by W. Eric Martin

• One of the familiar settings of modern games is outer space, with players typically focusing on fighting, finding things, or figuring out how to stay alive — and sometimes all of the above.

Cédric Lefebvre's Space Gate Odyssey, due out in Q1 2019 from French publisher Ludonaute, seems to fall into the category of fighting, albeit in a pacific "fighting for space in space" kind of way. Here's aa detailed overview of this 2-4 player game that bears a 90-minute playing time:

The future of humanity awaits you in Space Gate Odyssey. A system of viable exoplanets has been recently discovered and the Confederations are flocking into space to colonize it. In this 2 to 4-player development and flow-management board game, you play the leader of one of these Confederations and play your influence in the Odyssey command station to send as many of your settlers as you can on these exoplanets.

After decades of research and technological development, humanity is preparing to leave the Earth to colonize this discovered system. To get there, only one possible means of transport exists: space gates. For reasons related to physics and other quantum aspects, these gates can be built only in space. The Confederations have therefore embarked on the construction of their own station in orbit, equipped with space gates.

At the beginning of the colonizing era, these portals make it possible to go on one of the first three discovered planets. As soon as an entire contingent of settlers has joined the gate of a space station, it is teleported to the corresponding exoplanet. The landing conditions vary according to the planets and the choice of colonized spots quickly becomes strategic.

As soon as one of the three exoplanets is fully colonized, each Confederation gains influence according to its placement, then access to one of the two later discovered exoplanets becomes possible. At the end of the colonization of the five exoplanets, the stations are teleported to the Hawking planet and the influence of each Confederation is assessed. The leader of the most influential Confederation will be promoted to the rank of Governor of this new system.

One of the biggest challenges in Space Gate Odyssey is your ability to quickly develop and intelligently arrange your space station. The better you optimize the flow of your settlers to your station, then to the exoplanets, the more of them you can send to the favorable spots and thus gain influence.

The choice of the modules, their arrangement, and the distance between the airlocks and the gates are therefore essential elements — especially since, at the end of the game, the domains of the modules you used to build your station will bring you additional influence points if they are in line with the position of the domains on the Hawking planet Predominance.

Finally, you must be careful not to leave too many open corridors on the space void as this represents a real danger for your settlers and could therefore damage your reputation.

Your most amazing quest starts with Space Gate Odyssey. Will you be able to take over your opponents in order to take control of the new system, or will you stay at the dock?

• Alderac Entertainment Group has announced the first of what will likely be many expansions for John D. Clair's Space Base, with a March 29, 2019 release date scheduled for Space Base: The Emergence of Shy Pluto, which offers the following experience:

A strange new galactic body has emerged within the Milky Way. The greatest minds of The United Earth Services find themselves bewildered by the sudden appearance of Shy Pluto. Get the crews to their stations — it's time to deploy your ships.

The Emergence of Shy Pluto is a "Saga Expansion", that is, a collection of story-based scenarios that introduce new content to the game via a narrative structure. Not only are new ships added, but new scenarios are included as well. Once the story is completed, it may be replayed or the contents may be added to the Space Base base set.

On Twitter, Clair noted that not all Space Base expansions will have a narrative structure, but "generally yes", they will.

• In July 2018, Stephen Buonocore of Stronghold Games tweeted about the "(not-officially-announced) 'Core Worlds: The Board Game'".

Five months later, we still don't have an official announcement, but Buonocore has confirmed that Core Worlds: Empires — "a standalone board game set in the very thematic, rich Core Worlds universe" — is being developed by designer Andrew Parks and his Quixotic Games development team. No release date has been set since the game is still under development, but here's the game overview for now:

Six empires have risen from the ashes of the Galactic Realm. Still cemented by the alliance that enabled their unprecedented conquest of the galaxy, the six independent kingdoms now seek to consolidate their power, each hoping to carve out the strongest dominion in the cosmos. Conflicts among the young realms are inevitable, but will the galaxy return to a state of civil war?

Core Worlds: Empires is a worker placement game for 2-6 players. Each world in the galaxy occupies a board space that ambassadors (workers) can visit during the game. The worlds that appear during each game are variable. Each player starts with a certain number of worlds under their control, and more worlds enter the game as play proceeds.

At the start of the game, each player controls one unique worker that represents their faction leader (Chancellor Augustus, Baron Viktor, Prince Aaron, Empress Elona, Simon the Fox, or Lord Banner), as well as three generic ambassadors. All players periodically receive new generic ambassadors, but each player always possesses the same number of "workers". Players may upgrade their generic ambassadors into unique heroes in order to increase the quality of their individual workers.

Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

December used to be a slow month for game announcements, but these days it seems like we have only busy months and really busy months. Let's get to it:

• In Q2 2019, Tasty Minstrel Games plans to release Dawn of Mankind from Italian designer Marco Pranzo, and the short take on this 2-5 player game is "worker moving and aging" with a medium take being this:

In Dawn of Mankind, the people of your clan move along paths, gather resources, have children, create art, discover new methods of doing things...and eventually grow old and die. As your clan goes through these ordeals, you need to pay attention to when your food is going to spoil and where other people might want to go because if they choose the same path you've already trodden, they may inadvertently help you along your way.

You earn points for a variety of things, and whoever has the most points in the end wins.

• CMON Limited has picked up Emiliano "Wentu" Venturini's Walls of York — which Cranio Creations debuted at SPIEL '18 — and plans to release this game in North America in Q1 2019. Here's a summary of the gameplay:

The city of York is being built. Many buildings have already been built, but without a protective outer wall to defend against the Viking raids, the city is bound for failure. The king has called together his best architects to design defensive walls for the city, but only one design will be used. That architect will be hailed as the greatest architect in all the land.

In Walls of York, players must use the plastic wall pieces to construct a defensive barrier around the buildings on their city map. Each turn, a player rolls the building die, which dictates which types of walls are to be used. Players must enclose their city, containing the required buildings from the King's decree — but players must beware for the Vikings will come and lay waste at the end of the first age, forcing players to build anew in the second age. The player with the most coins at the end of the second age wins.

• In early 2018, U.S. publisher Compass Games hired Uli Blennemann to lead a new "Eurogame division" within the company, and the first title to appear within this division is Krzysztof Matusik's Cargo Express, a 2-4 player game that plays in 45-75 minutes and that's due out in early 2019. An overview:

In Cargo Express, players take over the roles of train entrepreneurs that accept orders and transport goods.

Cargo Express is mechanically simple, but planning the best moves is complex. Moreover, each player has to cope with always changing conditions. Each game turn consists of a planning phase and three player turns in which one of three cards is played.

Let your fellow players watch sparks fly from under the wheels of your dashing train!

• For a title that's more typical of a Compass Games release, we can turn to Weimar: The Fight for Democracy, a game for precisely four players from Matthias Cramer that plays in 5-6 hours. In a YouTube announcement of this title (starting at 10:30), Compass Games's John Kranz notes that the game is '80% political and 20% military". An overview:

On the 9th of November, 1918, the cold autumn air in Berlin is full of tension. The workers are planning to strike and since the city is full of troops, they do not know if they will survive that day. Three hours later, the German monarchy does not exist anymore, and the first German democracy is born.

Weimar: The Fight for Democracy is a game about the major actors in the spectrum of the new Republic. The Social Democrats and the Conservatives are trying to defend the democracy. Communists and Nationalists are looking to overthrow the government and install their own regime. Will this infant Republic survive? Or will Germany — as in history — fall to the Nazis and become a lawless state? Or will there be a Union of Socialist German Republics?

Weimar includes two major "battlefields": In public opinion, the parties struggle to influence the important political issues like the economy, the media, or foreign affairs. Winning these issues scores points and allows them to take significant decisions. At the same time, the parties try to control the streets and position their followers in the major cities of Germany for demonstrations, street fights, and actions taken by the paramilitary organizations.

Weimar is a tense and exciting card-driven game (CDG) on a most interesting topic. Cards may be played for the event, for public opinion, or for actions in the street.

In each of the six game turns, the parties play one agenda that defines their strategy for the turn (e.g., modifying their twelve-card play deck, defining issues, getting advantages in the streets). The goals of the parties are asymmetrical and contradictory. While the democratic parties score for stabilizing the state and removing poverty, the non-democratic parties score for coups and unrest.

• Speaking of Cramer, waaay back in February 2016 I wrote about him working on a new version of Glen More that would have improved components and new mechanisms, a version that "won't be released before 2017".

Well, that's one promise kept as Glen More II: Chronicles won't appear until the second half of 2019, with the game coming from new German publisher Funtails, which plans to hold a Kickstarter campaign for the game in early 2019.

The "Chronicles" in the title — a set of eight expansions included in the box — are a major part of what's new, and each Chronicle adds a new gameplay element to the base game. The "Highland Boat Race" Chronicle, for example, tells the story of a boat race in which the winner needs to be the first to reach their home castle after navigating their boat along the river through all the other players' territories. The "Hammer of the Scots" Chronicle adds a neutral "Englishman" playing piece to the time track that players struggle to control to get an additional turn — if they can afford him, that is, as he is paid using the market mechanism. All Chronicles can be freely combined, but says Cramer, "you would have a monster game. We recommend using one Chronicle for a 75-90 minute game or two Chronicles for experienced players."

Here's a summary of the gameplay, along with a comparison of what differs from the original game:

In Glen More II: Chronicles, each player represents the leader of a Scottish clan from the early medieval ages until the 19th century, a leader looking to expand their territory and wealth. The success of your clan depends on your ability to make the right decision at the right time, be it by creating a new pasture for your livestock, growing barley for whisky production, selling your goods on the various markets, or gaining control of special landmarks such as lochs and castles.

The game lasts four rounds, represented by four stacks of tiles. After each round, a scoring phase takes place in which players compare their number of whisky casks, scotsmen in the home castle, landmark cards, and persons against the player with the fewest items in each category and receives victory points (VPs) based on the relative difference. After four rounds, additional VPs are awarded for gold coins and some landmarks while VP penalties are assessed based on territory size, comparing each player's territory to the smallest one in play.

The core mechanism of Glen More II: Chronicles and Glen More functions the same way: The last player in line takes a tile from a time track, advancing as far as they wish on this track. After paying the cost, they place this tile in their territory, with this tile activating itself and all neighboring tiles, triggering the production of resources, movement points, VPs, etc. Then the player who is last in line takes their turn.

Improvements over the original Glen More include bigger tiles, better materials, new artwork, the ability for each player to control the end of the game, and balancing adjustments to the tiles for a better suspense curve. The game is designed to consist of one-third known systems, one-third new mechanisms, and one-third improvements to Glen More.

Aside from the Chronicles, another major change to the game is the ability to invest in famous Scottish people of the time, who are represented through a new "person" tile type. Persons not only have their own scoring, they also trigger one-time or ongoing effects on the tactical clan board. This adds a new layer of decision making, especially since the ongoing effects allow players to focus on a personal strategy of winning through the use of the clan board.

Five of the Chronicles in the game Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

Let's close out my PAX Unplugged 2018 coverage with a round-up of random pics from the show, which took place Nov. 30 to Dec. 2. Well, not truly random since I chose what to aim the camera at in the first place and I've deleted dozens of duplicate images and sat on embargoed pics and otherwise made authorial choices as to why I'd want to feature this over that, but sure, random.



Richard Garfield's Keyforge was the buzziest title at PAXU, with a line three deep at practically all hours in front of the Fantasy Flight Games booth, which was directly in front of one of the main entryways to the exhibitor space, which was in the sam hall as the "freeplay" area that included both the First Look tables and tables reserved for games taken out of the PAXU library.




James A. Wilson's Everdell was the second buzziest title based on my unscientific "crowd measurement" scale that consisted of me looking at crowds each time I passed a booth. Publisher Starling Games had several dozen copies of the collector's edition of Everdell for sale at PAXU, but all of the regular editions had been shipped to distributors by that point. All of them! Starling Games has no more copies in reserve, and a Starling representative at the show said it would be many months before the next printing of the game would be available.




While I've grown tired of the "Purr-ocessing" sign in the Exploding Kittens booth, I can appreciate how successful that booth is at every single convention where it's present. People love the mini-plays that ensue when someone approaches the wall to press buttons and order games or expansions, and these performances creates stories that others share, both in person and via social media, spreading awareness of the EK brand and making the effort involved in running this booth well worth it.

I wouldn't suggest that other publishers do the exact same thing, but they should consider that when they're selling games to players, they can sell more than just the game. Yes, the game will create its own experience that can be shared, but maybe that experience could begin before they even leave the booth...




Here's the hole in the exhibit floor where White Wolf Publishing was meant to be. In mid-November 2018, the company announced changes in which WWP would focus solely on brand management while parent company Paradox Initiative would, um, own White Wolf Publishing. It's not clear what Paradox will do since from now on White Wolf will "develop the guiding principles for its vision of the World of Darkness, and give licensees the tools they need to create new, excellent products in this story world. White Wolf will no longer develop and publish these products internally."




Jason Tagmire's Button Shy Games has a clear vision for the games it releases: Each release is a tiny game with a small price point that comes in a wallet-size package. The problem with this type of catalog, though, is how to market it to passersby when the games themselves as tiny and not likely to catch the eye.

Button Shy solved this problem by creating a booth that looked more like a clothing store than a game publisher's booth, with the games tucked into shirt pockets and the vital statistics of the games posted on boxes next to those shirts. Not blending in is a great way to get folks to give you a first look, and getting people to pause in their movement past your booth is a vital step toward introducing them to your games.




I realize that I'm focusing a lot on marketing in this round-up, but that's because I've already covered games played in my previous two round-ups from PAXU. I didn't play Ryan Courtney's Pipeline, for example, but this lit-up sign in the Capstone Games booth caught my eye and was unlike anything else I saw while walking the floor, so I stopped and looked. (I'm not the Capstone Games customer, though, so I moved on after checking out the sign for this game and others on display.)




Archon Games took something of the opposite approach to Button Shy and Capstone, with its booth being a colorless dimension that sucked you in due to it being weirdly and intriguingly monotone, more art gallery than sales stage.




A PAXU attendee shakes the final ten-or-so $50 mystery boxes, perhaps to see which one feels the heaviest. Not sure what other guideline you might have when spending money for a box that "may contain fun". I guess if the fun doesn't pan out, you'll at least have a greater quantity of kindling on hand.




Lone Shark Games' lead designer Mike Selinker was leading players through demo games of Apocrypha Adventure Card Game: Box Two – The Flesh and Apocrypha Adventure Card Game: Box Three – The Devil, which both debuted at PAXU. Again, I need to poke publishers far in advance of this show in 2019 in order to put together a convention preview and highlight debuts like these. It's hard to make plans for a show when you're not even sure what will be available there!




Battlestations: Dirtside is a standalone game from Jeff Siadek of Gorilla Games, and whereas Battlestations: Second Edition focused on what's required to keep a spaceship running in space, Dirtside lands that ship on the ground and confronts you with unexpected happenings on multiple worlds.




Gamewright has licensed the real-time reaction game Twin It! from designers Nathalie Saunier, Rémi Saunier, and Thomas Vuarchex and publisher Cocktail Games and debuted it at PAXU ahead of the game's "official" introduction to the market at NY Toy Fair in February 2019.




Asmodee demoed Black Mirror: NOSEDIVE, which debuted at the U.S. retail chain Target in late November 2018. I know some folks still protest the use of electronic devices in board and card games, but you might as well protest co-operative games. Given the number of titles hitting the market each year, you can be assured that (1) more designers will experiment with app-integration in their creations and (2) most designers and publishers will release app-free games, giving you more titles to explore than you can possibly absorb in a lifetime without other commitments.




In addition to selling the newly released Endeavor: Age of Sail, Burnt Island Games engaged in one of this era's most common convention activities: Showing off a game ahead of a crowdfunding project intended to bring said game to print. The practice makes sense, though, as I got a far better idea of how Jay Cormier and Graeme Jahns' In the Hall of the Mountain King works from three minutes of face-time than from fifteen minutes of reading and rewriting the description on the BGG game page.




The Stuff of Legend is a comic book series from Mike Raicht, Brian Smith, and Charles Paul Wilson III from Th3rd World Studios that started in 2009, and that series is now being transformed into a co-operative board game from designer Kevin Wilson. Here's an overview of the game:

As Allied forces fight the enemy on Europe's war-torn beaches, another battle begins in a child's bedroom in Brooklyn when the nightmarish Boogeyman snatches a boy and takes him to the realm of the Dark. The child's playthings, led by the toy soldier known as the Colonel, band together to stage a daring rescue. On their perilous mission, they will confront the boy's bitter and forgotten toys, as well as betrayal in their own ranks.

In The Stuff of Legend, each player takes on the role of one of the boy's loyal toys, each with their own unique abilities. Players work co-operatively, scouring the Dark in search of the Boy before the Boogeyman can escape with him. Players beware, through the course of the game your allegiance may change, and at any point one of your fellow players could be secretly working against you for the wicked Boogeyman.

Planetoid will be a 2019 release from Jon Mietling and Portal Dragon, with this game being a memory-based, set-collection game.

The production of the game board is smart, with a double-layering of cardboard that allows you to place tokens in the holes, then press on the edge of a token to lift it up in order to grab it and flip it.




The Stars Align is a two-player game from Sean Fenemore and Matt Radcliffe that (I believe) Breaking Games debuted at PAXU.

In the first half of the game, players take turns revealing patterns on cards, then placing stars in their color on the 7x7 board. Once the second half begins, you can start overlaying the pattern on spaces that are already filled, flipping up to three of the opponent's stars to your color while placing your own stars in empty spaces. When you fill a row or column with stars in your color, you score a point, then remove those stars from the board. Whoever scores five points first wins!




Deblockle is the first board game from Project Genius, a Texas-based publisher of brainteasers and logic puzzles. The company already has a presence in the Barnes & Noble U.S. retail chain, so its debut title will also have a presence there — which is a nice way to put your game in front of a bunch of potential customers.

In the short game, you flip a block to an adjacent space on your turn, then move the block based on the symbol now showing on its face. Move a block to the opponent's star space, and you remove it from the board. Remove three blocks first to win the game — or four blocks once you've moved past the introductory game.




One of the games I most excited about checking out at PAXU was Janna Ulrich's Quantified, which is due out in 2019 from Quality Beast.

Unfortunately, my to-do list was only in my head and not something that was driving me around the show floor to actually, you know, do, so I didn't see Quantified until late on Saturday night when it was too late to play. Thankfully my mistake turned out not to matter as the PAX representative overseeing that section of the First Look area said that Quantified is still very much in development for now. For background, here's the game overview in the BGG database:

Quantified is a co-operative board game set in a world in which everyone's behavior is constantly surveilled and analyzed. A player's behavior results in a social credit score, determining their position on the social ladder. Players start from different positions on the social ladder, as refugee, unemployed or employed, with unequal access to human rights. The goal of the game is to make all rights accessible to all players and to fight the implementation of totalitarian policies.

During a typical turn, players can move around the city, add non-player-characters to their network, attempt to solve so-called rally cards (initiatives that support human equality), attempt to prevent so-called threat cards (automatic, constantly approaching negative effects, such as invasive amendments, correction camps or totalitarian laws), or even simply work an official or illegal job. The trick is that not every action can be taken by every player. For example, those without the right to movement take longer to cross the city, while those without the right to free speech can't share their rally cards with others — and even the actions you can take must be taken with care as all actions leak personal data. If too much data is leaked, the players may have to face behavior analysis cards that negatively impact their collective game state!

Ultimately, by solving enough rally cards or working their way up the social ladder, every player should have access to all four human rights. Once this is done, the players win! But if three totalitarian laws come into effect before then or the threat deck runs out, the players collectively lose.

I love games that tackle subject matter not previously explored, whether silly or serious, and this design is taking on issues relevant to billions of people around the world. I have no idea whether the game works or not, but I'm curious to try it out once it clears development and is heading to market.

And with this post, my PAXU coverage is at an end. I actually finished posting about a show before the next one took place. Only in December!

Sample cards from Quantified Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

Friedemann Friese's Power Grid turns fifteen in 2019. Fifteen years, and that guy still can't get the setting right on that knob — or maybe he just likes holding knobs.

With that anniversary on the horizon, Friese and publisher 2F-Spiele's Henning Kröpke have taken a look at all things Power Grid and have made small, but meaningful improvements for this evergreen title. Says Kröpke, "Over the years we have released several expansions, which added variations and new ideas to the game's central mechanisms. The releases of Power Grid deluxe and Power Grid: The Card Game gave us the chance to streamline the game play and to literally play with even more of the mechanisms, improving the game experience step by step. Ten months ago, we took Power Grid into the workshop. We put the game through its paces, updated and exchanged parts, polished and rewrote the rules, until we were sure we were offering you the best possible version of Power Grid."

