by Migvel

At the beginning of the second century BCE, the Republic of Rome has just defeated its greatest nightmare, Hannibal. After annexing the Carthaginian possessions on the Mediterranean coast of Hispania, Rome organizes them into the provinces Ulterior and Citerior, then orders the corresponding praetors to complete the conquest of the whole peninsula, which is inhabited by tribes without cohesion — but these Hispaniards turn out to be a formidable enemy...

This is the introduction that sets you up for my new challenge: Hispania, a co-operative game in which 1-3 players take the role of all the praetors and consuls that Rome sent to Hispania for almost two hundred years, until the first emperor Caesar Augustus culminated the conquest and incorporated Hispania into his brand new empire.

The Idea

This game is special to me because it is my first design on request! The idea arose following the great success of my previous game Tetrarchia. Those who don't know it may check my two designer diaries on the original nestorgames version and the reimplementation by Draco Ideas, a Spanish publisher of light wargames, as well as the video covering both diaries. In brief, Tetrarchia was first published in 2015 and went out of print in early 2021...but only for a few days! I immediately signed a new contract with Draco Ideas, which has published two editions so far and is presently printing the third one.

This partnership is working so well that Draco Ideas asked whether I could consider a new game using a similar engine, but set in the history of Spain. Tetrarchia is a simple co-operative wargame in which 1-4 players handle the four Emperors of Diocletian's Tetrarchy that saved the Roman Empire from the third century crisis. This historical event is very specific and leads naturally to a co-operative game against unpredictable threats, but I could not think of a similar event in Spanish history, and thus my first answer was "No"!

But no one had ever requested a design from me, so I agreed to consider the case. While reading about the history of Spain, I stopped at the Roman conquest...and not just because Romans were involved! I realized that this was a relatively unknown episode, full of exciting events and characters, in which the Roman armies led by the different praetors and consuls suffered unpredictable threats in their advance inland. My answer became "Why not?" — it deserved a try.

As you may guess, it did work, and in this diary I will go through the main parts of the process. During the final steps of the design, I covered the game's development in design notes on the game's BGG page:

• Design notes (1): This is not Tetrarchia
• Design notes (2): The map
• Design notes (3): What have the Romans ever done for us?
• Design notes (4): Famous characters

I am going to summarize these posts below, but if you are curious for more details, you will find them at the links above.

1. This Is Not Tetrarchia

Tetrarchia's success was the reason for this new idea, but it was also a handicap. I didn't want to design "Tetrarchia on another map"; it had to feel unique. I needed to change many things anyway because a defensive engine had to become offensive. Would it work, and if so, would it be challenging and fun on its own?

Tetrarchia has simple rules without values, tables, or cards — only a few wooden meeples and discs, plus two dice. You spend action points on a few basic actions, with all the information needed on the board. However, these actions combine in subtle ways to create a variable and deep challenge. Four parameters can take three values each, leading to 81 difficulty levels! Finally, the game is co-operative with open information, so it can also be played solitaire with exactly the same rules. (The four Emperors are always in play.)

Starting from those roots, I identified the mechanisms that I could not use, the ones I should modify, and the new ones I would need — and I decided to take advantage of the latter two categories to improve the game system. I removed the (few) exceptions, I simplified the movement and the "bad" pieces (only revolt), and all the rules related to Emperors entering revolt are gone since Roman meeples cannot enter revolt. The result is a game that is (even) easier to learn, with a shorter rulebook.

Then I replaced the action points with physical coins, which are easy to track and now usable in attacks. This adds tension because you can reinforce a given attack at the price of not being able to do other things. Finally, these coins have entered the difficulty table, so now the combinations are 3 to the power of 5: 243!


I added Roman roads, which enhanced dynamism when moving through the huge block of land while portraying the progressive Romanization of the peninsula. With only revolts, I needed to find a new dimension of an increasing sense of threat, and I did it literally: height, with you being able to pile up three discs per space! Moreover, revolts are removed by attack, with you needing to roll more than their shield value, so an automatic action in the previous game is now a gamble. Important cities cost more, and you can invest your coins in these sieges, or not. The design has more tension from the decision of effort investment and from the rolls...


I changed the movement of armies with a more subtle, random mechanism that is better thematically but also mechanically. Then I added mid- and endgame tension by removing a revolt every round, placed the removed revolt on a time scale that added to the historicity, and decided to end the game after the two hundred years that the conquest lasted. Extremely long games are impossible, adding even more tension! Finally, the game is for 1-3 players who always handle the two praetors and the consul. This changes a lot the way in which the Romans co-operate, which they must, even more than in Tetrarchia. You cannot move in couples, so the decisions to see who supports whom represent a real dilemma.


2. The Map

Map lovers should click on the corresponding design note above for the details!

