by W. Eric Martin

Millions of people in the United States enjoyed seeing a full eclipse in early April 2024, but should you have missed out on that event, you can still get a glimpse of the moon on your gaming table...as well as in the sky nearly every evening, of course, but also on your gaming table!

• Pauline Kong and Marie Wong of Hot Banana Games debuted in 2023 with Steam Up: A Feast of Dim Sum, which landed on Barnes & Noble's as that bookstore chain's "game of the year", and for their second release they're asking you to leave the restaurant to put together a concoction in a far different environment.


Here's an overview of Moon Bunny, a 1-4 player game that will be crowdfunded in 2024:

In Moon Bunny, you take on the role of a master bunny alchemist inspired by folklore. Your task is to guide your bunny assistants on a journey through the lunar landscape to gather rare Asian herbs. Each assistant has their own unique hopping movement pattern, and it is up to you to choose the right ones for the task at hand. Once you have collected the necessary ingredients, bring them back to your workshop and arrange them in a specific pattern to brew the ultimate elixir of life. The bunny who is able to gift this elixir to the world, bringing health and happiness to all, wins the game.

Pauline Kong presents a mock-up of Moon Bunny at GAMA Expo 2024
• German publisher SPIEL DAS! Verlag has announced Monsters on the Moon, a new title for 1-4 players from designer Martin Schlegel due out in July 2024, but little information has been revealed to date:

A witch, a skeleton, a vampire, and a werewolf have taken a trip to the Moon, and now they want to make it their own.

Monsters on the Moon is a card-placement game in which every creature wants to expand their territory, collect moon crystals, and build walls, ideally spreading out over the surface in their quest for points.

• In 2023, Japanese publisher JUGAME STUDIO released Escape from the Moon, a solitaire game from Hiroshi Kawamura:

You were part of a crew working on a moon base, but the other crew members were involved in a mysterious accident during an exploration mission, leaving you alone on the base. The mother ship is in a satellite orbit of the moon. You're completely isolated, alone — when a warning sound rings throughout the base: "There is not much oxygen left. The cause is unknown. Get out of the moon base quickly. To repeat, there's not much oxygen left."

Since the emergency power supply has been activated, it seems that most of the base functions are down due to electrical problems, which means soon the base won't be able to supply you oxygen, let alone communicate an SOS to whoever might be monitoring you.

There is not much time left for activities. Can you restore the rocket in time and return to the mother ship? The challenge to Escape from the Moon begins, with you constructing a deck and managing a hand of possible actions to get yourself to safety, with success or failure depending on the decisions you make and the difficulty of your chosen scenario.

Spanish publisher Salt & Pepper Games has announced that it will crowdfund a Spanish-language edition of Escape from the Moon in Q2 2024, with an English-language edition coming in late 2024 or early 2025.

• As noted in January 2024, Rio Grande Games has a game coming from Donald X. Vaccarino titled Moon Colony Bloodbath, but no info has been released about this design.

• Finally, Hachette Boardgames has announced a June 2024 release date in North America for From the Moon, a design from Johannes Goupy and Gilles Lasfargues that publisher La Boîte de Jeu crowdfunded in March 2023.


Here's an overview of this 1-4 player game:

In From the Moon, players are representatives of factions trying to complete missions departing from our Moon in order to help humankind survive elsewhere in the galaxy. Indeed, the fate of the Earth is sealed, and time is running out!

The plan is to launch three survival missions before all life on Earth ends. To do that, each faction will contribute by building parts of the ships and build their own lunar base to store the necessary resources.

In the end, which faction will be most suited to lead the future of our race out there, far away in space?

Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

German publisher Lookout Games releases a wide range of games, so while its catalog features a few recurring factors — Uwe Rosenberg, Klemens Franz, Patchwork — it can surprise you as well.

The newest title announced from Lookout Games — TREOS from first-time designer Arne aus dem Siepen — sounds like a light adventure game, with players questing across a tiny, variable map in search of gold. Here's the setting:

On a stormy night, rumor spreads about a luck potion that one can buy for twenty gold coins on the black market in Treos. As your run of bad luck has been going on for a while, you decide to take your chances. The realm is vast, its forests dark, and the roads dangerous. But courier runs pay richly, so you dare to venture outside the protective walls of your city...

The land of Treos features towns, forts, inns, lakes, secret places, and highwaymen, with roads, trails, and rivers connecting various locations. Each player is a character with a unique power who starts with a personal quest and a deck of movement cards.

Each day, players draw five movement cards from their deck, then choose four to place on their player board, placing the final card on the top of their deck or discard pile; they then place their three intrigue markers face down on the final three cards. Everyone reveals their first card to determine player order for the day, then players go through morning, midday, and evening phases, with each of them revealing the card in that slot to move their character. Movement cards show which paths you can move on (roads, trails, or rivers) or which directions you can move in or both, along with a number of spaces you can move.

Each of the four regions of Treos has a common quest deck with the top card revealed, and when you reach the town on your personal quest, you earn 1 gold, then take the revealed common quest from that region. Additionally, you open a second quest slot on your player board, and whenever you end movement in a town, you can draw the revealed quest in that town's region, replacing an existing quest if you wish. Quests require you to visit one or two specified towns, and when you do, you gain gold, a common movement card (which is placed on top of your deck and is better than your starting cards), or a side quest — and possibly multiple rewards.

You can share locations with others, but highwaymen block players; when you reveal each movement card, you show the intrigue marker on it — and when you reveal the marker showing a highwayman, you move one on the board using the same movement you just made, ideally blocking an opponent from being able to complete a quest.

When you reach a fort for the first time, take the weapon from that fort, then gain a reward based on how many weapons you now have and who your character is. If you're the first player to end movement at an inn, you gain 1 gold, then take a side quest, with the inn granting only side quests from then on. Side quests stay face down, and you can have multiples. Secret places earn the first player to reach them 1 gold, then grant a single bonus — either a movement card or a side quest — or create a portal; three portals start hidden on the map, and once they're face up, your character can teleport from one to another during its move.

As soon as a player has collected 20 gold, they win the game instantly.

TREOS will debut in English and German at SPIEL Essen 24 in October, and the complete rules are available now on the Lookout Games website. Read more »

by Silvano Sorrentino

This all started because of a detective game.

No, my new game NOW! is not one of my typical escape room or deduction games like Deckscape, Decktective, or Mixtery Puzzle, but a light and quick card game...so this needs a little more explanation.

One day in early 2021, I got a call from Federico Latini, who (like me and most game designers) always has a lot of half-baked ideas in his notebook. We exchanged some ideas, and knowing I am sort of an expert in the field, he told me about his idea for a detective game: a "browser chronology game" in which you keep a deck of cards in your hand and you can decide to look at the information on a card — which represents the current page of a killer's web-browser — or go back in the chronology by looking at previous cards, which represent old pages and searches.

Eventually Federico did not pursue that idea, but the "swipe a card up and lose it forever" action sounded more like a cool betting mechanism to me, so I asked him for permission to use it in a very different game.

Here is a short-ish story of developing the game from version 1.1 to the final product. I will quickly explain what was changed in the design from one version to the next, trying to underline the "good" and the "bad" things, until we reached the current form of the game that — in my eyes at least — is all "good".

VERSION 1.1

The first working version of the game was pretty simple as the game came to my mind almost fully formed after deciding how to "bet".

I used a deck from The Mind to get the betting cards, numbered from 1 to 100. From that deck, I removed all the 10s (10, 20, 30...) to use them as the ten prizes, then I added ten "TOP" cards — well, pieces of paper with "TOP" written on them — to have a total of 110 cards, a common standard for card games.

Using cards from The Mind — thank you, Mr. Warsch!
The rules were so simple that I can copy-and-paste most of them:

Shuffle the ten prize cards and form a face-down draw pile, next to the ten TOP cards.

Shuffle the offer cards (everything else) and equally distribute them between players. Take all of your offer cards and keep them in your hand, facing up, so that you can see only the value of the card on the top of your deck. Flip a prize card for this round. Look at the top offer card in your hand; this is your current offer. You can keep it or discard it in front of you in a face-up pile. You can discard as many cards as you want this way until you are satisfied with your choice and say "NOW!" When everybody has said "NOW!", show your deck to everyone so that they can see your offer. Now, see who wins cards up for grabs:

➥ If you offered the closest value to the prize card without exceeding it, take the prize card and add it to your points.

➥ If you played the highest offer, take the TOP card and all of your offer cards discarded this round, and add them to your points.

You can win both the prize and TOP card at the same time. If nobody wins the prize card, discard it from the game. Discard any remaining offer cards from the table, then start another round by flipping a new prize card.

WARNING! There is no way to get your offer cards back, so use them wisely! If you run out of them, you will not be able to change your offer for the rest of the game.

END OF THE GAME AND VICTORY

The game ends after the tenth TOP card has been awarded. Discard any remaining offer cards in your hand and count your points:

• Each offer card is worth 1 point.
• Each TOP card is worth 2 points.
• Each prize card is worth 10 points.
• Each pair of prize cards adding up to 110 is worth 10 additional points.

The player with the most points wins.

THE GOOD
:star: The "use it or lose it" swiping mechanism was very promising.
:star: In this rare case, my original prototype has the same name as the final game.

THE BAD
:nostar: The first playtest fell a little flat.
:nostar: The scoring system was a little too complicated for such simple rules.
:nostar: With only 90 offer cards, this design worked only for two or three players. Maybe with four, but having fewer than 20 cards each sounded like a big "NO!" to me.

VERSION 1.2

The first thing I did in the new version was simplify the scoring system by using visual clues. I've always loved that Bohnanza cards show a coin on the back, so I used part of that idea: All cards you can win now show one or more coins, a big coin (worth 10 points), or half a big coin (worth nothing). If you get the two cards with the two halves of the same color, you can connect them and score 10 bonus points.

The two cards on the right score a bonus when linked
I also added a four-player variant, with two teams of two players each.

Other minor tweaks were implemented, but the coins on the card already made the game a little "juicier", so I started sending the idea to a few publishers and trying the game on Tabletop Simulator. I got some encouraging answers, but the game does not shine at all if you do not play it live, and I think I just needed to find an editor who loved it to start making it better.

But in 2021 I decided to skip SPIEL, so the game went in stand-by mode while I worked on different projects.

A minimal look for the betting cards
Cut to SPIEL '22 — this time I am in Essen armed with a couple of copies of my prototype, now with its own design. I made few appointments to show the game because I chose the best publishers for this particular idea. One of them was Scorpion Masqué; I had already showed them ideas in the past, and even though we did not find the right game, it looked like we were mostly on the same page. Their games are typically a mix of simple and weird ideas, and this looked like a possible hit.

Funnily enough, Christian Lemay from Scorpion Masqué had no time to play a round of the game after I spent most of my time showing him a different design, but he was sharing the office with some unknown guys, and after hearing a quick recap of the gameplay, he told me: "I think you should show this to them", "them" meaning Joël Gagnon and Chantal Quenneville from Randolph.

I did not know at the time that the two publishers were somehow linked, but I did know Randolph — not only because I liked their games, but also because I remember researching their name and discovering that, yes, "Randolph" was an homage to Alex Randolph, one of my favorite designers, who is partly considered an Italian inventor after living around thirty years in Venice.

I played a full game with the guys from Randolph, and they really liked it, so we started exchanging emails just after the fair and they decided to make the game very quickly. We started developing the game in the direction they needed, with periodic calls between me, Joël Gagnon, and his colleague Catherine Parent. Randolph is based in Québec, so usually we talked while they were having the first sips of morning coffee and I had already had my lunch in a time zone six hours in the future.

THE GOOD
:star: For the most part, they liked the game.

THE BAD
:nostar: Randolph also features their games in gaming pubs, so they'd really love for the design to allow up to eight players — but how can the game work with so many players without adding too many cards?
:nostar: During playtests, they noticed some players decide to stall when they have a high card because this will make them win a lot of TOP cards. Even though this is not a viable tactic since TOP cards are not that valuable, this needs to be fixed because not discarding means no fun at all.

VERSION 2.0

First, good news! Thanks to Randolph's production standards, I was not limited to the usual 110 cards. Actually, I can use up to 168 cards. Great! Maybe there is a way to make this work for eight players after all. I decided to test using numbers 1 to 120 for the betting cards, then I added 14 prize cards (numbered 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 100, 110, 33, 66, 99) and 14 limit cards (7 "higher", 7 "lower"). The idea is that the rules remain the same, but you win a "higher" or "lower" card if your offer is, respectively, the highest or the lowest, so now you won't stick with a high card because sometimes you want to bet a low number.

Prize, higher, and lower cards
Second, I decided to add more variety in the set collection by giving both a value and a symbol on the cards you can collect. If you have two cards with the same symbol, they will provide you with 10 extra points.

Not final art, luckily!
THE GOOD
:star: This was a major upgrade as now each card is worth different amounts to each player, and you have to make sure you collect the best cards for you. Swiping your bet is now much more thrilling because you can risk losing that particular card that maybe scores 18 points at once for you.

THE BAD
:nostar: It is a little confusing now to check who wins what, and people sometimes lose the focus on their long-term objective — collecting the right symbols — because it's always useful to win whichever cards you can, right?
:nostar: Some cards are definitely better than others because they both have a high value and let you score the 10 extra points if you collect a set. This sounds unfair.

VERSION 2.1

Just a little change: Now the value of a card is no longer related to its symbol. Also, the scale of values now goes from 4 to 12 instead of 1 to 9, so prizes are a little more fair because the worst card you can get is worth one-third of the best one, not one-ninth.

THE GOOD
:star: Set collection is a little more interesting now.

THE BAD
:nostar: Adding the points is a little boring if you play with two or three players and have a lot of card values and bonuses to sum.
:nostar: This still needs something to make it more fun.

VERSION 2.2

The "half coins" are back. Also, to spice things up a bit and give importance to both low and high cards, I combined the prize and limit cards into a single type of goal card. Each goal card shows whether you win it by playing the closest card that's higher or lower and shows you coins and half coins that you can complete with set collection.

When in doubt, add penguins and robots
This version also introduces the "jackpot" rule, which means that in each round you just add three more goal cards instead of replacing any unclaimed ones, so some rounds can have more than three goal cards up for grabs.

THE GOOD
:star: It's very easy to sum your points now: just count your coins.
:star: The "jackpot" rule works pretty well and adds variety to some rounds.

THE BAD
:nostar: The two different directions of betting make the game confusing. This needs an "undo"!
:nostar: The game now works for 2 to 8 players, but there is a major issue: with two players, you start with sixty bet cards in hand, while with eight players you have only fifteen. According to Randolph, it would be much better to have the same number of starting bet cards regardless of the number of players, but this would mean you always play with just fifteen cards, and that sounded like a big "no no" for me.

FAST FORWARD TO...

Okay, you have better things to do with your time, so I will skip the results of the playtests of several new versions, including ideas like:

• Having "walls" on the right of some cards so sometimes you cannot win twice in a row.
• Automatically refilling if you use all your bet cards and voluntarily lose the next round.
• Playing with fifteen cards and exchanging your deck with your neighbor for round 2.

Nothing seemed to be perfect. Was it wasted time? Not at all! Now that we tried adding stuff, it was finally time to remove what was not working and try to come up with clever solutions — and I say "clever" because some of these solutions came from brainstorming on the Randolph team side together with Scorpion Masqué, not from me, so kudos to them! (In the final phase, both studios really liked the game, so we decided to join forces to make the game as good as possible — yes, I am so lucky!)

NOW!

You can find the final French rules or English rules here on BGG. These are short, so please have a look and come back. I will comment on the biggest changes from the previous prototypes to underline how each little issue was solved while still keeping most of the original rules.

Looking good!
"Each player takes one of the eight colored decks of 16 player cards, shuffles it, and places it face down in front of them."

This brilliant idea from Randolph upgrades a lot of things at once:
:star: Set-up is easy — choose a color and take your 16 cards, without even counting them.
:star: Thanks to the power of math, the decks are balanced:

"Each deck in NOW! is unique and has been carefully balanced to ensure that all players have an equal chance of success. All decks have four cards that correspond exactly to a target card. This type of card is called a 'perfect'. Also, the decks have an equal distribution of numbers from 1 to 128."

:star: I admit it took a while to convince me that this was a good idea, but playtesters confirmed it is. Each time you swipe up you get a big jump from one bet to another, and each deck has an equal chance to win any bet, so there is still luck involved — of course! — but it's under control.
:star: As a bonus, you can decide to shuffle all the cards together and have each player draw sixteen off the top if you want to test the original version of the game and embrace the chaos.

Remember the big "no no" from me when Randolph suggested the idea of having only fifteen cards for each player? Did I change my mind for a single card more, sixteen instead of fifteen? No, I changed my mind because during set-up you now:

"Shuffle the deck of target cards and slide the refresh card into the approximate middle of the deck... When the refresh card is drawn from the target deck, the game is immediately paused. All players now shuffle their discarded player cards back into their deck."

This brings a lot of good things to the table:
:star: You have 16 cards in theory, but it's like having up to 32 because they get reshuffled at some point. As a result, you have roughly the same number of options you had in the original three-player game (30 cards each), while the game is now works for up to eight players.
:star: During their first game, some players swiped too many cards and got stuck with a single card for the final rounds. They got too greedy, yes, but it's not ideal to tell someone "You are playing this wrong; read these tactical hints for your first games." Now, even if you consume all of your cards, you will get them back at halftime. You have learned your lesson, and you still have a chance to win when you get your cards back for the second half — and from now on you will remember that each card is precious!
:star: When you reach the refresh card, you do not need to keep track of any partial score. The second half of the game will continue, and you will keep betting for more cards.

Okay, but how does the final scoring work now?

"The red or blue lines at the top of the target cards are points. For target cards of both colors, choose only one color — red or blue — to score. Take the higher total of the two colors, then subtract the total of the other color from this number to get your final score."

That's nice because:
:star: It's a simple set-collection rule: Win cards of the same color.
:star: This introduces a nice layer of complexity because in later round sometimes you want to lose a bet because you don't want to get those 5 blue points when you've been collecting red! Also, the other players can now try to guess which card you want most and play accordingly.
:star: There are two cards for each deck that you can win with a "perfect" bet – for example getting a 120 with card #120. These cards act like jokers, and you can make them count as red points or blue points — but is it worth it to go through your deck to try to win them at the right moment, or will you lose too many betting cards? And what if I say you also win the points on the refresh card if you land a "perfect"?
:star: Didn't I mention it's tedious to calculate sums and differences for the final score? Yes, but here is another nice touch: You can overlap your cards in the end and count the half-lines without having to do any math. Look at the example below. See the two blue half-lines at the bottom? That's your score: 2 points.

Scoring example
As you can see, the rules are much simpler than they were before, so we even added a bot for the two-player variant, a bot named Silvano after me, but I was not the one who chose the name. If I had, I would have called it...Randolph because I really loved working with them. They are very clever, and most of them are also game designers, so it's like working with co-authors and not "just" editors.

I also really like their choice for the design of the cards and box; everything looks clean, modern, and dynamic. Credit is due here to Fanny Saulnier, who was in charge of the graphic design team, as directed by the amazing art director at Scorpion Masqué, Sébastien Bizos, and of course Manuel Sanchez, the studio director.

The game was released on April 10, 2024, co-published by Scorpion Masqué and Randolph, so start looking for it...NOW!

Silvano Sorrentino

Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

We're only one-third of the way through 2024, but U.S. publisher 25th Century Games has already announced a quartet of releases for 2025 that will be crowdfunded before 2024 reaches the halfway mark. In February 2025, I covered the 1-8 player auction game Wine Cellar, from Andrew Stiles, and here's what else is on the 2025th agenda:


• Grand Central Skyport is a 2-4 player game from Dan Germain in which you want to efficiently operate your airship station and attract the most prestigious tycoons to your city. During the game, you attract new airships to your skyport, and each airship has a color and an initial slotting movement. Try to maneuver your airships to group them by color so that they stack to score increasingly more points. Unfortunately, with each new ship entering your station, its movement will trigger the rearranging of previously placed airships, so ideally you can race other skyport owners around a central rondel to choose the incoming airships that are best for you.

Prototype components
Drafting tycoons to your skyport will bring unique advantages in manipulating your docked airships, as well as additional scoring opportunities at the end of the game.

• Sand Art is a 2-4 player game from first-time designer Kory Jordan, who will debut three other games in 2025 through new publisher Gospel Games.

Mock-up front cover
Sand Art is a "move & fill" game that carries the spirit of "roll & write" games.

During play, you move back and forth along a linear track of actions on the workbench, gathering different colors of sand in your supply, mixing primary colors of sand into new secondary colors, and pouring them into bottles to create patterns and images that will attract customers in your shop. Creating the most unique and visually pleasing bottles will earn you the most points.

Mock-up back cover
I look forward to 25th Century Games releasing a deluxe version of this design so that players can get the full Sand Art experience of sorting all the grains of sand back into their proper baggies once the game is over.

• Big Sur is a 2-4 player card game from Mondo Davis that will have you cruising along California's State Route 1 on the Big Sur Coast Highway to check out the views and landmarks along the most scenic driving route in the world — or rather, inviting others to cruise on the highway that you build over the course of play.


During the game, players draft cards to use them either as resources to build new road sections or as the road sections themselves. Your linear path of cards will score for connecting terrain types and meeting other conditions. You can also add notable landmarks to your highway for other unique scoring conditions; these landmarks are based on scenic lookouts and locations on the real Big Sur.

• 25th Century Games is releasing more than a dozen games in 2024, including five licensed titles from Korean publisher Playte that will be available at Gen Con 2024:

— Circus Flohcati and Penguin Party, by Reiner Knizia
— Vampire Queen, by Wolfgang Kramer
— Jalape-NO!, by Kramer and Michael Kiesling
— Tasso Banana, by Philippe Proux and Junghee Choi


• One final(?) 2024 title from 25th Century is Iron Horse, a 1-4 player co-operative, press-your-luck, dice-rolling game from Henry Audubon:

A diverse team of outlaws have assembled for the gold heist of the century. Leveraging your unique skills and abilities, send your gang out into the territories to complete side objectives to help your efforts and fight off the Sheriff and Deputy as you try to steal gold from the train. You must act quickly, though! When the train reaches its final destination, your time to steal the gold is over, and you'll fail your mission.

Iron horse, not Iron Horse (Image by BullDawg2021 on Wikipedia — own work, CC BY 4.0)
Iron Horse features six unique characters with their own special abilities and unlockable upgrades.

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by Fabrice Puleo

Hello, I'm Fabrice Puleo, designer of Linx, which French publisher Matagot released in late 2023.

As a "new" game designer, I wanted to share my experience with you and also tell you about all the stages in the development of this game. In this article, I'll try to describe the path I took to get to the final version of Linx. I'm happy to share my adventure with you and hope you enjoy reading this diary!

October 2022: Chifoupion!

As always, in the car on the way to work I'm looking for new game ideas. That day, I set myself the goal of making a game that could easily be found on a supermarket shelf — that is, just by looking at the box, whether you're a player or not, you should already know the rules.

