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 »

by W. Eric Martin

• Power Vacuum from Kaleb Wentzel-Fisher and Keen Bean Studio presents players as anthropomorphic appliances competing for the role of Supreme Appliance following the death of the land's leader, who is, yes, a vacuum. Sucks to be him...


The deck has cards in five suits, with the backs of the cards showing cards in only four suits. One suit is disguised as the other four, and while red is trump in general, if a trick contains only cards of this hidden suit and red, then the hidden suit trumps red.

The winner of a trick leads the next trick, and whoever played the lowest card in a trick manipulates the power board. This board has spaces for the five suits and the power supply, with "plugs" on two of these six spaces. To manipulate the power board, you move 1 unit of power from one plugged space to the other, then you move one of the plugs. Each player has an agenda that depicts two suits, and you're trying to make one of those suits the most powerful in the round and the other the least powerful. You score points for your agenda depending on how early you declare it publicly, locking in which suit you want high and which low — or you can keep your agenda secret, essentially gambling double or nothing on getting both sides correct.

Mock-up power board
Power Vacuum is crowdfunding through the end of April 2024, with delivery expected in Q1 2025.

• Keen Bean Studio has another title in the works as well, this one a co-design by Kevin Privalle and company owner Malachi Ray Rempen. Here's an overview of the 1-4 player game Almighty: A Game of Gods & Ends:

You are a primordial cosmic deity who wants to build and control an eclectic pantheon of gods and act upon your various followers in all the ways that ancient deities tend to do: create marvelous miracles, bring about horrible curses, generate mysterious omens, and make increasingly outrageous demands — all to amass the divine power needed to perform even greater acts, attract even better followers, fulfill the best top-shelf prophecies, and prove once and for all that YOU are the almightiest in the universe!

Almighty is a tableau-building game of hand and resource management, with a dash of tile placement and area control. Each turn, players choose a god in their pantheon to perform an act card from their hand, impacting one or more of their followers. Acts and followers generate boons, such as Belief (used to buy new gods from an open market, as well as better acts and followers), Power (needed at increasingly higher levels to perform better acts and impact better followers), more followers (with higher, more valuable populations), and Souls (which grant endgame victory points, but offer bonuses if spent during the game). Acts are performed in one of four lands shared between all players; the more presence you have in a land, the cheaper it will be for you to build temples there, and each land grants a different amount of victory points for temples at the end of the game.

The game is broken into several ages, during which players compete to have the most boons of a specific type. Players also have three private prophecy cards to work toward, but must choose only one to score at the End of Days — the final, apocalyptic doomsday round of the game in which every player does their almighty best to make their final mark on the doomed mortal plane. The player with the most points at the end wins the title of ALMIGHTY!

• Looking for games from other German publishers, we run across Snatch it!, a 3-6 player ladder-climbing card game due out in August 2024 from Christwart Conrad and HeidelBÄR Games that has only minimal information available for now:

Once upon a time, there was a pond that hummed and buzzed happily...but then the frogs suddenly appeared. They greedily filled their mouths with everything within reach of their tongues. They even snatched their prey from the mouths of the others.

Your goal in Snatch it! is to secure as much food as possible. Become a hungry frog, and grab the tastiest cards from the pond. Protect your well-filled piles from the other greedy frogs who keep trying to snatch them away from you. Only those who collect their piles before they burst will not end up with an empty belly.

• A more involved card game awaits you in Suna Valo, a design from Andreas "ode." Odendahl of The Game Builders for exactly two players that will debut in Q3 2024 ahead of SPIEL Essen 24:

In Suna Valo, two individuals take on the task of establishing their own farm in the Solarpunk world of Overgrown. Located in the picturesque "Sunny Valley" (Suna Valo), nestled at the foot of a mountain and crisscrossed by a broad river, the village of Foriro has been erected — a place of new beginnings! The farmers in this village supply valuable goods using their transport drones and river ships.

The construction of your farms is made possible through farm cards across various categories. Cultivate vast grain fields, and harvest beautiful water lilies or blue flowers. Deliver your sheep's wool to the village for clothing production or collect eggs from your free-roaming chickens. But amidst your explorations of the surrounding lands, don't forget to reinforce your fleet of transport drones!

Suna Valo features an innovative purchasing mechanism. Secure the right cards before your opponent does, snatch up the more valuable ones, and host prestigious events! Each time you acquire a new card for your farm, you activate an entire column of cards, causing your farm to flourish. However, you must also earn the resources to cover the costs of these cards.

At the end of three game rounds, the player with the most victory points emerges as the winner of this peaceful competition, having contributed the most to the development of Foriro!

Read more »

by Filip Glowacz

I am an innovation digger and tend to seek new interesting mechanisms in game designs, even in those not of my own making. I always look for things that allow players to review the theme by reading the description in the rulebook and to "feel" it by playing the game itself. That's why Books of Time is a special title in my portfolio and my heart.

But let's start from the beginning.

"What more can be done with cards?" I asked myself on one of these days when I wanted to train my creativity. Initially, I didn't intend to make the whole game. To be completely honest, I just got lost in sorting out this question.

I set myself in the correct mood. The Game Developers Conference was running on the TV in the background, and I started walking around the office, totally focused, taking things from desks or shelves and leaving them somewhere else — without remembering where I left them, as usual. In all this chaos running in my head, I started analyzing the card anatomy and thinking about each aspect, one by one: "How can we use the card?", "What can a single card change?", and "What can we do physically to cards to impact the way they behave?"

That was a moment when my eyes stopped at the shelf with binders. "If we punch holes in cards and use binders, we can make a game where you can create books, real books", I thought, surprised and excited about this idea.

Shortly after that, I knew this game would make players become scribes writing down the history of mankind in the form of a few books, each one describing different fields: science, industry, and history — those were my first choices.


Before I jumped into making the first prototype, I had to set the framework for it. I wanted to design a game with a heaviness of 2.5 on BGG, with a playtime of at most one hour.

The most important aspect for me was to combine every action in the game with the fact that we have those binders. I wanted to create a mechanical reason for having them in the game, not only just to get the "feeling". I wished to have everything connected with the act of actual book writing: flipping pages, adding new pages, reading pages, closing the book — all of these as the main mechanisms and the source of everything in the game (points, resources, movements, etc).


After that, I focused on crafting the prototype. I must admit that preparing it was an exciting experience, and this was probably the fastest prototype I have ever created. I loved playing with this formula and shaping the final gameplay as those binders showed new interesting possibilities for where I could go with mechanisms. It was hard to stay focused and on track, even knowing the framework I had set up for this game. This was so exciting!

Having the books open brought natural limitations to what players could perform, and while adding new pages or flipping them, the actions changed completely. The fact that those three books are actually three decks of double-sided cards that function as books made this tableau/deck-building blend of mechanisms very innovative.



I wanted to make players analyze how to expand those books, where to add new pages to create a set of actions, and what type of cards to add so that actions would chain together.

The actions themselves had to be easy — along the lines of changing one thing to another, moving up on tracks, gaining resources — so that players would not have to constantly go through the books to check which actions they have; that would be administrative and fiddly. You know what to expect in the specific type of book you are working on, sure, but what's on the other side of the page once you flip it? You can always check with no impact on gameplay, yet that's still fiddly.

Since the cards are double-sided to act as pages in a book, the ideal solution was to place the same action on the reverse of the card, while making it a little weaker than what's on the front; now you know something about this action, even without flipping the page to see what's there. Additionally, this was the only way to solve the "market" problem of having double-sided cards as I can't imagine how terrible it would be if players had to check both sides of a card when deciding which card to take.

The idea started to form into a unique smash-up of a deck-tableau-building game in which players have to manage their resources.

I prepared the first prototype, then we gathered the Board&Dice team to play, and the sound of clicking binders filled the air. The game worked, yes, but what was most important was that the gimmick worked and added to the game exactly what I wanted.


After everyone tried out this game, we had to check whether we would be able to print this design that would include thirteen metal binders(!) at a production cost that would allow us to set the retail price at a really good level. After a few e-mails with the manufacturer, we got the answer we wanted: The whole project got a green light.

