categories: the original Spiel des Jahres (SdJ), the Kinderspiel des Jahres (KidJ) for children's game of the year, and the Kennerspiel des Jahres (KedJ) for enthusiast's game of the year, that is, for those already comfortable with learning and playing new games.

As part of its fortieth anniversary, jury chairman Harald Schrapers attended an exhibit about the SdJ at the Deutsches SPIELEmuseum in Chemnitz, Germany and announced the SdJ nominees during a live broadcast on Facebook:

• Just One, by Ludovic Roudy and Bruno Sautter from Repos Production (video overview)
• LAMA, by Reiner Knizia from AMIGO (video overview)
• Werwörter, by Ted Alspach from Bézier Games (and in Germany from Ravensburger) (video overview)

In commentary on the nominees, Schrapers pointed out that the three nominees are all small games that you can learn and play almost immediately. LAter in his commentary, Schrapers writes, "We now have a large number of titles on the table that are very high quality compared to decades past. Of the games that the ten jurors have played intensively over the last twelve months, probably more than one hundred would have been a candidate for the leaderboard in the 1980s."

Aside from these nominations, the SdJ jury recommended the following six titles: Belratti, Dizzle, Imhotep: The Duel, Krasse Kacke, Reef, and Sherlock, a series of three standalone games from GDM Games that were released in Germany by ABACUSSPIELE: Sherlock: Death on the 4th of July, Sherlock: Last Call, and Sherlock: Tomb of the Archaeologist.

Note that the Spiel des Jahres award is primarily aimed at family gamers, i.e., those who play games but aren't heavily into the gaming scene.




Nominations for the Kennerspiel des Jahres went to:

• Carpe Diem, by Stefan Feld from alea (video overview)
• Detective, by Ignacy Trzewiczek from Portal Games (video overview)
• Wingspan, by Elizabeth Hargrave from Stonemaier Games (and in Germany from Feuerland Spiele) (video overview)

The SdJ jury recommended four other titles at the Kennerspiel level: Architects of the West Kingdom, Lowlands, Newton, and Paper Tales. The winners of the Spiel and Kennerspiel des Jahres will be announced in Berlin, Germany on July 22, 2019.




The titles nominated for Kinderspiel des Jahres 2019 are:

• Fabulantica, by Marco Teubner from Pegasus Spiele
• Go Gecko Go!, by Jürgen Adams from Zoch (video overview)
• Tal der Wikinger, by Marie and Wilfried Fort from HABA

The Kinderspiel des Jahres jur, which differs from the SdJ/KedJ jury, also recommended seven other titles: Bauernhof Bande, Concept Kids: Animals, Magic Maze Kids, Monster Match, Monster-Bande, Octopus, and Voll verwackelt.

The winner will be announced in Hamburg, Germany on June 24, 2019, roughly one month prior to the winners of the other awards.


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by Shaun McMillan

I've heard it said that the easy way to start designing a game is to begin with a good base mechanism. The horrendous alternative approach that I most often follow is to start with a theme, then try to find the mechanisms that make that theme work.

The logic of starting with a simple mechanism sounds reasonable. It's something you can quickly make into a prototype and start testing. The sooner you can test your game, the sooner you'll get feedback from others and the sooner you'll know whether you have a marketable game. If strangers enjoy playing a game that is hand-written on a few index cards, uses a modified poker deck, or features a large geometric board with a few dice or shuffling thrown in, then surely thousands of Kickstarter enthusiasts will pay for the opportunity to play the same game with art, theme, and a little hype, right? It's a simple, straightforward, ideal route to success. Sounds awesome — why not start now?

The problem, in reality, is that a game with only one mechanism will not hold someone's attention for more than three rounds. It quickly becomes predictable, so you need a second mechanism to make the game a little more dynamic — but even with two mechanisms, you still have a game in which the choices you should make are pretty obvious. You really need three mechanisms all interacting with each so that unexpected layers of meta-gameplay emerge that players could not have predicted simply by knowing the base rules.

Ideally two of these mechanisms will be familiar to players or similar to other popular games, and one would be truly innovative or unique. This way the game is an easy sell. It would then have enough familiarity for it to find its true audience (those who like other popular games with these mechanisms would be drawn in by hearing a new game has the same mechanism), and your one new innovative mechanism would be the hook that leaves a little mystery to pique their curiosity. This is why most new games are a modified improvement of some other game from its genre.

Introducing too many new innovations too quickly can be overwhelming to players. As a megagame designer, I am speaking from experience. Many board game enthusiasts know what designer board games are, but are familiar with megagames. My audience is mostly high school and college students. Many of them don't even know what a designer board game is, so introducing them to a political science simulation that combines designer board game mechanisms with tabletop RPG mechanisms and LARP style theatrical roleplaying is completely overwhelming. For a little literature on this, you might find the books The Creative Curve and The Blue Ocean Strategy good to read. Both of them make the argument that when innovating and trying to be successful in a market, you want to be a little ahead of the curve on a rising trend, but not so far out that you are ahead of your time.

Okay, so let's start with a dynamic set of at least three mechanisms, two of which are familiar. Still sounds pretty reasonable right?

My Achievements to Date

After designing ALLIANCE: The Ultimate World Leader Political Science MegaGame, a game for 8-72 players that takes at least two hours to play, with my game design class of high school students, I decided to try something a little smaller, so I then successfully Kickstarted, then designed — yes, in this order as I prefer to do things backwards — from 2015-2016. Great Boy: The Game, which was based on the rules from T.I.M.E Stories, taught students how to understand a specific story from the Bible. Most of my games are educational because I am first and foremost a teacher. I became a game designer only because I saw that students learn better from simulations than they do from lectures.

But even my Bible Study simulation game took two to three hours of gameplay if you played the full version that included the optional social deduction mechanisms. My audience complained that the game was too long, and the rules too overwhelming to learn. (Most of them knew only Monopoly and Poker card games.)




Then I made a microgame slightly more complicated than Love Letter but just as short. This game simulated David hiding from King Saul.

Since then I have made another strategy card game called Conspiracy for 2-9 players in which you can choose who you want to ally with, and who you want to conspire against or betray. Many can win together, but one must die. It was my first non-educational game, but it's a lot of fun. I also created a sequel to my original megagame called ALLIANCE Last Days in which up to one hundred players are given four hours to bring the world back from the abyss of the Apocalypse.

Obligatory Shameless Self-Promotion

Starting May 19, 2019, I will be selling eighty tickets for a game of ALLIANCE Last Days that will take place at Gen Con 2019. You can see more about this game and my other ones on this website.

Okay, now that credibility has been established and all business aside, let's get back to avoiding the straightforward easy paths when designing games.




My Least Efficient Tried-and-True Fun Technique for Making a Game that Works: Take The Scenic Route, Not the Short Cut

So after designing four-hour megagames that can fit one hundred players as well as short fast strategy card games what have I learned? What actually works when designing a game? Here are a couple of the tips I've learned:

Play games. Admire their mechanisms and admire their systems, but keep in mind that what we really love about games is the emotional experiences that emerge from those mechanisms. Designing games is a lot of work, and very few of us are really making any money from it, so it should be fun — not work.

Designing experiences is fun, so start by dreaming about the epic experience that you want to emerge from your mechanisms, not the mechanisms themselves. I like and want to make games in which players have to build trust between each other, then feel the tension of not wanting to betray that trust, but having such an overwhelming sense of desire to reach a morally justifiable achievement that they find themselves choosing to betray that trust. Or maybe you want a game in which no matter how much of a lead the winning player has they still feel fear that the losing player's big gamble could result in their own very personal humiliation at losing that huge lead at the very last second. These emotional experiences are what we remember and live to tell others about after the game. This is what sells games. This is what motivates us to make games. Start with the emotions.

This emotional experience you are designing for will not emerge from mechanisms that don't exist, so now I have to research like crazy, playing every game that I think might have the mechanisms I need to create this experience. Maybe I can combine some of the mechanisms from Dead of Winter with the mechanisms of Pandemic, and possibly even a little bit from the Fallout video game. This is how I designed ALLIANCE Last Days.

Now I'm working on a standalone expansion to ALLIANCE Last Days in which five different factions are all investigating Ground Zero. It borrows some decksploration mechanisms from T.I.M.E. Stories, a deck-building mechanism from Shadowrun: Crossfire, and a little from The Grizzled. This is how I work. I am so excited to create that overwhelmingly emotional experience that it gives me the motivation to do the research required. It's not the easy fast way to make games. It's the long scenic route, but it works for me.




I took the short easy path once, starting with a couple of simple mechanisms when I designed Conspiracy. The basic idea was that it would be a simple cloak-and-dagger strategy game like Coup (excluding the bluffing mechanism, which is really what makes that game fun), but with the simple twist that you always have the option to give away your secret role card at the end of your turn. This meant the odds were only 50/50 that a player still had their secret role card after they used it to stab you.

This was the fastest I ever designed a game, but I knew that this mechanism combined with secret alliance mechanisms would create the kind of emotional experience that I love about social deduction games. I got very lucky that the base mechanisms worked from right out of the gate. The only real issue was making those mechanisms tighter and not so clunky. This leads me to one of the biggest lessons I've learned from making games:

Begin with the excitement of designing the game you want it to be, but finish with the game that the game wants to be

2. Player Experience = Emotions

The player experience can best be described with emotion words or feelings. I want one player to feel betrayed. I want the players to feel the immense pressure of having to make difficult choices with horrible tradeoffs. I want them to feel morally calloused. I want my players to feel drunk on power. This player will be blinded by their ambition and shocked when a weak player humiliates them. They will feel a sense of mystery as they each have only partial information and feel pressured because they have to make critical choices in a timely manner based on faulty information. They will project a sense of false confidence by bluffing.

1. Mechanisms = Actions

Mechanisms, on the other hand, can best be described with action words. In order to introduce an element of randomness, players will shuffle cards or roll dice. They will have to choose which bonus they want. They will have to discard the card after they use it as their action.

This is backwards in the sense that emotional depth emerges from simple mechanisms, so to start with emotions and make them a priority I have to use what I call the shotgun approach with mechanisms. Try tens or hundreds of mechanical ideas until the experience you're designing for emerges from the mix. You are like Edison trying hundreds of different metal filaments until you find exactly the right one that will efficiently turn electricity into artificial light. This method is neither fast nor efficient, but it is the only way I really enjoy the process.

3. Adjust Your Dials: Information and Power Values

The third thing you need is to dole out information and to hold information back. But this is simply a dial you will crank up or turn down to facilitate balance between the other parts of the game. It's like the purchase cost of any card or its power value. You don't start with these values; at first you throw in somewhat arbitrary numbers, then you keep modifying them until they seem to create some asymmetric balance (at least in the kind of games I design).

You will have only a wild notion of what you think could make for a playable game. It might work with the initial mechanisms and values you first throw together, but more likely it will be wildly broken or uninteresting — and often both.

But that's okay because as long as some part of it seems interesting, then you can throw in or take out mechanisms randomly or try different modifications of the rules until the game becomes the game that it was meant to be. You have to let the game mature and sacrifice many of the initial groundbreaking ideas you thought would form the identity of the game. It's like raising a child. Raise it according to its own individuality once you give birth to your game. Converse with the game through playtesting. Find what works for the game. Ultimately, it should create one novel emotionally thematic experience.

For me, the emotionally thematic experience takes priority over clever mechanisms. If it comes down to it, I must sacrifice clever mechanisms for the greater emotional experience. Maybe you thought your son would grow up to become a great pitcher, but as it turns out he wants to play soccer. If he has the potential to be a good soccer player or have a lot of fun trying, then celebrate because your game loves sports.

This could also be said for theme, but anyone reading this article will already be familiar with the "theme should match mechanisms" message.

There is yet one more method I have used to make games. As you might have noticed earlier, I like to start with my favorite games as a template and turn them into the games I wanted to make.




My Painfully Backwards Four-Step Technique for Turning Your Favorite Game Into an Entirely New Game

I love Dead of Winter. I like the weight of the box created by the overwhelming number of counters. I like the stupid simplicity with which the mechanisms simulate a personal dramatic narrative. I like the severity of the meanest twelve-sided dice I have ever rolled in any game I have ever played. I even like the art. (I am a rare species of game designer who actually draws, paints, and designs all of my own graphics. I don't care for maybe 80% of the board games I've played, and I like the art of even fewer of those games.)

I also really like Coup. I like short cloak-and-dagger strategy games, social deduction games, and deep, long narrative games, and almost nothing in-between. I like learning games and admiring their systems, but I don't care for just playing them.

I also really like — and don't worry as I am getting somewhere with this — T.I.M.E Stories. Well, I like how they turned a linear narrative into a playable game, but I hate their narratives. Their mechanisms are also quite shallow, but at least their choices and exploration are really good. Basically after reading six books on scriptwriting and storytelling, I believe I can do better. And who knows? Maybe I can even add in some social deduction between the players. This idea was what inspired me to create Great Boy: The Game.

It's also the process by which I am currently working on a standalone expansion to my megagame ALLIANCE Last Days. The idea for this game is that I want to make a T.I.M.E Stories-like "choose your own adventure" narrative game that explores moral ambiguities like a great sci-fi novel. I also want it to have deeper mechanisms that actually serve the story. Pixar says "Story Is King", and they design all of their characters, write every line of dialogue, and compose every storyboard to serve the purpose of that story.

Also, if possible, I would like to make it into a game that can be played by as few as two players, but as many as twelve, so that it can be played through at least five different times five different ways or at least be completely replayable and have far deeper mechanisms.




My ambitions are big, and according to the method I described above, it's time to shotgun some mechanisms until the above mentioned features emerge. Where to start? My suspicion is that I could use deck-building (old familiar mechanism) to allow each player to fulfill conflicting objectives (old familiar mechanism) while exploring a set of locations with a linear narrative in the guise of five different factions from five different corners/starting points, each with 2-3 players/characters (a somewhat new mix of relatively new trending mechanisms).

To make this game I:

1. Researched all of the games I thought might have useful mechanisms, including three adventure deck builders, Fallout the board game, T.I.M.E Stories, and countless others. I created a word document that explained all of the mechanisms as abstractly as possible and looked for both the similarities and differences between all of these games.

I also created an elaborate list of possible mechanisms I could throw in to suit my game's theme or create the emotional experience I hope my players will have.

2. I created a hand-written copy of Shadowrun: Crossfire on index cards and played it with friends to hear what they thought of it, then played it by myself on TableTop Simulator.

3. I then built a spreadsheet of all the cards in Shadowrun: Crossfire and re-themed them, changing all of the key vocabulary to match the themes in my game.

4. I then removed many of the decks that complicate the game and replaced them with mechanisms/decks borrowed from other games. For example, I added some T.I.M.E Stories-styled mechanisms through tarot-sized narrative card location decks to go along with the newly themed deck-builder. I also threw in a secret objective deck.

Now I'm slowly but surely modifying and replacing every rule and every card to match the themes and facilitate the ugly trade-off between players working together or against each other that I love from Dead of Winter.

I'm also fine-tuning the game by doling out information asymmetrically to each player and withholding information. I also need to play the game enough to see whether the power values of each card are balanced or not, but this will easily get sorted as I playtest with more and more players.

The game will begin to break as you begin replacing the original mechanisms with mechanisms from other favorite games, but at least it will be dynamic. When starting from scratch, it's hard to get the bare minimum number of mechanisms interacting with each to make the game interesting enough for game testing.

My Technical Process

I use a combination of Photoshop, InDesign, and Spreadsheets to crank out large numbers of cards quickly. I do all the graphic design myself, and these days I do full graphics for even the earliest version of my prototype for two reasons, neither of which justify you following my example:

A) I love to do the graphics. Don't take my fun away from me.
B) I'm a snob, and I demand the aesthetic appeal of playing a game that looks good.