I admit it's a strange challenge, but it's probably due to my self-publishing experience. Without a distributor, I had to go straight to stores, and I realized that given the volume of games produced every year, you have to keep your explanations as simple as possible — so why not mix two popular games: rock/paper/scissors and tic-tac-toe! (In French, chifoumi + morpion)

I quickly came up with the rules. That same evening, I made a rudimentary prototype on a sheet of paper. With my faithful tester — my twelve-year-old son — we played a series of games, and it worked. It's a real treat and seems so obvious that I spend hours on the Internet checking to see whether this game already exists. Indeed, other authors have mixed these two classics, but none have used the same material and, more importantly, the same game mechanisms. With only 18 tiles and a 3x3 grid, the game is playable and already has depth. I have my daughter and my wife test it, and they both approve.

The next weekend, I make a first prototype for testing with friends, the author's collective, and at local festivals.


Then, I wrote the rules:

Goal
Line up three tiles of the same color.

Game flow
Each player is assigned a color and has nine tiles: three each of leaves, stones, and scissors. To determine who goes first, the two players play a chifoumi with their hands. Starting with the chifoumi winner, each player in turn fills a square of the grid with a tile of their color: blue or yellow. A player can cover a tile already placed according to these rules:

• Stone covers scissors.
• Leaf covers stone.
• Scissors cover leaf.
• A maximum of two tiles can be played in a square.
• A player can cover their own tile, but they cannot cover all three squares in the same row.

End of game
If a player creates a horizontal, vertical, or diagonal line of three tiles in their color and the opponent cannot disrupt this line on their turn, the first player wins the round. (Ties are possible in a round.) The first player to win two rounds wins the duel.

December 2022

After extensive testing with no major changes to the rules, "Chifoupion" is ready to be shown to publishers. To do this, we need to make a video. During filming, I call on my hand model, and guess who it is? My son again. At the beginning of December, I send the "Chifoupion" presentation (rules + video links) by e-mail to a few publishers.

After three days, I receive an e-mail from a publisher (a fairly major one on the European market) expressing interest in my project and requesting a prototype by post. At this stage, I believe in my chances, but I remain cautious. To present the game as best as possible, I ask one of my friends who has a laser engraver to make me a nice wooden prototype.


February 2023: FIJ in Cannes

This is my first time at Festival International des Jeux: FIJ, the biggest board game convention in France, which takes place each year in February. I'm going alone for two days with a few prototypes, including "Chifoupion". I've made appointments with two publishers and am impressed by the venue. It's huge, and there are a lot of people. The gaming world is doing well!

On the first day, I met with the publisher who had asked in December for a copy of "Chifoupion". Disappointingly, he didn't take it. I can't say why, I can't remember.

And then, providence! I bumped into a friend at the festival who advised me to present "Chifoupion" to Matagot. The publisher is distributing microgames (a.k.a., wallet games), and my 18-card deck fits that range. I listen to my friend and head for the stand to try my luck. I play a game without the board with a Matagot staff member, and they find it interesting.

The next morning, I have an appointment with Matagot's management at their professional premises. I meet Arnaud Charpentier, who tells me he's in a hurry and has other appointments, and that he's willing to test my prototype, but quickly. We isolate ourselves in another room and play "Chifoupion" for ten minutes. At the end of the session, he scratches his head, thinks about it, then shakes my hand and congratulates me. He takes my business card and prototype and tells me he'll get back to me in the next few days to sign the contract, then he disappears. That short interview was a little surreal, but super effective!

At this stage I almost don't believe it, but the next day,Sunday morning, I receive an e-mail from the publisher confirming that the contract will be signed next week. It's crazy, but it's true!

March 2023: Matagot Makes It Multiplayer

At the signing of the contract, Arnaud informs me that "Chifoupion" will change its name and that the prototype has potential for another format, especially multiplayer. In fact, from the first week in-house, they've been running tests with four players with the same mechanisms — and it works.

A 5x5 virtual board
Arnaud is my main contact, and we talk regularly by phone and e-mail about how the project is progressing. I can feel his commitment to the project. I wasn't used to having so much support — a real collaboration, which is a change from self-publishing.

"Chifoupion" undergoes a metamorphosis. A new prototype was born, with more visible illustration. Symbols have been added — cross for scissors, circle for stones and square for paper — and in each corner of the tiles, the symbol is repeated to make the cards easier to read.


April 2023 to May 2024: Linx Development

Over ten days in April 2023, a huge amount of editing work was done on the rules, including two main changes:

• Each player starts with a set number of tiles in hand and draws two tiles whenever they place a tile face up; when you cover a tile, you place your tile face down and draw nothing.
• Victory now occurs when a player has three tiles aligned in a row either all face up or all face down.

These new rules may seem insignificant, but after hundreds of games, I can guarantee that they change everything. Linx is born, a multiplayer "Chifoupion" with more flavors!

In the meantime, the excellent illustrator Anthony Questel integrates the face up/face down distinction into the illustration. All players now have a symbol associated with their colored tiles instead of only a color, which is a clever move as the game is now suitable for colorblind players. As time goes by, we fine-tune the rules, the illustration, the box design, and the acknowledgements.

In May 2023, I receive a print-to-play copy of the final tiles. I play until my son overdoses on Linx. The first production copy is received in June, and I can't describe how proud I am to see the final object, to hold it.


The first boxes arrive in October 2023, and to mark the occasion, Matagot decides to hold its first exclusive sale at OctoGônes, a festival in Lyon. I couldn't miss it! Accompanied by two friends — Fabien, maker of the pretty wooden "Chifoupion" proto, and Maxime, who initiated contact with Matagot in Cannes — we drove for four hours, but I guarantee we weren't disappointed. The public was out in force, and the signing sessions were enjoyable. We sold out, and the icing on the cake was that I got my author copies.


The festival was good for morale! Even if you're convinced you've made a great game, there's always doubt, so it's reassuring to witness the enthusiasm of the players.

At the show, Arnaud informs me of the game's release date: May 3, 2024. I know it's a long time away, but it's a blessing in disguise as I've got something to look forward to. The publisher is continuing its sales drive, and Linx has attracted interest in Canada, Australia, Spain, and germany, with a digital version under development on Board Game Arena.

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by W. Eric Martin

• In April 2024, CRC Press published Michael James Heron's Tabletop Game Accessibility: Meeple Centred Design. Here's an overview of the book from the publisher:

This foundational resource on the topic of tabletop game accessibility provides actionable guidelines on how to make games accessible for people with disabilities. This book contextualises this practical guidance within a philosophical framework of how the relatively abled can ethically address accessibility issues within game design.

This book helps readers to build understanding and empathy across the various categories of accessibility. Chapters on each category introduce ‘the science’, outline the game mechanics and games that show exemplar problems, relate these to the real-world situations that every player may encounter, and then discuss how to create maximally accessible games with reference to the accessibility guidelines and specific games that show ‘best-in-class’ examples of solutions.

This book will be of great interest to all professional tabletop and board game designers as well as digital game designers and designers of other physical products.

• Voting is open for the 2024 Deutscher Spiele Preis on the SPIEL Essen website. You can vote for up to five games, with your top-ranked game receiving 5 points, your second game 4 points, and so on. You can vote for a single children's game. The page includes lists of eligible games, and the deadline for voting is July 31, 2024.

• Korea Boardgames has released Puerto Rico 1897 in Korean, and to publicize how this edition of the game differs from earlier ones, it translated (with permission) my 2022 article about that topic. After far too long, corrected editions of Puerto Rico 1897 finally seem available in English as well.

• In The New Yorker, Ethan Kuperberg suggests "Board Games for Liberals". One example:

Four-Dimensional Chess

When you checkmate your opponent’s king, start the timer—if they can explain to everyone within earshot that they actually lost on purpose, their king will regain control of the narrative, and take control of the board.

• The non-profit organization Mississippi Coast Crime Stoppers has issued 2,500 playing card decks that "feature people whose murders or disappearances have been unsolved for years", as Rebecca Carballo explains in The New York Times.


• Yu-Gi-Oh! Championship Series Japan TOKYO 2024 took place on April 28-29, 2024, coinciding with Tokyo Game Market on April 27-28, and that event set a record for "the most entrants in a trading card game tournament" with 7,443 participants, as recognized by Guinness World Records. In the end, Yutaro Takahashi was named champion of the event.


• Alexander Pfister is designing a digital deck-building game called Demon Loop that will be released by Magnolia Games.


• Gamers of a certain age might remember when Atari was the be-all and end-all of excitement. To tickle nostalgia for that time, Atari has created Atari Club, "a unique platform designed to celebrate the Atari legacy and shape its future. It's more than just a club; it's a community where your voice matters, your passion is rewarded, and your gaming experience is elevated."

Along those lines, through May 5, 2024 Atari Club is allowing members to vote on various aspects of a Centipede-themed card game: "As part of the 'Club Made' initiative, Atari Club members take the reins in shaping key aspects of the upcoming card game. Community votes will decide the three main elements of the game: the title, the visual style, and the core game mechanic."

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by Asger Sams Granerud

Daniel and I sat down with Days of Wonder to discuss expansions before Heat: Pedal to the Metal was even released — not because we knew that game would be the runaway hit of 2023, simply because we hoped it would have a dedicated audience, as one always hopes. It is safe to say that the reaction and support of gamers worldwide has outstripped our wildest imagination. I think the community has already made in excess of forty fan-made tracks, tons of more advanced legend variants, and several drafting variants for upgrade cards. Truly mind blowing for both of us!

Now the massive success also made it apparent that there were lots of mixed expectations for this expansion, pulling it in all sorts of different directions. Way before it was released, people posted several threads on BGG of what they wanted more of, what would be the first new car color, etc. Being met with high expectations like this is, of course, a good problem to have, but from this we always knew we would end up disappointing some of you. Fans have had a lot of "complaints" about different aspects of Heat: Heavy Rain, which debuted in late April 2024, and I will try to address some of the bigger ones.

Our design process is generally one in which we initially "overdesign", then subsequently chip away at those ideas, finding and honing the very best of them. This had already happened for the base game of Heat, and a lot of those ideas ended up being added to the core box. In many ways, you could argue that the Heat box already comes with 3-4 expansions included.

The first piece of "fan art", courtesy of Daniel's son
Whatever is "best" is then determined by which kind of product we want to make, and one of the biggest deciders of whether an idea ends up being in or out is the complexity level we choose to design towards. Especially for the first launch of a new product, where we also hope we can hit a wider audience, accessibility more often than not becomes our focus. This process leaves us with lots of ideas that almost made it, ideas that are relatively easy to develop into expansions.

Planning Ahead

Soon after release, we saw Heat was sold out everywhere and getting favorable reviews from the vast majority of users and media. Now a year-and-a-half after release, it still manages to sell out before restocks can arrive. All of this success allowed us to dream of several expansions, possibly stretching many years into the future, but that also posed a challenge to us.

It still blows my mind that Heat keeps selling out again and again.Thank you, everyone, for your support!
We had to find some kind of strategic approach to avoid invalidating our initial ideas by subsequent developments. In order to do this, we interviewed retail staff and distributors as we believe that for the long-term growth of any game, we had to take these partners' considerations into account. Once the BGG hype dies down, we think that Friendly Local Game Stores will be key to the game's long-term success — and that long-term success is key to whether we will be able to keep making more and more content for the game. We didn't interview them about Heat directly; instead we asked them two questions related to expansions:

1) Which games have the most frustrating expansions to handle?
2) Which are the easiest to handle?

First, the box sizes ended up being a central point. All shops have shelving, but all shops also organize their shelving slightly differently based on the layout of the store. Some frustrating examples highlighted to us were expansions stored in different locations across the store because they were made in so many different formats. This impacts the presence a game has in any given store as instead of the game being in one easy section to point to with lots of choices, it would be spread thinly across many independent sections and risk blending in everywhere.

A second point raised was straight-up confusion from navigating the vast amount of expansions some games have. Unless every single retail staffer was a huge fan of exactly that game, then the shop might stock the expansions, but the staff wouldn't be able to competently guide the customers in their purchasing decisions.

We learned some other points as well, but they pointed in less uniform directions. The one exception was that everyone agreed we should avoid making a big expansion that would end up costing €40+. This might work for dedicated gamers, but would be a barrier in the shop for walk-in customers.

Working on new tracks re-energized after a successful launch at SPIEL '22
Convincing Days of Wonder of our Vision

Armed with this unscientific and anecdotal data, we took on Days of Wonder, trying to convince them we should make a long-term strategy for the release of expansions. The team at Days of Wonder are great folks and have always tried to listen to our wishes as designers, but asking for "many" expansions well before we know how the first one would be received is obviously difficult. Friends in the industry have even called us "crazy" because the presumed logic in the industry is that the first expansion will sell at best half of the base game, with each subsequent expansion selling half of the previous one, resulting in continuously decreasing returns.

In advance of and at the annual Festival International des Jeux in Cannes 2023, we therefore made it a strong priority to make the DoW team experience what we had been telling them all along: that the game functions perfectly well with up to twelve players. Obviously the meta changes, and just as the different tracks impact the relative value of different upgrade cards, so does the number of cars on the track. There was a bit of back and forth, but it wasn't hard to get them on board with the vision we presented.

Testing twelve-car races at FIJ in early 2023
We wanted to make a box size that would fit naturally on the shelves next to the base game to accommodate the retailers' wishes. We wanted to make a series of expansions that would be easy for retail staff to get their head around once they had understood one of them. We wanted to make an accessible expansion that would still be relevant and interesting for a more casual audience. We wanted to make these expansions independent from each other so that you could buy any of them in any order, which is also important should any of them be permanently or temporarily out of stock.

The base game contains so much content that we wanted to make sure that regardless of what you loved in it, there would be a reason for you to also find value in the expansion. We knew from common sense, from our testers, and from reading threads and comments that we had to add a new double-sided board as everyone was asking for this, and we had lots of ideas for them. We also had countless ideas for additional upgrade cards that were either too complicated or too early to introduce in the base game, and we wanted to give players new ways to configure their cars. Adding a new season with events and sponsorships seemed like a natural next step. Probably the most controversial decision was adding only a single car, but from our point of view that was the plan all along, even if it in hindsight should have been communicated as such from the get-go. I'll get back to this point at the end when we return to the "complaints".

As a result of all this planning, we hope to release six expansions following the above model around February-March of each year. All of them will fit on the same shelves as the base game, and they are easy to understand for the retail staff. Any fan of the game no matter how casual should be able to find joy from any of the releases.

It is important to note that these six expansions are NOT the only expansions we want to make, or that we are limited to making one a year. There are lots of ideas we would love to handle with a dedicated expansion that clearly fleshes out a module with more complexity, even if that would make the game less accessible to the casual crowd. How we try to align this with the overall strategy, what those expansions would be, and when they release remains to be seen, though. Signaling anything can easily be interpreted on BGG, and such interpretations have proven to lead to expectations and even entitlement, despite no promises being made.

Hello, orange car...
Heat: Heavy Rain

I can't believe how many words I have already written before getting into the actual content of this particular expansion. I guess the coming five expansions will get a brief designer diary, then possibly a link to this one.

We added a seventh player with a new car and gearstick in orange, and also made room for up to twelve cars on the starting grid, something we have been playing with for the past three years. We added a new double-sided game board with two tracks: Japan and Mexico. We added twelve new upgrades, all introducing a new "Super Cool" symbol to the game. We added a 1964 racing season, with four new events that can be shuffled with the ten from the base game to create even more championships, if you want. We also added new sponsorships for those championships that use the new Super Cool upgrade.

The Tracks
The Japan track has the "heavy rain" feature that also lends its name to the expansion. These are special sections of the track where rain water has gathered. The rain makes it harder to slow down, which is represented by the rule that gearing down now costs an additional Heat card, so jumping down a single gear would cost you one Heat card and jumping down two gears would cost two Heat cards. To help everyone handle this increased challenge, we have also given players an additional Heat card for their engine during se-up. These sections of Heavy Rain have been thoroughly tested to try to make more people spin out, if they get overconfident. We want to make life tough for you, sorry!

The evolution of the Japan track
The Mexico track has a new feature in the Chicanes, which apart from some special rules around the road-condition tokens basically equates to two corners with the same speed limit very close to each other. Japan also has a Chicane, but it isn't the central feature as it is with Mexico. It is a simple addition when measured in added rules complexity, but it does allow us a new design space that grants new experiences. Because the Chicanes can be quite tough to navigate, we decided to reduce the Stress cards each car is presented with during set-up.

Mexico — from prototype to finished track
The proximity of the two corners in a Chicane did entail that we had to update the Legends rules, allowing them to sometimes cross two corners in a turn. This is called Aggressive Legends. This is an example of a design space we had not foreseen when we made the base game, and hopefully our strategic approach to these coming expansions will ensure that we won't have to go back and make such changes again.

An early test of Aggressive Legends using yellow cubes to indicate special corners...a rule that did not survive

Super Cool
The new Garage card upgrade is a new type of Cooldown card. Where the ordinary Cooldown cards allow you to take Heat cards from your hand and place them back in your Engine, Super Cool allows you to check your discard pile and move the allotted number of Heat cards directly from there to your Engine. This can be powerful, but the drawback is that this feature's effectiveness depends on the timing of what you have in your discard pile when played — not to mention that it's useless regarding Heat cards in your hand.


Prototype and final Super Cool cards
Complaints

Now, everything I have written above is made to cater to retailers, distributors, and mainstream casual gamers, so perhaps disappointment from dedicated gamers on a niche website such as BGG is unsurprising. Users on here who are fans of the game are unlikely to be the ones who will come across these expansions in a retail shop, let alone benefit from the guidance of retail staff. Chances are that such fans would know more details about the expansions than 99% of retail staff.

Though the above may explain some of the complaints that have surfaced, it doesn't make them less legitimate, so here is my attempt at adding context to some of the more common ones. It might not be to your liking how I choose to address it, but I hope you at a minimum appreciate that I am trying and that I convinced the publisher to allow me to do so (rather than just talk about all the stuff we are doing, ignoring the complaints). Finally, I am going to paraphrase these complaints. Their representation is generic, and if you — yes, YOU! — feel offended/misrepresented/whatever by the exact wording that I use, then find it inside yourself to read past it, and try to understand the general picture. Here goes nothing — let's poke the hornet's nest...

Early days in Japan using blue cubes to test water effects
Price
The price of the Heavy Rain expansion is amongst the top complaints I have seen. It costs about half the base game at €33, and I can currently find it on Europe's online shops for €4-5 less than that. I guess it is to be expected that people will always want things cheaper, and I guess it is also to be expected that people will make a superficial comparison of the content and try to do "napkin calculations" backwards from there, so here are some basic facts of the board game industry:

In general, the box and the board are the two most expensive items in any board game. A six-fold double-sided board is also amongst the most expensive boards you can choose. Of course the size of the box matters, but the main cost isn't the amount of material used; a box half the size doesn't cost half as it still has to go through all the same process steps. The same goes for an insert, where the real expense is the mold cost and production time, not the extra plastic used. The same is true for assembly, which is probably the third highest single cost on most games. The assembly costs are largely the same regardless of whether you have to add one or six cars to a box.

Then we have to factor in production at scale, which is almost a quadruple whammy. First, fewer components in each box means less scale per box. Second, an expansion never sells more than a base game, which means less scale to the print run. Third, all the illustrator and graphic designer hours are factored in across fewer units. Finally, the lower the price point, the higher the relative margin needed. None of these factors are massive in and of themselves, but together they all add up.

In summary, if you think you can extrapolate the logic from your grocery list for such calculations, then I will happily posit that you are factually wrong. This is before even getting into the fact that publishing is a business, and unless the company earns a profit on their products, then they will (worst case) go bankrupt and (best case) stop supporting the specific product altogether. I also know for a fact that the crew at Days of Wonder want to keep the price as low as possible. As a publisher myself, this is always a focus because the market is so competitive. I also think the base game is such an amazing value proposition that that alone makes the expansion look expensive in some minds that move towards a direct comparison.

Twelve cars navigating the Mexican chicane
Add More Stuff
The second most common complaint is from people who want more stuff...

• One vs. two cars: I will grant that a mistake was made here, and the base game should not have had extra spots for cars and gear sticks. We never intended to release two cars at once, both because the expansion price would have jumped another €4-5 at a minimum and because we figured that few groups were looking exactly for the step between seven and eight players.

• Stickers for Aggressive Legends: I've seen this request a couple of places. Personally I never thought of it, and I guess I have a blind spot because I treat most of my games quite roughly. However, adding them would have caused a couple of "problems'' as well: one is price, another is that this would have made Heavy Rain stand out from the coming expansions, and for some have made it a "mandatory" one to get. I guess we could also have ignored it and let the community reach their own conclusions for the Great Britain track. This is an example of the design creep we had not foreseen, and that I hope our current strategy will make redundant going forward.

• New Legend Decks for the orange car: Again, including this would have increased costs. It might not be common knowledge, but these cards come in decks of 55, and as soon as you add card number 56 you are basically adding the full cost of one more deck. Even worse, this addition would have been made redundant as soon as we released a second expansion in the line. We hope to provide an adequate solution that fixes this once and for all, but until then I can only thank the community for stepping in and providing their own files.

This is still the fastest method for us to test new track ideas: string some generic track pieces together, add in the corners, and play
The Future

I can already thank you for the reception of Heat: Heavy Rain as the first week of sales numbers were through the roof, even for DoW! And despite some of the complaints I've covered here, tons of happy fans are voicing their love of the game and appreciation of the content. We are proud and excited to bring this to you, and we hope the continued support will allow us to do so for many years to come.

Kind regards and happy racing,
Asger Granerud

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by W. Eric Martin

• Gachijo: Four Ninja and the Castle of Treasures is the fourth title from Japanese publisher Banana Moon Studio Sapporo, with this being a 2-4 player game from designer Martin Nedergaard Andersen. (KS link)


In the game, you are a ninja maneuvering through a castle to collect treasures, crystals, shinobi, and other items, with the hook of the game being that the playing area consists of transparent plastic sheets. You set up for a particular mission by placing the proper stage sheet on the base board, and on this stage sheet you place red and blue wall sheets perpendicularly, then a treasure sheet.


On a turn, you make three moves, either moving your ninja to pick up tools that will let you scale walls, travel through water, or attack opponents, or sliding the red or blue sheet one space, which will move the walls within the castle, giving you access to new locations and trapping others. By sliding the walls and merging the red and blue yin/yang symbols, you can summon a guardian of the treasure to strip treasure from other ninja.

• Another Japanese publisher with a new project on Kickstarter is Gotta2, which has the 3-6 player game from Okabenius called Rapid Dungeon, which debuted at Game Market in 2023.

Each player has a double-sided foam adventurer that they will use to collect gems, monsters, treasure chests, and other adventurers. On a turn, everyone turns over the top card of their deck simultaneously, then players race to claim one card by slapping their adventurer on it — but you need to ensure that the black/white status of your adventurer matches the background of the card you want to claim.