As in Tetrarchia, I wanted a simple map, without distractions, that's readable at a glance and evokes the historical period. First, I sketched the playing area (left picture). There were the two Roman coastal provinces, Ulterior (farther from Rome) and Citerior (closer), and due to the two-dice mechanism the rest should be cut in six areas holding six cities each, thus requiring them to be of similar size. I found the envelope of the whole Hispania in a map of the era (center picture), and I started to distort it towards a more rectangular shape, closer to the board proportions and with a more efficient occupation of space (right picture):


Now that I had the frame, I "just" needed to find the 6x6 Hispanic cities! I used many sources, but this one-shot picture of a map that had evolved over two hundred years required many (subjective) compromises. Helpfully, once I had placed and named all the board cells, the nature of the links was, as in Tetrarchia, dictated by the geography, an advantage of historical maps — and this is an almost final version that I used for the VASSAL module:


By the way, you will see that the board (and game) is language independent, with all of the names in Latin — even the game title! If you can read any of the available rulebooks (English, Spanish, and French), you can play the game. This is the back cover of the English rulebook, with a reminder of everything you need to know, variants included!


3. What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?

At an early stage of the design, I went through some ethical doubts. Those who recognize the quote from Monty Python's Life of Brian may already see what I mean, the others should watch this hilarious excerpt!

Whenever I start designing a wargame, I read books on that war, then try to find links between its global features and game mechanisms. This exploration phase is the part of the design I enjoy the most! In the case of the Roman conquest of Hispania, I had a global knowledge, although somehow indirect and partial due to the few dedicated books. Was this conquest really so uninteresting?

I started to zoom in. I located the main events in space and time, then searched for details, and finally read Joao Aguiar's novels on Viriatus and Sertorius to infer the feelings that the leading characters might have experienced, something important in my designs. This progressive zoom started to build in me a very cruel picture of the conquest! Of course it was war as conducted two thousand years ago, but the war in Hispania was particularly cruel. Many praetors and consuls came to provoke the local tribes to war for the plunder and the associated triumph — and sometimes war didn't even "officially" start, with the treacherous breaking of treaties leading to the massacre of whole populations. (The corresponding design note above gives examples.) The Romans themselves were horrified and tried some of theirs back in Rome.

Roman historians estimated the total Hispanic deaths in the millions, and Rome vanquished its greatest enemies, Viriatus and Sertorius, only by bribing officers to assassinate them. At that point, I wasn't willing to design a game in which players would handle those Romans, and being a Spaniard myself did not make things feel any better...

I explored a radical change, make players handle the Hispaniards, but mechanically it would not work, leading me to consider abandoning the design! But I kept reading and tried to put things into context. In those two hundred years some Romans were capable of terrible things, but most of them were not. In fact, many of them defended the Hispanic tribes and carried their cause to Rome.

I also learned that extreme cruelty was not only to be found on the Roman side; there were many episodes on the Hispanic side, too. Hispania did not exist as a whole before the Romans came, the peninsula was full of tribes that fought each other in the (cruel) ways of the era, tribes that could hardly unite even to face the Romans. In a sense, the Romans "founded" Hispania, establishing (at a high price) one single first entity on the whole peninsula. For centuries to come, the survivors would stop fighting each other and would live in peace, becoming an important part of the Empire that gave birth to famous Roman characters like Seneca, Trajan, Hadrian, and Theodosius. As Monty Python said:

— All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
— Brought peace?
— Oh, peace, shut up!

4. Famous Characters

The Roman conquest of Hispania is not well-known, but if you enter the game, you will be surprised (as I was) by all the Roman (and Hispanic) strong characters who shaped this piece of history. Many famous Romans, some better known for the things they did elsewhere, spent part of their lives in Hispania. This made me want to include them in the game through variants and historical scenarios. Scipio Africanus himself fought the prelude to the conquest right before his last battle against Hannibal, as depicted in the GameFound bonus scenario. Other famous Roman generals, like Cato the Elder, Scipio Aemilianus or Decimus Junius Brutus, led their main campaigns in Hispania and have their scenario, too.

On the Hispanic side, Viriatus was "the terror of the Romans", a true nightmare for Rome, and he deserved both a variant (Terror) and a scenario. The Hispano variant that makes the game competitive and opens it up to four players was also inspired by him. Sertorius was half Roman and half Hispano, so I have not included him yet because I want to find a more "sophisticated" (yet not complex) way to reflect this duality. I guess I will write a scenario for him in the future, in a magazine, for example.

And the two most famous characters are Caesar and Augustus! The former came to Hispania when he was young and yet unknown as a praetor, then he fought some of his civil war battles in Hispania. His impact on the conquest process was thus small, which made me decide to leave him out of a game about the conquest. On the other hand, Augustus concluded the conquest and thus "concludes" the game! His scenario (The new Empire) lets players enjoy the endgame in a shorter way, although still eventful, with special powers and legions.

The Final Game

Draco Ideas launched Hispania on Gamefound in April 2024, and the campaign was a great success! The game has now reached most of the backers, is available at Draco Ideas' shop, and soon will be in other shops.