These days I'm playtesting my games on Tabletop Simulator, which is a great cheap way to play both by yourself and with others remotely through the internet. If you are interested in playing any of my games, hit me up on my Discord server.




In Defense of My Own Backwardsness

I do have one major piece of advice I'd like to give, and not just to justify what I have already deemed as a backwards method: Take your project from the first phase all the way to the final phase as quickly as possible as many times as possible. Don't get stuck in any one phase. Don't spend an absurd amount of time obsessing over some minor mechanism as a form of procrastination to stave off the real fear of putting a real prototype in front of real players with real opinions. Print out an unfinished copy of the game and see what it looks like on the table being played. Deal with the real problems instead of avoiding or delaying them. Face them like a champ. Be astonishingly disappointed by aspects you didn't expect early on instead of later on. Find out that there is not nearly enough contrast to be able to read the text.

Is there some phase of this process that strikes you with terror simply because you've never done it before? Then focus on dealing with that fear more than any other aspect, especially more than on the aspects of the process that you are familiar and comfortable with. This is, of course, useful advice only for those of you who want to bring a game to market. If that's not you, that's okay. Then my advice is to enjoy your hobby and don't worry so much about your achievements compared to anyone else's. Know what your end goal is, whether that is to bring a game to market, or to enjoy playtesting your own creations only with trusted friends, and start with the end in mind as your top priority.

Shaun D. McMillan Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

• In 2008, designer Adam West released Galactic Emperor through CrossCut Games, which he co-owns. More than a decade later, he's revisited and reworked the design, with Empire of the Stars due to hit Kickstarter in 2019 ahead of a planned 2020 release. Here's an overview of the game, which sounds similar to the original at this high level:

Empire of the Stars is a fast-paced empire-building game of exploration, conflict, and struggle for dominance. The last galactic emperor has met with a sudden and quite fatal accident. Now there is a power vacuum in the galaxy, and you're one of the Planetary Dukes who wants to fill it.

Each of the 2-4 players takes one of 30 asymmetric powers and controls their own throne and sector of the galaxy. Using a unique action selection system, the game plays over several rounds, and within each round, the roles players choose determine what happens next. There are seven different roles: Explorer, Merchant, Steward, Engineer, Scientist, Warlord, and Regent. All players get a turn to act during each role, so the game is fast paced and everyone is always playing. Combat is thrilling and daring using a unique card combat system. There are 75 unique technologies impacting all parts of the game from industry and culture, engineering and the economy, and (of course) military might. Once the galactic throne is taken, every round after the game ticks down automatically, adding to the tension and excitement! Finally a 4x sci-fi game that guarantees a fast play time while arcing through an epic experience!

The player who uses all of this to their best advantage by exploring new worlds, expanding their empire, exploiting their precious resources and income, and exterminating their opponents to score the most galaxy tokens wins the game!

In this BGG thread, West details the changes from Galactic Emperor (which was for 3-6 players) to Empire of the Stars.




• Polish publisher Nasza Księgarnia has released new versions of two old-school two-player games: Głębia, which is Polish for "deep", is a new take on Stephen Glenn's Balloon Cup, with players now trying to sink in the ocean instead of floating high over mountains.

Kruki ("ravens") is a Polish version of the second edition of Odin's Ravens from Thorsten Gimmler, with the game's setting remaining the same and the otherworldly artwork being brand new courtesy of Marcin Minor.

Nasza Księgarnia has also released its own version of Zachary Eagle's Go Nuts for Donuts under the name Niezłe ciacho, which translates as "Pretty nice".




And the reprints continue with Fabryka czekolady ("The Chocolate Factory"), a new version of Nao Shimamura's Throne and the Grail, a two-player-only design that first appeared in 2016 from Taikikennai Games. In this game, over three rounds players either add a card from their hand to the river of cards or they take the most recent five cards from the river and add those cards to their collection. Collect majorities to score points, or collect all three grail cards to win instantly. The new version lacks a grail, of course, so you can try to collect the three bits of white chocolate instead.

Finally, we have Magazynier ("Shopkeeper"), a new version of Jog Kung's Small Warehouse that is for 2-4 players instead of only two. Each player builds their own collection of goods from cards that depict 3-5 types of merchandise on them. You can overlap the cards to create larger blocks of merchandise, and after you have eight cards, you score for each type of merchandise by multiplying the number of goods in that largest block by the number of different blocks you created.


Player cards in Kruki Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

I don't imagine that designer Phil Walker-Harding thought he'd be connected with sushi for the rest of his life when he self-published Sushi Go! in 2013, but here we are in 2019 with Sushi Go! being a staple title in the game industry, a go-to suggestion when someone wants to gift a game to a stranger or introduce a newcomer to modern games.

Sushi Go! is appealing to many people because it's quick and easy to play; in each of three rounds, you pick up the cards dealt to you, choose one, reveal it and see what everyone else has chosen, pass the cards left, then choose again. You get a little surprise each turn, whether it's in the cards you've been given or the discovery that someone else has taken the lead from you for the endgame pudding bonus. When a round ends, you score points for the sets and individual cards you've collected, giving everyone a chance to evaluate who's in the lead and what you might want to do next round — assuming the cards work in your favor, of course.

Sushi Go Party! in 2016 expanded gameplay to eight players (instead of the game maxing out at five), and it included a catalog of card options that allowed you to customize the deck each game. Set-up time increased, yes, but so did the variety of the game experience.

For 2019, Walker-Harding and publisher Gamewright have released another tweak of the game system: Sushi Roll, a 2-5 player game that places the sushi on dice instead of cards. Gameplay is similar to Sushi Go! with players drafting dice over three rounds, scoring at the end of each round, then evaluating the pudding bonus at game's end, but the introduction of dice over cards changes a few elements of the game.




First, the game lasts fewer turns, with players starting each round with 5-8 dice (based on the number of players) drawn at random from the bag. Instead of having maki cards that depict one or more rolls, you now have a maki die that depicts 1-3 maki on its six sides; instead of a three types of nigiri cards, you have three types of nigiri on one die. All the sides of all five types of dice are helpfully presented on the menu that lies in front of each player, letting you know the odds of what might come up a die.

At the start of the round, you roll your dice, place them on your personal conveyor belt card, then draft one die from this card into your personal tray. After each player has chosen one die, you rotate the conveyor belt cards left, roll all the dice you just received, then choose one die again, and you repeat this until all the dice have been chosen. Each player starts with chopstick tokens that let you yoink a die from someone else's conveyor belt and replace it with one of your own and re-roll tokens that let you re-roll as many dice as you want on your conveyor belt before making your choice for the turn.

With dice replacing cards, the drafting choices are now open. When I pick a purple die with a tempura symbol, I can see how many other purple dice are in the game and where they are — which is important since I want to have some idea of how many such dice might be available to me over the course of the round — but I won't know exactly what's available to me on those dice since I have to roll them at the start of each turn. Sushi Roll replaces the mystery of which cards are being handed to you to which faces you'll see on the dice, while also giving you tools that allow you to manipulate fate in your favor — well, at least some of the time because you might bomb out repeatedly on rolling the sashimi you need to complete a set.


All menus, conveyor belts, and dice fit in the bag, with the tokens needing a doggy bag of their own

The other big change that comes with using dice instead of cards is that players now draft sequentially instead of simultaneously, possibly giving you a chance to respond to what someone else does. If you're leading someone in maki, which awards 6 points to whoever has the most rolls at the end of the round, and you each have a maki die on your belt, that player knows you can retake the lead if they choose it, so they might take something else. When you take a wasabi die, you place it on your tray, then place the next nigiri die you draft on top of it, tripling the value of that die — but you and everyone else can see where those nigiri are, and someone else might use chopsticks to take what you need before you get the chance to.

You can also use chopsticks to set up future turns, perhaps by swapping a die on your tray for a die on the player to your right. You'll get the die you want right now from that other player, then that player will ship that die back to you on the next turn, giving you another chance to roll what you need.

I've played Sushi Roll four times on a review copy from Gamewright, and gameplay with two seems notably different from gameplay with three and four players. You use only 16 dice at a time with two players, with each of you of seeing everything available, and the choices seem to play out in a somewhat obvious manner.

With three players you have 21 dice in play and with four players 24, so with more players you have more dice in play, with the turn order mattering (since you're not simply handing trays back and forth as in a two-player game) and with players competing for different things. It's not just you and me fighting for both maki and pudding and sets, but now I'm competing with Alice for maki and Bob for pudding and Cecily for sets, so you're pulled in multiple directions, while at the same time drafting fewer dice than in a two-player game, which makes each choice feel more important.


Youtube Video Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

• Yesterday's post featured a new title from AEG that folks will first see at SPIEL '19 in October, so let's continue along those lines with even more games that most people will first experience in Essen.

Spanish publisher Looping Games will continue its historical series of games that are named "[year] [event/place]" with two entries, with those games being funded on the Spanish crowdfunding site Verkami through May 24. Esteban Fernandez' 1942 USS Yorktown is a 1-4 player co-operative game that the designer first released inline in 2011 under the name Sink the Carrier. Victory Point Games flirted with its own version of the game for a few years, but never released it, and now Looping Games will bring it to print in this guise:

On the stage of the Pacific battle, there was a concrete confrontation that marked a milestone in history, that of the American aircraft carrier USS Yorktown against the Japanese aircraft carrier IJN Shōhō. It is said that it was the first naval battle where the ships never saw each other, and they faced each other launching airplanes to locate their enemy and bomb them.

In 1942 USS Yorktown, you take the role of American pilots who take off from the USS Yorktown to try to locate and sink the Shōhō while you fight against the planes it throws at you. Time will be your main enemy since the whole game will be against the clock and there will be no time to prepare great strategies or for the dreaded "leader effect".

• The other title from Looping Games is 1987 Channel Tunnel, a two-player competitive game from designers Israel Cendrero and Sheila Santos that digs into a fascinating topic not previously covered in games as far as I know:

For centuries, the relationship between Britain and France has been marked by wars and rivalries, but also by mutual alliances. Both societies have a markedly different conception of Europe, but an intense commercial relationship that allowed them to work together in a common interest: the construction of the Channel Tunnel.

In 1987 Channel Tunnel, you get to put yourself in command of a team of builders from Britain or France to unite the two countries under the sea! You need to lead your team of workers, develop technology, and seek funding to bring the tunnel boring machine to the meeting point at the heart of this epic engineering feat. When the center of the tunnel length is reached, players earn points based on how far have they developed their technology tracks, which cards they have, and whether they haven't deviated with their machines too much.

When taking an action during the game, players play part of their tower of colored discs to perform it. This action won't be available for the rest of the round unless someone plays a taller tower (with more discs) on it. As soon as both players pass, return the discs to the bag, then start a new round.

• Michel Baudoin, who designed and illustrated 2011's Space Maze from Wacky Works, is launching new publisher Cinnamon Games with the SPIEL '19 release of Oh, Fox!, a quick-playing game for 2-4 players from first-time designer Hurby Donkers. Baudoin plans to demo the game at the UK Games Expo, which is becoming a familiar statement from European publishers who have new releases for SPIEL. Here's what to expect:

Only a few steps and those sweetly delicious berries you craved so much are yours to eat. They're right there, just take them! But you hesitate as things may not be as they seem. That vague shadow you spotted earlier could be anything and anywhere. It could be one of your forest friends, looking for food, as usual — or it could be something more dangerous, watching your every move, planning its time to strike...

In Oh, Fox!, players secretly take on the roles of animals of the forest, each with their own unique ability. Prey animals are gathering food while being hunted by the predator. Over seven turns, players move across the board by simultaneously playing one face-up movement card each turn. However, their figurines don't actually move until the end of the game! Until then, players try to hide their own identity while attempting to figure out who the others are before it is too late.

Read more »

Publisher: Paratime Design

The May 24, 2019 Friday Enhanced Map product contains a multi-layered PDF (allowing the options of white or black backgrounds, numbered or non-numbered areas, and secret doors on or off) and a zip file with all relevant map files as individual jpg images.

Price: $1.00 Read more »

Publisher: Wannabe Games

10 Paces brings Wannabe Games flair to the western world. Using pace die to bring the excitement of quick draw duels to the tabletop world. 10 Paces is a simple and flexible system that allows players to pick up and start playing in just a few minutes.

The world of 10 Paces is ruled by the almighty equalizer of the bullet. Many live in fear of the threat of violence, and there is little difference between an outlaw and the wannabe lawman. With prospecting towns popping up constantly there are fortunes to be earned, or stolen. The federal government has little oversight of the area, making the choice to draw your gun the most important one you can ever make.

This game was created live on Twitch (with some editing later on) on 5/19 by Alexander Sprague and Jessica Geyer of WannaBeGames. We are working on flexing our creative muscles and making new fun things for people. Follow us on twitter @jawska and @kittycrusade and drop us a suggestion for a game idea. We make something new every Sunday!

Price: $0.00 Read more »

Publisher: Greg Bruni

This contains 30 characters and 4 space ships inspired by the old "space pulp" stories and 1980s science fiction.  Each file is 480 x 480 (or slightly larger) pixels and 150 dpi.  

For comments, suggestions or feedback visit me at www.facebook.com/GreatBeyond.GregBruni or  mewe.com/i/greg.bruni  

Price: $8.99 Read more »

Publisher: Seafoot Games

Download Contains
Home-printable, A4 .PDF of the gridded map at 300dpi, spread over several pages.
300dpi .JPEGs of the map for A1 poster printing or VTT.
72dpi .JPEGs of the map for VTTs.

Want more bang for your buck? Come support us on Patreon, and get five or more maps for as little as $4.00 every month. 

Or, follow us on Facebook to recieve updates about new maps, adventures, and giveaways!

If you enjoyed any of our content, please leave a review below—or tell us what you’d like to see in the comments!

Price: $1.50 Read more »

Publisher: Wannabe Games

Rush home from school to make sure you don’t miss this Very Special Episode where you play as a character in an after-school special. Act out scenes of peer pressure and scandal with your friends, as threats such as “Marijuana,” “Dungeons & Dragons,” and “Satanic rock and roll” invade your social circle. You can just say No, or you can get hysterical and tell everyone your Uncle cut off someone's head after smoking pot just one time. Don’t miss out, everyone will be talking about this episode tomorrow.

A Very Special Episode is a party card game that incorporates old school "after school special" role play dynamics into a strategy game. Easy to learn, and easy to play; the game shines when people take themselves a little too seriously. Use your knowledge of tropes and your ability to get hysterical to stay on the winning team. 

This game was created live on Twitch (with some editing later on) on 5/12 by Alexander Sprague and Jessica Geyer of WannaBeGames. We are working on flexing our creative muscles and making new fun things for people. Follow us on twitter @jawska and @kittycrusade and drop us a suggestion for a game idea. We make them every Sunday!

Price: $0.00 Read more »

Publisher: Wannabe Games

In Some Assembly Required, you play as action figures pitted against household dangers like pets, people, and other playthings. Are you a superhero, a soldier, an alien, or something else? And just how durable is your plastic?

This game was created live on Twitch (with some editing latter on) on 4/21 by Alexander Sprague and Jessica Geyer of WannaBeGames. We are working on flexing our creative muscles and making new fun things for people. Follow us on twitter @jawska and @kittycrusade and drop us a suggestion for a game idea. We make them every Sunday!

Price: $0.00 Read more »

Publisher: Wannabe Games

Badge Buddies is an easy to learn 1-page RPG about being a Buddy Cop. Solve crimes and pull off daring deeds with your diametrically opposed partner. Play as a loose cannon cop with nothing to lose or the veteran 2 days from retirement. The important thing is to say cool 1-liners before you try anything too crazy, and no matter what, you have to solve the case!

