by Przemysław Fornal

Hello everyone! My name is Przemysław Fornal, and together with Michał Łopato, I co-create the Oak Dell game series. In 2023, we released Villagers of the Oak Dell, and for 2024, we've been working on Dungeons of the Oak Dell. I would like to tell you about the process of designing this new game.

•••
While creating the Oak Dell series, we wanted to pay homage to the classic video games that had a huge impact on us in our childhood. Villagers of the Oak Dell was inspired by The Settlers, also known as Serf City: Life is Feudal, while Dungeons of the Oak Dell draws from classic RPGs such as Eye of the Beholder, Dungeon Master, and Legend of Grimrock.

When we began the project, we started by defining the key elements that we wanted to emphasize. We quickly realized that all of these elements — combat, character development, and dungeon exploration — were equally important. However, the first-person view and combat became our priorities. Together with Michał, we decided to focus on creating a unique combat system that would be highly immersive.

Since our game series is based on roll-and-write mechanisms, it was natural that the writing tool would also serve as a sword to fight monsters by drawing lines. This was a good starting point; we just needed to develop mechanisms that would allow for diverse combat tactics and a variety of monster classes.

Our first idea was to use a grid on the monster where life points (circles), monster attack points (triangles), and miss points (X) were located. The player had at their disposal a set of weapons that could be used depending on their choices. The monster would be defeated after marking all of the circles and triangles. This system was somewhat reminiscent of Tetris but had the advantage of drawing lines. However, its main drawback was its tediousness. Decisions about weapon choice and attack location slowed down the gameplay significantly.


To solve the problem of long pauses between actions, we decided to simplify decision-making. In the second version of the game, players chose a die from an available pool. (I'm skipping the dice selection system as it's not the most important part.)

The new system involved drawing a line from a point marked as a die. The length of the line depended on strength, while possible turns depended on dexterity. The monster's life and attacks remained unchanged, but we removed the miss points and added points outside the monster that provided additional rewards (torches, potions). The new version was faster, but still unsatisfactory.


Seeing potential in this system, we decided to improve it by removing the dice to further reduce downtime. In the new version, players could draw lines from an external point, with the restriction that each point could be used only once. This was interesting but still did not meet our expectations.

Upon analyzing the system, we concluded that the problem lay not in the choice of actions but in the line drawing itself. The multitude of possibilities and the need to analyze each subsequent move made the gameplay too complicated and less immersive. Additionally, we did not like the effect of the grid and points on the monster.


It was time to change our approach to line drawing. As we started thinking about what cutting monsters should feel like, we spontaneously drew quick lines on their silhouettes. This was our first glimpse of what combat in our game should truly be. We drew several points outside the monster and tested whether there was potential in this idea. There was!


A simple mechanism in which two intersecting lines create a point turned out to be excellent. The rule for drawing lines was straightforward: draw a line from point X to point Y. When designing the matrix for strikes, we had to determine the average number of strikes needed to defeat a monster. We decided that six moves should suffice to defeat any creature. This gave us twelve points from which a strike could be launched. Additionally, we divided the points into four sections to increase the variety of choices.


Next, we explored different shapes for strikes to allow for more diversity. Unfortunately, we had to abandon this idea because all shapes, except for the circle, resulted in imprecise intersections of lines. The example below shows an intersection grid that zooms in on intersecting lines.


For our system, we needed a "clean" grid with appropriate distances between line intersections. Here is what our system's hit map looks like:


With such a map, we drew several conclusions:

• Assuming that each intersection with a line deals damage, we must exclude the central point that would deal 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 damage. Exclusion means omitting this point in the monsters' silhouettes. (We will return to this later.)
• Objects cannot be large blobs.
• The outline of the monster must be at the right distance from the line intersections to easily identify hits or misses.

The more we worked on this system, the more we liked it, mainly due to its "depth" and immersiveness. Adding additional fields with rewards on the monster's board and creating new monsters with unique abilities that change combat style became simpler.

We present two types of monsters as examples:

The first is the Strzyga, which has a large silhouette with many "easy" points to hit. However, its HP increases (marked by dashed lines) when it deals damage to the player, forcing a quick elimination to prevent a shortage of points for strikes.


The second type of monsters is the Spiders, whose difficulty lies in their numbers. Each has 1 HP, but each must be hit separately, making it harder to optimize actions. For this monster, we avoided the problem of stronger points to hit as they simply cease to matter.


Looking at the grid overlaid on the monster, it might seem that hitting it would be easy. Nothing could be further from the truth! In the game, you can't use a ruler or closely examine the angles. You simply declare from which point to which point you are drawing the line, and slash! But don't worry, we added a skill that allows for precise measuring of strikes.

Of course, a ruler is helpful for drawing straight lines. Specifically for this game, we created a shield-shaped ruler equipped with a special grip that allows for comfortable and quick use. We also included a universal writing tool handle to transform it into a real weapon...


In short, this is how our combat system was created. Naturally, we also had to design an action selection system, dungeon maps containing different scenarios, and a hero board with unique abilities. These elements also contain interesting solutions, but they are not innovative enough to delve into here.

Thank you for reading.

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by W. Eric Martin

• On October 3, 2024, Routledge released Graphic Design for Board Games, a book by designer/artist/graphic designer Daniel Solis, who has more than two decades of experience in the industry. A summary of the book:

With a sense of humor, plenty of examples, and simple tips, Graphic Design for Board Games covers everything from typography to retail presence. Learn how to effectively use graphic design elements to enhance player experience. Create stunning game components, clear rulebooks, and effective game boards that will keep players engaged...

Newcomers will learn introductory concepts of visual communication. Intermediate designers will find ways to anticipate common visual obstacles and improve playtest results. Experienced veterans will find insightful comments shared by fellow professionals.

Graphic Design for Board Games is the second book in the CRC Press Guides to Tabletop Game Design series following January 2024's Thematic Integration in Board Game Design by designer Sarah Shipp. (More on that book here.)

• The third title in this book series will be Cardboard Ghosts: Using Physical Games to Model and Critique Systems from designer Amabel Holland, with this book scheduled for release on January 13, 2025. An overview:

Games can be used to model systems because they are themselves systems. Video games handle this under the hood and teach you as you play, but because board games are operated manually and require the player to understand the system beforehand, they can be a valuable tool for recognizing, understanding, and critiquing real-world systems, including systems of oppression. These systems, often unseen and misunderstood, haunt our world. Board games turn these ghosts into pieces of cardboard we can see, touch, and manipulate.

Cardboard Ghosts: Using Physical Games to Model and Critique Systems explores both the capabilities and limitations of overtly political board games to model systems and make arguments. Two major approaches are considered and contrasted: one, built around immersion and identification, creates empathy. The other, applying the Verfremdungseffekt to distance the player from the game, creating space for reflection. Uncomfortable questions of player roles and complicity when modelling oppressive systems are examined.

Throughout this book, board game designer Amabel Holland draws connections to computer games, literature, theatre, television, music, film, and her own life, framing board games as an achingly human art form, albeit one still growing into its full potential. Anyone interested in that potential, or in the value of political art in today's world, will find many provocative and enriching ideas within.

• During SPIEL Essen 24, Funforge and Stonemaier Games announced a deal in which the former sold the Tokaido game line to the latter, effectively giving Funforge a lifeline that would allow it to complete its long-delayed Kickstarter project for Monumental: African Empires and continue as a business.

The same cannot be said of Mythic Games, with co-owner Leonidas Vesperini posting a long note on BGG on October 1, 2024 that can be summarized as "we have no money, and please stop harassing us". (Given the responses on that thread, the request did not succeed.)

In a January 2024 post on Kickstarter, Mythic Games stated that CMON had acquired the intellectual properties of both HEL: The Last Saga and Anastyr, two long-delayed releases that will be further delayed since in its acquisition announcement CMON states that "Upon careful evaluation of both titles, we have concluded that neither HEL: The Last Saga nor Anastyr are currently ready for publication in their current state and will require substantial effort to complete them." (I contacted CMON in October 2024 for an update on these projects and have not yet received a response.)

• Nucleum from Simone Luciani, Dávid Turczi, and Board&Dice has won the 2024 Jogo do Ano, the Portuguese game of the year. The other nominees were Evacuation, Hegemony, Horseless Carriage, and Scholars of the South Tigris.

• To catch up on an older national award, in June 2024 the Österreichischer Spielepreis, Austria's annual game awards, were named, with Daniel Greiner's Mycelia from Ravensburger receiving the top prize, the "Spiel der Spiele".

Other winners included Germán P. Millán's Sabika (expert category), Mathieu Aubert and Théo Rivière's Bag of Chips (trend), Julien Prothière and Juan Rodriguez' Featherweight Fiesta (families), and Fabrice Chazal and Anthony Perone's Garden Heist (children).

• For a lesser-known honor, let's look at the Generationenspiel, an irregularly-granted "seal of quality" to games that are suitable for play across all generations.

The Generationenspiel is issued by Spielecafé der Generationen, a non-profit organization in Pfarrkirchen, Germany that aims to create meeting spaces for all generations.

In September 2024, the card game Odin from Gary Kim, Hope S. Hwang, Yohan Goh, and Helvetiq was named the newest Generationenspiel winner, with Johannes Goupy's Rainforest having been selected in April 2024 and Richard Garfield's Dice Hunters of Therion chosen in January 2024. You can view all previous winners here.

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by W. Eric Martin

BoardGameGeek had a booth at SPIEL Essen 24, but unlike SPIELs of old, we were not livestreaming from the show.

The effort of that activity was monumental, consuming weeks of preparation time in order to schedule hundreds of game demos, followed by the on-site workload of booth management as we worked with no-shows and added in what we found on site, with a concluding push to edit and publish 300+ videos only to discover that few of them were viewed in great numbers.

Instead, this year in Essen we repeated what we did at Gen Con 2024, with Candice filming game demos at various booths with technology that far outstrips what I used in the 2010s. I'm not a tech guy, so this is all new to me, and I'm blown away by what's available in portable equipment.

Here's what Candice and Derek Porter have published so far, starting with Candice and me scouting Spielbar's used game booth at the end of SPIEL Essen 24's first day. We hadn't planned for this, but Stephen was on hand to film, and we started by Candice being curious and me being unable to stop talking:

Youtube Video
You can see the SPIEL Essen 24 playlist here, and for convenience I'll include all of the other videos published so far below, starting with Paolo Mori and Francesco Sirocchi's Battalion: War of the Ancients from Osprey Games:

Youtube Video
An overview of VPJ Arponen's Order & Opportunity: Making of the Post-Cold War World Order from GMT Games:

Youtube Video
An intro to Thaloria Quest, which blends gaming with journaling:

Youtube Video
An overview of Revenant, which is coming from Mindclash Games in 2025, courtesy of designer Allan Kirkeby:

Youtube Video
An overview of Jeremy Rozenhart's Tatsumi, which Adam's Apple Games will release in 2025:

Youtube Video
Candice wanted to conclude day two of SPIEL Essen 24 with a bit of show-and-tell of games discovered, and boy, was she ready to share. You can see a list of all the games featured, along with links to their BGG game pages, here.

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by Matthias Cramer

Prototype box coverComedy and Dramedy

In 2017 the film "The Death of Stalin", directed by Armando Iannucci, was released in cinemas. The film depicts the power struggle after Stalin's sudden death in 1953 in a humorous way, with a great ensemble portraying the Soviet leadership circle. In the battle for Stalin's succession, only the victor Nikita Khrushchev gained a place in the history books, while his opponent Lavrenty Beria fell into oblivion and is known only to those interested in the topic.

I find the scenario that took place thirty years earlier much more interesting: the battle for Lenin's legacy. Two heavyweights entered the ring who could not be more different: Leon Trotsky and Josef Stalin. Trotsky, the intellectual revolutionary, organized the Red Army during the Russian Civil War and drove his armored train across the country. Stalin, on the other hand, started out as a professional revolutionary and street thief and only rose to Lenin's leadership circle late in life. Lenin wrote in his will:

Comrade Stalin, having become Secretary-General, has unlimited authority concentrated in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be capable of using that authority with sufficient caution. Comrade Trotsky, on the other hand, as his struggle against the C.C. on the question of the People's Commissariat of Communications has already proved, is distinguished not only by outstanding ability. He is personally perhaps the most capable man in the present C.C., but he has displayed excessive self-assurance and shown excessive preoccupation with the purely administrative side of the work.

The Death of Lenin

When reading up on this subject, two major differences from the death of Stalin immediately stand out. The power struggle between Stalin and Trotsky did not just begin before Lenin's death, but actually peaked during this period. Lenin suffered several strokes between 1922 and 1924, after which he was partially paralyzed on one side and lost the ability to speak.

For a long time, the Bolsheviks tried to keep the state of his health a secret as he did not fit the image of a revolutionary leader. In fact, it was during this time that the personality cult around Lenin emerged, mainly on Stalin's initiative. The Georgian managed to gain personal access to Lenin and thus control the flow of news from and to the Bolshevik leader in his sickbed at home. At the funeral, it became clear that the power struggle had already been de facto decided: Stalin marched behind Lenin's coffin together with Lenin's widow, Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya.


The second aspect that distinguishes Lenin's death from Stalin's is the suitability of the subject as a tragicomedy. While two kleptocrats are engaged in a bloody power struggle in 1953, the first power struggle is still influenced by the civil war that has just ended and the subsequent famines, especially in Ukraine. This was the beginning of Russian nationalism, which is still relevant today with the current Russian war of aggression. The Bolsheviks did not "solve" hunger riots with food, but rather with the Red Army: They declared the hungry to be counterrevolutionaries and shot them.

Another parallel to the current situation is the fact that there was also fighting on the media front in the 1920s. The photo used on the prototype box is one of the early image manipulations. Stalin was enlarged in this picture; at 1.65m (or around 5'4"), he was just one centimeter taller than Lenin. His face was also edited to remove smallpox scars as Stalin had contracted smallpox at the age of six and had a correspondingly pockmarked face.

First Prototype as a Trick-Taking Game

For the first prototype of Lenin's Legacy, I tried to combine a card-driven game with a trick-taking game. The result was sobering, and the prototype was thrown away.

The game, which was called "Lenin's Death" at the time, remained a dead project for a few months, then I made a new attempt to model this power struggle: the players were to draft the cards and use them to fight for different regions and cities on a game board. This version of Lenin's Legacy was played with a fix deck of around thirty cards and lacked depth outside of the card functions. I was not happy.

Early game board with a VP track (left) and an issue track (right)
Deck Construction, Deck Destruction

At this point, I started to concentrate on the cards since they were the strongest point of the design. Most elements from the board were converted to cards or reflected by the issues that players compete over.

I wanted the deck to be modified a lot, so the common deck destruction element in CDGs — cards leaving the game after choosing the event — was not enough deck manipulation. Since the deck is a common one for both players, a deck construction element fit perfectly into the design. The politicians now moved from the base deck into a reward for winning the Politburo issue.

The scoring function of the regions also moved to cards. This added a nice twist as you can score powers with the regions in the game at the cost of neglecting the issues.

Politician and region cards
Pressure and Counter-Pressure

When I developed Watergate a few years ago, I wanted to have important cards on both sides that would allow powerful moves and pose a threat to the opponent if they were in play. When Nixon starts using "Gambit", the Washington Post must adjust its strategy and attack the conspirators.

When designing the cards for Lenin's Legacy, the question was whether this pressure could be increased further, and it quickly became clear that I needed several competing victory conditions. Thanks to the three power markers — Army, Party, and Fame — the status in these three victory conditions is always visible. No player can neglect one of these conditions. This makes choosing a region after winning the issue of the same name a strategic decision. At the same time, it means that a player who moves power markers several times is likely to fall behind in the issues and give their opponent the opportunity to catch up.

The Face-Down Card

For long stretches, I tested the game with all seven cards available for play each round placed face up. The mechanisms were exciting in themselves. The players not only had to choose a card, but also think about which card their opponent should not be allowed to play under any circumstances.

Nevertheless, there always seemed to be a little something missing: uncertainty. This eventually led me to simply cover up one card for each player. The consideration of whether it should be one or two cards quickly gave way to the realization that one unknown was quite enough to severely disrupt any predictability. This is also where the character of the players often becomes apparent: some take the opponent's face-down card as the last sensible option; some test whether they can land a surprise attack with it.

This was the final ingredient, and the game now felt complete. After showing it to Gene Billingsley and Jason Carr at SDHistCon in San Diego in November 2023 GMT Games decided to pick it up, and the game is now available for pre-order on GMT's P500 system. We've continued to test and tweak the design slightly, and we will eventually add a solitaire mode, but the playtesters are enjoying it so far, and I am looking forward to sharing it with all of you.

Matthias Cramer Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

Not the logo!In 2016, Sophie Gravel sold F2Z Entertainment — a Canadian publisher/distributor that owned the Z-Man Games, Filosofia Éditions, Pretzel Games, and Plaid Hat Games studios — to Asmodee.

Less than a year later, she launched Plan B Games, which she then sold in March 2021 — along with the studios eggertspiele, Next Move Games, and Pretzel Games (yes, again!) — to Asmodee.

In August 2021, Gravel took the role of Head of Studio at Z-Man Games. Among other things, she oversaw the release of the 2023 Kennerspiel des Jahres-winning game Challengers!, then she moved on.

And now Gravel seems ready to return to the game industry with new publisher Final Score Games as indicated by this October 8, 2024 Facebook post in search of a graphic designer. Curious to see what will result from this as she's consistently made smart choices about which titles to develop and promote. I've reached out for info, but have yet to hear back.

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by Wolfgang Kramer

It all started on May 31, 2021 with an email from Charles Amir Perret of publisher Super Meeple.


He pointed out that Tikal would be 25 years old in 2024 and asked Michael Kiesling and me what we thought about releasing a special edition of Tikal in 2024. He also said that Super Meeple would be ten years old in 2024.

Michael and I immediately spoke on the phone. It was a long conversation, and we agreed to develop a second Tikal game that was similar but with new, additional elements.

When I write about a second Tikal game, I have to add that the 2010 game called Tikal II was not developed by us as "Tikal II". The game we submitted to GameWorks SàRL was called "Der Schatz der Tempelritter" (The Treasure of the Knights Templar). GameWorks published "Knights Templar" as Tikal II: The Lost Temple, and it was our mistake that we did not try hard enough to prevent the title Tikal II as that design is not a Tikal game at all.


On June 1, 2021, one day later, I wrote to Super Meeple that we agreed to the proposal to develop an anniversary game for Tikal.

Before I tell you the story of the development of Tikal Legend, let's go back 25 years. It was the summer of 1999 in Berlin. The Spiel des Jahres jury had invited the media, publishers, and authors to the awards ceremony. We — Ravensburger and us authors — sat spellbound in our chairs as a beam of light moved in a circle from one of the nominated games to another, from Tikal to Giganten to Union Pacific to Tikal and so on.

The game on which the beam of light will remain is the new game of the year. Our eyes traveled with the beam of light. As the light illuminated Tikal, our hearts beat harder, and as the beam moved on, we were gripped by disappointment, but it moved on and on. It felt like a long time, in reality not even a minute, when the beam finally stopped at Tikal, and we jumped up enthusiastically and hugged each other. One of those moments that remain in our memories, that shape our lives, that trigger a feeling of elation, that show us what happiness is — one of those moments that leave others bitterly disappointed.


What does the Spiel des Jahres jury think about Tikal today? Here is an excerpt from an article on the Spiel des Jahres website written by Jochen Corts in 2024:

The Game

Tikal is an exploration game for 2-4 players aged 10 and over.

Two to four teams set off in search of Maya sites in the Guatemalan jungle. In the process, they penetrate deeper and deeper into previously unexplored territory. Temples that have already been largely uncovered can be taken out of the hands of the competition by leaving a guard behind. If a volcanic eruption occurs, there is a kind of cash check in which the excavation results and gold finds to date are evaluated.

After revealing and placing a terrain tile, ten action points can be used to recruit new team members, advance further into the jungle, work on uncovering a temple, post guards, dig up a treasure, swap finds with another team to increase their value, or finally set up a new camp to save long journeys. All of this costs between one and five points, meaning that only some of the most urgent tasks can be completed in the hunt for victory points. If the round is not subject to Fortuna's whims, one variant even offers the option of auctioning off newly revealed terrain tiles.

The Reasons

The technical implementation of the theme is brilliant. Although this is not the first time that action points have been used, they have been used in such a way that Tikal is generally regarded as a style-defining game element. Not only is it possible to distribute movement energy to different characters as desired, but there is also a whole bunch of different actions from which to choose. Moreover, this is so finely tuned that the resulting agony of choice is a pleasure to experience.

Even if it usually takes a while for a player to use up all their action points in a meaningful way when the game is full, there is no boredom for those waiting. After all, they can get a rough idea of the goals being pursued and immediately incorporate them into their own plans. This guarantees around two hours of enjoyable entertainment at a high level of difficulty, including set-up and maneuver critique, an evening's entertainment.

Two pictures from the award ceremony in 1999:

From left: Synes Ernst (chairman of the jury), Franz Vohwinkel (illustrator), Michael Kiesling, Wolfgang Kramer, Cornelia Rist (editor), Lothar Hemme (editorial director)
From left: Wolfgang Kramer and Michael Kiesling
Tikal was the first game in a trilogy. As the covers of all three games show masks, the games belong to the "mask trilogy". The other two games were Java (2000) and Mexica (2002).



The three games have the following points in common:

• All three games are building games. On a game board that is empty at the beginning, an advanced civilization is created, that of the Mayans or the Aztecs or the Hinduists and Buddhists on Java.
• All three games work with action points.
• All three games have new, original but different movement mechanisms.
• All three games have new, original but different piece placement mechanisms, i.e., how the pieces come into play.
• Box sizes are the same.
• The number of players is the same.
• All three games are tactical and strategic games with an element of luck.
• All three games were illustrated by Franz Vohwinkel.