Gameplay at Tokyo Game Market Spring 2024
In the advanced game, you add unicorns that boost gem points, thieves, and traps to complicate the adventurer slapping.

• And still another is Engro Games, which is crowdfunding Long Live Backyardia, an expansion for the mancala-driven, trick-taking game Bug Council of Backyardia from Patrick Engro and Kyle Hanley.

The gist of the main game is that you must follow suit when playing cards in a trick, but if you're void in a suit, you can play the suit you wish — and if multiple suits were played, whoever played the highest card in the strongest suit wins the trick. Whoever played the lowest card in the trick picks one of the five suits and distributes all the strength cubes from that suit mancala-style on the other suits.


Long Live Backyardia adds four modules to the game that can be used singly or together, such as leaders with special powers that you gain by collecting the majority of cards in a suit and the peacekeeper, who prevents the manipulation of a suit's power.

• Taiwanese publisher Soso Studio is crowdfunding a second edition of designer Chu-Lan Kao's game Formosa Tea, which debuted in 2019, then was picked up by Tasty Minstrel Games but barely distributed.

Here's an overview of this 2-4 player game that's expected to be available at SPIEL Essen 24, with this second edition featuring "improved balance and more strategic options":

The sub-tropical climate and environment of Taiwan makes the island highly suitable for cultivating top quality tea. But it wasn't not until the 19th century after English businessman John Dodd discovered some amazing Oolong tea there that the Taiwanese tea business truly begin to bloom and "Formosa Tea" became world-reknowned.

In Formosa Tea, players are tea farm owners competing to harvest the best tea leaves, improve their tea processing techniques, and produce tea of the highest quality for not only the domestic market but also for the international market. With the unique worker placement and worker advancement mechanisms, along with the tea dehydration and scenting processing, players must use their workers wisely to make the best tea in the market.

A game is played in four rounds. In each round, players take turns performing one of the five possible actions:

— Send a worker to harvest tea leaves.
— Send a worker to a tea factory to process tea leaves.
— Retrieve a worker from the tea factory after tea processing is completed.
— Send a worker to sell tea in the domestic market.
— Send a worker to sell tea to international merchants.

After the end of the fourth round, the player who has the most prestige points wins!

• The new title from designer Jeffrey CCH and Hong Kong publisher ICE Makes — creators of Eila and Something Shiny — ventures far from the adventures of a solitary rabbit.


Epochs: Course of Cultures, which is being crowdfunded through May 2024 for a scheduled mid-2025 release, takes 2-4 players through all of human civilization in 2-3 hours:

In Epochs: Course of Cultures, you will lead your civilization and plan a path through the crossroads of history across three epochs. Be a pioneer to expand territories, be an innovator to foster study and research, or be a warmonger to raid using superior armaments. The choice is yours, and it is your strategic acumen that will shape the course of cultures and lead your people toward victory.

Within the game, you will compete with other leaders to become the most prestigious civilization over three epochs: ancient, medieval, and modern. You will introduce a total of nine inventions to customize your civilization. On your turn, you can choose to expand your territories on the shared map, build a city, establish a trade route, do academic research, change the form of government, and build magnificent wonders to consolidate your authority. Unfortunately, being peaceful is not always the best way to benefit your people as leaders can choose to declare war on others within an epoch. A wise leader may have to prepare for war by improving military units...just in case.

Demo at SPIEL Essen 23 (image: Jakub Niedźwiedź)
Immerse yourself in a re-imagination of human history in which every decision carries weight and every action shapes the course of your civilization. Will you be remembered as a benevolent ruler, revered for your cultural achievements? Or will you carve out a legacy through conquest, leaving a trail of triumph in your wake? The fate of your people rests in your hands. Be a visionary leader, and create a civilization that will stand the test of epochs.

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by W. Eric Martin

• Italian publisher Horrible Guild is following its 2021 Railroad Ink Challenge: Collector's Edition not by releasing more for the roll-and-write Railroad Ink game series, but by presenting a new connection challenge: Railroad Tiles, which will be crowdfunded in Q2 2024.

This game also comes from Railroad Ink designers Hjalmar Hach and Lorenzo Silva, and it works as follows:

Railroad Tiles is a quick-playing, tile-placement game in which you pick tiles and place routes to build an interconnected community.

The game is played over eight rounds. You start each round by drafting your tiles from the sets available in the common pool, then you place your routes in front of you, trying to make as many connections as possible; be careful not to lock yourself in with choices that are too constraining. Each round, you can also place cars, trains, or travelers to populate the tiny little landscape you're creating...as long as you have free space on your tiles. The available actions change from round to round, so you need to prepare in advance!

The more pieces of the same kind each new placement connects to, the more points you earn. You can also score bonus points at game's end for placing tiles in a large rectangle without gaps and for creating sets of three adjacent city tiles.

• Boardcubator, the publisher of Project L, is crowdfunding a new abstract game with chunky plastic pieces: Square One, from Patrik Chleboun and Project L co-designer Jan Soukal.

You start the game with three tiles: two yellow showing a single square and one green showing two squares in a row. Each turn, you take three actions from five possibilities:

— Take a sequence: Draw and reveal a random sequence board. This will show spaces that you must fill with particular tiles in order to receive the reward depicted on the card, whether points or new tiles.
— Merge: Combine tiles in your possession into other tiles, e.g., combining a yellow and a green to make a row of three squares or three squares in an L shape; discard the original tiles and take the new one from the reserve.
— Split: Do the opposite of merge.
— Place: Take all the pieces in your reserve required to fill the highest empty line in a sequence, and place them on that board.
—Master: At most once per turn, take all the pieces in your reserve required to fill the same row in any number of sequences.


As you might expect, the crowdfunding campaign for this early 2025 release features an expansion and a Kickstarter-only bonus item.

• In March 2024, SlugFest Games ran a crowdfunding campaign for The Red Dragon Inn: Adventure Is Nigh!, a standalone game featuring characters from the "Adventure is Nigh!" YouTube series. Here's an overview of this early 2025 release:

After another wild adventure, it's time you kicked back with your buddies for a party at your favorite nightclub. Brawl, gamble, and drink your way through the night as a unique character with its own deck, traits, and mechanisms. The last adventurer standing wins!

All of the characters included can be mixed with characters from any The Red Dragon Inn game or expansion.

The Red Dragon Inn: Adventure Is Nigh! will be released in two versions, one using the artstyle from the YouTube series (as seen above) and another featuring the traditional RDI artstyle.

• In March 2024, I wrote about Kevin Wilson's Kinfire Council, which Incredible Dream Studios is crowdfunding through May 2024 for delivery in mid-2025. While at GAMA Expo 2024, I got a look at a mock-up of Kinfire Council, and it's a beast.

Incredible Dream Studios is also using this crowdfunding campaign to fund a second printing of Kinfire Chronicles: Night's Fall, with the game now being available in French or German, in addition to English. If no one is stepping up to do a localization, I suppose it's smart business for Incredible Dream to make that effort itself...

Kinfire Council mock-up at GAMA Expo 2024 Read more »

Publisher: Amora Game

Welcome to the Military of Thaddeus!

Meeting at the Barrow is part one in a series of encounters telling the journey from basic training to the hero's home in Thaddeus.

Spoiler Free Summary

The affairs of Compound 13 a week behind you, Guard Captain Neuss takes you to a military outpost. He signs your release papers and gives you orders to check in with the barracks upon your arrival in Thaddeus. However the road home isn't without unique encounters. Traveling near the town of Odias, the troops come across burial mounds called Barrows. Near the barrows, a man calls for help!

 
Meeting at the Barrow is a Novice adventure for the Savage Worlds Adventure Edition. It can be used in conjuction with the Fantasy Companion (SWADE). It can be adapted to any fantasy campagin setting.

NOTE: Prepare for War: Basic Training adventure is still being translated to Savage Worlds. It should be available by the middle of June 2024.

Price: $2.49 Read more »

Publisher: Onyx Path Publishing

Quantum Mechanics is a supplemental guide to the super science system of the Trinity Continuum as presented in Trinity Continuum: Aberrant. It breaks down the process, clarifies possible confusion points, and provides examples of Core-, Nova-, and Q-Tech. A selection of what nova traits impact the super science process is provided as well.

Price: $4.00 Read more »

Publisher: Game Arts Guild

The Resilience RPG takes place in today's world were player characters face contemporary emergencies. It uses stable and flexible rules that are easier to use than most other RPG systems. This is the RPG system also used in the 2nd Editions of both Squawk and The Dark Woods RPG.

Price: $14.99 Read more »

Publisher: thiagogomes

Biblical RPG - Free Rules is the free version of the Biblical RPG system, offering the essentials for you to start conducting adventures in the Old Testament era today. Later, if you're interested, you can seek out the Rules for Beginners and other supplements.

In this free book, we'll have five classes, many Generic Characteristics, a basic equipment list, and also the entire foundation of the rules system. I hope this book serves as the initial step for you to explore other books in the system. Grab this book now and start delving into this system. Conquer the promised land!

Price: $0.00 Read more »

Publisher: Original Frontiers

Nestled amidst the rugged canyons and rust-coloured mesas of Planet Forthas, the Twilight Outpost stands as a haven for those seeking to evade the iron grip of galactic authorities. Beneath its facade of dusty tranquillity lies a dark truth, veiled by the shadows of deceit and treachery.

At the helm of this lawless domain reigns Captain Malita Drake, a techno-pirate whose name echoes through the corridors of fear and admiration alike. With her private army of mercenaries and scavengers, Drake has seized control of Twilight Outpost, bending its inhabitants to her will with the cold efficiency of a predator stalking its prey. Under the guise of protection, she offers sanctuary to those desperate enough to seek refuge within the outpost's fortified walls. Yet, in the depths of her calculating mind, lies a plan far more sinister than mere survival.

 As the colonists of Twilight Outpost fall under Drake's sway, the tendrils of her influence stretch ever outward, ensnaring the unsuspecting in a web of deceit and exploitation. The local law enforcement, sworn to uphold the Trinity Pact that governs this lawless frontier, are swiftly dispatched, leaving the outpost bereft of justice and order. In the absence of law, chaos reigns supreme, and Drake's grip on power tightens with each passing day.

 Within the dusty streets of Twilight Outpost, whispers of rebellion simmer beneath the surface, fuelled by the smouldering embers of defiance. As the shadows lengthen and the last vestiges of hope flicker in the darkness, the colonists of this forsaken settlement find themselves teetering on the precipice of oblivion, with only the faint glimmer of a distant star to guide them through the long, dark night ahead.

________________________________________________

In this Solo Adventure you assume the role of a Character in a Dark Science Fantasy setting. You will  require The Haven Fallen Core Rulebook (CRB), and any associated Expansions you wish to use to assist you, along with a pen and paper or word-processing document, to play.

The story is set up with an Introduction, a handful of location details and a few pertinent Story Points. The rest is down to you and your imagination.

The Actions you take should depend on who and what you see, and how you wish to interact. Keep a record of your story and adapt it as per the result of each Action. As you progress you will see that you are behaving as your own Storyteller, creating the interactive world in which you are playing.

Use the Character Creation section of the CRB to create your Character and use the Storyteller section of the CRB to assist with generating NPCs.

Once you have familiarised yourself with the  following few pages, you are ready to begin.

THE BONUS DIE

When allowed to roll a Bonus Die, roll two of the same required Dice and choose the most beneficial result.

Price: $0.50 Read more »

Publisher: Redd Jack

A complete one-shot adventure for the Shadowdark TTRPG system that sees players exploring an abandoned mine that uncovers a sprawling underground tunnel system filled with goblins and an ancient colony of crystalline arachnids. 

Great care has been taken to make this supplement one that's helpful at the table. Each location's section is self-contained, with relevant creature stats and tables right where you need them and evocative, easy-to-understand language that seeks to make the game master's job as easy as possible. 

Includes:

• Descriptions, Maps, and guidance for running 5 unique encounter areas
• Detailed Location, Faction, and NPC lore with plot hooks that slip into any campaign
• Rules for procedurally generating additional rooms as needed
• 5 custom magical items /w digital handouts
• 10+ Random tables, for a unique experience every time you run
• 11 battlemaps, created with Dungeondraft

Price: $4.99 Read more »

Publisher: BirdEnuf Books & Games

100% Human Generated Art !

Tara Quinn presents these 100 pieces of fantasy stock art. As a lifelong artist and professional for nearly 2 decades, she has produced these fantasy illustrations with her own new-school cartoony twist.

These 100 original illustrations in black and grey or line art depict creatures, concepts, monsters or other content from the 5E SRD. The style invokes old-school artwork, but with Tara's own comic inspired design. All were hand-drawn digitally at high resolution 300 DPI in various shapes and sizes. Provided both in PDF sheets and individual PNG images, both with white and transparent backgrounds.

A great fit for 5E, OSR, or other fantasy works, this royalty-free stock art is authorized for both personal and commercial use.

You will be free to use the illustrations as you wish under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ("CC BY 4.0"), in any manner permitted by that license so long as you give appropriate credit to Tara Quinn for originally producing the artwork.

This means you can:

• Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format for any purpose, even commercially.
• Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.

1. Owlbear
2. Harpy
3. Ooze
4. Mimic
5. Skeleton
6. Griffon
7. Basilisk
8. Bulette
9. Cockatrice
10. Rust Monster
11. Homunculus
12. Dragon
13. Two-Headed Dragon
14. Wyrmling
15. Dragon with Hoard
16. Dwarf Fighter
17. Elf Wizard
18. Halfling Rogue
19. Human Cleric
20. Imp
21. Gnoll
22. Lich
23. 2d6 Dice
24. Backpack
25. Meat Chunk
26. Wine
27. Scorpion
28. Mummy
29. Lock
30. Scroll
31. Gem
32. Vampire
33. Ghost
34. Werewolf
35. Zombie
36. Bugbear
37. Gelatinous Cube
38. Barbarian
39. Blink Dog
40. Air Elemental
41. Water Elemental
42. Fire Elemental
43. Earth Elemental
44. Hill Giant
45. Ettin
46. Fire Giant
47. Stone Giant
48. Cloud Giant
49. Bag of Holding
50. Deck of Many Things
51. Potion
52. Unicorn
53. Sahuagin
54. Treant
55. Raven
56. Lizard
57. Rat
58. Morningstar
59. Gargoyle
60. Aberration
61. Wand
62. Shrieker
63. Shambling Mound
64. Crocodile
65. Frog
66. Flying Snake
67. Weasel
68. Bag of Beans
69. Banquet
70. Staff
71. Vial
72. Ettercap
73. Remorhaz
74. Pseudodragon
75. Roc
76. Specter
77. Will-o-Wisp
78. Robe of Eyes
79. Crystal Ball
80. Dagger of Venom
81. Chimera
82. Ring of X-ray Vision
83. Ring of Feather Falling
84. Xorn
85. Otyugh
86. Roper
87. Lizardfolk
88. Purple Worm
89. Boar
90. Ape
91. Dagger
92. Club
93. Handaxe
94. Scimitar
95. Shortbow
96. Arrow
97. Shield
98. Sling
99. Hydra
100. Sphinx

Price: $25.00 Read more »

Publisher: Off The Books

Hometown Hero flies at the giant robot attacking
the city… KAPOW! Katydid kicks the nefarious
Doctor Malevolence in the face… KAPOW!
Graphene extends her elongated arm forward,
smashing the gang leader Chain in the gut with
her fist… KAPOW!
KAPOW! is a superhero roleplaying game where
you become a hero, villain, or powered individual
in that grey zone between good and evil, fighting
for justice or for your own selfish gain. In this
world, extraordinary powers and abilities are the
norm, and the fate of the world hangs in the
balance.

Price: $0.73 Read more »

Publisher: Ninetoes82

Welcome one and all to Pamor! The City of Shores has always been a place governed by wealth, influence, and intrigue and they say that anything can be bought on the streets of Pamor for the right price. But now Pamor is under threat.

Night of the Crimson Veil is a heist adventure for the 5th Edition of the World’s Most Popular TTRPG. Aimed at 6th-level characters, this is an adventure of intrigue, cunning, and panache.

Price: $12.49 Read more »

Back in 2015, a shadow began to creep across the RPG industry. Shadow of the Demon Lord was a game designed by one of the designers that worked on multiple editions of D&D, Robert J. Schwalb. This was a fantasy RPG that was designed for people whose gaming habits had moved toward shorter game sessions and more succinct campaigns.

You started at 0 level, ended at 10th level, and you gained a level at the end of each adventure. The adventures were short and mostly designed to be run in one session. The game allowed for the kind of multiclassing combinations that a lot of gamers wanted but built it into the game in a manner like D&D 4e’s Paragon Paths and Epic Destinies. Unlike 4e, it allowed for more mixing and matching instead of connecting the Paragon Paths to a particular class.

While those were some of the design concepts, the setting broke from the assumptions of games like D&D, Pathfinder, or 13th Age. You were playing in a world in decay, one that was likely to fall into an apocalypse by the end of the campaign. The game was built on the idea of a campaign template to show how the signs of the apocalypse were happening. Characters accumulated mental and spiritual damage. There was literally no such thing as good on a cosmic level.

The game seized a lot of imaginations, but the nihilistic overtones made it harder for some gamers to engage fully with the setting, and the built in consequences of some game options made it more difficult to port the system to a less morally devastating setting. That brings us to 2023, and the Kickstarter for Shadow of the Weird Wizard, a game that builds on the mechanical structures of Shadow of the Demon Lord, but with a smidge less nihilistic dread.

Disclaimer

I did not receive a review copy of Shadow of the Weird Wizard, and my copy comes from backing the Kickstarter. I have not had the opportunity to play or run Shadow of the Weird Wizard, but I have both played and run Shadow of the Demon Lord.

 Shadow of the Weird Wizard

Writing, Design, and Art Direction: Robert J. Schwalb
Foreword: Zeb Cook
Editing and Development: Kim Mohan
Additional Editing: Jennifer Clarke Wilkes, Jay Spight
Aid and Assistance: Daniel K. Heinrich, Danielle Casteel
Proofreading: David Satnik, Jay Spight
Cover Design, Graphic Design, and Layout: Kara Hamilton
Cover Illustrator: Matteo Spirito
Interior Illustrations: Yeysson Bellaiza, Andrew Clark, Biagio d’alessandro, Çağdaş Demiralp, Nim Dewhirst—Kasgovs Maps, Rick Hershey, Jack Kaiser, Katerina Ladon, Britt Martin, Maria Rosaria Monticelli, Victor Moreno, Mitch Mueller, Matthew Myslinski, Eduardo Nunes, Mirco Paganessi, Claudio Pozas, Phill Simpson, Kim Van Deun, Sergio Villa-Isaza, Cardin Yanis
Character Sheet Design: Daniel K. Heinrich and Kara Hamilton

The Weird Wizard’s Grimoire

This first impression is based on the PDF of the Shadow of the Weird Wizard core rulebook. I should be receiving the hardcover, but it hasn’t been released as of this writing. The PDF is 274 pages, and is broken down to the following:

• Cover and Back Cover–2 pages
• Credits–1 page
• Table of Contents–2 pages
• Index–6 pages
• Character Sheet–2 pages
• Setting Map–1 page
• Secrets of the Weird Wizard Ad–1 page

If you have seen any of the Shadow of the Demon Lord releases, it shouldn’t be a surprise to know that this is filled with quality artwork. Compared to the Shadow of the Demon Lord art, this art is still often shadowy and ominous, but less grimy and dark. Where the headers and font on Shadow of the Demon Lord were blood red and a little intentionally rough, the headers and fonts in Shadow of the Weird Wizard are purple with a more pleasantly flowing font.

Shadow of the Weird Wizard is less of the full core book, and more like the Player’s Handbook of the game, explaining the general rules, character creation, and player facing options. The sections of this book include:

• Introduction
• Creating a Character
• Game Rules
• Equipment
• Magic
• Expert Paths
• Master Paths

Because this is more of a player’s handbook, there isn’t a lot of discussion of best practices for running a game, and the only monster or NPC stat blocks are ones associated with elements like summoning monsters or hiring retainers. Now that we’ve established the basics, let’s take a deeper dive into what’s in all of those chapters.

Setting and Concept

While the setting isn’t marching towards oblivion the same way the world of Urth is in Shadow of the Demon Lord, it isn’t a bright high fantasy setting. Players portray characters fleeing from the collapse of the Old Country, into the lands once controlled by the Weird Wizard, a despotic spellcaster that dominated the land, warping, twisting, and summoning strange things into his domain.

Characters don’t start off at 0 level as they do in Shadow of the Demon Lord, so the story starts with the player characters in a position of more competence, but the general feeling is less that the PCs are mythic heroes confronting mythic threats, and more like the PCs are competent mortal beings trying to protect humans completely unprepared for a land dominated by dangerous folklore. PCs feel like they are acquiring more and more powers to give them more tools to engage with the supernatural spaces of the world, but until their Master Paths, the PCs feel much more like outsiders trying imperfectly to interact with a mysterious world than fantasy heroes integrated with the supernatural.

On its face, the setting and its tropes almost feel like they play into older concepts of “taming” a wild land for human habitation, regardless of the previous inhabitants, but the game is more aware of the story it’s telling. The humans pushing into the former lands of the Weird Wizard don’t have the option of staying in the Old Country. The exodus of the Weird Wizard has forced the inhabitants of the lands to come to terms with how oppressive their magical despot was. Campaigns are as likely to involve finding detente with fey creatures near their settlement as they are to destroy magical mutated beasts. At this phase of the human migration, it feels much more like the theme is learning how to integrate into the lands rather than dominating them and building new kingdoms.

The perspective of Shadow of the Weird Wizard is distinctly human, although later supplements will provide rules for playing other ancestries. The tropes of fantasy RPGs are remixed with folklore, meaning that some things on their surface appear to be callbacks to older gaming, but with some wicked twists. For example, orcs are a violent threat, but unlike orcs in a setting like D&D, they are the product of a magical disease that makes them more like rage zombies than what most people associate with the species in modern fantasy. Some conflicts with fey creatures may be unavoidable because of absolute interpretations of promises made, but there is also the possibility of finding a way of turning absolute alien understanding of agreements to the mortal’s favor. In some ways, this setting feels like the kind of setting where creepy Muppets from 80s fantasy movies would be at home.

Setting information isn’t presented in a gazetteer fashion. The description of the setting exists in the introduction, with additional elements revealed in discussion of different Paths, magical traditions, and deities. This isn’t radically different than how Shadow of the Demon Lord presents its setting, where even later products that drilled down into particular regions were rarely more than 10 pages, with a few emblematic NPCs, but not a deep dive into exact distances, populations, or heavily detailed timelines.