This game was created live on Twitch (with some editing later on) on 5/5 by Alexander Sprague and Jessica Geyer of WannaBeGames. We are working on flexing our creative muscles and making new fun things for people. Follow us on twitter @jawska and @kittycrusade and drop us a suggestion for a game idea. We make them every Sunday!

Price: $0.00 Read more »

Publisher: Wannabe Games

My Mecha has Shark Arms is a mech-merging, kaiju-punching cooperative RPG. Link up with your friends to form up into one big mecha. In this quick action RPG, you have to roll in rhythm with your other crew members and attempt to take down increasingly difficult kaiju. This 2-page RPG was made in developed in 1 day (plus editing) by Alexander Sprague and Jessica Geyer live on Twitch.tv/KittyCrusade.

Let us know what kind of arms your Mecha had, on twitter @Jawska and @KittyCrusade. Also, keep an eye out as we release a new small game every week.

Price: $0.00 Read more »

Publisher: Wannabe Games

A social deduction game for 5-15 people the cult of the magic 8-ball is about passing new tenets and making heretics drink the deadly blue liquid. Quick to learn and adjustable to just about any group size or style.

This game was made on 4/14 by Alexander Sprague and Jessica Geyer of WannaBeGames live on twitch (with some editing later on). We are working on flexing our creative muscles and making new fun things for people. Follow us on twitter @jawska and @kittycrusade, and drop us a suggestion for a game idea. We make them every Sunday.

Have fun, or you are a heretic. 

Price: $0.00 Read more »

Last month I got on my soapbox about prep, specifically talking about how it does not matter how long your prep is, and I thought I would stay on the topic and talk about how I prep a game today.  This article will be a snapshot of my prep process because this is a GM skill that constantly evolves. It is one that is both a product of the way I GM, and the games I play. What I want to show you is the thought process behind how I get a game ready for the table, what stays in my head, and what gets written down.

Two Page Prep

Today, my prep is basically two pages, or one-page front and back, if you are getting really technical. That is not a constraint, but rather where I wind up. That prep is good for 4-8 hours of play, depending on how hard I am driving the game. I don’t have a single format, allowing the prep to fit the structure of what I am playing, but I do have elements that are always present. When I run a game for the first time, I usually spend a bit of time figuring out the template for my prep, which involves incorporating the important elements I need with the overall structure of the game. For instance: In my prep for Blades in the Dark, the middle portion of my prep is sectioned into Freeplay, The Job, and Downtime, to reflect the three major phases of the game.

How I GM and What I Play

I mentioned in the intro that your GMing style and what you run has a major impact on how you prep. So that the rest of this makes sense, let me take a few sentences to explain both of those. My GMing style is about 70% improv and 30% planned, with my planning mostly up front. I like to come up with a general idea of what is going to happen in the session, set that up, and then let the players loose. I then improv as I play off of what the characters do, always using where I had originally intended the game to go as a guide to where play should lead, but never adhering to that too hard. I am very much a play to see what happens GM.

As for what I play, I mostly play Powered by the Apocalypse games, because they mesh well with how I want to GM. Aside from PbtA games, I have been enjoying the Mutant Year Zero mechanics, used in Tales of the Loop.

The Essential Elements … For Me

When it comes to what I put into my prep, here are my essential elements that are always in my prep:

What Is Going On

This section was inspired by Fear The Boot and has never left my prep, once I learned about it. It is a few paragraphs that describe what is going on in the adventure and can sometimes take up to 25% of my 2-page prep. It is nearly always written in the absence of the player characters and does two things. One, it gives me a background of what has been going on, before the characters get involved. Two, it tells me what the forces in play will do if the characters do not succeed in intervening.

This piece is crucial for me because this gives me the logical construct for the game. What I mean is that as a background, it gives me some understanding of why things are going on and what has happened before. That is important for understanding motivations, clues, and for answering questions about what is going on. As a direction of what is going to happen, it gives me a direction in which to improv the actions/reactions of the NPCs, which then makes their actions drive towards a logical goal.

I cannot emphasize enough how important for me this piece is. If I had to reduce or eliminate most of my prep, I would not cut into this section one bit. I can do more with just this section than anything else I prep.

Major Scenes

Building off the information in What Is Going On, I then come up with 4-6 scenes that I think are most likely to happen in the session. The earliest scenes are the most probable to happen while the latter ones are less possible, as the game unfolds through play. These scenes are typically based on the story beats that would need to be achieved to accomplish the players’ goal, which is nearly always to interfere with the NPCs goal that I outlined above.

As I do for the overall story, I prep these scenes to set up a problem but not how to solve it (something learned from Vincent Baker in Dogs in the Vineyard). They are always based on a logical path to how the problem would be solved.

Example: In a dungeon exploration game (not a dungeon crawl) where the players are to recover a holy artifact, my major scenes would be something like this:

• Entering The Dungeon – encounter with some monsters to set the tone.
• Finding Clues of The Big Monster – a scene where I reveal something much worse is in the dungeon, that the players did not know about.
• Navigating Ancient Traps – a scene about getting past an elaborate trap.
• Dangerous Battle – combat scene in a location with difficult/dangerous terrain.
• The Big Monster and the Artifact – A confrontation with the big monster who is also trying to use the artifact.

In each of those cases, there is a clear set-up for what the scene will be about, and then I leave it up to the players’ ideas, the mechanics of the game, the genre we are playing in, and my improv skills to do the rest.

Essential Dialog or Clues

At all costs, I never want to retcon my game to give the players some important piece of information or clue that I was supposed to give them earlier, that I forgot in a past scene. So all of those essential pieces of information get written into my prep so that they can be referenced in play.

Stat Blocks

I always include the stat blocks for anything that the players may encounter. Even if the block is listed in the main book, I copy it into my notes. I do not want to stop and look things up, mid game. I want that information right at my fingertips.

If my game has a lot of different stat blocks, then I may make this its own page (sometimes expanding past my 2-page prep, if needed) and then I have them all in one place. In most cases, I will just put the block or two I need inline with my text.

Relevant Rules

If the scene has any esoteric rules that are not part of my normal play, then they get copied into this section so that, once again, I am not flipping through the book during the game.

Conclusion

As a way to wrap up the session, I have a section where I have notes about how to bring the session to a conclusion. These are often in the form of, “If the players do this, then that happens”. It also includes reminders for any end of session mechanics that need to be engaged.

Putting That All Together

In the absence of the elements or structures needed for a specific game, this is what my prep looks like, at it’s core:

• What is going on
• Opening Scene
  • Essential Dialog/Clues
  • Stats
  • Rules
• Scene
  • Essential Dialog/Clues
  • Stats
  • Rules
• Scene
  • Essential Dialog/Clues
  • Stats
  • Rules
• Scene
  • Essential Dialog/Clues
  • Stats
  • Rules
• Conclusion

I Showed You Mine…Show Me Yours

Your prep is a constantly evolving structure. It changes as you grow as a GM and as you play different games. It is something that both naturally evolves as well as something you can hone.

I showed you what goes into my prep, now show me yours. What elements are essential to you? What structures do you use? What element could you never give up?

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An Augmented Reality

We live in an interesting world full of more things to do and more places to see than we can ever hope to accomplish.

Marketing teams remind me every time I check my email.

• RE: your next trip—Just For You
• Must-Try Activities
• NEW Weekend Deals

Social media knows what I look at and who I care about, targeting me with content.

• Flashy pictures of who, what, and where I search
• Click bait headlines of what I read about
• The ever-evolving drama of friends, family, and associates

Overwhelming amounts of advertisements lead the lists of our search engines and surround our shows, it is almost inescapable! Our constant connection to the internet can distract us with something new or something noteworthy at nearly every moment. Trying to reduce the number of notifications by unsubscribing, changing settings (in each app), and unfollowing people is a constant battle as software updates and mailing lists grow.

When was the last time you were bored? When was the last time you didn’t have something you needed to do?

I didn’t ask the last time you had to replace your cell phone.

I mean truly bored. Bored enough to try something new.

A War Is Being Fought For Your Attention

Your attention, your time, is precious and you only have so much of it. Just think about it.

When do you have a valuable attention span?

• First thing in the morning?
• Just before noon?
• After the kiddos are asleep?

What do you do with it and when do you spend time doing what you love?  Do they align?

 

 

What do you need to make more time for? How do you remind players to make time for gaming? How do you find more time for gaming? 

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You’ll sometimes run across the phrase “springing up like mushrooms after a rainstorm” to describe something that makes an appearance too quickly to be pure coincidence. Mushrooms are able to do that because the mushroom, which is only the visible part of a larger fungus, is often fully-formed and ready to go, just waiting for the correct conditions to inflate like a water balloon and pop up out of the ground, ready to absolutely wreak havoc on people with mold allergies. This is a great metaphor for a lot of things — lawyer phone calls after a car accident, complaints after a Star Wars movie, or those moments when you realize you’re overdue for your next tongue-in-cheek listicle. Luckily, like a mushroom, this article was already mostly-formed because of part 1 of this series.

Just a quick reminder and warning: mushrooms can and will kill you if you eat the wrong ones.

Don’t eat anything that appears in this article based on what I write. I am not a person you should trust about what you should eat or drink, as both my waistline and liver demonstrate.

But enough introduction. You’re here for gaming advice and lowbrow humor.

The Humongous Fungus (armillaria ostoyae)

Nearly 2,500 acres and 2,000 years old, the single largest organism on Earth is not, contrary to what you may have heard, a slumbering elder god or tarrasque. The “humongous fungus” as it’s called, makes an occasional appearance in the form of honey-colored mushrooms scattered throughout its body that scientists have recently discovered are clones of one another, meaning that this single organism has been spreading for centuries, sapping life and resources from the place it calls home, which reminds me that I have some old roommates I should probably call and apologize to.

Potential Game Use:

Okay, so first of all, if you can’t think of something to do with a millennia-old evil the size of a small town hiding under the ground and only occasionally showing itself, I don’t know what to tell you, other than, I guess, my idea of what to do with a millennia-old evil the size of a small town hiding under the ground and only occasionally showing itself:

The adventuring party has been hired at a ridiculously high rate of pay by a frustrated but distant noble in order to investigate why an area’s crops and/or forest is inexplicably dying, threatening the livelihood of both the locals and the noble in question.

As the characters visit, they are enthusiastically fed a nonstop diet of delicious and filling mushroom steaks, pastas, soups, and breads; they should quickly realize the situation actually isn’t all that inexplicable: the populace realizes there’s a fungal infection in the area, but it’s providing them a seemingly-endless supply of tasty, healthy food that requires no work whatsoever to produce. Further, because the noble doesn’t know or especially care about what the people gather if it’s not crops or other easily-inventoried resources, they get to keep all of it. Upon learning how heavily the people are being taxed, the characters should better understand their position. A new era of art and leisure has dawned for the locals, as much of the time they would have spent tilling fields or hunting for sustenance is both unnecessary (because of the mushrooms) and useless (also because of the mushrooms).

Investigating further, the characters discover the underground lair of the sapient mushroom presence that has been preying (?) on the region and its people by draining vital energy. The characters are left with a conundrum: should they do the thing adventurers do and delve into the subterranean (and almost-certainly mushroom-themed) lair of the creature that is simultaneously feeding the people and destroying their land? Or should they leave the locals to their entertainments and free time, knowing that, someday soon, their resources will run out? If they do decide to slay the mushroom beast, will the people help or hinder them in their efforts to restore them to their old lives of thankless and exploited labor?

The Bleeding Tooth Fungus (hydnellum peckii)

I’d be lying if I pretended the number one reason for this mushroom making the list was anything except how incredibly metal its name and appearance are. Seriously. Look at that thing. It’s like Pennywise the Clown got ahold of some cauliflower and decided to really up the ante on the “caul” part.

But by happy accident,that gory-looking fluid on the mushroom is both an antibacterial agent and an anticoagulant. “Magical plant that saves the heroes” is a staple of genre fiction, and for good reason. Prior to the advent of modern medicine, local plants, fungi, and animals were basically the closest thing humans had to a medicine cabinet. Only the oldest and most daring of those who lived in the woods knew the secrets of which plants saved lives and which killed, which is honestly as perfect an example of survivor bias as you’re ever likely to get.

Potential Game Use:

A dangerous affliction has struck an important NPC; maybe he foolishly tried to use a cursed magical item to escape some bad guys and was stuck by some sort of ghost-sword, therefore slowly becoming one of the undead while his companions look on helplessly. Obviously, the best solution would be to stick with his friends and count on them to protect him, ESPECIALLY WHEN SAM WAS ALREADY TRYING TO FIGHT THEM LIKE A HOBBIT ON FIRE BECAUSE HE IS THE BEST PART OF THOSE MOVIES.

But hindsight is 20/20 and the characters find themselves in a situation where time is of the essence. An adventure involving a bleeding tooth fungus takes place in three phases:

Phase I is identifying the problem (and the solution). In this phase, PCs must make medicine/arcana/lore rolls to identify the malady and its solution. Particularly good results or clever roleplay can be rewarded by providing the characters temporary options that slow the spread of the poison (elevate the wound, use magic to apply ice to the injured limb, have Sam tearfully confess his true feelings to Frodo so they can be together forever). Poor rolls result in lost time, but still lead to the same conclusion. The ultimate cure, of course, is a heaping helping of hydnellum peckii and/or slash fan fiction.

Phase 2 is finding the fungus. Because this is presumably an adventure, this phase can take the form of whatever best suits your group’s style. Options include anything from an extended scavenger hunt (“the Devil’s Tooth only grows near the trees that spring up where a wizard dies”), to a combat encounter (“the mushroom springs from the mummified remains of the giant spider Himmthrow’s victims”), to a tense negotiation (“the local Fair Folk control the whole supply, and demand unspeakable boons from those who seek it”). Be sure to offer players ways to make rolls in this phase easier or more successful by taking longer.

Phase 3 is where the clock set up in Phase 1 really becomes important. If your players have been wise stewards of their time (or especially lucky), they will have enough time to get back to the NPC and save them. This is a great opportunity to use chase rules and mechanics in an unusual way, as the characters scramble against time to save their friend. Remember failure should always be an option in order to give the situation stakes. However, in this case failure doesn’t necessarily mean death. If the PCs don’t make it in time, the NPC might lose a limb, go into an extended coma (which could provide the impetus for a whole other adventure) or, if deus ex machina is more your speed, the NPC could be rescued by a nearby elf who takes them to safety and treatment, but then proceeds to lord it over the PCs for the rest of the game.

In case it needs to be said: everything I’ve said about not eating mushrooms based on this article apply 10,0000 times as much to trying to use them as medicine. Just don’t. Also: #Frodo/Sam4Ever.

Hat-Thrower Fungus (pilobolus crystallinus)

A previous article on medieval European/Classical jobs included references to a real-life fecal fireball. How could I possibly one-up that? With a poop rifle based on actual fungal biology, of course. Right now, you might be asking yourself “is he setting up a whole scatological armory?” And the answer is that I am definitely not not doing that, because my sense of humor hasn’t evolved since I was eleven years old.

Anyway, the hat-thrower fungus, as it’s sometimes called, is tiny (nearly-microscopic, in fact) and exclusively grows on herbivore dung. Its particular take on reproduction involves building up pockets of highly-pressurized fluid that, when ready, eject its spores with twice the acceleration of a modern rifle; [joke removed because this is a family-friendly website].

Potential Game Use:

Elves. They live in the forest and defend it against interlopers using techniques ranging from magic to animated trees to really hurtful comments about someone’s appearance. One of the great things about forests is that “real thing, except gigantic” fits their theme perfectly. Because this fungus only grows on the dung of herbivores, it stands to reason that giant versions of the fungus would only grow on the dung of giant herbivores. Shhhhh. Don’t think too hard about it.

So, imagine an elven village, defended by citizens armed with arm-length pilobolus stalks. Basically replace any given infantry charge from any given war movie with elves shooting single-use, bulb-headed mushroom cannons, and you’ve pretty much got the right idea.