What Happened to Tikal?

Tikal was in the Ravensburger program only until 2004. It then moved to Rio Grande Games, with distribution for Germany being taken over by ABACUSSPIELE. From 2017, the French publisher Super Meeple acquired the rights, with the exception of German and English, which finally followed in 2021. Super Meeple launched a beautifully designed new edition in 2017, which is still available today and will remain so in the future.

The First Steps in the Development of Tikal Legend

On 31.05.2021 Charles Amir made an inquiry, on 01.06.2021 we accepted, and on 02.06.2021, we presented our concept. I wrote an email to Charles Amir (Super Meeple) with the following content:

Yesterday and today Michael and I have phoned a long time. The theme was Tikal 25th anniversary.

We will add a new dimension to the game that can be played with existing and additional game material on the back of the game board. We have in mind a river that runs through the entire game board. It can be crossed with bridges that must be purchased (action points).

Gold can be mined in the river. Players can also purchase a boat (action points) and sail along the river.

There are also jungle fields that can be moved to if a staircase points to the field.

To move forward in the jungle, you need a machete (costs action points). In the jungle you can find statues/monuments and dig them up. As before, it is about the most victory points, but you can also earn them by digging gold and statues, so we have several strategies how to win.

Perhaps there is also a cave to descend into to find gems or find an exit that leads to a small game board that is outside of the actual game board.

All of this requires extensive development work with lots of testing. We would be willing to do this.

Michael developed several new game boards with a river and bridges. You could find gold in the river. To recover the gold, you needed at least one boat with an expedition member. During this phase of development, Michael designed several game boards.





There were action cards for exploring a volcano and buying a boat, the latter of which could be used to sail along the river.

Unfortunately, the first tests with the jungle divided into several parts by a river did not produce satisfactory results. We decided not to pursue this route with a river that divided the jungle into several pieces.

I then developed a new game plan that was identical to the Tikal game plan. The river flowed around the outside of the jungle, where you could mine gold.


The yellow dots next to the river showed where gold could be recovered in the river. Trucks replaced the missing ships. Michael and I conducted several tests with this game plan and came to two important conclusions. The interconnected jungle brought the Tikal feeling back into the game. That's why we wanted to use the Tikal game board for the new game as well.

We felt that the integration of the river into the Tikal game was not a unity. It was two different mechanisms that existed side by side. It didn't feel like they belonged together.

It was with a heavy heart that we decided to remove the river completely.

On the Right Track

I carried out my subsequent tests with the Tikal game board and terrain boards. I experimented with the Tikal rules. I deleted all the rules that restricted the players' development options. For example:

• A terrain tile can be placed anywhere on other terrain tiles. This means that you can also place it in such a way that the new tile cannot be entered.
• A terrain tile can also be placed on the game board in such a way that it has no connection to other terrain tiles.
• Expedition members can also enter volcano tiles if stairs lead to them.
• Expedition members can also enter jungle tiles that do not have a terrain tile on them if there are stairs leading to the jungle tile.

These changes made it possible for the game board to vary wildly at the start of the game. Whereas with Tikal, you always have to start at the starting square, you can now start on a different terrain board if you set up a camp there right at the start.

The standard set-up for Tikal Legend is that nine terrain tiles are placed on the game board.


Scenario 1
Two terrain tiles are placed on the left in the starting area, and seven terrain tiles are placed on the right edge of the game board.

The starting area is now more attractive because two four-point temples start there, whereas the right edge of the game board is also attractive because you can get there only if you build a camp on a jungle clearing and place your own explorers there.


Scenario 2
The nine terrain tiles placed on the game board at the start of play are laid out in the middle of the game board.


Scenario 3
The nine terrain tiles initially placed on the game board are not connected to one another. (And yes, I know ten tiles are on the board above.) In this way, you can start each game with a new, interesting jungle landscape that presents players with new challenges each time.

The Cenotes

The new game board is larger than the old game board. Players can now enter volcano, lake, and jungle spaces and use these spaces for victory points. The cenotes were of particular importance to the Maya. These are sacred lakes, sacred springs, and underwater caves. Centuries ago, they ensured the Mayan water supply; they were ritual sacrificial sites and are full of stories of Mayan culture. The word "cenote" comes from the Mayan language and means "place with access to water".

A cenote on the Yucatan peninsula (Royalty-free image from the Internet)
Multiple Winning Strategies

Tikal Legend is designed to offer players multiple winning strategies, whereas Tikal has only two winning strategies: the temple strategy and the treasure strategy. To enable further strategies, new areas are needed that can lead to victory points.

In addition to the temples and treasures, the following new areas have been added and are scored:

• Volcanoes
• Lakes
• Treasure fields with and without treasures
• Jungle glades


The Outer Squares

There had to be new fields for the new areas, so I introduced the outer fields, which are located at the edge of the game board. These spaces are dashed. Under the action tiles are tiles that are placed on these spaces. They show cenotes (lakes), temples, volcanoes, and jungle spaces and have a step so that these spaces can also be entered.


There are outer fields on which a lake or a volcano is already marked on the game board. However, most of the outer spaces show only jungle. To enter these spaces, a staircase must lead to them, e.g., from the treasure space to the volcano, which is marked with a "1" in the image above.

Action cards showing a volcano, a lake, or a temple can be placed on the outer spaces. An outer space without an action card is a jungle space.

From left: volcano, lake (cenote), temple (level 6), forest field
Sequence Control with Action Pool and Action Tableau

The decisive step forward in this project came from my idea of the action pool and the action board for each player.

Each player receives an action board at the start of the game, and the objects from the action pool are placed on this board. The action board of a player:


The following objects are in the general action pool for two players:

Sequence cards
There is a sequence card for each player. The player who takes order card 1 is the first to select an object in the next round.


Action point cards

Terrain tiles


Action tiles


The players fill their action board from the action pool. The player with the order card 1 begins, and they and the other players are spoiled for choice. Should they take the new order card 1 first, or the highest action point card, or an action point tile, or a terrain card?

The player first takes the action tile with the additional 2 action points per round. In the next round, they take the action point card with the 9 action points, then the terrain card with the volcano, and so on.

After the acquisition phase, the player board is full. Now the players take one action after another. The player with the order card 1 begins and carries out an action. This is followed by the player with card 2. The player with the adjacent tableau decides to perform the action "build a camp" first, building the camp on a clearing on the right edge of the game board.

A round is completed when the player board is empty except for the sequence card. The dark blue spaces on the left-hand side may still contain action tiles that the player would like to carry out in the next round.

Action tiles

There are 72 action tiles, which include good and very good tiles. Each tile is advantageous for the player. The following tiles have been developed:




Scoring

Players score twice during the game and once at the end of the game.

The scoring during the game takes place after a player places a volcano on the game board. Each player now has one turn with 10 action points available. Each player scores for themselves, and the following are evaluated:

• Temple: The value of all temples in which the player has the majority of EM are added together.

• Highest temples: From temple height 7, victory points are awarded according to the table.


• Treasures: One treasure scores 1 victory point, two identical treasures score 3 victory points, three identical treasures 6, four identical treasures 10, and five identical treasures 15 victory points.

• Volcanoes: For each volcano where the player has the majority of EM, they receive 10 VP.

• Lakes: Number of lakes multiplied by number of gold masks. The player must have the majority of EM for both the lakes and the gold fields.

• Jungle fields: Number of jungle fields multiplied by number of temple fields. The player must have the majority of EM for both the jungle fields and the temple fields.

Handover of the Tikal Legend prototype to Super Meeple


Special abilities per player
In December 2023, Super Meeple had the idea of equipping each player with special abilities. To keep the balance of the game intact, these abilities should be used only once in the game. I designed various ability cards with three alternative abilities on them. The player could use one of them once in the game.

Although four ability cards were needed, I sent eight cards to Super Meeple and let them choose and assemble them for the game.

Test experience and introductory game
When Michael carried out the first test, he called me immediately: "What have you come up with? You have so many opportunities to make good moves that you're constantly spoiled for choice. Ina is flabbergasted. Do we want to make an expert game for Tikal Legend? Or should we make the game a little less complex?"

Super Meeple had a similar reaction after the first test. Charles Amir wrote something like this:

I am always impressed by your games and your talent for designing. You did a really fantastic job. Keeping the spirit of Tikal and bringing a great, new mechanic into the game. I really love how it is.

However, I do understand Michael and we think the game is maybe a little too expert as it is now.

The difference of level between the basic Tikal and Tikal Legend is too large. Perhaps we should make an introductory game to which modules are added: lake module, volcano module, jungle module.

Depending on who I was playing with, I had very good test results, but also those in which I was told that the game was too complex, so I complied with the request and developed a "starter game" that was between the levels of Tikal and Tikal Legend. Anyone playing for the first time should start with the starter game, then switch to Tikal Legend later. I developed and played the starter game completely. However, the starter game was not realized after all. This was probably due to the fact that Super Meeple became more and more familiar with Tikal Legend through many test games.

Final image of a test by Ina and Michael Kiesling from August 2023
Solo Game

For Super Meeple, it was clear from the start that Tikal Legend had to include a solo game. With time well advanced in May 2023, I agreed that Super Meeple should award the contract for the solo game to Dávid Turczi, John Albertson, Aleksandar Šaranac, and Jeremy Avery, with playtesting by Chuck Case.

In addition to the solo game for Tikal Legend, there is a solo game for Tikal "Classic".


Start of the Kickstarter Campaign

The crowdfunding campaign will begin in the second half of October 2024. We are all excited to see how it will go. We hope that there will be enough fans willing to purchase the game so that the project can be realized.

The games will not come onto the market until 2025. Until then, the publisher and the authors will continue to test the game frequently in order to improve it. The game was created during Corona. At that time, it was not easy to find test partners; today this is no longer a problem.

A long time has passed since the end of May 2021, when development on the game began, until 2025, when the game will be released. I've enjoyed working on the game during this time and wouldn't want to miss a minute of it — but what will happen after the game is released is no longer in our hands. Now it depends on the game fans whether the game will be a success. I wish everyone who plays Tikal Legend a lot of fun with it.

Wolfgang Kramer
September 2024

Tikal Legend set-up at SPIEL Essen 24 Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

• In addition to winning the 2024 Deutscher Spiele Preis, Kosch's game Forest Shuffle from Lookout Games was named "À la Carte 2024" by Fairplay magazine, which awards an annual prize for best card game. The other nominees for the award were Kaya Miyano's Trio from Cocktail Games and Michael Modler's Cabanga! from AMIGO.

• Merz Verlag recorded sellouts at SPIEL Essen 24 on all four days, selling out of four-day passes shortly prior to the show, with all single day passes running out shortly before those days arrived. From a press release following the end of the fair:

The visitor count was 204,000, significantly exceeding last year's figures. "This year, we worked with a ticket quota for the first time to create a pleasant experience for as many people as possible and to comply with safety regulations. There could never be more than nearly 50,000 people on-site at the same time," explains Carol Rapp, managing director of the organizing Merz Verlag. "We ensured wide aisles and good walking paths for easy movement in the halls and to the booths."

I'm not so sure that last goal was achieved to satisfaction. Ideally for 2025, Merz Verlag and Messe Essen can engineer a system that catapults people who stop in the aisles to chat into a net suspended above the floor. (I realize that my approach to navigating the halls differs from the average visitor since I'm typically bolting to an appointment and am not ambling in order to eye all of the games within view, but still, chatterers, please step to the side of the aisle.)

• On October 10, 2024, Hasbro will host its second Women Innovators of Play virtual event, with more than a half-dozen speakers discussing how to "promote an inclusive and equitable toy and game community, encourage more women's participation in the space, inspire the next generation of young women and girls to unleash their creativity, and increase awareness and exposure to creative career paths". You can register for the event here.


At the conclusion of this event, Hasbro will launch its second annual Women Innovators of Play Challenge, which aims to encourage female inventors to submit toy and game ideas to receive funding, mentorship and a trip to Hasbro HQ. In more detail: "Finalists will pitch their concepts to Hasbro leadership during a visit to Hasbro HQ. Winners will be picked by Hasbro leadership. Anyone who submits an idea has the chance for their idea to be optioned, regardless of finalist status."

• Speaking of Hasbro, on The Verge, Andrew Webster reports that the publisher is creating Fortnite adaptations of several board games in its catalog, with Murder Mystery: Clue having debuted on October 4, 2024. A Fortnite adaptation of Guess Who? will debut later in October 2024, with Connect Four coming in December.

• On October 3, 2024, The New York Times published an article from Julia Carmel about how Kurt Vonnegut's "lost" game GHQ made its way to publication:

Kurt Vonnegut's notes and sketches were shepherded posthumously by Geoff Engelstein, a tabletop game designer who first learned about GHQ more than a decade ago, when it was briefly mentioned in an article.

"I tried to find out more about it online, and there was like no other information at all," Mr. Engelstein recalled.

In 2012, Mr. Engelstein reached out to Indiana University, which houses Mr. Vonnegut's papers, but the school could not release anything about the game without permission from his estate. Mr. Engelstein eventually got in contact with Donald Farber, who represented Mr. Vonnegut's works and estate, and got his blessing.

The university library located a box labeled "board game materials", and soon enough Mr. Engelstein received about 40 pages of the author's ideas and drawings.

• Engelstein is also president of the Tabletop Game Designers Association, and the TTGDA has worked with bookstore chain Barnes & Noble to have designers' names listed on the games that B&N sells online as of October 4, 2024: "TTGDA is using the resources at the BoardGameGeek website to assist Barnes & Noble in the ongoing process of adding designers to their large catalog of games, enabling this information to be available for both new releases and existing games."

Engelstein notes that this idea was suggested by TTGDA member Tom Lehmann. Maybe Amazon, Walmart, Target, and other retailers will follow suit. After all, people follow the careers of actors, musicians, and authors, staying abreast of their current and future projects, so why not feature that information for games as well?

Not all games on B&N have author credits yet, but many do Read more »

by David Thompson

Darkness covers your approach as you alight on the riverbank. Swiftly, you hide the boat and shoulder your gear. The mission is clear: capture or kill your target; rendezvous at the extraction point; get out. You have two days. Nodding to your team, you set off toward the glowing lights of Vaillant.

War Story: Occupied France is a co-operative narrative game for one to six players set in World War II occupied France that captures the stakes and tension of espionage and resistance warfare. Your team of covert operatives is all that stands between the infamous German officer Heidenreich and the systematic destruction of French Resistance forces in Morette.

Through three replayable story missions, you must exploit the specialties of your chosen agents to uncover information, enlist allies, and obtain weaponry. Engage occupying forces on tactical encounter maps where careless positioning could cost your agents' lives. Remember, no plan survives contact with the enemy...and time is running out.

This is the story of how War Story: Occupied France came to be.

Origin

The origins for War Story: Occupied France can be traced to late 2020, almost four years ago. Dave Neale and I had met years earlier as part of a design and playtest group in Cambridge. Over the years we stayed in touch, but in November 2020 Dave reached out and asked me this:

Hi David. I've been thinking about the tentative narrative wargame we floated a while back, and I'm still interested in the idea if you are too. But I was also wondering what are the possible stories we could tell – as in, is there anything more unusual or nuanced than traditional war stories about a battle? I wondered what kind of stories you can think of, perhaps from war films or novels, etc., that haven't been told in wargame format yet? Is there a particular type of story or a particular angle on war stories we could do that hasn't been done?

Dave and I had chatted earlier about the idea of a narrative-driven war-themed game at SPIEL '19. The idea was to fuze Dave's expertise with narrative-driven games and my experience with tactical games and knowledge of military history. While there have been wargames that featured emergent narrative in the past, there really hadn't ever been anything like what we were envisioning.

I eagerly agreed to the idea of collaborating with Dave on the game, and we met for the first time to discuss the concept just a week later, on November 23, 2020. At that meeting we brainstormed various ideas for the game: the setting, overall structure, and how we would track the story. Even as early as this initial meeting, we knew the game would feature some sort of modified "choose your own adventure" approach for driving the narrative, but the details on how that would work, especially for combat, were up in the air. We also needed to identify a process and software for tracking the story.

Regardless, coming out of that first meeting in late November 2020, we had a general direction for the game, and we were both excited about the possibilities.

Design Approach

The first thing Dave and I needed to do was settle on the specifics for the story's setting, sketch out the overall story arc, and figure out how we were going to map out the story in a way that would enable a complex, interwoven narrative. I suggested early on that the Special Operations Executive (SOE) would serve as an excellent backdrop for our game. The SOE was a British organization formed in 1940 to conduct espionage, sabotage, and reconnaissance in German-occupied Europe and to aid local resistance movements during World War II. The SOE would provide the players interesting characters with lots of varied options for stories, and it was also a good choice for keeping the scale of the game at the individual character level.

In terms of tracking the complex branching of the story, our first approach was to use draw.io. Draw.io is a software designed for diagramming, and while we were able to use it early on, it didn't have the features and capabilities we needed. In the earliest iterations of the game, when we were working through core game design concepts, we would have to track all of the ties between the passages manually, which was tedious and limited the practical complexity for the branching narrative.

During the earliest phases of the design, when we were primarily focused on working through the core mechanisms of the game and sketching out an initial sample storyline, we used a combination of draw.io and manual tracking.

It took us about a month to put together the initial working prototype of the game. In that earliest incarnation, we were working on a story that still reflects some of the ideas and plot beats that live on in the War Story: Occupied France final mission, though I'll refrain from getting into specifics as I don't want to spoil the mission.

One thing I do want to mention, though, is that from the beginning I wanted combat in the game to reflect real-world tactics for small-unit engagements.

An example tactical map from the original prototype
Research and Creating the Setting

Once we settled on using the SOE as the basis of the storyline and background for the characters, Dave and I set about researching the organization, its operatives, and missions. Much of the foundational reading material came from Osprey Publishing, with their excellent books on the topic, e.g., SOE Agent: Churchill's Secret Warriors. In addition, I used a wide variety of sources for the small-unit tactics. When possible, I used sources from the time, such as WW2 doctrine manuals and SOE documentation, but in general small-units tactics haven't changed much over the last eighty years.

Another choice Dave and I made early on was to use a fictional setting for the game and characters. We were inspired by the real-world SOE operatives and their missions, but we wanted the game to reflect the history, not try to recreate it as a simulation. Ultimately we decided to set it in a fictional French countryside in the mid-war period, with a focus on the French Maquis and German Gestapo.


Gameplay

For the next ten months, Dave and I worked on the initial prototype mission for the game – something that would allow us to flesh out the core system and give us something we could pitch to a publisher.

Most of the core gameplay concepts came together quickly. Characters would have a range of skills, and the game would ask for checks against those skills – sometimes asking for the highest or lowest skill for a single character, or perhaps asking for the total skill level for all the characters together. It wasn't until about May 2021 that we hit on the idea of a pool of tokens that could be shared across the team. The tokens allow players to make critical decisions about when to use their limited resources to boost checks during the game.

At its core, War Story: Occupied France is a game about making careful, informed choices and managing that limited pool of resources. The game is purely deterministic – there is no randomness in the game — but the variety of choice means that there is no single "best path" and that any combination of agents, choice of paths in the game, and decisions on when to use tokens to boost skills will have a massive effect on the narrative and can lead to very different situations.

Our "bugbear" early on in the design process was how exactly to handle combat. We knew that we generally wanted to handle it through the core narrative-driven process in the game rather than a separate sub-system dedicated to combat, but we went through many, many iterations on exactly how to represent and track combat. In some early versions of the games, weapons had their own effects, we had more ranges of combat, we handled melee combat differently than ranged combat, etc.

Ultimately we settled on a system that works entirely within the narrative-driven framework of the game, albeit with the support of tactical maps to provide a visualization of the action. Weapons were streamlined to just two ranges (short and long), and hand-to-hand combat was integrated directly into the game as part of the narrative and tied back to other skills as the situation warranted.

The biggest difference in how we ultimately decided to handle combat and other skill checks in the game is by distinguishing "firearms" (or a character's proficiency with guns) and all other "skills". These two categories defined a character's traits, and we created a separate firearms token in the game that can be used only for boosting combat checks in the same way skill checks can be boosted with skill tokens.

The last major change to this system was the addition of "advantage" tokens. These "wild card" tokens can be used for either firearms or skill checks, but they are fleeting. They are earned during the game to abstractly represent a situational advantage that the characters have, and if they aren't used quickly, they will be lost.


One other major decision that we made during this early period of design was how the pool of characters would work and how players would interact with them. We considered tying the number of characters to the player count, but this proved problematic primarily in that we wanted the game to tell the story of a small group of agents working together. Ultimately we decided that the players, regardless of player count, would always collaboratively control a pool of four characters at the start of a mission. Of course, casualties in the game are common, and while there is a larger pool of eight total characters from which to draw for the game's three missions, character death can play a serious role in the game.

Dave and I continued refining our prototype mission for most of the year, typically meeting every other week to work on the game, and we eventually expanded our tests to both guided and unguided playtest groups. Reactions were positive, and by late October 2021, we were ready to pitch it.

Development

On October 25, 2021, Dave and I met with Osprey Games to pitch them the game (which, at the time, we simply called "War Stories").

Osprey seemed a perfect fit to us: I already had a close relationship with them, having partnered on the Undaunted series, and the idea of a narrative-driven, war-themed game seemed perfect for their catalog. We met with developers Filip Hartelius and Anthony Howgego online, walking them through the demo of our game. The meeting seemed to go well, with Filip and Anthony wanting to take the demo and play it for themselves. Later that same day Filip and Anthony reached out to me and Dave to let us know they had played the game and wanted to sign it. Dave and I were ecstatic! In his email to us, Filip said:

Hello David and Dave. We've now had a chance to play War Stories twice (as well as had a look through some of the other paths) and I can confidently say that I would love to have Osprey Games publish the game. It's evocative and effective, and does something truly innovative within the genre.