Thus, in March 2019 the old Power Grid base game will be replaced by Power Grid (Recharged Version), which will bear a "Recharged Version" logo on the front of the box. The first print run with 2F-Spiele's partners will include versions in English, German, Spanish, Dutch, Japanese, Polish, and Portuguese (for Brazil), with more versions to follow in 2019 and 2020.

Kröpke notes that changes to the game's graphics are minimal, with rule improvements only to smooth gameplay, such as the updated player order with two rows (as in Power Grid deluxe) so that players can more easily identify who has already taken their turn.

He adds, "Step by step, we are also checking all expansions, as some of their rules and variations need updating, too. In January 2019, we will release an FAQ containing all necessary minor changes and updates for each of the twelve expansions, so owners of these 'classic' expansions can continue to play and enjoy them while playing with the new Recharged rules. Future print runs of the expansions will also show the 'Recharged Version' badge."

While we're waiting for that new edition, how many differences can you spot between the new cover at right and the earlier cover shown at left? Read more »

by Saigo

Editor's note: Game Market took place in Tokyo on November 24-25, 2018, and Saigo — who translates game rules between Japanese and English and who tweets about new JP games — has translated reports about this event (day one and day two) that were written by Takuya Ono, who runs the Table Games in the World blog. Mr. Ono has given permission to reprint the photos from his post. Many thanks to Saigo! —WEM



Tokyo Game Market 2018 Autumn took place at Tokyo Big Sight (West Halls 3 and 4) for two days starting on November 24, 2018. Here is my report on its first day.

Approximately three thousand people were queuing before the opening of the show at 10:00 a.m. (according to Rael-san's report). The total attendance over the two days is expected to be 22,000 by the Game Market Management Office and approximately 23,000 by Rael-san.


[twitter=1066134802640789504]Caption: "Game Market has opened."

Shortly after the opening, a greater number of booths than normal had many people queuing in front of them. This is likely due to an increase in the number of both participants and attendees. As a result, the aisles were congested here and there, requiring more time to move in the venue.




At the BakaFire Party booth, in addition to the people queuing to buy the games, fans crowded around the stage.




The Little Future booth also had many people queuing for the second edition of Tokyo Sidekick and its expansion. Different cosplay characters appeared there each day.




Antoine Bauza, who now visits Tokyo Game Market quite regularly, was seen visiting booths and actively trying out games. Furthermore, his autograph session took place to celebrate the release of the Japanese edition of Attack on Titan: The Last Stand. [Editor's note: Cocktail Games' Matthieu d'Epenoux is seen at right. —WEM]

Here are some games that attracted people's attention:




SINGULARITY is a tower defense and worker placement game from Head Quarter Simulation Game Club, whose previous game Improvement of POLIS released last autumn, is one of the finalists for the Game Market Award. It sold out quickly.




Duetti Pantiino (from UNiCORN) is a card game about placing one's ideal panties in line according to the player's fetish. It sold out quickly.




Mamey (from Hoy Games) is a card game about collecting cards from bean fields and selling them in sets to the market. There are three fields where cards accumulate if they are not selected. There is an upper limit to the number of cards you can keep in your hand, requiring tactical handling.



TOKYO✖CROSSING, released on trial from Hanayama, is a game about making your way through the busy pedestrian scramble of Shibuya, Tokyo. The character pieces move differently according to their types: ninja, otaku, and high school girl.




Jelly Jelly Games released the Japanese edition of Shifty Eyed Spies, in which you wink at the player indicated on the card and try to determine the location on the table where that player is casting their glance. Meanwhile, you can challenge other players if you catch them winking.




Nage×Nage Portside YOKOHAMA (from KenBill) is a game in which you take turns playing cards. As soon as the icons on the cards played meet the criteria, throw your record disc into the turntable box in the center of the table. You need to throw in your record disc quickly without missing the box.




Psychic Pizza Deliverers Go to the Ghost Town (from One Draw) is a game that involves taking notes to deduce the positions of the pawns moved behind the screen by the game master.




Masala Magic (from natriumlamp games) uses scents of various spices for the gameplay. Nice scents were wafting around their table.




Saashi & Saashi had arranged with the Kyoto Municipal Transportation Bureau to produce and release the Kyoto City Bus 90th Anniversary Edition of Let's Make a Bus Route. This edition has been sold at various stores in Kyoto, such as Yellow Submarine, Tokyu Hands, and Bricks, as well as at the Kyoto City Train and Bus Fan Fair.

I see more and more board game accessories at recent Game Markets. Here are some notable new items on display. They are reasonably priced and quite alluring.




Rasen Works brought a rich variety of dice trays of diverse sizes and patterns.




Hot Games, using a 3D printer, produced board game accessories, such as poo tokens for Who Did It? and tile holders for The Castles of Burgundy.




Colon Yuran's accessories and card cases included meeples lying in the field.




Nicobodo had a magnet label saying "Board Gamer in Car" and a 2019 calendar with beautiful photos of board games.




In this board game workbook from Dilettante, you can keep a log of the board games you have played.




Itayama Shoukai had a variety of wooden pieces.

BakaFire Party was not the only one to hold lively events in their block booth.


Sugorokuya invited guests to hold a participatory event to play pen-and-paper games and the giant-sized edition of Rhino Hero.




Masashi Kawaguchi of DEAR SPIELE, Azumi Date of Asobi Cafe, and Sho Shirasaka of Jelly Jelly Cafe speak during the board game café owner panel session hosted by Jelly Jelly Cafe.




Kengo Otsuka, Yoshihiko Koriyama, and Kazunari Yoshimitsu talk at the board game designer panel session hosted by Jelly Jelly Cafe.

I am looking forward to seeing many more events tomorrow.




•••

Here is my report on the second day of Tokyo Game Market 2018 Autumn. The number of people queuing before the opening amounted to 1,700, almost half of that from yesterday (according to Rael-san's report), but the board game flea market, which opened one hour later, was much more crowded.




More than 1,300 items were brought to this flea market managed by the Asakusa Board Game Flea Market Management Office, and the congestion was handled by issuing numbered tickets to the visitors.

On the second day, I had to check only the new games not present on the previous day, so I had relatively more time to spare, which I spent visiting demo tables and chatting with people. Such time to spare reminds me of the earlier days of Game Market when it was held in Asakusa. As the booths grew in number, our time to spare decreased and that led to the demand to expand Tokyo Game Market to a two-day event. Among the people I met, there were people I met for the first time, friends of friends, friends to meet after a long time, friends from my local region... It is always fun to meet and chat with such people at the Game Market.

It is worth noting that at this Game Market, there were more block booths where they held panel sessions and mini-game events on both days. Along with this, I witnessed many people watching not only such events but also many demo tables without playing the games. Thus, starting from an event to buy games, Game Market has expanded to new dimensions, to an event to play games and further to an event also to watch games.




At the Jelly Jelly Cafe booth, rakugo storyteller Sanyutei Rakuten performed his TRPG-themed rakugo story titled "Innsmouth Nagaya" ("Innsmouth Tenement House") in front of an audience of more than one hundred people, who enjoyed the performance with laughter.

At 1:00 p.m., the ceremony for the Game Market Award took place for the designers of the five finalists (and winners of the Award of Excellence), namely Improvement of the POLIS, Instant Propose, Tenka Meidou, Tokyo Sidekick, and Tricks and the Phantom. The award ceremony was held in front of a large audience.


The designers of the five games that won the Award of Excellence stand in line

First, the Expert Game of the Year, which was won by The Founders of ENDE in 2017, was won this year by Improvement of the POLIS (from Head Quarter Simulation Game Club). Improvement of the POLIS is a gamer's game in which you develop the city-states of ancient Greece by utilizing the characteristics of each city-state. It is presently out of stock, but it has been announced that this game will be published and distributed widely.



Improvement of the POLIS (from Head Quarter Simulation Game Club)

After it was announced that there was no game to receive this year's Kids' Game of the Year, the Best Game of the Year was announced. With the sound of a drum roll, a decorated paper ball was broke in a traditional style to reveal the name of the winner, which was Tenka Meidou (from 77spiele). Tenka Meidou (which means "World Rumbling") is themed on the battles during the Sengoku period (the period of warring states). The chief juror Jun Kusaba commented that the game's flow to conquer small castles, then send reinforcement to larger castles reminded him of the famous warlord Oda Nobunaga, while the system to choose the areas to move one's troops by combining three dice rolls has a beauty like that of Reiner Knizia's games. There was also a comment mentioning that this third game from 77spiele is made with minimal components, such as the board being printed in black and white while the pieces were bought from 100-yen shops, demonstrating that the game's appeal can come through even without a fascinating appearance.

The game designer Shinichi Yogi, upon receiving the award, commented that he adores the works of Sid Sackson and Reiner Knizia and was very pleased that such designer's name was mentioned by the chief juror Jun Kusaba. He has not released any game after this third game, but I hope that receiving the award will prompt him to design more new games.


Tenka Meidou (from 77spiele) [Editor's note: This article's author, Takuya Ono, stands at right. —WEM]
The award ceremony venue was then transformed into an area to demo and try out the award winners: Improvement of the POLIS and Tenka Meidou. I noticed some staff members there teaching with remarkable skills how to play the games. I became curious and asked about them, and found out they were members of an organization called Analog Game Eventers, who were there by the request of the Game Market Management Office to teach how to play a number of board games as well as to work as game masters of some TRPG. In addition to their love for the games, they had studied in advance the rules of the games they were to teach in addition to making other efforts to prepare, such as devising short-game variants to demo long games. Game Market is being supported by such labor in the background.

Here are some board games I played and some that gathered attention on the second day:




A new edition of Tricks and the Phantom, which received the Game Market Award of Excellence, was published from Oink Games with renewed artwork for wide distribution.




5×5 City (from OKAZU Brand) is a tile-placement game to develop your city in accordance with the effects of building and blocks.




Candiabury (from Northgame) is a game to determine the whereabouts of the candy marbles dropped from the top of the board (which represents the night sky). Players choose one of the pockets to collect their marbles. Northgame has consistently released games with beautiful hand-made components in a small number of copies.




Noblesse Wallet (from ChagaChaga Games) is a game in which you draw coins from a bag and use them to shop, whereby you can increase usable special effects and the source of scoring. The players all share one bag, and this makes the game quite interactive and lively, prompting the players to shout things like, "Try to go for one more coin!" on another's turn.




No Hand (from 758 Board Game Circle) has the subtitle "trick-taker without cards in your hand". After partly sharing the available information about the trump, how to follow suit, and ranks, some cards are placed in line and the players bid for the card they wish to play. Later, the players' applied rules are disclosed, then they check which color has won the trick.




I Don't Wanna Leave Kotatsu (from Shime Shime Games) is a game about choosing whether or not to stay under the warm kotatsu-blanketed table on a cold day. The players secretly check their household chore cards and place orange tokens on the kotatsu table. Then they simultaneously choose to stay in the kotatsu or to move out of it to do their chore. Lastly, the oranges are divided among the people in the applicable groups according to the choices they made.




Donou no Kai, which specializes in two-player abstract strategy games, was joined by the president of the publisher nestorgames (as shown) from Spain. They sold 33 games at their booth. Ken Shoda, who usually accompanies some guests as their interpreter/guide at Game Market, was also at the Donou no Kai booth as one of nestorgames' game designers.

Game Market Management Office has started the questionnaire surveys on the show and newly-released games. Your responses will be appreciated.

The upcoming events are Osaka Game Market 2019, which will be held on March 10 (Sun) at Intex Osaka, Tokyo Game Market 2019 Spring in May 25 (Sat) and 26 (Sun) at Tokyo Big Sight (Aumi), and Tokyo Game Market 2019 Autumn in November 23 (Sat) and 24 (Sun) at Tokyo Big Sight (Aumi). The maximum capacity of the Tokyo Big Sight Aumi Hall is twice as large as the present West Halls 3 and 4, so it is expected to sufficiently accommodate the increasing number of participants.

•••

Follow-up article: Tokyo Game Market 2018 Autumn: Attendance of 22,000 over Two Days (original post)

Game Market Management Office has announced that a total of 20,000 people attended Tokyo Game Market 2018 Autumn, Japan's largest analog game event, which was held on November 24 (Sat) and 25 (Sun) at Tokyo Big Sight. The attendance was 12,000 on the first day and 10,000 on the second day. In total, it was 2,000 people more and 10% larger than that of Tokyo Game Market 2018 Spring (May 2018).

Since Game Market expanded to a two-day event, the attendance has steadily increased from 18,500 to 20,000 to 22,000. Over the past three Game Markets, the number of exhibitors has changed from 730 to 692 to 779 and the number of newly-released games from Japan has changed from 495 to 301 to 564. Thus, both of them have reached the highest number at this Game Market.

The questionnaire survey on newly-released games, including original games, imported games, Japanese editions, TRPG and SLG, has started. An autocomplete widget, which displays the applicable game names after you enter the first few characters, has been newly adopted for higher ease of rating. If you have played any of these games, please submit your rating on them. Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

In late November 2018, I wrote about Jeffrey D. Allers' card game Rolnicy that's available only from Polish publisher Nasza Księgarnia. Well, here's two more "hidden" titles from that country, both from Instytut Pamięci Narodowej (IPN) — Poland's Institute of National Remembrance, which caught the public's attention in 2011 thanks to the release of Karol Madaj's Kolejka.

Since 2009, IPN's Public Education Office has been releasing board games about Polish history, and it released two new games in 2018, one for younger players and one for older. Jan Madejski's Niepodległa — "niepodległa" being the Polish word for "independent" — is the latter title, with this being a co-operative game for 2-4 players that plays in 30-90 minutes. An overview:

The First World War is coming to an end. It had a devastating impact on Habsburg Austria-Hungary, the Kingdom of Prussia, and the Russian Empire, which over 120 years earlier partitioned and wiped the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth from the maps. But this global conflict that exhausted the partitioners of Poland gives the opportunity to restore Poland and regain independence. Now, go back to the time of the First World War and join the key statesmen of the era. Responsibility for the existence and the future shape of Poland lies on your shoulders. Only through cooperation may you revive your homeland and protect it from its enemies. Are you brave enough to undertake the mission?

Niepodległa is a board game published by Poland's Institute of National Remembrance to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the rebirth of Poland. The game illustrates the events that led to the restoration of Poland's sovereignty. This co-operative game has two variants: basic, mostly aimed at education (30 minutes) and advanced for intermediate or experienced players (90 minutes).

The scope of the gameplay are the events of the years 1910–1920 with an emphasis on the period between the outbreak of the First World War and the restoration of Poland's sovereignty in 1918. The board represents the former and — eventually — future territory of Poland. The players immerse themselves in the operations undertaken by the key characters of the battle for the independence; they try to spread the ideas of independence, seek a national consensus, and strengthen Poland's position in the world. If they fulfill certain conditions, Poland will regain sovereignty in the grand finale in 1918.

However, despite regaining independence, if the players fail to meet decisive challenges — the Peace Conference in Paris, the development of a new state administration, the struggle over Poland's borders as well as the uprisings in Greater Poland and Silesia and the Poland-Bolshevik war — Poland may well cease to exist.

Game board for the advanced variant

• The second title from IPN might ring a bell for anyone who's played Scythe — Miś Wojtek, a.k.a., Wojtek the Bear. This Karol Madaj design for 2-5 players aged 6 and up is based on an odd event from history: the enlistment of a bear in the armed services. This summary features as much background info as detail about the game:

Miś Wojtek is a family board game with a rich historical background, telling the story of Poland's "soldier bear" Wojtek (pronounced like "VOY-tek") who shared the complicated fate of Poles deported from Poland deep into Russia during World War II.

In September 1939, Poland was attacked by its neighbors: Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Poland was conquered and divided between the invaders. Many Poles were expelled and sent to forced labor camps or sent to remote areas of the Soviet Union. Then, in a surprise move in 1941, the German army invaded the USSR. Joseph Stalin, the leader of the USSR, agreed to create an army from the Polish soldiers who had been held in Soviet camps. Following the deterioration of Polish-Soviet relations in March 1942, these Polish soldiers and civilians left the USSR under the command of General Anders to support British allies in the fight against Germany.

On their way from the Soviet Union to Iran, Polish soldiers bought a small, malnourished bear from a hungry Persian boy. They named the bear "Wojtek" and enlisted him in the army, complete with military papers and the rank of private.

Wojtek remained with the soldiers throughout their difficult journey from Iran, through Palestine, Egypt, and Italy to Scotland. He shared their ups and downs, their joys and sorrows, giving them many opportunities to smile and helping them when in need. He guarded the equipment, and during the battle of Monte Cassino, he even carried heavy ammunition boxes.

The players join Wojtek the bear and the Polish II Corps on their journey from the USSR to Edinburgh, Scotland. Along the way, they collect souvenirs related to the fate of General Anders' soldiers and their famous bear. The aim of the game is to collect the best set of memorabilia!

At the beginning of the game, players receive five travel cards and a bear pawn. Players take turns in clockwise order. On a turn, the active player plays a travel card with a truck and moves their pawn to the next (closest) empty space in the color of the card played. Then the player takes one bear card from the board, from the box with the same color as the color of the space to which their pawn moved. Finally, the player refills their travel card hand up to five cards, and ends their turn.

To move their pawn, the players may also play wild cards with a walking bear (which allows them to move to a space of any color as long as they don't pass another pawn) or play three travel cards in the same color in order to name any color and move to the next (closest) empty space in the chosen color.

At the moment when the first pawn reaches Edinburgh or any player has a complete set of bear cards (six different cards of the same type), the last round of the game begins.

After ending the last round, players score their bear cards. Players sort their cards into sets. Each set must have the same type of cards, with no repeated cards. The largest possible set is a complete set of six different cards in one color. The player with the largest set wins.

Wikipedia has more info on Wojtek, and stories like this one suggest that the universe of game settings is far vaster than what we've encountered to date. I'd only be too happy to never again have to write about needing to replace the recently deceased king...

Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

• Don't expect the cover shown at right to survive to the published game as it represents the past and not the future. In Q4 2017, German publisher AMIGO Spiele ran a Kickstarter campaign for Richard Garfield's Carnival of Monsters, a drafting card game that had a marketing hook of reuniting Garfield with famed artists from Magic: The Gathering, such as Mark Tedin, Nene Thomas, and Jesper Myrfors. That hook did not work out, with the KS project reaching only one-fifth of its (unrealistically high) goal of $250K.

As of October 2018, AMIGO has reconfigured the project, with the game now featuring artists familiar to the German market — such as Franz Vohwinkel, Dennis Louhausen, and Michael Menzel — and with a new anticipated release date of Q4 2019.

• Uli Blennemann of Spielworxx has posted an overview of that publisher's release calendar for 2019:

—March: Yínzi: The Shining Ming Dynasty (formerly called "Yangtze") from Luis Costa and José Carlos Santos (a.k.a. Rôla)
—May: Die Macher from Karl-Heinz Schmiel, "with quite a bit of changes", according to Blennemann
—July: Auf der Walz from Jimmy Maas
—October: Throne of Allegoria from Robin Lees and Steve Mackenzie

...with a "heavily revamped" version of Schmiel's Lieber bairisch sterben having previously been announced as a 2020 Spielworxx release. Here's an overview of Yínzi, the only title for which we have details at the moment:

China experienced the greatest economic expansion in its history during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). The silver trade between the Americas and Europe and onward to China had a profound effect on the world economy – it may be considered the beginning of a global economy.

In China, social mobility led to the growing of cities, especially in the lower Yangtze area, which was at that time responsible for the main production of wheat for the whole country. In addition to wheat and rice, other crops like tea, fruits, and sugarcane were grown on a large scale. Immigrating peasants changed their profession to become merchants and artisans. Many people from the countryside were employed in private or state run factories, producing commodities like paper, porcelain, refined sugar, or silk textiles.

Trade and commerce thrived in this liberalized economy and was aided by the construction of canals, roads, and bridges by the Ming government. Ming China saw the rise of several merchant clans, who owned large amounts of wealth.

In Yínzi: The Shining Ming Dynasty — "yínzi" meaning "silver" — the players represent merchant clans developing parts of China in the late Ming period in the early 17th century along the last 200 km of the Yangtze river before it reaches the China Sea.

The players plant crops, sell goods to the rural or urban markets, develop raw materials, build and upgrade factories, and sell their goods to ships already waiting in the port. In order to reach the port, the players need to improve their river transport capabilities along the Yangtze.