Rules and Resolutions

The core resolution of the game is to roll a d20, plus or minus an ability bonus, compared against a target number. The target number usually defaults to 10, unless it’s a roll against a character, whose defenses may be determined by their level or degree of threat. Advantageous circumstances grant you a boon, while detrimental circumstances assess you a bane. Boons allow you to roll a d6 and add it to your roll, while Banes have you roll a d6 and subtract it from your result. Boons and Banes cancel one another out, and if you have multiple Boons or Banes, you subtract or add only the highest die to your roll. Critical successes are results that are a 20 or higher, and critical failures are rolls that are 0 or lower. When someone is afflicted with an ongoing effect, sometimes a character may make an ability check to resist or remove an effect, but often, characters make a Luck roll to see if an effect ends, which is a d20 roll that is successful on a 10 or higher.

There are a number of afflictions that can affect your character. These are adjudicated with a variety of options, often by assigning banes that come into play under certain circumstances, or persistently. Some assess a boon to those acting against you, and some cause you to suffer damage at different intervals until they are removed.

Ongoing afflictions that cause damage bring us to another distinction in the rules. Characters have a Health score, but when you get injured, you don’t subtract from your Health, you total your damage and compare it to Health to see if you can still function. One of the reasons for this distinction is that some effects directly damage Health. For example, if you’re on fire, you take damage, but if you are poisoned or diseased, you may subtract numbers from your Health. Characters are injured when their damage equals half their Health, and when a character’s damage is equal to their Health, they are incapacitated. When you’re Health is 0, you die, and many times when you are incapacitated, you remove Health every round until you pass a Luck check.

There are no skills in the game, but a character’s profession either grants them narrative position to do something other characters cannot, or a boon if anyone could attempt the action, but a professional would have a greater chance to accomplish the task. There are some simple but structured rules for discerning information and interacting with NPCs. For example, a character can make an Intellect roll to know something useful to the situation, and there is a list of what is common knowledge in the setting and what can be added to that list of common knowledge based on professions.

Social challenges have different rules depending on what the challenge is. For example, the rules define the following social challenges:

• Transaction
• Appeal
• Argument
• Alliance
• Coercion

Each type of challenge explains the requirements for the interaction and what abilities are used, as well as any situations that would grant boons or banes. For example, an appeal is resolved with Will rolls, while an argument is resolved with Intellect. In some cases, some of these interactions have guidelines for what critical success or failure looks like in the interaction.

Combat assumes tactical positioning, in as much as it assumes actual ranges rather than conceptual ranges or zones. No one rolls for initiative. Instead, there is an order of operations:

• Combatants under the Sage’s control, in any order
  • Combatants under the player’s control can use reactions if applicable, when triggered
  • Roll to resolve any end of turn ongoing effects, in any order
• Combatants under the player’s control, in any order
  • Combatants under the Sage’s control can use reactions if applicable, when triggered
  • Roll to resolve any end of turn ongoing effects, in any order

Characters have one reaction per round, unless some other rule grants them additional reactions. In addition to the standard reactions a character can take, a character can burn their reaction to Take the Initiative and act before the Sage’s characters.

Characters pick their abilities from a standard array, and their Novice Path options are Fighter, Mage, Priest, or Rogue. Characters gain a natural defense score, health, language, and starting path ability from this choice. You gain additional benefits from this path at 2nd and 5th level. At 3rd level, you pick an Expert Path, which grants you additional features at 4th, 6th, and 9th level. At 7th level, you pick your Master Path, which grants you path abilities at 8th and 10th level. The progression looks something like this:

• 1st Level–Pick Novice Path
• 2nd Level–Novice Path Abilities
• 3rd Level–Pick Expert Path
• 4th Level–Expert Path Abilities
• 5th Level–Novice Path Abilities
• 6th Level–Expert Path Abilities
• 7th Level–Pick Master Path
• 8th Level–Master Path Abilities
• 9th Level–Expert Path Abilities
• 10th Level–Master Path Abilities

This means you may not have your full character concept locked in until you reach 7th level. The Expert Paths are grouped under Paths of Battle, Faith, Power, and Skill. The Master Paths are grouped under Paths of Arms, The Gods, Magic, and Prowess. These correspond to the initial four paths, but characters don’t have to pick a similar path at Expert or Master level. A Fighter that chooses a Path of Battle and a Path of Arms is likely to be very specifically a toe-to-toe combatant, but some paths synergize well across concepts. For example, depending on the type of weapon and tactics a fighter uses, Skill and Prowess paths often work well for various concepts.

Some paths are specifically about synergizing elements across paths. For example, the Spellfighter Expert Path of Skill is all about being a martial combatant that also uses spells in addition to weapons. Some character classes/archetypes that have become familiar from games like D&D, Pathfinder, or 13th Age don’t show up until the Expert Paths, which reminds me a bit of BECMI D&D. For example, Berserkers, Commanders, Martial Artists, Rangers, Paladins, Artificers, Druids, Psychics, Assassins, Bards, and Warlocks don’t show up until the Expert Paths.

Depending on the path, a character might pick up a special ability they can use a number of times per rest, a number of extra spells, a new magical tradition, or bonus damage on their attacks. Multiple dice of damage present an interesting tactical choice, because you can sacrifice 2d6 of damage to make another attack, but that attack must be against a different target. If you get additional spells, you pick them from the traditions you already know.

Since we’re talking about magic, spells, and magic traditions, let’s move on to talking about those things in their own section, because 90 pages of the 274 pages (about 33%) are devoted to magic traditions and spells.

The Many Faces of Magic

Spells in the game are all arranged into thematic traditions, which each feature several supernatural talents in addition to the spells grouped under that tradition. When a character discovers a tradition, they gain one of the talents from the tradition, which are separate supernatural abilities compared to spells. Some of these talents are like cantrips, where they are recurring minor supernatural abilities. Some are more powerful, and once they are used, they don’t come back until you make a Luck roll for them to recharge, or in some cases, until after you have a chance to rest. The traditions listed in the core book include:

• Aeromancy
• Alchemy
• Alteration
• Animism
• Astromancy
• Chaos
• Chronomancy
• Conjuration
• Cryomancy
• Dark Arts
• Destruction
• Divination
• Eldritch
• Enchantment
• Evocation
• Geomancy
• Illusion
• Invocation
• Necromancy
• Oneiromancy
• Order
• Primal
• Protection
• Psychomancy
• Pyromancy
• Shadowmancy
• Skullduggery
• Spiritualism
• Symbolism
• Technomancy
• Teleportation
• War

When you learn a spell, the entry tells you how many times you can cast the spell before you rest. You can pick the spell multiple times to gain the ability to cast the spell more times per rest. Spells under their individual traditions are also grouped by Novice, Expert, and Master spells, meaning if you are allowed to learn new spells when you gain a level, you must pick from a level that is equal to or less than your current character tier. In other words, you can’t pick Master level spells from your available traditions until you are at least 7th level.

Unlike Dungeons & Dragons magic schools, these aren’t cosmic absolutes. Two spells can do very similar things, but will be in two separate traditions, because of the narrative elements of how they create the effect of the spell. For example, Shadowmancy and Teleportation may both create a point from which someone can enter in one place, and exit in another, but Shadowmancy rips a hole through the void, and Teleportation bends space to make two points touch.

Shadow of the Demon Lord always had extremely evocative ways of explaining what could otherwise be perfunctory effects. While Shadow of the Weird Wizard is a little less gruesome in its descriptions, it’s no less evocative. For example, there is a spell that splits your opponent into two creatures exactly half the size of the original creature. An Astromancy spell flashes a foe with ultraviolet light, burns them, and impairs their agility, because they develop a rapid onset of severe sunburn. One of the spells of the Chronomancy tradition allows the caster to summon themself from the future to aid them. One of the Necromancy spells summons a psychopomp to swoop over the target, bringing them closer to death. A master level Technomancy spell lets you summon a huge moving fortress equipped with a massive cannon, which is both extremely hard to destroy and blows up spectacularly if you do manage to destroy it.

Because these traditions contain both talents and spells, many of these traditions play into the theme of different paths as well. For example, Technomancy or Alchemy both pair well with Artificer, to produce a “magical scientist/engineer” with a much different feel. While there isn’t a starting path that indicates that a character is psychic, taking the psychomancy tradition can help flavor a Mage as a psionicist before they make it to 3rd level and take the Psychic path.

Overlapping Shadows

Shadow of the Weird Wizard has a lot in common with Shadow of the Demon Lord. It’s very clearly an evolution of the same system. But I wanted to take a few moments to summarize some of the changes between the two. I know I’ll miss some, but let’s give this a go:

• Shadow of the Weird Wizard starts at 1st level instead of 0
• The scale for health and damage is higher for Shadow of the Weird Wizard
• Insanity and corruption are not tracked for player characters in Shadow of the Weird Wizard (although at least one path introduces corruption tracking for a character with that path)
• The round structure doesn’t use the Fast Turn/Slow Turn structure of Shadow of the Demon Lord
• Shadow of the Weird Wizard adds d6 damage progression to attacks
• Shadow of the Demon Lord paths occur at different levels, and Shadow of the Weird Wizard doesn’t have an option to take a second Expert Path instead of a Master Path
• Shadow of the Demon Lord spells always provided a number of castings based on a spell rank determined by paths taken
• Shadow of the Demon Lord traditions don’t provide talents based on tradition
• Shadow of the Demon Lord’s core rulebook includes GM/campaign advice and a bestiary

Both books are the same size, but Shadow of the Demon Lord had 16 Expert Paths and 64 Master Paths, as well as 30 magic traditions, and 5 additional ancestries in addition to humans. Shadow of the Weird Wizard has 42 Expert Paths, 122 Master Paths, and 33 magic traditions. Obviously the big expansion of player materials is in the Expert Paths and Master Paths, but the Magical Traditions take up more space as well, due to the inclusion of the talents associated with the tradition.

If you were hoping the two games would have compatible material, that’s unfortunately not the case. Health and damage scales differently, making Shadow of the Demon Lord monsters a bit underpowered in comparison. Traditions aren’t compatible because of assumptions about power levels and talents. Novice, Expert, and Master paths all key in their options at different levels between the two systems.

Final Thoughts

One of the reasons I wanted to write this as a first impression rather than a full review is that while the Shadow of the Weird Wizard book is available in final form in PDF, Secrets of the Weird Wizard, the “GM” book for the line, is still in beta. You can purchase the PDF, but it’s still in development. You can play other ancestries or use the monsters and NPCs from that book, but it’s still in the process of being finished.

I enjoyed the customization of Shadow of the Demon Lord when I first encountered it, and Shadow of the Weird Wizard is continuing this trend. While Shadow of the Demon Lord was working towards a very specific feel, and almost everything in that game does play towards the concept of the game, it’s definitely a wise move to remove things like Insanity and Corruption from a core high fantasy experience that doesn’t lean into horror.

When running my Shadow of the Demon Lord game, one of my friends observed that he wanted to make a character that was an effective fighter mage but had a hard time finding the right options to make it work. I feel like the options that are meant to allow for a “multi-classing” feel in Shadow of the Weird Wizard are a lot more transparent in how to mix and match concepts and make them work. As far as spellcasting goes, a lot of that transparency comes from not worrying about the power level and what traditions boost that rating to increase your castings.

While this is much less nihilistic and horror driven than Shadow of the Demon Lord, this isn’t a system that can seamlessly swap in or out for a setting that was written for D&D or Pathfinder. This is less dark than Shadow of the Demon Lord, but the game still has an edge to it, drawing from folklore and older versions of fairy tales. It’s still a game where heroes doing everything right may still see the consequences of evil that they can’t fully mitigate. They might be able to make the world better within a limited scope, and the world isn’t necessarily marching toward oblivion within the next generation, but the supernatural will always be dangerous and at least a little hostile, and life may become less challenging, but will never be easy.

Because this resembles 5e SRD fantasy superficially, I think some people may be unsatisfied or conflicted if they don’t realize that the game is pulling on a more specific subset of influences than a lot of modern fantasy utilizes. It’s easy to infer that a human centric game where PCs fight monsters in a land they are trying to tame, with tropes like “all orcs are evil” is playing in a less mature, older fantasy RPG paradigm. On the other hand, I think it’s intentionally playing in the same space as a game like Symbaroum, where it’s fully aware that people “taming a land” is a fraught narrative, and that the satisfying play space is to understand where to introduce hard decisions and moral choices.

I’ve seen one of the adventures for the system, and even without reading through more of the setting information and campaign advice in Secrets of the Weird Wizard, I’m pretty sure this is a game that wants you to know your heroes can be wrong, but that they also aren’t being relentlessly pushed into spaces where they can’t find a better way. With the number of rules about combat and the number of combat spells, I can see people losing the thread on options that don’t involve reducing enemies to ash. I think the game is deep enough to present more options, while still acknowledging that people want to kick butt once in a while.

Looking To the Future

I enjoyed Shadow of the Demon Lord, not only for the system, but also for the way in which the rules reinforced tone and theme. It was (and still is) a game that can be very satisfying if you know what kind of game it wants to deliver. Shadow of the Weird Wizard is going to be able to do the same thing, with even more clarity of design and transparency of intent with its player facing rules. I’m looking forward to seeing the final version of Secrets of the Weird Wizard, and the rest of the line.

Read more »

I love a good front. Of all the tools to come out of Powered by the Apocalypse games, fronts are probably one of my favorites. (Second only to clocks, really.) Because fronts allow me to keep track of everything from the arrival of the catastrophic doomsday event to the minor rival NPC’s petty revenge plot, and they give me the tools I need to not only figure out what the bad guys are up to but also how they’re going about their nefarious deeds.

(Confession: Even though I’ve read a bunch of Powered by the Apocalypse and Forged in the Dark games, I’ve only ever run a single session of one (the original version of Dream Askew), and I’m pretty sure I ran it completely bass-ackwards. And yet my love of fronts endures.)

You know what else I love? Putting my PCs in positions of power. I love foisting eldritch artifacts or ancient magics onto their shoulders. I take glee in giving them influence within an important organization and seeing what they’ll do. It allows me to ask tough questions about how and when they use their great power responsibly (thanks, Uncle Ben). Plus, it gives my players the power to enact real change in the game – something all of us can sometimes feel powerless to do in our real lives. (My group’s go-to power fantasy is making the world a better place.)

These two loves, though – they are at odds with each other. At least, they are when it comes to my villains’ devious plotting because those fronts happen in the background. Yes, I can write down that Professor Bad Guy’s Ultimate Plan of Evil has six steps, and I can plant clues throughout the game’s narrative that could potentially lead my characters to put the pieces together and figure out his plan.

Still, I can be an anxious GM at times, worrying that my clues are too obtuse or that my players will reach the wrong conclusion. And if I fail to deliver, then they’ll fail to figure it out in time, and The Ultimate Plan will succeed without the players having had a chance to thwart it.

Now, I know some games have done a wonderful job of systematizing when fronts advance. Still, when you’re porting the concept into a game that doesn’t already have them baked into the mechanics, you’re basically running that background minigame on vibes. And on the one hand the GM can basically do whatever they want (as long as it serves the story and creates a good time for their players).

But on the other hand, the GM can basically do whatever they want, and oh gods, I was already working with themes of using power responsibly, so now I’m second-guessing my second guesses!

GIVE THEM A WAR ROOM

Fronts are meant to be a GM-facing tool — a little mini-game the GM plays with themself between sessions. When I run games, I like to flip it around and, instead, give the players a “war room.”

Maybe it’s an actual war room in the command center of their base. Maybe it’s an oracle-like NPC or familiar that keeps track of their enemies’ actions. Maybe it’s the murder board in their detectives’ office. Regardless, all of these war rooms have one thing in common – the threat map.

Just like fronts, the threat map is a big circle with all of the campaign’s (known) threats arranged around it like a clock. At the center of the circle are the PCs (or their town, their ship, their community, what-have-you). Each threat has it’s own number of steps, and as those steps are completed, they get filled in from the outer rim, moving towards the PCs in the center.

At the end of each session, I show my players the threat map, and together, we discuss what threats they addressed and those threats don’t advance (or get crossed off if they eliminated it).

The ones they didn’t deal with, though. Those tick down. Getting closer and closer to completion.

Of course, the threat map is fluid. As they discover more threats, they’re added to it. When they eliminate one of the threats, it’s removed.

A war room with a threat map gives your players several things – it gives the players a feeling of control (or at least the potential to feel in control), it gives them a way to prioritize the most immediate threats in the game world, and gives them a core list from which they can build out what they know about the villains’ schemes. It basically gives them a quest log.

Depending on the tone of the game and just how many enemies the players have made, I may also introduce a mitigation mechanic – some way for them to delay a threat without actually dealing with it in the session. Sometimes, it’s a die role at the end of the game. Other times, it’s a resource cost. (This is also a great place to use an NPC delegation system.)

Because while the threat map can keep your players focused on the main tasks at hand, it can sometimes make them too focused. Any mitigation mechanic you introduce will allow them to breathe and indulge in ancillary role-play that wanders a bit.   

IT’S NOT FOR EVERYONE

I don’t always use a player-facing threat map when I run games. It works best in games where your players have the means to not just react to dangers but also get out ahead of them. I wouldn’t use this tool in games like Shiver or Camp Murder Lake, for example, because those games are about not being in control.

That said, introducing the threat map at a point in the game where the characters have crossed a certain power threshold could be a great way of driving home the fact that they’ve got bigger responsibilities now.

THE LAST THING I LOVE

Besides my spouse, my dog, and my library of books and games, I love one other thing — a good template.

Here’s the threat map I used when I was running Starfinder. Feel free to download it and make it your own, and tell me how you think you might incorporate player-facing threat maps into your next campaign!

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Ang gets JT and Walt on the mics to learn more about what the OSR (Old School… Renaissance? Revival? Retro? The R varies) actually is. Join us and learn more about this style of roleplaying game.

 

Links:

JT’s Amazon Book Page

Origins Game Fair

Renegade Game Studios

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One of my gaming groups plays a mashed up game with three genres: Highschool, Swashbuckling, and Urban Fantasy. We call it Children of the Shroud. In the game we play high school kids in a hidden magic world. As part of our magical learning we are part of the Junior Guardians club. It’s a club for magical students at our high school in Buffalo NY. Due to reasons, we got ourselves involved in trying to stop a magic prosperity cult who are using the in-game currency of a video game called Call of Violence to try and manifest a new primal elemental of prosperity. This in-game currency can be bought with real world money. Prosperity magic is outlawed by the magic cops because it can destroy the magical veil which helps hide the magical world from the normals out there. If those normals found out about the magical world they’d get really torch and pitchforky on the magic folks. 

Our characters are…interesting. My character, Silas, had his girlfriend’s essence bound to his soul when the campaign started and has been trying to make her whole again. Ti is a medusa in a really nice middle class family of medusas. Gunny just figured out he was a wind elemental and his dad isn’t dead, but some big bad criminal, or spy, or both. On top of that we can all manifest magical weapons that let us cast stronger and stronger spells the longer we fight, and two of us are also on the academic decathlon team at school, or the Knowledge Bowl team, as our friend Ti likes to say.

It’s a mashup. So let’s talk about how you can do something similar.

Pick Genres

First, pick three genres. Need a list? You can try TV tropes or here’s a bunch of genre’s to pick from: 

Action, Adventure, Comedy, Crime, Espionage, Fairy Tale, Hard SciFi, High Fantasy, High School, Historical, Horror, Low Fantasy, Martial Arts or Wuxia (It’s Woo-Shhaaa, say it with me, Woo. Shhaaa.) Mecha, Medical, Medieval, Modern, Mystery, Politics, Post-Apocalypse, Prehistoric (who doesn’t love a big old dinosaur), Psionics, your favorite version of the punk genre, Pulp, Science Fantasy, Soft SciFi, Space Opera, Sports (we need more sports RPGs), Suburbia, Super Heroes, Sword & Sorcery, Urban Fantasy, Western, Zombies AKA Hordes of shambling dead people where the shambling dead are the least dangerous thing.

Understand Your Genres

Second, understand what your genres are about. Let’s look at the Children of the Shroud game I mentioned. I’ll be quoting the Cortex Prime rule book for their take on the first two genres:

High School: Teenagers are complicated, and so are the adults that share their worlds, especially when the drama is dialed all the way up because of exams, proms, drugs, and bullies.

Swashbuckler: Icons of this genre are pirates, musketeers, and scoundrels, but it really extends to anything where the characters engage in flashy exploits, daring escapes, over the top swordfights, and perilous relationships.

There isn’t an Urban Fantasy genre in the Cortex book but here’s my best take on it.

Urban Fantasy: often deals with a world of magic in a modern setting. Most Urban Fantasy has a mystery at the center of these stories, leaning on its roots in noir fiction, but the genre is primarily about mixing the magical with a mundane world and seeing how they interact. The PCs should also have one foot in both the magical and mundane worlds.

Fit Those Genres Together – Largest Step

Third, try and look at how the genres can fit together. This examination also lets you take a genre to a different sub genre or lets you add a sub genre. Once again, here’s how we did it with Children of the Shroud.

In our Children of the Shroud game we decided everyone would have a magical weapon of some sort that they manifested, and the weapon would generate mana as it was wielded through different forms for combat magic. That was the intersection of Swashbuckling and Urban Fantasy. It also let me push a bit of the high school magic animes I enjoy into the game.

We decided we wanted ritual magic that took longer to use but was more flexible than combat magic and could produce a variety of effects. This strictly fits the Urban Fantasy genre.

Our GM, and fellow Gnome, Phil, created something called the Shroud, which hid the magical world from the mundane world but it could be strained if magic was used too blatantly. This also meant there was a governing body over magic in the world (the Veil), who helped maintain the Shroud and investigated and prosecuted those who sought to expose the Shroud or use magic in a way that would harm it. This pushed us to a hidden magical world as part of our urban fantasy genre. 

To help make this hidden world, urban fantasy, and high school genre even more poignant and overlapped, we placed the parents of our characters as part of this magical society in some way. On top of that, Gunny’s player decided his mother doesn’t know anything about the magical world, creating some hidden world genre tension.

Next we crafted mechanics that pulled in school cliques to highlight the high school school side of play. We called them Roles. This is a feature of Cortex Prime. Our Roles trait set includes Emo, Geek, Jock, Popular, and Performer. They provided attributes, but also our social standing in different school cliques. This is predominantly a highschool thing, but the mechanics also played into the action parts of our swashbuckling since Jock and Geek were used in our dueling rules.

We also decided our high school would be mostly mundane, but there would be a special club called the Junior Guardians that was a cover for the magical teens attending the school. This club would be where they got their magical education. This hits the high school and urban fantasy genres along with that hidden world sub genre.

Lastly, we have our important relationships. We started with two in the magical world and two in the mundane world to keep up the idea of being in both worlds from Urban Fantasy. Also, because one of the genres is Swashbuckling our GM decided to also do their best to make some of those relationships dangerous in a variety of ways.

There’s actually more to it than that, I just threw a bunch of examples of what we did at you. If you break it down there’s really just three things the group needs to consider and one extra the GM should keep in mind. Time for a sub list.

Setting

Your setting should do its best to find these overlaps. As human beings we’re pretty good at finding the patterns and intersections where these different genres and their setting elements can intersect. Just ask yourself a few questions such as:

• Where are the predominant locations the game will take place?
• Who are the important NPCs and how do they fit into the setting?
• Why are people or organizations doing what they’re doing? What’s their motivation?
• Where is the tension and conflict in the setting and how can it be related to the genres being used?