Initially Filip and Anthony wanted the game to include five(!) missions, but Dave and I knew immediately that was too much. Each mission in War Story contains a massive amount of content. Players would have to replay each mission many, many times before they could experience every possible path. The word count for War Story: Occupied France ended up exceeding the word count of the average novel. Five missions would have just been too much, and we preferred to focus on quality over quantity, so we settled on three missions for the game, missions that could technically be played in a standalone fashion but are meant to be played as a continuous experience.

Of course, now is when the real work needed to start. Dave and I needed to create a complete storyline, with three missions, while continuing to refine the core game design elements. We soon came together to sketch out the game's three mission arc. We identified some key story beats, the overall focus of each mission, and some key characters. Our typical approach was for the two of us to come together, discuss the high-level story concepts, then I would go off to add a bit more detail to the story structure and work on the combat encounters. I would turn over the skeleton of the story structure to Dave, who was also working through some of the non-combat narrative, and Dave would turn my notes into beautiful prose.

We knew that our process for constructing the narrative – the combination of draw.io and manually tracking the branches – was not sustainable. We looked for alternatives and eventually settled on Twine, "an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories" – exactly what we needed. Although it took us a while to find our feet with Twine, primarily in developing a consistent style guide and effective method of file sharing, it unlocked the potential of the game for us. Previously we had been constrained in the complexity of the branching we were able to use in the game, but no longer. We could track various states and paths throughout the scenario, with numerous interconnected variables, and Twine allowed us to ensure we weren't breaking our story.

To give an example of the complexity, Dave and I created a special demo mission for War Story: Occupied France to be used at conventions such as Gen Con and SPIEL. There is a combat encounter late in the mission that consists of 125 interconnected passages, though players will encounter only a small number of those passages in a single play of the game. Here is a visualization of part of that single combat encounter:


We continued refining the game until mid-2023, when we turned it over to Osprey Games for their heavy lift on the game. Between late-2021 and mid-2023, the developers at Osprey had changed, with Filip and Anthony leaving, and new developers Rhys ap Gwyn, Jordan Wheeler, and Luke Evison joining the team. They took our three missions and began the Herculean task of formatting them, looking for opportunities for improvements, leading the art direction, and just generally taking what I think was a good game and making it something incredible.

I've partnered closely with Osprey Games for almost ten years now, and I can honestly say that no game required more work, care, and attention to detail than War Story: Occupied France (with the possible exception of Undaunted: Stalingrad, which was a similarly massive undertaking). The amount of effort and love put into the game by the Osprey team was remarkable.


Art and Graphic Design

I was blown away when my friends at Osprey Games told me that Kwanchai Moriya was going to be the artist for the game. Kwanchai has always been one of my favorite artists. The first game of his that really grabbed me was Days of Ire: Budapest 1956. Ever since then, I've closely followed his work and dreamed of collaborating, so when I learned he was going to work on War Story: Occupied France, I couldn't have been happier.

Kwanchai's art helped the game come to life. Every illustration beautifully captures the story Dave and I were trying to tell, and of course, the range of his work is on display in the game, from illustrations of the operatives to the tactical encounter maps. I couldn't be happier with the art for the game, and I think players are going to feel the same way.

The graphic design was another critical area for the game. Graphic designers Jared Viljoen and Dídac Gurguí did an amazing job working closely with the Osprey development team to integrate subtle but effective elements throughout the rules, the mission books, and the other components to help players easily play the game without all the extra cognitive load that could have come if the game relied more heavily on text to convey critical information.


Release

When War Story: Occupied France is released on October 8, 2024 – after demos taking place at SPIEL Essen 24 on October 3rd-6th – it will mark the end of a four-year process to make the game a reality. From that first message Dave sent me, inviting me to collaborate with him, to the published version of the game, the creative process for War Story: Occupied France has been extremely exciting for us. We hope that everyone enjoys playing the game as much as we enjoyed creating it!

David Thompson

On left: Kwanchai Moriya and David Thompson at Gen Con 2024 Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

SPIEL Essen 24 is over, and I'm once again at the Düsseldorf airport far too early in the morning, surfing along waves of other sleepy convention attendees pushing their overweight bags. The convention high is wearing off, leaving only tiredness and backache.

My phone is brimming with images unshared; my notebook full of publisher plans for 2025. I'll start getting to that material — similar to my reports on Devir (link) and Hasbro (link) — in a few days. I had planned to keep posting daily from Essen, then continue afterward, but I need to take a breather and tend to home matters before metaphorically mounting the keyboard again.

A quick take on SPIEL Essen 24: As with Gen Con 2024, no unexpected game seemed to bubble up and become the talk of the crowd. We can reference the Geekbuzz results (available for an unknown period of time) and the Fairplay results to see which titles topped both lists, but even so I find it hard to take those lists as anything more than a starting point. How much can you absorb a SETI, Civolution, or even a Bomb Busters or Castle Combo in the convention environment when blitzed by noise and the pull of hundreds of other potential treasures?

(That said, I taught Castle Combo to friends over Indian dinner — which I had four times during the show! — and it's as good as I thought after four previous plays...even though former BGG livestream host Katherine rocked us.)

I didn't play much during SPIEL Essen 24, but the one anticipated game I was delighted to play was Friedemann Friese's Fishing, which I played twice on a review copy from 2F-Spiele, once each with four and five players.

In short, Fishing feels like Friese has crossed trick-taking with deck-building, although that's a misleading description. You start with a basic deck of cards and take tricks — no trumps, no special rules, just lead the followed suit and the highest on-suit card wins — and score points equal to the number of cards you collect, but winning comes at a cost.

Flat fish
For the next round, you shuffle the cards you won and use some or all of those as your new hand...but those who don't have enough cards to fill their hand draw new cards from a reserve deck, and those cards have higher values than what came before and they introduce trump cards and special actions. Those new cards can help you take control of the current round's tricks, but that can mean that others are shoveling garbage into your net, garbage that you'll have in hand in future rounds.

Fishing is an ideal name for this design as you feel like you're riding waves of success and failure. Even after two games, it's clear that you don't always want to take a trick that you could win. Sure, you're scoring a few points now, but how much are you giving up down the road?


One great element to Fishing is the uncertainty of what other players have, sometimes because they're drawing mystery cards from the deck, but also because someone who has taken more cards in a round than they'll draw next round will not necessarily have the cards you think they do. Did they draw their blue cards, which means you can lead a high blue and they'll be forced to play under you, or did they draw no blues and will trump you instead?

Memory might play a bigger role in Fishing than in other trick-taking games because if you want to, you can track cards played over multiple rounds. You're playing the odds over who has which cards when, similar to games like Wizard in which not all cards are used in a round, but with a twist.
[o]Fresh fish![/o]The cards in the reserve deck are tagged with 1-5 stars, with all the 1-star cards on top, then the 2-star cards, etc., so the cards enter play in roughly the same order each game, but not exactly. Will your blue 10 hold as high card in the suit? Only one way to find out!

I feel like this game will reward experience as you become better attuned as to when to cast your net and how to time your takings in order to maximize your haul in the eighth and final round, but as I just wrote above, only one way to find out...

Okay, turns out that I wrote another post while writing about how I won't be posting for a few days. In the meantime, enjoy upcoming designer diaries from David Thompson about War Story: Occupied France, Matthias Cramer about Lenin's Legacy, and Wolfgang Kramer about Tikal Legend.

Eye'll see you later, downtown Essen Read more »

Publisher: anaislalovi

"Medusa stock art Inktober Special Edition" illustration made entirely from scratch in digital format. 

This product includes:

• 1 JPG full illustration (signed) with background (420mm x 297mm 300ppi RGB)
• 1 JPG full illustration (signed) with background and margins (perfect for framing) (420mm x 297mm 300ppi RGB)
• 1 PNG line art without background for use it with the background that you want or printing in special sheets (420mm x 297mm 300ppi RGB)

Non-exclusive licence.

Terms of Use and Licence: 

www.anaislalovi.com/terms-of-use-and-licence-stock-art

Price: $7.50 Read more »

Publisher: Rarr! I'm A Monster Publishing

Chaos is a Spoon

Rules of Nonsense

Dive headfirst into a world where the absurd reigns supreme and logic has fled the scene! Chaos Is A Spoon invites you to embark on an unpredictable journey through a universe where reality twists and turns like a noodle in a bowl of soup. Here, the sky tumbles sideways, mountains bounce in mismatched socks, and the sun whispers riddles about forgotten vegetables, each word dripping with delicious nonsense.

Your adventures are not bound by the chains of conventional storytelling. Instead, you and your fellow players will craft surreal vignettes filled with bizarre encounters and laugh-out-loud moments, embracing the delightful chaos that unfolds with every roll of the dice. As you search for the legendary Forgotten Spoon—an object of absolutely no significance—you’ll discover that the journey itself is a treasure trove of creative destruction and whimsical absurdity.

Characters will evolve through the art of tearing apart their own goals, replacing the mundane with the ridiculous. Imagine convincing a flock of invisible birds to sing songs made of spoons or teaching the mountains to wear sunglasses! Each session is a canvas where the only rule is that there are no rules, allowing your wildest imaginations to flourish.

In Chaos Is A Spoon, every moment is a joyful celebration of nothingness, where the only constant is unpredictability. Gather your fellow misfits, embrace the nonsensical, and step into a chaotic playground of creativity and laughter. Will you uncover the meaning of the Forgotten Spoon, or will you simply revel in the delightful mayhem? The answer, much like everything in this game, is wonderfully unpredictable.

Price: $3.68 Read more »

Publisher: Terry Maranda

 Join us and explore Sol'Kesh at: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/solkesh/bestiary

A Bestiary book of over 70+ beasts inspired by the speculative evolution of a far future earth.

Please enjoy this free package featuring:

• CR 3 Wrakis creature statblock
• Craftable Item that can be made from harvesting its slain corpse
• TTRPG Token and Monster Icon
• 3D printable miniature STL
  
  
  

Price: $0.00 Read more »

Publisher: Moira Games

In these lands of eldritch goo, it's a fine line between victory and a sticky situation

Tzork, the sentient globe of glass, wasn’t exactly born from a grand spell—it was more of a cosmic "oops". After a backstabbing disciple named Theridus offed his master and snagged the relic, he promised his followers unimaginable power. But instead of turning them into terrifying demons, Tzork turned them into puddles of goo. Now, the once "glorious" cult's mansion is less a temple and more a swamp of melted, failed adventurers, attracting only the most reckless of treasure hunters.

'Morass of the Melting Men' is an adventure for Knave 2e, suitable for low-level PCs. The adventure revolves around an extremely powerful sentient magical item that has gone out of control, melting all the nearby people and turning what was once an evil temple into a swamp of slime, filled with bones and eyeballs. In Morass of the Melting Men, players enter a location flooded with a magical liquid exuding chaotic energy. The longer the PCs remain within the swamp, the more they suffer the unexpected effects of this alien magic.

Step inside this morass if you dare — goo and treasure awaits... but mostly goo

What you'll find here:

• A complete 22-page adventure
• A 20 room dungeon map
• Several new (and bizarre) magic items such as the magnificent Tray of Force and the powerful Theridus' Head.
• Several wild random tables of weird and gooey outcomes

• Design, layout and cartography by Felipe Tuller (@felipetuller.bsky.social)
  
• Art by Alvaro Gonçalves (@hamspresunto)
  

Morass of the Melted Man is an independent production of Moira Games and is not affiliated with Questing Beast LLC.

Price: $5.00 Read more »

Publisher: Black Cats Gaming

“Cursed Captains of Cthulhu - Tabletop Audio Tracks” – MP3 tracks

This set of 5 audio tracks sets the scene for all your high-seas horror adventures. From dock-side taverns to ship battle, to grim eldritch beings moving in the night, these audio tracks have you covered. Lend ambiance to you home games and a professional feel to your streams – a perfect accompaniment to your Cursed Captains of Cthulhu games!

Each track has ambient and musical elements, and is also separated into just musical and just ambient options as well to

 

Includes:

The Taven – 10 mins
 + (The Taven -AMB and The Taven-MUS)
Ship Battle – 10 mins
 + (Ship Battle-AMB and Ship Battle-MUS)
Under Sail – 10 mins
+ (Under Sail-AMB and Under Sail-MUS)
Something Lurks – 10 mins
+ (Something Lurks-AMB and Something Lurks-MUS)
The Horror – 10 mins
+ (The Horror-AMB and The Horror-MUS)

Also includes background and musical tracks (each 10 mins as well), separated out so GMs can choose exactly the right tone for their scenes, for a total of 2 and a half hours of tracks.

Genre: Pirate, Horror, Fantasy, Fantastical, Tavern/meeting place.

Time - 10:00 min per track, + 20 minutes separated track elements. Total: 2h30min

All the tracks are great for loopable background sound, with the ambient tracks being especially good soundscapes for steaming.

All the tracks are MP3 format, meaning they are playable by all common listening apparatus and software. All tracks have been tested on standard windows audio systems; if there are any issues please check your sound setup before contacting Black Cats Gaming customer support.

Immerse yourself in the sounds of Cursed Captains of Cthulhu now!

Price: $6.50 Read more »

Publisher: Third Kingdom Games

Issue 38 of Populated Hexes Monthly returns to the standard format, this time moving north to the mountains and fjord on the southern shore of the Inland Sea. It contains a hex inhabited by a prophetic raven and hungry giant frogs, as well as guidelines for incorporating prophecies into play, the giant raven stat-block, information on the petty kingdoms in the region and the eldritch warrior class, a spell-wielding martial class that is not just a re-skinned elf.

Price: $2.95 Read more »

Publisher: Rarr! I'm A Monster Publishing

It started with a whisper—a small door, barely noticeable, appearing one day in the wall of your home. At first, you couldn’t open it, and it seemed harmless enough. But each day, the door grows larger. Each day, it becomes more a part of your life, your mind. And each day, you hear the sounds from behind it: the scratching, the knocking, the faint voices you tell yourself aren’t real.

You can’t remember when the fear started, but now it’s all you feel. As the door grows, so does the sense of dread that tightens its grip around your heart. What lies beyond that ever-expanding doorway? Why is it here, and why can’t you stop thinking about it?

The Door is a solo horror journaling experience that drags you deeper into the unknown with each passing day. Using tarot cards for randomization, you will chronicle your descent as the door takes root in your home and your psyche. Every card drawn reveals a new layer of terror, bringing you closer to the moment when the door will finally open. What waits on the other side?

Play at your own risk, and remember: some doors should never be opened.

Price: $3.00 Read more »

Publisher: Terra RPG

Introducing the *Terrae RPG: 5e Rogue Compendium*! This 22-page eBook is your ultimate guide to mastering the Rogue class in 5th Edition, with 12 thrilling subclasses—each offering unique ways to approach stealth, cunning, and combat. Whether you prefer silent assassinations, clever gadgets, or outwitting enemies, this compendium has something for every type of Rogue. Here’s a look at each Lodge included:

1. **Lodge of the Assassin** – Masters of stealth and precision, Assassins are trained to kill swiftly and efficiently. With their deadly strikes and ability to blend into the shadows, they take out high-value targets before disappearing without a trace.

2. **Lodge of the Blade Thrower** – Specializing in ranged attacks, these Rogues are experts with thrown weapons, turning simple blades into lethal projectiles. They excel at taking down enemies from afar with precision and agility.

3. **Lodge of the Gadgeteer** – Inventors and tinkerers, Gadgeteer Rogues craft bombs, traps, and a wide array of mechanical devices. They use their creations to surprise, trap, and outsmart their enemies, combining brains with brawn.

4. **Lodge of the Masked Hero** – Inspired by iconic masked vigilantes, these Rogues live double lives, using their secret identity to fight injustice. They rely on quick reflexes, acrobatics, and tactical strikes, always staying one step ahead of their enemies.

5. **Lodge of the Shadow Dancer** – Rogues who follow this path are masters of manipulating shadows. They teleport between dark spaces, evade detection, and strike from the darkness with unparalleled stealth and finesse.

6. **Lodge of the Skirmisher** – Agile and quick, Skirmishers specialize in hit-and-run tactics. These rogues are not only adept at quickly identifying an enemy’s weak points but also at communicating this vital information to their allies, giving them an edge in combat.

7. **Lodge of the Soulblade** – These Rogues channel ethereal energy into their blades, creating weapons that cut through both flesh and spirit. They are masters of both stealth and soulcraft, becoming more powerful as they collect the life essence of their foes.

8. **Lodge of the Spy** – Masters of infiltration and espionage, Spy Rogues excel at gathering information, deceiving others, and uncovering secrets. They blend into any environment, using their intelligence and cunning to manipulate events from the shadows.

9. **Lodge of the Thief** – Classic Rogues with a focus on agility and stealth, Thieves are experts in picking locks, disarming traps, and pilfering valuable items. Their dexterity and quick thinking make them the ultimate burglars.

10. **Lodge of the Thug** – Brutes among Rogues, Thugs focus on brute strength and intimidation. They rely on raw power and underhanded tactics to dominate foes in close-quarters combat, making them fearsome enforcers.

11. **Lodge of the Toxicologist** – Masters of poison, these Rogues mix deadly toxins and venoms into their weapons. They incapacitate enemies with a variety of poisons, weakening their targets before delivering the killing blow.

12. **Lodge of the Trickster** – Arcane Rogues who blend magic with mischief, Tricksters use illusions, enchantments, and arcane tricks to confuse and outmaneuver their enemies. They specialize in creating chaos and using magic to gain the upper hand.

With stunning artwork and in-depth descriptions, the *Terrae RPG: 5e Rogue Compendium* offers countless ways to craft the perfect Rogue character. Whether you prefer subterfuge, gadgets, or arcane mischief, these 12 Rogue Lodges offer endless possibilities for cunning and daring adventurers!

Price: $1.99 Read more »

Publisher: D10 Dimensions

Space is big. Space is empty. But across those vast expanses are people, ships, creatures, phenomena, treasures, and things that are pre-cious, rare, strange and dangerous. Any good captain worth that title quickly learns to determine the difference between threats and opportunity or they can be lost to the cold darkness of space.

This list is intended for any space opera setting (like Traveller, Star Wars, Star Trek, Mothership, Space Opera, Rifts, Babylon 5, Red Dwarf, etc.) where new people, worlds, and technology create situations that are not necessarily uniform or simple. We designed this product to be applied to many different kinds of planets and moons to give you dozens of different ways to add a new dimension to your next journey to a new world.

This Roll Percentile list has one hundred possible results in this format:

Roll result: A brief description of an encounter in a planetary orbit.

Example 101: Two ships (a local fighter and a foreign scout) are floating in a high stress encounter - shields and weapons are up.

Price: $0.99 Read more »

“Only make the players roll when the results are interesting.”

I try to take that advice to heart, but I also take it one step further – I figure my players should only roll when failure would be interesting.

And while, on the surface, that sounds like perfectly reasonable advice to me, when I stop and think about it there is one big problem that always trips me up in the heat of a good session – how do I know when the roll will be interesting?

Well, a couple weeks ago, I had the pleasure of recording a podcast with Ang and Carl about stakes – GnomeCast Episode 198: How Do You Like Your Stakes? – and while we were talking about things like player agency, respecting the power of backstories, and how to offer meaningful choices, it all clicked for me.

Interesting rolls are rolls that – if failed – raise the stakes!

Worry About Failures, Not Successes

Consider this scenario: your court wizard is trying to figure out how an elusive phantom thief has stolen the queen’s diamond from a locked vault, seemingly without a trace. You ask them to make a knowledge check. You’ve planned for what happens if they succeed – you’ve figured out the clues that will put them on the trail and allow them to capture the culprit.

But, really, in the moment of that roll, you shouldn’t worry about what happens if they succeed. After all, you already know what’s going on with the thief. Why they’re stealing royal gems. How they’re pulling off their heists. Presumably, you figured all that out during your session prep.

What you should worry about is what happens if they fail, because if the answer to that question is “nothing,” well then the stakes of the scenario are gonna die right then and there and start stinking up the session like microwaved fish.

Every chance you give the players to fail – in other words, every time you ask them to roll the dice – should be a chance to make the story more interesting by way of the consequences of their failures.

It’s consequences, after all, that propels most stories in new and interesting directions. It’s what the game books mean when they say “fail forward.”

If a failed roll results in nothing happening, then we’ve halted all forward momentum and entered a kind of stasis (and as any Mage: The Ascension player out there knows, stasis = badness).

Failing forward, though, keeps us tumbling down the hill to our inevitable conclusion and (hopefully) a big finish.

Easy concept to grasp.

Difficult concept to pull off.

The trick, though, lies in knowing your stakes.

Medium Rare

There are two kinds of (sometimes overlapping) stakes I try to focus on in the moment when I’m running a game: situational stakes and personal stakes.

SITUATIONAL STAKES are the ticking clocks counting down during the course of your encounter, session, or campaign. The bombs are about to go off. The villagers are about to be sacrificed. The jewels are about to be stolen by that phantom thief. Situational stakes typically apply to the entire party of adventurers and are closely tied to the main plot of the story. “Will the detectives catch the serial killer before he takes his next victim?” That’s a situational stake.

But situational stakes don’t have to be big things. In fact, the stakes in any given moment of an encounter are probably much smaller (if no less important). For example: picking the lock on your cell before the guard gets back from his lunch break, or maybe lying to your boss about why you’re always falling asleep in meetings (so he doesn’t find out you’re moonlighting as a masked vigilante).

PERSONAL STAKES are similar to situational stakes (and depending on the story, they’re likely to overlap), but personal stakes are less focused on the over-arching plot and more focused on the characters, their backstories, and their personal motivations.