[twitter=1061500058095497216]

• Italian publisher Post Scriptum has already dropped info on the 2019 release Legend Raiders from designers Dario Massarenti and Francesco Testini, with some familiar-yet-not-entirely-specific characters populating the box cover. Here's an overview of this 2-4 player game:

In Legend Raiders, each player represents an adventurer who wants to collect as many ancient coins (a.k.a., victory points or VPs) as possible, searching for legendary treasures and mythical places. In every round on the main board are four different missions, each composed of a discovery to be performed and two random tools (ropes, shovels, compasses and maps) supplied by the bureau. The explorer who gains the most points wins.

On their turn, a player chooses between two actions: (1) Take a discovery and place it on the personal board together with the two randomly related tools, or (2) Perform one or more discoveries with the tools already on the personal board.

To be discovered, each treasure requires a specific combination of tools. Places require more tools than artifacts, but will give more VPs in the following expeditions. When a player uses their favorite tool, they gain more VPs; the torch can be used as a joker by turning it off, but only if it's on!

Discovering new treasures gives the player VPs based on number of ancient coins visible on the personal board, uncovered by the ongoing missions. Solving one mission at a time allows the player to have more visible ancient coins and thus to score more VPs, but having more missions on the board and solving more of them in a single turn gives the player a benefit in terms of time. Each time one or more legendary treasures are discovered, the player also gains a expedition card from the four available at the bureau; expedition cards show goals that grant VPs at the end of the game if achieved.

Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

After a few weeks discombobulated by multiple conventions — including our own BGG.CON 2018 in mid-November — Scott Alden, Steph Hodge, Lincoln Damerst and I have returned with a new episode of The BoardGameGeek Show, and given that I had just come back from PAX Unplugged 2018 and seen examples of marketing both good and bad on the floor of that convention, I thought it would be interesting to talk about that topic.


Youtube Video

00:32 Introductions
01:20 BoardGameGeek 2019 Support Drive has begun
04:29 Support us as well through our BGG Store
04:00 What have you been playing?
04:08 Stonehenge and the Sun - Naotaka Shimamoto - itten
07:30 Underwater Cities - Vladimír Suchý - Delicious Games
09:48 Eye My Favorite Things - Daiki (Nilgiri) Aoyama & ぺぺR (Pepe_R) - するめデイズ (Surume Days)
11:25 PUSH - Prospero Hall (Forrest-Pruzan Creative) - Ravensburger Spieleverlag GmbH
13:26 Chronicles of Crime - David Cicurel - Lucky Duck Games
18:30 Metal Gear Solid: The Board Game coming from Emerson Matsuuchi and IDW Games in 2019
19:29 NSKN Games and Board&Dice have merged
20:38 Changing publisher needs and strategies with the onset of more mergers
25:09 Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood of Venice board game comes to Kickstarter
27:43 How (not) to market games at conventions (examples from PAX Unplugged and elsewhere) Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

Yesterday I covered a few games that appeared at PAX Unplugged with little to no advance notice from publishers, so now let's look at a few that were on my radar thanks to some degree of marketing push ahead of the show.

Such pushes are encouraged if you want people to know that your game exists or will exist at some point in the future, and I can already see that ahead of PAX Unplugged 2019, I need to lean hard on publishers for info more directly so that I can create a convention preview for that show. On Saturday, for example, designer Daryl Andrews told me that Renegade Game Studios was selling Ghostbusters: The Card Game, which he had co-designed with Erica Bouyouris and which he had not known would be available until he arrived at the booth and they gave him copies. Designers tend to shout about their releases to the world, so if publishers aren't even telling them about the games that will be on hand, it's going to be harder for those titles to find a footing in this flooded marketplace.

[ImageID=4434739 rep]• One company that had promoted the PAXU appearance of an upcoming release was Calliope Games, which had announced that Tom McMurchie's Tsuro: Phoenix Rising, the third title in its Tsuro game series, would be available for a sneak peek. I caught company president Ray Wehrs at the end of Friday for a sample two-player game — the title handles up to eight players, as with the other two Tsuro titles — and he was happy to play and is fine with me talking about the game, although he allowed only the (unfortunately) blurry image below of the prototype bits.

Gameplay in Tsuro: Phoenix Rising resembles that of Tsuro in that each player is moving their pawn over paths on the tiled gaming area and you want everyone else to have their paths cut short so that only you remain in play. If you're the only player with a piece on the board, you win. Where the game differs from earlier releases, though, is that the tiles are placed in troughs in a plastic game board and only the perimeter of the board is empty at the start of play. The center spaces each start with a double-sided tile on them, and instead of each tile having two connections along each edge, sometimes the tiles have looping connections that take you to the corner of a tile — perhaps even where no connection exists! Many of these center tiles have lanterns on them, and place a red, blue or yellow token on these lanterns at the start of play.

Each player begins with one life token, representing the ability of your phoenix to arise again and have a second life if travels off the board. On a turn, if your phoenix is off the board or facing a blank space, you place your tile in hand on an empty space of the playing area; if your phoenix is at a dead end in front of a tile already in play, you pick up that tile and reorient it so that you can move along the path just built. If you move completely through a lantern space on your turn, then you collect a star token, and you can pick up multiple stars on a turn. At the end of your turn, move all such lanterns to different tiles in play, ideally setting up scoring opportunities on future turns.

If a player manages to collect seven stars, their phoenix has gained immortality and they win the game immediately.


Expect the final pieces to be in focus

• Alderac Entertainment Group and designer Peter McPherson were showing off Tiny Towns, a game for 2-4 1-6 players that's scheduled for release on April 26, 2019.

What's more, they were demoing the game in what was nearly an ideal manner for a convention. McPherson and other AEG folks were behind a table on the edge of their booth, greeting everyone who passed and inviting them to play, with the possible reward of a $100 Home Depot gift card being dangled as an incentive. I passed the table multiple times and nearly always saw people playing, with empty seats being filled within a minute. Instead of you needing to mess around with the game components, the seven different building combinations were printed on the tablecloth, which allowed onlookers to play along and kibitz about what the actual players were doing. (The length of the table was the only downside as it was difficult from one end of it to clearly see the other end.)

Everyone played on a sheet of paper that contained the details of the giveaway, space for you to build, room to write down your points (with these spaces indicating additional gameplay elements that would come packaged in the box), and space for your name and email. AEG needed this info to contact you about the prize, of course, but more importantly you were signing up to be on its mailing list, giving them a way to reach out in the future and let you know when this game (or other titles) hit the market.

Whatever you think of AEG's games, this set-up is a model for other publishers who want to tease a game ahead of its release: make it easy to jump into a game or watch, tease other elements in the box while keeping the current demo streamlined, and get contact info so that you can connect with the player later since they're unlikely to remember everything they've played.

So what is Tiny Towns anyway? You might think of it as a town-building take on the awesome Threes! puzzle app. During the game, players build cottages, taverns, farms, factories, and three other types of buildings on a personal 4x4 grid. Each game starts with players laying out one card for each of these types of buildings, with the card specifying which building blocks you need in which combination in order to create that building.

On a turn, the active player calls out one of the five types of building blocks, then each player takes one of these blocks and places it in an empty space in their 4x4 grid. The next player in clockwise order calls out a block, and so on. After placing a block, if a player has an arrangement of blocks that matches one of that game's building patterns, then they can remove those blocks from their grid and place the appropriate wooden building on one of the spaces previously occupied. You don't have to remove them, and sometimes you want to leave your options open to take advantage of what an opponent might call — or keep them from being able to call something that will hurt you. Eventually, though, you need to convert blocks to buildings as that clears space in your grid and gives you more room to build.

Once you can't place a block, you're done and can tally your points, with you no longer calling our block types since you'd solely be trying to mess up others instead of building something yourself. The last player with room in their grid can place whatever they want block by block. Each building scores in a different way, with some buildings not scoring at all and with you losing a point for each remaining block. Farms feed up to four cottages, for example, and if you don't feed cottages, then you don't score points for them. When you complete a factory, you choose a type of good, and whenever someone calls that good, you can place whatever block you want in your grid.

Tiny Towns is my style of game, but I played like a dimwit and quickly had nothing to do but block up my town and pretend that I was sleep deprived and not really this bad of a player. In addition to having different block set-ups for the seven building types, the game includes a deck of block cards; if you want to focus solely on building in a learning game — or you want to deny mean players the chance to block you — you can flip the block cards at random to determine what everyone has to place.


My terrible tiny town

• Japanese publisher itten appeared at PAXU for its first U.S. convention, and in addition to selling past releases such as HATSUDEN, Here Comes the Dog, and the new version of Tokyo Highway that Asmodee is distributing, designer Naotaka Shimamoto was demonstrating Stonehenge and the Sun, a 2-4 player dexterity game that hits Kickstarter in mid-December 2018.

Many dexterity games feel like one another, especially those in which you stack or build things, and while Stonehenge and the Sun has a building element, that's not the focus of the gameplay. You and your fellow (perhaps godlike) players are building Stonehenge one block at a time on a circular base, but each time you build, you must then represent the passing of time by swinging a heavy metal ball — the stand-in for the sun — through the building area. If you knock over any blocks, you take them as penalty points, and whoever knocks over the fewest blocks wins.


Shimamoto preps the sun for launching

In more detail, each player starts with a marker evenly spaced around the base. On a turn, you take a block from the reserve and add it to the perimeter of the base or stack it on another block, with stacks being at most two blocks tall. Alternatively, you can take a block that's already on the base and lay it across two pillars already in play to create a gate. If you add a block, you must move your marker to either side of this new block, and the area where your marker is located is the target through which you must swing the sun. If you create a gate, then you don't move your marker. You can't share an area with another player, and you might be forced to move depending on how others place blocks.

After you build, you then launch the sun — and the question that nearly every observer had about the game is "How do you set that up at home?" At PAXU, itten had build a wooden frame over the table and attached the ball via fishing wire to this frame. In the First Look area, they suspended the ball from a mic stand. They were soliciting advice from players as to what they should include in the final box: a suction cup? a carabiner? a screw hook? Stonehenge and the Sun might be the only game that requires you to screw something into your ceiling in order to play.

The game includes rules for a second game called "Orbit", with this being a real-time game. You place the blocks around the base evenly, and each player places two markers next the base and opposite one another. Someone launches the ball in orbit around the base, and once it's circled three times, everyone start building simultaneously, placing blocks only next to their markers. You can't touch the ball or string or else play stops and you lose a point. Whoever places ten blocks by their markers first wins the round and scores a point; whoever scores three points first wins.

For a sample of what the game looks like in action, check out the video I tweeted from PAXU, a video that shows both success and failure:

[twitter=1068542763048808448] Read more »

Publisher: Dancing Lights Press

Use Underground Realms in Character Development, Adventure Design, and Worldbuilding

The concept of an underground world comes straight out of the classic hero’s journey. The hero leaves home, descends into the underworld to be tested, and returns a changed person. It’s the part of the story where the challenges are faced, the glory is earned, and the treasures are acquired. Other mythologies portray realms under the earth to be the land of the dead, where souls go after a person dies. A lot of folklore, and quite a bit of fantasy fiction, depicts underground as the place where evil dwells.

For characters, underground realms are places of legend. Any adventurer worth their salt has descended into the earth to battle all manner of bizarre and terrifying creatures. There are stories of entire civilizations that have fled the light to dwell in darkness, carrying with them an abiding hatred of the surface world that shunned them. Parents frighten their children with tales of the monsters that come up from the deepest caverns, simply to eat naughty boys and girls who don’t finish their porridge.

Antagonists will find the underground to be a place of sanctuary and power. There will be allies there possessed of the same loose morals and twisted ethics. It may be that the underworld is their home, their point of origin, providing a metaphorical if simple explanation for their distorted views and baser desires.

Among common folk, the underworld will represent the unknown. As a place few have ventured, it will be a source of folklore, fear, and superstition. While there may be truth to what passes for common knowledge, it will likely be greatly distorted. The popular version of underground realms, for surface dwellers, will be rooted more in theme and motif than fact.

In this book, we’ll show you how to utilize the underground in your worldbuilding endeavors. You’ll see how it can influence character, setting, and story elements. By the end, you’ll understand how to better utilize underground realms as essential, useful, and entertaining parts of your campaign.

Price: $1.00 Read more »

Publisher: 2nd Dynasty

Expand your Starship deck plans with these narrow bunk cabin tiles suitable for use with 28-32mm miniatures. Compatible with other 2nd Dynasty tiles or any other OpenLOCK-compatible tiles.

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Compatible with the OpenLOCK system created by and available at Printable Scenery. Important! You will need the basic OpenLOCK templates to print clips to connect these products, available free from Printable Scenery.

Please note that these are STL files only! You will need a 3D printer or print service in order to print the parts. The parts have been designed with FDM printers in mind at 100-200 microns using PLA or ABS plastic, although you will achieve better results with SLA/DLP printers (resin) or higher resolution FDM prints. You may need to rotate objects for optimal printing or add supports, particularly for overhanging areas, such as the top of door frames.

Parts are designed in 28-30mm scale (1" squares), but can be rescaled easily in your 3D printing software package.

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This package includes:

• Narrow Bunk Cabin (2x3)
• Door

Price: $2.99 Read more »

Publisher: 2nd Dynasty

Expand your Starship deck plans with these door expansion tiles suitable for use with 28-32mm miniatures. Compatible with other 2nd Dynasty tiles or any other OpenLOCK-compatible tiles.

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Compatible with the OpenLOCK system created by and available at Printable Scenery. Important! You will need the basic OpenLOCK templates to print clips to connect these products, available free from Printable Scenery.

Please note that these are STL files only! You will need a 3D printer or print service in order to print the parts. The parts have been designed with FDM printers in mind at 100-200 microns using PLA or ABS plastic, although you will achieve better results with SLA/DLP printers (resin) or higher resolution FDM prints. You may need to rotate objects for optimal printing or add supports, particularly for overhanging areas, such as the top of door frames.

Parts are designed in 28-30mm scale (1" squares), but can be rescaled easily in your 3D printing software package.

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This package includes:

• Regular Doorway (DS)
• Doorway (IA)
• Regular Door
• Wide Doorway (DS)
• Wide Door

Price: $3.99 Read more »

Publisher: 2nd Dynasty

Expand your Starship deck plans with these cabin collection pack tiles suitable for use with 28-32mm miniatures. Compatible with other 2nd Dynasty tiles or any other OpenLOCK-compatible tiles.

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Compatible with the OpenLOCK system created by and available at Printable Scenery. Important! You will need the basic OpenLOCK templates to print clips to connect these products, available free from Printable Scenery.

Please note that these are STL files only! You will need a 3D printer or print service in order to print the parts. The parts have been designed with FDM printers in mind at 100-200 microns using PLA or ABS plastic, although you will achieve better results with SLA/DLP printers (resin) or higher resolution FDM prints. You may need to rotate objects for optimal printing or add supports, particularly for overhanging areas, such as the top of door frames.

Parts are designed in 28-30mm scale (1" squares), but can be rescaled easily in your 3D printing software package.

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This package includes:

• Wide Bunk Cabin (3x2)
• Narrow Bunk Cabin (2x3)
• Wide Double Cabin (3x2)
• Narrow Double Cabin (2x3)
• Wide Single Cabin (3x2)
• Narrow Single Cabin (2x3)
• Door

Price: $9.99 Read more »

Publisher: 2nd Dynasty

Expand your Starship deck plans with these narrow cabin pack tiles suitable for use with 28-32mm miniatures. Compatible with other 2nd Dynasty tiles or any other OpenLOCK-compatible tiles.

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Compatible with the OpenLOCK system created by and available at Printable Scenery. Important! You will need the basic OpenLOCK templates to print clips to connect these products, available free from Printable Scenery.

Please note that these are STL files only! You will need a 3D printer or print service in order to print the parts. The parts have been designed with FDM printers in mind at 100-200 microns using PLA or ABS plastic, although you will achieve better results with SLA/DLP printers (resin) or higher resolution FDM prints. You may need to rotate objects for optimal printing or add supports, particularly for overhanging areas, such as the top of door frames.

Parts are designed in 28-30mm scale (1" squares), but can be rescaled easily in your 3D printing software package.

---

This package includes:

• Narrow Single Cabin (2x3)
• Narrow Bunk Cabin (2x3)
• Narrow Double Cabin (2x3)
• Door

Price: $7.99 Read more »

Publisher: 2nd Dynasty

Expand your Starship deck plans with these narrow single cabin tiles suitable for use with 28-32mm miniatures. Compatible with other 2nd Dynasty tiles or any other OpenLOCK-compatible tiles.

---

Compatible with the OpenLOCK system created by and available at Printable Scenery. Important! You will need the basic OpenLOCK templates to print clips to connect these products, available free from Printable Scenery.

Please note that these are STL files only! You will need a 3D printer or print service in order to print the parts. The parts have been designed with FDM printers in mind at 100-200 microns using PLA or ABS plastic, although you will achieve better results with SLA/DLP printers (resin) or higher resolution FDM prints. You may need to rotate objects for optimal printing or add supports, particularly for overhanging areas, such as the top of door frames.

Parts are designed in 28-30mm scale (1" squares), but can be rescaled easily in your 3D printing software package.

---

This package includes:

• Narrow Single Cabin (2x3)
• Door

Price: $2.99 Read more »

Publisher: 2nd Dynasty

Expand your Starship deck plans with these narrow double cabin tiles suitable for use with 28-32mm miniatures. Compatible with other 2nd Dynasty tiles or any other OpenLOCK-compatible tiles.

---

Compatible with the OpenLOCK system created by and available at Printable Scenery. Important! You will need the basic OpenLOCK templates to print clips to connect these products, available free from Printable Scenery.

Please note that these are STL files only! You will need a 3D printer or print service in order to print the parts. The parts have been designed with FDM printers in mind at 100-200 microns using PLA or ABS plastic, although you will achieve better results with SLA/DLP printers (resin) or higher resolution FDM prints. You may need to rotate objects for optimal printing or add supports, particularly for overhanging areas, such as the top of door frames.

Parts are designed in 28-30mm scale (1" squares), but can be rescaled easily in your 3D printing software package.

---

This package includes:

• Narrow Double Cabin (2x3)
• Door

Price: $2.99 Read more »

Publisher: 2nd Dynasty

Expand your Starship deck plans with these wide cabin pack tiles suitable for use with 28-32mm miniatures. Compatible with other 2nd Dynasty tiles or any other OpenLOCK-compatible tiles.

---

Compatible with the OpenLOCK system created by and available at Printable Scenery. Important! You will need the basic OpenLOCK templates to print clips to connect these products, available free from Printable Scenery.

Please note that these are STL files only! You will need a 3D printer or print service in order to print the parts. The parts have been designed with FDM printers in mind at 100-200 microns using PLA or ABS plastic, although you will achieve better results with SLA/DLP printers (resin) or higher resolution FDM prints. You may need to rotate objects for optimal printing or add supports, particularly for overhanging areas, such as the top of door frames.

Parts are designed in 28-30mm scale (1" squares), but can be rescaled easily in your 3D printing software package.

---

This package includes:

• Wide Bunk Cabin (3x2)
• Wide Single Cabin (3x2)
• Wide Double Cabin (3x2)
• Door

Price: $7.99 Read more »

Publisher: 2nd Dynasty

Expand your Starship deck plans with these wide single cabin tiles suitable for use with 28-32mm miniatures. Compatible with other 2nd Dynasty tiles or any other OpenLOCK-compatible tiles.

---

Compatible with the OpenLOCK system created by and available at Printable Scenery. Important! You will need the basic OpenLOCK templates to print clips to connect these products, available free from Printable Scenery.

Please note that these are STL files only! You will need a 3D printer or print service in order to print the parts. The parts have been designed with FDM printers in mind at 100-200 microns using PLA or ABS plastic, although you will achieve better results with SLA/DLP printers (resin) or higher resolution FDM prints. You may need to rotate objects for optimal printing or add supports, particularly for overhanging areas, such as the top of door frames.

Parts are designed in 28-30mm scale (1" squares), but can be rescaled easily in your 3D printing software package.

---

This package includes:

• Wide Single Cabin (3x2)
• Door

Price: $2.99 Read more »

This story has been told before, way back on the Treasure Tables forums, before they became You Meet In A Tavern, before that site also went defunct. Since none of those places exist anymore and I doubt the story got caught by the wayback machine, and since it was well received back in the day, and since I anticipate this being relevant soon, I will again share the story of the Evil Mules.

2007-2008ish. It was game time, 3.5 DnD. The PCs were a troupe of morally gray government enforcers in a point of light in a post apocalyptic world. And I had nothing prepared.

I asked the players what they wanted to do for the session, and the consensus was that they were going to head into the mountains to hunt for trolls so the druid could learn to shapeshift into them. (Yes, base druids can’t shift into monstrous humanoids. He had some splatbook kit/prestige class or something. It’s not important to the story.) I skimmed the Monsters by terrain list while we took a pre-game snack break and noticed that it included mules… They weren’t an appropriate Challenge Rating for the party. Mules are CR two, the party was around level six but I had a moment of Evil GM Inspiration and literally sat at the table cackling in anticipation while the players gave me weird looks.