From this moment, the game was taken over by our dev team, completely out of my hands. We've stuck to the rule that designers should not develop their own games. It's reasonable that the person (and the team) doing the hardcore development should not be emotionally attached to the game so that every needed change or modification would be dictated by playtest feedback (i.e., hard facts). Of course that doesn't mean the designer will not be included in the process or can't do anything other than hope the dev team will do it right. At B&D, each game we are working on has a "game champion", a member of the dev team who is responsible for monitoring the process of a particular game, and one of the key aspects of this role is keeping the designer updated about changes and the processes.

For this game, the development process took around eight months, and during this time the core game structure stayed the same, but the team brought many good ideas and improvements to the design, such as the Chronicle Book, which is a thematic round counter as well as the endgame trigger; it also adds additional decisions during a player's turn. My first idea for the common scoring tracks turned out to be too complex as all players built their own tracks during the game. This idea was interesting, but this design was not about the development of scoring tracks; the team told me to design a separate game about this if I like the idea. As I said, staying focused is important. The fewer elements that drag you from the main concept/mechanism, the better, especially in a game of the 2.5 BGG weight we were aiming for.

When the game entered the art process, we wanted a vintage-clean look so that we could make beautiful book covers and truly vibrant illustrations. The art also allowed us to think about inclusivity in the game, so the science pages would have a variety of famous scientists and inventors. We decided to co-operate with our friends from Our Family Play Games to create the ideal representation there. They also reviewed everything in the game from that perspective. The cards don't have text, but we included a section in the rulebook where players can find descriptions of the illustrated people, inventions, and events.


After twelve months of work, the game ended up in production with eight language localizations and premiered during UKGE 2023. It was an exciting experience for me. I hope you will have as much fun while playing the game...

Filip Głowacz

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by W. Eric Martin

• On April 24, 2024, CMON Limited announced a deal with Japon Brand General Incorporated Association to acquire Japon Brand.

Japon Brand has been a regular presence at the SPIEL game convention in Essen, Germany since 2006, introducing hundreds of tiny games to players outside of Japan — and to publishers.

While Japon Brand sells directly to individuals, its larger function has been to serve as an agent for Japanese game designers and represent them in licensing deals with non-Japanese publishers. I first recall seeing licensed Japanese games appear from Z-Man Games in the early 2000s with titles like R-Eco, Fairy Tale, and Stack Market, and Z-Man picked up several designs represented by Japon Brand, such as Parade, Traders of Carthage, and Master of Rules.

Other publishers have licensed Japon Brand titles as well, such as Asmodee with Robotory, FoxMind with String Railway, and AEG with Seiji Kanai's Love Letter, which proved to be a breakthrough title in terms of worldwide awareness of Japanese game design and which in 76 years will undoubtedly still be one of the most important games released in the 21st century.

In 2022, CMON had founded a Japanese games division, with Nobuaki "Tak" Takerube in the role of Director of Japanese Operations and Ken Watanabe as Japanese Sales Manager. Tak has been central to the growth of Japon Brand over the years, and BGG has enjoyed hosting him on many SPIEL livestreams in which he and Simon Hammar would present up to two dozen games in an hour-long blitz.

In the press release announcing this deal, CMON notes that "Japon Brand will continue to serve as an independent agent division, leveraging CMON's infrastructure and management capabilities to introduce games to the global market." More from the press release, as Google translated with some clean-up:

The new president of Japon Brand will be 野村紹夫 (Akio Nomura), who has been active as a board game designer for many years and who served as a board member under the old system. Nomura describes his aspirations as follows:

"The situation surrounding Japan's analog game industry has continued to change over the past ten years. The number of people exhibiting overseas on their own has increased, and the number of overseas buyers visiting Game Market [in Tokyo and elsewhere] has also increased. However, for many individual artists, "overseas'' is still a long way off due to social and economic circumstances. I hope that the existence of Japon Brand will continue to be a source of hope for them. With the support of CMON, we expect to be even more active than ever before."

David Preti, COO of CMON Limited, also commented: "Japon Brand has always been a great ambassador for Japanese game design to the world. That spirit is extremely important, and we are honored to be a part of that long tradition."

In order to make the most of the synergy with CMON, Japon Brand is building a business structure, and without losing its traditional spirit, will continue striving to convey the wonders of "Japanese games" to the world.

In an April 26, 2024 Facebook post, Nomura says he first met Japon Brand in 2011, released his title Air Alliance with Japon Brand in 2015, directed the SPIEL exhibition for the first time that same year, and returned to SPIEL following Covid in 2023 for what he thought would be his swan song: "It's the last time, so I came up with all the ideas I could think of, and did aggressive booth decorations and management, and there was zero trouble on site. (First time ever!) I was happy to see all the exhibitors and returned home with the beauty of the final." (Again, I've used Google translation, then cleaned up the text.)

Now he plans to refresh the Japon Brand format, to "translate the company's words" anew: "Why I go to Essen. Why do we all go. Why I work as an agent. Getting clear on the standards of each purpose and accomplishment, rebuilding what is necessary and what is useless one by one."

Nomura feels confident taking on this challenge after having run his Route11 creative studio since 2005: "About 70% shaped now. Still seems a long way to go. I think it should take about three years to prepare. If this challenge can be accomplished, Japon Brand will become a sustainable structure, that is, an organization that can always change positively."

• In other Japanese news, media conglomerate KADOKAWA has purchased Arclight Games, which publishes games and game-related magazines, owns retail game stores, and manages game conventions in Japan, including Game Market.

Here's an excerpt from the press release announcing this deal, once again Google translated, then edited:

The KADOKAWA Group is promoting the basic strategy of "Global Media Mix with Technology'' in its medium-term management plan ending in March 2028 in order to improve its corporate value over the medium-to-long term. As an important measure for this purpose, in addition to increasing the number of IP (intellectual property) points we create from the current 5,500 points to 7,000 points per year, we will further accelerate the media mix to increase the LTV (lifetime value) of each of these IPs. We aim to maximize the LTV.

In recent years, analog games that do not require power supply, such as trading card games (TCG) and board games (BDG), have become increasingly popular not only in Japan but also around the world, and the market continues to grow. The size of the TCG domestic market has rapidly expanded after the coronavirus pandemic, more than doubling from ¥113.3 billion in fiscal 2019 to ¥234.8 billion in fiscal 2022. The global BDG market is expected to expand from $9.3 billion (approximately 1.2 trillion yen) in 2023 to more than 2.4 times in 2036. In addition, the number of participants in Japan's largest analog game event, "Game Market'', sponsored and operated by Arclight, has reached a record 25,000.

Arclight operates Hobby Station, which has one of the top store networks in the TCG industry, and has strong planning and development capabilities that have created popular original works, as well as know-how in managing Japan's largest analog game event. Furthermore, we hold many domestic licenses for world-famous analog games.

KADOKAWA has also been involved in the analog game business for some time, and クトゥルフ神話("Cthulhu Mythos TRPG''), made in collaboration with Arclight since 2004, is a representative work in this business. Masu. In addition, we collaborated with Arclight in 2022 to release モンスターイーター ～ダンジョン飯 ボードゲーム～ ("Monster Eater: The Delicious in Dungeon Board Game"), which is based on the ダンジョン飯 ("Delicious in Dungeon") manga.

By welcoming Arclight into the group, we will expand the genre of media mix of popular IP owned by KADOKAWA, in other words, accelerate the commercialization of analog games, and also promote new games through the largest analog game event in Japan sponsored and operated by Arclight. By discovering developers and writers, we aim to further expand the number of IP creation points and accelerate the growth of the group.

Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

What's black and white and read played all over? Othello — and potentially games about pandas, especially given all these new panda-based games hitting the market in 2024:

• Let's kick off with a new game from the greatest designer ever: Carl Chudyk, creator of Innovation, the greatest game of all time. His new game is Panda Spin, a climbing-and-shedding card game for 2-5 players from new publisher Moon Gate Design, a studio within French publisher Matagot. Here's an overview:

In Panda Spin, each player attempts to be the first to rid their hand of cards, collecting bamboo in the process to keep their pandas well fed.

In more detail, Panda Spin is a climbing game played with a special deck of "double-headed" cards. All cards start with the orange animals toward the top. Each player receives a random wind card — each of which has a unique playing condition — and a hand of eleven cards, with the remaining cards placed in a deck.