Failing to catch every Pokémon. Disappointed your ancestors. Flubbing your prom-posal and getting laughed at by half the school. These are all personal stakes. Do they make a difference in the grand scheme of things? Probably not. Do they make a difference in the lives of your characters? You bet your ass they do!

(One could argue that the closer the Venn diagram of Situational and Personal stakes is to a circle, the better your story is, but YMMV. For more ways you can make this happen, check out this article.)

Going Up

So, now that we know our stakes, how do we raise them? This is where we have to get mean because you’ve got to identify ways in which the situation can get worse. Twist those screws. Make their lives harder.

– Maybe that manifests in more physical danger to their characters. A monster shows up; more monsters show up; a meteor shows up, and it’s falling straight at them.
– Time pressure is another good way to turn up the heat. The proverbial bomb ticks closer to zero.
– Don’t forget about emotional damage! This reminds you of the time you disappointed your father right before he died in that wildebeest stampede.

Back to the Dice

This brings us back to the original question – when do you ask for a roll from your players? The answer is, as we’ve been discussing, “when it raises the stakes if they fail.”

Now we know what it means to do that. We ask ourselves what important aspect of the story could be enhanced with a failed roll, and if the answer is “nothing,” then don’t call for a roll!

In systems that have skill lists, it’s tempting to have your players roll their skills for everything. After all, they invested those points during character creation. They might as well get use out of them, right? If they dumped a lot of points into investigation, and you just hand out the clues, then it kind of feels like they wasted their points on the ability to find those clues.

But if the roll’s not important, it’s okay to just let them succeed based on their previous experience and expertise in the subject matter. Let them be competent and succeed without effort. It’s a great way to make them feel like the heroes of the story, after all.

In Practice

So, let’s go back to that knowledge check example. Since you’ve already prepared your notes, you already know what happens in the event of a success.

You’ve determined the roll is important because if the wizard investigator doesn’t figure out how the phantom thief pulled off the heist, the thief will strike again and steal a priceless artifact this time. You also know, thanks to the character’s background, that the wizard learned everything they know about forensic magic from their ex-girlfriend, who runs her own detective agency.

So now you have options for raising the stakes in an interesting way, and instead of a “no, you can’t figure that out” on a failure, you could raise the personal stakes by saying, “The magic resonance is familiar, but the only person you know who could decipher the meaning is your ex-girlfriend.”

Or, you could raise the situational stakes and say something like, “You figure out how the thief did it, but it takes you the whole day, and by the time you realize they’re using the Magic Boots of Wall Walking, they’ve already snatched the next diamond.”

It’ll take practice to get into the habit of asking for rolls this way (lord knows I haven’t perfected my technique yet) but as you fail, I guarantee, you’ll be failing forward.

Read more »

If you give me the ability to customize something, whether its fonts, colors, formatting, whatever, I’m going to end up spending way too much time playing with those options. Even when I know this is the case, it doesn’t stop me. The best thing I can do is to find a tool that lets me spend all that effort on customizing something that I’ll actually use, instead of letting me drift into setting up something I won’t use for months, if even then.

I’m mentioning this because I’ve spent a lot of time seeing what I can and can’t customize on a VTT platform recently, so I wanted to touch base on what I’ve learned so far. I’m going to talk a bit about Shard Tabletop today, a VTT platform that is customized specifically to work with 5e SRD games.

Disclaimer

While I started exploring Shard VTT on my own for a while, I received several products from both Lazy Wolf Studios and Shard Tabletop to look at for review. I made purchases and started my customizations before I received those items. I have run a session on Shard, and I have been a player multiple times on Shard.

How Did I Get Here?

My exploration of Shard is something that’s has started and stopped multiple times, and then went into high gear more recently. During the sheltering at home days, I was avoiding VTTs as long as I could, but eventually, I realized I was going to need to learn how to game on a VTT if I was going to get the gaming in that I wanted.

There were three main VTTs that I looked at, Fantasy Grounds, Roll20, and Shard. I’m going to avoid direct comparisons where I can, but I did want to touch on why I didn’t end up using Shard Tabletop from the beginning.

I played a D&D campaign on Fantasy Grounds as a player. It did a lot of things I liked, which weren’t easy to do on other platforms. For example, I loved that you could actually target a token, and the VTT would keep track of your success and failure without the DM even getting involved, and you could apply damage directly. That said, there were things I never felt were intuitive (adding gear to a character sheet), and other things that felt like it just had one more step than it needed to have, and that extra step was easy to forget. I reminded me of some of the software I’ve worked with working in data in the education field.

I spent a lot of time playing though some scenarios on Shard Tabletop. The biggest mark against it, at the time, was that it could only run 5e SRD, and I was running multiple systems. I wanted something that was going to have tools for multiple game systems, but I came back to Shard multiple times to run “simulations,” where I was able to see how different characters fared against different monsters.

Roll20 won out. I don’t know that its more intuitive than Fantasy Grounds, but I would say that some of the unintuitive aspects of Roll20 were clustered together in a few places, rather than spread out across the interface. It had a decent range of official product support, as well as the character sheets, which made it useful for games that didn’t have official support. In some cases, these character sheets made it must faster to roll dice pools or count successes.

Because I had been happy with Shard for my “simulation” scenarios, I talked to Ang detailing what I liked about the platform but mentioned that it didn’t have official D&D support. Ang used it way more than I did and learned the ins and outs of importing characters and building out monsters and encounters.

I returned to Shard Tabletop because I wanted to start playing with characters and options with Tales of the Valiant, especially making characters at different levels and using the heritage and lineage system. While there are multiple platforms that were included as options for VTT support, only Alchemy and Shard Tabletop had their implementations up and running. Since I was already somewhat familiar with Shard, I went there to start exploring options in the Black Flag Reference Document.

I liked what I saw, but my current D&D campaign was on Roll20, I had all of my official content on Roll20, and even though I could get Kobold Press material on Shard, that would require me to purchase everything that I owned over again for a new platform, and I wasn’t thrilled with that prospect.

Playtesting and Frustration with Roll20

I did some playtesting of the D&D 2024 rules as various Unearthed Arcana documents came out, but not as much as I would have liked. Part of the problem with this is that if I wanted to use Roll20, I had to build out the class/subclass/species options individually on the character sheets. Nothing was persistent. A new class, subclass, or spell would only exist on the character sheet where you customized it. I couldn’t keep up with that, especially when there were more and more spells included in the playtests.

I had the same problem with the Tales of the Valiant playtest documents I received from the crowdfunding campaign. That became even more frustrating because I could just use the base class and change a few things that were different. Because subclass levels were changing, I had to remove and replace several features.

There were also an increasing number of companies releasing playtest material, most of which would have to be built feature by feature for each pregenerated character. I could duplicate the character and change things around, but it still felt like I was putting a lot of work into one specific character sheet, not into that campaign. Even some of the custom items from different publishers may or may not work as well as official options. For example, the Kobold Press Witch and Theurge classes were included if you purchased Deep Magic Volume 1 and 2, but the spells available to those classes and several class features weren’t functioning as expected.

The Subscription Model

Before we get into some of the newer subscriptions, it’s probably important to touch on Shard Tabletop’s subscription levels. You can use the basic functions of the site without a subscription, but you don’t get access to the expanded 5e OGL options included in the subscriptions. It also determines how much you can share with your players. These levels include:

• Adventurer–$2.99/month
• Gamemaster–$5.99/month
• Gamemaster Pro–$9.99/month

Adventurer lets you do some customization. You can get fancier dice, you can have two campaigns active at the same time, and you get a bunch of the race, subclass, spells, and feats that Shard offers, which are mostly options that Kobold Press has allowed them to use for these purposes. This option gives you unlimited characters. If you don’t have a subscription, you’re limited to six. You can only share what you own in one campaign (but you can only have two active to begin with). You also get the ability to customize your character sheet with different borders, colors, and images.

Gamemaster expands the number of campaigns you can have active at once to six, you can swap out tokens to customize appearances, and you don’t have access to free products in the Marketplace unless you have this option. You also get access to a split screen mode that lets you display the player view when you are using Shard for an in-person game.There is also a watch mode available where you can let others watch your game as it unfolds. You can share what you own in five different campaigns.

Gamemaster Pro gives you an unlimited number of campaigns that you can have active. You can do additional customizations with your tokens, like borders or multiple images you can switch between. The watch mode allows the watchers to interact with people in the game. If you are comfortable creating art elements within the parameters used by the site, you can create your own custom token elements and dice.

I’ve got the Gamemaster Pro subscription, in part because I like setting up a lot of “potential” campaigns to test options out, and I don’t want to worry about exceeding the number that I can have. I haven’t done much with creating borders or dice myself, but Ang, awesome person that she is, created some custom dice for me, and I have purchased borders from places the DriveThroughRPG, so I can have the special borders around my legendary creatures. It’s an affection I picked up from my World of Warcraft days, so it’s fun to be able to do something like that in a tabletop game.

I haven’t done anything with view sharing options, but even though we haven’t been playing in person, we have played with the split screen options in the game that Chris is running for Ang and me.

Company Subscriptions

The newest subscriptions offered by Shard Tabletop are company specific subscriptions. Currently, the following companies have subscription models on the site:

• A Tiny Living Room
• Kobold Press
• Troll Lord Games
• Underground Oracle Publishing

I can’t really speak to the other bundles, but I have subscribed to the Kobold Press bundles. And I did say bundles, because Kobold Press has multiple tiers to their subscription models. It’s probably worth mentioning that Kobold Press has a ton of material on the site, so there is a decent amount of material in these bundles.

• Gamemaster Subscription
• Kobold Hoard Subscription
• Player Subscription

All these bundles have new items have had items added to them over time. There are still a few special products that are released that do go into any bundles, but the only example I have for this so far is the Free RPG Day adventure digital version that has been released on Shard.

The Gamemaster subscription includes the campaign setting material, sourcebooks, and adventures. It also includes the Tales of the Valiant Monster Vault. It’s worth noting that while there have been several shorter adventures released for Tales of the Valiant, most of these items are pre-Black Flag RD 5e SRD material. That’s not a giant hurdle for most of these products, although some of the sourcebooks with subclasses are a bit trickier, and older spells are split out into the new, broader spell lists.

The Kobold Hoard Subscription includes the material from Kobold Press’ discontinued Warlock zine, as well as some of the short supplements from the website. These also include the blog article products that get reformatted and released after some playtesting and development.

The Player Subscription includes all of the player facing books that Kobold Press has released for the 5e SRD, including the “thematic” player guides (Southlands, Underworld, etc.), and the larger player facing sourcebooks Kobold Press has released, including the Midgard Heroes Handbook and the Tome of Heroes, as well as Deep Magic Volume 1 and 2. These sources are a little trickier to use, since they include a lot of subclasses and feats that don’t fit the Tales of the Valiant format, but converting isn’t insurmountable. If you’re interested in Tales of the Valiant, this is the option that gets you the Player’s Guide options, as well as the recently released Lineages and Heritages Volume 1.

This is what got me to commit to setting up a campaign to play on Shard. This lets me have access to the Kobold Press material that I currently have for Roll20, and don’t want to purchase over again.

Revisiting Playtesting

One of the things that made Shard more attractive for playtesting scenarios is that you can create classes, subclasses, spells, feats, talents, species, lineages, or heritages and save them, making them available over and over once you build out that game option. As an example of some of the playtesting options I have entered into Shard, I’ve entered the Ghostfire Gaming Monster Hunter class, as well as the Worlds Beyond Number Witch class.

You can also save other game elements, like monsters, which is possible in other VTTs as well. You can also create handouts for your players that you can make available for your players, which can be something like an in-game entry in a book that’s relevant to the campaign, or a document summarizing your campaign’s house rules.

How Do I Get What’s Out Here, In There?

Books do what you expect them to do when you purchase items from the marketplace, meaning there are pages you can read, where you can click to the next section and read the next topic. Books can also be used to facilitate importing information. If you put a spell or a monster stat block into a book, and you import that book, Shard can convert that information into game elements that can be saved and used like any other item of that type.

You can’t just drop any information in and hope Shard will figure it out, but it is easier than I anticipated. You need to make sure that certain sections of the stat block or rules elements have a certain header type associated with it, and if you want an expression in the text to allow you to click on it to roll dice, you need to bold that section of the text.

I’ve had a lot of luck importing monsters and spells using this method. If you get the hang of what formatting goes to what section, you may get a simpler monster to just work as soon as you click on that section and then click on the option for Shard to convert it. Even more complicated monsters usually look pretty usable and may only require a little bit of cutting and pasting to make sure some information that ended up in the wrong section goes in the stat block where it belongs.

You can attempt to import things like classes or subclasses, but I’ve had a lot less luck getting those to work well, and the amount of reworking I’ve had to do has just convinced me to just copy a similar class or subclass and then add and delete the options I want to see.

When you are creating classes and subclasses, if you name a feature something similar to a feature you already have saved, there is a lightbulb icon that you can click, which shows you all of the similarly named rules elements, which you can click on to import that into the current class. This is handy for something like making a front-line fighting class that you want to give the class the fighting style feature that many of them get, or when you want to give a class an ability from another class in a subclass.

The modeling features are very robust, but in some cases, they are also very specific. You can easily just drop in a description of what the ability does, but you can also link in everything that the ability does and apply those effects, if you add all the bells and whistles. You can do more complicated things, like having a class feature that lets you pick three specialized class features, each one working in a slightly different way.

You can also create custom versions of classes, swapping out abilities that you want to change, but when you still want that class to count as the class you are modifying. One thing to keep in mind is that if you do something like this, you may want to save this as a separate class with a distinct name, even if it’s something like Fighter (House Ruled), because if you save any changes to a rules element, when there are updates to those classes, they won’t populate. You still won’t automatically get them in your custom class, but if you’re using the standard fighter in another game you play in, and you are only using your custom fighter in one of multiple campaigns you are running, the standard fighter will get updated regularly.

One of the best features that Shard had doesn’t work anymore, and that’s the import function from D&D Beyond. At one point in time, you could post a link to your D&D Beyond character, and Shard could look at your character and convert it over to working in Shard. Some features didn’t work perfectly, but it did an amazing job of bringing most of the functionality over, including copying the classes, subclasses, feats, spells, or species that aren’t present in Shard. You still needed to own those things on D&D Beyond, but once you have that character set up, you could bring it over with very little difficulty, and even be able to level the character up with those options. Unfortunately, the 2024 implementation on D&D Beyond has broken this function.

Shard Tabletop has created a number of rules packages that emulate some of the subclasses from Xanathar’s, or Tasha’s, for example, but you need to connect a few dots and rename some things, since they don’t bring in information directly from those sources.

Campaign Setup

Another series of customizations you can make is to allow very specific things into your campaign. This is extremely powerful compared to some options that you can use to customize campaign options on other platforms. D&D Beyond never seems to filter out exactly what you want to filter out, and Roll20 can exclude or include an entire source, but you can’t go into the individual options in the book and restrict specific spells or feats, for example.

Shard has multiple ways to customize information that appears in your campaign. Extensions are broad sets of rules, which might include or exclude a few things that aren’t meant to work with that implementation. For example, the 5e SRD might be one extension, Esper Genesis might be another, and Black Flag RD may be another. If you directly modify an extension, you can customize your campaign, but as with classes above, that keeps the extension from getting updated when updates are released. Which means if you’re going to be tweaking things, you may want to make a copy of the extension and give it a unique name.

Once you add that into your campaign, your extension has a number of packages, the best example of which are all the rules bundled into a specific product. You can exclude any of these packages, but if you like some of the options from that package, you can also set preferred or restricted content. When you do this, you can restrict that handful of spells you really don’t like from that one book that you want to include, for example.

If you’re obsessive like me, you can also do things like adding unique languages to the Extension or remove languages that you don’t want to be available in the game. Are you, like me, annoyed that Ignan, Auran, Aquan, and Terran are all just dialects of Primordial? Then you can remove Primordial as an option. If you add an ancient language that was just recently rediscovered, you can add those in as well.

There are a few options that live in all of the Extensions, even if they aren’t a default in that set of rules. For example, you can turn on Luck from the Black Flag RD versus Inspiration in the 2014 5e SRD.

Going back to my playtest examples, it’s really easy to restrict options in a playtest campaign so that you are testing the material with a closed set of options, rather than throwing everything official and third party at your playtest at the same time.

Ongoing Adventures

When I was setting up my testbeds in Shard, I didn’t fully understand the assumed way to utilize this function. I just opened a map, added tokens to the map, and then ran the combat. For the published adventures, you open a blank book. You can detail whatever notes you need to have to run your game, and then you add the map to the book. On the map, you can then pin encounters to the map.

When you click on the pinned encounters, you can start running the encounter. In addition to what you can do when you just add tokens to a map that you’ve imported, building an encounter lets you add inactive participants that you can activate, for example if there is a possibility for reinforcements to show up. Additionally, you can add treasure packets to the pinned encounter, which you can reveal once the PCs interact with where that treasure is located, and the treasure can be automatically distributed across all the PCs when you end the encounter. You can also assign XP at the end of the encounter based on the monsters you have added to the encounter, and within the encounters, you can also add additional XP amounts detached from the creatures in the encounter.

Most of the spells have an icon attached to them that lets you drop a token on the map showing the spell’s area of effect, but the GM can also drop templates of different sizes on the map. These have their own icon to click on, rather than sorting through artwork to find the templates, although if you have special artwork for your tokens, you’ll need to pull those out of your artwork normally.

There is an area where you can click on to start the encounter, and all the creatures the GM has added to the map will automatically roll their initiative and line up. The PCs can all roll their initiative themselves, and then they slot into the encounter in order. If you click on the spell you are casting, the initiative tracker will keep track of how long the spell has been in effect, as well as if it requires concentration. That’s extremely handy as a reminder. Additionally, whenever you have a condition, your token has an icon attached to it, and you’ll see the name of the condition by your character’s name. It’s also really easy to assign custom conditions, which can be handy for on-the-fly narrative elements you want to make sure to track.

Making Characters

If you’re making a character from inside the campaign, the campaign options will limit what you can use for that PC. If you build a PC outside of the campaign, you won’t have those items restricted, but the GM has to allow the character to join the campaign. So, if you want to make sure you’re not using something that your group has already agreed to exclude, you want to make sure to go into the campaign you have access to first, then create the character from there.

What’s very interesting is how Shard has implemented the Tales of the Valiant rules. When you first create the character, you get a dropdown asking for what ruleset you are using, the 5e SRD or the Black Flag RD. Regardless of if you pick the 2014 5e SRD or the Black Flag RD, you have a few decision options that lets you pull in things from either ruleset. For example:

• You can choose either Race or Lineage and Heritage
• You can choose 5e SRD backgrounds or Black Flag RD, which gives you a talent.
• You can pick a class from either ruleset, for example, the 5e SRD Cleric or the Black Flag RD Cleric
• Subclasses are attached to the class, meaning you can’t pick subclasses that aren’t designed for that version of the class to use with that class.

Because you get feats or talents based on when those come up in your class progression, which one you have access to will be based on the class you picked, but if you picked the Black Flag RD background and then picked the 5e SRD class, you could still pick up a single talent that is related to the background.

If you’re making a 2014 5e SRD character, and you pick a species that is from a source that still assigns character ability boosts, you have the option to change your ability score boosts to whatever ability scores you want. If you picked the Black Flag RD, you get the slightly larger standard array or point buy option, but if you then use a 5e SRD species with that, you get the +1/+2 from that option, so if you are going to mix and match, makes sure you know all of the interactions that are going on.

In addition to customizing the rules, if you have one of the subscriptions, you can make some modifications to your character sheet. Everything will stay in the same place no matter how you modify it, but you can change things like the background color, whether outline elements are rounded or squared, and change what color the fonts are based on themes. You can also upload artwork that you can use as background to your character sheet as well.

There is a section for “heroic abilities,” which is a collection of special abilities that a character may pick up as part of a campaign, rather than as part of character progression. There is also an icon for shape changing which lets you replace your stat block while you are transformed, as well as a section of the character sheet where you can assign companions or other NPCs the PCs may have access to in the campaign.

Practical Experience

In our Heroes of Hovel’s Way campaign, Chris has created custom subclasses for us, as well as building out companions and NPCs. Ang and I both have the companion characters assigned to our character sheets, where we can click on them and bring up their stats, when we need to run them in class. We’ve also got a custom spell added into the campaign as well. Ang and I have added custom dice for our characters, as well as using custom tokens.

Every ability I’ve used so far that gets reset on a short or long rest has reset on that rest. When rolling for attack damage, you can reroll individual dice that are displayed. I’m playing a paladin, so I can click on a box to add in my smite damage when I burn a spell slot. The GM can hover over a token and assign damage based on a list of recent rolls.

I did some customization for my Tales of the Valiant game, which I’m running in the Thrones and Bones setting. For example, I swapped around some of the languages, and I restricted some of the lineages and heritages that are available. In the notes section of the characters, I could post how they arrived at the beginning of the adventure we were playing. Because I had more players than the adventure assumes, I added a few extra characters to an encounter, and it took virtually no effort to do so. It’s also been easy to navigate the adventure using the index for the book that appears next to where the page information appears.

Before we settled on Thrones and Bones for our game, I was adding in additional Kobold Press material that hasn’t appeared on the site yet, like the Tales of the Valiant options available in Campaign Builder: Castles and Crowns. I didn’t get stumped too often as I was adding the lineages, heritages, or subclasses that appear in that book.

For someone that spends hours thinking about what dials to turn and what new material from various products to include in a campaign, I love to add bits and pieces as I have ideas about what I would like to do with those new widgets. I used to write fairly detailed campaign documents spelling out what was and wasn’t going to be used in the campaign, sometimes explaining how some of the books we wanted to use were on the table, but some specific options inside it are off limits. I can focus a lot more on other topics like theme, lines and veils, and people and locations the PCs want to include in the game.