Much like how actual firearms changed the face of war, our pointy-eared friends are nigh-unto unassailable in their forest. Except that their latest enemy, an unscrupulous lord seeking to turn the forest into timber, has discovered the secret to their defense, and sent his spies to the manure field/armory that the elves depend on and burned it to the stinking ground. The player characters have been charged with gathering additional weapons and refreshing the fields the elves depend on for their defense.

Remember how I mentioned that the imaginary pilobolus only grows on the dung of giant mammals? Here’s where that becomes relevant. The characters must find the territory of a wild giant deer (any other herbivore will work, but I like deer), identify its spoor, and figure out how to bring back enough of it to revitalize the martial strength of their elven allies, all without getting caught by the opposition forces who are also looking for the same deer. When those opposition forces find and try to slay the source of the elves’ strength, how will the characters save it? Assuming the characters survive, they might be granted a few “loaded” pilobolus stalks as a reward. Since these are single-use and extremely valuable, making them extremely damaging won’t overly impact the direction of the game, since once the characters use up the three to five they were given, that’s pretty much it.

This idea works best woven into an already-existing conflict. The defenders don’t necessarily have to be elves — they might instead be a group of druids defending a sacred grove, or even a clan of barbarians resisting the encroachment of their more “civilized” neighbors.

Truffle (~185 species)

Truffles are well known for being expensive and requiring a well-trained pig to find, since they grow underground. Slightly less-famously, they give off a fragrance that strongly imitates mammalian pheromones, which is why pigs (and to a lesser degree, dogs) are so attracted to them in the first place. So, basically, at some point in time, some rich people decided that lumpy, underground balls of fungus that smell like an excited pig’s crotch are worth approximately $100 an ounce, which is probably an even better refutation of the “rich people are rich because they’re smart argument” than the rise and fall of the Juicero.

Potential Game Use:

A small farm has had its crops routinely destroyed by an endless, rotating cast of wild animals (mammals, specifically). No one is entirely certain where these creatures are coming from, or why they’re so obsessed with this particular farmer’s fields. Neighboring farmers’ fields are entirely untouched, and the animals that have been destroying the wheat, barley, beans, and similar staples have been leaving the plants themselves alone.

Investigating the fields, the characters should be able to see that the animals were extremely agitated as they hunted through the dirt. Particularly good rolls might reveal that the animals were obviously looking for something, and they took that something away with them. Characters who stalk these animals to their lairs will find nothing out of the ordinary, though those that kill the animals (or catch them in the act) may realize that whatever they’re hunting for, these animals eat. If players get stuck at this phase, feel free to leave a trail of breadcrumbs in the form of spots where the animals have stopped to eat the truffles that they find, or even catching one of these creatures in the midst of chowing down on some disturbing nuggets of what looks like dirt.

Successful nature-type rolls will enable the characters to realize that the things that these animals are eating are, indeed, truffles, and the reason why the crops are being destroyed is that these (extremely valuable) truffles are growing in the farmer’s field. If the characters fail their nature rolls, have the character who is most closely associated with high culture recognize what the tiny dirt balls actually are. While the players or locals could attempt to just keep killing animals that try to dig up the fungi, or wait for the animals to exhaust the supply of spores in the ground (which will happen if some part of the truffles are not placed back underground) players will probably want to work with the farmer to capitalize on the much more valuable crop they just discovered. This is a great jumping-off point for a low-stakes game of intrigue as the farmer fights with their local lord about the proper ownership of these truffles, neighbors begin sneaking into the fields with their own dogs or pigs to try to dig up the fungi to sell themselves, and traders from the nearest Big City (TM) attempt to negotiate the lowest possible price for these truffles, possibly using shady maneuvers that only the characters will recognize. This kind of intrigue/setup probably won’t work as well at higher levels, but it does create an immediate investment in an NPC (the farmer and their family) an area (the farm and the village), and rivals who, despite being various flavors of jerk and/or unethical, probably shouldn’t just be executed with a fireball for how they deal with the sudden presence of a valuable resource.

In Conclusion

Fungi can be just about anything you need them to be in your game: environment, medicine, food, weapon, ally, or antagonist. Now you have, in total, eight different ways to use fungi in your own game, and I hope you enjoy incorporating them into your world as much as I’ve enjoyed including them. So do you think you’ll be using more fungi in your games? If so, how? Sound off in the comments and let us know!

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Join Ang, Matt, and special guest gnome Crystal Neagley for a behind-the-scenes discussion about the production of Gnome Stew‘s April 1st project this year, The April Foolio of Fiends. Will these gnomes’ writing and art be enough to keep them out of the stew?

So to recap from last time: I was excited about a system for creating urbancrawls outlined at The Alexandrian and was also inspired by the feeling of the Steve Jackson Sorcery! gamebooks and decided to give the urbancrawl system a shot to design a “strange magic” city.

Links:

• Part 1 of this series
• Part 2 of this series
• The Alexandrian’s Urbancrawl series
• Steve Jackson’s Sorcery!
  • Books
  • Video Games

We left off last time with:

• a list of districts
• a definition of what a neighborhood was
• a list of layers we were going to use
• a rough map
• a neighborhood list
• neighborhood breakdowns for the Temple, Palace, Ruins, and Crafting districts

Since there are plenty of neighborhoods, I’m tackling the Bazaar district this time. I’m also finalizing what I’m doing with the docks. I’ll cover the two slum districts next time.

Here’s the (very rough) map. It’s just a set of neighborhoods surrounded by the city walls and bordered by the wall, the five major rivers, the major roadways, and the shores of the central lake. Note that none of those have names at this point. This is just one step up from a sketch, and then only because I figured using software would result in a slightly more readable result than hand drawing it.  Districts are color coded, Neighborhoods are labeled with a key. We’re also not going to name them at this point either. That’s something we can handle later and something that takes up an awful lot of brain space and time while being subject to change if the neighborhood map or list changes under it.

Note, I finally made a decision on the Docks district. I’m just having a single dock neighborhood. Boats enter the city via the rivers, and dock at the central lake.

• B – Bazaar District: Since the city is a trading hub, this is the main district. It encompasses three of the five water entrances to the city, three land entrances, and much of the lakeshore. Though it comprises two non-contiguous pieces of land, it is considered a single district because the palace (P1) and temple (T2) neighborhoods that separate the two parts are also mainly economic, and the two parts can be easily bridged by the smaller roads that circle the lake shore and by ferry and skiff across the lake.
  The neighborhoods in this district contain many densely packed shops of all descriptions around their exterior. Inside are mostly middle class dwellings and a fair amount of local services, amenities, and green areas.
  • B1 – Animal Pens: This fairly large neighborhood has its own docks, and shops and residences are fairly spacious. This is because most of the shops deal with livestock of some sort. Prices are generally high since the city has very little dedicated agriculture and imports most animals, feed, bedding and other needs. Shops all have pens and cages and are mostly open air. Residences often have their own pens and are unassuming. The animal handlers, farriers, and other caretakers that live here sell to citizens, shops, and the temple trade district. Public spaces are often simple and are sometimes used for grazing areas when not otherwise in use.
    Landmark: The dung heap – Excess animal excrement is piled high and sold as fertilizer and fuel. While this shop isn’t that impressive, it is easy to find by scent alone.
  • B2 – The Heights: At some point in the history of this neighborhood, one of the residents decided to get more real estate by building up as opposed to out. It quickly caught on and now the whole neighborhood boasts three to four story shops and residences that widen each story, crouching over the streets below, sometimes even meeting their neighbors — creating claustrophobic tunnels beneath. Inside, narrow staircases lead to cramped floors above and dizzying balconies. Within the neighborhood, navigation can be difficult without the sun as a compass. Residences are usually shorter, but still multiple stories. Public areas are often gardens in the few areas that receive a little direct sunlight.
    Landmark: The Heights Theatre – The theatre is a semicircle of buildings on the dockside road. Performances are held almost all day, with the best seats on streetside risers.
  • B3 – Floating Market: This neighborhood is still mostly underwater. The buildings are on stilts and small merchant boats and larger water striders weighed down with packs crowd into the remaining spaces. Though a pedestrian can make their way around by jumping or walking on planks between ships, it’s more common to hire a small skiff or a water strider to move around. Further in, the neighborhood has fewer boats, floating board walkways are strung between raised buildings. Public areas are often little more than bits of open water where residents can sit, fish or bathe.
    Landmark: Strider Market – Dockside is a stall with a pen of stakes driven into the muck that sells the local water strider steeds that can traverse both water and land with ease. They can even climb walls with the right tack and enough skill.
  • B4 – Junktown: The city currents eventually drag the floating detritus from all corners of the city to the edge of this neighborhood. The buildings here are made up of scrap wood, sailcloth and other  bits. Residents scour the incoming debris for anything of value and sell it at cobbled together stalls. Residences are often lean-tos and tents of scrap cloth. Public areas are often little swap meets in their own right where scavengers consolidate the day’s findings for later sale.
    Landmark: The Wrack – Dockside hosts the slowly growing pile that washes up from the rest of the city. Scavengers of all types can be found night and day sifting through the debris and carting off anything of value.
  • B5 – The Landing: Earlier in the history of the city, there was very little solid land and much of the population lived in small boats. Many of these boats became landlocked and stranded in this area as the Palace and Temple district were built. Though this neighborhood houses many traditional buildings, it also is home to these beached boats which have been converted to shops and dwellings. Inns in this neighborhood are popular tourist spots. Within the neighborhood, the remaining water is found in public park areas.
    Landmark: The Ghost Ship – In the early days of the city, an untended ship drifted downriver and was declared cursed. It drifted about for years, considered an ill omen, before getting beached along with the other ships in this area. Eventually it was taken over by a visitor to the city and now is a popular pub.
  • B6 – The Maze: One of the original districts of the city, the Maze was constructed before there was much dry land. As such, streets are very narrow. The neighborhood also grew haphazardly over time, so the layout is confusing for non-residents. Shops on the outside are small, densely packed, old and somewhat run down. Inside the neighborhood the maze-like streets have a reputation for confounding visitors. Because of its maze-like construction, rogues and thieves often make The Maze and its boltholes their home or base of operations. Public areas are often small sitting areas with just enough room for a few people.
    Landmark: The map shop – A small booth that sells maps of the city, this shop originally started as a place to buy maps of the neighborhood itself. As that task became more impossible, they branched out to the rest of the city and surrounding areas.
  • B7 – Raised Market: During the construction of the raised crushed stone foundation of the Palace and Temple districts, the wealthier merchants of the city funded the same renovation for one of the neighborhoods of the Bazaar district. The shops ringing this neighborhood are large, sturdily constructed, and well decorated, and sell expensive high quality goods. The residential areas are a range of mid-large sized apartments and smaller villas similar to what is found in the nobles district. Public areas are fairly large with statuary, gardens and water features.
    Landmark: Statue of the Founders – A larger than life construction of the merchants who paid for the upgrades to the neighborhoods, this statue is placed along the road facing the noble district as if a challenge to those dwelling there. In the time since, several of the founders have in fact entered the upper ranks of the government.
• D – Docks District: This single neighborhood district sits in the heart of the city and is where most of traffic enters and leaves. Raising the land in the city for building has created a central lake which is ringed with docks and wharfs and populated with small crafts of all types. Most of the shops and buildings that ring the central lake are built similarly to the neighborhoods they front. Though most trading happens off the docks, bulk goods are traded from ship to ship right here. Though few people actually claim residency, there is a large transient population: sailors, traders, and travelers all fill the inns that ring the lake. There are few public spaces, but that doesn’t stop anyone from fishing or swimming off the docks.
  Landmark: The obelisk – half buried in the muck on the shore near the northern slums, a rune-scribed standing stone lists to the side drunkenly. 

Next time: I finish the northern and southern slums. After that, it’s time to start filling layers.

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Last year I was chatting with a co-worker who asked about my plans for the weekend since I was taking an extra day off to make it a long weekend. When I described the gaming weekend my friends were hosting at their house, he replied, “Oh, it’s another one of your bespoke, artisanal conventions then.”

Anyone who has read my articles knows I love conventions. I’ve got several scattered throughout the year, with Origins being a highlight in June. Gen Con used to be part of my regular rotation each year, but I eventually had to back off due to expense and size of the con. As much as I love the big cons with throngs of people, there is also something wonderful and amazing about getting together with a smaller group still focused on enjoying each other’s company while playing as many games as possible. My co-worker may have been joking by describing my upcoming weekend as bespoke, but it does ring true. Bespoke essentially means custom tailored for the specific needs of a person, or in this case, a group. It’s a funny, but true way to describe a private mini-convention.

What qualifies as a ‘bespoke’ mini convention? By my definition, it’s any time you get together with a group of select people and play multiple games over the course of a day or several days. Here are some of the ones I have attended:

• This year will be the 10^th anniversary of a ‘House Con’ that friends have been holding for the last decade. They average about twenty-ish players a year with four slots of games between Friday evening and Sunday afternoon. They often have three to four games running during each slot.
• When a GM running an ongoing, annual invitational game at Origins decided to end a session in a cliffhanger, we were ‘forced’ to gather a couple months later to find out what happened next. The group of us crossed several states to hang out and play the sequel to that game as well as a couple of other games that weekend.
• One mini-con was born out of a desire to thank a group of GMs for running consistently awesome games at Origins and some other cons. For the last three years, about 25 folks have gathered at a hotel in Ohio that was chosen for being somewhat central to people in multiple states. We get downright serious about games and squeeze in five games between Friday evening and Sunday morning.

Beyond the fact that you’re getting to play games with people you know you like, there are a few different benefits to having a small gathering like this:

• The cost can be significantly lower, opening up the opportunity for people to attend who may not be able to afford the not insignificant cost of a larger convention.
• Many people don’t enjoy big conventions because they don’t like large crowds, or find no joy in playing games with strangers. Coming to a smaller mini-con gives them a safer space to still enjoy multiple games.
• Events held close to home allow those with family or work responsibilities a chance to attend. While they may not be able to get to a big con in another town, getting to a friend’s house for a day is more doable.
• A more intimate event can provide newer GMs a chance to run a con-style game in a safer space. Running for friends, but in an organized setting is really good experience for new GMs.

A potential downside to be mindful of is the perception (or reality) of exclusionary gatekeeping. Any time a group gets together with a closed invite list, it can be purposefully exclusionary in all the wrong ways. Now, with each of the mini-cons I have mentioned above, they were essentially extensions that grew out of the larger cons we all attended. A goal of most public conventions should be to open doors and create welcoming, inclusive environments for gaming. This is my goal and the goal of many of my friends, but we all still want an opportunity to focus our gaming time with each other.

So, let’s get into some of the specifics for organizing a “bespoke, artisanal convention”:

• Understand the space you’re working with. If you’re going to hold this at your home, be realistic about the number of people you can fit in the space. An apartment will work fine if you’re only having a handful of people, but isn’t a good idea if you’re inviting enough people for multiple games at a time. You also need to consider crash space if you’re inviting folks from out of town. Do they need to get a hotel room or do you have a guest room? When you’re organizing and hosting, it’s your job to at least consider the options available to your guests.
• Have a plan, but be flexible. You’re holding a con, so you need to have a general itinerary of what’s happening when. Regardless of whether you have multiple games happening at the same time or just one table with different games throughout the weekend, your GMs need to know what they’re running and when so they can prep. You also want to tell the players what they’re playing when. Respect your attendees’ time and make sure you have a plan in place. At the same time, maintain enough flexibility to adjust on the fly when people can’t make it or other issues pop up.
• Food is a thing. People need to eat. Whether you’re hosting this at your home or some external location, you need to account for how and when your attendees are going to be eating. Believe me, you don’t want to leave it up to the last minute and end up with a dozen or more people all going, “What do you want to eat? I don’t know, what do you want to eat?” Decide ahead of time if you’re ordering in, caravanning the group to a particular restaurant, or ambitious enough to try and cook for the crowd you’ve invited.
• Keep in mind your costs. Organizing one of these isn’t necessarily cheap. If you need to rent a room or cover the cost of food and snacks, make sure you recognize when you need to spread the cost out to your attendees. No one is going to begrudge you asking for $20 if you’re feeding them for the whole weekend.