That’s just off the top of my head. Add questions that work best for your group and creative style.

Situation

An addendum to the setting would be situation. What is the initial situation the characters find themselves in or what is the overall situation the game assumes the characters will be involved in? Some folks think of this as a scenario or plot but it’s a little higher level than that. It’s more of a guideline for the players so they more easily craft characters inside the campaign. It also gives starting tensions, problems, and ways for the GM to provide meaningful hooks for the PCs.

In our Children of the Shroud game we were all a part of the Junior Guardians, which meant we had Junior Guardian missions we had to take part in. On top of that we had personal goals the GM ok’ed as part of the initial situation. Silas had his girlfriend Meseme’s essence bound to his soul and was dealing with the fallout from that. Gunny had just discovered he was magical, and that his dead father wasn’t dead and was also magical.

Mechanics

Your mechanics need to find ways to fit the overlaps. Cortex Prime made this easier because we built a game using the Cortex Legos. It was a little more upfront work but made for a very fun experience.The relationships, the roles, our dueling rules, how magic affected the Shroud, and our magic ritual rules all touched on the genres we chose in some way.

You can look around for a game that just does what you’re looking for. If you want a pulpy weird west with a dash of horror game, you can play Deadlands. But if you’re trying something where it’s not quite as obvious, or there’s not a game that fits what you’re looking for, it’s time to break out some house rules, hacks, and drifts. It’s a whole discussion on it’s own, but here’s a couple ideas for how to go about it:

• Utilize the core mechanisms of the game to build the things you believe you need to make the game fit the genre.
• Adapt mechanics and ideas from other games to the game you prefer.
• Combine the above two ideas.

What I would advise against is excluding rules for things that would be important to the genre and just leaving it up to interactions at the table. Of course, if your table is ok with GM fiat as a final arbiter for important decisions and moments in the game, then you should do that. Every table is different in what they enjoy.

Characters

Your characters should be crafted with the genres in mind, along with the above mentioned situation. Genres have character tropes that fit inside of them and story tropes which help drive character action. Here’s a solid way to come up with an interesting character for a genre mash game. Let’s do an original from Children of the Shroud:

• Start with a character archetype from one of the genres or pick two and mash them together
  • Manic Pixie Girl with sleep magic (High School / Urban Fantasy) She’s very pro Veil (Hidden World)
• Put a spin on it
  • She’s really pretty anxious about talking to people about things that matter unless it’s in her dream space. (High School / Urban Fantasy)
• Pick some kind of story arc you’d like your character to go on
  • Will she still see the Veil as the bastion of order, law, and good she believes it to be after working inside of it? (Swashbuckling / Urban Fantasy)
• Then play to the motivations of the character, the ideas of the trope, the idea of the story arc, and the spin.

The above example isn’t really an original, it’s a character named Bo who’s a much more prominent NPC in our game these days. She’s part of the Junior Guardians which is how our PCs know her, and she went to the Prom with Ti. This is just the story I would envision for her if I was playing her.

Together these steps will give a way to make a character that fits into the game you’ve mashed together.

Scenarios

Lastly, let’s talk about Scenarios. It’s actually the easiest part because you just look at the plots and tropes those kinds of genre stories have and build scenarios utilizing them as foundations. Then you can add some interesting bits from your characters, setting, and situation, utilizing your genre tropes where appropriate, and you have yourself a genre mashed scenario.

Phil did this quite expertly in our 3rd Children of the Shroud story, Smarty Pants. We started with an academic decathlon against a rival school (High School). Silas spied a student on the opposing team, Lowell Thornton, using a magical Altoid to give himself a temporary intellect boost during their one-on-one trivia battle. Thing is, Lowell isn’t magical (Urban Fantasy). On top of that, before we started the story Phil asked us about how we knew our friend Morris who died at a party at Lowell’s house this past summer, drowning in Lowell’s pool (Swashbuckling – Perilous Relationship). I told Phil my character was really tight with Morris, who was the one who introduced Silas to Meseme, my girlfriend whose soul is cohabiting my body (Highschool / Urban Fantasy). We come to find out that the Altoids were imbued with the essence of Morris, who had his soul sucked out of him in a magical ritual (Urban Fantasy). So now our characters are running down who sold the Altoids to Lowell which leads to who tried to kill Meseme in the same way (Swashbuckling / Urban Fantasy). During the entire story Silas is having emotional anger issues. His friends are doing what they can to deal with it, but tensions are high (High School). There’s a running battle in the park with one of the essence dealers, but she gets away (Swashbuckling). Hard conversations are had but eventually Silas’s friends, Ti and Gunny, help Silas commune with Meseme within his soul, which helps calm him down, and three are able to track down and bring some of the people involved with taking people’s essence to justice(High School / Urban Fantasy). This was, of course, in a huge sword fight in an abandoned asylum for the mentally ill in the city of Buffalo, NY (Swashbuckling). Yes, we have one of those here. It’s real.

Now that you have the list, here’s the most important thing to keep in mind. These items aren’t necessarily done in order. You’ll most likely need to bounce around to each of them, getting little bits of information, making choices, asking questions, and filling things out until you have a clear enough picture to proceed with whatever might be the next logical step in your genre mashup.

Session 0 or Session -1

To help this process you might want to gather your game group for this genre mash. Session 0’s are great for this, or even session -1 where you’re just hashing out the above items. There’s a lot to talk about, but here’s a starting list of things to think about when having this discussion.

Genre

• Which genres are we going to use?
• What do the genres mean to each person? 
• Where do the genres overlap?

Setting

• What do the genre overlaps mean for the setting? 
• Is the setting original or something created whole cloth? 
• Who’s building or deciding on the setting? Is it a group effort? Is the GM going to take point and get input from the rest of the group, or will you use some other methodology? 
• What’s the initial situation for the characters going to look like?

Mechanics

• What mechanics are you going to use? 
• How do they fit your genre mashup? 
• How don’t they fit your genre mashup? 
• Are you planning on hacking them to make them fit better? 

It can feel like a lot, but I find this kind of effort to be a fun creative exercise, regardless of whether you’re doing most of it alone or with your group. In my experience, if you just follow the flow of answers and questions as they come up, and refer to the above questions as you find yourself getting stuck, you’ll have a pretty easy time with this.

I will provide one more bit of advice. If you’re the GM and are doing this exercise with your group, I would suggest facilitating this part just like you run the game. Ask a question, get some answers, take some notes. Always do your best to provide and get clarifications on things that are said. Also, don’t be afraid to say no to things that don’t fit together, or ask the group how those pieces that don’t look like they fit together actually do fit together. You should do your best to control the pace and when things bog down, utilize the people in your group to get unstuck.

I just want to say thanks if you’ve read this far. Let me recap the steps I think about when putting together a genre mash game.

Recap

First, pick three genres.

Second, understand what your genres are about.

Third, try and look at how the genre’s can fit together and if you need to take a genre to a slightly different sub genre. When doing this you should think about these things:

• Setting. The people, places, important history, and current events of the game. These should all reinforce one or more of the genres.
• Situation. This is the initial set of circumstances the characters will find themselves in.
• Characters. Player characters that fit inside the genre and can be protagonists in the game.
• Mechanics. Mechanisms and procedures that make sense with and enhance the genres of the game you’re playing.
• Scenario. Build scenarios using the aforementioned elements along with the plots and story beats used in the genres you’re mashing up.

Once you’ve done that you have yourself a genre mashed game.

Now let me ask you. What kind of Genre Mashups have you put together? How did you do it? How would you enhance what I’ve presented?

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When starting to design an adventure for your home group, the first things I always consider are the mood, tone, and theme of the adventure. This will dictate all design decisions, descriptions, monsters included, sometimes the treasure gained, and the general aesthetics of everything I create for the adventure.

Before I jump in, you’ll note that I’m leaving genre out of this list because I’m assuming you already have an established genre for the game you’re running for your group. If you’re working with a “clean slate” (meaning no campaign in flight for this adventure), then you really should determine the genre(s) you’re going to take into account for this adventure. Picking the genre first will drive many of the tropes, assumptions, styles, and approaches for storytelling within the adventure.

Having said all of that, I’m going to delve into mood, tone, and theme, in that order. I truly feel that one leads to the next that leads to the next. I always do them in this order.

Mood

This is the emotional resonance of the adventure. This encompasses the presentation of the material and the feels you want to evoke in your players by way of their characters’ experiences. I highly encourage you to head over to David Hodder’s web site and look at the top “emotion wheel” he has posted there. You’ll start with the innermost level of the wheel and pick an emotion. Then drill toward the outer edges to find more precise emotions.

I recommend having several moods/emotions chosen for your adventure, but make sure they’ll mesh together or have one lead to another. Sometimes, an adventure can present different moods at different stages of the adventure. Perhaps the adventure starts with a village celebration (jubilation) that gets invaded by nearby ravagers (panic) until the party of adventurers restores calm (content). However, during the invasion, the beloved mayor of the village is slain (rage/hate), so the adventurers take it upon themselves to venture into the nearby wilderness to put an end to the ravagers once and for all (stimulated). When they successfully return from their mission (satisfied), the villagers heap glory and accolades upon them (relieved/passion).

Tone

The tone of the adventure is how things are presented to the GM and the players. I’m assuming the GM is you, so you’ll want to make sure your notes, ideas, writings, and concepts reflect the tone you want to present to the players. By approaching your writing of notes with a specific tone in mind, you’ll be more consistent in your presentation of that tone to the players.

Some examples of tones for adventures are:

• Optimistic
• Pessimistic
• Joyful
• Sadness
• Fearful
• Hopeful
• Humorous
• Serious
• Horrific
• Mundane
• Warmongering
• Peaceful
• Weird
• Normal

Theme

The theme of your adventure can, I would argue should, borrow from literary themes. They are well-established, well-researched, and in many places are thoughtfully presented for your education. There are numerous lists of themes on the Internet. A quick search for “story themes” will produce gobs of results. Set a timer for 20-30 minutes before doing any research like this to avoid wasting hours down “the Internet rabbit hole.”

The lists of literary themes are so numerous and lengthy, I’m not going to try and reproduce them here. Instead, I’m giving you the above homework of doing your own research. I just don’t have the space or word count here to even sum up themes that can be applied to adventure creation.

Most of the themes are going to reflect how your PCs interact with the events and situations in your adventure. If you come up with your theme and then design an encounter that doesn’t support or mirror that theme, then the encounter might feel like a waste of time to the PCs. If you can tie every setting, every encounter, most NPCs, and the story arcs to your theme, the adventure will feel more like a cohesive whole rather than random bits tied together with string.

Taking my above example of the ravagers attacking the village during a celebration followed by the PCs tracking down the ravagers in the wilderness and putting an end to them, I would propose that my theme should be something along the lines of “righteous justice.” However, if I shift things around a bit and have the ravagers motivated by their leader’s love for the mayor’s daughter, the theme can change to “unrequited love.” If the daughter loves the leader back, it changes again to “fated love.” If there is no love element in the story arc, but the ravagers are going through a famine and just needed some food the villagers wouldn’t (or couldn’t) sell to the men and women in the wilderness, then you have a “survival” theme. This can be especially true if the famine of the wilderness is creeping toward the village and its farmlands.

The key is to pick a theme to run with, so that it can properly inform and color your story as you put the pieces together.

Changes Over Arcs

I’m also going to add on here that if you have multiple “acts” or “story arcs” within your adventure, you can have a different theme (or mood or tone) for each act of the adventure. I’m mainly working off the assumption that your adventure is a single act, but if it’s longer, then you can definitely have multiple choices going on here. The longer your adventure, the more opportunity you have to explore different aspects of storytelling within your plans.

Stay Tuned!

Next month, I’m going to tackle a concept that I came up with (though it’s probably not unique) called “designing back to front.” I hope you liked this article and stick with me for the next one.

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Licensed games usually take the approach of presenting material that can happen far away from the canon events of the setting. This works especially well in settings like Star Trek or Star Wars, where there is a literal galaxy of locations available for storytelling. Player characters may hear about canon events, and there may be a butterfly effect on some of their options, but the assumption of the game is that the player characters aren’t going to be directly confronting and potentially contradicting the fictitious history of the setting.

Despite this, there are some fans who want exactly that. If they are playing in a game about a given setting, they want to be present for the events they have read about or seen on screen. They may or may not want to step into the shoes of an existing character, either by playing that character, or by playing a character that replaces the canon character in the game table’s narrative. If you want to play through a campaign where it’s possible for Luke Skywalker to miss the shot that destroys the Death Star because a PC failed to keep a TIE Fighter off his tail, that’s largely on the game facilitator to navigate.

Modiphius has taken an interesting approach to this with their Dune: Adventures in the Imperium RPG. While it largely assumes that player characters will be engaging in house politics in other corners of the galaxy or touching upon Arrakis in moments between galaxy shaking events, it has also introduced products that directly engage the canon narrative. The primary example of this has been the Agents of Dune boxed set, which places the player characters and their house in the place of House Atreides, inheriting Dune from the Harkonnens by decree of the emperor.

The adventure we’re looking at today also places player characters directly in the path of galactic history, presenting a campaign that takes place just before, during, and in the aftermath of Paul Atreides’ takeover of the imperial throne.

 Dune: Fall of the Imperium

Creative Lead Andrew Peregrine
Line Editor/Canon Editor Rachel J. Wilkinson
Writing Richard August, Simon Berman, Jason Brick, Jason Durall, Keith Garrett, Jack Norris, Andrew Peregrine, Dave Semark, Hilary Sklar, Devinder Thiara, Mari Tokuda, Rachel J. Wilkinson
Graphic Design Chris Webb, Leigh Woosey, Jen Mccleary
Art Direction Rocío Martín Pérez
Cover Artist David Benzal
Interior Artwork Artists Amir Zand, Joel Chaim Holtzman, János Tokity, Simone Rizzo, Jakub Kozlowski, Carmen Cornet, Eren Arik, Hans Park, Mikhail Palamarchuk, Mihail Spil-Haufter, Lixin Yin, Susanah Grace, Alexander Guillen Brox, Imad Awan, Louie Maryon, Justin Usher, Jonny Sun, Olivier Hennart, Pat Fix, Avishek Banerjee, Bastien Lecouffe-Deharme, Simone Rizzo
Proofreading Stuart Gorman
Project Management Daniel Lade
Brand Management Joe Lefavi for Genuine Entertainment

Disclaimer

I am not working from a review copy of this product and did not receive a review copy to work from. I have received review copies from Modiphius Entertainment in the past. I have not had the opportunity to play or run this adventure. I do have a familiarity with the 2d20 system, having run and played multiple iterations of the rules.

Layout and Design

I am working from a PDF of the adventure. The adventure is available as a PDF or a physical book. Additionally, there is a Roll20 version of the adventure for sale. The PDF is 146 pages long. The content of those pages breaks down to this:

• Covers–2 pages
• Inside Front Cover Art–1 page
• Company Title Page–1 page
• Product Title Page–1 page
• Credits Page–1 page
• Table of Contents–1 page
• Shuttle Map–1 page
• Map of Arrakeen–1 page
• Modiphius Product Ads–3 pages

There is some glorious artwork in this book, and the design of most of the outfits, vehicles, architecture, etc. match the recent movies. While this book assumes the continuity of the original novels, the licensing is all bound together, meaning they don’t have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to producing artwork. The pages are in a light parchment color, with geometric flourishes under the text. There is artwork throughout, especially depicting notable characters. Each of the chapters starts with a two-page spread of full color art.

The layout varies depending on the purpose of the text. Most of the adventure is in a two-column layout, but background material and overviews are formatted in centered text boxes or single columns that run down the middle of the page. Sidebars are often in the lower right- or left-hand side of the page.

The Judge of the Change

This adventure is the framework for an entire campaign, if you couldn’t glean that from the introduction. The book itself is broken into the following sections:

• Introduction
• Act I: The Gathering Storm
• Act II: Muad’Dib
• Act III: Fall of the Imperium
• Act IV: War Across a Million Worlds
• Adventures in the Era of Muad’Dib

Adventures in the Era of Muad’Dib is a section that details the kind of setting assumptions that should be considered for playing the RPG during the establishment of Paul’s reign. This includes the differences between the chaos and violence of that era, contrasted against the political maneuvering and quick betrayals of the previous era.

Each act of the campaign has its own set of acts, which are the primary adventures that characters will engage with as that leg of the campaign progresses. This means that within all four acts, there are three adventures, each with their own three acts.

While I mentioned the Agents of Dune campaign boxed set above, unlike that product, these adventures assume that the events of the novels happen when and how they are detailed in the source material. There are a few notes on what might happen if the GM and the players want to deviate from the story, but most sections assume that the path of history rolls forward unabated.

Who Are You?

The PCs are playing agents of their own house, managing their interests in light of emerging events. For several parts of the campaign, this means you’ll be dealing with the cascading effects of galactic history, rather than being right next to it. However, there are several places where the adventure narrows back down to canon events so the PCs can be present as witnesses.

There is an interesting sidebar at the beginning of the adventure which I both agree with and think oversimplifies the situation, especially when it’s applied to the players and the decisions they are making. The sidebar mentions that both Paul and the Harkonnens are nobles whose people toil for the profit of their rulers, and that while the Harkonnens are vicious and violent in their tactics, Paul starts a war that kills billions of people. All on board with “Paul isn’t the Good Guy.” But it also frames this as “there are no villains,” which, no, that’s harder to take. Paul isn’t the good guy because of the repercussions of his actions, but it is hard to say that the Harkonnens aren’t villains. I think it’s pretty easy to conceive of a story where there are no heroes, only villains, rather than saying there are no heroes or villains.

Part of why this sidebar exists, however, is to reinforce the concept that making decisions for a House in the Landsraad often means choosing between multiple bad options. If the PCs ally with the Harkonnens for a time, they aren’t suddenly the villains of the story, they may just be doing something very distasteful for them in order to help their house survive. There are several places in the narrative where characters have the option of throwing in with different houses against other houses, which means being allied doesn’t always mean being long term friends or business partners.

As agents of a Landsraad House, there are a combination of missions you can undertake for the betterment of your house, which also happens to give you insight into the greater events unfolding. For example, trying to secure a hidden smuggler’s cache of spice after the Atreides take over Arrakis lets you stumble upon some Harkonnen records that may lead you to the hidden base of operations of a Sardukar agent, and so on.

While the adventure has several places where events unfold at a distance from the events of the novels, there are a few key places where the PCs are funneled back into the main narrative. These include:

• The night House Atreides falls
• The Death of Rabban
• The Death of Leto II
• The sequence of Paul’s ascension to the throne and all the events surrounding it

If you read “The Death of Leto II,” and thought, wait, I don’t want to be there for that, I completely understand. That particular aspect of the adventure kind of underscores some of the problems the adventure has whenever it funnels the PCs back to major canon events. It’s very clear you are pushed into those events to witness them. If you play the adventure as written, you are sent with the Sardukar on their raid of the sietch, and you arrive at the scene just after Leto II has been killed.

In many of the “up close to history” scenes, your characters are rolling to avoid getting in anyone’s way and hoping to pick up some things beneficial to your house on the periphery of bigger events. One exception to this is the death of Rabban. The PCs have several paths to this point, but almost all of them involve someone wanting them to kill Rabban in the lead up to the most tumultuous events preceding Paul’s ascension.

This would be a really neat, “that was your characters!” moment, except there are still some heavy handed sections where his location is a bait and switch, so you must encounter Feyd, and you can’t kill Rabban all by yourselves, Gurney Halleck will show up and either try to do it before you, or help you out.

The Wide-Open Galaxy

Act II is especially open compared to the rest of the adventure. Your characters are negotiating for spice as Harkonnen production slows. You chase spies on a ski resort planet. You skulk around backwaters looking for blackmail information and encrypted documents. In one of my favorite moments in the adventure, your characters navigate a night of betrayal that is both thematically calling back to the attack on House Atreides, but both more subtle and distinct. It’s one of those places where it really feels like the adventure delivers you a very “Dune” experience without just using canon Dune events.

Act IV is strange. While it deals with events we know happened, broadly, i.e. Paul’s crusade ravaging worlds that failed to show their loyalty, the places where these adventures take place generally don’t have a lot of canon surrounding them, meaning that the PCs actions can have greater effect. The downside is that in many cases, the reason they are in the path of these events is very thin. In several cases, Paul issues an imperial decree for the PCs to go to a place, where they may work against his agents, and the next time they see Paul, “he sees something in their future that keeps him from acting against them,” and then they can go somewhere else and either discreetly or overtly defy him.

The culmination of the entire adventure/campaign is that a House that has long been associated with the PCs’ House is accused of treason. The PCs can find out what is going on, disassociate themselves from their allies or exonerate them, and determine who to screw over and who to align themselves with to keep one of Paul’s lieutenants from declaring their House as an enemy of the throne.

Mechanical Resolution

An aspect of the adventure that I really enjoy is that it leans into the 2d20 concept of creating traits. If you aren’t familiar with traits in a 2d20 game (which have slightly different names depending on the 2d20 game in question), they function in a manner similar to Fate aspects. They are a broad description of something that is true. Depending on the narrative, traits either grant narrative permission to do something that wouldn’t be possible if the trait weren’t active, or it adds or subtracts from the difficulty of a task if it is relevant to that task.

Depending on how the PCs resolve different scenes in the adventure, they may acquire different traits, which will be available for use either by the PCs or the GM if they are still active. For example, in many cases, PCs that ally with a house will gain a trait that denotes that they are “Ally of House X,” and any time that’s relevant, it might make a check either more or less difficult. They may also gain traits that reflect their reputation; for example, if they resolve a scene by hiding, they may get a “Cowardice” trait, which might come into play whenever dealing with characters that are proud of their martial accomplishments.

There are also events that remove traits. For example, early in the adventure, it’s a lot easier for the PCs to pick up the “Ally to House Harkonnen” trait, which they may end up shedding if, later in the adventure, they advocate for the emperor to strip them of their rights to Arrakis.

Like Star Trek Adventures, Dune: Adventures in the Imperium makes provisions for a player running characters other than their primary character, usually in circumstances where the PCs wouldn’t want to personally be involved in the activities they are directing. This is separate from, but adjacent to, Architect play, where PCs can say they are using resources from a distance to manipulate events, making checks for broad actions they are taking, to influence events.

For example, if a character has troops as one of their resources, and there have been smugglers raiding their holdings, they could use Architect mode to send troops to take care of the smugglers without ever going to that location, rolling to see how well their orders are carried out versus the difficulty of the outcome they want. The downside to Architect play being that it’s hard to get specific granular results. In the example above, you might be able to get rid of the smugglers, but the GM may tell you that unless you show up yourself, you can’t expect your troops to capture a smuggler alive for interrogation.