A Note on Finding What You Want

Most functions that interact with images have an internet search associated with it. If you look for a token for a monster, you can use a single click to search the web based on the name of the game object. For example, I imported Strahd’s stat block as a test, and it was very easy to find an image of Strahd. It was also very easy to find alternate artwork of a swarm of bats, which I could switch to when Strahd changes form.

I could also find general map terrain easily using simple search terms. If you find terrain images you can create a grid at whatever scale you want, and if you have a gridded map, there is a template you can use to measure the size of your grid that resizes the map based on that template and where you line it up.

All this works well, and if you’re not running a professional game, or raising money for your actual play based on streaming your videos, its probably not a problem. That said, there are tons of resources for maps in the Marketplace, as well as frames and token images. It’s also worth noting that all of the 5e SRD creatures have assigned images that are pretty functional as well.

What I’m Really Enjoying

There are a number of functions I really like on Shard that make it very attractive to use to run a 5e SRD based game.

• Customizing available character options
• Easily modified standard content
• Subscription options if you want access to Kobold Press material
• Powerful import tools for monster and spell stat blocks
• Easy to modify encounters
• Quick transition into initiative
• Damage and conditions are easily applied
• Easy to interact with rerolls that interact with dice pools
• Can save customized game elements to be used persistently
• Highly customizable character sheet appearance
• Automatically assign treasure and XP
• Can save completed encounters to a journal to be referenced later
• Ability to create a custom ruleset from multiple options
• Can upload sounds and play them during encounters
• Developers active on the Discord and quick to respond not just to bugs, but modeling questions

What I Wish I Didn’t Have to Contend With

There are still some aspects of the VTT that I’m not particularly deft at navigating, and there are some things I wish were available or worked differently.

• No official D&D support
• Limited 3rd party 5e SRD support
• Learning curve to understand some of the terminology in the ruleset
• It’s easy to pull spells or monsters from a different ruleset than intended
• Limited tools for controlling sound clips, outside of manually starting and stopping
• No 3-D capability, which makes it look a little less shiny than other VTTs
• No dynamic lighting, so all visibility on maps must be done manually
• Easy to accidentally mass delete items from your personalize content (ask me how I know)
• Its easy to accidentally mark artwork as a different type of artwork, locking it out of what you want to use it for (for example, marking something as a background instead of a map)
• The map and encounter building tools work well, but you need to understand books and how adventures are structured to utilize it

Final Thoughts

 I said a long time ago that a VTT built for a specific RPG is going to be better for running that game than one that tries to accommodate multiple, potentially very different game systems. Shard is a proof of concept of that statement. 

I’m really impressed with what I can do with Shard. I said a long time ago that a VTT built for a specific RPG is going to be better for running that game than one that tries to accommodate multiple, potentially very different game systems. Shard is a proof of concept of that statement. Like a lot of robust toolsets, there are times you can get lost in the options, but I feel more like it’s a matter of understanding terminology instead of learning a structure that is overly cumbersome.

I would love to see more 3rd party 5e SRD companies convert material for this VTT. I realize that takes time and effort, but I feel like the people at Shard understand how to implement what appears in these supplements better than some other VTTs that sometimes feel like they are snowed under trying to get a large number of systems and supplements to play nice in their system.

If you want a 5e VTT that lets you pick up and go, I can almost recommend Shard, but that’s going to depend on what products you want available in your campaign. If you want to engage with Kobold Press material, you’re solid. If you’re a fan of some of the other 3rd party 5e SRD companies that have been gaining momentum over the last few years, or you really want official D&D content, I don’t know if the ease of use in game will offset time you need to take to set things up, even if you can set things up exactly the way you want them. But if you’re the type of person that has a favorite font, and you know exactly how big you want your cells to be in a spreadsheet, and you have default conditional formatting you like to apply, I think this is going to be something that will be very rewarding (it’s me, I’m talking about me).

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And here we come to the end, the final article in the Earning Their Trust series (see parts one and two, respectively.) This is the last planned entry into the series, but like nearly every one-shot I’ve ever planned to run “in a single evening, I swear” the series might go over.

That’s future Josh’s problem to worry about, though. Today, I want to tackle the idea of the GM as the blind arbiter of the rules, and how taking on that role can impact the trust your players have in you and your game.

This is Not a Perfect World

In a perfect world, every rule of every RPG system would be clear and unambiguous. The game developers would know exactly what they wanted to communicate and would do so with precision and in such a way as to be completely obvious when read by the players the very first time.

Alas, we live in a world where even the roundness of our planet is (somehow) debated, and the languages we use to relay rules are about as precise as a clutch of ferrets writhing inside a trench coat.

To that end, I would say that as a GM, there is no way you can be a completely objective judge of the rules and the system. After all, how can you be expected to make objective decisions when the rules themselves are not objective?

Game developers do not write rules systems to create a perfectly fair simulation of a (made-up) reality. They write them to create a very particular kind of experience.

D&D simulates traveling through dungeons and beating up monsters with your friends. Call of Cthulhu simulates investigating cosmic horrors and slowly (or not so slowly) losing control of your mental faculties…with your friends. Pasión de las Pasiones simulates over-the-top extra dramatic soap operas. With your friends.

The point is that in order to simulate these experiences, the rules, as they’re written, cannot be objective. They have to prefer the desired experience. And so, as a GM, you can’t be objective either. I would argue, in fact, that you shouldn’t be, but we’ll get to that in a moment.

The other part of the simulation I want to call out is the part where you do all of these things with your friends. Unless we’re talking about solo RPGs or journaling games, TTRPGs are social games. And your friends, I’m guessing, want to play a game with their friend too. Not a passionless judge beholden to the rules as written. If that were the case, you could all just play Baldur’s Gate 3 again.

Punitive Parent VS “Cool Mom” GM

The problem with viewing the GM as the impartial arbiter is that the GM creates the situations and scenarios the players have to overcome to begin with. They can’t be an unbiased judge because there’s no third party in this equation. There’s the players, and there’s the GM. There’s an inherent power imbalance if the person who put them in the situations is also in charge of making the rulings about those situations.

Now, you might try to ignore the reality of that imbalance and think to yourself, “This doesn’t apply to me. I’m able to remove my emotional connection to the campaign scenarios I spent hours creating and make fair and balanced rulings.” But I promise you, at some point – despite your best intentions – there will come a day when you have to say to your players, “I’m sorry it went that way for you, but I’m just following the rules.”

And really, isn’t “I’m just following the rules” the GM’s version of “I’m just doing what my character would do?”

Of course, on the flip side of that, you’ve got what I call the “Cool Mom GM.” You know, the one who’s not like all those other GMs. They let you take sips of their wine and give you magical artifact weapons when you’re still level two. They also never let anything bad happen to their players, regardless of what the rules say. This play style might be fun for a little while, but eventually, players will get bored if all they do is – as DJ Khaled says – win, win, win, no matter what.

So where does that leave us? Well, following the rules you set out at the start of a game – including your choice of systems, the house rules of your table, and the boundaries set forth in session zero – will, without a doubt, help you earn your players’ trust, but knowing how and when to break the rules will help you keep it.

Let’s look at how to do that.

Bringing Balance to the Force

How do you use the rules in a fair but biased way? You lean into the experience. Like I said above, TTRPG rules aren’t written to be reality simulators. They’re written to be experience simulators. In other words, you’ve got to use the – dare I say it – spirit of the rule, not the letter.

What does that look like? Well, let’s take an example from Pathfinder 2nd Edition (pre-remaster). There was a lot of debate over the wording in the death and dying subsystem about when and how the wounded condition was applied.

The rules could be read one of two ways, and depending on how they were read, the system was a lot more or a lot less deadly.

So, how do you use the experience simulation to make your ruling? Ask yourself the kind of Pathfinder game you’re running. Is your campaign a high adventure with lots of swashed buckles and feats of derring-do? Rule for the more lenient interpretation.

If, on the other hand, you’re going for a gritty campaign where the threat of death is omnipresent. Well, the choice is simple.

Not every ruling you make will be this clear cut, but if the experience – not the RAW – is your guiding light, then you’ll be able to navigate the turbulent seas. And, if you do this with consideration to your players’ characters and the stories they’re building (see the first and second parts in this series), then you’re going to solidify the trust you’ve been building up the whole campaign.

In Conclusion, Your Honor

When it comes right down to it, it’s all about showing your players that you’re working with them to interpret the rules of your game, not against them. That doesn’t mean saying yes to everything they ask for or assuming that their interpretation is correct and yours is wrong. It means knowing when a rule interpretation benefits the story you’re building. Together.

I think you’ll find, when everyone at the table has trust in each other, those stories are going to be freakin’ epic.

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At my table, a few weeks ago, the characters were outside the lair of a nefarious being, preparing to breach and assault. Before they did, one of the players announced that they wanted their character to do a quick recon, a very prudent idea. I was just about to request a Sneak check when I paused and decided against a roll, and instead just told him what he found by scouting. The sneak check would have been interesting to see if they did or did not get seen by the guards, but the better action for the evening was inside the lair – not having some skirmish outside. So I handwaved the roll to move the action along. I did it because I have recently begun to think that not everything in a game needs a roll. Let’s talk about it.

The Nature Of Rolling

We should start by talking about what a roll does in a game. It applies to a skill check and holds for a combat roll, save, etc. When the game mechanics require us to roll a die, an element of uncertainty is introduced into the scene. The die emulates the somewhat randomness of life and is often buffered by bonuses representing our skill, acumen, etc, to make what would be totally random somewhat more predictable. 

Randomness creates uncertainty and in turn, creates excitement. We don’t know what will happen when we let go of that die. Will it be a success or a failure? That excitement creates emotional investment, in a very similar way that the roll of dice in a Craps game or the release of the Roulette ball does in gambling. 

If an RPG had no rolls, it would lack that excitement of uncertainty. Conversely, if you have to roll for everything it can be tedious. This is why many games tell you that you don’t need to make an Agility check to walk across the street. 

Only Roll When Its Interesting

Over time, we evolved a GMing convention which has made its way into the mechanics of more modern games. It states something along the lines of, “Only roll when both success and failure are interesting.” Solid convention. Let’s consider it the 101 level.

The idea behind this convention is that if only one outcome of a roll is exciting, then you have a 50% chance of the roll being exciting vs it being boring. I have personally experienced this in a Pathfinder game (not its fault) where I tried three times to force a door of a storeroom open, and upon finally doing it, found out it only contained some grain. Honestly, neither outcome was exciting, and it came off like a giant waste of time. 

Not All Interesting Rolls Are Equally Interesting

Let’s jump up to the 201 level and say that even if both outcomes are interesting, a given roll may not be as interesting as another roll soon. 

Go back to my intro. Scouting around the lair is an interesting roll, if successful you are not seen and gain some useful information. If failed, you are seen by guards and a fight ensues. It’s interesting and a valid check to call for at the table. 

But… Once the party enters the lair, there is a whole bunch of cool encounters awaiting them, with cool opponents, etc. Those checks to move through the lair and to fight those creatures are far more exciting. 

That said, we could amend our interesting roll rule to say something like:

Only roll when both success and failure are the most interesting things to happen in the next few minutes. 

The main point of this evolution of thought is to maintain focus on the main plot of the story and to help the main plot progress. This tool streamlines extraneous encounters, potential red herrings (from failed rolls), and roadblocks to the story. It is best used when you want to drive the game forward. 

It works well when you are time-constrained, like in a convention game, or you want to get into the “meat” of the story.

Some Other Reasons Not To Roll

Let’s go to the 301 level and talk about some other reasons why you may just want to pass on an interesting roll. These reasons all have the same effect as above, to move us closer to the “good stuff”, but also support some other parts of the game.

Don’t call for that interesting roll (roll for brevity) when…

• It distracts from the plot
• If one of the outcomes of the roll will send the players down a tangent that pulls them away from the main storyline, which could result in significant time spent doing something other than moving the main plot forward 
• “If you fail this roll, you will attract the attention of the city guard, and you will have to fight or evade them before you can get into the temple”
• It breaks the genre of the game
• Game settings sometimes have genre conventions, things that we expect to happen because of the genre we are in. If the roll is going to potentially break with the genre, then pass 
• “You are a group of ninjas sneaking onto a roof at night. Roll to see if you are heard”
• If it is something reasonable the character can do

This is an evolution of the idea of not requiring a character to make an Agility test to cross the street. The idea is that if a character is reasonably competent in something, just give them the successful outcome. I find this especially useful in knowledge/skill checks. 

“Your character has a 75% in art history. Yea…this painting is a forgery”. 

There Are Other Ways To Solve This Problem

Not calling for rolls is a tool, like a screwdriver. It does not solve every case that comes up in a game, rather it solves some cases. There are other techniques for making rolls more interesting or relevant, like re-framing the check or changing the stakes. Sometimes it is better to use those in your session. When they are, use them.

Or Don’t Use the Screwdriver

Your personal preference as a GM or player may be to make all the interesting checks and see where the game unfolds. This is a more organic approach, leaning into the natural randomness of the game. There is nothing wrong with that approach. That style of play can be less focused but equally fun. 

Make a…nah nevermind

The die roll is a key part of most RPGs. The roll is a moment of uncertainty, that can bring about excitement and drive emotional investment in the game. There is nothing quite like a nat 20. Game systems often give good guidelines for when to call for rolls, but most only give the 101 instructions. With time and an understanding of the flow of games, you can use the 201 and 301 versions of this rule to move the story towards more interesting action.

Do you call for every interesting roll, or do you let some pass? What kinds of rolls are you more likely to let pass? 

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Join Ang, Josh and Carl Lehman as they talk about setting stakes for your games and how to keep your players and their characters invested and involved. LINKS: The MMO Acronym Accident Fabula Ultima Symphony Entertainment The Last Journey Home Stream Obsidian Read more »

While it’s sometimes fun to flip open a bestiary or monster manual to find a random monster to throw at the PCs, when you’re planning a boss for your party to face, it’s best to put some thought and care into the selection. You might even go so far as to make the boss of the adventure a full-fledged and statted-out NPC using the typical character creation rules instead of relying on the sparse monster stat block in the book. How much prep you put into the boss is up to you, and is, quite honestly, an entirely different article than this one.

Regardless of how much prep you put into the boss, they should support the themes of your story, have their own styles, speak in a recognizable manner, and have a reason to be the leader of the mooks the PCs will be facing.

Support Your Theme

The boss (or bosses) of your adventure should support the overall theme and tone of the story you’re presenting to your players. If you have an adventure about rescuing a kidnapped ice pixie, then having a fire-based boss as the main opponent would feel appropriate because of the opposing forces at play. However, if you have a gang of intelligent raiders capable of intricate planning and execution of their schemes, then having a lower-intelligent creature (like an ogre) as the leader of the raiders wouldn’t quite make sense.

If your theme is one of romance, then a swashbuckling, sword-wielding, bright-eyed person might fall right in line with reflecting the themes and tones of your story. If you’re going more for space-based horror, then the boss might be the queen xenomorph that has infested a space station or colony.

Style and Affectations

Let’s talk about two different appearances and styles using the examples I just put in the prior section.

The swashbuckling swordsman (or swordswoman) will likely have fancy, bright, ornate clothing to go along with their flashy sword moves. There will be layers of clothing that are different colors and hues, but the combination of colors won’t clash or look gaudy (to most people). The colors will look wonderful and amazing on them. Something that catches the eye, really. They’ll most likely have a handkerchief readily available for dabbing at minor wounds or wiping away tears from a heartbroken lover. They’ll be kind and gentle in all appearances and approaches…. Until it’s time to draw blood, then they’ll be deadly serious.

The queen xenomorph, on the other hand, will be all scales and carapace and fangs and acidic drool. Odds are, the xenomorphs will blend in with the darkness of space, which means they’ll be black and shades of dark gray, except for their teeth, which will clearly show in dim light. The queen will most likely not speak the PCs language, if she speaks at all. She might be intelligent, but incapable of forming proper words with her fang-filled mouth. Just because she can’t speak doesn’t mean she’s at animalistic intelligence.

Speech Patterns

I’m with Phil in this area in that I can’t do quality accents for a great length of time, so I don’t try at all. However, there’s more to speech patterns than the accents. Word choice, emphasis, and inflection can play into establishing a character’s style and imprinting on the players’ memories.

If you’ve ever read the Darksword trilogy (technically there are now 4 books, not counting the RPG effort) by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, then you’ll be aware of speech patterns from a few different characters. Saryon is hesitant, halting even, in his speech because he lacks confidence. Joram speaks bluntly and to the point because of how he was raised. There is one character that when you see his dialogue, you know it’s him. That’s Simkin. He is, I’m pretty sure, the only character in all that lengthy tale that uses the word, “egad,” in his dialogue. There are other examples as well. When you read Simkin’s dialogue, you just know who is speaking because of the word choices and cadence of speech.

What does this have to do with your boss? Well, you can make the boss stand out by letting most NPCs and mooks and such have similar speech patterns, but break the mold and have your boss speak in a different manner. Give them some flair or special way of talking. A way that allows the PCs to identify them in just a few syllables. It’ll drive home the uniqueness and special nature of the boss.

Leadership

Why is the boss the boss? Why are they leading? The best way to approach this is to give them a driving purpose and goal (along with some motivations, eh?) that are more important and powerful than those of the lieutenants and mooks that follow the leader. People tend to follow leaders that have a clear vision and purpose. If someone is “in charge” but doesn’t really have a desire to drive a mission or objection forward, they’re probably not going to be “in charge” for very long. Nature abhors a vacuum. Likewise, followers abhor a lack of leadership and direction.

This means you need to give your mooks a reason to follow the leader into perilous situations. Otherwise, the foundation of your story will crack, crumble, and sag.

Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed this sixth installment of this series. We’re about halfway through now, and I’m looking forward to talking about the mooks that follow your boss in next month’s article.

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Seven years ago, the original edition of Star Trek Adventures was released. That was before so many major developments with the franchise. Multiple series debuted, new eras were visited, and the two corporate entities that split the rights to Star Trek between movies and television series assimilated one another to add their distinctiveness to each other. While the Star Trek Adventures line was moving into the new series with sourcebooks, it makes sense to bring those new series into the examples and references in the core book.

Disclaimer

I have received review copies in the past from Modiphius for other 2d20 products, but I have not received any review material for the Star Trek Adventures: The Roleplaying Game Second Edition Core Rulebook, and I purchased this for review on my own. I have not had an opportunity to play through or run the material in this book, but I have run the first edition of the game for multiple campaigns, as well as other 2d20 RPGs.

 Star Trek Adventures: The Roleplaying Game Second Edition Core Rulebook

2d20 System Designer Nathan Dowdell
Project Manager Jim Johnson
Writers Mike “O’dah ziibing” Ashkewe, Tilly Bridges & Susan Bridges, Rachael Cruz, Alison Cybe, Michael Dismuke, Nathan Dowdell, Keith Garrett, Patrick Goodman, Jim Johnson, Fred Love, Erin Macdonald, PhD, Aaron M Pollyea, J.D. Kennedy, Chris McCarver, Troy Mepyans, Al Spader
Editors Jim Johnson, Marieke Cross, Scott Pearson
Proofreaders Jim Johnson, Marieke Cross Art Director Ariel Orea
Graphic Designers Michal E. Cross, Mark Whittington, Stephanie Toro Cover Artist Paolo Puggioni
Interior Artwork Artists Eren Arik, Cristi Balenescu, Marc Bell, Carlos Cabrera, Joshua Calloway, Alexey Chernik, Aurea Freniere, Michele Frigo, Chaim Garcia, Nick Greenwood, Aaron Harvey, Eva Lara, Jens Lindfors, Toma Feizo Gas, Matheus Graef, Vincent Laik, Thomas Marrone, Wayne Miller, Ariel Orea, Dat Phan, Paolo Puggioni, Tobias Richter, Vadim Sadovski, Martin Sobr, Steve Stark, Vitali Timkin, Rodrigo Gonzalez Toledo, Salvador Trakal, Justin Usher, Rhys Yorke, Eaglemoss Ltd., CBS Studios, Inc.
For Paramount Global Marian Cordry, Stephen Zelin, Brian Bromberg, Aaron Hubberman, Brian Lady, Danwei Lando, James Salerno, Russell Spina
With Thanks To Gene Roddenberry, Marian Cordry, BC Holmes, and the many fans who support this game

Computer, Display Schematics

For this review, I have had the opportunity to look at both the PDF and the hardcover version of the game. The hardcover is a solid chunk of a book that is very similar to both the original Star Trek Adventures book and the Klingon variation of the core rules. It uses similar font, but the colors deviate from the darker colors of the spines for the original books. The original version of the game had pages that emulated the L-CARS appearance of Next Generation consoles, including the black background for the pages. The second edition ditches those black backgrounds for a white one, which I can understand. It’s always a little disheartening when you end up with a permanent fingerprint on your solid black pages.

The official page count of the book is 384 pages, and includes the following:

• Front Endpapers with a map of the Alpha and Beta Quadrant (2 pages, PDF, endpapers in hardcover)
• Back Endpapers with a timeline of Star Trek properties, the Prime Timeline, and the Terran Universe Timeline (2 pages, PDF, endpapers in hardcover)
• Credits Page (1 page)
• Table of Contents (1 page)
• Character Sheet (2 pages, front and back)
• Personal Log (1 page)
• Index and Acknowledgements (4 pages)
• Front and Back Cover (2 pages, PDF, front and back cover, hardcover)

Most of the book is in a two-column layout. Some pages have a smaller column with sidebar commentary, as well as offset text boxes exploring topics brought up on the page. There are full color pieces of art introducing each chapter, and there are many half page pieces of art portraying various scenes that would be common for a Star Trek narrative, which includes staring at majestic ships in drydock, Starfleet medical personnel treating inhabitants of a planet, enjoying a meal in the lounge, and the more action oriented combat scenes. There are images from across the timelines detailed, and most are in the same style, except for a few “Lower Decks” styled images inserted in various locations.