During the game, players lay down cards to tricks as singles, in sets, in runs, or in formations (two consecutive pairs, two consecutive triples, etc.) If you're the first player in a trick, lead what you wish other than a bomb, that is, four or more cards of the same value. In turn, players must play a higher matching set of cards, e.g. a higher three-of-a-kind on a three-of-a-kind, or pass, after which they can no longer play in a trick. (A bomb cannot be lead, but can be played on any card combination.)

When you pass, if you've played cards and all of those cards have orange animals at the top, flip the cards so that the blue animals are at top. Each time you flip a card, you change its value depending on its suit: e.g., the water 4 becomes a pair of Qs, the wood 6 becomes a A+bamboo (and each time you play a card with bamboo, you take a bamboo token from the reserve), the earth 8 becomes a Q+panda (with you stealing a bamboo from an opponent for each panda you play), the fire 3 becomes a 10+fire, with the fire being a value of your choice when played.

If you pass and the cards you've played have at least one blue animal, you discard all of those played cards. The winner of the trick always discards all of their played cards, then they lead to the next trick. When you play a wind card — the south wind, for example, beats a run or formation with 3+ different numbers in it — you draw two cards from the deck; subsequent players need only beat the card combination played prior to your wind. If you play a wind, you always discard all cards you played to the trick.

Mock-up cards (Image: Natsume)
When a player runs out of cards — that is, they "show out" — they score bamboo equal to how many cards are held by the player with the largest hand. When all but one player have shown out, the round ends, then you shuffle all the cards (including the winds) and deal everyone a new hand. A player immediately wins the game when they have at least twenty bamboo — but they must score their 20th bamboo by showing out; playing wood and panda cards scores you no bamboo when you have nineteen bamboo.

• Panda Royale is a dice-drafting game from Nathan and Jake Jenne of Last Night Games for 2-10 players, which isn't a range present on many boxes. The publisher is fulfilling a 2023 Kickstarter campaign in April 2024, then the game will head to retail. Here's what awaits you:

Each year as the mid-summer festival begins, the seven panda clans gather to celebrate their many years of peace and prosperity. After all the feasts, stories, and games, the Elders host the annual competition wherein the bravest of all pandas gather to battle for honor and glory. The panda clans each have their own powers and abilities, and the Elders consider those strengths carefully as they assemble their teams.

In the game, each player starts with a single yellow die, and over ten rounds builds a hand of ten dice to earn the most points, with each color of dice having its own scoring properties. Players vie for the best drafting order to pick from the allotted dice each round.

• U.S. publisher Allplay is launching a new line of tiny games in 2024, with one of those releases being Panda Panda, a new edition of designer Kaya Miyano's 2023 title Cat Poker from Japanese publisher Mob+:

In Panda Panda, players carefully manage their cards to try to make specific hands. On a turn, players can discard a card, draw from the deck, or draw from an opponent's discard pile. If a player discards an "A" card, everyone has to pass one card to the right.

To win, yell "Panda Panda!" when you start a turn with a completed hand. Can you collect the right cards, figure out what your opponents are going for, and time the "A" cards correctly?

• Okay, you've assembled a team of dice and a hand of cards — now how about pulling together an embarrassment of pandas?

In Villa Panda, a game from designers Miguel Suárez Olivares, Alejandro Ortiz Peña, Roberto D. Rivera, and Ignacio Villa Toro and publisher Salta Pal Lao, you start with a lone panda who desires a leadership position in its village. To earn the 12 points required to do this, you need to erect buildings, enact plans, and expand your influence by hiring other pandas to strengthen your position.


Each round, you roll a pair of dice, with the sum of these dice activating the panda cards in front of all players, then you choose one of the dice to activate only your cards. Next, you place your panda figure on the main board to obtain resources (water, bamboo, bao, or gold) or perform an action: market, build, hire, or activate.

• Believe it or not, another panda-based game from a quartet of Spanish-speaking designers will hit the market in 2024: Party Panda Pirates from Gabriel González, Adrian Alamo Borja, Pepe Macba, Victor Valdés, Detestable Games, and Draco Studios.


In this 2-6 player game, you needs treasure chests to win, and to get those chests, you'll participate in mini-games in each of the six rounds, whether played in teams, 1-vs-many, or a free-for-all. The mini-games range from dexterity-based to memory, luck to area movement, and the better you play, the more coins you earn. Before each game, you guess who will win, giving you another chance to earn coins. Coins convert into chests at the end of the game, but you also have a chance to discover buried chests on the treasure hunt board.

• Parachute Panda is a "take that"-style card game for 2-6 players from Conner Coleman, Mike Richie, and Redshift Games in which you are all pandas falling to your doom from an airplane, and since you're fated to die anyway, you decide that hitting the ground last would be a good thing for your spirit...which means you need to help others get there first.

Every panda starts near the top of the game board, and on a turn, you fall, then play cards from your hand to catch a balloon to rise higher, or manifest a grand piano at the top of someone else's column, or catch a breeze to move you out from under a piano that someone else manifested. In addition to movement cards, your hand might have attacks and reaction cards, but in the end momentum will turn all but one of you into a panda-shaped rug.

Gameplay example at GAMA Expo 2024 Read more »

by David J. Mortimer

War of the 3 Sanchos 1065–67 (Wot3S) was my first game to be conceived, developed, and signed during the UK pandemic lockdowns of 2020 and 2021.

Games normally start whirring in my brain when a new mechanism or two I've been toying with collides into an interesting theme. At that point, the game gestates in the grey matter (and Google Keep checklists) when I have the spare brain capacity from my day job...and life in general! It can take between a few weeks and a few years before I'm happy enough with the idea to bring it to life and get it playtested to destruction at playtest groups and meetups before submitting to publishers. This kind of mental gestating can be draining, so when key aspects fire up, I have a notebook to hand at all times to take pressure off the brain power.

The pandemic changed all that. While I always like to design within thematic self-imposed constraints, usually limiting components and mechanisms to drive creative thinking to overcome problems, this was the first time I'd had a constraint imposed upon me. I was locked down at home with few distractions from work and social life. This led to three critical paths occurring:

1) I couldn't meet with any of my usual playtesters, so I needed to find a way to playtest the game to destruction without meeting up.
2) I was watching a ridiculous number of box sets on video streaming services and surfing the internet researching.
3) My brain was underused, so I had much more capacity than normal, meaning the gestating period was much shorter.

The way these three paths collided was extremely fast. I'd had a unique combat mechanism in my notebook for a while in which three parties could participate in a new three-way command-card system. I'd also started to watch foreign-language drama series for the first time. One of these was "The Legend of El Cid", a Spanish historical series about Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar. This was thoroughly entertaining, and I binge-watched the first season (and also the second during a later lockdown). At the same time, my search bar results for "battles involving three armies" brought up War of the 3 Sanchos. This was the catalyst for the brain-gestation period that occupied my spare-time thoughts, especially once I realized El Cid was also around during the War. At that point, the fire was lit for a three-player pocket campaign game set in medieval northern Spain.

El Cid's statue in Burgos. (Photographer: El Caminode Santiago 09 2006; Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0)
A week later, I was ready to bring this to life, and this is where another critical path intervened. How was I going to get this playtested? I'd tinkered with Tabletopia and Tabletop Simulator (TTS) in the past, but the former burnt out the screen on my Surface Pro due to the sheer amount of work required by the processor to run the app and Skype, and the latter was an issue as many of my testers didn't use it and would have to pay to get the app. I wasn't ready to fund their apps just yet, although that was an option I considered, as I was finding the user interface much more complicated than Tabletopia. (Another web app, Screentop.gg, ended up being my preferred solution, but I didn't discover it until much later.) I took the only option open to me at that time: I would have to start this game as a solitaire design, then layer multiplayer in later! This itself was an interesting constraint, and I dove straight in.

As is my wont as a qualified accountant, I started to build a spreadsheet that could generate a card list with three events and the command points on each, the idea being the events would relate to each side in the game. At this point, my access to War of the 3 Sanchos information was limited as my Spanish is non-existent. Therefore, details on Wikipedia and in The Legend of El Cid would be used initially. (Alan Paull would later come to my rescue with naming and historical research!) This meant originally the sides were called Castille, Navarre, and Aragon. El Cid himself took a back seat at this point, with the TV series just giving me inspiration for the theme.