As I said, I love conventions. The people, the games, the concentrated gaming. It’s one of my joys in life. But, my friendships with my fellow gamers always end up stronger after these smaller, more intimate gatherings. There’s still a ton of gaming, but the chance to hang out with a smaller group makes my gaming even stronger.

Have you ever hosted or attended a ‘house con’ or a small mini-con like this? I’d love to hear about your experiences with them.

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It’s International Tabletop Game Day and I am lucky enough to be at a friend’s house to run a rousing game of Pasión de las Pasiones. I walk in to the smell of something delicious and the sizzle of a hot pan on the stove. Fellow gnome Camdon is standing in the kitchen and he’s got piles of chopped onions, carrots, and celery while the chicken cutlets in front of him brown with a touch of salt and pepper, and he’s got capers and dijon set aside to add in once everything is combined. We chat, and then we sit down to game and eat some wonderful food.

Running the game, I lay out my thoughts — there’s a pile of relationships, all tangled together. There’s the glitz and glitter and riches of the telenovela, shining for our theoretical audience. There’s the evil twin, working at cross purposes. I’m throwing all of these into the sizzling pan of El Jefe’s illicit alcohol smuggling operation, with a little extra seasoning from the helicopter that is about to explode. We chat, and we laugh, and we jump in to play a wonderful game.

In the same way that the practiced cook will trust themselves to create a meal, the practiced GM can drop a game. And in both cases it comes down to the same ideas — experience, practice, and trusting yourself. If I am going to toss together a meal, I need to have an idea of what ingredients I have on hand and what will work together to create a harmonious meal. When I’m running a game, I need to have an idea of what genres and tones of games I am comfortable running and what kind of tropes I can use or subvert to create a shared story experience that matches the expected tone. It’s fun adding that one flavor that makes the dish pop in the same way it brings me joy to throw in the twist that makes all my players gasp. And sometimes, when you’re tired, it’s perfectly acceptable to have a sandwich instead of doing anything fancy — just like it’s totally fine to run that game that is exactly and precisely in your comfort zone, that you don’t have to think about. (Except, maybe sometimes, grill it and put an egg on it. The sandwich, not the game.)

So what is the point of thinking of GMing the way we think about cooking? The thing about cooking is that anyone can learn how to cook if they don’t already know. Your taste buds will guide you as you learn, and there are so many recipes out there to help you get started. Some you’ll love and you’ll make again and again and get so comfortable with you’ll be willing to start tweaking. Some you’ll make and not see a need to make again — they just don’t hit the right flavor profile, or they were far more work than they were worth.

GMing is the same thing. Anyone can learn the skills to do it. The games that you enjoy will guide you to what you will enjoy running. There are many pre-written adventures out there that you can run, or analyze the construction of so that you can start creating your own. Some adventures may work better for you than others, and you can learn from both what works and what doesn’t work for you. Or you may be more comfortable starting with something you know — like a sandwich — and building on it, adding things that seem like they’ll work and learning from experience what works well and what doesn’t. You don’t need to be an expert to GM a game — just like cooking, you can ask other people what might go well in that dish, or what the best way to cook something is (or how does this mechanic work). If you try to make a dish and it doesn’t work, you might eat it anyway and shrug, or you might throw it out and go out that night and try again later…but we don’t tend to put the same amount of pressure on successful cooking that we do on successful GMing. Don’t be afraid to experiment and not get it perfect the first time. Every time you run a game, no matter how successful or not it feels to you, you are learning more about how to run a good one next time — just like how every almost successful meal teaches you to add more salt or to lower the heat a little. So go out there, pick up some plots at your FLGS on your way home, and cook up a good story tonight.

It’s really no surprise that we call this blog the stew.

What’s your best GMing recipe? Soup’s on!

 

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Gamemasters looking to pull themselves out of their gaming rut might consider running a scenario with a “Groundhog Day” time loop.

I have an affinity for such storylines, and will eagerly watch a TV show or read novels that employ the time loop trope, should they cross my path.

(Strangely, though, I have never actually seen the trope’s namesake, the 1993 film comedy “Groundhog Day” starring Bill Murray — I prefer to meander into these experiences through happenstance rather than intentionally seek them out, I suppose).

I unexpectedly encountered another such example when I recently watched Star Trek: Discovery for the first time. One episode in the new CBS Series features the rascal Harry Mudd using a time loop to exact vengeance upon the Discovery’s captain and crew.

My favorite comes, of course, from Xena: Warrior Princess. In “Been There Done That,” Xena, Gabrielle and Joxer keep reliving the same day until she finds a way to prevent a town’s young lovers from rival families from using the Romeo and Juliet “solution” to consummating their affair.  In one iteration, Joxer buys it with a chakram to the chest — perhaps the most therapeutic moment of the entire run of the series.

There are others, of course. The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Cause and Effect,” Doctor Who and Romana taking on Meglos and the classic X-Files episode “Monday.” And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Roland’s entire quest from The Dark Tower series or the repetitive Seven Ages that serves as the introduction of each novel in the Wheel of Time series. (“The Wheel of Time turns, and ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legends fade to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again.”)

With that out of the way, how can you structure a scenario so that it presents a Groundhog Day scenario for your players?

Part 1: Construct a Decision Line.

This is the first, and most important part. Establish a sequence of decisions that serves as the spine of the scenario. Between five and seven decision points should prove sufficient. These are the “turn left, turn right” moments the PCs must correctly determine to correctly “fix” the timeline. Basically, these are knobs that must be turned to a correct setting so that time resumes correctly. To think of it another way: it’s like setting a combination lock or making sure a sequence of switches is open to complete an electrical current circuit.

Part 2: The first time

The PCs will go through the decision tree. There is no right or wrong at this point — yet. But the GM should note the decisions.  Once the PCs complete the “day,” begin the reset. Pick about half the decision points, and flick them “off.” That means those points in the narrative are the ones the PCs have to change. Keep these changes to yourself. It’s up to the PCs to discover the correct combination on subsequent loops.

Part 3: Every day in the loop starts the same

This is the cue to the PCs that their efforts in each loop were not successful and that time is, indeed, repeating.

Part 4: Establish an Objective

At this point, the GM must decide who or what is causing this time ripple and forcing events to repeat. A powerful entity, a god, quantum mechanics, a leaf on the wind — one is as good as another. The more important question is to answer “Why?” Before the sequence can be established, “something significant” must be corrected. Usually, this means that one of the PCs must fall in love / discover something about themselves / treat someone special with an appropriate amount of “love and/or respect. It is a McGuffin of sorts — and instead of digging into one of the characters’ psyche, obtaining an object is also a good substitute. Nothing can happen until someone has that proverbial Golden Apple.

Part 5. Interloper

The person or persons that are key to obtaining/understanding the object need to be introduced on the second loop. This NPC must have characteristics that encourage one of the players to have a change in their personality or outlook — or if you are playing D&D fifth edition, causes them to reevaluate their bonds, flaws or ideals.

Part 6: Hand wave the rinse and repeat

Once the PCs establish points of the sequence that are correct, the PCs should be able to handwave over any sequences they know are correct. Essentially, they are fast forwarding past known decision points — just like they do on TV. This keeps the game moving along and prevents any miscues and keeps the session manageable.

Part 7: A magical thing

The final solution should be an extraordinary demonstration of one PC’s ability — or, even better, group collaboration.  The PCs must somehow manage to do one magical thing correctly to carry the day. It must be a stretch of their abilities — and carry an element of risk. (For example, Xena making that most difficult chakram toss of her career).

Part 8: That day is done — at last!

How does one know the solution was effective? The next day starts differently for the first time.  The sun rises, the birds sing and all is right with the world …

… until the next adventure comes around the corner.

 

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Join Ang and get to know one of the newest Gnomes, Chuck, in this “Meet a New Gnome” episode of Gnomecast! Learn about Chuck’s gaming origin story, his future plans for Gnome Stew articles, and some of his anticipated upcoming games! Will new gnome Chuck be able to avoid the stew this week?

Wytchsun: Elleros Origins is an Elder Scrolls like open world game which will release May 27th. loading...You are the only one who can stop the cataclysm from destroying the land of Elleros. Every 400 years a cataclysm wipes out nearly all life in the land of Elleros.... Read more »

Topless Robot checked out the ATOM RPG: Atom RPG - v1.08 Quality of Life Update | Backlog Quest! loading... Today Bawss Sawss dives into the vast alternative past of a post-nuclear Russia. Atom RPG - v1.08 Quality of Life Update has added a lot of life to this excellent and immersive homage to the old Black Isle Fallout titles while still keeping a unique flavor all its own.... Read more »

The open-world pirate adventure RPG Sail and Sacrifice has been released as Early Access version: Sail and Sacrifice In this single player open-world adventure game, you will be the captain of yer own pirate fantasy! Explore 25 islands, sail the seas, amass a crew, and choose yer allies in The Archipelago.... Read more »

A new "closed alpha" gameplay trailer for Nioh 2. loading... Read more »

GOG Galaxy 2.0 is under development and beta applications are open. What is GOG GALAXY 2.0 and why should I use it? GOG GALAXY 2.0 is an application, thanks to which you'll be able to combine multiple libraries into one and connect with your friends across all gaming platforms, consoles included.... Read more »

A video introducing the Ventrue clan for Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines 2. loading... Historically, Seattle has been the site of many industrial booms, and of course, the Ventrue have been there to capitalize on its fortunes. As more and more billion-dollar corporations shape the local and global landscape, enterprising Ventrue have entrenched themselves in the businesses of the 21st century, paving the way for a prosperous future for their clan… and making enemies of the residents who preferred the way things used to be.... Read more »

DSOGaming reports that Rune: Ragnarok has had a name change and is now known as Rune II. In addition the game will be exclusive to Epic Game Store. Human Head Studios has announced that Rune Ragnarok has been renamed to Rune II and will be coming to the Epic Games Store this Summer.... Read more »

Techquila checked out Rage 2: Rage 2 Review: Mad Max Meets Borderlands in this Wannabe Just Cause Title Rage 2 released this month to an overjoyed audience, after a long wait, promising lots of senseless destruction and violence. And that’s exactly what it delivers.... Read more »

A new trailer for The Sinking City has been released, focussing on the horror and rotten powers gripping the city. loading... Read more »

Chapter 12 of Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master describes ways to reduce the eight steps of RPG preparation down to the ones that matter the most for your game. This list changes depending on the type of game a DM runs and available material a DM has to run it.

Today we're going to look at which steps best fit common scenarios in which DMs often find themselves.

If you are not familiar with the eight steps from Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master you can read this PDF preview of the book or watch these videos including this 8-step summary video to better understand the eight steps. For a quick summary, the steps include:

• Review the characters
• Create a strong start
• Outline potential scenes
• Define secrets and clues
• Develop fantastic locations
• Outline important NPCs
• Choose relevant monsters
• Select magic item rewards

This list of steps is all-inclusive but we can often skip steps depending on what sort of game we're preparing. You can watch me do this all the time in my Lazy DM prep video series in which I use the eight steps to prepare for my own weekend D&D games but often cut steps out depending on the type of game I'm about to run.

Let's look at some common scenarios and see which steps best fit.

The Continuous Homebrew Campaign

Based on the results of the 2016 Dungeon Master Survey, this scenario is likely the most common. Most DMs run their own campaign worlds and their own adventures. It's also likely most DMs run continuing campaigns and not a series of single-session adventures.

Of all of the potential ways to play D&D, this one likely needs most, if not all the steps, each session. Since you don't have a pre-existing published adventure, you can't easily fall back on other tools that help you skip certain steps.

Sometimes, when you're in the middle of a campaign, you might already know what fantastic locations are coming up. You might also have an idea of what scenes might take place or you simply don't care and plan to let the game go wherever it goes.

Generally, though, you'll want to go through all eight steps.

In a recent Shadow of the Demon Lord campaign I ran, I ended up falling back to my own story and my own campaign. Unlike running published adventures, I needed all eight steps to help me fill out each session. I found the checklist helpful (one would hope I would!) but I did need to go through each step on it.

Even if you are playing in someone else's campaign world (and most DMs likely are not), this won't really help you skip steps for any given session. An overall campaign world means less work on the details of the world but all eight steps are still relevant for the next session you plan to run.

When running your own series of adventures in your own campaign world, you'll likely benefit from going through each of the eight steps while preparing for your next game.

The Continuous Published Adventure

Though likely not in the majority, many DMs run larger published campaign adventures such as the D&D hardback adventures for fifth edition. Like the continuous homebrew campaign, these stories continue from session to session. Unlike homebrew campaigns, we have a lot of material we can fall back on that help us skip some the steps.

Big published adventures require a lot of work, but that work is mostly up front when reading the adventure through to understand what's in it. We'll also want to review the adventure before each session to know what comes up next. That said, such early preparation helps us skip steps session to session because the published adventure includes much of what we need. In particular, we can often skip the following steps:

• Scenes. We know what scenes are often coming up because they're listed in the adventure.
• Fantastic locations. We're using the locations in the book so we don't need to think them up ourselves.
• Important NPCs. We might still want to list the ones who matter to the characters but overall we don't need to come up with many NPCs from scratch because they're in the adventure itself.
• Relevant monsters. Again, these are likely in the adventure so we can skip it.
• Magic items. Also often rewarded in the adventure.

Some adventures, like Curse of Strahd, Storm King's Thunder, and Tomb of Annihilation have large open-ended chapters that require more prep from the steps above. When the adventure goes off the rails, it's up to us to fill them in with interesting scenes, locations, monsters, NPCs, and magic items. Most of the time, though, we can rely on the adventure to do that work for us.

This leaves us with the following steps we still need to do:

• Review the characters. We still need to focus on the actual characters in the game and how the world is reacting to them.
• Create a strong start. It still helps to start strong in our games, especially when we're in the middle of a published adventure.
• Define secrets and clues. Often we can drag these out of the background of a published adventure but we still have to write them down. These secrets are still tremendously valuable when we're actually running the game, published or not.

Going from eight to three steps is a nice drop, however, which is why I highly recommend running published adventures. There's a lot of value packed into these books.

Homebrew Single-Session Games

Like the homebrew continuous games, we're going to need all eight steps when running a single-session homebrew adventure. In particular, scenes become more important because we know we're going to need to fit in a full story arc in one session. Timing also becomes critical so we need to know where we can cut the story down and still get to the ending on time.

Overall, we still need the full eight steps when running a single-session homebrew game. That said, these eight steps help put together an entire adventure for four hours of entertainment which is a pretty great return for the effort.

Published Single-Session Games

We'll often see published single-session games when running organized play games or running games at conventions. Above all, the best value we get when running such a game is to read it and understand it before we run it. Often, time is the most critical factor. Like the homebrew single-session game, we have to complete a full story arc in the allotted time which can be a real challenge.

Some single-session published adventures may not have the same quality of design, editing, and playtesting as the big hardcover published adventures so it's worth paying special attention while reading it to ensure it can fit into a single session. This is the work we must do up front but, like the published continuing game, we don't have to use all of the eight steps.

Here are the steps we can likely skip:

• Review the characters. We often have no idea who the characters are so there's no real work to be done here.
• Create a strong start. Often these adventures start how they start. We might replace the strong start if the published start sucks but generally we'll use what they have.
• Develop fantastic locations. Already outlined in the adventure.
• Outline important NPCs. Already outlined in the adventure.
• Choose relevant monsters. Already outlined in the adventure.
• Select magic item rewards. Already outlined in the adventure.