While there are images from across the timelines, the book also uses a set of iconic characters, first introduced in the quick start. These characters are all from the Strange New Worlds era of Star Trek, with the same uniform and gear from that show. This includes a Betazoid security officer, a human science officer, a Vulcan chief medical officer, a Tellarite chief engineer, an Andorian first officer, and a Trill captain. These are the characters that make some opening comments about the topics introduced in the various chapters.

In addition to those iconic characters and their chapter introductions, there are quotes from a wide range of characters. Some of the characters that contribute quotes or commentary include Picard, Archer, Worf, Tendi, Boimler, Pike, Janeway, Gwyndala, Zero, McCoy, Booker, Data, Georgiou, Kirk, Mariner, Nog, Decker, Sisko, Freeman, Kira, Quark, Ransom, La Forge, and M’Benga.

The book itself is broken up into the following sections:

• Foreword
• A Star Trek Primer
• Starfleet
• The Final Frontier
• Reporting for Duty
• Your Home Among the Stars
• Technology and Weapons
• Operations
• Conflict
• Gamemastering
• Introductory Adventure
• Allies and Adversaries

The new format makes one nice improvement. There aren’t the random strings of numbers on various pages that were meant to represent cluttered data on a viewscreen. I often run the PDF text to speech function while reading, and it could get very tedious when those numbers were read as text instead of a background image.

For The Seasoned Officers

Before I dive into the details of the book, I wanted to hit a quick summary of the differences between the 1e and 2e edition of Star Trek Adventures. This is just a fast rundown, so feel free to check out the details further in the review.

• Say goodbye to the challenge dice–damage and progress are tracked without them now
• Stress is now determined only with your Fitness attribute, unless you have a trait that uses a different attribute
• Some challenges may use stress as one of the consequences of accomplishing goals
• In combat, you take an injury unless you spend stress equal to the weapons rating to resist the injury
• You can recover different amounts of stress by taking a breather (10 minutes or so), taking a break (a half hour to a couple of hours), or sleeping (several hours)
• NPCs don’t have a stress track, but Notable and Major NPCs can spend threat to resist injury
• In ship combat, shields work more like a progress track you are working to complete, rather than the stress for the ship
• There are guidelines for when to use a challenge versus when to use an extended task
• Your progress on extended tasks is based on your rating in a relevant department, rather than the results of the challenge dice
• Many species talents of been rewritten
• You get an additional focus at the end of character creation to reflect a personal interest (for example, Riker might use this extra focus for Jazz)
• There are more guidelines to what species traits are meant to summarize
• Character progression now defaults to the “personal log” method first introduced in the Klingon core rulebook
• Much like in certain political discussions of climate change, the scientific method has been abandoned
• The book is a “greatest hits” of some of the previous releases, incorporating some player character rules for species, traits, technobabble, reprimand and acclaim, and commendations, to name a few

Life in the Federation

I wanted to talk about the Star Trek primer section of the book first, because I think the summary of how the Federation operates may be one of the most concise and inclusive attempts that I’ve seen in any Star Trek product. The primary purpose of this section is to set the tone for what a Star Trek Adventures campaign should look and feel like, but it does more than that. The baseline assumption is that Star Trek Adventures is meant to portray a hopeful future, where humanity can live up to it’s potential, and learn and grow by interacting with other advanced species, while also pointing out where conflict happens.

There is a section that touches on the major cultures of the setting, including:

• The Klingon Empire
• The Romulan Empire
• The Cardassian Union
• The Ferengi Alliance
• The Orion Syndicate
• The Borg Collective
• The Dominion

These aren’t exhaustive treatments, but they often touch on those societies in multiple eras. The Klingons and Romulans both get multiple pages, the Cardassians and the Dominion both get a page, and the others each have a half-page of information. The information is current up through the third season of Picard, but that also means we get some season four information from Discovery.

There is a page on “other civilizations,” which includes a few paragraphs on the Tholian Assembly, the Q Continuum, and the Pakleds (including Lower Decks updates), as well as a paragraph that talks about Delta Quadrant societies like the Hirogen, Kazon, Vidians, and Talaxians. A notable omission is the Gorn Hegemony, which I imagine may have been avoided since Strange New Worlds is still in the midst of an ongoing narrative with that culture.

The information about life in the Federation is where this section shines. Have you ever wondered exactly what Star Trek means when various characters say they don’t have money in the Federation, especially in light of situations where Federation members seem to be working for profit or trading with cultures that definitely do still use money? What about human religion in the Federation? Have you ever wondered why sometimes something from the holodeck can leave the holodeck? Why can’t you use cargo transporters to transport large numbers of people from one place to another? These all receive answers that should make you feel better equipped to answer those questions when they come up.

Life in an Alternate Federation?

The previous version of Star Trek Adventures included a section on planet classification, space-phenomenon, and the basics of warp travel and subspace. This time around, there are a few more sections that touch on additional topics like alternate universes and time travel.

There is a brief section on the Terran Universe (or the Mirror Universe), and Quantum Multiverses (lots of different realities where things may be changed in smaller, significant ways). This also touches on time travel, and the different ways it can be accomplished in Star Trek (there are at least five different ways that this can happen outlined in the book).

Life in Starfleet

While this iteration of Star Trek Adventures isn’t quite as tied to portraying only Starfleet Personnel, it is still considered the default mode of playing the game. As such, we get a section on how Starfleet works, and how it has changed over the eras.

There are some sidebars on organizations adjacent to Starfleet, like Division 14, the section of Starfleet introduced in Lower Decks, which deals with Starfleet personnel that have been affected by strange phenomena. There is also a sidebar with a few paragraphs on Section 31, which frames the organization the way I prefer it to exist, as an organization that isn’t known outside of a few members of Starfleet that are allied with it, which does not have any official standing with the Federation or Starfleet.

The book touches on the Temporal Prime Directive and assumptions about what Starfleet personnel should do in a time travel situation. The original Prime Directive is also addressed. I enjoy that the examples they give make the Prime Directive feel more like something you can discuss and use in game, rather than an absolute hammer to drop on players that make the wrong decision. True to many of the episodes, you may need to justify your interpretation, but unless you completely throw it out the window, it should provide you with more roleplaying opportunities rather than an excuse to punish players for making hard decisions.

The section on Starfleet then discusses Starfleet Academy, duty assignments, and mission types. I appreciate that among the mission types, we get Second Contact missions integrated into standard Starfleet procedures, giving us a solid tie into the contribution made by Lower Decks.

There is a half-page dedicated to Non-Starfleet campaigns, which are better supported than in the original Star Trek Adventures book, but not as supported as, for example, in the Klingon core rulebook, which make sense. The biggest support from this section would be Federation civilians working in concert with Starfleet personnel, representing characters like ambassadors and civilian academics working with Starfleet science personnel.

(Quantum) Game Mechanics

The heart of the 2d20 system is pretty simple. Whenever you make a check, you roll two twenty-sided dice. You compare this to a number derived from an attribute and a department (in the case of Star Trek Adventures). Your attribute will top out at 12, and your department will top out at 5. If you roll under those two numbers added together, you get a success. If you have a Focus that applies to the task you are attempting (like Martial Arts if you are making a hand-to-hand combat attack), you gain an additional success if you roll below your Department score. That means if you have a focus that is relevant, on 2d20, you could get from 0 to 4 successes.

You can spend some game currencies to buy extra dice, and some talents may add an additional die. You can never roll more than five on a check., meaning you would max out, in a spectacular series of rolls, at 10 successes. In some situations, someone else can aid you, but they will only be rolling 1d20, and you can only add their successes to your own if you have at least one success. That means, if you are facing a Difficulty 3 check to calm down an enraged government official, and someone is aiding you, and they roll two successes on their attempt to help you, if you roll 0 successes, it doesn’t help you at all. But if you roll one success, you can add their successes to your own and meet the Difficulty of three.

There are several currencies in the game. Momentum tops out at six. If you get more successes than you need on a check, you can generate momentum to add to your pool. You can use Momentum for several things, like buying extra dice, asking additional questions, or adding damage to a weapon’s rating. Threat is a similar currency that the GM can use. Whenever a PC rolls a complication (usually a 20), the GM can create a trait in the scene or add two additional Threat to their pool. Among other things, the GM can use this to create scene traits, or to modify NPC rolls in a manner similar to what PCs can use Momentum for. Players can choose to add threat whenever they don’t have Momentum to spend.

The final currency is Determination. You can only have three Determination at any one time. You can only spend Determination if you have a Value relevant to the task you are attempting, or if your task is related to the mission directives you have been given. Determination buys you an extra die, but the die is considered to have rolled a 1. That die does count against your five dice maximum. Your Values determine what your character believes, and if you challenge one of your values, you can add a Determination, cross it out, and rewrite it after the mission is over.

Talents work the way you may expect, being much like feats, talents, perks, or other game rules across RPGs. They are exceptions to how the regular rules work, granting you things like rerolling dice under certain circumstances. There are talents that add additional species abilities, general abilities, or abilities related to what career path you are on.

Character advancement is tracked by filling out character logs. The log doesn’t need to be a deep explanation of what happened in a game session. Instead, it’s a quick note about “X happened, this relates to my Value of Y.” After a number of log entries, a character gains an advancement, and characters can “spend” those log entries to remember a relevant situation to generate Determination in a current mission.

A good portion of play deals with traits. A scene trait may narratively deny a course of action or may make something more difficult to accomplish. Traits can have higher magnitudes, so you can have Ion Storm (3), which would make the difficulty of checks to transport through the storm, or send communications through the storm, increase by three. Traits are more open-ended, where the GM and the players can discuss what those traits mean and when they apply.

Character Creation

Character creation can be done in one of two ways. The first is a Lifepath system, where you walk through your character’s life up to the current day, adding attributes, department ratings, talents, and values at various steps of the process. The lifepath follows the following steps:

• Species
• Environment (where you were raised)
• Upbringing (how you were raised)
• Career Path (what you learned)
• Experience (how long have you been doing this)
• Career Events (significant events)
• Finishing Touches

If you don’t want to go through this process, there is the Creation in Play method. In this case, the character has a number of values, focuses, and unassigned division ratings. When your character attempts to do something, they can decide they want to assign points to one of their departments, and maybe a focus, to help with the roll. Once this happens, those elements are locked in, and the character has one less of each of those to assign.

There is much more direction about what a character’s species trait means. For example, they give examples that something that requires raw strength may be slightly less difficult for Klingons or Vulcans, because they have above average strength for humanoids their size. The species abilities have been reworked, and I like the directions many of them have moved. For example, Vulcans can spend stress to avoid gaining a trait associated with an emotional state, but if they are Fatigued, any emotional state trait they have is increased in potency by 1, to represent that Vulcans aren’t emotionless, they are just tightly in control of their strong emotions.

There are additional career paths that are civilian based, instead of the standard Starfleet career paths, including Diplomatic Corps, Civilian (Physician), Civilian (Scientist), Civilian (Official), and Civilian (Trader). Service roles integrate some of the slightly different roles that appear in the Star Trek Adventure’s Player’s Guide, including civilian postings like Bodyguard, Expert, Merchant, or Political Liaison. You can also choose to have a character that has cybernetic components or that has been genetically modified.

Shields Up

Starship combat is a little different from the first edition of Star Trek Adventures, but not dramatically. One of the big differences is that it has been framed to look a lot more like personal combat, but with a few more formal procedures that take place with each action. I don’t mind some extra procedure in rules like these, mainly because starship combat in Star Trek is more deliberate and tactical when it occurs. But that added procedure still needs to be approachable.

Like ground combat, movement is defined by zones. Unlike 1e edition, the similarity in combat rules means that you can fly your ship behind cover if cover exists in the zone, making you harder to hit. If your helm operator takes the Evasive Action option on their turn, the difficulty of hitting your ship changes from a static number to an opposed test. Damage takes down your shields, but you may also be reducing incoming damage as well based on your size and hull. If you can’t mitigate oncoming damage, you suffer a breach. When a system is breached, you need to make temporary repairs to get it back online, but if it takes a number of breaches equal to your ship’s scale, that system has been effectively destroyed.

Certain options are available to characters in different positions on the ship. For example, the Operations console allows you to reroute power to regenerate your shields.

Should I drop supporting characters here? Your number of supporting characters is tied to the scale of your ship, so why not?

Just like in STA 1e, you can bring supporting characters into scenes. This can be done when a player’s role on the ship doesn’t make sense for the away team, for example. You can create a number of supporting characters up to your Crew Complement, and these characters belong to the ship, not any particular player. Supporting characters have a slightly lower standard array of Attributes, a range of Department ratings, and three foci.

Lower Decks has inspired a new twist on this, which is a Supervisory character, a senior character not played by one of the players that can be adopted by players when they need an officer to help direct them. They get a slightly higher array for their attributes and departments, and an additional focus. They also start with a value and stress track. Since I had a crew of players where no one wanted to play the captain, this would have been a nice rule to have available for that campaign.

While you can still contribute your own advances to supporting characters, reintroducing a supporting character now triggers an advancement once per adventure. These include gaining a Value and a stress track, increasing Attributes or Departments, adding a focus, or adding a talent to the character. A character that has gone through all of these improvements can’t be further improved unless a player adopts them as their new player character.

Mission Status

In addition to the rules, character creation, NPC stat blocks, and ships, the core rulebook also contains a starting adventure. If you’ve been following my reviews for a while, you know I’m a fan of including adventures. Even if you aren’t going to use them, they help you to see how the designers intend the rules to be used for game sessions.

The adventure included in this book is based in the Strange New Worlds/just pre-The Original Series era. I like the structure of this adventure, because it presents a Prime Directive quandary, and enough wiggle room to argue for limited intervention, in addition to the science/medical emergency that is the primary conflict of the adventure.

The adventure includes a synopsis, a section on Spotlight Roles (the crew positions that will be doing the heavy lifting in the adventure), and the mission directives. The action is divided into three acts. The adventure has one encounter that might turn into combat, but most of the conflict comes from the moral quandaries and the science that needs to be done.

Glory to Your House

 The broader options for non-Starfleet characters open up some character types that we’ve seen in multiple series. 

The way much of this book has been put together really does simplify the processes in the game. Combat makes more sense. Stress is more versatile. The species abilities are more nuanced and work together well with some of the new talents. The broader options for non-Starfleet characters open up some character types that we’ve seen in multiple series. There are better examples for when to utilize challenges and when to use extended tasks, and extended tasks are a little easier to follow. While the challenge dice were never a major impediment to me, I have to admit that when I’ve played 2d20 games that don’t utilize them, everything feels like its rolling along just a little bit smoother.

I Protest, I Am Not a Merry Man

The discussion of species traits did a wonderful job of explaining how those traits can be used in a contextual manner to cover a wide range of abilities native to the species. I wish they had extended that logic to Attribute bonuses, which are still tied to species. The organization of the book is much better than 1e edition, but I still feel like I need to hunt a bit to pull together all of the Starship rules. Some of the game rules are great and make sense for Star Trek, like the character log advancement, but may seem a little intimidating to a player that has first encounters it.

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

When the original Star Trek Adventures rulebook came out, I thought it was one of the best examples of an RPG based on a property that understands its topic and is designed to support the emblematic narratives native to it. This version is no exception, doing what a solid new edition does–keeping a lot of the familiar structure that works, and streamlining the elements that weren’t as flexible or as intuitive in long-term play.

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Join Ang, Tomas and Walt as they talk about bringing brand new players into the hobbies. Tips, tricks, and things to keep in mind as you introduce the hobby to someone for the first time. LINKS: Magnolia: City of Marvels Victoriana 5e Kickstarter Deborah Ann Woll teaches Jon Bernthal D&D Read more »

Trust. It’s the most important aspect of a story, whether you’re writing it down on paper or telling it with dice and friends. If a player doesn’t trust their GM, then why are they spending time at that table?

In the first article, we looked at ways to build trust at your table. In this article, we’ll talk about maintaining it by keeping the narrative promises you made to your players.

What are narrative promises? I’m no panda, but the term is important enough that I think I should take a swing at defining it anyway: A narrative promise is a commitment you make to your audience, the folks experiencing your story (or in the case of a TTRPG, the people creating the story alongside you).

Think of a cozy mystery show like Murder She Wrote. There are at least three narrative promises in every episode:

1. There will be a murder
2. Jessica Fletcher, even though she is not nor has she ever been a licensed investigator, will be tasked with solving the crime
3. The culprit will be discovered and brought to justice

If any of these promises aren’t fulfilled, the viewer could be left unsatisfied, and there’s a high risk they’ll lose trust in the entire series altogether. (Yes, there are ways of breaking format that will satisfy the audience, but those are all based on the trust the storyteller has built up. We’ll talk more about that later.)

The Writing Excuses podcast has a number of episodes devoted to promises authors make to their readers, and I highly recommend checking out at least one or two. They’re incredibly helpful.

THE PROMISES YOU SAY OUT LOUD

When you’re running a TTRPG, there are two kinds of narrative promises: the ones you say out loud and the ones you don’t. They’re both tricky to keep, though, so let’s look at each category on its own.

Most of the promises you say out loud you’ll say before the campaign even starts. I’m talking about things like lines and veils and other safety mechanics – the things you promise either won’t be in your game at all or will only be included in a limited capacity.

Hopefully, I don’t have to explain why it’s bad to break the promises you set forth there. But there are other aspects of session zero and maybe even pre-session zero where you will specifically make promises to your players. Maybe not by saying the words, “I promise,” but they are promises all the same.

For example, let’s talk about campaign pitches. When you go to your table and say, “I’ve got an idea for a Shadowrun campaign,” you’re essentially saying, “I promise that I’m going to – you know – run Shadowrun.” Not D&D or Kids on Bikes or Pasión de las Pasiones. You’re promising Mr. Johnsons, magic, and cyberware.

If, on the other hand, you want to use the setting but swap out the rules system for something more streamlined, then that’s something you have to say when you’re proposing the campaign. Otherwise, when you’re players show up on game night with a suitcase full of D6s but you say you’re going to use the Genesys system instead, well, trust is going to be stretched.

Likewise, always, always, always avoid bait and switches. I won’t harp on it too long here, but promising a high adventure, almost pulpy modern-era campaign and then pulling out the rug and running a brutal horror campaign should be an obvious no-go.

Now, campaign premises will often shift over the course of play. That’s natural, but when you notice it happening, it’s a good idea to check in with your players to make sure they’re okay with the drift. Acknowledging the deviation from the original pitch will let them know you’re aware and that you care. Maybe you’ll lean into the drift. Maybe you’ll pull back and refocus. Either way, you’ll definitely solidify that trust we’ve been talking about.

THE PROMISES YOU ONLY IMPLY

A lot of the promises we make at the table go unsaid, and these are the trickiest ones to nail down, but I’ve found there are two big areas of unspoken promises: character backstories and genre conventions.

BACKSTORIES

We talked about backstories in the last article and how listening to what your players are telling you is an important step in building trust at the table. But they’re an important part of the game and worth talking about twice.

When you accept a backstory, you’re making an implied promise that the story means something to the game. This means that unless you’ve stated otherwise, you’ve got to find a way to work it into the campaign. (See my advice on organically working backstories into your campaign here.)

Obviously, how much of their backstories you’ll be able to fit into the game depends entirely on the kind of game you’re running. A one-shot at a con? Probably very little, if any, AT MOST. A five-year campaign spanning levels 1 through 20? They better be getting their own arcs.

Regardless, if a player hands you a 75-page tome detailing every aspect of their character’s past, from grandmother’s birth to the present day, what you do with that massive amount of information matters. If they give you too much, ask them for bullet points or a TLDR, but be frank and upfront. Otherwise, they might expect you to know the name of their childhood bully or fourth-grade teacher.

And whatever you do, don’t dismiss it outright or accept it with a smile and then turn around and toss it. Regardless of whether or not it’s appropriate for your game, that player spent time and energy crafting that backstory. Even if it’s not what you asked for – even if you didn’t ask for it at all – if you want that player to trust you with their character, you at least have to acknowledge the effort they put into crafting the history.

GENRE CONVENTIONS

These are the other unspoken promises you’re going to make when you decide to run any kind of game, and those are your genre conventions – the tropes people expect when they show up for a certain kind of story.

Romances, for example, have to have a happily-ever-after ending. Trust me, romance fans are VERY vocal about this. Mysteries, likewise, need to reveal the culprit because there’s an inherent promise that the unknown will become known (see the Murder She Wrote example above). Space opera should probably have spaceships or be set in, you know, space.

A lot of these conventions live in the sub-basement of our consciousness, but they’re easy enough to haul up out of their hiding spots. Just search for “YOUR GAME’S GENRE + Genre Conventions.” I guarantee you’ll find more than enough YouTube videos and writing blogs with a detailed checklist to run through.

Then, if you plan on breaking any of those conventions, follow the evergreen GMing advice of bringing it up during session zero. Think of it like establishing the difference between a superhero game based on The Avengers versus a superhero game based on The Boys. Both of those are technically in the superhero genre, but they use the conventions of that genre in very different ways.

A Rant on Twists

Everyone wants to pull off a twist worthy of M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense. Unfortunately, when we try to do a big twist reveal in our games, 99% of us are going to end up being more like M. Night Shyamalan when he directs pretty much any other movie.

Twists run the risk of coming off more as bait-and-switches (see above), and that’s why the general rule of thumb is to just avoid them.

In order for a twist to work, you need to lay A LOT of groundwork. That way, when it happens, it feels both obvious and inevitable, but hopefully only seconds before you actually say, “He was dead the whole time.”