So, the PCs go into the mountains and discover an abandoned mining town. Buildings stand open and dilapidated, weeds grow in the streets, the occasional skeleton pokes out of the rubble. And milling about are dozens of mules. They chew absently on the overgrowth and eye the PCs warily. The PCs poke around a bit, discover nothing much of interest and try to befriend some mules with handle animal checks without much luck, and try speak with animals abilities and get ignored. The whole time I’m emphasizing the way the mules keep staring at them and acting strange so the PCs decide to infiltrate the mules. The druid changes into a mule and goes up to a mule and starts trying to communicate with it. The mule wanders off, stopping periodically to wait for the druid to follow. After they leave, the party notices that the rest of the mules have wandered off as well. They find themselves in a deserted street waiting for the druid to come back and report. Meanwhile, the druid is on the far side of town surrounded by a small pack of mules all staring at him silently.

The mules press in closer, then without a sound all start to attack. He was the party tank and mules aren’t that dangerous in combat so he wasn’t in much danger, but rather than discover these mules are more dangerous than he thinks, he runs and regroups with the rest of the party. The mules don’t pursue and the PCs keep exploring town, giving the mules a wide berth. Eventually they discover a weird cave that has a pit full of skeletons, strange crude half man half mule statutory, carvings in an unknown language they can’t decipher and a very evil aura.

The PCs have had enough of this and book it back to town, but along the way they have mule haunted dreams and repeatedly encounter mules, all of whom seem to be giving them the evil eye. Bunking at an inn, the party rogue wakes from her nightmares in the middle of the night and heads to the stables to check on her noisome troglodyte henchman (Mike the troglodyte. That’s a different story.) and is startled by a mule which seemingly appeared right behind her! One panicked sneak attack later and an early morning explanation of a dead mule to an incredulous stable master, and the PCs decide that something must be done to halt the evil mule menace that is slowly infiltrating their homeland.

After some amazing diplomacy checks, the local lord grants them a contingent of soldiers and several wagons of salt and they march into the mountains, slaughter every mule they can find, tear the village down to its foundations and scatter the stones, and literally burn and salt the earth for miles (not that that much was growing on the side of a mountain anyway). They also had the foresight to bring a scroll of comprehend languages with them, and translated the script in the cave before effacing it, tearing down the statuary and consecrating it to the priest’s god. The script was the testimony of a villager driven mad and inspired by dark forces relating the story of the village:  A dark god had sent an avatar to the material plane in the form of an intelligent infernally virile and darkly evil mule. This scion quickly bred with the local stock and after there were enough of his descendants, in a bloody coup forced the villagers to erect the shrine and sacrifice one another to his dark master.

They never did find any trolls.

In the years since, the evil mules have cropped up now and again in items I’ve created.

• I have created several blank white cards based on them.
• One of the 9 forms of the 5 room dungeon is named after them.
• This entire plot ended up in Eureka: 501 Adventure Plots To Inspire Game Masters. (page 97)
• I can’t believe I forgot to include them in my article about weird fantasy farm animals.

P.S. In case you were wondering: Evil Mules are telepathic, and can understand common but have their own language they use with each other: Donk-ese. They are also prolific and crossbreed with anything they can (despite the fact that mundane mules are sterile). Their progeny have the half-ass template.

P.P.S.S. I take no credit for this and I’m 100% sure he was in no way inspired by my game, but Weebl made a music video about the dangers of donkeys that is appropriate to the topic. Great minds and all that:

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In an unpublished dissertation, Alice Pitt (1995 – Ontario Institute for Studies in Education) noted that “learning about content is not the same thing as learning from it.  In other words…learning is something more than a series of encounters with knowledge; learning entails, rather, the messier and less predictable process of becoming implicated in knowledge” (p.298). As such, gaming tables are undoubtedly places where informal learning happens. The growing variety and accessibility of tabletop roleplaying games present educators with powerful tools to provide students with the agency to shape the trajectory of their learning within and outside traditional classroom settings. From traditional subjects such as mathematics, science, history, and art, to social skills and resiliency, RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons can serve as powerful tools with which to collaboratively interact with curriculum materials and the world beyond the gaming table.

“RPG Math”

Whether you realize it or not, gaming tables are informal spaces to practice math. The variable interplay between rolling dice and mathematical formulas to determine narrative outcomes results in opportunities to make math feel real and beneficial. I’ve never been good at math, but I’ve always been good at what I call RPG math. By that, I’m referring to any math that would involve dice rolling or using a character sheet (aka player spreadsheet). From the shape recognition and geometry associated with using polyhedral dice to the basic operations of arithmetic required during character creation and turn taking, there’s no denying that many popular RPGs, particularly the dice-heavy D20 or Year Zero engines, are exercises in mathematics. Let’s not forget that character sheets are essentially spreadsheets.

A few of my favourite RPGs for practicing math:

• Dungeons & Dragons
• Pathfinder
• Coriolis

“The History & Science Books You Always Wanted”

Whether it be indirectly or directly, analog games draw on the collective experiences of humanity to inform their worlds. Just take a look at the genre staple Dungeons & Dragons. From the multitude of fantastical creatures to the arms and armour players use, almost everything has a parallel in the cultural or natural history of the earth. Even the Magic: The Gathering crossover world of Amonkhet (a fantasy Egypt) demonstrates the lengths to which the most popular RPG in the world takes inspiration from reality. Some games take it even further by encouraging players to develop culturally relative perspectives of history. Two of these games immediately stand out, both for their attention to historical detail and educational intentions. Night Witches by Jason Morningstar draws players into the fictional lives of real-life WWII aviators of the 588th Night Bomber Regiment – known to the Germans as Nachthexen or Night Witches. This Powered by the Apocalypse game is particularly popular with my students at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), who enjoy continuing their education of WWII through gaming…all while playing in the museum’s galleries! The second is Thousand Arrows by James Mendez Hodes and Brennan Taylor, another Powered by the Apocalypse title which takes place during Japan’s Warring States period (the Sengoku Jidai). I myself have also endeavoured to author an RPG for educational purposes – Ross Rifles. As an educator, few roleplaying games have helped me teach science like The Warren by Marshall Miller. In this indie RPG, players assume the role of intelligent rabbits navigating the natural world and the dangers of being at the bottom of the food chain. The Warren is an excellent example of how science can come to life in the form of a story game. From the stellar art by Shel Kahn to the text, it so perfectly captures and communicates one aspect of the natural world. I took this a step further and co-created a rules-light RPG called Zany Zoo. In Zany Zoo, players take on the roles of animals escaping captivity. Think Madagascar meets Finding Nemo/Finding Dory.

A few of my favourite games for engaging with history & science:

• Night Witches
• The Warren
• Thousand Arrows
• TimeWatch

“Level Up” Your Social Skills

Despite all of the above, playing RPGs are first and foremost opportunities for human connection and community. Aside from the amazing human beings I’ve met playing and designing RPGs, these games have personally provided me with the opportunity to internalize and communicate my feelings, develop self-confidence, and flex my creative muscles. With both the Royal Ontario Museum and Level Up Gaming, I have nearly 7 years of experience using tabletop RPGs to facilitate opportunities of people with autism and other disabilities to develop their social skills. During this time, outlined on episode 3 of the Asians Represent! Podcast, I came to appreciate perhaps the most powerful educational aspect of the RPG hobby. The seemingly intuitive “unwritten rules of social behaviour” are naturally codified by games. A session of any tabletop RPG is a highly structured and safe social environment. There are rules of engagement, objectives, and moderation. While gaming, everyone at the table is tasked with recognizing and defining problems, exploring options, considering strategies, putting their plan into action, and reflecting on the process and outcome. Unlike multiplayer video games, those of the tabletop variety provide uniquely democratic spaces for exploration. Everyone at the table is involved to a degree that they are comfortable with, and analog games have the narrative and mechanical freedom to be tailor-made to the needs of the players. Story games provide impactful and structured opportunity for social connections where you can learn how to exchange space in conversation, communicate needs, and provide help to others when asked.

A few of my favourite RPGs to practice social skills:

• Emberwind
• Tales from the Loop
• The Veil
• Urban Shadows

From both a professional and personal perspective, games that encourage meaningful and engaging connection to the world never cease to amaze me. They enrich our lives beyond simple entertainment and make each us of better with every playthrough.

Stay curious and game on!

Daniel Kwan is an educator, media professional, and game designer based in Toronto, Canada. He is one of the co-founders of Level Up Gaming, an organization that provides individuals with autism and other disabilities opportunities to develop their social skills through group gaming experiences. His first educational RPG, Zany Zoo, was released in 2018. He is currently working on Ross Rifles, a Powered by the Apocalypse RPG about the lives and experiences of Canadian soldiers stationed on the Western Front during the First World War. Daniel has over a decade of experience using tabletop RPGs in educational contexts at the Royal Ontario Museum.

Works cited:

Pitt, A. (1995) “Subjects in tension: engaged resistance in the feminist classroom’, Unpublished Dissertation, OISE/UofT, Toronto, ON.

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Where’s the line between the game the players want to play and the game the GM wants to run? Is the GM bad if they’re getting upset that the players are completely ignoring their setting and plot? Are the players bad if they’re bored and uninterested in what the GM is presenting and they’re trying to pursue things that would be interesting to their character? Who does the game belong to — the GM or the players?

Of course, the answer is ‘both’. If everyone at the table isn’t having fun, then something is wrong with the game. Now, the specifics of what’s wrong could be any number of things. Yes, it is possible the GM is being inflexible and railroading their players through a game that isn’t nearly as engaging or interesting as they thought it would be. And yes, it’s equally possible the players are being deliberately obtuse and disregarding the time and effort the GM put into prepping the game they’re playing. Over the years, I’ve seen both of these extremes happen but usually most examples fall somewhere in the middle.

As with most things, it’s not a black and white situation and the middle ground is super broad and very fuzzy. Think back on the favorite games that you’ve ever played or run. I know mine have always been a beautiful mix of the best of a GM’s prep and skill combined with players elevating the game in exciting and unexpected ways. Unless you’re one of those GM’s that craves absolute control or one of those players that craves pure chaos, your favorite games are probably also a similar mix of what both sides bring to the table.

On the GM’s Side…

A friend complained not too long ago that he was seeing a lot of advice in various RPG communities that was essentially telling GMs they should always just roll with whatever the players want to do, even if that completely disregards the setting or plot the GM had prepped for the game. Having talked to a fair number of GMs, I know how absolutely frustrating that advice is when you’re no longer having fun running games. While we are there to bring an entertaining game to the table, our fun shouldn’t be completely disregarded in favor of the players.

At the same time, if we’re not cognizant of the players’ expectations and running a game without their engagement in mind, we’re setting ourselves up for failure. No matter how awesome our ideas as GMs are, if they’re not offering the players an opportunity to add their own flavor and change the game world, we’re essentially asking them to just sit there and be an audience to our greatness. In addition, no matter how excited you are about a game or campaign idea, if the players you’re presenting it to are lukewarm on the idea you’re unlikely to get a very good game out of it. Not every game is meant for every group of players. If you want a high intrigue game of politics and mystery and your players just want to blow off some steam by cracking jokes and punching evil in the face, you’re both going to end up frustrated.

On the Player’s Side…

Players aren’t completely innocent in this equation. I’ve seen plenty of players who think messing around with the GM’s plan is the height of entertainment, so they go out of their way to screw up any perceived plot. This is always a little sad but funny when I run a Powered by the Apocalypse style game and mostly run improv style. There are also players who get wrapped up in their own ideas to the point that they’re trying to slam the square peg of their character into the round hole of the GM’s planned game. Players absolutely can make or break a game by their willingness to engage with what the GM is presenting.

Now, this isn’t to say players should just lay down and take it when a GM is running a bad game, and no one should feel forced to play a game they’re not interested in. There are times when a game is just bad and any fun you get out of it as a player is going to be what you make of it for yourself with the other players. Or, sometimes a GM’s logic behind their scenario fails and the players make the game go sideways through no ill intent on their part. If I am completely honest with myself, I’m a horrible player to have at the table when I’m not enjoying a game. My impatience is obvious and I don’t hesitate to call out things that are making the game less fun for everyone at the table. Diplomacy isn’t always my best skill.

It’s OUR Table…

What can we do to avoid this tug-of-war between GM’s and players? Neither the players nor the GM have a game if the other half of the equation isn’t there, so it’s in everyone’s best interest to figure this balance out.

GM’s:

• Be clear with your players about what your expectations for the game are. Explaining the tone and principles of the game up front, regardless of whether you’re starting a campaign or running a one-shot, is going to help get everyone on the same page right at the beginning.
• Give your players very explicit character creation guidelines and stick by them. Allow them the flexibility to create someone they’re going to enjoy playing, but don’t feel pressured to let a player build a character that won’t fit the game. You’ll regret it from the moment play starts.
• Be flexible and learn how to think on your feet when your players aren’t engaging with things the way you expected. You can lead your players to a plot hook, but you can’t make them bite. Every GM makes an occasional misjudgment on what is interesting for the players, so we all learn to adjust when needed.

Players:

• Don’t agree to play games you know aren’t your cup of tea. While I encourage everyone to stretch their horizons with new games, you know yourself best and will know when you’re not going to have fun with a game.
• When you do agree to play a game, play the game the GM is bringing to the table. Find a way to balance a character you’ll enjoy with the setting and tone of the game. Talk with the GM and work out what you’re hoping to get out of the game with what they’re bringing to the table.
• Remember that your fun at the table is dependent on the fun of everyone else at the table, including the GM. Figure out how to facilitate your own fun while drawing in the other players and even with the plot the GM is dangling in front of you. Do that and it will make you a player any GM wants at their table.

Ultimately, roleplaying games are a collaborative hobby.  Bring out the best in both the players and the GM and your game will be an amazing thing you and everyone else at the table will be talking about for a very long time.

What are your experiences with finding the balance between the GM’s fun and the player’s fun? I’d love to hear your stories.

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So, both as a designer and as a player I prefer fantasy roleplaying games that have a slightly darker backdrop than, say, the Forgotten Realms, which retains its hopeful outlook at all times.

(Not that FR isn’t awesome — I spend a lot of time there — though I usually turn the dial on the darkness setting higher than what appears on the page).

The pseudo-European backdrop of my homebrew setting Steffenhold is a dark fantasy reflection of the pre-Renaissance period.

And Kobold Press’ Midgard, which is steeped in Slavic legends and folklore, filled with imposing ghoul-stocked forests and tricksy gods who never reveal their motivations nor true selves, fits in my wheelhouse.

I’m also up for most Gothic-inspired horror. Baron von Strahd and Count Dracula are fearsome adversaries — plenty of room for heroics in an otherwise ink- and blood-stained milieu.

With that out of the way, however, I’d suggest that gamemasters not forgot that they should always make room for unicorns — or some other symbol of hope — in their fantasy adventures. Let a little sparkling light pierce the darkness.

I use unicorns as an example simply because in film and literature, unicorns were used to good effect in both The Last Unicorn and Legend. In war-torn lands troll- and goblin-filled, the mythical equine beast represents chastity and fidelity, an enduring quality that gives hope to good-hearted folk that they may yet triumph over oppression and tyranny.

But, of course, the maiden’s lure need not be the only bright light in your setting. Consider salting your universe with any of these options if you feel unicorns are a tad to cliche.

Dog. The “master’s hound” has represented fidelity and obedience for centuries, but was a powerful symbol during the middle ages. Dogs of great heroes have been recorded in many legends, King Arthur’s favorite hound was Cavall, and Ulysses’s dog was Argos — who recognized his master from his return from Troy and then died of joy. In fantasy gaming, a hound archon is one of the great celestials.

Elephant. A Danish order of knighthood that once consisted of 30 knights. Although a “white elephant” carries the connotation of a burden, the King of the White Elephant was a title born by the great king of Ava (Myanmar).

Griffin. The offspring of two creatures said to be of noble heritage, the lion and the eagle, the griffin represents valor and magnanimity. The griffin also guards sacred treasures.

Phoenix. This magical beast represents resurrection, a powerful symbol in both ancient times and in the middle ages. The creature also has an association with alchemy.

Serpent. Turning the Semitic/Christian connotation of the tempter on its head, adopt the other characteristics of the serpent — eternal, healing, wise and spiritual guardian — instead. Probably best represented as a coatl, symbol of the Aztec winged serpent Quetzalcoatl.

 

 

 

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I really enjoy books about roleplaying games. Not just products that are rulebooks, supplements, or adventures, but products that discuss the process of roleplaying. I enjoy products that discuss how to run games, and how to play them. Even in a single game system, the value added to long-term play by looking at the game from multiple directions is tremendous.

There is no shortage of books that look at roleplaying games from the perspective of game moderators. In fact, some of the other gnomes have been involved in some amazing books on the topics of preparing, managing, and executing various games at the table. What is less common is a book about roleplaying that isn’t designed for a particular system that is aimed squarely at players instead of moderators.

There is an increasing number of games that give players an opportunity to flesh out their player characters in deep and interesting ways. Traveller was one of the earliest RPGs to address detailed backstory with its lifepath system, which some modern games such as Modiphius’ Conan and Star Trek also use. Pathfinder includes Character Background rules in Ultimate Campaign. Shadow of the Demon Lord has some detailed character background tables in the core rules, which are expanded in the Victims of the Demon Lord line of supplements. The Dungeons and Dragons supplement Xanathar’s Guide to Everything also includes a detailed This is Your Life section that can be used to generate a more detailed backstory.

System specific backstory rules can be useful but are often created as a means of narrowing mechanically defined character options. In other words, these backstory elements often explain why a character picks the game elements they have for a character or narrows the options to help eliminate option paralysis. That doesn’t mean that those backstory systems are deficient, it just means that even the depth that is added in those systems may not touch on important backstory elements or motivations that a character might have.

The next natural extension of this would be for a player to have a guide that isn’t tied to a specific game system or setting. A guide aimed at getting a player to get inside their character’s head in a way that isn’t just a means of determining if they should specialize in using a sword or an axe. The Ultimate RPG Character Backstory Guide is a book that aims to add details to a character’s life story that aren’t just a means of justifying what game elements went into mechanically building that character.

The Chronicle of Chronicles

This review is based both on the paperback version of the book, and on the Kindle version.

The book is 272 pages long. It contains no illustrations, but does have solid formatting throughout, with headers, bullet points, lists, and call out boxes. The colors present in the book are black and orange-red. The formatting for the various bullet points and lists remains consistent in the Kindle version of the book. Because so much of the book is comprised of lists and questions, the formatting makes it very easy to follow from one exercise to another.

Introduction and What Can We Accomplish?

The first three pages of the book establish the goal of this work. There are numerous exercises in the book to help a player find the perspective of their character. These exercises are largely written with a game like Dungeons and Dragons in mind, but the What Can We Accomplish section helps to define the power level and experience of a player for which an exercise is written.

Humble Beginnings

As you might expect from the title, these exercises are for low-level characters to help determine how they got into adventuring in the first place, and how they determine party dynamics as they first begin to work with one another. The suggested character range is levels 1-7, but that’s essentially short hand for adventurers that are still relatively new to adventuring.

The following exercises exist in this section:

• Idioms
• Save the Cat
• Holidays
• What Gets Left Behind
• Beanstalk
• Five Lessons
• Ventur
• My Associates
• Across a Crowded Tavern
• Orphan Details
• What Can You Do For Me?
• A Matter of Status
• What Drives You Forward?
• Where I’m From
• Finders Keepers
• Well Worn
• Five Things You Packed but Shouldn’t Have
• Of the Cloth
• Five Fears
• What Does It Mean to Be . . . ?
• Private Mysteries
• Prophesy Half-Remembered
• On the Line
• Red Flags
• Damn Merlinials
• Rival
• The Taming of the Wolverine
• My Grimoire
• Familiar, but Not Too Familiar
• A Touch of Home
• Vision of the Future
• Mentor
• Magic Mirrors
• Visualizing Intellect

Some of these exercises cover the basics you would expect when discussing a character’s backstory, like the very basics of where they were from, and the people that they knew. Other exercises go a bit deeper, examining how a member of the party would petition another to gain their help for a goal, as well as examining what it means to have interactions with characters that have a different status (higher or lower) than the player character.

Some of the exercises are relatively straightforward, while others are multi-step procedures that build on the answers provided in previous steps.

Veteran Heroes 

These are questions geared towards characters that have been adventuring for a while. The level range provided for a more traditional D&D style game is 8-14, but it’s easy enough to use this for characters that have been working as adventurers for a significant amount of time in non-level-based systems.