A lot has been written about game design approaches, with painting and sculpting often used to describe the main methods. Both have their merits, although the latter seems to be considered more cool among boardgame design technique writers. With pocket games, I find sculpting (throwing everything you can think of into the design and chipping away the unnecessary) too inefficient, and I will usually paint (start with a canvas and add new layers with each iteration). My canvas will be one solid mechanism intrinsically linked to the theme I am working on. This will probably be a dull game, but there is plenty of time to do the first FF in game design: Find Fun.

First, though, I need a balanced base upon which to build the game. In this instance, it was the command cards. Another key component (often overlooked by new designers) in pocket-game design is the players. You can't get the same multiple routes to victory in pocket games as in large strategy games, so much of the variability comes from the players discovering new heuristics (those rules of thumb you develop to hang your strategy around) and out-thinking each other each game. For the first game in the Pocket Campaigns series, The Cousins' War, this was the ability for players to lie about what they had rolled and deal with the consequences if found out. This is one of the key reasons this design was such a success as this fit the theme of a time of intrigue and betrayal beautifully. I'll cover the other, much less obvious reason for its perceived success shortly.

Again, this is where self-imposed constraints kicked in. In the old days — for me, the early 2010s — card sheets were a certain size, and publishers liked to receive games that had 18, 27, and 54 (or 20, 30, and 60) cards so that the game could be printed on one sheet with no blanks and therefore minimize costs (which is critical for pocket games). This constraint doesn't really matter anymore as printing machines are much more flexible and cards come in all kinds of sizes. That being said, this is still something I like to do early on. In this instance, I decided to keep this to a 54-card deck. My thoughts were that I would have nine cards per side, so 27 in total, then I could playtest from all three sides and have another three nine-card decks that would have events with clear instructions for bot opponents.

Prototype cards
I use Affinity Designer and Publisher as my tools of choice. These are much cheaper than the ongoing Adobe subscriptions for Illustrator and InDesign that do the same things. Free (or cheap) apps like Inkscape for design and nanDECK for building deck templates can achieve the same thing (which I have used in the past when introduced to them by the likes of Rob Harper). But the interaction of the same platform of Affinity is seamless and hence why I was prepared to pay the relatively modest one-off costs.

The advantage of these apps is that you can create a card template that links to a spreadsheet so that you can make modifications affecting all cards by editing in your spreadsheet, then running the merge program again. (I've also seen Dávid Turczi use Mail Merge in Word to similar effect with a bit of VisiBasic programming.) This helps the other FF in game design: Fail Fast. The quicker you can play again and fix faults — another FF! No wonder Friedemann Friese is such a game-design genius! — the longer the muse remains upon you to inspire more development.

This is the fun bit for me. Formulas were used to create a balanced deck initially as well as listing terminology and actions. Before I had played, I had six nine-card decks: three for bots and three for players. Initially I had thought to have each player's deck separate, but on impulse I shuffled in Castille's and Aragon's bot decks with my player cards for Navarre.

I hacked together a rough board using the map from Wikipedia (again this would be fixed later as the map wasn't from the proper time) to create regions with values for control and a score track like all great area-control games. This is where the second new mechanism — the combat chart — would be introduced as the score track seemed perfect for this. My idea was for a three-way combat system in which the bigger the army, the more likely it was to get in its own way. Long-distance communication in the 11th century was still in its infancy, so errors in battle would often occur. I wanted to replicate this. Some people will be able to do the probabilities, but most will run on gut feeling.

Prototype set-up on Screentop.gg
This is where the combat system you see now came to life, and it has changed little since, beyond refining constraints like the number of dice and playing with the King's die structure (originally a d10) during development with Alan Paull. The 3 Sancho Kings needed to be represented, so a meeple and a special King die were thrown in, along with counters to represent the troops. This is one of the most critical elements of the design of small area-control games and is the other reason I alluded to earlier that The Cousins' War (and later The Ming Voyages) found some success. Limiting the number of troops to the right number is critical: too many, and players aren't faced with meaningful decisions on where to control, then unintentional snowball effects occur; too few, and players become frustrated at not being able to do enough things.

It is at this stage that initial development began like all games: play, tear down, rebuild, repeat. Not always interesting, but always rewarding. The bot instructions were constantly changing to give them new powers and evolve the decks from being symmetrical to asymmetrical to take account of the different starting positions on the board. Each side needed a different flavor, especially for solo play, so that playing from each side would be a different experience with different heuristics to discover. This is where the lockdown constraint allowed me to design a game in a manner I would never have thought of trying before. It also occurred to me that I had sculpted rather than painted this game. All the layers (bar one that appeared in later development – El Cid) were there from the beginning. I was just chipping away at options, numbers of dice/tokens, and so on, but I had clearly found the fun and had a solid design.

We were then released from lockdown, and I had a chance to pitch this design to Alan Paull at Surprised Stare Games. He was instantly taken with the concept, and with many hours of professional development — a skill that is very different to design and that Alan has in bucketloads; just check what he did with Kingmaker — we then started to work on the multiplayer versions. The three-player version came together quickly, and it played very differently to solo. This is often the case because the table talk and picking on the leader in area-control games often helps it to self-balance.

The two-player version proved more tricky to balance. It started as "pick a Sancho, put the two-player decks in and add the third for the bot". Each player and the bot would take a turn, but we just couldn't make the bot effective without it becoming overpowering in solo. In a discussion with Alan, I suggested we should allow the player of the card to control what the non-player Sancho does. This would bring the two-player game to life and give us another game that felt different from solo and three-player. I am very proud of this aspect. I was always in awe of how Agricola plays differently strategically at every player count, and we seem to have achieved that with the three different player counts of Wot3S — not a jack of all trades, but a new master at each player count.

Many more development sessions ensued that led to the inclusion of El Cid to help with some balancing, changes in the King die configuration from a d10 to a custom d6, and a combining of the player and bot decks to halve the cost of the cards. (Game cost is another constraint that kicks in late on.) The region boundaries were tweaked, and a solo board with the decision disc added.

Two critical changes in this process came from group playtesting, particularly with players who aren't regular command-card game players. The first was turn structure. Players struggled with the aspect of everybody doing something on their turn, and it was eating into the brain budget for them. Alan and I thrashed this out, and it dawned on us to call each player's turn a round, with that player being commander for it. This was such a simple rulebook rewrite that took out a lot of explanations, and people just "got it" when taught how to play.

The second was a case of one of my darlings being killed. A golden rule of command-card games is that command points (CPs) can be spent on only one action, so this is how Wot3S played — but with the change from each player having a turn to each player commanding a round, we ended up with the perception that some events were more powerful than spending the CPs on just one thing. Alan contacted me and said he'd tried allowing the CPs to be broken up. I instantly applied my Feedback Filter (FF again...) and said no, the decision tree will be too big, but he was stubborn on this, so we agreed to playtest. (Again we were locked down, so I built Wot3S in Screentop.gg.)

I was stunned. This small change was unbelievable. It was usually pretty obvious what not to do, so the decision tree was much smaller than I had anticipated, basically boiling down to a few choices each turn to mull over. With this flexibility for the commander, we could remove the need for them to access their own event. This went down really well in playtesting, and I am glad Alan talked me into it!

In addition, Alan threw his energies (as is his wont) into researching the subject and calling on co-publishers, other experts, and Gamefound followers to help us tighten up the theme and naming.

Youtube VideoIntro video for War of the 3 Sanchos from our Gamefound campaign
If you got this far, then I am impressed! This was a labor of love that kept me sane during lockdowns and even helped me learn new skills, such as building online prototypes with Screentop.gg to allow Alan and me (and others) to continue playtesting and refining. Klemens Franz worked his usual magic, helping us keep the card count to 27 and bringing the board to life. Frosted Games and 2Tomatoes Games helped tremendously on their visions of how the game and rulebook should look. All of this teamwork has led to the biggest Pocket Campaign game to date, and a game I am proud to see coming to life to be released into the world.