There are a few places in the adventure where broader goals are mentioned as something the PCs might attempt with Architect mode, usually in the periphery of events that surround the political maneuvering in Act II. There are also a few brief mentions of using supporting characters during certain events, especially if the player character in question isn’t a particularly martial specimen, and they tackle a mission like killing Rabban.

Because these are excellent tools, I wish the adventure had spent more time expanding how they could be used to greater effect in various scenes. While I don’t think any scene where the PCs have most of their agency removed is going to be fun to sit through, I could see several of the “you must go this direction” encounters being easier to swallow if those scenes were expressly meant to be carried out by secondary character operatives. I suspect that this wasn’t done in part because the adventure wants your primary PCs to be present at these major events, not just a character you are playing.

Having a few lines referencing, “they could get X, likely through Architect play,” isn’t nearly as satisfying as a more detailed list of resources or events that the PCs could undertake that had a direct effect on the narrative and the position of their house in each act.

Aftermath

When I first saw there was a section on Adventures in the Era of Muad’Dib, I was thinking something along the lines of the one-page mission briefs from Star Trek Adventures. This is, more precisely, tools and mechanics available to reflect the differences in the galaxy after Paul’s ascension to the throne and the spread of his religion. It introduces the faction template for the Qizarate, as well as six new talents that are either tied to that faction or involve interaction with Paul directly.

While there aren’t “mission brief” style adventures, there are sections on what resistance to the throne looks like in this era, some of the espionage that might be going on, and a few adventure seeds surrounding interacting with Paul, the adherents of his faith, and the changing allegiances in the Imperium. These are generally short, one paragraph long descriptions.

 I feel like you’re either going to have some frustrating moments as written, or you’re going to be reworking some key scenes so that the PCs have actual agency in those moments 

The Mystery of Life Isn’t a Problem to Solve, But A Reality to Experience

I really appreciate the ambition of this adventure. It really shines in Act II, and a bit in Act IV, where the PCs have lots of options available to them, and the main thing that is determined by canon are the stakes they are navigating. I absolutely love the Night of Slow blades section of the adventure, because it hits that sweet spot of “this is tailored for your PCs” and “this feels like exactly what would happen in the novels.” There are also some other scenes across various acts that shine. While not everyone may take the road that leads to this, I really liked the details of negotiating with Baron Harkonnen, as well as the scenes where the PCs can debate with other agents of the Landsraad houses in court with the emperor.

An Animal Caught in A Trap Will Gnaw Off Its Own Leg to Escape. What Will You Do?

I wish that when the adventure pushes the PCs into “witness” mode, there was more for them to do than observe and make a few checks to see if they pick up a new trait or asset for themselves or their house. There are some brushes with canon events early on that feel especially frustrating. You may get into a fight with Rabban the night of the Atreides attack, but he’s got plot armor. You might see Jessica and Paul being herded onto an ornithopter in the distance, but you’re too far away to do anything about it. The absolute worse example of this is being present for Leto II’s death. I don’t expect the adventure to give you the opportunity to stop this from happening–it’s a pretty pivotal story beat. But I don’t know that my desire to witness the noteworthy events of Dune included helplessly traveling with the people that murder Paul’s infant son.

Tenuous Recommendation–The product has positive aspects, but buyers may want to make sure the positive aspects align with their tastes before moving this up their list of what to purchase next.

I don’t want to be too brutal. I think that if you are a fan of Dune (and I’m not sure why you would be buying Dune RPG material if you weren’t) you will find some use for this adventure. On the other hand, I feel like you’re either going to have some frustrating moments as written, or you’re going to be reworking some key scenes so that the PCs have actual agency in those moments. That’s a shame, because there are some wonderful moments in the adventure that tie the PCs and their house to events with a little more room to breathe, that would be great to see attached to an adventure that didn’t funnel you back into your front row seats for a show you can’t really affect.

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Ang, Chris and Josh chat about mixing up genres in our RPGs and as a result touch on what genre is, and why we can and should mash it all up together!

Links:

D&D Lego!

The Nebula Awards

Daggerheart Playtest

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We are all familiar with the trope of a regular gaming group. You know, the one who meets on regular days in the regular gaming location. And while the particularities of the imagined group differ, the factors of time and space stay constant, but so too does the cast. Although we all know how wonderful a regular gaming group can be, I am here to suggest that there’s several benefits of regularly shifting up the cast around your gaming table as well. I will discuss the pros of this, and of course mention some of the cons while suggesting how they can be remedied or at least reduced. I might even suggest that shifting up your regular gaming group will just mean you’ll have a regular gaming circle, but that’s getting ahead of myself. I’ll discuss the benefits of not having a regular group first.

Scheduling

People’s lives change, along with their calendars, interests and priorities, and unfortunately also health and postal codes. Having a steady group is all well and good, but sometimes scheduling games will take a lot of effort. For a lot of us that’s where the real issue of burnout comes from, with a tedious and complicated scheduling matrix, and the accompanying cancellations. I find that it’s much easier to fit people to dates I’m available instead of finding people first and then looking at the calendars. I’d rather play shorter campaigns for six months or so, than risk having campaigns end in scheduling limbo, due to peoples changing lives and priorities. It’s much easier to find a date that works for all if the group is brought together on the same premise and not just out of habit. If everyone assembled for your Weird Western-game is really wanting to play weird western and have all cleared the same date in the week, you are more certain that they will attend game nights than if they’re just your friends, have other hobbies and are really just wanting you all to go back to playing a Fantasy or a Cyberpunk game again. Sure, people will still have emergencies, or just family or work commitments, but if you have a robust group bound together on a mission, you might at least get to finish the campaign together, at the very least experience a somewhat satisfactory ending, even if things keep happening. Oh, and as a bonus, you also have at least one friend who is eagerly awaiting the start of the next Fantasy or Cyberpunk campaign!

Different Experiences

While monogamy has its virtues, I find that gaming with a richer and more varied crowd brings a lot of benefits to myself, the other individuals and the group as a whole, while also benefiting a larger circle of people. We avoid the rut that a steady group will sometimes attain, and variations in cast give different players the chance to try out different roles/functions/classes that some players tend to monopolize. Like the players who will “always” play “The Face” character, but the GM knows that one of the shyer players has talked about playing one for a long time. This might also include the one who will always play the lone magical talent or the baddest of the baddest combatant as well. Also, I believe new blood opens up for new perspectives, ideas and challenges, and that the table dynamics won’t get stale. New players also mean new approaches, new words and maybe something different that people can add to their repertoire. This goes double if your gaming table carousel includes different GMs as well as players, and I’ll add that your great tricks will reach more roleplayers as well.

Polygamery

Not all players will play all types of games and genres, and my experience is that some groups tend to be quite selective in what they enjoy to play. Not only can you finally play that heart-(and other body parts-)wrenching game of Monsterhearts, but you can do it without the sighs of those who would rather rob the Megacorps of Night City or kill the inhabitants of the Caverns of Chaos and take their stuff. Changing up your groups opens up for bringing your Sun Tzus and butt-kickers to one game and your Elisabeth Bennets to another; for optimization of enjoyment. A wrong player might weaken the right game, but the synergies of players who truly “sing” together is a beautiful experience. Playing lots of different games means that you might even get your non-roleplaying friends to attend, because they’re so into the Russian Women’s Piloting World War II efforts or Dinosaur Princesses, bringing more people into our lovely hobby and maybe having even more intimate friendships?

Network

If you treat your table or living room as a carousel, I believe it will in time give you access to more players, multiple GMs for those burnout periods, and, as mentioned, a roster for different play experiences. A larger pool also means that your games will be less vulnerable to people relocating or otherwise becoming unavailable for play, and if you game online you might meet those friends at conventions and maybe even get to do some couch surfing? I recently had a friend lend me a proper bed and feline company for a faraway convention. Since we had experience gaming online together, I was also certain their games would give me some good gaming experiences. While I believe the benefits to yourself are clear, I also believe you’ll be doing other people a favor, introducing them both to other people and other games, and perhaps even other playstyles than they’re used to. Maybe you can help spawn new groups as well as new friendships?

Note: Friendships will endure even if a game is paused! Playing with someone else doesn’t mean you can’t do other stuff or even play one-shots with friends, and I also believe that you don’t need to game with all your gaming friends, especially if your playstyles and game interests don’t really match up that well.

Cons

Changing up the group all the time means regularly (re)establishing group lingo, forming-storming-and-norming-before-performing (optimally) and the flip-side of the new perspectives and shaking up the dynamics-coin. Safety? Not everyone will be comfortable meeting new people at their places or even bringing them home, and just needing to go to another neighbourhood or taking another bus route might be an issue, even if the group is safe itself. There’s also the dreaded FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), which I myself consider an old friend. I can honestly say that not only will it get better, but you’ll learn to be happy when your friends get to play, even when it’s without you. I understand that it can be difficult, especially if you’re not actively gaming yourself at the time. Sometimes it’s really easy to think that you’re being excluded, even though your friends have a full gaming table of people who are much more interested in the particular genre/game than you, but you’ll recognize that the sting of perception isn’t real. If you regularly change up the makeup of your own gaming table, it’s easier to understand that this is the case when you yourself aren’t asked first to that genre you don’t really like. In time you’ll learn to be happy when your friends get to play, even if you yourself are devoid of game time; because you know that soon your big roster of gaming buddies will invite you. Sometimes you and your best friend play parallel games that aren’t for each other, but that doesn’t mean you can’t meet up and talk about the different games and revel in your friend’s happiness of being in a game you wouldn’t have liked anyway.

Conclusion

I truly believe that treating your gaming table as a carousel that regulates its cast to the different experiences, both in number of players and temperament suited to different gaming experiences, will benefit both you and the other players. Maybe someone will even take up the GM mantle, since they can’t rely on you always bringing them along for the ride? Yes, it’s easier to enforce this idea if you’re always the GM, but it’s not like you couldn’t invite different GMs to GM different games either. I guess a lot of GMs would be happy to not have to deal with scheduling, and to be assured of enthusiastic and consenting players for that particular game. I also believe that if it is known that you regularly change up the cast around your table people will make more of an effort when they’re there, and others might even want to pursue a chair around your table, by inviting you to their game first.

Even though I advocate changing the cast around everyone’s gaming tables, I’ll gladly admit that my three current groups are all talking about doing another campaign after our current one ends. So am I hypocritical? Well, probably, but in this case I find it a natural development of having played with a lot of different people. You get the aforementioned roster, and you will naturally gravitate to players who like games you like and want to play more with them, and vice versa. Not only that, but you’ll also get to learn player skills, table habits and GM techniques from a lot of people, enabling yourself to become a really popular and crafty GM or player. Every now and then someone’s other life elements will leave them out of a campaign or two, or their interest just isn’t there for a project, and that’s when you’ll be happy for your big roster.

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Face to face, out in the heat, hanging tough, staying hungry…

                                                                                                                                             — Survivor, “Eye of the Tiger”

In a proud GM Dad moment, my eldest daughter just ran her first RPG session as a Game Master! I let her be, but stayed close enough to answer the occasional question, and by all accounts and an enthusiastic reception from her players she did a great job!

While preparing for her first session, she asked me a lot of questions. I answered them as best I could and thought that incorporating that advice into a single primer might help. Unfortunately, I didn’t get a chance to finish this before she started running, but I thought I’d finish it anyway and put it here in the hopes that someone reading this might find it useful.

In terms of background, I’m coming at this from the POV of a Call of Cthulhu Keeper (GM), as that is what my daughter was running. Thus, my headspace was focused on investigative adventures, but I’ve tried to make the advice universally applicable.

So, without further ado…

Trust your group.

This is a big one and I think should be stated first. Unless you are running a convention game, you are probably playing with your friends, friends who understand that this is your first time taking the chair. They know that it’s a big responsibility and they’ll be willing to cut you a lot of slack. They’re happy that you’re willing to run a game for them. So, relax and don’t worry about being judged!

Note that this holds true for convention games, too. Believe it or not, many attendees who join convention games are home GMs who are happy to be players for a while. In any event, most of your players are getting used to playing with each other as much as you, so don’t think that a quiet table is an unhappy table. Everyone needs a little time to feel things out.

Expect to make mistakes.

You’re going to make mistakes, probably lots of them. But that’s okay. As a new GM, you’ve got a lot to keep track of and a responsibility to guide the session. You’re going to get tripped up here and there. Your players know that, and they’ll be fine with it. Again, they’re happy that you’re trying your hand at running!

And here’s a dirty little secret (or not so secret): we veteran GMs make mistakes too! The best advice I can give is not to hide it when you mess up. Nothing eases the stress on you like admitting that you made a mistake. If it’s something that didn’t derail the adventure, then just note the mistake and keep going. If it adversely affected the players, then compensate them and move on.

Be fair in your rulings.

While your players are going to give you their trust, it is up to you to keep it. A good way to do that is to be fair in your rulings. Note that “rulings” aren’t “rules,” they are how you run the game and apply the rules. As long as your decisions feel rational and you apply your rulings fairly, you should maintain the trust of your group.

It’s okay to take advice from your players regarding rules or rulings, but don’t let things get bogged down if a quick ruling keeps things moving. Ultimately, the rules are simply there to help you make decisions. Just make a decision for now and look up the rule after the session. You can apply the rule in the future.

Only appeal to chance when it matters.

Players generally want their characters to be competent. They don’t want to create a martial arts expert that gets easily clubbed unconscious by a purse-wielding senior or a scientist that doesn’t know basic chemistry. An easy way to do this is to simply assume competence when the act ultimately doesn’t matter or when the task seems too easy to fail. On the flip side, you can also say “no” when a character tries to do something that is obviously beyond their capabilities.

This is especially important if you’re running an investigative adventure. If your characters are investigating a crime scene, then they should be able to find any obvious clues as well as clues that they would know to look for. Nothing kills an adventure dead like the players not being able to follow leads because their character missed a skill roll to find a necessary piece of evidence!

There may be times when you’ll want the players to roll but you also need them to succeed. Keep in mind that you don’t have to make the roll a pass-fail test. It may be that if they fail, then they still succeed but draw some sort of complication. For example, if a character fails a roll on an internet search, then you may rule that they found the information only after wasting all night surfing and now they’re exhausted the next day.

Roll in the open.

This one isn’t truly necessary, as there is a long tradition of GMs rolling dice behind screens, but rolling in the open does two things. First, it fosters trust between you and your players that you are keeping things fair. Second, if you know that you’ll be rolling in the open, then you’ll also make sure that you’re only calling for rolls when you can accept the result. If you can’t, then why are you leaving it to chance?

Know the basic beats of your adventure.

Hopefully, you’ve done your prep work on your adventure. If you designed it yourself, then you’ve already internalized it. If you are using an adventure that you didn’t create, then you’ll want to read it at least twice (three is better!).

After reading the adventure, make a quick flowchart that follows the basic beats of the adventure and note where player choice matters. This flowchart doesn’t have to be very detailed, just enough to remind you of where the adventure is heading and how to guide the players back if they take their characters too far afield.

If the players need to meet a key NPC, find a crucial clue, or otherwise need a McGuffin to get to the next part of the adventure, then you’ll want to note that on the flowchart as well. That way, the flowchart will remind you of the important things you need to introduce along the way.

Keep things moving…

One of the worst things that you can do as a GM, new or veteran, is to allow the players to be stumped for too long. Sometimes what is obvious to you isn’t obvious to them, or they’ve simply discarded a clue that’s important because it doesn’t fit their theories. This can lead to unnecessary frustration.

Don’t be afraid to offer guidance. Sometimes, you can simply remind them of what they’ve found or offer suggestions to follow leads. A gentle reminder that they never visited the business on the matchbook they found, or they never thought to check the hills for the goblin encampment may be enough to get them moving without feeling like you handed it to them.

Also, don’t be afraid to end an encounter early if the conclusion is obvious. If the player characters are wiping the floor with kobolds, then you can simply say that they’ve finished them off without having to waste another 15 minutes. If an NPC isn’t going to give the players the information they want, then you don’t need to wait 10 minutes while the players keep asking questions.

…But don’t railroad.

If you’ve played RPGs for any length of time, then you’ve probably heard about the dreaded “railroad.” Simply put, railroading is whenever you take agency away from the players in situations where they believe that they should have agency. If the players are going to follow the adventure, it should be because it feels logical, or at least rational, for them to do so.

A good way to counter this is to always offer an open-ended option whenever you offer suggestions. “So, do you want to go to the business on the matchbook, follow up on Mr. Tanner’s interrogation, or do something else?” reminds the players of leads they haven’t followed but also tells them that you’re willing to go with whatever they decide.

Simplify the rules and internalize them.

Note that while I think most GMs get intimidated by the rules, I’ve made rules the lowest on the list of priorities. That’s because rules are the responsibility of everyone around the table, especially given that most out-of-game arguments during play tend to be about rules.

You don’t need to commit an entire rulebook to memory, but you should internalize the basic mechanic. Don’t worry about side cases. You can always make rulings until you’re more familiar with those rules. Just remember that point above about being fair!

In Dungeons & Dragons, for example, most tests involve rolling a d20 and adding modifiers to meet or exceed a target number. That, along with granting advantage or disadvantage, is enough for you to run a session with little trouble.

You’re supposed to be having fun, too!

This is not so much a guideline but a reminder. As a GM, you aren’t supposed to sacrifice fun; you are simply trading one type of fun for another. You get to see all the behind-the-scenes plotting, enjoy having the players interact with your adventure and make creative (and sometimes bone-headed!) decisions, play a bunch of NPCs, and overall control the flow of the adventure. It can be a blast!

Your players have a responsibility to ensure that you’re having fun, too. While there will certainly be times that a player doesn’t agree with you, they should respect your ultimate decisions. If things become too aggravating or frustrating, then it’s better to take a break or even shut down a campaign until those issues are resolved.

Wrapping Up

While taking the GM Chair can seem intimidating and even overwhelming, it doesn’t have to be. Hopefully, the advice above is helpful in showing you that it’s possible to ease into GMing and, hopefully, lead to your guiding friends through many new adventures!

And as a final (and most important) reminder, GMing is not something to be tolerated, it is meant to be enjoyed!

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Age of Wonders 4 celebrates the first anniversary: Celebrating One Year of Age of Wonders 4! Dear AoW Community, Today, we celebrate the first anniversary of Age of Wonders 4! This milestone could not have been achieved without you, our fans and players.... Read more »

A new version of Archmage Rises is available: Rivals Beta Released! RIVALS COMBAT BETA NOW AVAILABLE! It’s finally here! You can now find and fight your rivals. They won’t go down easy though and will put up a good fight, with mages from each school of magic bringing it’s own unique challenges and strategies to the battlefield.... Read more »

Couchpotato spotted a new development update for Xenonauts 2: Xenonauts 2 Monthly Development Update! Hello everyone! April is now over and it's time for our monthly Xenonauts 2 progress update. Sound DesignLast month we brought an experienced sound designer onto the team to work on the game audio, as earlier in development we hadn't had the time and funds to give it the attention it deserved.... Read more »

GamingBolt can think of 10 ways to improve Fallout 4 -> text version: 10 Ways Fallout 5 Should Improve On Fallout 4 Thanks Couchpotato!   Read more »

Tim talks about game prequels: Prequels Thanks Couchpotato! Read more »

Couchpotato spotted several Early Access reviews for Hades II: Hades II - Early Access Reviews The Escapist: Hades 2 Is the Best Underworld Homecoming I Could’ve Asked For EuroGamer: Hades 2 early access review - polish and terrifying po... Read more »

The Gamer Social Club reports that Microsoft is going to close several studios and Redfall will be cancelled: Xbox Closes Multiple Studios, Including Hi-Fi Rush & Redfall Teams More horrible cuts hit the industry, as Microsoft shutters multiple studios.... Read more »

IGN reviewed the Early Access version of Hades II: Hades 2 Early Access Review Read more »

Wccftech reports that Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 looks stunning: Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 Animations Look Incredible in New Gameplay Footage; DLSS, FSR Support Confirmed Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is going to feature some impressive animations, judging from some new gameplay footage that is making the rounds online.... Read more »

Here are two free resources to help you run your games online.

• Owlbear Rodeo
• Level Up A5e's Monster Tokens

Owlbear Rodeo

Owlbear Rodeo is my favorite virtual tabletop. It's lightweight, fast, easy to use, reasonably priced (including a free tier), and system agnostic. Players don't have to create accounts to join in. You can run it on a phone. It's quick to get a map up and running with a fog of war and some default tokens. It also works for any RPG, whether it's Shadowdark, Level Up Advanced 5e, Numenera, or Blades in the Dark.

Owlbear Rodeo switched from a more lightweight locally-hosted version 1 to a full cloud-based version 2. It can take some re-learning to make it just as fast and useful as it was in the old version but I believe it is just about as easy as it was once you get things wired right.

I recorded a YouTube tutorial on Owlbear Rodeo for Lazy GMs intended to help people get their hands around all the features and how to use them easily during play.

Owlbear Rodeo includes some awesome default tokens representing monsters and characters but you may want a better set of tokens to represent most monsters in fantasy roleplaying games. That's where this next resource comes in.

Level Up Advanced 5e's Free Monster Tokens

EN World publishing released a full set of monster tokens representing core 5e monsters from the A5e Monstrous Menagerie for free. It includes 178 tokens representing all the core monsters you're likely to find in the D&D Monster Manual or other 5e core monster books.

They work really well when imported into Owlbear Rodeo. In order to import them most effectively, however, you'll want to do a few things:

1. Create a new collection and import tokens into this collection so you don't flood your main collection with nearly 200 tokens. You can import the tokens all at once.
2. If desired, set the default text of the token set to "Copy Image Name". It automatically removes file extensions so you'll get a nice token name like "Troglodyte" or "Demon, Balor" under the token. If you'd rather add the names yourself, you can skip this step.
3. If you do decide to use token names, select the right font size. I like 36 so the name is easy to see.

This set gives you a huge collection of tokens for monsters in Owlbear Rodeo – a collection you can use in any game you plan to run.

More Sly Flourish Stuff

Last week I posted a couple of YouTube videos on Choosing the Right 5e Stat Block and Myre Castle Ruins - Shadowdark Gloaming Session 27 Lazy GM Prep.

Last Week's Lazy RPG Talk Show Topics

Each week I record an episode of the Lazy RPG Talk Show (also available as a podcast) in which I talk about all things in tabletop RPGs. Here are last week's topics with time stamped links to the YouTube video:

• Roll20 and Discord Integration
• Alphastream on the Summit One Year Later
• Return of the Witch King Adventures for Shadow of the Demon Lord
• Kobold Press Offers Sourcebook Subscriptions on Shard
• Tales of the Valiant Monsters Hitting Too Hard?
• Forge of Foes Monster Stats Tool
• Use an Oracle Die

Patreon Questions and Answers

Also on the Talk Show, I answer questions from Sly Flourish Patrons. Here are last week's questions and answers:

• Managing One Year Later Montages
• Sticking With the City of Arches
• Help Players Tap Into Their Emotions

RPG Tips

Each week I think about what I learned in my last RPG session and write them up as RPG tips. Here are this week's tips:

• Help every character shine.
• Lean into the characters’ BS.
• Focus on enjoying spending time with your friends.
• Run lots of monsters sub-optimally.
• Add flavor and story every turn in combat.
• Set up monsters to show off character abilities.
• Build awesome boss fights with a variety of monsters, waves of combatants, cool environmental effects, and wild terrain.