This leaves us with two steps to focus on when running a single-session published adventure:

• Outline potential scenes. Because we know we're going to have to fit the adventure into a set amount of time, we want to have a solid understanding of the outline of the scenes and what we can cut if we need to get the time back on track. This step is vital for single-session published adventures when time is a factor.
• Define secrets and clues. It's still helpful to know what the clues the characters can learn to get them from point A to point Z during a single-session published adventure.

Pilfering Published Material for a Mashup Game

Many DMs enjoy taking published material and smashing it into their own campaign arc. This provides a lot of the benefit of a published adventure but with the creative fun of a home campaign.

When we're looting other published material, we don't have to stick to the fixed structure of a published adventure. This gives us more flexibility to share our own story but it means more work too.

When we pilfer published material, we're most likely to steal locations and NPCs. We'll still have to go through the rest of the checklist to fill in the blanks we have in our campaign. Finding interesting fantastic locations, however, can be a big benefit so it's always worth stealing what we can.

Further Room to Customize

These are just a few potential scenarios DMs will likely have while preparing their D&D games. Your own specific circumstances will determine which steps are most useful to you. As you prepare and run your own games, consider which steps help you the most. Focus on those, reduce or remove the rest, and continually improve your system to run the best game possible.

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This is the third in a series of articles on running Waterdeep Dragon Heist. The other articles include:

• Session Zero of Waterdeep Dragon Heist
• Running Waterdeep Dragon Heist Chapter 1: A Friend In Need

A Different Sort of Chapter in a Different Sort of Adventure

Waterdeep Dragon Heist is already a different sort of adventure than we're used to but, at least in chapter 1, it still feels like a typical adventure. A quest is given, the characters conduct an investigation, they crawl a dungeon, and face a boss. That's the outline of thousands of D&D adventures and it works really well.

Chapter 2 in Waterdeep Dragon Heist is nothing like this. Chapter 2 is mostly a toolkit for two major activities: restoring Trollskull Manor and getting connected with factions. There's no central storyline in this chapter and it's possible the activities in this chapter will take many tendays, months, or even longer depending on how you run it.

Running this chapter is not easy. If you find yourself having trouble running this chapter, hopefully this article will help.

Repairing the Manor

Much of this chapter will also revolve around repairing and funding the manor. It's up to you and your group to determine how much detail you want to expose in this venture. This event might be as simple as acquiring the funds to build up the inn once again. Maybe they hire an intermediary to do act as their agent in such matters, for a fee of course. Maybe your group really enjoys the detail of building out the inn. Some groups will love these details and some what to go off on adventures like they expect to. You'll have to gauge this yourself.

Choosing Factions and Quests

The rest of this chapter brings in seven factions that can potentially recruit the characters and send them off on a variety of missions. There are 28 such missions, none of which have anything to do with Raenar Neverember or the missing dragons.

I have two recommendations for these faction quests:

1. Choose one to three factions you want to introduce and ignore the rest. You might choose the Zhentarim, Bregan D'aerthe, and the Gray Hands as three interesting ones to drop into the game. You might choose three others. You likely don't want to introduce all seven of these factions. Pick the ones that fit the characters and the game and dump the rest.

2. Choose the faction missions which sound the most fun. There are tons of these faction missions and introducing them all can send the characters off on wild goose chases for weeks. Instead, pick a few that fit the current story of the characters and improvise any others you want to bring in.

Choose Your Own Adventures

This chapter is the perfect time to bring in your own small adventure seeds if you want. You can build these seeds from the backgrounds of your characters, inserting personal quests or group quests that focus on one particular character or another while they are busy fixing up the inn and dealing with the other issues going on. You can expand upon the rivalry between the new owners of Trollskull Manor and Emmek Frewn. Maybe it's your own little version of Patrick Swayze's Roadhouse. If you ever wanted to run some low level city adventures, this is a great time.

The Haunting of Trollskull Manor

For a more direct introduction to the chapter we can haunt Trollskull Manor, not just with Lief the poltergeist, but maybe with the hag mentioned in the manor's background. Back in Trollskull Manor's history, it was once owned by a hag who pretended to run it as an orphanage before she was routed by paladins of Helm.

What if that hag is still around?

This is our chance to add in some of our own mini-adventure. The two times I've run this chapter I added in a green hag named Auntie Potiti who had been routed from Trollskull Manor long ago but isn't fully gone. She still haunts the manor and adds all sorts of terrible discoveries including:

• A giant closet that eats people.
• Dead children that stomp around on upper floors or talk to the party.
• A crazy big hag hand that comes out of a painting.
• An illusion of a woman bathing in childrens' blood.
• Paintings that depict the characters as young children hand in hand with the hag herself.
• A glimpse of the hag's outdoor lair complete with catoblepas herds.

We can channel our best interpretations from It, Poltergeist, and The Shining to build out this our haunted manor. You might even replace it with your own version of Death House if you haven't run it before.

The hag might have a pet Banderhobb lurking in the cellar and the cellar itself might have a secret entrance into the Waterdeep sewers or even to Undermountain.

The goal of the party in this sequence is to survive the hauntings for one night and to route the hag. She will leave the manor but is still out there and may haunt the characters from time to time. Hags are fun.

The Mystery of Leif's Murder

Another interesting storyline to investigate in this chapter is Leif's murder. Perhaps the murderer was Leif's assistant, a young man at the time but old man now. Perhaps this assistant did so only after being fed lies by the rival innkeeper Emmek Frewn. Now the assistant is down at the dock wards, continually down on his luck. He has never forgiven himself for killing the only man who ever showed him kindness. It's up to the characters to find this killer and bring him to Leif, not so the ghost can kill the poor old man, but forgive him. In my game, one of the characters found out his name and used one of the paper bird messengers to summon him to the manor for a mysterious treasure. Smart!

Blue Alley

If your group needs more structure and you want to throw a dungeon in the middle of this chapter, consider running Blue Alley by MT Black. This deathtrap alleyway is a fun way for the characters to engage with some wild traps and earn some valuable treasure to help them fund the reconstruction of Trollskull Manor. The dungeon can be unforgiving in some places so add in some valuable relics so the characters can earn more coin or acquire one or two nice powerful single-use magic items for their adventures to come.

Fireball!

Whenever you feel like the pacing of this chapter is getting to be too slow, it's time to drop in the fireball. Chapter 3 of Waterdeep Dragon Heist focuses on the aftermath of an explosion that rocks the alley. It's a strong start to the rest of the story of this adventure. You can drop in this event at any point while running chapter 2 so it's a great way to help you tune the pacing of the adventure. If you ever feel like things are getting stale or boring, drop in the fireball.

An Open but Challenging Chapter

Chapter 2 of Waterdeep Dragon Heist gives DMs a lot of freedom to bring in new elements to the story. It also gives players a new style of game. Instead of chasing leads, fighting bad guys, and delving into dungeons; they get to build up their own home base, meet interesting factions, and go off on small quests. It's a way for them to feel the living and breathing city of Waterdeep.

This wide open narrative can be equally challenging to run. Take some time, shrink the aperture, and build it into the chapter you want it to be.

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Of all of the things required to run a great Dungeons & Dragons game none is harder than getting a group together regularly to play. Finding and maintaining a group is the biggest hurtle for Dungeons & Dragons. In a previous article I wrote recommendations for finding and maintaining a D&D group. In today's article, we'll look at options for handling the game when players are missing. What do we do with their characters? Which options offer us the most flexibilty and ensure the most games? Which techniques are most likely to keep people at the table and which might push people away? We'll dig into all of this today.

To prepare for this conversation I asked on Twitter how DMs handle missing players in their own games and got about 250 replies. I spent some time digging through the results to try to gauge how DMs tend to handle missing players. The following typical ways came up often:

• Simply ignore that they're missing and keep going on.
• In the fiction, send the character off to engage in some other activity.
• Let another player run the character.
• Let the DM run the character.
• Cancel the game until all or all-but-one player can make it.

I broke this down into a Twitter poll on the topic and got the following results from about 3,100 responses:

• About half let characters just fade into the background.
• About one in four let someone else run the missing character.
• About one in ten let the character go on a side quest.
• About one in ten cancel the game.

Based on these results, here are my own thoughts, experiences, and recommendations.

Running a Game Comes First

Getting friends together regularly is worth more than the pure cohesion of the story. We love sharing these stories at the table but real life happens. It's hard for many of us to maintain a regular D&D schedule. Many people have other priorities in their lives, like it or not.

Thus, if someone misses a session we should do our best to keep the game going forward. This is why having six primary players and two on-call players can work so well. If you can manage to run a game with three or four players, it would take five to six people cancelling before you have to cancel a game. That puts the odds highly in favor of being able to run a regular game.

If we can somehow work the absence of the players's character into the story, that's a great way to go. Sometimes things line up well and they can serve the story even in their abscence. Maybe they get kidnapped. Maybe they go undercover for a while. Maybe they go hang out at the inn because of a bum knee acting up. Sometimes these side-treks work well in the story. Sometimes they're ham-fisted. Even ham-fisted, though, it's better than cancelling the game.

Maybe there's really no good in-fiction way to account for the character's absence. Even the good old "we stick them in a portable hole" trick might not even work. If that's the case, we can simply let it go.

Letting It Go

Running the game is more important than maintaining a purely cohesive story. In the case where one or two players can't make it but we still have enough to run a game, we go forward anyway, even if it doesn't make perfect sense in the story. Those characters who don't make it? They fade back into the scenery. When they come back, they come back.

About half of polled DMs agreed with this idea and I'm glad to see it.

Most of us are adults. We have commitments we must keep. We recognize that the real world intruded on our fiction. That's ok. We can let the realism of our fantasy world fade a bit for the sake of getting together for a good game.

For DMs who run stories that are really wired to the characters this can be hard to do. All I can recommend is loosening your grip on the story a little bit to help support a more regular gaming schedule. In the end, it's worth it.

Running Characters for Missing Players

Many groups have someone else, either the DM or another player, run the missing players's character. This isn't an unworkable approach but it can cause a few problems. First, what if the player or DM running the character makes choices the main player of that character wouldn't make? What if the character dies? These situations might not be typical but if they come up they can cause problems.

You also have the problem of too many characters on the table compared to the players. Running characters as NPCs or having players running multiple characters can complicate the game and put too much spotlight time on the player running additional characters. A DMs life is usually hard enough that running an additional character adds an extra burden.

Instead, just let the character fade into the background and focus on the characters whose players are actually in attendance.

Making it Easy to Return

One consideration when dealing with a missing player is to make it easy and inviting for them to come back to the table. Over the years I've seen people suggest that missing players need to be somehow punished for not showing up. I'd recommend a "less stick" and "more carrot" approach. If you make it hard for players to come back to the table, you're increasing the chances that they won't come back at all.

Consider experience and leveling. One of the many advantages of using milestone experience instead of calculating experience points is that players who miss a game won't miss out on character progression at the same time. They'll know that even though they missed a game, their character will still keep up with the others in the group. This might, somehow, not seem fair, but consider that experience points and levels are arbitrary rewards anyway. Nothing prevents us from starting at higher levels if it works out for the story. If players miss out on a game and their character starts to fall behind the other characters, it becomes easier for them to simply stay away instead of returning and continually feeling like they're behind everyone else for the rest of a campaign.

Likewise, removing any other punishments for a player's absence makes it easier for the player to return and know they aren't somehow worse off for missing out.

Missing out on a D&D game is punishment enough, we don't have to compound it.

Keep the Game Running

Above all we should consider any structure or rule we have and test it against one goal: keeping the game running. Whatever rules you put in place for a player absence, ask yourself if it best serves the game. The most tight and cohesive story is no story at all if no one makes it to the table. Build a system to keep the game going and make it as easy and inviting as possible for players to keep coming to the table to play a great game of D&D.

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In the March 2019 episode of the DM's Deep Dive I had the wonderful opportunity to talk to Dungeons & Dragons and RPG luminary Wolfgang Baur who is currently the Kobold-in-Chief at Kobold Press the most popular third-party publisher for fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons supplements including the Midgard Campaign Setting, the Tome of Beasts, and the Creature Codex.

You can listen to the podcast of the show on the Don't Split the Podcast network, watch it on Youtube, or watch the episode below.

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The rest of this article offers some notes from the episode.

Top Three Tips for Worldbuilding

Here are Wolfgang's top three tips for worldbuilding in D&D:

1. Know what you're trying to build. Pick a theme. Pick a seed. Pick a tone. Do you want gothic horror? Survival horror? Elfy fantasy? Choose your theme, write it down, and stick to that. This is particularly useful for shorter campaigns where you have a focused overall theme for the campaign.

2. Start small. For newer worldbuilders the urge is to build out everything. This can be deeply satisfying for the DM but our players just need a village. They need a hommlet. Start small. The focus on local concerns will resonate much more with your players than a big grand world. The five thousand years of history may be important to you but you can't expect your players to care until it matters to their characters.

3. Before you roll out a new campaign in a new world, make sure the players are on board with your setting. Have a pre-session zero discussion in which you pitch the campaign theme and pay particular attention to the body language of the players. Maybe your group of high fantasy heroic players aren't down with the dark gritty horror fantasy of Shadow of the Demon Lord.

Would we have had the Lord of the Rings if Tolkein hadn't farted around with elvish languages, 5,000 years of history, and a bunch of songs? A lot of the Silmarillion doesn't appear in Lord of the Rings but it was important to Tolkien.

If you care about your world, go for it, but don't expect your players to care.

Every poll Wolfgang ran back in the TSR days agreed with my own polls that DMs run their own campaign world. This has been true and will be true probably forever because DMs love building their own worlds.

Wolfgang recommends focusing on a region like the Sword Coast or Zobek for Midgard. Smaller worlds mean the players will actually be able to explore it. Hint at the ancient history.

Wolfgang thinks Keep on the Borderlands's popularity comes from its focus. Players want to know what is going on here and now but DMs love to go deep. Wolfgang had customers say that the 450 page book for Midgard was just a teaser for the world. How much more can he provide? Well, he has a whole Kingdom of the Ghouls Kickstarter in the works so probably quite a bit!

Choosing Between Homebrew and Published Campaign Worlds

How much time one has available will likely dictate whether DMs choose to build a homebrew campaign world or a published setting. Some DMs just don't have the time to build a campaign world so they take it out of the box and run with it. If you go with your own homebrew world, you have to worry about understanding traderoutes or governmental systems.

Players: "We just want to go to the old ruins on the hill."

DM: "But the town councils meeting..."

Players: "We don't really care about that."

Wolfgang's players aren't there to share Wolfgang's homebrewed stuff. They're there to play a game. The homebrew that matters is that which focuses on the characters. Build your homebrew from the hooks of the characters.

The spice on top of a campaign setting seems to resonate more to players than the in-depth stuff. The throw-away lines gather as much momentum as the carefully planned stuff.

Wolfgang's Highest Expectations for Midgard

Wolfgang's highest expectation for Midgard is that DMs will strip it for parts. He's perfectly happy for people to take the shadowfey and leylines and the bearfolk and put them into their own worlds.

Mash it up. Wolfgang is a big believer in mashing up material.

Getting Buy-In

Beyond getting your players together to make sure they are on board with your campaign, maybe get them involved a bit in the world building. What's the name of the assassin's guild?

Bringing Published Campaigns to the Players

Wolfgang's primary points to give to the players:

• Who's in charge?
• What's going horribly wrong?
• Who are the gods or religious powers involved?

Wolfgang likes to have conflicts between individuals versus the state. You might have a great base attack bonus but the court of the shadowfey doesn't give a shit.

Midgard and other campaign settings have the "seven things you need to know" (see chapter 16 from Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master).