However, since TTRPGs are an interactive medium, you also have to be ready and willing to abandon your twist if your players figure it out beforehand. Because if you’re laying out the clues in a way that they can piece them together – they might actually piece them together earlier than you expect!

And really, is that bad? It means they’re paying attention and that they care about your narrative!

I know from experience that the temptation will be there to railroad them away from the answer or change the twist at the last minute, but this won’t be satisfying for anyone. It will be obvious what you’re doing, and it will erode the trust you’ve worked so hard to build.

And I know some of you out there are saying to yourself, “That sounds like a challenge!” And by all means, take it as such, but might I suggest you do your homework first? And if you’re still dead set on pulling it off, make sure you are playing with a group that’s willing to trust you and also willing to forgive you if things go horribly wrong.

Next Time

That’s it for keeping your promises. Next time, we’ll look at how to build trust with your rules and rulings. (Spoiler: it’s about being fair BUT ALSO fun.)

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As characters explore dungeons deep and ancient ruins, they often come across decorations from times past. Such decorations serve as excellent vehicles for secrets and clues, single-sentence pieces of history or lore revealed through play.

Here are ten types of stonework decorations to keep on hand to improvise the revelation of such secrets and clues.

1. Relief. The projection of an image in which the stonework around the image is carved back, leaving the image protruding forward. Includes low (bas), high, and sunken. Such reliefs might reveal lost histories or forgotten knowledge.
2. Frieze. A long horizontal stretch of painted or sculpted decoration at the upper edge of a wall, room, or object like a sarcophagus. These decorations might not be noticed at first glance but a perceptive character might pick up interesting clues with their keen eye.
3. Mural. A piece of graphic artwork painted directly on a wall or ceiling. Murals can depict great wars, images of gods, or rulers of old. Murals might peel away revealing layers of such works.
4. Fresco. A vivid painting applied directly to freshly laid plaster. The plaster might break away showing carvings on the wall underneath.
5. Mosaic. A pattern or image created from inlaying small pieces of stone, glass, or ceramic. Such pieces of glass might contain magical lights or other embedded spells.
6. Runic carvings. Writing of language or ideographs carved into rock slabs or tombstones. A knowlege of history might uncover their meaning.
7. Encaustic painting. Using heated wax to apply pigments to a surface, often wood or canvas. The wax might be melted away to reveal something underneath.
8. Gilded Engravings. Applying a thin coating of gold over another surface, sometimes inlaid within a carving. Such engravings might conduct electricity or activate a trap when pulled away.
9. Marouflage. Applying a painted canvas to a wall with an adhesive such as plaster or cement. Such decorations might hide a secret door behind the canvas.
10. Sgraffito. Scratching through the surface of one pigment to reveal the pigment underneath. Scratching away further might reveal a mural painted underneath – like a giant scratch-off ticket.

Keep these art styles in mind to add richness and detail to the characters' discoveries in the depths of the dark.

These decorations have been added to the Lazy GM's Reference Document in the "Core Adventure Generators" section released under a Creative Commons Attribution license.

More Sly Flourish Stuff

Last week I posted a couple of YouTube videos on Finding Players and Building a Resilient RPG Group and Dragon Empire Campaign Building Part 2 – 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:

• Enter the Labyrinth by Kobold Press
• Dragontown and the Darkness Below
• Horizons Magazine by Wildmage Press
• Beadle and Grimm 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide Map Pack
• 2024 Player's Handbook is D&D's Fastest Selling Book Ever
• You Don't Own Your D&D Beyond Books
• Hidden Subclass Compatibility in D&D 2024
• The Current State of Generative AI and 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:

• Industry Standards for Releasing RPG Material Under Open Licenses
• Coming Up with Villains or Fronts in Strange Campaign Settings
• Excluding a Player from a Game

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:

• Mix easy encounters with hard encounters. Don’t always push PCs to the limit.
• You don’t always have to call for an ability check. Sometimes characters just do it.
• Add shortcuts to your dungeons so characters have an easy way to enter and exit big multi-level dungeons.
• Visions or remnant illusions can show moments of history long forgotten.
• Know your wall decorations: mosaics, frescos, reliefs, friezes, murals, tapestries, engravings, marouflage, and encaustic paintings.
• Use waves of combatants to shake up challenging fights.
• Tag improvised monsters with keywords that remind you of unique abilities like “life drain” or “necrotic blast” or “cunning action” or “pack tactics” or “reposte”.

Related Articles

• Re-Using Secrets and Clues
• Bathe Your World in Lore
• Build from the Characters Outwards

Get More from Sly Flourish

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

Buy Sly Flourish's Books

• The City of Arches
• 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 »

Your brain, fueled by books and augmented with simple tools, is your best resource for preparing and running awesome tabletop roleplaying games.

Many GMs and players say they find a lot of value out of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and other generative AI tools like Midjourney or Dall-E. Who am I to tell them they’re not finding them as useful as they say they are?

But there's a high cost for generative AI.

• They're built on people’s intellectual property without their permission and without compensation.
• They use tons of power and water.
• They displace workers with shitty AI alternatives.
• They fill the internet with slop.

With this in mind, we can ask ourselves two questions:

• Is generative AI really helping you more than other tools and techniques you have available?
• Is generative AI worth the cost to the world to use it?

Your answers to these questions may be "yes". That's up to each of us to decide and I'm not here to judge. I find LLMs useful for small coding projects but they don't help me with RPGs. They offer the illusion of help, but my best RPG work is the work I do myself.

The Current State of Generative AI in TTRPGs

Creators, companies, and hobbyists of tabletop roleplaying games find themselves on both sides of the generative AI value discussion.

Chris Cocks, CEO of Hasbro (the parent company in charge of D&D) is super excited for AI in D&D, saying:

I play with probably 30 or 40 people regularly. There’s not a single person who doesn’t use AI somehow for either campaign development or character development or story ideas. That’s a clear signal that we need to be embracing it.

On the other side, Wolfgang Baur of Kobold Press issued the No-AI Pledge:

We don’t use generative AI art, we don’t use AI to generate text for our game design, and we don’t believe that AI is magical pixie dust that makes your tabletop games better.

Among 3,700 players and GMs I surveyed, about 3 in 10 use generative AI when preparing for or playing RPGs. There’s a lot of divisiveness between these groups:

It helps me immensely. I’m the type that’ll stare blankly at a screen for hours before being able to write a single word, so having AI to get things started has helped me in everything.

No, and I never will. Never use plagiarism software.

Your Best Large Language Model – Your Brain

You already possess the most powerful computer in known existence – available any time to help you generate awesome ideas for your tabletop roleplaying game. Instead of nuclear power, it runs on meat and plants and other garbage like a Mr. Fusion in Back to the Future. It has no monthly fee. It’s not killing creative jobs, stealing the work of millions, literally boiling the ocean, or filling the internet with crap.

Your best RPG tool sits right behind your eyes.

It’s easy to get caught up in the “magic” of large language models but, in my experience, they’re not great for generating game content when compared to reading books and using your imagination.

Our brains – fed with great source material and simple tools like random tables – give us tons of ideas to fuel our games like they have for over 50 years.

GM Brain Tricks

We don’t need a data center the size of Ohio to think about our games. Here are some fun brain tricks to help you prepare and run awesome games.

• Read sourcebooks. Highlight them. Reference things from other books. Take notes. Connect the dots. Enjoy the experience of diving into lore written by other human beings.
• Think about your characters. Think about your villains. Write down secrets and clues connecting them to the world. Write some flash fiction to show your players where the villains are going and what plans they may be making.
• Think up lists of ten things – NPCs, locations, monsters, quests, factions, secrets and clues, or anything else you need for your game.
• Grab a Dyson map and fill out rooms with interesting features for your next adventure location.
• Mash together random tables. Roll on multiple tables and combine the results into more meaningful random encounters.
• Build your own faction tables for your campaign. Combine them with items, NPCs, quests, or locations for results customized around your campaign. See my Forgotten Realms factions and my Eberron factions for examples.

Find more brain tricks in these articles:

• Creative Mind Exercises for D&D
• Break Conventional Thought with Random Tables
• Play D&D Anywhere
• Develop Your DM Brain Attic
• Get Ideas for your RPGs
• Good Books of Random Tables
• Random Creativity in D&D

Other Fantastic Non-Generative-AI Tools

Here are other fantastic resources to help you shake up your brain, come up with awesome ideas, and run great games for your friends.

• The Lazy GM’s Resource Document. A free creative-commons-released document including tons of random tables from the Lazy DM’s Workbook and Lazy DM’s Companion. Remix these lists to your heart’s content.
• Perchance. An online tool to build your own random generators. The Lazy GM’s Random Generator, a Patreon exclusive feature, is built using Perchance.
• Dyson Maps. Fantastic reskinnable maps. Pick one, jot down short room descriptions, and let your mind fill in the blanks.
• Donjon.bin.sh. A fantastic and venerable random generator for all sorts of fantasy RPGs with a lot for D&D and 5e.
• Stock art on DriveThruRPG. Great art by real artists with reasonable licenses at reasonable prices. If you’re looking for character or NPC portraits for your game, check out Inkwell Ideas’s Portrait Decks available in print and PDF.
• Dread Thingonomicon. A huge book of random tables by Raging Swan for all sorts of fantasy situations.

Give Yourself Time and Space

In our always-on world, we seem to be in a constant state of FOMO. Whatever we’re doing now, there are a thousand other things we could be doing instead. Go for a walk. Do some structured daydreaming. Get away from your phone and computer for an hour. Grab physical books. Roll on random tables. Write your notes longhand. Pretend to be Gandalf in the old library of Minas Tirith blowing dust off old tomes to find ancient secrets.

You don’t need a large language model to read books for you and spit out half-truths and nonsense. Dive in yourself, cross-reference things, jot down thoughts, and come up with awesome ideas yourself for the game you’re going to run with your friends.

You are your best large language model.

More Sly Flourish Stuff

Last week I posted a couple of YouTube videos on Leaving Blanks and Return to Bittermold Keep – Shadowdark Gloaming Session 43 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:

• Pirate Borg
• Run I6 Ravenloft with Shadowdark on Halloween
• Free D&D 2024 Rules with All Twelve Classes
• D&D Adventurer's League Moves to D&D 2024
• D&D 2024 PHB Available Physically and on Four VTTs
• D&D 2024's Handling of Tools and DCs
• Two Words for Increasing Combat Challenge

Patreon Questions and Answers

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

• What's My Next Campaign?
• Upward and Downward Beats in a Campaign
• Why Switch to Obsidian?

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 seeds of clues even on low ability checks.
• Use static initiative to better time and pace battles. 5 for slow, 10 for medium, and 15 for fast creatures.
• Spread out combatants and clarify the distances if trying to avoid all the baddies getting nuked at once.
• If a spell you’re not familiar with sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
• Start your prep with a map of a cool location. Print it out. Jot down two word room descriptions. Put your strong start, secrets, NPCs, monsters, and treasure on the back.
• A single sheet of paper is likely all you need for your prep notes.
• Give monsters one cool trait to make them unique.

Related Articles

• Getting Ideas for your RPGs
• Good Books of Random Tables
• Award Treasure and Magic Items in 5e

Get More from Sly Flourish

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

Buy Sly Flourish's Books

• The City of Arches
• 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 »

Each year I like to run Castle Ravenloft, either through the original I6 Ravenloft adventure from 1983 or the updated Castle Ravenloft from Curse of Strahd. While I've typically run Ravenloft using 5e, in 2023 I ran it with the excellent "old school feel, modern sensibilities" Shadowdark RPG.

It was a perfect fit.

Shadowdark captures the feeling of dread and horror in Castle Ravenloft better than I've ever seen it. Shadowdark's rules almost perfectly match the mechanics and feeling of 1st edition D&D with a focus on darkness and lighting, flat math, high randomness, and a system of grim horror lurking just inside the surrounding shadows.

Patrons of Sly Flourish get access to a Shadowdark Ravenloft Lazy GM kit including

• a one-page handout for players.
• ten pregen characters.
• a GM reference sheet to keep track of your card draws, character info, and quick monster conversion stats.
• printable i6 Ravenloft handouts.

Patrons can find the Shadowdark Ravenloft Lazy GM kit on your Sly Flourish Patreon rewards page under "Adventures".

Experiences from the Shadows of Ravenloft

Here are some primary observations from running Ravenloft with Shadowdark.

• I used 5th level pregen characters from Shadowdarklings. They worked perfectly. The characters had enough resources to survive the night but just barely.
• I generated 10 pregens for five players. We used every one of them. We had a lot of deaths. New characters would pop in as lost adventurers in the castle as needed. I'd recommend not bringing in new characters in the final battle with Strahd. It's fine to bring in new characters everywhere else when they die.
• The characters definitely want to acquire magic items or use spells to make their weapons magical. Many creatures, including Strahd and other vampires, are immune to non-magical weapons. You might be kind and toss a couple of silvered weapons their way either in the beginning or during the game.
• I used my abbreviated Ravenloft adventure built for a single session. More on this version later.
• We used old-school mapping. I would draw a loose diagram of rooms and one of the players drew their own map to keep track of where they went and what options they chose. In more than 10 years of running Ravenloft, I'm still running into new rooms I haven't seen before.
• We got through a lot of chambers in the three hours of exploring the characters did. Shadowdark makes it easy to move quickly.
• The characters ran from a lot of encounters. That was a good idea given the adventure's lethality and the timing of the adventure.

Introducing Players to Shadowdark

Before our session, I sent out a one-page Shadows of Ravenloft guide to help players understand how this game was going to work. It includes the following list to help 5e players understand how Shadowdark RPG differs from 5e.

• The core mechanics and abilities of Shadowdark match 5e. Roll a d20, add a modifier, match a DC.
• Shadowdark embraces randomness. Die rolls carry a lot of weight. Ability scores are generated 3d6 down the line, and are thus much flatter than standard 5e ability scores. There are no skills – only ability checks.
• Characters have far fewer hit points than in 5e but so do monsters. Damage is a flat die roll, no ability modifier, so damage is lower and more swingy.
• There are no spell slots or cantrips. Casting spells requires a spellcasting ability check. On a failure, you lose the spell. Most of the time, if you succeed on the check, the spell succeeds – targets rarely get saving throws.
• Torches matter, equipment slots matter, and rations matter – Shadowdark has a much greater emphasis on the logistics of dungeon delving.
• Beware the dark! Torches burn in real time, for one hour. When they go out, the horrors lurking in the dark fall upon you.
• You’re always in turn order. We go through turns and rounds regardless of what the characters are doing. Spend too much time dorking around and wandering monsters fall upon you.

The Rules of Halloween Ravenloft

Beyond using Shadowdark for the game, my single-session Castle Ravenloft game runs differently than a normal adventure. Here's a breakdown of how I run it.

• The session is scheduled for five hours. This schedule gives us an hour to socialize and get acclimated before the adventure begins.
• The game begins with the characters in a carriage heading towards Castle Ravenloft. Madame Eva is in the carriage and does the card reading as in i6 Ravenloft.
• With the reading done, the characters arrive at the castle and in they go.
• The characters might meet with Strahd. He offers them the chance to escape Ravenloft with their lives and leave Ireena to him. If they take this deal, he laughs at them and says they'll soon get what they deserve (whatever they choose, he's still going to spend the evening hunting them down in his castle).
• With their meeting complete, Strahd tells them they may explore his castle with what remains of their lives and he will join them in X time. X being whatever time is left for the session minus 45 minutes.
• I set a timer for that amount of time and the time counts down. When the time runs out, Strahd appears wherever the characters are and starts the killing. This timer is separate from torch timers.
• The characters spend their time hunting down the relics of Ravenloft before Strahd shows up.

Modifying I6 Ravenloft for Shadowdark RPG

I6 Ravenloft needed very little conversion to run with Shadowdark. Shadowdark's flat math and I6 Ravenloft's 1st edition AD&D rules work well together. Many monsters in Ravenloft exist in Shadowdark or are easily reskinned. Strahd zombies, for example, can use the normal zombie stat block but with twice the hit points and twice the attacks. The witches can use the acolyte or cultist stat blocks.

For Strahd himself, I used the standard vampire stat block. He was plenty hard. I didn't bother giving him spells but you can give him some mage or drow priestess spells to fill him out. Snuff is a great ability for him to use.

If you're being generous, you may want to throw in a couple of silver weapons early in the session so characters have a chance of hitting Strahd if they don't find the sunsword or any other magic weapons.

Modifications to the Relics of Ravenloft

The items in Ravenloft work mostly fine as-is except for the Holy Symbol of Ravenkind which is simply too powerful. If the characters have that relic, they can stop Strahd dead in his tracks without any effort.

Instead, consider having it impose disadvantage on Strahd's attacks, stop or break his charm, and prevent the regeneration from his blood drain. The vampire's blood drain is already a really powerful ability. I limited his regen to 2d6 per round instead of per hit or else he would have completely overpowered the characters.

Maps for Online Play

If you're playing online you can find these excellent Ravenloft battle maps on the DM's Guild.

You can use a lasso-style copy and paste utility to grab the part of the map the characters have seen and avoid showing rooms they haven't yet gotten to. With some practice, this technique is a fast way to show off parts of this massive dungeon. Owlbear Rodeo is another great option for a fast and lightweight virtual tabletop. With Owlbear Rodeo and the Ravenloft battle maps, I was able to get all of Ravenloft loaded up and ready to go in less than ten minutes!

A Fantastic Combination

I really loved running the classic Ravenloft with Shadowdark RPG. It was a perfect match for the old-school feeling of the adventure. I highly recommend it.

More Sly Flourish Stuff

Last week I posted a couple of YouTube videos on The Most Underappreciated Combat Style and Dragon Empire Campaign Building – 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:

• Worldographer 2025 by Inkwell Ideas
• Shadow City Mysteries
• Level Up Advanced 5e on Bundle of Holding
• MCDM's License for Draw Steel
• Shadowdark Guide to Monster Statistics by Matt Dietrich
• Four Sources of D&D History
• Instant Monsters for 5e

Patreon Questions and Answers

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

• Handling Back Seat Driving Veteran Players
• Running the City of Arches with Shadowdark
• Managing Secrets with Multiple Paths Ahead
• Building Single-Session Episodic Adventures

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:

• Reiterate lines and veils if your game heads towards potentially sensitive areas like body horror or sexual intimacy. Peoples’ feelings may have changed since your session zero.
• Stay in turn order, even outside of combat so you give everyone enough time in the spotlight.
• Give players' roles including quartermaster, cartographer, scribe, and caller.
• Two key pieces of dungeon-crawling structure: what is the marching order of the characters and who's maintaining light?
• Build a faction list unique for your campaign including gods, factions, historical figures, and campaign icons. Roll on this list to flavor items, monuments, and NPCs.
• Roll on behalf of characters when their character wouldn't know if they succeeded or not.
• Offer multiple paths and decisions as often as you can.

Related Articles

• Running Ravenloft / Curse of Strahd in a Single Session
• Delving Into Shadowdark
• My Favorite TTRPG Products of 2023

Get More from Sly Flourish

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

Buy Sly Flourish's Books

• The City of Arches
• 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 »

Finding and maintaining a great RPG group remains the biggest hurdle for the RPG hobby. It's the topic of memes all over the internet. With all of our technology and interconnectedness, it hasn't gotten significantly better.

But there's hope.

Today we're going to look at best practices for finding local players for your tabletop RPG. For those of you who play online, do not fret. I plan on a similar article for finding great online players. In the meantime you can read my article on Interviewing New D&D Players for Online Games. Online play is a fantastic way to enjoy RPGs but today we're going to focus on finding local players.

Many suggestions here came from some fantastic discussion on this YouTube community thread. I've consolidated the many responses I received when I asked how GMs best find players for local games.

Where to Find Players

Here's a list of common places people found players for local games:

• Local game shops
• Colleagues at work
• Family members
• The local library
• Local meetups and conventions
• Schools and universities
• Asking new friends
• Facebook groups
• Meetup.com (I don't know if this option is still a good one but it used to be)
• Local Discord servers or Reddit groups
• Local Adventurer's League meetups
• Local bulletin boards (actual physical boards)
• Local volunteer groups

Run Games

It's much easier to find players than it is to find gamemasters. GMs are still the rare commodity in this hobby, so if you're willing to GM, it's easier to find players. The last time I saw a poll on it, most GMs became GMs because no one else would take the role. So take it and you'll find it easier to find players.

Try One-Shots

When you're first finding people and inviting people to play, consider running single-session or short-run campaigns in public places. This trial run gives all of you an element of safety and helps you ensure you mesh with players before you commit to a regular game or a long-term campaign.

If you have the chance, you might meet up with potential players, either physically in a public place or online, just to see how well you get along before you sit down to a game but the real test will be gaming itself.

Focus On What They Want to Play

You might have a huge stack of different RPGs you want to play but new players don't know you at all yet. They might know what system they're already comfortable with – likely D&D. Start with something familiar to them. Run a few sessions. Show them what kind of DM you are and gauge what kinds of players they are. Once you've built some trust, you can talk to them about running other systems if you want or you might find you're enjoying the game you're running.

If you start off trying to bring players in for a lesser-known game system, it may be harder to find people. They don't know you and they might not know the system, so why jump in?

Worth the Effort

Finding a group to play RPGs is worth the effort. RPGs are important. They build stronger connections between us than most forms of entertainment these days. They matter to peoples' lives. It take time and energy and likely involves some false starts and frustrations to put together a great RPG group, but it's worth it in the end.

Be patient, be persistent, and be hopeful that you'll find an awesome group to enjoy your favorite RPG.