David J. Mortimer

Image: Rolf Wognsen Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

What are putting on the table today? Food or games? Well, how about combining the two to get a taste of both?

• Sausage Sizzle! is a new edition of Inka and Markus Brand's 2012 dice game Würfel Wurst that publisher 25th Century Games will release in October 2024.

You start each round by rolling the eight dice: four showing six different animals and four showing the numbers 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, and 1, with the 1s being represented by sausages. Set aside at least one die, then re-roll the remaining dice, continuing to do this until you decide to stop or are forced to. Choose an animal that you haven't yet scored in the game, then score points equal to the number of this animal you rolled multiplied by the lowest number you rolled. Sausages are normally terrible, but if all the number dice show sausages, then you multiply the number of animals by 7 instead of 1.

After six rounds, whoever has scored the most points wins.

• If you're like me, you accompany breakfast sausage with maple syrup, so let's turn to Sébastien Bernier-Wong's Masters of Maple Syrup, self-published through Firestarter Games.

In this two-player tableau-building game, players take turns choosing the action that both players will take, with the active player getting a slightly better version of this action. Develop your property by adding trees to harvest sap from and utilities to improve your syrup production. When any player has ten cards in their tableau, the game ends, and players tally their score based on the value of cards in their property, along with any scoring bonuses granted by cards played.

The first edition of Masters of Maple Syrup is no longer available, but Bernier-Wong plans to crowdfund a new edition.

• Breakfast might be too early for drinking, but if not, give Piña Coladice a try.

Each turn in this dice game for 2-4 players from Yann Dupont and IELLO, you roll the five dice up to three times, ideally then claiming one of the coasters in the 4x4 grid. The earlier you claim a coaster, the more points it's worth — and if you place four of your cocktail markers in a line, you win instantly. Piña Coladice is due out in July 2024 in France, with an English-language edition coming as well.

• Another breakfast accompaniment might be Toasty Toasts, the first game from designer Coco Chen, who crowdfunded the game in mid-2023 and now has it for sale on her website.

In this 2-4 player card game, players draw cards at the start of each turn, then take two actions, such as adding toppings to their base toast, creating flavor combos, starting more toast, playing action cards, or covering their toppings with another piece of bread to create action-immune sandwiches. When the "Time to Eat" card is drawn from the deck, everyone stops playing with their food and tallies their points.

• Should you care to order out instead, perhaps you can engage the services of a dabba walla — but unless you live in Mumbai, that's probably not going to happen.


Dabba Walla is a game for 2-4 players from Felix Leder and Patricia Limberger that publisher Queen Games plans to debut at the Origins Game Fair in June 2024 before it hits retail later in 2024. Here's an overview of the setting and gameplay:

Every morning in Mumbai, over five thousand workers dressed in white swarm out to deliver more than 200,000 "dabbas" (multistoried lunch boxes) to the offices of the Indian metropolis. These "Dabba Walla" have been an iconic fixture in the cityscape since 1890. The food is freshly prepared at home by families, then collected from their front doors by the Dabba Walla. Even though some of the dabbas travel very far, they are delivered punctually via a network of intermediate stations with an amazing reliability of 99.999%! Now it's time to join the Dabba Walla on their daily journey through Mumbai...

The game Dabba Walla consists of two phases:

— Pick-up phase: Take turns moving your Dabba Walla through Mumbai to collect dabba cards. Each time you pick up a card, you then play one of the three in your hand to take the depicted dabba tile — a polyomino of 1-4 squares — and place it in your cart, stacking tiles higher and higher as the rounds progress. Dabbas come in four colors, and you must place them on flat surfaces, filling holes with empty dabbas if needed. If you connect two half-chai symbols on tiles on the same level, you draw a random chai tile with a bonus action. Keep all played dabba cards in a personal discard pile.

— Delivery phase: After everyone has placed fifteen tiles in their cart, it's time to deliver lunches! Pick up all the cards you played, then complete a number of delivery rounds equal to the highest level that someone has stacked their dabbas. Each round, each player plays and reveals one dabba card from their hand, optionally playing chai tiles as well. Sum the value of each color of dabba, then everyone scores their dabbas on the current level based on these values, removing the tiles from their carts. (Note: If not all players have dabbas on the current level being scored, they still play a card, but they score nothing.)

Once all the dabbas have been delivered, players score for their remaining chai tiles, then whoever has collected the most tips wins.

Dabba Walla contains two expansion modules to provide additional ways to score or change the value of dabbas being delivered.

Read more »

by Molly Johnson

I don't play a lot of digital games. In person, at the table, holding a deck of cards in my hand, moving pieces on a board — that's my preference. My colleagues Shawn and Robb at Flatout Games, however, really love digital games. They have played a lot over their lifetimes.

When we were developing the first Flatout Games CoLab board game, Calico, the team — which included designer Kevin Russ, developer David Iezzi, and graphic designer Dylan Mangini — decided that the rulebook should include scenarios and achievements, "like a video game would". We've heard that many players, particularly those who play solo, like this feature, and we've since included it in all of our bigger box games: Cascadia, Verdant, Fit to Print, and Nocturne.

I don't think we ever had digital implementation in mind exactly, but the team would tell you that having their board game turned into a video game is an ultimate achievement.

By the time Calico fulfilled its Kickstarter backers, we were several months into the Covid-19 pandemic. We'd all been playing more board games digitally — thanks, Board Game Arena! — and digital games, specifically digital implementations of board games, were on our minds.

And out of the blue, in 2021, Monster Couch reached out. Would we consider making Calico a digital game? Holy noodle! Would we ever!

Monster Couch is a small company of about 25 people based in Poland, whose previous project was Wingspan, including all of its expansions. The team at Monster Couch was looking for games that could be adapted to include new — and stand out — content, and we were excited to be working with a company that focuses on a small number of projects at a time.

With Calico, they wanted to take the concept (making a quilt, attracting cats) and create a digital game with its own identity. One of the biggest ways that they have done this is by adding a story mode. Players take on the role of an aspiring quilter in a series of mini-games that use Calico's mechanisms, and you visit an extraordinary world inspired by the works of Studio Ghibli in which cats have great power and influence over people's lives. This has taken Calico far beyond its original puzzle and has the potential to appeal to both fans of the original game and new [digital] audiences.

We really like this approach. The adaptation of an analog game into a digital game should build on the features that lend themselves to digital games. For example, cats are clearly the stars of Calico. In the digital version, players are able to customize their cats, allowing each player to personalize the game. The Monster Couch team also focused on the 3D animation of the cats, making sure, for example, that the quilts yield under the weight of their paws when they inspect your handiwork.

The Monster Couch team also built on the scenarios and achievements of the board game, taking the "Master Quilter" challenge further than we had in the analog version, although as with the analogue version, this remains a great way to test your skills.

The perk everyone probably talks about with digital implementations of board games is that the scoring is programmed. Can I place a tile here? Does it score? The digital version will tell you! I've certainly stumbled through many first plays of digital games, learning the rules as I go. While the Flatout Games team spends the time figuring out the best phrasing in a rulebook to support this, a digital games development team needs to make sure all the coding is spot on.

For Monster Couch, they aim to make learning the rules of a game as seamless as possible. As anyone who has played digital games knows, this is done through a tutorial. This part of digital game development is challenging and demands lots of trial and error.

While the Monster Couch development team pushed themselves in new areas of animation and story building, there was also one tiny change we had to agree on: What to name the game? There was already a digital game called Calico on Steam, and Monster Couch was clear that we needed to distinguish the games. The team landed on Quilts & Cats of Calico, which is a mouthful, but I think it conveys a bit about the digital game's story mode.


A lot of people play the Calico board game because of its solo mode. In some ways, this probably makes the design a more natural fit for a digital implementation. An element of Quilts & Cats of Calico that the Flatout Games team appreciates is that it is easy to play a quick game, without losing the charm of the analogue version. This new implementation means that people who prefer digital games will have the opportunity to try out the Calico puzzle.

Additionally, one of the reasons that Monster Couch looks at analog games to bring into the digital world is to allow friends and family to play these games even if they live in different parts of the world. The Monster Couch team, while focused on digital games, really enjoys tabletop games. It was a big task to create four-player games in which each player can have their own set-up and be able to see other players' boards, but the Monster Couch team believed it was worth taking on.