Related Articles

• Owlbear Rodeo: A Simple D&D Virtual Tabletop
• Seven Fantastic Tools to Play RPGs Online
• Crafting Lazy Monster Tokens for D&D

Get More from Sly Flourish

• Articles
• Newsletter
• Bookstore
• Patreon
• Podcast
• YouTube

Buy Sly Flourish's Books

• Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master
• Lazy DM's Companion
• Lazy DM's Workbook
• Forge of Foes
• Fantastic Lairs
• Ruins of the Grendleroot
• Fantastic Adventures
• Fantastic Locations

Have a question or want to contact me? Check out Sly Flourish's Frequently Asked Questions.

Read more »

Here's an easy house rule to streamline the integration of a new character into an existing group. When the new character shows up, state:

"Looking into their eyes, you see their heroic spark – noting them as a stalwart and trustworthy fellow adventurer."

This statement bypasses 20 minutes of narrowed-eyed suspicion, threats, and in-world paranoia as your current characters decide whether to trust this new adventurer to join their group. You, as players, all know exactly why this character suddenly showed up deep in the dungeon.

Player characters are special. They have an actual human being behind them – one seeking to make their character the central focus of their take on the story. They're not just some disposable NPC or monster the characters happened across.

We can clarify the heroic spark and get back into the action instead of wasting time building trust in a group when we all know how it's going to end – of course we trust them. They're the player character of Pat, whose former character got thrown off of a 150 foot deep cliff into a pool of boiling mud. We know why they're here. Let's skip the trust building. You look into this new character's eyes and can see them as a stalwart and trustworthy fellow adventurer.

Unless everyone agrees, your game shouldn't hinge on these sorts of inter-party trust questions. If this sort of trust-building is part of the game, discuss it with your players during your session zero.

Seeing the heroic spark also doesn't bypass the need for the character to introduce themselves, talk about their background and goals, and give the other players an understanding of who they are and what they want. That's important too.

But let's bypass the tedium of taught bowstrings and intimidation checks and get the new character into the group.

Show characters the heroic spark of new companions joining their group and get back to your adventures.

More Sly Flourish Stuff

Last week I posted a couple of YouTube videos on What Is 5e and Marin's Hold Bloodbath – Lazy RPG Prep.

Last Week's Lazy RPG Talk Show Topics

Each week I record an episode of the Lazy RPG Talk Show (also available as a podcast) in which I talk about all things in tabletop RPGs. Here are last week's topics with time stamped links to the YouTube video:

• PJ Coffey's Crafting Heritages and Cultures CC-Released Doc
• Campaign Builder - Dungeons and Ruins
• 13th Age 2e Preview
• Secret of Summervine Villa
• Cynthia Williams Leaves Hasbro
• Build Your Resilient TTRPG Hobby
• Matt Coleville on Long-form versus Short-Form Adventures
• The MtG Hobby Compared to the D&D Hobby
• Fantastic Short-Form Adventure Publishers

Patreon Questions and Answers

Also on the Talk Show, I answer questions from Sly Flourish Patrons. Here are last week's questions and answers:

• Villains and NPCs Responding to High Level Characters
• Warlords Are in 5e
• Repeating Descriptions and Getting Players to Pay Attention

RPG Tips

Each week I think about what I learned in my last RPG session and write them up as RPG tips. Here are this week's tips:

• Skip scenes or locations if there’s no chance to learn something interesting or useful in them.
• Spend time building and planning your big boss encounters.
• Clarify choices.
• Use the opportunity at your game to step away from real life and enjoy tales of high fantasy with your friends.
• Drop in potions or concoctions that let characters receive the equivalent of a long rest.
• Challenge high level characters with waves of combatants — hordes of low challenge monsters, a few even-power monsters, and huge heavy hitters.
• Let players learn about changing circumstances through the dialog of their opponents.

Related Articles

• Build from the Characters Outwards
• Ask Players to Describe New Character Abilities
• Focus Extra Prep Time on the Characters

Get More from Sly Flourish

• Articles
• Newsletter
• Bookstore
• Patreon
• Podcast
• YouTube

Buy Sly Flourish's Books

• Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master
• Lazy DM's Companion
• Lazy DM's Workbook
• Forge of Foes
• Fantastic Lairs
• Ruins of the Grendleroot
• Fantastic Adventures
• Fantastic Locations

Have a question or want to contact me? Check out Sly Flourish's Frequently Asked Questions.

Read more »

Over the past couple of months I've written articles defining adventure types – how we prep them, how we run them, what pitfalls we might run into, and how to mitigate those pitfalls. These articles include:

• Dungeon Crawls
• Infiltrations and Heists
• Investigations and Mysteries
• Overland Exploration and Travel
• Missions and Quest Chains
• Defense
• Roleplay and Intrigue
• Combat
• Mashups or the Undefined

Robin Laws's book Adventure Crucible – Building Stronger Scenarios for any RPG inspired my thoughts on this topic.

Know the Rules then Break the Rules

Now that we've defined adventure types, it's time to throw them away.

You see, these adventure types often don't line up with the actual adventures we run at our table. Our adventures might span across multiple types, or they might not be defined by any adventure type at all.

Our romp through Ironfang Keep might feel like a dungeon crawl, a heist, or an investigation. Our traversal across the ghoul city of Vandekhul might feel like travel or intrigue. Our battle against Camazotz might start as a major combat session but turn into roleplaying.

Adventures just don't fit cleanly into any given adventure type.

So why did you bother to read all those articles? Why did I bother to write them?

Because understanding adventure types can still help us run awesome games.

Actual adventures and sessions might not fit perfectly into one specific adventure type, but when we break down the elements of these adventure types, they give us a possible framework to build off of. They help us identify pitfalls and mitigation strategies for the elements of our game that do fit.

Which Adventure Type Best Fits?

When preparing or running our game, try to identify which adventure type or types best fit our game and use the preparation, execution framework, and tips for pitfall mitigations that make sense for the adventure you're running. Dungeon crawls, heists, defense, roleplaying, and combat situations can all come up during our campaigns or even in the middle of a session. The type tell us how we might switch modes and run that style of game.

If we're not sure what we need when prepping our game, we can ask ourselves which adventure type best fits what we're looking at and aim our prep around that type. Sometimes finding a suitable adventure type means taking a fuzzy concept and defining it within the bounds of the adventure type. "This situation at the castle feels like both defense and intrigue – let me look at those adventure types."

Absorb Adventure Types, Then Let Them Go

The more proficient we are running adventures, the more we can absorb the concepts for these adventure types and then set them aside when we're running adventures outside the bounds of any one adventure type.

Adventure types help identify different modes of play in our fantasy tabletop roleplaying games. Like many generalities, they often break down when you apply them to the actual games we run at our table.

Yet we don't have to throw away the underlying adventure type concepts in how we prep, how we run, the pitfalls we might face, and how to mitigate those pitfalls. Those concepts hold up even if the defined shapes of an adventure type doesn't perfectly fit the adventure we run.

Build Your Own Frameworks

These articles offer one perspective on adventure types. Through your own experiences you might find other adventure types or choose to redefine them yourself. Your own steps for preparing, running, identifying pitfalls, and mitigating pitfalls might be far more useful to you than the advice in this series of articles. That's fine. That's awesome. Define your own adventure types. Ask yourself what you need to prep, what you need to run them, what pitfalls you often run into, and how you can mitigate those pitfalls.

Find the adventure types that best fit your actual adventures and use the tools within to run awesome games.

More Sly Flourish Stuff

Last week I posted a couple of YouTube videos on Using the 8 Lazy DM Steps at the Table and Swamp King Fronk – Lazy RPG Prep.

Last Week's Lazy RPG Talk Show Topics

Each week I record an episode of the Lazy RPG Talk Show (also available as a podcast) in which I talk about all things in tabletop RPGs. Here are last week's topics with time stamped links to the YouTube video:

• Robert Schwalb on La Taberna de Rol
• DM David Compares MCDM, Daggerheart, and 5e
• Wandering Tavern by Homie and the Dude
• Infestation at Devil's Glade by Jeff Stevens
• Restless Encounters by Inkwell Ideas
• 13th Age Megabundle on Bundle of Holding
• Dyson Logos Commercial Map Packs
• Cairn 2 Character Builder Open Sourced
• Readings and Reflections with Sly Flourish Podcast
• JP Coovert's video on Indie RPGs
• Split Up Your Prep

Patreon Questions and Answers

Also on the Talk Show, I answer questions from Sly Flourish Patrons. Here are last week's questions and answers:

• How Often to Level Characters?
• What to Prep When You Have a Long Time
• Accounting for High Power Characters with the Lazy Encounter Benchmark

RPG Tips

Each week I think about what I learned in my last RPG session and write them up as RPG tips. Here are this week's tips:

• Give characters and players a warning when they’re facing a foe beyond their capabilities.
• Use rolls for distance and motivation to change up random encounters.
• Improvise connections between random encounters and the larger story through secrets and clues.
• Build your own 5e from the sources that bring you the coolest options for your game.
• Clarify options and choices.
• Print maps and write down one- or two-word descriptions right on the map.
• Build encounters, secrets, NPCs, monsters, and treasure from the characters outward.

Related Articles

• Running Dungeon Crawls
• Running Defense Adventures
• Running Roleplay and Intrigue Adventures

Get More from Sly Flourish

• Articles
• Newsletter
• Bookstore
• Patreon
• Podcast
• YouTube

Buy Sly Flourish's Books

• Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master
• Lazy DM's Companion
• Lazy DM's Workbook
• Forge of Foes
• Fantastic Lairs
• Ruins of the Grendleroot
• Fantastic Adventures
• Fantastic Locations

Have a question or want to contact me? Check out Sly Flourish's Frequently Asked Questions.

Read more »

This article is one in a series where we look at types of adventures and examine

• how we prepare them.
• how we run them.
• what pitfalls we might run into.
• how we avoid these pitfalls.

These articles include:

• Dungeon Crawls
• Infiltrations and Heists
• Investigations and Mysteries
• Overland Exploration and Travel
• Missions and Quest Chains
• Defense
• Roleplay and Intrigue
• Combat
• Mashups or the Undefined

Your own adventure types and how you run them may differ from mine. That's totally fine. There are many right ways to enjoy this game.

Robin Laws's book Adventure Crucible – Building Stronger Scenarios for any RPG inspired my thoughts on this topic.

For a far more in-depth look at running monsters in combat encounters, please check out Forge of Foes, our book on building and running fantastic monsters for your 5e games.

Understanding Combat Adventures

Good fantasy RPG sessions most often include mixtures of exploration, roleplay, and combat. Adventures or sessions focusing on only one pillar of play may bypass players' preferences for the other elements.

But, on occasion, we find ourselves with a session focused almost exclusively on combat.

Completely combat-focused sessions may occur when characters face a big battle at the beginning of the session and we know this battle is going to take up most of the session. Other combat-focused sessions might happen when the characters face a gauntlet of battles, one right after the other, whether they're exploring a dangerous dungeon, defending a location, or otherwise find themselves with a series of battles staged in sequence.

Combat-focused sessions should be rare. The best sessions include scenes and situations with opportunities for roleplaying, exploration, and combat. We want situations where the characters make meaningful decisions to move the story forward.

But combat-focused sessions do happen and thus are worth examining.

Preparing Combat Sessions

During prep, GMs can prepare combat sessions by

• understanding how these combat encounters begin and where they occur.
• deciding on a style for combat. Are you going to run it in the theater of the mind, on a combat battle mat, or run abstract combat?
• choosing a goal for the combat encounter. Sometimes the battle isn't all about killing the monsters but achieving another outcome.
• selecting monsters for each combat encounter. Rich combat encounters often include two or more different monster types with some synergies between them – big brutes up front and nasty ranged attackers in the back for example.
• choosing the environment surrounding the encounter. What larger environmental effects might be in play in the combat arena?
• selecting interesting terrain features the characters and monsters might use (see Anatomy of an Environmental Effect – Chernobog's Well)
• planning potential shifts in the encounter. What events might change the course of the battle?
• outlining the transitions between each combat encounter. What takes the characters from battle A to battle B to battle C?
• building out, drawing, or preparing your battle map – either digital or physical.
• gathering miniatures, tokens, or digital assets if you're playing online.

Running Combat Sessions

For 5e games and other fantasy d20 games, combat tends to be the most well-articulated and refined style of gameplay. For combat-focused sessions, GMs need only start the session and get into the first battle. Between combat encounters ensure the sinew is there to connect one battle to the next. The rest falls on the rules of combat for our chosen system.

Depending on the complexity of the encounters, the number of characters, and their level, combat encounters may be easy or difficult to run. The higher level the characters – the more power and capability they bring to the battlefield – the trickier it can be to maintain a consistent challenge. The dials of monster difficulty can help balance such a challenge.

When running combat, continue to draw the players into the fiction of the world. Describe the situation from the point of view of the characters. Describe what attacks and hits look like. Ask players to do the same. Reveal secrets and clues when appropriate. Include opportunities for roleplaying with NPCs and enemies before, during, and after the battle. Avoid getting lost in the mechanics of combat and remember the story going on in the world.

Pitfalls of Combat Sessions

Here are several potential pitfalls when running combat-focused adventures and sessions:

• Too many hard combat encounters becomes repetitive and tiresome.
• Combat goals aren't clear. Players don't know why they're fighting.
• Combat focuses exclusively on the mechanics with little focus on the story or fiction.
• Combat encounters are tactically boring.
• Players resent encounters built to contradict their characters' capabilities.
• Battles take too long. Players who enjoy roleplaying and exploration miss out.
• It's easy to forget important monster mechanical details when running lots of monsters, more complicated monsters, or both.

Mitigating Pitfalls

GMs can help mitigate these pitfalls by

• mixing up easy and hard encounters or waves within a single encounter. Let the characters shine while fighting weaker foes as stronger ones come on later.
• clarifying encounter goals. Tell players how things work in the encounter so they know what they need to do.
• continually describe what's happening in the fiction of the game. Ask players to describe their actions including attacks and killing blows.
• include different monster types and terrain features to keep encounter tactics interesting.
• include lightning rods – monsters intended to show off the powerful capabilities of the characters.
• include elements of roleplaying and exploration during combat. What do the villains say? What do the characters discover about the world and situation as they fight for their lives?
• read over monster stat blocks before play and run simpler monsters for those who don't really matter, saving mechanically crunchy monsters for bosses and lieutenants.

An Uncommon Adventure Type

Combat-focused sessions are best held for big battles against boss monsters. Other session types in this series of articles offer a better balance of exploration, roleplaying, and combat. Combat-focused sessions are prevalent enough, however, for us to internalize what makes them fun and what we can do to avoid common pitfalls.

Build fantastic and intricate combat encounters and let the characters shine.

More Sly Flourish Stuff

Last week I posted a couple of YouTube videos including Build Your Own 5e and Add Black Flag's Luck to your 5e Games.

RPG Tips

Each week I think about what I learned in my last RPG session and write them up as RPG tips. Here are this week's tips:

• Offer opportunities for roleplaying even in the depths of the darkest dungeons.
• Mix up battles with several smaller foes and fewer large foes.
• Build encounters first from the fiction. What makes sense?
• Add motivation and distance rolls to random encounters for unique experiences.
• Include interactive monuments in bigger battles.
• Write down connections between the characters and the next session you’re running.
• Single monsters are at a significant disadvantage against a group of characters. This disadvantage gets worse the higher level the characters are.

Related Articles

• Running Overland Exploration and Travel Adventures
• The Story Focus of D&D
• Running Dungeon Crawls

Get More from Sly Flourish

• Articles
• Newsletter
• Bookstore
• Patreon
• Podcast
• YouTube

Buy Sly Flourish's Books

• Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master
• Lazy DM's Companion
• Lazy DM's Workbook
• Forge of Foes
• Fantastic Lairs
• Ruins of the Grendleroot
• Fantastic Adventures
• Fantastic Locations

Have a question or want to contact me? Check out Sly Flourish's Frequently Asked Questions.

Read more »

This article is one in a series where we look at types of adventures and examine

• how we prepare them.
• how we run them.
• what pitfalls we might run into.
• how we avoid these pitfalls.

These articles include:

• Dungeon Crawls
• Infiltrations and Heists
• Investigations and Mysteries
• Overland Exploration and Travel
• Missions and Quest Chains
• Defense
• Roleplay and Intrigue
• Combat
• Mashups or the Undefined

Your own adventure types and how you run them may differ from mine. That's totally fine. There are many right ways to enjoy this game.

Robin Laws's book Adventure Crucible – Building Stronger Scenarios for any RPG inspired my thoughts on this topic.

Understanding Roleplay and Intrigue Adventures

In adventures focused on roleplaying and intrigue, the characters primarily talk to NPCs to accomplish goals or learn information. Intrigue adventures often overlap with Investigations and Mysteries with less of a focus on location-based clues and expanding the goals beyond uncovering mysteries.

Example goals in roleplay and intrigue adventures might include

• convincing royalty to commit military forces in a war.
• exposing treachery in a royal court.
• saving the life of a condemned prisoner.
• pitting two enemies against one another.
• learning the location of a secret treasure vault.
• getting permission to enter a closed city.
• asking priests to hand over a powerful artifact.

Roleplay and intrigue adventures are often built around a set of linear or networked scenes. In these scenes, the characters talk to one or more NPCs learning something or attaining a goal that leads them to the next scene.

Preparing Roleplay and Intrigue Adventures

During preparation for roleplay and intrigue adventures, GMs can focus on

• clarifying the goal of the adventure.
• fleshing out the backgrounds of notable NPCs.
• finding artwork they can show to players for each notable NPC.
• writing down what NPCs know and what they want.
• defining secrets and clues the characters might uncover when talking to NPCs.
• adding other adventure elements as needed from the eight steps.

Running Roleplay and Intrigue Adventures

Roleplay and intrigue adventures can begin with a strong start to bring the players into the game, clarify the goals of the adventure, set the stage, and let the players begin interacting with NPCs.

During play, the GM thinks as the NPCs would think given their backgrounds and goals as they interact with the players. As the conversation goes on, the GM may decide how NPCs react based on what the players say or they may have players roll ability checks if there's a meaningful chance for failure that doesn't end the adventure in a brick wall.

GMs can use ability checks to determine how easily or how difficult it is to acquire information from an NPC or shift the NPCs attitude without shutting off entire paths if the adventure on a single bad check.

Other elements from typical adventures may come up in these sessions including exploring locations or getting into a fight, even if the overall focus is on talking to NPCs.

Pitfalls of Roleplay and Intrigue Adventures

Roleplay and intrigue adventures might suffer from the following pitfalls:

• Players don't understand what they're doing or why.
• Too many roleplay scenes in a row can bore action-focused players.
• The characters blow important rolls or engage in the wrong approach and shut off critical paths for the story.
• Players don't understand how best to engage the NPCs.
• Characters have better social skills than their players have or vice versa.

Avoiding Pitfalls

GMs can avoid or mitigate these pitfalls by

• Clarifying the characters' goals regularly.
• Including other action-focused scenes in the adventure such as combat encounters or location exploration.
• Ensuring the whole story doesn't get shut down on bad rolls or poor approaches and instead leads the story down a different, potentially harder, but still interesting path.
• Use the result of a roll as a scale of how well or poorly something went instead of a hard success or failure. See 1d20 Shades of Gray.
• Offer suggestions to players who have a hard time understanding how to engage with characters. Don't let them make foolish mistakes their characters would know better than to make. Show them opportunities their characters would recognize.
• Use a high-charisma character's charisma as a baseline, recognizing that their character might be better at negotiating than the player is.
• Use a charismatic player's approach as a baseline even if their character has a lousy charisma. Don't always call for a roll.

A Common Sub-Adventure Type

Roleplay and intrigue adventures might often slide into or be shuffled into other larger adventures. As one of the core pillars of roleplaying games, roleplay and intrigue scenes appear often throughout campaigns and can drive the story forward as much, or more so, than other adventure types.

Clarifying the goal, building rich reactive NPCs, creating interesting paths forward regardless of the outcome, and delivering the other elements of gameplay can make roleplay and intrigue adventures as exciting as the most explosive combat encounters.

More Sly Flourish Stuff

Last week I posted a couple of YouTube videos on Running Evil Cities and 175 Free Tokens for Owlbear Rodeo.

Last Week's Lazy RPG Talk Show Topics

Each week I record an episode of the Lazy RPG Talk Show (also available as a podcast) in which I talk about all things in tabletop RPGs. Here are last week's topics with time stamped links to the YouTube video:

• Dungeoncraft on Getting Cheap Miniatures
• Monsters of Drakkenheim
• Cairn 2e Boxed Set
• Tales of the Valiant Wight
• Why CR3 is the best CR
• New Search Engine for Sly Flourish!
• The Two Different Games at the Table

Patreon Questions and Answers

Also on the Talk Show, I answer questions from Sly Flourish Patrons. Here are last week's questions and answers:

• Lazy DM Steps in an Online VTT World
• Handling Failure at the End of Campaigns
• Handling Flying Characters
• Feeling Bad After a Big Battle
• When to Give Out Magic Items

RPG Tips

Each week I think about what I learned in my last RPG session and write them up as RPG tips. Here are this week's tips:

• Challenge high level characters by attacking several points — AC, saves, death saves, exhaustion, hit points, cumulative -1 penalties, and so on.
• Build big arenas for big boss battles with interesting terrain and layers of monsters.
• Offer weapon enchantment gemstones any character can affix to a weapon or armor to make it magical.
• Let the characters glimpse their final villains. Make villains and boss monsters ever present.
• With six regular players and two on-call players, five people have to cancel before you can’t get four to the table for a game.
• Print maps, pen in one- or two-word room descriptions, and make a list of potential inhabitants.
• Roll up treasure horde parcels and jot them down in your notes. Distribute them when it makes sense.

Related Articles

• Running Dungeon Crawls
• Running Defense Adventures
• Running Overland Exploration and Travel Adventures

Get More from Sly Flourish

• Articles
• Newsletter
• Bookstore
• Patreon
• Podcast
• YouTube

Buy Sly Flourish's Books

• Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master
• Lazy DM's Companion
• Lazy DM's Workbook
• Forge of Foes
• Fantastic Lairs
• Ruins of the Grendleroot
• Fantastic Adventures
• Fantastic Locations

Have a question or want to contact me? Check out Sly Flourish's Frequently Asked Questions.

Read more »

This article is one in a series where we look at types of adventures and examine

• how we prepare them.
• how we run them.
• what pitfalls we might run into.
• how we avoid these pitfalls.

These articles include:

• Dungeon Crawls
• Infiltrations and Heists
• Investigations and Mysteries
• Overland Exploration and Travel
• Missions and Quest Chains
• Defense
• Roleplay and Intrigue
• Combat
• Mashups or the Undefined

Your own adventure types and how you run them may differ from mine. That's totally fine. There are many right ways to enjoy this game.