More Sly Flourish Stuff

Last week I posted a couple of YouTube videos on One Night with Level Up Advanced 5e amd Haldrin the Lich – Shadowdark Gloaming Session 42 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:

• Mike Loses a Bet
• D&D 2024 and Free D&D on D&D Beyond
• Rich Lescoulflair Talking Phantasy Star RPG on Morrus's Podcast
• Matt Coleville on Eldritch Lorecast Talking About Project Sigil
• Free Hex Crawl Rules from Cursed Scroll 4
• Broken Weave for 5e by Cubicle 7
• Distance, Activity, and Attitude for Random Encounters

Patreon Questions and Answers

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

• Rewriting Published Adventures for Table Use
• Building Your Own Pantheon
• Using the Eight Steps for Published Adventures

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:

• Don’t start your game with a huge hard battle. It might wipe out your players’ energy just as things get started.
• Give characters multiple paths to research problems and discover answers.
• Abstract clues from their location and method of discovery. Improvise their discovery during the game.
• Add meaningful choices to every scene.
• Drop one interesting encounter in the middle of travel.
• Roll and mix two random encounters together.
• Use random encounters to show what passes by before.

Related Articles

• Finding and Maintaining a D&D Group
• Building Stronger Friendships through D&D
• Describe your GM Style

Get More from Sly Flourish

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

Buy Sly Flourish's Books

• The City of Arches
• 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 »

Like the best lazy GM tricks, monuments serve multiple purposes in our fantasy RPGs.

A monument is a physical object sitting in the middle of a room, location, or scene. They draw our players' attention – making a location feel real. Monuments can act as vehicles for secrets and clues, markers to remember past locations, and artifacts of power to change up combat encounters.

Today we're going to look at the steps for building out encounter-changing monuments of power.

Step 1: Build a Monument

The best monuments are built from the context of the scene. See Chernbog's Well for an example of an in-world monument with some great environmental effects.

Here's a list of baseline monuments from the Lazy DM's Companion:

1. Sarcophagus
2. Obelisk
3. Orb
4. Bone pile
5. Skull
6. Megalith
7. Pillars
8. Throne
9. Statues
10. Well
11. Orrery
12. Effigy
13. Arcane circle
14. Spire
15. Altar
16. Pit
17. Fountain
18. Archway
19. Cage
20. Brazier

Random tables help us shake up ideas for monuments. Often, a monument itself isn't enough so we can tie it to conditions, effects, origins, species, gods, moments of history, and other potential variables. You can find useful tables like these in the Lazy DM's Companion as well. It often helps to build your own custom god, faction, or history tables for your own campaign setting and tie those aspects to a monument.

Step 2: Choose CR and Stats

How powerful is the monument? Use your same encounter benchmarks to determine how difficult a monument might be. You probably don't want a monument of a higher CR than the average level of the characters. It likely shouldn't be the most dangerous thing in the room all on its own. Smaller monuments have lower CRs.

Monuments of power may have different effects on the battle. If monument powers are mostly defensive, they might just make the battle longer. If they're offensive, the difficulty might be much higher and have a greater impact on combat. If they can be turned in favor of the characters, manipulating the monument might shift the battle halfway through.

When you select a CR for the monument, you can choose its AC, DC, and hit points from the Forge of Foes quick monster builder, available in the sample chapter. You also give the monument an attack bonus and damage per round if you need it for the effects it produces.

Monuments are immune to psychic and poison damage and probably all status effects. You might give them resistances, vulnerabilities, or immunities depending on the type of monument as well.

Some characters want to bash monuments in which case they attack its AC and do damage like normal. Others may want to perform ability checks to disrupt or turn a monument. In those cases, its AC can act as a DC.

For example, a CR 5 monument has a AC / DC of 15 and 95 hit points. A successful intelligence (arcana) check might inflict 35 damage. You may want to base the amount of damage the character does with an ability check on the damage it otherwise would do in a round. A 9th level character, for example, can likely inflict 35 damage in a single turn so that makes sense.

You might include multiple smaller monuments instead of one single big one. Reduce their CR appropriately for their number and effects.

Step 3: Choose Effects

Monuments of power radiate powerful encounter-changing effects. Here's a list of twenty potential powers a monument might have.

1. Offers advantage to particular creatures on attacks and saving throws.
2. Increases damage to particular creature types.
3. Reduces damage taken by particular creature types.
4. Unlocks particular abilities of creatures.
5. Gives access to particular spells they wouldn’t otherwise have.
6. Obscures vision.
7. Prevents or reduces healing.
8. Prevents teleportation.
9. Acts as a vessel for extra spell concentration.
10. Has an ongoing protective spell effect.
11. Offers regeneration.
12. Animates dead minions.
13. Grants temporary hit points to nearby creatures.
14. Grants resistance or immunity to a specific damage type.
15. Gives a +2 bonus to attack rolls to certain creatures.
16. Adds damage to the attacks of certain enemies.
17. Grants the ability to fly.
18. Summons and controls a powerful creature.
19. Offers legendary resistance and shrugging off other debilitating effects.
20. Radiates damage.

Some of these monument effects can protect bosses. Others can throw out damage. You choose what power you want to add to a monument based on the in-world situation and what would be fun for the battle.

You can also tie spell effects to monuments. Here are a few spell effects that work well when tied to a monument:

1. Globe of invulnerability
2. Fire shield
3. Spirit guardians
4. Spiritual weapon
5. Darkness
6. Stone skin
7. Protection from good
8. Greater invisibility
9. Silence
10. Antimagic field

Step 4: Ensure They're Fun

The line between a fun monument and a tedious monument is thin. The wrong monument with the wrong power can feel like a slog instead of an interesting tactical decision in a big battle. Ensure the monuments you create add to the fun instead of just slowing everything down. In particular, avoid monuments that take away agency. Monuments should add interesting choices to a battle, not take choices away. If a monument is too powerful, the characters have no choice but to go dork with it. But a monument that gives villains an edge creates a choice for the players – do they just bash the boss or go disable the monument?

One great trick is to let players reverse a monument instead of destroy it. Looking down the list of potential effects, ask if there's a way the characters can channel it in their favor instead of just destroying it.

Shaking Up Big Battles

Our 5e games remain interesting session after session because every battle is different. The environment changes. The mix of monsters changes. The situation changes. And with monuments in our bag of tricks, we can change them even further. Our bosses become harder. The characters have to move around. Extra variables create battles completely unique from one game to the next.

More Sly Flourish Stuff

Last week I posted a couple of YouTube videos on City of Arches – Running Summervine Villa and Haldrin's Tower – Shadowdark Gloaming Session 41 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:

• Follow Up on D&D 2014 Material in D&D Beyond
• Lost Worlds of Gygax Humble Bundle
• D&D Direct Announcements
• Knave 2 by Ben Milton
• Twelve Types of Medieval Artwork and Architecture for Dungeon Delving

Patreon Questions and Answers

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

• Convincing New Players to Try a New System
• 18 Months Since Other Publishers Published on D&D Beyond
• Using City of Arches with Theros
• Empire of the Ghouls Out of Print
• Favorite Campaign Sourcebook and Setting

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:

• Build layers of gods the characters can discover as they explore the world around them.
• Improvise gods by shifting the names, appearances, genders, and domains of existing gods from fiction or history.
• Study types of historical artwork and decorations to improvise such features in your game.
• Lean in on the characters’ cool abilities.
• Change up encounters so the characters discover two groups already engaged in battle.
• Mix roleplay, exploration, and combat even in the deepest dungeon.
• Warn players that they might not have everything they need, should they have to backtrack in a dungeon.

Related Articles

• Anatomy of an Environmental Effect – Chernobog's Well
• Character-Focused Ancient Monuments
• Lost Monuments of Chult

Get More from Sly Flourish

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

Buy Sly Flourish's Books

• The City of Arches
• 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 »

The eight steps for game prep from Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master include:

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

Obviously, with so many different types of games and many different adventure models, these steps are intended to flex and shift as you need them.

One step in particular holds a lot of weight and contains a lot of flexibility: outlining potential scenes.

This step can act as a catch-all for many different things depending on what you need for your session. This includes:

• Adventure hooks – what draws the characters into this session's adventure?
• Forks and options – what paths might be open for the characters in this session?
• Five scenes – What scenes might happen in the game? You probably need about one scene for every 45 minutes of gameplay. Writing down this handful of short scene descriptions is the default use for this step.
• Potential shifts in the story – where might the world move to in the short-term if certain things happen?
• Next steps – what options do you want to put in front of the players this session to figure out where they're going in the next session?
• Steps required to accomplish a task – what do the characters need to do to accomplish a goal? This works well with the three of five keys idea.

You don't need all of these things for any given session, of course. Sometimes the hooks are already firmly planted. Sometimes there aren't clear forks or there are so many forks (like when exploring a dungeon) that you don't bother to break them out into scenes. Sometimes you know where the characters are going next so you don't need to outline the next steps.

A Flexible Catch-All

Use the "scenes" step to apply whatever glue you need to hold your session together and give you what you need to prepare the next one. There's no fixed format for this step (or really any of the eight steps). Like secrets serving you, this "scenes" step serves you to help you get your hand around the session you're going to run and helps you get what you need to keep your game going in the right direction.

And, of course, you can omit it completely. None of the eight steps are mandatory. Each step is there to help you get your hands around what you need to run an enjoyable session for your friends. If a step doesn't serve that purpose, skip it. If you feel like you already have what you need, toss out anything else.

More Sly Flourish Stuff

Last week I posted a couple of YouTube videos including Regions and Biomes of the City of Arches, Let's Build a Character in Shadowdark RPG, and Return to the Gloaming – Shadowdark Gloaming Session 40 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:

• D&D Designers of All Editions Talk About and Play D&D
• Kelsey Dionne of Shadowdark on Morrus's Unofficial Tabletop RPG Podcast
• D&D Beyond Changes, Then Reverses, How They Will Handle 2014 Characters
• Track the 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:

• Running Short Games for Large Groups
• Favorite D&D 2024 Rule?
• Running Mastermind and Dark Nemesis Bosses
• Releasing the Forge of Foes Generic Monster Stats into the CC
• What's In your DM - GM Kit?

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:

• Bathe dungeons in layers of lore.
• Give characters a customizable home base.
• Write down names of NPCs associated with the characters
• Drop in quick combat encounters in looser exploration and downtime scenes to focus peoples’ attention.
• What cool magic item reinforces each character’s theme? Take notes and review them during your prep.
• Think of encounters as situations the characters can navigate instead of purely tactical combat encounters.
• Write your own quick random lists to bring locations to life.

Related Articles

• Using the Lazy DM's Eight Steps At the Table
• The Eight Steps of the Lazy DM – 2023 Review
• Choosing the Right Steps from the Lazy DM Checklist

Get More from Sly Flourish

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

Buy Sly Flourish's Books

• The City of Arches
• 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.

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13th Age is an awesome fantasy roleplaying game built by Rob Heinsoo and Jonathan Tweet as their love letter to D&D. There's much to love in this book but today we're going to focus on one feature:

The Flee action.

Fleeing in D&D is a problem. Monsters get you locked down and by the time you know you should flee, two of your characters are down and the others are going to take a mountain of opportunity attacks if they try to run. Players already hate running from a battle, but often by the time they think they need to, they mechanically can't. By the time players realize they need to run, it's already too late.

13th Age has an elegant solution for this dilemma.

The Flee Action

Here's the flee action from the 13th Age SRD (known as the Archmage Engine):

Flee: Fleeing is a party action. On any PC’s turn, any player can propose that all the characters flee the fight. If all players agree, they successfully retreat, carrying any fallen heroes away with them. The party suffers a campaign loss. The point of this rule is to encourage daring attacks and to make retreating interesting on the level of story rather than tactics.

In short, if your group says they want to run, they run. They get away, carrying any downed characters with them – but at a story cost.

This is an easy rule for handling retreats – something players surely want to avoid but one which doesn't penalize them for mechanical idiosyncrasies like being locked down by potential opportunity attacks or dropped to zero hit points. It isn't a matter of the tactics or mechanics that let them flee – it's a matter of the story and what it means in the fiction.

The Cost of Retreating

Retreating has a cost. But we don't want this cost to be too severe or we'll still steer players away from the option of retreating. Instead, we want this cost to be interesting. We want it to move the story forward, just in a different direction. It doesn't end the situation, it begins a new one.

Here are ten example campaign shifts when the characters flee from combat:

• A ritual succeeds and a portal to the hells is opened.
• An important NPC is killed and the politics of the city becomes chaotic.
• The villains acquire or complete the construction of a powerful artifact.
• An unearthly horror is released into the world.
• A new cult forms around a creature the characters didn't defeat.
• Armies of disparate warbands now convene around a central warlord.
• One of the two ships the characters had in their possession is destroyed.
• The characters find themselves in darker and danker chambers below the site of their exit.
• Prisoners the characters hoped to rescue have become thralls.
• The Cult of the Black Harbinger activates the obelisks and discovers the doorway of the Black Cathedral.

Planning Costs Ahead of Time

When we're prepping a big dangerous battle, or a series of battles, we can ask ourselves:

"What happens if the characters lose this fight?"

It's one thing to assume the characters all die but what if they escape and the villain's plan moves forward? Fleeing from a battle shouldn't be the end of the story, it should be a new and interesting beginning.

Tell Your Players

The flee action isn't helpful if your players don't know they can do it. You may want to add it to your session zero checklist or your list of house rules and describe it as an option before the players need it. That way they always know they have this feature available to them if they want it.

If you don't think calling it the "flee" action will sit well with your players, call it the "retreat" action instead so they don't feel so bad using it.

An Easy Way to Focus Fleeing on the Story

This house rule for fleeing can be a great addition to our games. Instead of focusing on avoiding opportunity attacks or saving downed characters, shift the conversation back to the story itself. Let you and your players find a new path and a new angle in the ever-changing tales we share at the table.

More Sly Flourish Stuff

Last week I posted a few of YouTube videos including City of Arches Campaign Paths, Lazy GM Kit 2024 – Tools of the Lazy Dungeon Master, and Let's Build a Character with Tales of the Valiant.

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:

• Horror at Devil's Run on Foundry
• Rob Heinsoo on Gnomecast
• Free League Publishing Pulls PDFs from the Alchemy VTT
• Thrones and Bones Player's Guide by Lazy Wolf Studios
• Letters to Washington Post About D&D
• Running an Infiltration in Summervine Villa

Patreon Questions and Answers

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

• Do We Need to Change Forge of Foes and the Lazy Encounter Benchmark for D&D 2024?
• Can a Paid DM Run Your Books?

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:

• Track magic item rewards per character. Don’t let a character fall significantly behind.
• Let random treasure tools inspire your own parcels and rewards.
• Keep character names in front of you. Track turns even outside of combat.
• Keep the lazy encounter benchmark on hand to tell you if a fight is way too difficult or not. A battle may be hard if the total of monster CRs is greater than one quarter of total character levels, or half of total character levels if the characters are 5th level or above.
• Prep handouts and secret villain notes. Use them to keep yourself and your players focused.
• Clarify goals in open situations, heists, or infiltration adventures.
• Give characters a home base.

Related Articles

• The Heroic Spark
• Tell, Don't Show
• Focus Extra Prep Time on the Characters

Get More from Sly Flourish

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

Buy Sly Flourish's Books

• The City of Arches
• 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 »

"How close are the gnolls?"

"25 feet."

Understanding distance when running combat in the theater of the mind can be tricky if players have their heads still wired around 5-foot-per-square distances in gridded combat. It's hard to break this focus on spatial representation, so GMs often find themselves answering a lot of questions about distance.

How close or how far a creature is from a character isn't the real question they're asking.

"Can I get up the gnoll and hit it with my hammer?"

That's the question they're asking.

"Can I blast it with eldritch blast?"

Players want to know if they can do stuff. The distances don't really matter. We want the characters to do stuff. So we have an easy default answer.

25 feet.

25 feet is a perfect distance for lots of things. It's within range of just about every ranged attack. It's within the distance of any character's move.

It's also not yet in melee. So characters can move without taking opportunity attacks. 25 feet is the perfect distance to give characters options for just about anything.

Next time you're running combat in the theater of the mind and a player asks you how close or far something is. Instead, think about the real question they're asking – can they do the thing they want to do?

Yes.

How close are they?

25 feet.

For our Metric-Using Friends

If you're using the metric system for your game, treat 5 feet as 2 meters. It's close enough and as long as you're consistent across the rest of the game, the extra meter won't matter. Most characters, for example, move 12 meters in turn.

How close are the gnolls? 10 meters.

More Sly Flourish Stuff

Last week I posted the following YouTube videos:

• City of Arches – The Obsidian Skull
• Let's Make a Character with Level Up Advanced 5e
• Unblurred 2024 D&D Player's Handbook Deep Dive

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:

• Amazing Encounters and Dungeons
• The Perilous Void
• Follow-Up on Blurring 2024 D&D PHB Videos
• Mike on Morrus's Unofficial Tabletop Podcast on Blurgate and Project Sigil - the D&D 3D VTT
• More Character Builds with Tales of the Valiant and Shadowdark
• WOTC Designers on Eldritch Lorecast
• Tales of the Valiant on Herolab and Shard
• Biomes of the City of Arches

Patreon Questions and Answers

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

• Bifurcation of the Hobby Between 3d Online and Tabletop Play
• Handling Simultaneous Events
• Is a D&D Beyond Content Subscription Service Acceptable?
• Which To Buy – D&D 2024 PHB or Shadowdark?

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 the characters and players clear goals and meaningful options in open-ended situation-based adventures.
• Gauge the types of interactions players are interested in while running situation-based adventures.
• Work with players to coordinate their activities in larger open situations.
• Prep a handful of solid NPCs the characters can meet in social interactions.
• Steer players towards the fun even if you have to just tell them where it is.
• Write notes during your game. Keep track of what's important to the players.
• After your game, evaluate what worked well and what could be improved.

Related Articles

• High Value Prep
• How to Survive a Digital D&D Future
• Being a Good Steward of the TTRPG Hobby

Get More from Sly Flourish

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

Buy Sly Flourish's Books

• The City of Arches
• 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 »

On a previous episode of Mastering Dungeons, Teos Abadia and Graham Ward answered an excellent question about whether Hasbro / Wizards of the Coast was being a good steward of D&D.

Graham turned the question around, asking whether we were being good stewards – a far more useful question. We can't control what Hasbro does with D&D. But we can influence how we promote our love of tabletop roleplaying games to others.

Embrace the Diversity of the Hobby

I think the most important thing we can do to be good stewards of the hobby is recognizing that there's no one right way to enjoy tabletop RPGs. Embrace the wide range of games we play and how we play them. Embrace the diversity of the people playing them. Embrace the breadth of books and accessories we have available to add to our games. Embrace the wealth of knowledge and experiences people in the hobby share. Embrace the different ways people come to the hobby.

Being a Good Steward

What are some specifics for being a good steward of the hobby? We each get to decide, but I'll offer some thoughts:

• Welcome new members. Show them how awesome and important the hobby can be. Teach them how to play. Listen to them.
• Get to the fun fast. Lower the barriers to play. Start small and simple.
• Teach what players want to learn. If they want to learn D&D, teach them D&D. Don't steer them away from the game that drew them in.
• Show them the breadth of the hobby. Talk about different games. Talk about different supplements. Expose them to the many excellent publishers and products that exist in the hobby.
• Focus on what matters. Show people how these games help us enjoy a fun and creative time with our friends.
• Always be learning. Learn from players' new experiences. Expand your view of the hobby. Recognize when your preconceptions might be wrong.

Things to Avoid

What are some things we can avoid so we're continuing to be good stewards of the hobby?

• Don't gatekeep. Players and GMs don't need to prove themselves to enjoy the hobby. They can enjoy this hobby many different ways from our own. Don't alienate people who come into the hobby through avenues different than yours. Someone who starts playing because they love watching Critical Role or Dimension 20 isn't a tourist, they're a fellow member of the hobby.
• Don't bash other games. Don't promote one game by tearing down another. Let people choose the games that speak to them even if their chosen system isn't for you.
• Avoid alienating jargon. Describe games using real words people understand.
• Don't brag. Avoid throwing around how long you've been playing. Someone playing for only a few months is just as valuable to the hobby as someone playing for decades.
• Don't promote a single "right" way. There are many right ways to enjoy the hobby – don't assume yours is the only right way.

Keep an Open Mind

Recognize that the way we enjoy the game doesn't have to be the same as those we talk to. This hobby evolved continually over fifty years. People of all different ages, backgrounds, experiences, drives, and motivations come at it from all different angles. They enjoy different things. They have different experiences.

Learn from new players as much as you teach them.

More Sly Flourish Stuff

Last week I posted a couple of YouTube videos including Golgoron Rises – the Intro Scenario for the City of Arches, Let's Build a Character with the 2024 D&D Player's Handbook and the Temple of Saint Terragnis.

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:

• City of Arches Kickstarter!
• Victoriana 5e by Cubicle 7
• WOTC Made Me Blur My D&D 2024 Videos
• Shadowdark Wins Four ENNIES!
• Survive a Future Digital D&D
• City of Arches Campaign Outlines

Patreon Questions and Answers

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

• Maps and Mapping At the Table
• What Makes the City of Arches Unique?
• Awarding Treasure to Specific Characters

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:

• Even if characters chase a red herring, give them something valuable for their effort.
• If a character fails the save to fall a great distance, give another character a chance to succeed on a check to catch them before they fall.
• If you use music in your game, build playlists for relaxing, sinister, and combat music.
• Let your players know if they're at risk of missing something awesome.
• Add one secret tied to each character's story during your prep.
• Mix up monster types. Don't fill crypts with nothing but undead.
• Jot down three noteworthy features for larger locations. Use one feature for smaller rooms or chambers.

Related Articles

• Letters to New and Veteran Dungeon Masters
• How to Survive a Digital D&D Future
• D&D Beyond, Wizards of the Coast, 5e, and You

Get More from Sly Flourish

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

Buy Sly Flourish's Books

• The City of Arches
• 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 »