The exercises in this section include the following:

• Five Scars
• Wed, Bed, or Behead
• The One that Got Away
• Never Have I Ever . . .
• Last Will
• My Friends
• I Know You From Somewhere
• Five Things You Can’t Throw Away
• These Things Rarely Work Out
• A Traveler’s Taste
• I’ve Heard Stories About These
• Cursed
• We Clean Up Well
• Song of Folly
• Old Haunts
• Atonement
• Wanted
• It’s More Than Personal
• Movements of a Master
• Campfire
• Hero’s Best Friend
• Unheard Confession
• A Taste of Death
• Conquered Fear
• Getting to Know You
• A Show of Force
• Five Times Your Name Was Cursed
• Mountains and Molehills
• Life Goes On
• In the Eye of My Enemy
• Irrational Taste
• Fish Story
• You Have No Idea
• The Gauntlet
• Honey Pot
• Trusty Steed

The exercises in this section are designed to add details that characters may not have thought to stop and add as they began to advance in levels or get more adventures under their belts. Many of them examine how the appearance of a character may have changed, or how they might describe their fighting style or abilities differently now.

Instead of having exercises about how the group deals with sudden adversity, there are exercises that look at how the group would plan for events that they know are coming. Additionally, there are exercises that ask about what supporting characters and areas look like now that the PCs have left their mark.

Some of my personal favorites are “I’ve Heard Stories About These,” which is a generator for coming up with wildly inaccurate things a character might believe about a monster they still haven’t run into at this point in their career, and “Fish Stories,” which is a guide to determining how exaggerated an exploit from your past has become. I couldn’t help but think of the Hero of Canton from Firefly.

Myths and Legends

The final section of exercises is recommended for characters of levels 15-20, or at least those adventurers that have become larger than life in the campaign.

The exercises for this section include:

• Tower of Terror
• Monuments
• Classifying Villains
• Home Heraldry
• “It Is My Distinct Please to Announce . . . “
• God, No
• Five Commandments
• Pocket Dimension
• For the Myth that Has Everything
• Inventory
• Art of Facts
• Terror of Wisdom
• A Cutlass Carol
• Private Secrets
• It Sounds Good on Paper
• I Knew Them Well
• Alive Only in Memory
• Collecting Dust
• Sign of a Legend
• Hobby
• Five Lives
• You Made It Weird
• In the Eyes of Mortals
• Hangover
• Apprentice
• Five Enemies
• Impossible Trial
• Not Looking to Get Merlined
• Crisis of Faith
• Your Kind of King

The exercises in this section deal with campaign elements such as how a character may have made a major change in the setting without contemplating the ramifications, as well as looking forward to how the character’s actions will be viewed in a historical context. There are also exercises that look at how many enemies a character has vanquished and what that means, people and places that are long gone, and how supporting characters in the service of the player character operate or act.

Some of my favorites in the section are “God, No,” which is an exercise that details how the player character would deal with a visit from a deity, and “For the Myth That Has Everything,” which is about trying to determine what you could provide your fellow epic player characters as a gift.

Ultimate Ups

 The book does a wonderful job of bringing up motivations and off-screen events that neither a player nor a game moderator would commonly think to add to a game. 

The book is a great resource for thought exercises. Just reading through the exercises without doing them is entertaining, but there are some deep character examinations that can evolve by following several of the multi-step procedures.

Wandering Guide

It’s not really a downside, but because there are so many exercises, it may be easy to get lost in them if you really want to specifically narrow down some details about your character. Being written through the lens of games with similar conventions to Dungeons and Dragons means that some exercises will either not be as useful to non-fantasy gamers or may take a little bit of adaptation to be useful. Some of the exercises, by default, give the player a little more world-building authority than a game moderator may be willing to hand out, especially if they are playing in an established setting. While entertaining, some of the exercises exist just to be humorous, and don’t do much to flesh out the backstory or history of a character.

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

Anyone that has been a player in an RPG is likely to get some enjoyment from this product, even if it is geared towards fantasy gaming. Even without using it to flesh out a specific character, the various exercises are both entertaining and instructive about the kinds of elements players may want to add to a character. Reading the exercises is also likely to give a game moderator some ideas about what questions they want to answer over the long term in established campaigns.

What are your favorite system agnostic, player-facing products? How often do you read products about roleplaying games that aren’t about a specific system or genre? We would love to hear from you in the comments below!

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Sometimes you play one of those games that’s just so good, you can’t stop talking about it. I’ve already written several articles inspired by the Tales from the Loop game I played, and so has my fellow gnome Wen — and here, at the end of the campaign, is one more. A tribute to the intensity, the feels, the fun, and the amazing experience we all had, if you will: here are three important lessons I learned (or relearned) from the end of that campaign. To preface these lessons — Tales from the Loop is a wonderful game! If you have played it in setting, you will probably notice my stories from this campaign bear little resemblance to the book. We riffed a lot and for this return to our characters didn’t wait for Things from the Flood. We just fast forwarded everything 10 years, played a round of Microscope to fill in the timeline, and jumped back into a world with aliens, cloning, and time travel technology.

1. You shouldn’t always have a sequel.

That game was good. It was the kind of good you never want to end. I could have played that game into eternity, but…by the time we got to eternity, it wouldn’t have been the same game anymore. Despite my desire to continue playing out Stacie and her terribly messy love and life situation, there is a point where it would become boring. Routine. No longer shocking, fascinating, and surrounded with questions. The end of this campaign was bittersweet to be sure — some lived, some died, relationships ended — but we know how their stories will go. All the major questions have been answered (yes, Stacie ends up with Harrison, yes, she will eventually have to kill him). I want more…but I shouldn’t have more. This story is complete, and like any good story, it has an end point.

Ending on wanting more is a lesson we learn again and again in this age of sequels and trilogies that were only intended to ever have one movie or one season — the sequels are rarely as good. So I’m happy to leave our wayward band of time travelers in their alternate past. The world is an absolute disaster, but the questions we started with about all our characters are answered brilliantly. It’s time to bid them goodbye.

2. Just because it’s crazy doesn’t mean it’s not deathly serious.

I run crazy games all the time, and I love them! My games hit a level of crazy that’s very silly because they aren’t serious. (See: The Art of the Off the Wall Con Game) The thing with games that go a bit crazy like that is that they are frequently unsustainable, because you can’t keep raising the levels forever. The thing with this game was that while the level of crazy started…well, pretty off the wall, the emotional intensity started lower and built beautifully over the course of our sessions. The plot twisted into a roiling mass of time travel and time loop events, but the true drama was ours, our kids from part one, ten years later, just trying to figure out how to be themselves and grow up in a world that couldn’t let them be normal. And sure, things were seriously all over the place — but we were absolutely and completely committed to the emotional play of our PCs. Sometimes we laughed a lot, but those meta moments were interspersed with scenes worthy of Oscars dealing with difficult decisions and trust. Trying to describe the events of this game is definitely one of those narratives that gives gaming stories a bad name (you simply had to be there), but there wasn’t an in game moment that wasn’t worthy of the kind of apocalyptic time travel epic it became.

Having a culture of safety and trust with the people that you play with is storytelling magic. Games with anything goes kinds of plots can be functionally covered in knives from a safety perspective because everyone can drive the story and we are always reaching for the next level, to go further. Knowing that there is a safe space to revoke your consent in play if something goes too far means we can be much more willing as a group to see just how far we can go. I feel unbelievably privileged to play with these folks and have that space, where we can just keep pushing things harder and see what happens.

3. Music is not the enemy.

I am not always a fan of background music in games. Frequently I find it distracting and often not on the right tone for whatever is happening in game right now. It can be technically challenging and slightly disjointed as a GM to try to manage keeping up with music and making it match the current mood — it’s like improvisational sound design, which is a lot of extra cognitive load.

In this game, our GM Quincy used music so brilliantly I don’t even have words.

The songs that we each selected as representative of our characters when we recreated their 90s selves came back to haunt our much wiser, much worse for wear selves as we concluded the campaign, creating a brilliant circle and a reminder of where we’d started before our timeline went to hell in a handbasket. Halfway through a scene of me telling my fiance that I didn’t want to marry him after all, quiet in the background comes up the song I chose so many weeks before: Don’t Speak (No Doubt). Perfection incarnate. I am rethinking my feelings about using music in my games, because intentional, specific music for those moments is truly magical.

It was truly a pleasure, Tales from the Loop. Perhaps someday we’ll visit you again.

Do you have those games that left strong memories for you? Did they end at the right time, or go on too long? Did you learn anything from the way they ended?

 

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I am in the car on my way home from Thanksgiving at my parent’s house. It is the second leg of the trip, and I am now a passenger. We are due home in about two hours, just in time for me to run Scum & Villainy for my Sunday evening group. That was when the text came in.

I am not feeling well. I need to waive off tonight.

Blown Session. Time to initiate Blown Session Protocol.

I texted the other players in my group, and everyone wanted to play something; a backup game. That was fine. I had just finished reading Beach Patrol, and I was down for some Baywatch action. The only thing is, I had no session prepped. The book had an adventure idea generator, but it comes up with a premise, which is good, but I also needed a bit more structure in terms of scenes, beats, etc.

So I opened my phone, clicked on OneNote and started writing some quick session notes, using a pretty standard story framework that is my go to when I am improvising games.

What is a Story Framework?

A story framework is a narrative structure, a formula of sorts, that tells a story. Which means that it has a start, a middle, and an ending, as well as some number of scenes. It is not an actual story but rather a framework that you can adapt to create a story, or in this case a gaming session.

There are numerous frameworks for stories but the one that most people who were educated in the US know is Freytag’s Pyramid.

This is a simple structure but very effective. Basically, the story starts, some things happen to build up to the climax, and then things start to resolve in the wake of the climax, and the story ends.

If you want to really jump into the rabbit hole when it comes to plot structures, check out Plotto by William Cook.

Using a Story Framework

So what is the deal with story frameworks? It has to do with prepping sessions. When we prep a session, we use some kind of framework to lay out our encounters and how the plot of the session will unfold.

So if you are doing traditional prep, this often takes the form of an outline. We sit down and outline how we think the session will go, and then write our notes. Often when we are doing this, we are using some kind of framework either intentionally or unintentionally.  These frameworks make prepping your game faster because they are known structures that you can employ.

Where these frameworks really shine is when you are doing a low/no-prep game. Because if you know one or more of these structures, you can quickly come up with a session on the fly, using the structure to give some shape to your session. Often what I do, when I run a no-prep game such as Action Movie World or Beach Patrol, is that I use a framework to write myself a quick outline in my notebook or on an index card, as the players are making characters. This then gives me an idea of where my game can go, which helps when you are improvising, because you have some idea of where the story can go — making your contributions to the story more focused.

My Go-to Framework

The framework that I have committed to memory, and the one that I use the most when I am improvising sessions, is this:

1. Opening to show how cool the characters are
2. Introduce the Problem
3. Goal 1
4. Goal 2
5. Goal 3 (optional – based on time)
6. Showdown
7. Aftermath

In this structure, there are multiple goals that the players must achieve in order to be able to confront the cause of the problem in the showdown (climax).

Quick Example:

It’s a game of Rockerboys and Vending Machines and the characters are trying to extract a Singer from a nightclub. So my outline would be:

1. Opening scene at their home bar where they get the job
2. Problem: Scouting the Nightclub
3. Goal: Getting into the Nightclub
4. Goal: Getting past security to get to the back of the nightclub
5. Goal: Getting to the Singer to extract her
6. Showdown: Extraction & Opposition
7. Aftermath: Delivering the Singer and getting paid.

That right there is all I need for a few hours of play. Now when it comes to running the game, we may deviate wildly from this initial outline, but at least I had a starting point for the game.

Elaborating on the Framework

So I am in the car with two hours until I get home, so I have some time to work up a slightly more complex story for Beach Patrol. So, I take the basic framework but I decide to have two plots going on during the session.

A-Plot: A calendar photo shoot is taking place on the beach and creating issues.

Possible encounters:

• A model that can’t swim
• Heavy crowds watching
• Stalker following one of the Models
• Dangerous shooting setup that endangers beachgoers

B-Plot: A new version of Ecstasy has hit the beach and is causing a lot of teens to get into trouble.

Possible encounters:

• Drowning victim
• Sex on the beach
• User falling off the cliff in Lovers Cove
• Drug deal going down on the beach

Then I adapt my standard framework a bit to look like this:

1. Opening: Briefing at HQ
2. Goal: A-Plot encounter
3. Goal: B-Plot encounter
4. Goal: A-Plot encounter
5. Goal: Resolve B-Plot
6. Showdown: Emergency A and B-Plot
7. Aftermath: End of Shift

In this case, I am weaving the A and B plot in alternating scenes, and then in scene 5 I look to close up the B Plot, but I bring back some elements of it in the Showdown.

For the Goals, I pulled from the list of possible encounters, based on what felt right at the time. But I decided that the showdown would be a boat rescue situation where the drug dealers crash their boat into the model’s photo shoot out in the ocean, and there are all sorts of people who need to be rescued.

Blown Session Protocol – Engaged

Thirty minutes after I received that text, I had brainstormed and created a genre-fitting adventure for a game that I was running for the first time. We played that night and had a blast. The models were rescued and the drug dealers captured. The Beach is safe once again.

Having a go-to story framework, one that you are comfortable with, is a great tool for any GM, but especially for improv GMs. It helps with coming up with a game with little or no time to prep, and when you have more time, you can elaborate and subvert the structure to make more varied plots.

Do you have a go-to story framework that you use in your games? Are you now thinking of making one? What are some of your favorite frameworks?

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Join Ang, J.T., and Senda for some tips to help you learn to play a game right out of the book without someone to teach you! Will our gnomes learn enough to avoid the stew?

There are a lot of reasons why I go to gaming conventions. I get to meet new people, try new games, and see old friends. One truth that remains constant throughout the varied cons I’ve been to over the years: they succeed or fail based on the GMs and players that they attract.

Great GMs give players an excellent experience, which brings them back to the con next year. Great players that come back build a strong culture of excellent gaming. When those positive GM/player interactions happen, it lifts everyone up and creates spaces that grow and thrive.

I’m going to do my best to prepare you for the special challenges that a convention experience holds by sharing my top five strategies for success.

#1 Know Your Game

Convention games demand a certain level of rules mastery. I learn the game system so that I can focus on the people at the table instead of the rules. I don’t need to have every rule and exception memorized but I should have a full understanding of the game I’m running.

In a convention setting, I know that I will need to make quick decisions when questions come up and I don’t have time to look up the rule. It doesn’t need to be a perfect call but it should be in line with the spirit of the game and the story.

I am excited to celebrate every type of player that may show up to play a game that I am facilitating. I have to be prepared to guide players with no experience, make sure that players with an encyclopedic knowledge of the minutia have fun but don’t take over the game, and encourage those players that live in the middle.

#2 Be an advocate for the players

Without the players, I would live a lonely life at an empty table. I certainly have plenty of horror stories about difficult players but the reality is that they are the minority of people I share a gaming table with. Almost everyone that I meet at conventions are wonderful, giving, and fun people.

I take my job as a game facilitator very seriously. I am there to create a safe space, make sure that players respect each other and the rules, and help tell a cool story. I help set the social contract for the group by starting each session with a talk about my boundaries and expectations for the game. Clear communication makes it easier to understand what the table needs from me.

I make sure that everyone at the table understands that I will enforce the use of the X-Card by moving the story in a different direction when it is used. I warn and/or remove anyone that doesn’t respect, or demands an explanation of why, someone has used it.

While we all contribute to creating a safe environment I recognize that I have taken on an extra level of responsibility to do my best to advocate for anyone that needs it.

If a player is trying to take agency and control away from another person then it’s my job to talk to the offender and give them the opportunity to either adjust their actions or leave the game. If someone is being rude or exclusionary the need for those conversations becomes immediate and serious. It’s important to me that I say, “We don’t do that here. I need you to stop or we can try to find you another game.”

Many conventions have staff members and clear procedures in place to help GMs deal with any problematic players that won’t respect the convention’s code of conduct. Make sure you familiarize yourself with what safety procedures and policies the con you’re at has.

I’m not just there to stop negative behavior. It’s even more important that I highlight the players and their strengths so they get a chance to shine. I endeavor to provide each of them a task that is especially suited to their character. Take the time to ask each person, “What do you want to do,” or “Describe what happens when you punch the cyborg ape!”

I work to help them tell a great story and create memories by encouraging the players to support each other. I support this group of strangers as they build friendships and create community by keeping the space inclusive and welcoming. I share their love of gaming and give them the encouragement they need to be amazing.

#3 Be an advocate for the story

Tabletop RPGs are, at their best, an opportunity for collaborative storytelling. This is not tied to any one particular game system. Even if I’m running a module, I can give the story room to breathe, grow, and feel personal to the players by letting them explore, interact with the world, and having the world react to their choices.

If someone at my table wants to talk to the bouncer at Club Red Herring in the game I’m going to let them. If I didn’t want characters to interact with him I shouldn’t have described him. I’m going to follow along as they run down the wrong road and adjust the road so it leads where they need to be. Maybe I had a major confrontation planned for a power plant on the outskirts of the city but there is no reason that I can’t move it to the basement of the club. I make a slight adjustment that better serves the story that we’re telling.

Convention games are a one-time experience so I want them to play pretend and have a joyful time.  In your home game the life and death of your character matters because you’re coming back next week and you don’t want to start over. Players at a convention don’t need to worry about long term repercussions of their choices so they can be as reckless and heroic as they want.

The stories we tell aren’t mine alone. They belong to the table and to our shared experience. I expect a con game to go off the rails and for everyone to have fun. That’s why we’re all there and that is what the story if supposed to be, fun. If my desire to control the narrative keeps the players from having a voice then I have failed them.

#4 Time is precious

Keep track of the clock. I mean it. Don’t make me type this in all caps. Manage your time.

In a four-hour convention game I will have about three hours and 15 minutes of actual gaming if I’m lucky. Those 45 minutes are filled with bathroom breaks, late players, introductions, chatting, and cleanup after we are done. I’m left with around three hours to answer questions, tell a complete story, and build friendships. That time goes quickly if I’m not focusing on the clock. The converse happens too, where I’m speeding through content and discover that I’ve still got over an hour left despite being at the end of what I had planned.

I would rather end early than run over the time I have. I watch the clock constantly but I still make mistakes sometimes. It happens and I deal with it as best I can. I will remove portions of the adventure that aren’t crucial to the overall story to save time. I cut whatever is necessary to make sure to end on an epic moment.

If things are going too fast I’ll add in another piece to the adventure on the fly. I won’t add content that ends up feeling like a chore to the players just to make the game longer. If I add something I want it to be fun

Those final moments of the game are what the players will remember about their experience with me. I try to leave them with the triumph, tragedy, or conflict of that final scene and not a disappointing moment.

#5 Be the leader your table needs

The gaming table doesn’t belong to me. It is a shared space that I have agreed to guide while we tell a story together. When does this space need me to step up and take a leadership role? When the players don’t know how to move the story forward. When someone needs me to step in and enforce an agreed upon boundary. When conflict threatens to disrupt or derail the table. What do I do the rest of the time? I get the hell out of their way.

Because of the time constraints of a convention game, the story can’t afford to bog down and stall. When that happens I step in and offer suggestions about what options are currently available to the players. If they are arguing about what to do next I will call for a vote from the players and then move forward in the direction that the majority has chosen. I’m there to support them not control them.

It’s my job to be kind, attentive, and fair to everyone at the table. I set the expectations of conduct, tolerance, and kindness with my words and actions. I want to be a leader not a dictator.