Any worldbuilder would be smart to come up with that list. What are the five, six, or seven things the players should know when playing in this world?

On Getting Campaign Worlds Published

Wolfgang: "Sometimes you get these people who say 'I have these sixteen notebooks and I want you to edit, develop, illustrate, and publish them and send me a check'."

Me: "It sounds like the villain from Se7en."

I crack myself up.

The pitch for a world setting is almost never going to happen. The sad reality is that RPG companies can barely keep their own settings going.

The way to gauge the popularity of a setting is to do it yourself.

Forgotten Realms started as a bunch of articles in Dragon Magazine before it was a boxed set. Start with small articles about your setting.

Building Campaign Worlds from Adventures

Greyhawk started as adventures years before it became a campaign setting.

Building campaign worlds from adventures means you build the world in a slow and incremental pace.

Focus your efforts on doing the most awesome and amazing adventure possible and your players will come back every week demanding more. If you focus your most limited prep time on genealogy and coats of arms, you're probably not putting time where it should be spent.

Your most important adventure is the next one.

Build the world from the history of a paladin's recovered sword.

City Building

"What are your thoughts on building cities?"

"Oh! I have thoughts about this!"

"I know, you gave me the question."

I crack myself up.

The history of fantasy RPGs is the history of cities. Greyhawk, Waterdeep, Sigil.

When you're building a city you have to know how normal people act. What do they drink? What's the government like? How do the laws work? Who handles the nightsoil?

You have to know something about history and society to build a credible city.

Questions From the Audience

"How do you find the sweet spot of having standard recognizable stuff with new stuff specific to your world?"

There IS a sweet spot. Wolfgang uses the boredom gauge. If he gets bored while writing about them, they probably need something unique. What is the twist or mashup for these guys?

If you're writing for a beginner audience or your players are new, don't spend a lot of time making new core races and what-not. The core stuff will be fine for them. If your audience is jaded and has been gaming for 20 years, it might be worth shaking things up with new races and classes and stuff.

"What kind of material are customers most interested in with campaign settings?"

Wolfgang finds that people are most interested in friction, hooks, and where stuff is blowing up. If you leave parts of the campaign setting unresolved, you're identifying a place where the game master can run with it.

People also love high fantasy and weirdness. Midgard was supposed to be low fantasy but then became high fantasy the more they injected it into the setting.

People love gods wandering the Western Wastes, ancient tombs, and broken leylines.

Give people the most exciting NPCs, flashpoints of danger, and the high weird.

You can't answer all the questions when building worlds. If you do so, you're doing it wrong.

Leave yourself room to breathe.

In Midgard, there's a lot blank. The far north and the Hyporboria hasn't been touched.

"How do you update canon?"

Wolfgang doesn't really update events in Midgard. Things happen really slowly in Midgard.

Things change in Midgard when adventures push it that way.

"How would you introduce world-changing events into an existing campaign world?"

You have to get your players buy-in for big change like this and then you can just drop them in. Spelljammer makes travel too easy. It's hard to change the rules half-way through a campaign.

Major shifts for the characters can make the players resent you. Don't change the rules on the players without their buy-in. Don't take their magic items. Give players a choice.

"What mistake with worldbuilding have you learned the most from?"

Advancing the timeline too quickly.

In one campaign world there is a beautiful and awesome part of the world that the characters can't really get to. Make sure things are exposed to the players.

"How important are connections between lands and nations?"

It's a mistake not to connect them! Connect your nations and societies. It's fuel for adventures. Trade, religious, and political connections are very useful for the story.

"If someone is new to Midgard, what's the elevator pitch?"

It's a dark world with strange magic full of leylines, shadowelves, and bearfolk. It takes European history and puts it in a blender with dark fantasy. There are over a hundred adventures for it for the past ten years. It has a little something for everyone.

Thanks to Wolfgang Baur for taking the time for the talk! Check out the Midgard Campaign Setting today!

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Warning, this article contains spoilers for Tomb of Annihilation.

This is the final article of a number of articles discussing the Dungeons & Dragons hardback campaign adventure Tomb of Annihilation. Other articles include the following:

• Session Zero of Tomb of Annihilation
• Running Port Nyanzaru in Tomb of Annihilation
• Exploring Chult
• The Urgency of the Death Curse
• Acererak's Prepared Spells
• The Lost Temple of the Eshowdow
• Lost Monuments of Chult
• Running Omu
• Handling Tag-Along NPCs
• Generating Enhanced Tomb Guardians
• The Deadly Shift in Tomb of Annihilation

Today we're going to focus on the campaign's conclusion: the battle against the atropal and the arrival of Acererak.

Story Versus Challenge

Almost everywhere else when running D&D games, I'd argue, we're better off focusing on the story instead of tuning the game to fit a particular mechanical challenge for the characters. When building encounters I recommend building encounters from the story and not to simply select monsters based on the particular level of the characters.

Boss fights are different. Boss fights and campaign closers have a particular feel for them, one that requires some mechanical attention.

Maybe this isn't always true. Maybe, even in boss fights, we're actually better off just letting the story go how it goes just like we do with the rest of the game. Maybe I'm not wise enough to let go completely. I want to see a solid challenge. I want to watch the characters struggle but end victorious. I want a continual feeling of fear and hope rolling through the battle. I want something as powerful as the end of Vox Machina.

As it stands now, though, when it comes to boss fights and campaign closers, I tune things around the characters and their capabilities to keep a continual feeling of hope and fear.

On the Atropal

The atropal encounter in Tomb of Annihilation can be swingy. The atropal a powerful creature with a lot of options—a lot of options to remember. It also has a huge vulnerability: radiant attacks. A paladin who smites the atropal can drop it very quickly. In some circumstances that may be just fine. They still have to deal with the Soul Monger itself and Acererak's arrival.

We can keep a handle on this dial if we want to. The average hit points of the atropal is 225 but its maximum hit points within its hit dice is 324. We can also ignore the radiant vulnerability if we think it's going to get nuked too quickly. Keeping a hand on the hit point dial is a good way to maintain a consistent challenge during a boss fight.

The atropal's necrotic aura is also worth remembering. The atropal floating around the room blocking healing and damaging characters by its mere presence is a big part of the fun. We can remember all of these special abilities if we grab a 3x5 card and write down the atropal's important actions and features so we don't forget it during the fight.

The atropal is also missing legendary resistances but we can always throw them back in if we think it will get knocked out of commission too easily. We can also turn its ability to summon a wraith into a bonus action so its dropping wraiths every round. When the atropal dies, so do the wraiths.

We might replace the atropal's wail with a maddening wail instead. I'm a huge fan of madness and gaining levels of exhaustion felt like it could be too much. This form of madness could be removed if, at the end of their turn, the character succeeds on their saving throw. Or, if they chose to, they can take 28 points of psychic damage at the beginning of their turn to break out of the maddening effect and get their full round of actions. This is a nice hard choice for players to make if they get stuck by this ability.

Most of the time we can focus its legendary actions on its ray of cold attack and increase the damage of this attack from 21 (6d6) to 28 (8d6).

The tentacle attacks from the soul monger are also important to remember and can do a lot of damage. Every turn the soul monger is attacked, it attacks with a tentacle. Thus, its attacks scale up nicely with the attacks of the characters. I gave the tentacle the ability to hit someone for damage and pick them up, threatening to drop them in the lava at the end of their next turn if they don't do something about it. This added a lot of interesting pressure on the characters to save one another before they're tossed into lava.

In this battle we can also tweak the pacing by considering the hit points of the soul monger itself and how many rods need to be broken to send it into the lava. If you have more than four characters, its probably fine to require two of the struts to break or even three if they're having an easy time of it. If they focus on the soul monger, we can increase its hit points as well.

Thus, we have a lot of dials we can turn in this combat to keep the pace nice and threatening without wiping out the characters in the last scene of a year-long campaign. Here are a few we might consider:

• Tweak the hit points of the atropal and the soul monger.
• Give the atropal legendary resistances and remove its radiant vulnerability.
• Let the atropal summon a wraith as a bonus action.
• Add a maddening wail that inflicts short-term madness. This can be removed by taking psychic damage.
• Let the tentacles from the soul monger inflict damage and grab on a hit.
• Don't forget about the atropal's necrotic aura.

On Acererak

It's hard to offer meaningful advice for running Acererak at the end of this campaign. What happens in this battle and how you end up handling it will depend very much on each individual campaign.

I ran this encounter twice for two different groups and it went completely different each time. Neither time did they face off and try to fight the archlich directly. Smart thinking on their part.

In my versions of this encounter, Acererak becomes aware that his creation is under attack. I foreshadowed his coming arrival, describing how he was interrupted while carving a billion-year-old temple out of a dead rock of a planet with some of his lich apprentices and his sphere of annihilation. He arrived in my game when both the soul monger and the atropal were killed.

At that point, both the discussions and the disintegrations began.

In one group, we had an ongoing story thread in which our warlock character, Ogechi, was slowly turning into a lich himself. He pulled the black key in the maze room and gained a powerful necrotic spell attack as a result, along with an arm that looked like a lich.

When Acererak showed up, he wasn't so quick to kill Ogechi since this warlock proved to be a potential apprentice. All Ogechi had to do was sign an infernal contract scribed by one of Acererak's succubus lawyers. One of the other characters, the bard Tharmond, secretly charmed the succubus who forged Acererak's own signature on the contract, thus freeing Ogechi without Acererak knowing it. They then convinced the succubus to tell Acererak to return to his former work and they would take care of things here.

While this is going on, Acererak is hurling his sphere of annihilation (which has a terribly low DC and is easily avoided) at one of the other characters who is tossing phylacteries into the lava. He eventually lost the save and got disintegrated only to have the trickster god within him restore him only to be disintegrated AGAIN and so on. That was weird.

A couple of characters got a couple of hits on Acereak but eventually he left knowing he had a new apprentice with a tattoo key to open up the doors of the world of the night serpent.

So there was no real fight against Acererak.

My other game took a similar turn. In this campaign, Acererak discovered that one of the characters carried a dagger that acted as a key to open up the doors to the lair of the Night Serpent. He was willing to spare their insect lives if they handed over the dagger. They did, but, at the last second, threw it into his sphere of annihilation and ran for the portal. Thus they escaped into the jungle with an archlich's dark gaze upon them.

One way to handle this encounter is to ask yourself what the characters have that Acererak may want as much as he wanted the soul monger and the atropal. If you can throw this in earlier in the campaign, all the better.

Other than this, I have little good advice on running the encounter with Acererak. It's a strange fight to face a monster this powerful in the final scene of the game.

Skipping the Final Puzzles

In both of my games I ended up skipping the final rooms of the lowest floor. I felt that, after the fight against the atropal and Acererak, it was time to be done. Your results may vary, of course.

One Year Later...

One trick I've learned for ending a campaign, one that has served me very well, is asking the players to describe where their characters are one year after the end of the story. Some of the best stories I hear in the entire campaign come from these one-year-out montages. The bard, Tharmond, started a hit play in Waterdeep called the Tomb of Annihilation. The paladin who sold his soul to Grimfinger the Erinyes, built a temple to Torm on the edge of the Anauroch desert doing his best to serve his god before his soul belonged to a devil. The restored druid Warryn transformed himself into the new King of Feathers hunting undead in the jungles of Chult. The cursed warlock, Ogechi, went to the doors of the night serpent with Fenthasa, just as she predicted, and murdered her at the door, which she did not predict.

In my other game, Shelby, our tortle ranger returned home to his tribe on the coast of Chult. Tysabri returned to the graves of her parents. Truth and Sirzek returned to Sirzek's tribal home in the Spine of the World to restore honor to his tribe. Feski wrote a best-selling book on her adventures in Chult, nearly knocking Volo's Guide off the best seller's list. Fromash the lizardfolk death cleric built a new temple to a benevolent god of death in the city of Omu and helped the city return to its former glory.

Amazing stuff.

If you get nothing else from this article, ask your players what happens to their characters one year after the end of the campaign. They almost always have ideas and they're almost always way more awesome than you can think up.

An Incredible and Strange Feeling

Over the past few years I've finished a handful of large campaigns. I finished a four-year campaign battling against Orcus the God of Death. I finished one-year campaigns for Hoard of the Dragon Queen, Rise of Tiamat, Princes of the Apocalypse, Out of the Abyss, two Curse of Strahd campaigns, two Storm King's Thunder campaigns. Now I've completed two Tomb of Annihilation campaigns. I am very lucky to have run them.

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"A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone."

- Tyrion Lannister, Game of Thrones

Over the past year, this topic has shown up in lots of other articles here at Sly Flourish and many of my DM tips on Twitter as well. For some, this seems completely obvious. For others, it can come as a surprise. This big tip?

Read the books.

One might be surprised by the fact that some haven't read their D&D books all the way through. I admit, only recently have I finished reading them all the way through. That is not something I'm proud of.

This isn't a tip just for new DMs. This is a tip for all of us. New or old. DMs or players. All of us can draw a great deal out of this game if we take the time to dig into our D&D books and enjoy what they have to offer.

New DMs, Read the Starter Set Books

If you're new to D&D, start with the D&D Starter Set. The D&D Starter Set is the best way to get into D&D for a low cost and begin to digest what D&D has to offer. Instead of suddenly finding yourself with over a thousand pages of material from the Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, and Monster Manual, the Starter Set comes with only two books. A main rulebook and the adventure Lost Mine of Phandelver. It also includes a set of pregen characters which means you don't have to suddenly know every ability of every race and class found in the Player's Handbook.

The value of the Starter Set cannot be overstated. The adventure, as written, is awesome, but it also includes a great set of monsters that you can use for your own low-level adventures. The maps in Phandelver also span the range of maps you might drop into your own campaigns including a bandit lair, goblin caves, ruined castle, ruined village, and dwarven mines. These maps are reskinnable for your own adventures as you need them.

Because the Starter Set books are relatively slim, it won't take you forever to read them and understand how D&D works. Thus, when you begin, start with these books before trying to tackle the full set of core books.

A Reading List for Dungeon Masters

As you get more experienced, or if you are experienced already, it's time to get into the core books. While it's definitely worthwhile to read all three books cover to cover, you can triage your reading to the parts of highest direct value while running your games. Here's a reading list:

Player's Handbook. Read the intro, chapters 7, 8, 9, 10, and the appendicies. You can skip over the chapters on races, classes, backgrounds, equipment, customization options, and spells for now. They're definitely worth reading but your players can also dig into these chapters and tell you what you need to know to run a game. Again, you'll want to read these eventually.

Dungeon Master's Guide. You'll want to give this whole book a solid skim read. You might not have to read it cover to cover right away but you should at least know what you have in your hands. There's tons of fantastic stuff in this book but it does you no good if you don't know that you have it. When you can, read it through. This is also a book worth re-reading every year or so to remind yourself what is in it. Many times you might think of an option or sub-system for running your game only to find that it's already in the DMG.

Monster Manual. This book is also worth reading all the way through but you can focus primiarly on monsters you're likely to use in your campaign. Start with low challenge monsters and work your way up to the ones likely to show up in future adventures. The monster book is packed with awesome adventure and campaign hooks so worry less about the stat blocks and more on the lore of monsters. We can come up with hundreds of campaign ideas from this book alone.

Volo's Guide to Monsters and Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes. When you're able, read these all the way through as well. Like the Monster Manual, they're packed with adventure and campaign ideas. Unlike the Monster Manual they spend lots of time focused on specific monsters like hags, mind flayers, beholders, and githyanki. Read them. Enjoy them. Let them seep into your DM's mind castle.

Xanathar's Guide to Everything. Like the DMG, this book is packed with great ideas for DMs, both from a mechanics standpoint and from the lore of the game. In an episode of Dragon Talk, Jeremy Crawford mentioned that the design of spells in Xanathar's (and those in the Player's Handbook as well) are designed not just to give toys to players but for the DM to weave into the story. Spells like Druid's Grove and Mighty Fortress are as interesting to witness from powerful NPCs as they are when cast by a player character.