Robin Laws's book Adventure Crucible – Building Stronger Scenarios for any RPG inspired my thoughts on this topic.

Understanding Defense Adventures

In defense adventures, the characters defend a location and its inhabitants from invaders, bandits, or monsters. This adventure type is structured similar to infiltrations and heists in that players spend significant time planning for the attack before the attack itself. I often refer to defense adventures as Seven Samurai adventures because of how well the model of Akira Kurosawa's classic samurai movie fits as a fantasy RPG adventure.

The typical scenario for a defense adventure includes:

• The characters are recruited by townsfolk (or someone similar) to defend a location.
• The characters plan and prepare the location and inhabitants for the coming attack.
• The attack begins with the invasion of a large enemy force.
• The characters focus on their part of the attack while NPCs defend their locations off-camera. Things might change, forcing the characters to move around.
• There's an aftermath.

Defense adventures don't have to follow this model perfectly but this scenario is a common approach.

Preparing a Defense Adventure

GMs can prepare for a defense-style adventure by

• defining the theme. Who are the attackers? Who are the defenders? What's the location like? What themes or flavor can we wrap around the adventure?
• finding or creating a suitable location for the defense and ensuring it has the right characteristics for a good defensible position.
• further defining the "villagers". Who asks the characters to defend them? What's their secret?
• preparing a menu of options the characters can choose to prepare the defense including training NPCs, fortifying defenses, spying on the attackers, preparing weapons or spells, or engaging in other activities to aid in the defense.
• outlining the villains. Who are they? Who leads them? Where do they come from? Where are they located before the attack? How many are there? How will they attack?
• preparing the remaining eight steps as needed.

Running a Defense Adventure

Like a heist adventure, the players plan their defense during the first half of the adventure. Give players time to plan their defense, talk to NPCs, scout the villains, and engage in other activities to prepare for the attack. Improvise ability checks to see how well their defenses hold up.

When the attack begins, focus the spotlight on the characters and their part of the battle. Describe the results of the larger battle based on the defenses the characters put up and how well they did on their checks but keep the spotlight focused on the characters.

Pitfalls of Defense Adventures

Defense adventures might suffer one or more of the following pitfalls.

• The characters' defenses don't come into play – they wasted their time.
• The characters' defenses are so good there's no threat from the villains.
• The players don't know how to prepare the location. They don't understand how they should defend the location.
• The location is too hard to defend. It's too wide open with no good choke points or defensible positions.
• The characters split up instead of staying together making it harder to run the whole adventure.

Avoiding Pitfalls

GMs can avoid or mitigate these pitfalls by

• ensuring the characters' defenses come into play by improvising the descriptions of the villains' attacks.
• ensure there's enough variance to the attack of the villains to still make it a threat even with a very solid defense.
• ensuring there's a clear list of options the characters can choose from to build up the location's defenses.
• during prep, ensuring the location has clear defensible positions and choke points like ravines, rivers, swamplands, walls, towers, and other defensible positions.
• Push players to keep their characters together during the fight so you don't have to run split battles all over the location.

A Fantastic Situation for Heroic Tales

Defense-based adventures stand as an excellent adventure style to give the players agency to shape their own story. It's a perfect example of situation-based adventures in which the GM sets up the situation and the characters navigate it. GMs and players play the situation out together, building a story at the table neither side could have guessed before it began.

More Sly Flourish Stuff

Last week I posted a couple of YouTube videos including a Shadowed Keep on the Borderlands Deep Dive and 5e Travel Systems.

Last Week's Lazy RPG Talk Show Topics

Each week I record an episode of the Lazy RPG Talk Show (also available as a podcast) in which I talk about all things in tabletop RPGs. Here are last week's topics with time stamped links to the YouTube video:

• Jim Ward Passes Away
• Bob World Builder's Survey of D&D and WOTC Popularity
• Legos and Sneakers and Hawaiian Shirts
• Tome of Beasts 2023 on D&D Beyond
• The SF Patreon Q&A Database
• Larian says No BG3 Expansions or BG4
• Reach and Run Awesome Campaign Endings

Patreon Questions and Answers

Also on the Talk Show, I answer questions from Sly Flourish Patrons. Here are last week's questions and answers:

• Too Much Comedy and Joking at our Serious D&D Game
• How Much is Gold Worth? Function Economies in our D&D Games
• Lazy Encounter Benchmark for Multiple Battles in a Day

RPG Tips

Each week I think about what I learned in my last RPG session and write them up as RPG tips. Here are this week's tips:

• Give players the option to avoid monsters if desired.
• Test future boss fights with similar but reskinned interim battles.
• Think about the hooks between each character and elements from the next session.
• Give big monsters a way to threaten back-line characters.
• Give characters a painful option to break out of effects that take away their actions.
• Mix and match 5e elements from several published sourcebooks.
• Bathe your dungeon crawl in interesting lore.

Related Articles

• Running Dungeon Crawls
• Running Infiltration and Heist Adventures
• Running Roleplay and Intrigue Adventures

Get More from Sly Flourish

• Articles
• Newsletter
• Bookstore
• Patreon
• Podcast
• YouTube

Buy Sly Flourish's Books

• Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master
• Lazy DM's Companion
• Lazy DM's Workbook
• Forge of Foes
• Fantastic Lairs
• Ruins of the Grendleroot
• Fantastic Adventures
• Fantastic Locations

Have a question or want to contact me? Check out Sly Flourish's Frequently Asked Questions.

Read more »

This article is one in a series where we look at types of adventures and examine

• how we prepare them.
• how we run them.
• what pitfalls we might run into.
• how we avoid these pitfalls.

These articles include:

• Dungeon Crawls
• Infiltrations and Heists
• Investigations and Mysteries
• Overland Exploration and Travel
• Missions and Quest Chains
• Defense
• Roleplay and Intrigue
• Combat
• Mashups or the Undefined

Your own adventure types and how you run them may differ from mine. That's totally fine. There are many right ways to enjoy this game.

Robin Laws's book Adventure Crucible – Building Stronger Scenarios for any RPG inspired my thoughts on this topic.

Understanding Missions and Quest Chains

In mission-based adventures the characters accomplish several goals across a series of scenes. The scenes may be linear or run in a network where players choose different paths leading to different future missions.

Often mission-based adventures take several sessions, perhaps an entire campaign, to complete. Each leg of the mission might be its own adventure.

Each mission or quest of the quest chain might be small – like killing a fire giant boss at a burned out watchtower, acquiring one of several needed items, or getting information from the shady vendor in the Lower Reaches. In a series of wartime missions, the characters accomplish specific missions while war rages around them.

Missions might also be built so the characters attempt to accomplish tasks before the bad guys, or the characters face a rival group attempting to complete the same or parallel quests. This competition results in an ever-changing situation as both groups follow their chains of quests.

Some example missions include:

• Collecting three keys (out of 5) to open the vault of Ibraxus.
• Destroying the four sub-lieutenants of King Lucan the vampire lord.
• Disabling the four obelisks to prevent the opening of the doorway of the Black Cathedral.
• Conducting four missions to thwart the hobgoblin armies of Lord Krash.
• Recovering four powerful artifacts required to defeat Orcus, Lord of Undeath.

Preparing Mission-based Adventures

GMs may prepare for mission-based adventures by

• determining the overall goal of the mission or quest chain.
• building an outline or tree for the quests in the chain.
• filling out the adventure details of the next quest or mission in the chain with the eight steps such as locations, NPCs, monsters, and treasure.
• outlining which quests might follow the next one.
• determine the path and progress of rival groups following these same quests if any.

Running Missions

When running mission-based adventures or campaigns, the GM should

• clarify the goals of the overall quest chain.
• clarify the paths the characters can take and choices they can make when conducting their missions.
• run the current mission or quest as its own typical RPG scene or adventure.
• offer the choices for the next possible quests in the chain.

Mission or Quest Chain Pitfalls

When running mission-based or quest-chain adventures, GMs might encounter the following pitfalls:

• The choices aren't clear. Players don't know which mission to follow next.
• Players forget why they're following these quests.
• The mission paths don't offer meaningful choices. Characters just follow the steps in a predetermined order.
• Large chains of missions can be thwarted when only one mission is accomplished (see all or nothing collection quests).

Avoiding Pitfalls

GMs can avoid these pitfalls by

• regularly clarifying the goal of the mission or quest chain.
• clarifying the options the characters can take and ensuring each option is meaningful.
• not running too many missions.
• ensuring each leg of the quest chain shows clear progress towards the goal.
• ensuring the success of a single mission doesn't thwart the large plans of the villains or characters by using the three of five keys quest model.

A Common Adventure Style

Mission-based adventures are one of the most common styles of adventures. Hopefully these guidelines help you keep your mission-based adventures on track with meaningful choices, clear options, and dynamic situations.

More Sly Flourish Stuff

Last week I posted a couple of YouTube videos on Roll Twice and the Elven Orb – Shadowdark Gloaming Session 24 Lazy GM Prep.

Last Week's Lazy RPG Talk Show Topics

Each week I record an episode of the Lazy RPG Talk Show (also available as a podcast) in which I talk about all things in tabletop RPGs. Here are last week's topics with time stamped links to the YouTube video:

• Dungeon Crawl Classics Humble Bundle
• Worlds Without Number SRD in CC0
• WOTC's "Do You Like Me" Survey
• Hasbro's Chris Cocks on D&D and AI
• WOTC Partners with StartPlaying.Games
• Daggerheart Open Beta Available
• Lazy DM's Companion On Sale!
• Dungeon Chambers
• Challenging High-Level Characters

Patreon Questions and Answers

Also on the Talk Show, I answer questions from Sly Flourish Patrons. Here are last week's questions and answers:

• Getting Players to Speak Up During (Online) Games
• Staying Excited about Long Campaigns

RPG Tips

Each week I think about what I learned in my last RPG session and write them up as RPG tips. Here are this week's tips:

• Show players the results in the world of the choices they made.
• Show players how powerful their characters have become.
• Throw in lots of low CR monsters to fireball or turn or otherwise blow away.
• Always lean towards putting meaningful choices in front of the players.
• Clarify goals selected by the characters often -- at least once per session.
• Bring old NPCs back and show how they’ve changed.
• Mix your adventure types. Dungeon crawls, heists, and intrigue all work together into a unique mashup of an adventure.

Related Articles

• Running Dungeon Crawls
• Running Roleplay and Intrigue Adventures
• Running Defense Adventures

Get More from Sly Flourish

• Articles
• Newsletter
• Bookstore
• Patreon
• Podcast
• YouTube

Buy Sly Flourish's Books

• Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master
• Lazy DM's Companion
• Lazy DM's Workbook
• Forge of Foes
• Fantastic Lairs
• Ruins of the Grendleroot
• Fantastic Adventures
• Fantastic Locations

Have a question or want to contact me? Check out Sly Flourish's Frequently Asked Questions.

Read more »

This article is one in a series where we look at types of adventures and examine

• how we prepare them.
• how we run them.
• what pitfalls we might run into.
• how we avoid these pitfalls.

These articles include:

• Dungeon Crawls
• Infiltrations and Heists
• Investigations and Mysteries
• Overland Exploration and Travel
• Missions and Quest Chains
• Defense
• Roleplay and Intrigue
• Combat
• Mashups or the Undefined

Your own adventure types and how you run them may differ from mine. That's totally fine. There are many right ways to enjoy this game.

Robin Laws's book Adventure Crucible – Building Stronger Scenarios for any RPG inspired my thoughts on this topic.

Understanding Travel Adventures

For the sake of this article, overland exploration and travel adventures follow the characters as they travel from one place to another, usually over significant distances across the surface of the world.

Sometimes the characters know clearly where they're headed. Other times they might only be following vague rumors. The paths they follow might be well known or something they discover as they go.

Travel adventures might be run as hex crawls, pointcrawls, or linear paths of connected locations. They could be a quick journey during a single game or run over several sessions.

Resources for Travel

Your chosen RPG might include material for running travel scenes. Two books offer excellent guidance and systems for running travel adventures for 5e games: Uncharted Journeys by Cubicle 7 and Trials and Treasure for Level Up Advanced 5e by EN World publishing. Uncharted Journeys offers a solid system for travel and a huge range of potential encounters. Trials and Treasure includes excellent random encounter tables, character roles, weather options for various climates, and more. If you choose only one book, start with Trials and Treasure.

Preparing Travel Adventures

Preparing for an overland exploration or travel adventure might include

• defining the starting point, the destination, the distance, and the path.
• understanding how you plan on running the journey – point crawls, hex crawls, a linear series of encounters, or a single encounter during the journey.
• defining potential paths.
• preparing a list of roles and activities the characters engage in during travel.
• preparing a random weather table.
• writing down potential encounter locations along the journey for each node in the pointcrawl or within one or more of the hexes along the journey.
• preparing a list of encounters – random, fixed, or a mix of both.
• writing down secrets and clues, NPCs, or treasure the characters might discover along the journey.

Running Travel Adventures

Like dungeon crawls, travel adventures can follow a particular model of gameplay. This procedure includes

• clarifying the starting point and destination for the journey.
• asking each player to select a role for the journey – scout, pathfinder, quartermaster, etc. Characters might instead choose to aid someone else.
• roll on a weather table each day to determine what weather the characters deal with that day.
• expend daily resources such as food and water.
• have the characters roll ability checks based on their role. A scout may notice creatures before the creatures notice the characters. A pathfinder may stay on course or get lost. A quartermaster may give the characters temporary hit points or lose resources.
• roll for monuments or other notable features as they travel or use one of your predetermined locations.
• roll for random encounters. Even if they don't encounter something, you might roll to see what came by recently or what might be coming. You might roll twice and mix two encounters together.
• move on to the next day.

Pitfalls for Travel Adventures

Here are some common pitfalls for travel adventures:

• Too much time is spent on travel when the real story is happening at the destination.
• Too many downward beats or hard encounters – it feels like a slog.
• Travel feels like a needless chore or time-wasting filler.
• Travel doesn't offer meaningful choices or actions.

Avoiding Travel Pitfalls

Here are some ways to keep travel on track.

• Drop in relevant secrets and clues the characters discover during their journey to tell them about the world, its inhabitants, and elements of the larger story.
• Include interesting monuments to solidify specific locations and encounters and act as catalysts for secrets and clues.
• Include roleplay and exploration scenes, not just combat encounters.
• Run some easy encounters the characters can resolve many different ways.
• Let characters get the drop on monsters and give them the choice to fight them or not.
• If travel isn't interesting or challenging, shorten it or skip it completely and get to the more important scenes the players care about.

A Bridge Between Other Adventures

Travel adventures are often a bridge between one part of the story and the next part. With careful planning and execution, travel can offer stories just as interesting as other types of adventures.

More Sly Flourish Stuff

Last week I posted YouTube videos with Thoughts on Obsidian for TTRPG Prep and the Lazy DM's Companion Sale.

Last Week's Lazy RPG Talk Show Topics

Each week I record an episode of the Lazy RPG Talk Show (also available as a podcast) in which I talk about all things in tabletop RPGs. Here are last week's topics with time stamped links to the YouTube video:

• Last Week's Sly Flourish RPG Newsletter
• Planestrider
• Surviving Strangehollow
• Lazy DM's Companion On Sale
• NASA Releases a 5e Adventure
• Chaosium RPG Design Contest
• Taking Notes During and After the Game

Patreon Questions and Answers

Also on the Talk Show, I answer questions from Sly Flourish Patrons. Here are last week's questions and answers:

• Running City of Arches as an Open Table Game
• Villainous Plans and the Three of Five Keys Model
• Introducing New Players to RPGs
• Secrets and Lore as Character Knowledge
• Secrets and Clues in Dark Sun

RPG Tips

Each week I think about what I learned in my last RPG session and write them up as RPG tips. Here are this week's tips:

• Challenge high-level characters by attacking several vectors: AC, various saves, area attacks, advantageous terrain, flippable environmental effects, and so on.
• Benchmark encounters with the Lazy Encounter Benchmark: A battle may be deadly if the sum total of monster CRs is 1/4 the total of character levels; or half of character levels if they're 5th level or above.
• Tweak the Lazy Encounter Benchmark based on what you know of the characters. Really powerful? Pretend there is one additional character of the party's level.
• Warn players when they're going to enter a long fight. Change the fight midway and keep up the story to make long battles interesting.
• Include switchable terrain that works against the characters at first and for them later on. For example, an unholy effigy gives evil creatures advantage but gives characters advantage when turned into a holy effigy.
• Level characters after significant accomplishments in the story.
• Damage is the biggest threat a monster offers that doesn't take agency away from the characters. Want a bigger threat? Do more damage.

Related Articles

• Running Dungeon Crawls
• Running Travel Scenes in 5e
• Running Defense Adventures

Get More from Sly Flourish

• Articles
• Newsletter
• Bookstore
• Patreon
• Podcast
• YouTube

Buy Sly Flourish's Books

• Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master
• Lazy DM's Companion
• Lazy DM's Workbook
• Forge of Foes
• Fantastic Lairs
• Ruins of the Grendleroot
• Fantastic Adventures
• Fantastic Locations

Have a question or want to contact me? Check out Sly Flourish's Frequently Asked Questions.

Read more »

This article is one in a series where we look at types of adventures and examine

• how we prepare them.
• how we run them.
• what pitfalls we might run into.
• how we avoid these pitfalls.

These articles include:

• Dungeon Crawls
• Infiltrations and Heists
• Investigations and Mysteries
• Overland Exploration and Travel
• Missions and Quest Chains
• Defense
• Roleplay and Intrigue
• Combat
• Mashups or the Undefined

Your own adventure types and how you run them may differ from mine. That's totally fine. There are many right ways to enjoy this game.

Robin Laws's book Adventure Crucible – Building Stronger Scenarios for any RPG inspired my thoughts on this topic.

Understanding Investigations and Mysteries

In investigation and mysteries, one or more previous events have occurred which have led to the current situation. The characters spend their time in the adventure learning what happened and potentially changing the course of future events based on what they find. During investigations, the characters talk to people, explore locations, uncover clues, and face those foes who seek to thwart them.

Mysteries are difficult to run because, unlike narrative fiction, we don't know where the characters are going to go, what they're going to investigate, or what clues they might pick up. They could identify the key villain in the first scene or pursue tangents away from the clues you expect them to follow. Both of these situations need to be accounted for in your prep and play.

Preparing Investigations and Mysteries

These steps can help you prepare to run an investigation or mystery:

• Develop the starting situation. What happened? Who did what? What is the timeline of previous events?
• Develop your strong start. How and when do the characters get involved in the situation? What hooks them into the mystery?
• Develop a list of NPCs the characters can talk to. Who are they? What was their involvement in the situation? What do they want? What are their goals? Avoid introducing the main villain too early if you're trying to keep them a secret.
• Develop locations the characters can investigate. Where can they go? How can they uncover the clues they eventually need? What happened at these locations?
• Develop a list of secrets and clues. Keep them abstract from their place of discovery so you can drop in these clues when it makes sense based on the investigation undertaken by the characters. In investigations and mysteries, you may need more than ten.
• Write down monsters and treasure for the more traditional adventure elements.

Running an Investigation or Mystery

The following list provides a structure around running investigations and mysteries:

• Use your strong start and sink in the hook so the characters, and their players, want to dig in and figure out what's going on.
• Introduce NPCs helpful to the characters who can give them a push in the right direction.
• As the characters investigate, drop in clues that lead the characters to other locations, meeting other NPCs, and discovering more clues and so on.
• Throughout the adventure, expose clues until the players can piece together the whole scenario.
• Add henchmen or other hostiles to add some combat as desired.
• When the time is right, drop in your villain and have a big confrontation.

Common Pitfalls for Investigations and Mysteries

Investigation and mysteries may sometimes include the following pitfalls. During prep and play, keep these pitfalls in mind so you can avoid them and run a fun evolving game.

• There's only one way to find the right clues and the characters don't follow it.
• The characters discover the villain or source of the mystery too early.
• The characters never discover the villain or figure out the mystery.
• The GM leads the players on too much – making it clear the players didn't figure it out but had the results spoon-fed to them.
• The pacing gets tiresome. Players who want to crack some skulls end up bored.
• The mystery is too complex. Players can't figure out all the important details.

Avoiding Pitfalls

Consider the following ways to avoid the pitfalls listed above.

• Keep the clues needed to uncover the mystery abstract from their location of discovery. Drop in clues along the path the characters take during the investigation.
• Don't introduce the villain too early. Keep them a blank spot in the story until it's time for their revelation.
• Provide the right amount of information for the players to be able to piece together the puzzle themselves. Don't spell it out for them.
• Clarify that the characters are the ones discovering information and piecing it together – not you the GM.
• Have multiple ways to uncover the truth. Don't let discovery of the mystery hinge on a single element the characters might miss.
• Include combat and skirmishes to keep combat-focused players interested.
• Keep in mind that players only grasp about half of what you reveal. Keep mysteries simple enough that players can actually piece them together.

Build Situations, Not Mystery Novels

A key to running a good investigation and mystery is not to assume you know how the players will discover the truth. Build and set up the situation during prep and let the characters follow their own path to their ultimate discovery.

More Sly Flourish Stuff

The Lazy DM's Companion is currently on sale for 50% off the PDF and 20% off the PDF and softcover version! If you don't have this book, now is a fantastic time to pick it up! The Lazy DM's Companion includes tools, tables, and tips for running awesome fantasy D20 games. Grab it today!

Last Week's Lazy RPG Newsletter

I had a cold last week and didn't record an episode of the Lazy RPG Talk Show (also available as a podcast). Instead, I wrote a text-version of the talk show in the Lazy RPG Newsletter for 3 March 2024 with news, tips, and Patreon questions and answers.

I did post a YouTube video on Using Paper Character Sheets.

RPG Tips

Each week I think about what I learned in my last RPG session and write them up as RPG tips. Here are this week's tips:

• Name villains and sentient opponents. Make each one unique.
• Have players identify monsters with interesting physical characteristics.
• Add an interesting usable environmental object or effect into significant combat encounters.
• Tie clues, treasure, and MacGuffins to the backgrounds, knowledge, and history of the characters.
• Reveal the world through the eyes of the characters.
• Ask each character what they think about from their past and their current larger goals during short or long rests.
• Show the characters the results of their actions in the world.

Related Articles

• Managing Mysteries and Plot Twists
• Running Dungeon Crawls
• Running Roleplay and Intrigue Adventures

Get More from Sly Flourish

• Articles
• Newsletter
• Bookstore
• Patreon
• Podcast
• YouTube

Buy Sly Flourish's Books

• Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master
• Lazy DM's Companion
• Lazy DM's Workbook
• Forge of Foes
• Fantastic Lairs
• Ruins of the Grendleroot
• Fantastic Adventures
• Fantastic Locations

Have a question or want to contact me? Check out Sly Flourish's Frequently Asked Questions.

Read more »