This whole process has been a window into the digital games world and piqued my interest in coding. I have also been trying out more digital games, such as the Monster Couch implementation of Wingspan (love it!), the new Snufkin: Melody of Moominvalley (Hyper Games), and even (so so late to the party) Slay the Spire — but I am happy to stick to making analog games and letting the experts run with their skills and creativity.

And now Quilts & Cats of Calico is out there in the world on Steam — and coming soon to Nintendo Switch! It has been fascinating to see a digital version of our game come to life. I can say with a lot certainty that Monster Couch poured many, many hours of heart and soul into the implementation, and we hope that Calico fans, old and new, are enjoying it!

Molly Johnson

Youtube Video Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

Let's retroactively add one more item to my teaser post from Thursday, April 25 thanks to this late-in-the-day revelation from Belgian publisher Repos Production:


An Antoine Bauza and Bruno Cathala design from Repos Production? The team responsible for 7 Wonders Duel?!

In case this illustration from Vincent Dutrait — yes, him again! — doesn't clearly indicate the setting of this game, the image features a MEE (Middle-earth Enterprises) trademark and copyright notice and an Asmodee France post bearing this image declares: "One game to rule them all."

The teaser is all we have for now, so maybe this illustration can double as a representation of every gamer checking their phone late at night to see whether Repos has posted anything else about what this design might be... Read more »

Publisher: Pelgrane Press

Price: $0.00 Read more »

Publisher: Paizo

The festival of the muses is the most exciting time of the year for the town of Fugue and the Bard College of the Four Muses as they host a legendary musical fesitival for all to join in. This year will be more exciting than most as the doors to the inner sanctum of the muses has once again opened. What trials will await our adventures and what will they learn in The Trial of the Muses.

Price: $0.99 Read more »

Publisher: Miska's Maps

This high-quality spaceport nightclub map comes with three different variants to fit any adventure: Exotic club, Nightclub, and Frontier Cantina. Immerse your players in the vibrant atmosphere of Club Solar, from the main lounge to the stage area and VIP area, with all the detail and realism you need to elevate your space opera adventures!

Variants

All variants come with and without a grid.

• Exotic Club (with lights and neutral light)
• Nightclub (with lights and neutral light)
• Frontier Cantina (with lights and neutral light)
• Three different backgrounds (structures, rock and desert building)
• Each variant comes also with transparent background (PNG + WEBP)

Resolution & Scale

• Resolution: 140 pixels per square
• Grid dimensions: 23x17
• Recommended Scale: 5 ft / 1.5 m per square
• File types: JPG, WEBP, PDF, PNG

Price: $4.99 Read more »

Publisher: The Iron Realm

Now includes TWO emerging maps of the unfolding Expanse!  PLUS clues to Dire Tests Six through Nine!

AT LAST.  The expert advice and strategies you need to WIN the world's first Play-By-Podcast MegaDungeon - along with the customizable gaming aids you need to record your progress in an invaluable Adventure Log format.

The Iron Realm Dark Fantasy RPG Campaign brings the focus back to where it belongs. Deadly danger. Traps. The unknown. Dark dungeon corridors. Creatures. A desperate fight to survive in a world of utter darkness.  In an audio drama unlike any other, you fight alongside the tribe against every dark fantasy horror that hides within the deepest reaches of The Iron Realm Infinite MegaDungeon.

And now, with The Iron Realm Adventure Log & Strategy Guide at your command, you will partake of this dangerous world, and where others have merely walked, you may yet conquer.

Along with this book you are invited to download the podcast for FREE - my own special gift to you - so that you may advance through the World's First Play-By-Podcast RPG Campaign in all its glory.  Everything you need is at your command.

For within these pages you are given the action - chapter by chapter.  The clues.  The expert advice.  And the strategies you need - straight from the game's creator and into your hands.  This is the Maze Master's deepest wisdom for securing the greatest treasures, taking advantage of the best tactics, and enjoying the richest roleplaying that a fully loaded Iron Realm Campaign has to offer.

Yet this volume also serves as a comprehensive Adventure Log - for the character that YOU create - including space for gaming stats, maps, logs, notes, challenges, profiles, histories, transcendent disciplines, powers, treasures, and much, much more.  No longer will you have to fumble through a mess of pages at a critical life or death moment.  All you need is here in a handsomely compiled portfolio for your ease of use and enjoyment.

The greatest adventure beckons you now from the dark.  Find what you need within to play it as a solo or as a multiplayer delve beyond all imagining.  The Iron Realm awaits!  I, your Maze Master, will see you there.

This Strategy Guide covers Chapters 141-150.  Obtaining Iron Realm Strategy Guides for the prior chapters (and future chapters!) along with this one is highly recommended.

Price: $5.99 Read more »

Publisher: Skirmisher Publishing

Happy May Day! Skirmisher Publishing is celebrating this ancient Spring festival with a very special customer appreciation bundle that contains a dozen diverse titles, ranging from new releases to a Platinum-bestseller. It will be available for just a very short time, so get it while you can!