Read Published Adventures

If you're running one of the published D&D adventures (Curse of Strahd and Tomb of Annihilation are my two favorites) it helps significantly to read through these adventures cover to cover before we run them. Reading the full adventure means knowing which secrets and clues to put in front of the players from session to session. It means knowing how to tie the adventures together. It helps inspire you to hack it yourself into the adventure you want it to be for you and your group.

It takes time to read through a full published adventure but the return is worth the effort.

A Reading List for Players

If you're playing D&D but you're not the DM, you're reading list isn't as large but can still give you a great deal of enjoyment out of the game if you take the time.

Player's Handbook. Read the chapter on your race and your class. Read the spells your class has access to for level 1 and the next couple of levels above your current level. Take note of spell components and describe them when you're playing your character.

If your race is one of the races from Volo's Guide or Mordenkainen's, it's worth digging deep into your race's background and history. Learning how the elves are connected to Corellon or how the halflings see their gods as extended family members with legendary exploits can enrich your character to the full.

Players likely spend a lot of their time focused on the mechanics of their class but getting into the story and lore of their race, class, and background can make the whole game much more enjoyable.

Read to Inspire, Not to Memorize

When we're digging into these books, our goal isn't to memorize every single rule in them. Our goal is to let the worlds of D&D flow over and through us so we can drop into it when we're running the game. That sounds pretty hippy but it works. The more we digest this game and the worlds it encapsulates, the easier it is to help us improvise when we're running our game and our ability to improvise may very well be the most important skill DMs can have.

Even if it doesn't help us memorize every aspect of the game, reading through the books will let us know what's there so we know what we have and where to find it when we need it during the game.

We don't read these books to memorize them. We read them to let them inspire us.

Read On the Go

Finding large solid blocks of time in our days is, for many of us, quite hard. Being able to sit on our nice couch with good lighting and read our books for a solid hour may be impossible for a lot of us. Yet, as busy as we are, we find time to surf through Facebook or get enraged by the news or get lost in cat mischief on Reddit. With D&D Beyond it's just as easy to read a bit of our core books as it is to read anything else on the web. Having the core books on our phones means we can read part of it whenever we have free moment. Keep your current book in your browser window and maybe skip the social media for a bit while you read up on Merfolk. Every monster description is about as long as a Facebook post already so it's not a stretch to read one monster block at a time all throughout the day.

Know the Rules Before You Break the Rules

We DMs are often a super-creative bunch. D&D becomes our outlet to share the stories we've had bottled up in our heads all our lives. We're also likely to have a different game in our head than the ones in the books so we immediately want to start tweaking and twisting and cutting and pasting all sorts of new house rules. I see this come up often on Facebook: "What if we got rid of charisma scores?" or "I'm going to completely redo the fighter class" and the like.

This isn't inherently bad but we should be cautious until we actually know what we're talking about. Of course, in our own games, we can experiment however we want but it helps if we actually know the rules before we break the rules. Before you start rebuilding your own fantastic 5e game, maybe read what the designers have put in there already.

The Hardest Step for the Lazy Dungeon Master

We're all about cutting corners here on Sly Flourish to get the most value out of our game for the least effort. Value, return over effort, is our ultimate goal. Reading over a thousand pages of rules isn't effortless. It takes a lot of time and a lot of work. Hopefully this article gave you an idea where to start. As much time as it takes, the value we gain by reading these books is well worth the effort. For that reason, reading the books is a core staple for the way of the Lazy Dungeon Master.

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Over the past year I've been recording my own game preparation using the eight steps from Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master. I broadcast these these shows live on Twitch Sundays at 10am EST and then post them to Youtube right afterwards. I used to begin each show by describing the eight steps but realized that was getting redundant.

Now I have a series of ten videos that summarize the eight steps of game prep from Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master, review the rest of the chapters in the book, and ten dig into each of the eight steps one-by-one in more detail.

You can watch the first video reviewing the eight steps below or see the whole playlist of all ten videos on Youtube.

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These videos don't cover everything in the book. If you want that, you're still better off buying the book itself but the videos will give you a good deep look into the process and the material you'll find in the book itself.

Enjoy!

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If you read deeply into Tomb of Annihilation and Dungeon of the Mad Mage, you'll notice that Wizards of the Coast has avoided a common problem in older adventures. Older adventures often focused on rooms full of monsters that reacted to the characters in basically one way—by attacking them.

The fifth edition of D&D focuses on three pillars of play: exploration, roleplaying, combat. While previous versions of D&D arguably focused more on combat than the other two pillars, 5e has definitely shifted more towards roleplaying and exploration as at least equal partners to combat.

When we're thinking about and preparing for our D&D games, we might break down the scenes we plan to run by the scene's type. We might think of it as a roleplay scene, an exploration scene, or a combat scene. Previously on this blog I brought up the idea of an adventure template with prescribed scene types to maintain the beats at the right time. I no longer believe such a template serves our game. I believe that we should build situations, not scenes. We should build situations that allow for all of the three pillars and let the players choose how they want to interact with it.

Examples in Published Adventures

In Tomb of Annihilation there is a den of scum and villainy in the forbidden city of Omu called the Fane of the Night Serpent. This temple to a dark and terrible elder evil is a clear example of a location that seems ripe for combat. Yet, as written, the characters have many different ways they can interact with it. We learn of many interesting personality quirks between Ras Nsi, the leader of the Fane and his second-in-command, Fenthasa the Nightmare Speaker. Other interesting social connections include Ras Nsi's bodyguard and the bodyguard's love for one of Ras Nsi's concubines.

The physical construction of the Fane also offers options for exploration. The doors have cut-outs at the bottom allowing the passage of snakes or those in snake form. A druid with shape shift could likely slide on in and spy on the whole den. There are also multiple entrances into the Fane and lots of ways to travel within it. There are lots of things to discover and many secrets to uncover.

The Fane is built so that characters (and players) can choose how they want to approach it. Do they want to pretend to be prisoners? Do they want to sneak in the back? Do they want to talk their way into Ras Nsi's throne room? Do they want to kick in the front door and start cutting down snake people? All of these are viable options.

In Dungeon of the Mad Mage, nearly all of the 23 levels of the dungeon includes multiple factions that interact with one another in different ways. Instead of each level being a monster closet slaughterfest, the characters can work with or against these factions as they see fit.

This idea extends through many recently published adventures. Instead of rooms full of monsters to fight, there are factions at work with goals that may run parallel or perpendicular to the goals of the characters. Combat is still an option but it is often only one of many.

Expanding Your Scenes

We can use these examples to help us build our own situations when preparing and running our games. Whenever we're putting together a scene or situation in one of our games, we can ensure that the scene allows for multiple solutions instead of just one.

One great way to ensure there are opportunities for roleplaying are to add factions to your enemies. This might be subordinates who secretly hate their leader. It might be two warring factions. Factions, even more than two, are excellent tilled earth for your characters to plant seeds of intrigue instead of just slitting throats the whole time.

We can also ensure our scenes have something to discover in it. This might be interesting murals, tapestries, or frescoes on the wall that someone can investigate with history or religion. We can layer the scene with all sorts of stuff the characters can investigate. If we've prepared some secrets and clues you can drop in these secrets whenever a character successfully investigates some interesting part of the area.

Bored guards and lots of shadows make for some great stealthy work. Because group stealth can be hard and a wrong move can alert an entire castle, we might go a bit easier on the characters if they choose subterfuge instead of combat by helping them fail forward on unlucky rolls. A failed group stealth check doesn't lead to an alert but it means the group gets split up as sleepy guards walk through or that they collapse into the sewers beneath the castle.

When building for the three pillars, we can keep a little checklist to help us ensure we're building around the three pillars:

• Is there a way to sneak around?
• Are there NPCs to talk to?
• Are there factions within the monsters and villains to exploit?
• Are there areas to explore and things to learn there?
• Are there things to fight without bringing the whole place down on top of them?
• Are there different ways to get into and explore the area?

These aren't perfect but they're a good start.

Understanding the Goal

One way we can keep our scenes open to all of the possible options characters bring to the table is to focus on the goal. If the goal is "kill everything in the dungeon" that will probably force combat. But if the goals are more specific like "steal the bowl used in the dark ritual" or "remove the enchantment possessing the king", it lends itself to other alternative paths.

In the 4th edition D&D days, Dave the Game talked about the "early out", a way to make overly long battles go faster. Instead of having a goal of killing everything in a battle, the goal was something else. It might be "stop the ritual" or "blow up the bridge" or "close the portal". The goal went beyond simple slaughter.

That same idea can be expanded to situations in our fifth edition D&D game. What is the characters' goal in the situation? What do the characters need to do? Can we foresee ways to accomplish that goal that aren't just killing things?

Relax

When we think about building scenes for our games, it's easy to fall in the trap of overpreparation. As written in Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master we might get more out of our game by preparing less. It's important that we set up scenes that allow for many different approaches but we don't have to plan for every one of them. Instead, we can place in the components that help ensure there are options available for the characters to choose from.

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A while back I asked newer DMs on Twitter to describe the hard parts they encountered when running running D&D games. I got back a lot of interesting responses many of which focused on learning the rules, finding players, how to prepare for a game, and learning how to improvise. A few people brought up the difficulty in gaining the confidence to run D&D games. Since we've yet to cover this topic on Sly Flourish, I thought we would do so now.

Confidence is a hard to muster in many situations but it can be particularly hard when running Dungeons & Dragons games. We're already not necessarily confident creatures but when running a game of high fantasy in front of our friends, it can feel like we're in a room full of adults playing make-believe (which is, of course, exactly what we're doing). All our lives we're pushed to act like adults. Its hard to be confident and grab on to the imagination of a child again.

Yet DMs break past these confidence barriers and run some fantastic games every day. Today we're going to offer some tips and tricks to help muster up the confidence required to run some great D&D games.

How do DMs Get the Confidence to Run Games?

Much like the question on the hard parts of running D&D games, I took to Twitter to ask how DMs got the confidence up to run D&D games. I got more than two hundred responses to this question. I took these results and categorized them into a handful of common themes. The top results included the following:

• I did it because no other DMs were available.
• I had a supportive group of friends or family.
• I gained confidence through continual practice.
• My drive to tell a story outweighed my nervousness.
• I watched liveplay games and advice videos particularly Matt Mercer and Matt Colville)
• I saw examples of either good or poor DMs.

There were many other answers as well but those above got mentioned repeatedly, with the top two getting nearly five times as many responses as others.

We're not going to focus on the results above in the rest of this article but we will use them to help guide our discussion on how DMs might get the confidence they need to run great D&D games.

Surround Yourself with Allies

D&D works when everyone around the table trusts one another. This means, first and foremost, bringing the right people to the table that you trust and that want to enjoy a fun game. Assuming that you have the right people at the table, your next goal is to build an environment of trust by removing our competitive nature from the game. Everyone at our D&D table has the same goal—to witness a great story. Focusing on the story instead of worrying continually about challenge and mechanics is a good way to break down the walls. Enjoy the successes of the characters, not the monsters. Let players narrate parts of the story as it plays out. Say yes.

If we have surrounded ourselves with people supportive of our time in the DM's seat and we build an environment focused on collaborative storytelling, we'll get the support we'll need to feel confident as we run the game.

Above all, everyone we bring to the table is there to have a good time. We all want to get together and play games with our friends. Our players aren't here to make fun of us or pick holes in our understanding of the rules. They want to share a story together as people have done for tens of thousands of years. There is little greater joy in our lives beyond sharing stories with some friends and a handful of dice.

Fake It Until You Make It

Going all the way back to Aristotle, the idea that to be virtuous, we must act virtuous works just as well with the confidence we need to run our D&D games. We might not feel confident, but if we did, what would that look like? How would we act then? What if we pretended to be confident? This essentially has us diving into our games with both feet, waving our arms and trying out our silly voices even if we totally suck at them. Who cares?

I found the final sentence in the Wikipedia page on this topic particularly interesting:

In the 1920s, Alfred Adler, a disciple of Sigmund Freud, developed a therapeutic technique that he called "acting as if". This strategy gave his clients an opportunity to practice alternatives to dysfunctional behaviors. Adler's method is still used today and is often described as "role play".

Holy shit! Role playing! That's what we're trying to do already! So maybe we're nesting our roleplaying a bit, first roleplaying that we're actually fully competent and confident DMs who then roleplay the NPCs, villains, and monsters in our game. Every layer of our roleplaying, however, buries our self doubt a little more.

Faking it until we make it also helps us actually make it the more games we run. The more games we run the easier it gets.

Avoid the Resistance

Author Steven Pressfield wrote a book about writing called The War of Art. In it he describes "The Resistance" as anything, real or imaginary, that gets in the way of creating art. DMing is one such form of art and the Resistance continually gets us to doubt ourselves and our ability to run a good game. If we can see this shadowy demon for what it is, we can recognize when it's sinking its claws into us and realize that it is simply getting in the way of us running great games.

When we hear voices in our head saying things like "it's too hard" or "I'm not good enough" or "I'll never be Matt Mercer", that's the voice of the Resistance and it's there to always keep us from making art. Put it aside, run a game, and then run another one.

Learn from the Best

Many people worked up the confidence to run D&D games by watching excellent dungeon masters run their own games online. This is a relatively new way to learn about this hobby, one we've only had for the past few years in the past few decades. Yet it is also likely responsible for doubling the amount of people playing D&D.

In particular, the Critical Role series by Matt Mercer and Dice, Camera, Action by Chris Perkins are excellent examples of D&D run by masterful DMs. The D&D advice videos by Matt Colville also come up often as sources for DM advice and as examples to help new DMs get into the seat. Even for veteran DMs, watching other DMs practice the craft can teach us a lot about how we might better run our own games. Will our style mimic these DMs? No. Will our games look like these? Maybe not. Can we learn from them? Hells yes.

Grab On to the Story

Losing ourselves in the fiction is an excellent way to forget about the stress of running a game. Many DMs said that they began DMing because they had stories to share. When we lose ourselves in the stories, when we go there, we'll forget how nervous we are and just run with it. When DMing goes well, we're in the flow. We lose track of time. We're fully engaged with the game. I can't speak for everyone but when I'm running a good D&D game, there isn't any other place I want to be.

Thinking Clinically About Our Games

Sometimes our games don't go well. Maybe people didn't have such a good time. Maybe we didn't have such a good time. It's easy to fall into despair, thinking we're horrible DMs and taking ourselves out of the chair. Instead, we can take a step back, look at the details of the game, and work on the specifics. Maybe we didn't suck as bad as we thought but we mis-matched the expectations we had with those of the players. Maybe we got too wound up in a battle and shut down a player's idea when we should have let it work.

Likewise, when we're playing in games, we can look at what is working well and what is going poorly. It's probably easier to do the latter. When games go well we're not likely thinking about why, we're just enjoying it. The tips and tricks we pick up from both good and bad games can help us polish our own.

We can learn from all of these experiences. If we see the path of DMing as a continual lifelong journey of learning and discovery, not a state we're going to one-day find ourselves in, these speed bumps won't turn into brick walls. We can take feedback one piece at a time and make our next game a little better than the previous.

Step back from the emotions we feel, study them, study the situation, and make small changes to your game.

Watch, Learn, and Do

When we look at what has helped DMs gain the confidence to run games along with the sorts of things that help people build confidence in all aspects of life, we can come to some simple advice. Yet many times the best advice (eat less, exercise more) is easier said than done. Still, when we focus on it and remember where it came from, such simple advice can sometimes push us in the right direction.

Watch people play D&D. Learn from other DMs. Think about their advice. Watch them run games. And then do it. Run games. Act as if. Grab on to the story and the fiction of the game. Become a kid again. Run some D&D.

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