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A gameplay video for Void Bastards from IGN. loading... The developers of the comic book-looking shooter/strategy game Void Bastards take you through a meaty 18-minute chunk of gameplay. Read more »

The creative director of Below played the first 13 minutes of the game and spoke to IGN. loading... Yes, Below is FINALLY here! Creative Director Kris Piotrowski walks us through the opening minutes of the loooooong-awaited Zelda-ish roguelike and discusses what the end of the development journey has been like for him.... Read more »

Druidstone: The Secret of the Menhir Forest was previewed by Rock Paper Shotgun. The last thing I was expecting Druidstone: The Secret Of The Menhir Forest to remind me of was a deck-builder. Not least because it doesn’t feature any decks. And yet, there’s something about this deeply tactical isometric RPG, from Legend Of Grimrock’s creators, that contains the same spirit of gradually gaining a deeper and more refined understanding of a limited set of tools, through repeated failure, and incremental improvement.... Read more »

A new update for Element: Space introduces Captain Christopher. loading... Background *Early Concept Art Read more »

The latest newsletter for Praey for the Gods announces that closed beta is underway and the plans for early access and beyond. Screenshots at the link. Hello to all of our backers and newsletter readers!Progress on PFTG has been going great! PAX West feels like it happened ages ago, but I think it's important to let you know that it went very well for us.... Read more »

Its time for the top 100 mods of 2018 at moddb. Back for a 17th time, welcome to the 2018 Mod of the Year Awards. You will find no loot boxes, microtransactions, unlockables or DLC here - just amazing free mods made by dedicated creators for your enjoyment.... Read more »

@Bluesnews Jon Shafer's At The Gates is a 4x strategy game from the designer of Civilization V. The release date has been announced as the 23rd of January and a Steam page is now available. loading...At the Gates is a 4X grand strategy game from Jon Shafer, designer of Civilization 5.... Read more »

Sector interviewed Viktor Bocan about Kingdom Come: Deliverance and ask where it succeeded and where it failed. Since the release of Kingdom Come: Deliverance has been running for some time, you've had a lot of repairs and some DLCs. When you look back at the game, what do you think is your greatest success, and what, on the other hand, is the area where you have somehow failed? I think the best thing is that the game is successful in the sense that we managed to give people a message.... Read more »

A Dragon Named Coal has run into some production problems as explained in the latest update. ADNC On Hold After a lot of thought and consideration, our team has decided to put A Dragon Named Coal (ADNC) on temporary hold for the time being. We’ve been actively developing the game for almost five years with a lot of success, but we’ve hit some roadblocks we can’t easily overcome.... Read more »

I love the roleplaying game 13th Age by Rob Heinsoo and Jonathan Tweet. Written as a love-letter to D&D by two designers who worked on two different editions of D&D, 13th Age has some of my favorite rules for running great roleplaying games. Like Dungeon World, it's a RPG that often gets pilfered for great ideas DMs can bring into our own games like the "one unique thing", the escalation Die, and their method of abstract combat.

I also love the monster design of 13th Age. As a simplified version of 4th Edition D&D's monster design, monsters in 13th Age are easy to use and are some of the most well-balanced monsters in any d20 game I've played.

It also has a really cool feature that, like the others mentioned above, we might pilfer and use in our 5th edition D&D games: the nastier special.

Many monsters in 13th Age include a way to beef them up to build a really tough challenge if the GM wants one. Here's an example for the Hezrou:

The fifth edition of D&D doesn't have clear dials like this we can use to change the threat of a monster. The system, however, is flexible enough that we can come up with our own, often improvising them right on the spot if we want. Once we have some experience built up, if something feels right, we can drop in our nastier specials without any work at all.

We've talked before about building stronger encounters and how to improve boss fights. This article goes hand-in-hand with both of those.

A List of Nastier Specials

The following is a list of a few potential nastier specials we might add to our monsters. My hope is that these are simple enough that we can keep them in our head and use them when the time feels right for it. We shouldn't need to write them down. Above all, these specials need to make sense within the story. Why are these specials in place? We're not doing it to be mean to our players, we're doing it to add fuel to the fire of the story.

Maximize damage. One of the easiest ways to dramatically increase the threat of a monster is to maximize its damage output. Monsters suddenly start hitting for a lot more, sometimes nearly twice as hard, when their damage is maximized. Are you worried that your high level characters are going to kill Tiamat when they face her? Not if she's breathing for 156 damage as a legendary action! Ok, that's an extreme example, but you get the idea. If you really want a monster to be dangerous bordering on lethal, max it's damage output.

Add extra attacks. Along with or instead of increasing damage, we can give a monster extra attacks. Maybe it attacks faster than others of its ilk. Maybe it's hastened. Maybe it has more appendages available for such attacks. More attacks increases the number of times a monster will hit so you can spread its damage around to multiple targets instead of hammering on one target all the time. This is a good nastier special when a creature is fighting by itself against a full party of adventurers.

Maximize or double its hit points. Bigger nastier versions of a monster could have significantly more hit points than the average listed in the Monster Manual. We are free to change these hit points as much as we think fits the story within the range of the hit dice. We can also just ignore it and double a monster's hit points if there's a good reason. One dirty trick that helps us maintain pacing is to keep in mind the maximum hit points a monster might have and, if it fits the story and the pacing, change those hit points during the fight so a monster sticks around a little longer or drops at the right moment. Yes, it's cheating, but it's for the good of the pace of the game.

Add Legendary Actions and Resistances. We can make any monster a legendary foe by giving it legendary actions and resistances. Typically legendary actions will let a monster attack or move up to three times between its opponents turns. Keep in mind that the power of a legendary version of a monster will be much stronger than it otherwise would be. Legendary resistances also help monsters, particularly monsters fighting alone, to break out of nasty save or suck effects like hypnotic pattern or dominate monster. Again, these should be used sparingly and only when they make sense within the fiction of the story. Why are these monsters legendary?

Damage shields. The spell fire shield is powerful on its own but it's really powerful if it's on a monster that everyone is going to hit. Put it on a dragon and that dragon becomes a lot more dangerous. We don't need to stick to fire or cold either. We can add any element we want to the damage shield. A lich might have a necrotic damage shield or a demon might excrete poison or acid. We can also increase the damage on this, maximizing it to 16 or more if we think it's right. Note that this is particularly hard on monks who attack about seventy times a round and will take damage every time.

Give Monsters Spell-Like Abilities. If you're looking for a nastier special, look no further than the hundreds of spells at our disposal in the Player's Handbook. These spells aren't just for player characters. We DMs can build entire stories around the spells found in that book. And they make fantastic ways to customize monsters. Spiritual weapon, shield, misty step, wall of fire; the list of useful spells for monsters goes on and on. We can reskin and reflavor these spells to fit the theme of the monster as well. A powerful devil might invoke a wall of screaming souls that acts very much like a wall of fire except it does psychic damage instead of fire damage.

We can make these spells more useful by making them part of a monster's attack action instead of using up a whole action for the spell. A drow spellblade might be able to hurl a lightning bolt right after slashing with its own lightning-enhanced scimitar, for example.

We can also give monsters spells that might not otherwise be in our game, like spells from third-party publishers. Unlike giving them to characters and potentially changing the face of our game permanently, a monster with a spell like this will only hit the table once and then be gone. My current favorite monsterous spells are the Blasphemies of Bor Bwalsch by D&D writer and creator of Shadow of the Demon Lord Rob Schwalb. They're awful spells that are perfect for lichs, vampires, demons, devils, hags, and any other hideous spell casters.

Give Monsters Exotic Potions. Monsters don't always have to have access to spells to gain some interesting new abilities. Instead we can give intelligent monsters access to potions or scrolls with some interesting and dangerous abilities. Potions of displacement could give a monster the same trait as a displacer beast. Potions of greater invisibility could give an assassin a seriously dangerous edge. Potions of giant strength can turn monsters or NPCs into mountain-crushing horrors. It makes sense that powerful NPCs like the gladiator or champion would have access to a potion like this. A champion with a potion of storm giant strength is a true foe to be feared. It doesn't hurt if the characters get access to reserve potions like this so they can gain the same benefit even if it's only for a few minutes.

Building Your Toolkit of Nastier Specials

All of these are just examples of the sorts of ways you can tune monsters to be something interesting and unique. New armor, magic weapons, potions, scrolls, and spell-like-abilities are ways to change monsters within the fiction. Simple mechanical effects like increasing it points, increasing damage, and adding attacks are easy to implement and turn a normal monster into a brute.

Build your own mental list of nastier specials that make sense for the situation and are relatively easy to implement. With a good set of nastier specials you can turn the hundreds of monsters in the Monster Manual into tens of thousands of monsters your players will remember their whole lives.

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Note, this article has been updated since the original written in 2012.

Many DMs like to use tent cards hanging over a DM screen to run initiative and this is a fantastic way to do it. There are a few small businesses out there who sell very nice tent cards for characters and monsters to use this way and custom character cards look great when printed nicely.

There's a lazier way, though. It's one I've been using for the past six years or so and, though it isn't nearly as beautiful and elegant, it's fast and easy. It requires very little preparation, no upkeep, and you don't need a DM screen to use it.

I first learned of this technique from Teos Abadia (Alphastream on twitter) who learned it from Paul Ellison, one of his long-time players back during the Living Greyhawk days. I've since had the opportunity to meet and play with Pual at a couple of gaming conventions. His fan-dance larping is second to none.

But I digress. Here's how these easier initiative cards work.

Preparing the Cards

Take nine or so 3x5 note cards and fold each one in vertically in half. Then number them on both sides with the biggest black marker you can find, numbering them from 1 to 9. When you're done, you should have a set of folded 3x5 tent cards numbered 1 to 9 written on both sides.

Rolling for Initiative

When it comes time for initiative, have everyone roll their initiative result and then hand out the cards, with the highest initiative winnner starting at 1 and counting down. Each player puts their initiative card in front of them at the table. Now everyone can see who goes in what order.

Monsters too get their own initiative card which goes in front of the DM. The nine cards will cover six players and up to three different monsters. Any more than that and you have far bigger problems than how to handle initiative.

When you begin combat, look around the table to see who has card 1. After that person takes his or her turn, look for the next card down the list and so on.

At the end of the battle, have the players throw in their initiative cards to prepare for the next battle.

Delegating Initiative

One way to make your life easier and help keep your players' attention on the game is to delegate the handling of initiative. At the beginning of your game, ask for a volunteer to handle initiative. If no one is forthcoming, ask someone in particular to help you. With the initiative cards in the player's possession, he or she can call for rolls and pass out the cards. This makes it easier for you to roll monster initiatives and give your scores to the delegated lord of initiative. It also spreads around responsibility for the management of the game which has side benefits as well. Players may be less competitive with the DM when they're helping to manage things outside of their character.

No DM Screen Needed

Unlike previous initiative card systems, this one requires no DM screen. Some DMs, myself included, now forgo the screen to keep dice rolls open and knock down the physical barrier between DMs and players. Letting go of your DM screen also keeps your DM kit small.

Caring for your cards

To keep your cards always standing upright (*snort*), use a binder clip to bind them together when not in use. Make sure to bind them in the folded position, not flattened, so they'll hold their shape over time. If treated right, this single set of cards could last the rest of your life. These cards are an excellent accessory to throw into your DM walk-away kit.

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There is only one real wandering monster in the Tomb of the Nine Gods in Tomb of Annihilation, the Tomb Guardian. These armored flesh golems are no joke but they can get stale if we run them again and again.

Today we'll offer a generator to create enhanced tomb guardians. Each of these still uses the default statistics for the flesh golem with an armor class of 18 for the armor bolted onto its body, though some might be more dexterous and wearing leather armor but we can still give them an AC of 18. Each of them is also empowered beyond the normal tomb guardian as Withers enhances his creations, all with different races, with enchanted weapons and armor.

A Random Enhanced Tomb Guardian Generator

Here are twenty randomly generated enhanced tomb guardians. Reload the page for a new set.

var guardian = {origin:[""], weapon:[""], element:[""], spell:[""]}; guardian.origin = [ "dragonborn", "dwarven", "elven", "abyssal", "orcish", "dark elven", "demonic", "human", "gorilla", "ogre", "giant", "hobgoblin" ]; guardian.element = [ "flaming", "icy", "electrical", "thunderous", "poisonous", "necrotic", "acidic", "forceful", "psychic", "radiant", ]; guardian.attack = [ "dagger", "mace", "spear", "battleaxe", "flail", "longsword", "morningstar", "scimitar", "shortsword", "warhammer", "spiked gauntlet", "spiked chain" ]; guardian.spell = [ "shield", "lightning bolt", "fireball", "spirit guardians", "cloudkill", "sleep", "fire shield", "cone of cold", "improved invisibility", "haste", "globe of invulnerability", "glyph of warding" ]; function GuardianGenerator(origin, element, attack, spell) { function shuffle(o){ //v1.0 for(var j, x, i = o.length; i; j = Math.floor(Math.random() * i), x = o[--i], o[i] = o[j], o[j] = x); }; this.generate = function(length, targetDiv, write_out){ var output_list = []; for(var i = 0; i < length; i++){ shuffle(origin); shuffle(element); shuffle(attack); shuffle(spell); output_list.push("A " + origin[0] + " tomb guardian armed with a " + element[0] + " " + attack[0] + " and a " + element[1] + " " + attack[1] + " empowered with a " + spell[0] + " spell.") } if(targetDiv && write_out) $("div#" + targetDiv).html("

• "+output_list.join("
• ")+"

"); } } $(document).ready(function() { var count = 20; var output = true; var guardianGenerator = new GuardianGenerator(guardian.origin, guardian.element, guardian.attack, guardian.spell); guardianGenerator.generate(count, "guardianlist", output); $("#reload").bind("click",function(){ trapGenerator.generate(count, "guardianlist", output); }); });

Each enhanced tomb guardian uses the statistics of a flesh golem with an armor class of 18. Enhanced tomb guardians add 7 (2d6) damage onto each weapon attack of the damage type defined by descriptors on the weapons. You can use the proper dice for each weapon, doubling the normal dice and adding the flesh golem's strength bonus, or, if you're lazy, you can just use the default damage the flesh golem already inflicts plus the bonus damage.

The spells the enhanced tomb guardian can cast do not require any components and are cast at 5th level. They have a DC of 15 and a +7 spell attack bonus. Spells with a duration are cast before combat begins and the enhanced tomb guardian does not need to concentrate to keep a spell going.

Want to build your own enhanced tomb guardians at the table? Use the tables below to roll for your tomb guardians.

Origin

What creature or creatures make up the tomb guardian? Roll 1d12 and consult the following:

1. Dragonborn
2. Dwarven
3. Elven
4. Abyssal
5. Orcish
6. Dark Elven
7. Demonic
8. Human
9. Gorilla
10. Ogre
11. Giant
12. Hobgoblin

Weapons

Roll 1d12 twice on this list to determine what weapons the tomb guardian wields.

1. Dagger
2. Mace
3. Spear
4. Battleaxe
5. Flail
6. Longsword
7. Morningstar
8. Scimitar
9. Shortsword
10. Warhammer
11. Spiked Gauntlet
12. Spiked Chain

Elemental

Some tomb guardians might have an elemental bond. Roll 1d4, on a 4, roll 1d10 on this table to determine what elemental condition it might have. If Withers feels like the characters are having too easy a time, he might send more tomb guardians with these bonds.

1. Fire
2. Cold
3. Necrotic
4. Poison
5. Acidic
6. Thunderous
7. Lightning
8. Radiant
9. Force
10. Psychic

Spellbound

Withers has implanted spells on some tomb guardians as well. If the characters are having an easy time, he might send these spellbound tomb guardians to thwart the party.

1. Shield
2. Lightning Bolt
3. Fireball
4. Spirit Guardians
5. Cloudkill
6. Sleep
7. Burning Hands
8. Cone of Cold
9. Improved Invisibility
10. Haste
11. Globe of Invulnerability
12. Glyph of Warding

Adding Flavor to Tomb Guardians

These enhanced tomb guardians are intended to change up the threat the characters face when facing one of these thematic tomb guardians. We add these interesting abilities not to punish our players (that's Acererak's job) but to keep things interesting. Each time our players see one of these enhanced tomb guardians coming for them, they'll know they're going to be facing something unique and chaotic.

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In a previous article on Sly Flourish we talked about the value of randomness and creativity in D&D and breaking conventional thought with random tables. Randomness is obviously a big part of the gameplay of Dungeons & Dragons. We're rolling dice all the time while the story unfolds during the game. We might even think of the die, and randomness in general, as an additional player in the game, one who steers the direction of the game in ways we could not have expected.

So we all take it for granted that randomness is a core component of the game (ability checks, attack rolls, and the like), but we might not consider how randomness can affect larger parts of the story as well, like the potential scenes that take place.

Random encounters go back to the beginning of D&D. Against the Giants and Descent into the Depths both published in 1978 included wandering monster tables that made these adventures feel alive and unpredictable. Even the DM didn't know where things were necessarily going to go.

Nearly all of the fifth edition D&D hardback adventures include robust random encounter tables with encounters for many environments and detailed descriptions of what the characters might find in the encounter. Xanathar's Guide to Everything includes a bunch of random encounter tables based on environments that we can use for our own adventures. I've also included a set of random dungeon encounters in the Lazy DM's Workbook.

Criticism of Random Encounters

While many DMs are fine with random encounters, some DMs don't like them at all. Criticisms against random encounters include, generally, two main themes: they take away from the main story of an adventure and they take up valuable game time. These criticisms aren't necessarily wrong but there are ways we can incorporate random encounters that make them an interesting and exciting part of the story instead of a distraction. We can steer how we use random encounters to stay true to the story, expand the world, and liven up the game for both our players and ourselves by introducing the unexpected. Today we'll look at some of the ways to get the most out of random encounters in our D&D games.

Cooking At The Table

Why would we want to use random encounters at all? Why not plan out all the encounters that the characters will face so we can tune them very carefully around the story? As we talked about in the article Randomness and Creativity we recognize that sometimes random elements can make us more creative. We'll avoid stereotypes. We'll push our minds towards new ideas we might not have seen otherwise. Just as the dice we roll for a character affects the outcome of a story, so can the dice help us see what scenes might take place.

Rolling for random encounters is a bit like cooking at the table instead of in the kitchen. We have the ingredients all set up for us but a couple of die rolls might change things up in ways we didn't expect.

For some DMs, this is scary. We like to have control over the game and might even feel like that control is critical to ensure the game will be fun. Sometimes, though, we have to just let go. For others, though, it can be a great way to sharpen our ability to improvise right at the table. We don't roll random encounters to divert the story of the game. We roll random encounters to find new and interesting ways to expand that story.

Use Theater of the Mind

The fact that random encounters add time to our games is hard to get past. If our games are already constrained, random encounters are likely the first thing to go. One way we can manage the time is to skip the battle map and handle the scene all in our conversations. First off, the random encounter might not end in combat anyway. Characters might sneak by, negotiate their way past, or find some other way to get out of the situation without drawing a sword. If we pull out a mat, we're telegraphing to our players that combat is the likely way out. If we keep it aside, the players might try other ways to navigate the scene.

If it does come to combat, we can stay with our narrative approach by running combat in the theater of the mind. This keeps things moving fast and keeps the players in the story instead of worrying about tactical positioning. Even if you use the grid for big battles, running smaller battles in the theater of the mind is a great approach to keep on hand, particularly for random encounters.

Situations and Undefined Scenes

When we introduce a random encounter, it works well when we think of it as a situation the characters are going to get involved in. We don't have to consider what type of scene it is: exploration, roleplaying, or combat. Instead, we can focus on the fiction. Even if it's a horrible monster, the characters might find another way out of the situation than sword and spell. The less we define an encounter, the more freedom the players have to navigate it. This works well for the whole game, really, but it works particularly well for random encounters.

Tying Secrets and Clues to Random Encounters

I'm a huge fan of secrets and clues as an improvisational aid and preparation technique. It's the cornerstone of the checklist in Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master. The keys to a great secret and clue is that it's relatively short, it matters to the characters, and we don't know how it will come up during the game.

Random encounters are a great way to use those secrets and clues we prepared. Often we can reveal a valuable clue through a random encounter. When this works well it feels like magic. Suddenly something we couldn't anticipate came true at the table and tied directly into the story. We had a secret but didn't know where it would come up. We have an encounter we didn't expect but rolled the dice and there it is. Put the two together and we have the very example of how the story unfolds at the table.

Don't be a Slave to the Dice

Sometimes you roll the dice for a random encounter and it just doesn't work out. You either roll an encounter that already happened or that just doesn't make sense for the situation. We need not accept such weird answers. It helps to take a moment and really think about how it might make sense. The dice, after all, are helping us break out of our current creative shell and think differently. If it really doesn't work out, roll again or let your eyes wander up and down the list of random encounters and pick one that makes sense.

The Right Tool for the Right Job

There are circumstances when random encounters really don't fit well at all. If you're running a single-session time-focused game, like a convention Adventurer's League game, you probably don't want to throw in a random encounter. I don't think many Adventurer's League adventures include random encounters for this very reason.

If you're running a homebrew single-session adventure, however, you can account for the extra time within the structure of the adventure. If the characters are navigating an old crypt to find the remains of the Blood Prince, you might account for a random encounter within the tomb as they seek the villain.

Avoid Building Your Own Random Encounter Lists

Here's a bit of a controversial statement. As DMs, I don't think its a valuable use of our time to come up with our own random encounter lists. Instead, we can just come up with encounters. Leave the random encounter lists to publishers and random encounter generators. Game designers get paid to make large lists of random encounters, knowing that many of them will not get used by any single player but that, overall, they will have a high impact on the games played among many groups.