	'TSRPG' Coasters/Character Sheets Regular price: 0 Bundle price: 0 Format: PDF	We have always said that all of the stats for a TSRPG (Travel-Sized) RPG character can fit on something the size of a coaster, so we have created a coaster that has a complete TSRPG character sheet on one side of it!  Just download and print out on heavy paper or cardstock the page associated with this freebie; cut along the solid guide-lines and fold along the dashed guide-lines; and affix the two halves with some sort of relatively dry adhesive (e.g., glue stick).  This title also includes a preview of the cover for "The Call of CthulWho," a a self-standing Mythos horror scenario that we currently have in the works and which uses the TSRPG system as its game engine. ...
	100 Oddities for a Pilgrimage Trail Regular price: 0 Bundle price: 0 Format: PDF	Welcome to 100 Oddities for a Pilgrimage Trail, the latest title in Skirmisher Publishing’s popular and ongoing “100 Oddities” series! For thousands of years — and especially since the era of the Middle Ages — people have been prompted to undertake spiritual journeys of various sorts and this concept in general, and the desire to help facilitate and inspire such quests was the motivation for the creation of this universal sourcebook. This system-free thematic sourcebook contains an annotated list of 100 people, objects, conditions, or other things that characters might encounter on a trail dedicated to the veneration of some deity, demigod, hero, saint, or religion. It also contains a subtable for determining the characteristics of roadside markers and more than 60 illustrations, ...
	Festivals & High Holy Days Regular price: 0 Bundle price: 0 Format: PDF	Every calendar is peppered with holidays and annual causes for celebration. From local village festivals to grand revels that consume empires, no campaign setting is complete without holidays to mark the passage of time with jubilation and ritual observance. In addition to adding greater realism and flavor to campaign, holidays also offer unique benefits to adventurers who celebrate during downtime or take a break from their quests to get into the spirit of the season.  "Festivals & High Holy Days" contains entries for a dozen holidays and details on how to use them in role-playing games, to include the benefits they can bestow upon those participating in them.  This mini-sourcebook has been specifically designed for use with the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game but can be used with any ...
	Maps for a Viking Jarl's Hall (36 x 24) Regular price: 0 Bundle price: 0 Format: PDF	This title includes two versions of a large map for a Viking Jarl's Hall, one with a grid and one without. The non-grid version of the map and two full-page illustrations appear in a preview PDF, and high-resolution JPG versions of both maps, along with a custom compass rose, are included in a ZIP folder. The gridded versions of the map is 36 x 24 inches and has 1-inch squares.  These beautiful maps by noted fantasy artist Bob Greyvenstein are suitable for any fantasy or historical RPGs, miniatures games, or wargames, and are especially suitable when running games online or on virtual tabletops. ...
	Preview 'In the Footsteps of Hercules' Regular price: 0 Bundle price: 0 Format: PDF	This special pay-what-you-want preview of Skirmisher Publishing's Gold-bestselling In the Footsteps of Hercules universal sourcebook is intended to give readers a good sense for what this title contains and includes its table of contents; foreword; introduction; overview of the pilgrimage route it describes; two segments of the trail; and the Asclepion of Lerna, one of the 13 specific places that appears in the full version of the book.  In the Footsteps of Hercules is a system-free sourcebook devoted to a pilgrimage trail that can be used in con­junction with any fantasy role-playing game. This book describes the various sections of the trail and the prevailing terrain and conditions associated with them; how most pilgrims travel them; alternate ways some pilgrims choose to appro...
	Six Spells: Festivities Regular price: 0 Bundle price: 0 Format: PDF	Many games focus solely on the combat aspects of magic, but in a fantasy world such powers can do almost anything. Spellcasters from more peaceful magical traditions might specialize in promoting health and the social good, often using the six spells described in this publication to enliven harvest festivals and other celebrations (but crafty players could, of course, use them in many situations). "Six Spells: Festivities" is stat'ed for the "Basic version of the d20/OGL game system and can be used as-is or easily adapted for any RPGs using the same core rules. ...
	TSRPG (Travel-Sized RPG) Regular price: 0 Bundle price: 0 Format: PDF	TSRPG (Travel-Sized RPG) is a rules-light storytelling game designed for a storyteller and one or more players that can easily be played anywhere, from the airport waiting area you are stuck in, to the overnight in some hotel where there is nothing to do (and also, of course, in your own home). All the basic rules for TSRPG fit on one page; no dice are needed; characters have just two stats, Physical and Mental; and any bookkeeping that might be required can be done on a cocktail napkin with a pen borrowed from a waiter. Action is resolved through Challenges, and the consequences of these — whether good or bad — determine the flow of a shared narrative. We have also included a version of the rules that can easily be printed out, folded up into a convenient little booklet, and tucked into y...
	Warning: Danger! A Children’s Guide to Mines & Unexploded Ordnance (Обережно: Небезпека! Дитячий довідник про міни та нерозірвані боєприпаси) Regular price: 0 Bundle price: 0 Format: PDF	One of the most serious threats to children in Ukraine, especially those in parts of it that have been occupied or fought over, is the presence of landmines and unexploded ordnance like grenades, fuzes, firing devices, and submunitions.  In response to this tragic and frightening situation, we have created this activity book designed to help children in Ukraine identify, be aware of, and avoid landmines and other explosive hazards. It includes two-dozen coloring book images (many depicting devices at their actual sizes), two puzzles, a board game, and full-color samples of various devices and the game board!  We are currently in the process of distributing as many copies of this publication as possible to vulnerable children in Ukraine, and all proceeds from its sale here will go toward t...
	Wisdom from the Wastelands Issue #34: Plant Mutants I Regular price: 0 Bundle price: 0 Format: PDF	No matter what your choice of post-apocalyptic game, plants usually get the hind bud. And, unfortunately, Mutant Future is no exception. Although the core rulebook has example mutant plants and many plant mutations, there just are not enough of either. This is especially true considering that our world has many more plants than animals. Wisdom from the Wastelands is dedicated to providing useful information, game content, and ideas to players of modern, science fiction, and post-apocalyptic table-top and role-playing games in general and to fans of Goblinoid Games’ Mutant Future RPG in particular. The material it contains are compatible with it and any others that use the "Basic" system introduced in the most popular role-playing games of the early 1970s and a...
	~ Zwergensoldaten: Druckbare Figuren für Rollenspiele & Kriegsspiele („Cardstock Characters“) ~ Regular price: 0 Bundle price: 0 Format: PDF	Dieses Set herunterladbaren „Cardstock Characters“-Miniaturen enthält drei Variationen von fünf verschiedenen Figuren: einen Champion, einen Infanteristen, einen Armbrustschützen, einen Ziegenreiter, und eine Kriegsziege.  Diese Figuren sind eine ideale Ergänzung für jede Art von Fantasy-Rollenspiel oder Kriegsspiel. Sie können verwendet werden, um Begegnungen zu verbessern oder sogar als Grundlage für sie dienen, und die verschiedenen Variationen können auch verwendet werden, um unterschiedliche Fähigkeiten leicht widerzuspiegeln. Eine der Fraktionen hat sogar leere Schilde, die leicht angepasst werden können.  Wir hoffen, dass Sie und Ihre Spieler Spaß daran haben werden, mit ihnen zu kämpfen! ...
	~100 Oddities pour un Donjon (Bizarreries Pour Jeux de Rôle)~ Regular price: 0 Bundle price: 0 Format: PDF	Bienvenue dans “100 Oddities pour un Donjon,” en français “100 Bizarreries,” la première en langue française de la gamme populaire et best-seller parmi les livres sources de Skirmisher Publishing! Cette édition est conçue pour rendre toutes les zones ou rencontres qui se déroulent dans le donjon plus amusantes et intéressantes. Elle est consacrée aux donjons au sens classique qui sont des lieux utilisés pour enfermer et punir les gens, y compris les prisons, les geôles, les oubliettes et les chambres de torture; comme c’est décrit dans les œuvres d’auteurs comme Edgar Allan Poe (par exemple, Le Puits et la Pendule), Alexandre Dumas (par exemple, L’Homme au Masque de Fer) et le marquis de Sade (par exemple, Justine); et tel que présenté dans des œuvres cinématographiques allant de celles d...
	~GEBB 02 – Probing Questions~ Regular price: 0 Bundle price: 0 Format: PDF	An extraterrestrial presence is real, and the agents of an interplanetary Consortium monitor us from sites hidden throughout the world. All the while they watch humanity strip mine its planet to fuel the growth of populations and economies. If there is a plan to avert environmental and social disaster, the aliens operating out of a subterranean base in Antarctica didn't get the memo. As much as some of them might want to help, the faceless bureaucracy they are part of prevents them from doing so. Rather, they go through the motions of their jobs, which mostly involve abducting people who won’t be missed, subjecting them to probes and other exams, and then eventually returning them to their homes throughout the heartland. GEBB follows the ongoing activities and periodic adventures of the oc...
	~Hijos del Lobo: Personajes de Cartulina para Juegos de Rol y Juegos de Guerra (Cardstock Characters™)~ Regular price: 0 Bundle price: 0 Format: PDF	¡Cambia de forma, aúlla a la luna y corre con la manada! Este hermoso conjunto de miniaturas de cartulina altamente detalladas del renombrado artista de fantasía Bob Greyvenstein contiene 10 figuras únicas, variantes para cuatro de ellas y versiones horizontales de todas ellas para brindar variedad adicional (para un total de 28 miniaturas diferentes), así como así como los tokens correspondientes para su uso online y con mesas virtuales. Todas las miniaturas se suministran en dos tamaños, estándar c. Escala de 28-30 mm y escala grande de 54 mm (2"). Este conjunto incluye: ●  Tres hombres lobo de aspecto poderoso (uno con una variante con arma); ●  Cuatro lobos diferentes (algunos más o menos monstruosos que otros); ●  Tres personas con capucha de lobo, tanto en versión armada como d...

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Publisher: Gabriel Ciprés

Sometimes, cyber-implants accumulate due to wounds as a space knight grows older and they reach a point when they are more machine than human. Some orders execute ruthlessly those knights with too many implants, but others group them  in special formations that act with the cold logic of the machine in combat situations.

This is a new type of company to be used in the ttrpg Super Space Knights. To use it you will need a copy of the rules.

A veces, los ciberimplantes para recuperarse de heridas se acumulan a medida que un caballero espacial envejece y llega a un punto en el que es más máquina que humano. Algunas órdenes ejecutan sin piedad a los caballeros con demasiados implantes, pero otras los agrupan en formaciones especiales que actúan con la fría lógica de la máquina en situaciones de combate.

Este es un nuevo tipo de companía para el juego de rol Super Space Knights. Para emplearla, necesitarás una copia del reglamento.

Price: $1.00 Read more »

Publisher: Michael Tresca

Go big or go home!

Price: $14.95 Read more »

Publisher: nonPareil

A Cyberpunk/SciFi Medical Robot for your tabletop wargames and RPGs. If you like this free file please check out our MyMiniFactory Tribe here…

https://www.myminifactory.com/users/nonPareil%20Institute?show=tribe

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where you can get over 20 new models each month for as low as $1.00.

nonPareil institute is committed to building better futures for adults with autism through technical and work-readiness training and social engagement activities. These 3d models were created by former nonPareil Institute students and staff members who help other adults on the autism spectrum explore their technical passions and skills. You can check us out at www.npusa.org and www.powersourcing.net

One or more textures presented in this pack of these 3d models have been created with photographs from Textures.com. These photographs may not be redistributed by default; please visit textures.com for more information.