When we DMs write out random encounter lists, we're not likely to use it very often and thus a lot of our effort is wasted. Our time is better spent designing actual situations we know the characters will face and using random encounter lists to help us think outside of our own mind a little bit. Others may likely argue against this, and that's fine, but consider how much impact the whole random encounter list you write affects your actual game and decide if it's worth the time or if that time is better spent elsewhere. That is, after all, the number one lesson of Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master.

Prepare what matters.

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As part of the work we did on the Lazy Dungeon Master's Workbook, I surveyed the Kickstarter backers of Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master and asked them which references, charts, and tables they found most and least useful while preparing and running their 5e games. The three madness charts trended towards the bottom of the list.

I'm not completely surprised but a little sad at this. I love the madness charts. Ever since using them in Out of the Abyss, I've used madness here and there throughout my D&D games and always found them to be an enjoyable addition. Today I'm going to dig into why I love these charts so much and what they can bring to their game.

Regardless of the results, I stuck the madness tables in there anyway. Hell, it's my book. Today I'll talk about why.

(art by Walter Brocca)

The Great Equalizer

Madness is a strange effect. It isn't technically a status effect but when it hits a character, it acts very much like one. We don't know exactly what that effect will be should a character fail a madness check but it sure won't be good.

When we have high power characters, it can be hard for us dungeon masters to challenge them all the time. Many times that's perfectly fine. It's fun to carve through all sorts of monsters when you're a high level and high power character. Since D&D isn't tuned around magical items, the items characters acquire push them outside of their expected power level and that feels great.

Sometimes, however, particularly for really powerful monsters, we want to show the danger. We want players to be scared of things. If Demogorgon rises out of the black waters of Dark Lake, we don't want the characters to just start preparing their attacks and jumping in.

That's where madness comes in. Some creatures are just too horrible to behold. Their very presence pushes the mortal mind outside of the bounds of sanity. The walls of reality crack and in seeps the horror of worlds beyond.

It doesn't matter how many attacks a round you can dish out, a DC 24 Charisma saving throw will turn just about any fighter into a slug-eating buffoon, at least for a few seconds.

The round a demon prince comes out and that aura of madness hits the characters, that's the most dangerous round in D&D. And that danger can be really fun.

When To Use Madness

Madness is an effect we should keep in our back pocket and not use all the time. The appearance of a demon prince or lord of hell is a great time to drop in madness. The arrival of a powerful entity of the Far Realm might be another. Should Slarkrethal the kraken rise from the depths of the seas, it's psionic wave will crash on them like water tearing down mountains.

Other circumstances might also warrant a madness check. Opening up and gazing upon a book of terrible rituals, maybe the Book of Vile Darkness itself, could crack the minds of the strongest wizards. Staring into the shifting planes of a portal to an outer world might invoke madness. Some Fantastic Features containing the depths of evil and studied too rashly might drop waves of terror upon those who gaze upon them.

Again, madness should be used infrequently but, when the situation is right, it's a powerful effect.

Tuning Madness for Fun

As written, madness might be too powerful. The biggest reasion is that it offers no saving throw at the end of a turn to get rid of the effect. We can easily add this end-of-next-turn saving throw when a character is hit with a short-term madness effect during combat.

If the saving throw is too high, though, as it might be for characters who have poor charisma scores, this might not even help. A fighter is going to have a hell of a time beating a DC 24 Charisma save even if they get it at the end of any round. A number of spells can remove madness, as described in the Dungeon Master's Guide including calm emotions lesser restoration, remove curse, dispel evil and good, and greater restoration. We might also argue that damage done to the character can snap them out of their daze or at least give them advantage on the check.

The Creativity and Improvisation of Madness Effects

One of the reasons I love the madness effect so much is that it's full of flavor. While a stun is generally just a stun, madness carries such flavorful effects as "the character experiences an overpowering urge to eat something strange such as dirt, slime, or offal." Hard to beat that for flavor!

Other status effects too have such flavor but it's tied to the way it hits the character. When a drow mage casts web on a character, we know more than just that the character is incapacitated. We know that they are cocooned in a magical sticky web, stuck to the wall or ground and gasping for breath. We might forget this when we're deep into the mechanics of the game but it behooves us to go there and remember what is really going on in the game's fiction.

Likewise madness brings flavor to the game beyond its mechanical effects, which are substantial. Think about the source and describe what happens. One of my favorite questions is to ask the player to describe their happy place when they retreat into their own mind due to a madness effect. A player will describe a nice leatherbound book, sweet pipesmoke in the air, and the familiar softness of a leather chair in front of a warm fire while the rest of the party is being shredded by the tentacles and mental probes of a cyclopean titan risen from the depths. Oh what fun!

Though we tend not to use it often, short-term madness is a wonderful flavorful effect to add into our games from time to time. The next time a character witnesses something outside the bounds of the mind, time to hit that madness chart.

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The more we focus on the story of D&D, the more ability checks become the main mechanic as characters interact with the world around them. Asking for checks and getting the results sounds easy. Ask the player for a roll, add the appropriate modifiers, and match it up against a DC. Simple.

When we're running our game, though, it isn't always as easy as it sounds. It isn't always clear how we should call for checks, to whom, and how we should adjudicate the results. What if a player does a particularly good job roleplaying an encounter with an NPC but rolls poorly on their persuasion check? Is all that good roleplaying lost? What about when a character wants to examine a door, rolls a 2, and everyone else at the table wants to jump in and check the door as well?

In today's article we're going to dig deep into how we use ability checks in the story of our D&D games.

A Summary of Ability Check Options

This is a big article so here's a summary.

• Read up on the intent of ability checks in chapter 7 of the Player's Handbook and chapter 8 of the Dungeon Master's Guide. Freshen up regularly before you start changing how you run things.
• Consider how randomness fits into the world and the situations in which we might call for an ability check. Does this check warrant a roll or is a passive ability check enough?
• Roll secretly for a character's ability check when the character might not know if they succeeded or failed such as when searching for a trap.
• Offer advantage on checks in which players roleplay particularly well or when an aspect of their character gives them an advantage in the situation.
• Allow full table rolls if the circumstances allow for it. The highest roll learns the in-game results first.
• If needed, curb full-table rolls by determining if only one character can reasonably perform the check or by accepting only the first roll.
• Be prepared for an entire table to fail a check. Make sure it doesn't halt the game.
• Ask for rolls only from those trained in a skill when a particular level of expertise is required such as decoding magical runes.
• Ask players to describe how they aid an ally or guide them with guidance.
• Build your own toolbox of methods for adjudicating ability checks.

Understanding the Rules As Written

Whenever we're going to dig deep into any mechanic in D&D, it's best to read the rules and understand their intent. In the case of ability checks, we have chapter 7 page 173 in the Player's Handbook and chapter 8 page 237 in of the Dungeon Master's Guide to give us the written rules and some solid advice on how best to use ability checks. If you're going to monkey around with ability checks or find that things get confusing at your game, spend a few minutes reading both of these sections to reinforce how the designers intended for ability checks to work.

One thing of note, particularly for DMs who have played older versions of D&D, there are no skill checks. In the fifth edition of D&D, there are only ability checks. Skills are subjects in which characters are proficient and add to an ability modifier when the circumstances allow it. This sounds pedantic but the distinction matters, particularly in the vocabulary of the rules.

These sections in the Player's Handbook and Dungeon Master's Guide give us the basics of using ability checks including group checks, aiding another character, and using advantage and disadvantage based on the circumstance of the check. It's worth reading and refreshing ourselves on these rules regularly, particularly once we've seen how they actually play out for the group at the table.

The Random Chances of the World Around Us

The real world around is is constantly and continually moving based on random chance. Very likely the reason I am writing this and the reason you are reading it are based on very slim random occurrences that happened over our lives and the lives of our ancestors. When we interact with the world around us, random chance plays a big part in those interactions as well, even if we don't see it or choose not to.

The same is true in the world of our D&D games. In the Dungeon Master's Guide, we're given the advice that we need not worry about asking for ability checks when the task being done is either so easy that it's almost assured or so hard that it's nearly impossible. There's another way to think about this, though, and it's by considering how much randomness exists in the situation itself.

If the characters are talking to a town guard, maybe there's randomness in the response of that guard. Maybe he ate something bad earlier that day or got in a fight with his husband before work. Maybe we want to account for that potential random circumstance when our charismatic sorcerer decides to ask him about the secret tunnels beneath the ruined watchtower.

But maybe we don't. Maybe, for the sake of the story, its just easier of the guard tells the characters what they want to know. Regardless of any digestive or domestic issues the guard has, he's still likely to tell a charismatic sorcerer about the tunnels. We don't need to roll for this.

Page 236 of chapter 8 of the Dungeon Master's Guide has a whole section called "The Role of Dice" that discusses when DMs should consider rolling or ignoring dice. The section called "The Middle Path" likely offers the best option: use the dice when a bit of randomness makes sense for that situation or ignore it when the characters approach the situation in a way that makes failure unlikely.

It's important for us to understand why there is a random component when it comes to interacting with the world overall. This randomness isn't there to take some excellent roleplaying and throw it away on a shitty roll. It's there to help the world feel as unpredictable as any realistic world would feel. It's also there to make the story more interesting. If everything were simply comparisons between static ability scores and difficulty classes, we could predict every interaction before it occurred (hello Leplace's Demon!). With the roll of the die, mysterious things happen and that's fun for both players and DMs alike.

How we inject this randomness into our games and how we tweak it based on the context of the story takes some deeper understanding.

Passive Checks

There's a whole interesting discussion to have about passive checks; particularly how passive perception and passive insight work. Jeremy Crawford talked about this on a previous episode of Dragon Talk. Here's a clip from the episode where he goes into details.

In short, passive scores (perception and insight) are always on as long as you're conscious. Players don't get to say that they're using it. Passive perception is intended to be the floor of a character's perception. They might not notice anything specific but they'll know something is going on. If a player rolls perception, they might roll lower than their passive perception but the passive perception is still going on. Anything they would see with that, they'd see anyway.

We can use passive scores for just about anything if we want to but they're most likely to be used for these sort of "always on" skills. As mentioned above, if we feel like the random elements of a situation don't exist in a particular situation, we can opt for a static check on anything. If a rogue has +7 to stealth we can consider it having a general stealth of 17 if they're sneaking through a whole area and we don't want to roll on it all the time.

We might use passive checks instead of rolls in the following circumstances:

• When randomness isn't a meaningful factor in the situation.
• When we'd normally have to make a large series of checks.
• When a skill is "always on" as the characters explore. These skills might include Arcana, History, Insight, Investigation, Medicine, Nature, Perception, Religion, and Survival.

DM Rolls and Hidden Checks

There are times when the results of a situation might be a mystery to the characters regardless of a success or failure. The ability to detect a trap, for example, might be known or not regardless of the results of a roll. Yet when we ask a player to roll to detect a trap, they will know the result because they can see the result.

Instead, we might ask for a character's Wisdom (Perception or Investigation) bonus and make a hidden roll to see how it goes. This gives some mystery to the results. If they detect the trap, they know it's there. If they did not detect a trap, though, it could be because there isn't one there or they missed it. That's exciting.

There aren't many circumstances where we'd roll an ability check for a character and keep the results hidden but it can be useful and fun when it does happen. Here are a few circumstances when rolling a hidden check might be appropriate:

• Detecting a trap
• Negotiating with an NPC who hides their responses
• Checking for secret doors or hidden compartments
• Detecting whether a liquid is poison or not
• Recognizing the traits of a monster

This technique can be fun but should be used sparingly. It's almost always best for players to roll their own checks.

Awesome Roleplaying, Poor Rolls

Sometimes, and we can see this in a lot of streaming games like Critical Role, players do quite a bit of awesome roleplaying when interacting with an NPC. Sometimes, however, their character actually isn't particularly good at that type of interaction. The character has an awesome bit of dialog intimidating the goblin but has an intimidation bonus of -1.

Sometimes we might ask for the check after such a narrative exposition and then see a terrible roll come up. All of us know, based on what was actually said, that it should have gone better than that.

There are a couple of ways we can handle this. First of all, we're within the intention of the game to offer advantage to the player for a fine bit of roleplaying. We can even give them inspiration if they want to hang on to the advantage for another check.

We can also lower the difficulty class on the fly based on the particular approach that was taken with the NPC. We might even use our shades of gray on the roll to turn a bad roll into an interesting divergent path in the situation.

We might even let the roll go away completely and, based on the awesome roleplaying, determine that there's basically no way the interaction will go against the character when they take the approach they're taking. No matter what, we are not slaves to the dice. If the approach and the situation are stronger than random chance, we can judge it a success and move forward.

Full Table Rolls

Invariably we sometimes get into a situation where a character wants to spot something, announces their intention to look around an area, rolls a 2, and then the whole rest of the group jumps in and wants to make the same check.

This can happen in both wide circumstances, like keeping an eye out for monsters while resting or something small like checking a door for traps. When the players see another player fail a check, they want to leap in to make the same check.

The circumstances of such a roll matter a lot in how we adjudicate this. We might, in our minds, have a clear idea that only one character may see or miss seeing such an event only to realize that if everyone tries, someone is bound to make the check.

If the task at hand is something only one character can reasonably do, we can simply veto the checks when the rest of the group wants to roll. We might argue that only that one chance could work and subsequent attempts won't succeed. Other times, however, we might shrug and go with the group check.

Here are some circumstances when only one character can reasonably perform a check:

• Detecting a trap
• Disarming a trap
• Picking a lock
• Forging a document
• Manipulating an object
• Reading arcane energy off of an object
• Climbing a wall

And here are some example circumstances when a whole group can reasonably check.

• Investigating a room
• Scouting an area
• Foraging for food
• Forcing open a door
• Studying a written document

If we do find circumstances where the whole group can participate, we might instead call for a group check. See page 175 of the Player's Handbook for details. We use a group check when the whole group acts together and succeeds or fails together. The most common group check is the group stealth check to avoid being seen as a group travels through an area but we can use it in other circumstances too. In a group check, all participants roll for the check and more than half of them must succeed in order to succeed at the roll.

If things seem too easy when the whole group would roll on a check, we can use the group check to even things out a bit.

Full Table Failures

Sometimes we want to pass some information to the characters and we ask for a full group check expecting that someone will pass. Sometimes, however, the dice work against all of us and no one succeeds. If the information was vital, we might find ourselves stuck in a corner of the story. We expected someone would pass. Now what?

Even when we're calling for a group check in which only one member of the group must succeed, we must be ready to handle it if no one succeeds at all. In these circumstances it might be best to give the highest rolling player the required information and "fail forward" with a complication of some sort such as giving away their position or not noticing the arrival of another group of creatures before it's too late.

Only Those Trained Can Succeed

The fifth edition of D&D expects that all checks are "ability" checks, not "skill" checks. Thus, when a DM calls for a check, they ask for an ability like "give me a wisdom check" to notice something coming closer in the distant sky. We might also tag on a skill with it and say "give me a wisdom check and add your proficiency if you're trained in perception". I imagine most DMs skip this and go straight to "give me a perception check" and players know to roll flat wisdom if they aren't trained.

One way to ensure that an entire group doesn't try a particularly narrow skill is to ask for only those trained in the skill to check. For example, understanding arcane runes protecting a vaulted door might require that it be checked only by those trained in Arcana. Understanding the intricate information stored in a religious text or recognizing the origin of a buried statue might require someone trained in Religion.

Requiring proficiency in a particular skill goes outside the bounds of the intended D&D rules, but it is a good way to make those proficiencies count during the game. We might stack on other backgrounds, races, or classes onto this list as well. If the characters come across a mystical tome, maybe only those trained in Arcana or those able to cast spells can attempt to decode the book's secrets using their spellcasting ability score to understand it. Perhaps only someone trained in Religion can recognize the ancient buried statue except for dwarves who might recognize that the statue is of a dwarven deity lost long ago.

Here are some example circumstances where we might only ask those who are trained to make a check:

• When decoding powerful arcane runes
• When investigating ancient religious artifacts
• When picking a difficult lock
• When hunting a deceptive beast through the jungles
• When digging through formal histories for a particular nugget
• When attempting to brew a particular poison
• When seeking the particulars from the wounds found on a corpse

Again, this method for ability checks goes outside the expected rules and, as Jeremy Crawford says, it should be used sparingly.

Offering Advantage for Character Traits and Backgrounds

It's always nice to reinforce a character's interactions with the world through that character's race, class, background, or any other trait of the character that gives the character an advantage in a particular situation. In these circumstances, we can give a character advantage for a particular check based on this trait.

If the characters are examining an ancient fresco buried underneath centuries of moss, the high elf character might get advantage on the check since the fresco depicts elements of the ancient elven struggle between Corellon and Lolth.

The Dungeon Master's Guide specifically discusses when to use advantage and disadvantage on ability checks. Page 239 includes circumstances when one or the other makes sense with one particularly interesting statement: "Consider granting advantage when circumstances not related to a creature's inherent capabilities provide it with an edge."

When a rogue is disarming a trap or picking a lock, we don't give them advantage for being a rogue. Their proficiency is already wired into being a rogue. Picking locks and disarming traps is what rogues do. We already know that barbarians are particularly athletic, they don't get barbarous advantage for bending bars or lifting gates. They actually get it anyway if they're raging at those vexing bars.

Backgrounds already offer skills so we might think of that as an inherent capability already but if the details of a background can aid a character beyond a skill proficiency, we can consider that enough to offer advantage on the check.

Here are some examples where we might offer advantage on an ability check based on a particular trait of a character.

• When a sailor is examining a wrecked ship
• When a sage is reading through an old tome
• When a dwarf is investigating the construction of an underground citadel
• When an Warlock serving a Great Old One patron peers into a portal to the far realm
• When an assassin investigates a potential poisoning

Describing Aiding and Guidance

The aid another action is a great way for two characters to work on a problem with one of them giving advantage to another. The most common problem I've seen with this is that the player of the aiding party grabs a d20 and rolls without thinking about the fact that they aren't the ones supposed to be rolling. If this happens, we can tell the partners that this second roll counts as the advantage roll and add whichever modifier is higher between the two characters.

We can apply a small cost to this aid as well by asking the player to describe how they're aiding. This is a nice trick to get players into the story. It isn't enough for them to say "I'll aid them", the question is how they'll offer that aid. Fun stories can come from such questions.

The same is true with the cleric's spell guidance which offers 1d4 to any ability check. When a cleric casts this spell, we can ask the player to describe what that aid looks like. Is it a holy light that fills in the nooks and crannies of a difficult lock? Is it a small glowing halo that surrounds the rogue as she talks her way past the town guards? Is it a tiny glowing light in the eyes of the wizard as she decodes the magical glyphs embedded in the wall?

Getting players to answer these in-game story-focused questions is a great way to get them outside of their character sheet and into the world you're creating together.

Ability Checks: The Primary Mechanic between Players and the World

When we think about it, ability checks may be the biggest mechanic of D&D. In our more story-focused games, these ability checks guide nearly every challenging interaction between the characters and the world around them. The basic mechanic of ability checks; rolling a d20, adding a modifier, and matching against a difficulty class; seems so simple but how we actually implement these checks into the game can have a big impact in how the game is played and how it turns out.

Read the rules, see how they play out at your own table, and build a toolbox of methods for calling for and using ability checks in your own game. Let these checks act as the chaotic vehicles for the awesome stories that unfold at your table.

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Reading Volo's Guide to Monsters, along with the Monster Manual is a fantastic way to fill our head with D&D lore that helps us plan our games and improvise while we're running them. If you get nothing else out of this article, consider how much value you can get by reading these books cover to cover to steep yourself in D&D lore.

Reading the section on gnolls in Volo's Guide got my head spinning around the idea of a full level 1 to 20 fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons campaign built around gnolls. I had in my head an image of a hyena twitching in the remains of a half-digested corpse of a villager (gory, I know). As the characters watch in horror, the hyena starts to twist and break like the best scene in American Werewolf in London. The party witnesses the full transformation (or maybe partial transformation if they decide to blast it to pieces before it finishes) of a hyena into a gnoll.

A whirlwind of events would take them from that single scene all the way into the Death Dells where they will hunt—or be hunted by— Yeenoghu the demon prince of gnolls and the most powerful minions on Yeenoghu's home plane of existence in the Abyss.

Can we build an entire campaign around this central pillar? I believe we can! Of course it won't JUST be gnolls. We'd have lots of side threads going on too, but building a full level 1 to 20 campaign arc focused on Yeenoghu's Hunger sounds like a lot of fun to me, so let's dig in.

The Campaign Elevator Pitch

Following the steps in Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master for building new campaigns, we start with a central theme for the campaign. The shorter the better, so here is my campaign pitch in three words:

End Yeenoghu's hunger.