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Publisher: Role Arts

Urban Character Portraits and Tokens 1 is a 96 (¡¡96!!) PCs and NPCs portraits collection by artist Luis Miguez. This images are presented as a PNG token collection and as a 3-pages PDF document.

The tokens, useful for online gaming sessions in platforms like ROLL20, are presented as round and square color 72 pps png images. The PDF pages could be printed and its B/W 300 pps images cutted out and attached to character sheets, or to heavy cardboard or cardstock to be used as counters or markers. They can also simply be used as a visual aid when describing PCs and NPCs to the players.

Urban Character Portraits and Tokens 1 is ONLY for private, personal, non commercial use. Urban Character Portraits and Tokens 1 is a proud 100% AI-free product.

Price: $4.26 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.

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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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TSA checked out Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance: Shin Megami Tensei 5: Vengeance Preview – Can Persona’s progenitor hit the big time? We’ve all heard of Persona - it’s one the undisputed kings of the RPG right now, each game pitting one unwitting school kid against an evil adult, using an army of angels and demons to achieve the insurmountable odds stacked against them.... Read more »

Learn more about Mythical Beasts in Titan Quest II: Mythical Beasts In our March update, we detailed the ichthian faction, but alluded to how not all types of enemies in Titan Quest II form factions. The boss enemies that you encounter are perfect examples of this.... Read more »

The tactical RPG FRONT MISSION 2: Remake has been released: FRONT MISSION 2: Remake A classic tactical RPG returns! The second game in the main Front Mission storyline is finally available outside of Japan for the first time. FRONT MISSION 2: Remake blends intense strategy with a deep and involved storyline.... Read more »

Mortismal Gaming checked out Lords of the Fallen again: Lords Of The Fallen - Several Months & Updates Later Thanks Couchpotato!   Read more »

GamingBolt checked out Remnant 2 - The Forgotten Kingdom DLC: Remnant 2: The Forgotten Kingdom DLC Review - The Final Verdict Thanks Couchpotato! Read more »

The retro dungeon crawler Labyrinth: The wizard's cat will be released in Q2/2024: Labyrinth Enter the dungeon and help the master wizard to find his missing cat in this oldschool dungeon crawler game with nice retro pixel art graphics. Make your way deep into the dungeon.... Read more »

The Adventure RPG Dread Delusion will leave Early Access on May 14: Leaving Early Access! Delusionites, your time is coming Thank you again to each and every one of you who made Dread Delusion’s early access a success! Your enthusiasm and feedback have been essential to helping create the final version of the game, and everyone at both Lovely Hellplace and DreadXP are eternally appreciative of each one of you who has taken this journey along with us.... Read more »

Knight's Arcade interviewed Warhorse Studios about Kingdom Come: Deliverance II: Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 - Warhorse Studios Interview (English) Thanks Couchpotato! Read more »

Henriquejr spotted an article about XCOM-likes on Tom's Gaming Blog: 2024, the year of X-com-likes The X-com genre hasn’t exactly been dead, so I can’t say 2024 is the year it will make a glorious comeback, but hot damn, there sure are a lot of games coming out in the genre making it somewhat of an event.... 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 »

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 Infiltration Adventures

In infiltration adventures, the characters often have significant information about their goal, the location in which they must accomplish the goal, and knowledge of the inhabitants of the location. Heists are a common form of infiltration adventure but many infiltrations involve doing something other than stealing something.

Infiltration adventures differ from dungeon crawls because the characters often know more about the location they're infiltrating and spend more time planning their approach. Goals for infiltration adventures can vary, even if how we prepare and run them remains mostly the same. These goals include:

• Stealing something
• Kidnapping someone
• Rescuing someone
• Hunting down a bad guy
• Performing a magic ritual
• Disrupting a magic ritual
• Uncovering war plans
• Recovering blackmail evidence
• Uncovering evidence of a plot
• Planting evidence

Preparing Infiltration Adventures

Preparing infiltration adventures focuses on the following activities:

• Clarifying the goal and ensuring it's something important enough that the characters are willing to risk their lives for it.
• Choosing a map. Unlike dungeon crawls, there's a good chance we'll give a copy of this map to the players.
• Filling in the location with details. I like printing out a Dyson map and writing a couple of words per room or area right on the page.
• Listing out inhabitants and understanding their behaviors. What are they doing when the characters aren't there? Unlike dungeon crawls, inhabitants of a location in an infiltration adventure are often more mobile.
• Listing potential complications. What unknown events might shake things up? Make a list of a handful to either choose from or roll on during the infiltration.
• Ensuring there are multiple paths to achieve the goal. Do they sneak in an upper window? Pretend to be servants? Delve in through the sewers below?

With that material in hand, we're ready to run our infiltration adventure.

Running Infiltration Adventures

Infiltration adventures often break down into the following phases:

• Planning. Unlike other adventures, players spend a lot of time planning their infiltration.
• Choosing roles. What jobs are each of the characters taking on the infiltration? Is someone acting as the "face" character? Is someone the muscle? Is someone sneaking around and spying on things from a higher floor?
• Execution. This is where the real adventure begins. The characters start doing the things they planned.
• Flashbacks. A concept taken from Blades in the Dark gives players an opportunity to flash back earlier in the story to set something up or acquire something they need. Inspiration or luck may be a good mechanic to allow for adjustments or additions to the party's plan.
• Complications. Things never go according to plan. What changes? What complications do you throw in from your list of potential complications? Or do you roll it? Complications don't always have to go against the characters.
• The climax. What happens when the characters achieve their goal? What happens if they fail or partially succeed?
• The escape. How do the characters get out afterwards?

Infiltration Adventure Pitfalls

Infiltration adventures might go wrong for the following reasons:

• Players spend too long planning.
• The plans go out the window too early.
• The characters aggro the entire location, making the job impossible to complete.
• A single bad check affects too much of the outcome.
• Too many complications disrupt the whole plan.
• The changing situation makes it too hard to adjudicate.

Pitfall Mitigation

What can we do to help ensure these pitfalls don't crud up our fun session?

• Arbitrate conversations and get the players to a consensus so the game can move forward. Ensure the players you're not pushing them down one path or leading them to utter destruction.
• Keep a balance on consistency and chaos. Some things should go to plan, some things should go haywire. Don't disrupt or destroy the whole plan too early.
• Use Blades-style "clocks" to escalate tension based on failed checks rather than everything going bad all at once.
• Give leeway in choosing when adversaries become aware of the characters. It should take multiple failed attempts before the characters are discovered and it shouldn't chain out to every adversary in the whole location.

A Framework for Countless Adventures

The infiltration style adventure is a popular and flexible model we can use for many different adventures. Change the goal, the location, and the situation and you have something fresh every time yet still have a consistent framework around which to build your adventure.

More Sly Flourish Stuff

Last week I posted a couple of YouTube videos on High Value Prep and The Marrow Fiend – Shadowdark Gloaming Session 23 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:

• Rascal.News for TTRPG News
• Ginny Di on D&D with ADHD
• Shadow of the Weird Wizard Released
• The Benefits of Character Factions
• The Many Right Answers of TTRPGs

Patreon Questions and Answers

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

• WOTC and Table-Usable Maps
• Selling Magic Items -- Info and Inventories
• Tying Backgrounds to Curse of Strahd
• How do I Feel about AI in TTRPGs?

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:

• Write your own map key on a printed map.
• For dungeons, focus on one or two word descriptions for each chamber. Save longer descriptions for complicated set-piece chambers.
• Build your own binder with your favorite reference pages in it.
• Stuck for an idea? Write down ten and pick the best one.
• Need inspiration? Take a walk and let your mind wander.
• Find a suite of tools for your prep that you love and you'll be drawn to use it.
• Put dialog-friendly NPCs in the deepest dungeons – talking statues, paintings, magic items, or ghosts. Everyone wants a friend!

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 »