That's simple but it's a good central pillar around which to build the campaign. It's a quest the characters can get early on in the adventure and work towards all throughout their characters' levels.

Six Truths of the Hunger

Next we come to the campaign's six truths. What sets this campaign apart from others? Here we list the six things that make this campaign unique among campaigns. These are truths we will share with the players so they know what to build their characters around.

• A blood moon rises in the sky each night and has for a full month with no sign of stopping.

• Signs of a twisted new cult have begun to appear. Some whisper of cannibalism.

• Trade between smaller villages and towns have begun to cease. Some say entire villages have been found slaughtered and devoured.

• Hobgoblins from a warband known as the Black Fist have sprung up in greater numbers.

• Cities of the lands have begun to close their borders and seal their walls. Even they do not know exactly why.

• A great black and green storm swirls over the mountains of Shattered Teeth. Sages say the very atmosphere over the mountains has changed.

This is going to be a campaign of overland exploration and dungeon delving and will have all three pillars of play. We can reinforce to the players that they will will want to build players with the following goal:

"My character wants to work with their fellow adventurers to find the source of the bloody hunger that grips the land and end it."

The Fronts

We don't have to build out an entire campaign from end to end here, but we will outline the major story drivers of the campaign. We've borrowed the idea of Fronts from the excellent RPG, Dungeon World.

• Front: Yeenoghu and the gnoll hordes
• Goal: Devour all humanity in the world.
• First Grim Portent: Packs of gnolls in great number stop trade between the major cities of the land.
• Second Grim Portent: Yeenoghu and his gnoll hordes attack a smaller settlement.

• Third Grim Portent: Yeenoghu and his greater horde attack one of the larger cities.

• Front: The Cult of the Hunger

• Goal: Pave the way for Yeenoghu's cleansing.
• First Grim Portent: The cult grows larger as it recruits from disenfranchised towns on the outskirts of major cities.
• Second Grim Portent: The cult steals the powerful Tome of Savagery from the greatest library of the land and uses it to open a second portal to Yeenoghu's realm, the Death Dells.

• Third Grim Portent: The Cult of Hunger assassinates the leaders of a major city and sends its armies into chaos.

• Front: The Black Fist hobgoblin mercenary army

• Goal: Let the gnoll horde weaken the defenses of the cities and then sweep in and take over.
• First Grim Portent: The Black Fist hobgoblin army takes over a ruined castle within striking distance of two major settlements.
• Second Grim Portent: Black Fist scouts track Yeenoghu's trail of destruction.
• Third Grim Portent: The Black Fist stands outside of a major city, waiting until both sides are weakened before sweeping in and taking it over.

We hold these fronts loosely. New fronts might pop up and old fronts might change drastically. Volo's Guide includes a wonderful section on hobgoblins as well as gnolls so we can add them as a third party that might end up as allies of the, enemies, or both for the characters and their goals.

When it comes to the selection of monsters we might choose or this campaign, Volo's Guide has an excellent section on the Anatomy of a Warband and on Gnoll Allies that works as a great checklist of potential monsters we can sprinkle throughout our campaign.

A Loose 1 to 20 Outline

While we don't need anything more than the above to run a decent start to a campaign, it might be fun to write a loose outline of the places the characters might visit and the events that might occur as they go through the campaign. I picked twenty such places and events, one for each level of the game. I have no illusion that these will all get used at exactly the right level but it gives me a loose outline of ideas I can go through when running adventures. I am happy to throw any or all of these away as the campaign progresses.

Level 1: The Dying Hyena. The party encounters a dying hyena that turns into a gnoll in front of their eyes. More hyenas howl in the distance.

Level 2: Slaughter at the Village of Nix. The party sees the slaughter of the village of Nix and hunts down those that committed the act.

Level 3: The Charnal Pit. The party witnesses the gnoll's feast at the charnel pit outside of Nix.

Level 4: Assault on Fort Kellum. The party arrives at Fort Kellum to see it under assault by the gnolls.

Level 5: The Dead Gate. The characters explore the ruins of a planar gate previously used by Yeenoghu four hundred years ago and the ruins of dwarves and deep gnomes that surround it.

Level 6: Citadel Gallax. The party explores, infiltrates, or is invited into a ruined citadel now rebuilt by the Black Fist hobgoblin warband.

Level 7: The Tower of Fangs. The party faces the cult of Hunger at one of its temples and discovers their dark portents.

Level 8: Mountain of Broken Teeth. The party backtracks to the Mountains of Broken Teeth where Yeenoghu first came to the world.

Level 9: The First Portal. The party finds and close the portal Yeenoghu used to enter the prime plane.

Level 10: Dragonspear Castle. The party goes to Dragonspear Castle where the Black Fist warband wages war against a huge gnoll army.

Level 11: The Temple of the Hunger. The party faces the cult of Hunger and its high priest to recover the Book of Savagry.

Level 12: The Demon Rift. The party discovers and must close a rift spilling out scores of maw demons like an infected wound in the world.

Level 13: The Hunters at the Twisted Shrine. At a long-forgotten shrine, the party must survive an assault by a war band of gnolls specifically born and bred to hunt them down and slay them.

Level 14: The Assault on Baldur's Gate. The party arrives at Baldur's Gate to find Yeenoghu and his army waging an assault on the city.

Level 15: The Prince of Savagery. The party faces Yeenoghu and his army in order to save Baldur's Gate.

Level 16: The Gateway. The party faces Yeenoghu's gatekeepers and enters the gateway to the Death Dells.

Level 17: The Death Dells. The party begins their exploration into Yeenoghu's Abyssal plane.

Level 18: The Maw. The party travels through a huge sinkhole consisting of the rotten corpse of a single huge maw demon.

Level 19: The Hunting Grounds. A twisted maze of brambles surrounds Yeenghu's lair in which the mightiest gnolls of the demon prince eternally hunt their prey.

Level 20: Yeenoghu. The party faces the Prince of Savagery on his throne of corpses.

A Loose Outline and a Fun Exercise

When we sit down to plan a campaign like this, we need not plan too far. Things are going to go off the rails from the very first session and that's what makes these games so much fun. We can, however, get our minds working by thinking about what might happen and have some fun diving deep into the lore of the game to see where our minds go. Such exercises keep our minds limber and keep us ready to run some great games even if we never get around to running a campaign like this.

When you think of your own campaign, where does your mind go?

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In the Dungeons & Dragons adventure Out of the Abyss, the party has the potential of grouping with a number of NPCs as they all attempt to escape from their captors in the depths of the underdark. In Storm King's Thunder, the party can be accompanied by Harshnag, a powerful frost giant wielding an incredibly powerful magical axe. Finally, in Tomb of Annihilation, the characters have the potential of grouping with assassins, a Couatl, or an artifact-donning hero and his lizard companion wielding a holy avenger.

Some DMs may not have any problem handling these tag-along NPCs in a game. These NPCs find their place in a group and work their way into the story as it unfolds. Other DMs, myself included, have trouble with tag-along NPCs. Here's why.

First, tag-along NPCs make our lives harder as DMs. Running a whole world is already hard work, even for the lazy. Adding tag-along NPCs gives us a whole other set of variables to handle.

Tag-along NPCs also make combat take longer since there's another character in the mix. Sometimes we can hand this off to one of the players but not if the NPC has a secret identity. If you hand Dragonbait over to a player, I bet that sword is getting traded.

These tag-along NPCs also skew the balance of power in a group. Challenges that the party might have had a hard time with suddenly got easier. That extra NPC adds to the overall synergy to the party and that synergy is a huge power boost. If we want to challenge the characters, we're going to have to account for it.

Probably the worst offense of tag-along NPCs is that they draw the spotlight off of the characters. Our attention should be on the characters and how they interact with the world around them. Now we have this new character that doesn't belong to anyone but who also takes some of that spotlight away. This gets exacerbated if the NPC overshadows the characters in power, like Artus Cimber, Dragonbait, or Harshnag.

How do we handle it when tag-along NPCs become a burden to a game? Many DMs discussed the problem and potential solutions in a Twitter thread on the topic. The following includes ideas they discussed as well as some of my own.

Don't Let them Tag Along in the First Place

If we know these tag-along NPCs might show up in our adventure, we can head them off before they actually join the characters. Maybe we just don't have them show up at all. What is their reason not to join the party? I hinted at Artus Cimber and Dragonbait in my Tomb of Annihilation game but never pulled the thread on them and never had them show up. Maybe I would have if they came up in a random roll of the dice but maybe I'd simply roll again. This is certainly likely after hearing how difficult these high-level NPCs can be when they join a game.

The easiest way to deal with tag-along NPCs is simply not to. Don't let them become tag-along NPCs.

Have an Exit Strategy

If an NPC does join the party, it always helps to have an exit plan for the NPC. When will the NPC leave the group? What circumstances will lead to their departure? How do you steer things to ensure that circumstance actually takes place?

Harshnag in Storm King's Thunder had an exit plan; getting crushed under a million tons of ice in the Eye of the All Father. I don't know that Artus Ember and Dragonbait had much of an exit plan but they might come to either fear the characters or fear for the characters and head out during the night. The various NPCs in Out of the Abyss might eventually betray the characters or leave for other reasons. The guides in Tomb of Annihilation might get sick or might have another tangential agenda that leads them away from the party.

Keep your options open when considering how to get an NPC to leave the party and be ready to enact it if you find the NPC is overstaying their welcome.

Limit Their Utility

What the NPCs do while their with the party can also make a huge difference in how things play out. If an NPC agrees up front to stay out of combat, that makes things easier. This works best if the NPC clearly isn't much of a combatant to begin with. It's harder when you see a lizard with a holy avenger sword who's standing back while you fight ancient crocodiles by yourself. There are few reasons why a combat-focused NPC wouldn't fight but, if there's a good reason within the context of the story, that can work out. Lets pretend Jarlaxle joined the group. He has a clear reason to disappear every time things get dangerous even though he's a hell of a combatant. It's a lot less likely Drizzt would stay out of a fight, though.

Instead, we have another way we can keep them out of the way.

Make them Background Scenery

One way we can have a combat-focused NPC in a party and still not causing much trouble is to make them part of the background. If the party is facing three ogres, maybe they're actually facing four and our combat-focused NPC is taking care of the fourth. We pull these two combatants out of the actual battle and simply describe the battle taking place between them in the narrative. No dice need be thrown, no damage needs be tallied; we just make it part of the scenery going on while the main battle takes place in the foreground.

This has limits, though. This style will likely get stale if you do it over and over. This problem points back to getting them out of the party as soon as you can so it doesn't get that stale.

Let Players Run Them

In the case of an NPC who isn't seriously outclassing the rest of the party, let one of the players—maybe the player with the simplest character—run the NPC. You can give them a copy of the stat block, maybe taking a picture of it with their phone, and let them run the NPC on their same initiative. This is usually quick since monster stat blocks aren't terribly difficult.

If the NPC has a secret identity, say like Eku from Tomb of Annihilation secretly being a Couatl, you can instead give the player the stat block for the NPC they're pretending to be, say a spy or a veteran. These characters are likely to pull their punches anyway so as not to expose their true selves and that can be accounted for in the false statblock. It also keeps their power under control.

Be Aware of the Spotlight

Beyond adding extra power to the characters that might make potentially challenging situations trivial, NPCs in the party can have a tendency of pulling the spotlight away from the other characters. No one wants to watch DMs play with themselves. This can get tricky if the NPC is clearly the right person for a particular job, either because of what they know or the skills they happen to have. Why wouldn't the NPC who already knows the king be the one to negotiate for the party? This is something you'll want to noodle through before it starts to happen in your game. The spotlight should always be on the characters and tag-along NPCs should always be in the background. We might have to fudge the story a little bit to get them there but its important enough that it's worth bending the story to make it happen.

Player-Provided Tag-Along NPCs

So far we've been talking about NPCs in the adventure who, through the purposes of the story, end up tagging along with the group. Sometimes, however, players will bring their own tag-along NPCs as part of their characters. Maybe they hired a hireling or maybe they summoned a pet. Maybe they have their own simulacrum walking around with them or some sort of intelligent pet. This is a slightly different situation because you can't simply route the NPC out of the group. If a character's NPC starts to hog too much of the spotlight, it might be worth having an out-of-game conversation with the player to determine how you can ensure their NPC isn't stealing the joy from the rest of the table. Mabye that shield guardian of theirs wanders off unexpectedly. Maybe that hireling quits. Maybe the simulacrum goes back to protect the characters' airship.

Other times these player-provided tag-along NPCs aren't that much of a problem. You can always account for them when determining the challenge of a fight if a challenge is what you seek by adding one or two monsters to balance them out. They also often make juicy targets.

One nice house rule you might incorporate is the rule of mutually-assured destruction for tag-along NPCs. This works well for delicate pets and familiars. If a character's NPC doesn't come out in a fight, you won't target them; even with area of effect spells. This helps them keep their delicate NPCs without worrying about them getting killed in every fireball that happens to target the party.

Just Say No

Many of these problems and potential solutions go away if, when you have the chance, you simply forgo having tag-along NPCs at all. If an adventure calls for an NPC to follow the party, consider whether it really needs to happen and, if it does, how they will exit out again. Be particularly careful with high power NPCs like Artus Cimber, Dragonbait, and Harshnag. They can completely unbalance an adventure if they stick around too much.

The easiest thing is to simply avoid such NPCs. That's what us lazy dungeon masters do.

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Note: This article has been updated since its original version published in November 2012.

Published in 1983, the classic D&D adventure I6 Ravenloft, was ranked in 2004 by Dungeon magazine as the second greatest adventure of all time. Five years before its publication, Tracy and Laura Hickman ran the classic D&D module every Halloween. Ravenloft contains one of the best open-ended randomly determined adventures produced for Dungeons & Dragons and it's perfect for a Halloween one-shot game.

With the release of Curse of Strahd, we have a fully updated 5th edition D&D version of Ravenloft. Though intended for a long campaign, we're going to strip Curse of Strahd down to a single five-hour game for 8th level characters perfect for us to run on or around Halloween every year.

Let's take a look at how to run Curse of Strahd in a single session Halloween-themed adventure.

The Party's Goals

We'll start by stripping down the goals of this adventure to one single goal: Kill Strahd. Expanding this a bit, we're killing Strahd to prevent him from enthralling Ireena Kolyana and making her his dark bride.

To help them kill Strahd, the characters must seek out three powerful artifacts hidden within the castle. These three artifacts include the Sun Sword, the Icon of Ravenloft, and the Tome of Strahd.

You'll notice that we replaced the Holy Symbol of Ravenkind with the Icon of Ravenloft because the Icon's abilities better fit with the theme of the game. A paralyzed Strahd isn't much fun. That means the Icon of Ravenloft does not sit on the altar in room K15. We can replace this with a large bowl of clear water suitable to restore the vitality of the party once, giving them the equivalent of a short or long rest depending on how hard a time the characters are having.

We're also going to add a trait the Tome of Strahd that helps streamline this adventure. If Strahd is defeated, the Tome of Strahd can be burned to destroy him within his coffin regardless of where the characters are when they set it ablaze. In truth, this is the only item the characters actually need assuming they can defeat Strahd without the Sun Sword or the Icon.

Ireena

Ireena accompanies the group into Ravenloft. She isn't putting up with his stalkerish ways and is taking the fight right to him. Ireena is a veteran and can be controlled by a volunteer player who is already running a simple character.

Alternatively one of the players can play Ireena. She is human but otherwise can be any class the players choose and is the same level as the rest of the party.

Ravenloft Character Bonds

We're going to keep the bonds between characters very simple. Instead of a whole slew of interconnecting bonds, every character has the following bond for this one-shot adventure:

By blood or by deed you and your companions are sworn to aid and protect Ireena from the devil Strahd.

Now every character has a built-in motivation to group together, go to Ravenloft with Ireena, and destroy the vampire once and for all.

Intro: The Carriage Ride to Ravenoft and the Drawing

When the characters begin the adventure, read or summarize the following:

The ornate black carriage roars along the narrow winding road that leads to Castle Ravenloft. As you peer out one window, you watch rocks from the road fall one thousand feet to the river below. Looking ahead you see the carriage master, his cowled face turned your way and staring at you with invisible eyes shrouded under his tattered leather tricorn hat. Reaching back impossibly far with an arm too long for his body, he gently pushes you back into the carriage and locks the door.

A raspy laughter rattles the glyphed coins that make up Madame Eva's veil. Sitting across from you, she draws an ancient worn deck of cards from her colored robes and begins to place them on the small table in the center of the inside of the carriage.

We will be using the simplified fortune drawing described in James Introcaso's Guide to Running Curse of Strahd as a one-shot adventure with one minor exception: we're going to skip the ally and just stick to the three artifacts and Strahd's location. Remove all but the following cards from the common cards in the Tarokka deck:

• Paladin (2 of Swords/Spades)
• Mercenary (4 of Swords/Spades)
• Berserker (6 of Swords/Spades)
• Dictator (8 of Swords/Spades)
• Warrior (Master of Swords/10 of Spades)
• Transmuter (1 of Stars/Ace of Clubs)
• Evoker (6 of Stars/Clubs)
• Necromancer (8 of Stars/Clubs)
• Swashbuckler (1 of Coins/Ace of Diamonds)
• Merchant (4 of Coins/Diamonds)
• Guild Member (5 of Coins/Diamonds)
• Miser (9 of Coins/Diamonds)
• Shepherd (4 of Glyphs/Hearts)
• Anarchist (6 of Glyphs/Hearts)
• Priest (Master of Glyphs/10 of Hearts)

Ireena places out four cards, three from the common deck (one for each artifact) and one from the high deck which represents Strahd's location. With those cards placed, the adventure is ready to begin.

Strahd's Invitation

The characters arrive at Castle Ravenloft under the invitation of Strahd as described in the book. Instead of an illusion of Strahd playing the grand organ, it is Strahd himself. As they dine, Strahd lays out the rules of his "game" which, in short is the following:

"Defeat me and you save Ireena. Perish and she is mine."

In his unfathomable cruelty he asks Ireena a simple question:

"Give yourself to me now, my love, and you can save their lives."

Ireena looks to the party for guidance. If she appears as though she will give herself to Strahd, he turns to them and asks:

"and you would allow this?".

Should they choose to hand her over, Strahd looks very disappointed.

"They are obviously not worth your affection. Let them rot in this castle. Let you walk with them and see the results of their cowardice first hand."

Strahd then departs from the dinner as the room grows cold.

Should the characters decide to confront Strahd there and then, Strahd is accompanied by two vampire spawns and has an additional spawn for every character above four. They're not likely to survive.

Recover the Three Artifacts Before Facing Strahd

The party must find all three artifacts before facing Strahd. 45 minutes before the end of the game, Strahd attacks the characters wherever they are and with whatever they have. If the party does not have the Tome of Strahd, they cannot defeat the vampire. Depending on how difficult you want the fight, he might come with his three brides, each a vampire spawn. One of these vampire brides has the casting capabilities of a mage. One has the fighting capabilities of a veteran, and one has the capabilities of an assassin without the poison.

Strahd's Interjections

Throughout the session, Strahd might decide to jump into a situation to harass the party if they have been having too easy a time. Strahd will arrive in his hybrid bat form or his hybrid wolf form, poke at the party, and then leave. Each time Strahd arrives, his entrance is foreshadowed by his children of the night.

Facing Strahd von Zarovich

45 minute before the end of the game, Strahd arrives and unleashes his full power. Take a few minutes to read Strahd's full entry in the book before the game to remember all of his intricacies.

If we want to run Strahd on "hard mode" if the characters have been having too easy a time of it, we can use our "nastier specials" from our Running Strahd article. This includes the following:

Use the following changes to increase Strahd's difficulty:

• 200 hit points
• 19 AC (mage armor from a scroll)
• Unarmed strike does 11 (2d10) bludgeoning and 21 (6d6) necrotic damage.
• Bite does 9 (2d8) piercing and 14 (4d6) necrotic.
• Switch out the following spells: shield instead of comprehend languages, counterspell instead of nondetection, lightning bolt instead of fireball, and dispel magic instead of nondetection.
• Add Beguiling Gaze.

Beguiling Gaze. As a bonus action, the vampire fixes its gaze on a creature it can see within 30 feet of it. If the target can see the vampire, the target must succeed on a DC 17 Wisdom saving throw or the vampire has advantage on attack rolls against the target. The effect lasts until the target takes damage or until the start of the vampires next turn. For that time, the affected creature is also a willing target for the vampires bite attack. A creature that cant be charmed is immune to this effect. A creature that successfully saves against the vampires gaze is immune to it for 1 hour.

A Halloween Tradition

With Curse of Strahd in hand and our streamlined plans in place, we can make Castle Ravenloft our very own Halloween tradition. Give it a try!

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