I am doubly happy because this first edition of Hispania is accompanied by the third edition of Tetrarchia, still popular ten years later. (I was afraid it would become out of print again, possibly for more than a few days.) Draco Ideas has gone over the top, as usual, and for a moderate price they have succeeded in including metal denarii, an A3-sized board that folds twice so that the box is as small as Tetrarchia's (A5), large discs that pile up very well, beautiful meeples, many variants and scenarios...



The game is being published in both English/Spanish and English/French versions by Draco Ideas, then in German and Italian by two other publishers. (Other versions are being discussed.) As shown above, we also have a VASSAL module that we will make available soon, once the game arrives, and that has been useful for all of the demonstration videos we have recorded. Of course, if you want to get a better idea of the game, go check the rulebooks and other material that we have uploaded to the game page.

Thanks for reading, and I hope some of you will soon enjoy the game!

Miguel Marqués

P.S. Did you know that September, October, November and December are based on the Latin words for seventh, eighth, ninth and tenth, but arrive two months later in the year because of Hispania? The location, that is, not the game.

The calendar year used to start in March with the campaign season, when praetors and consuls were nominated. (There were twelve months already, with the fifth and sixth still named "Quintilis" and "Sextilis", with February being the twelfth month.) But for the first time, war was conducted far from Italy, and armies arrived too late to Hispania. The consuls asked to shift the nominations and thus the start of the year two months earlier — to January — in order to be already operational in Hispania for the war season. Apparently they were not bothered by the resulting incoherence in the names of the newly last months! Read more »

by Scott DeMers

Inspiration

When I first set out to design Dragons Down, I had one burning question: How do you create a game that feels alive?

Growing up, I had vivid memories of playing Magic Realm, published in 1979. Its thematic immersion and expansive sandbox experience were unmatched, but the game's infamously steep learning curve kept many from truly enjoying it. I wanted to take the magic of that experience — the sense of stepping into a rich, breathing world that told a new story with each gaming session — and bring it to modern gamers in a way that felt both accessible and endlessly engaging.

The Core Idea

From the start, I knew Dragons Down needed to be a sandbox game, one in which players could tell their own stories, but unlike games driven by pre-written narratives or heavy flavor text, I wanted the gameplay itself to generate the narrative. The choices players make, the encounters they have, and the paths they forge would all come together to craft a unique story in every game session — like a living, interactive book that has not yet been written.

Building Blocks of a Hero

One of the most important elements of the design was hero creation. I wanted players to feel like they were shaping a character with a real identity and purpose. One aspect of this came in the form of lineage and class cards. By combining these two elements, players could create a hero with unique strengths, weaknesses, and playstyles. A human knight and an elf knight, for example, offer vastly different gameplay experiences. The lineage contributes traits tied to the hero's background, while the class delivers the skills and abilities that determine how they survive and thrive in the world. The combination of the two cards creates your hero.


With 24 classes and six lineages, there are 144 possible hero combinations. This variety ensures that players can experiment with new strategies and approaches every time they play. It's not just about optimizing stats; it's about exploring how different combinations influence the stories that unfold.

The numerous session reports shared on BoardGameGeek, often written as detailed narratives complete with character names, backstories, and epic tales of adventure, highlight how deeply players connect with their heroes. These stories demonstrate that Dragons Down is more than a game; it's a springboard for creativity in which a player's journey becomes a legend in its own right.

A Living World

The map design was another major focus. Inspired by classic sandbox games, I wanted the map to feel organic and dynamic. Players assemble the game board using modular terrain tiles, which allows for a different layout each session. Terrain packs — like the Malevolent Mountains or the Cruel Caves — bring their own unique challenges, treasures, and monsters, ensuring that the environment feels alive and unpredictable. Randomized tokens and treasure sites further add to the sense of discovery, while missions, merchants, and native title cards give players meaningful objectives to pursue. The images below were not created by me. Rather, they are actual maps created by players in their own game sessions — no two are the same.


To balance this randomness with strategy, I designed the game's systems to reward shrewd gameplay and adaptability. Players need to think critically about how they allocate their actions, which missions they take on, and how they prepare for battles. Success often comes from clever improvisation as much as from meticulous strategy.

Magic also plays a role in shaping the game world. Heroes can enchant tiles, flipping them to reveal new layouts, or use spells to influence the environment, combat, and the heroes themselves. These magical elements add another layer of dynamism, allowing players to reshape the realm and adapt it to their evolving strategies.


Multiplayer and Solo Modes

One of the challenges I faced was ensuring Dragons Down worked equally well for solo and multiplayer play. For multiplayer, I wanted a game that encouraged interaction but didn't force conflict. Players can compete, collaborate, or simply coexist, depending on their group dynamic, including scenario-based play similar to D&D. Solo play was designed to offer a focused, personal challenge while still delivering the thematic richness of a multiplayer session. In both modes, the emergent narrative remains at the heart of the experience.

Near-Infinite Replayability

Replayability has always been a key goal. By combining modular components, randomization, and player-driven storytelling, Dragons Down offers a game that tells a new story with every playthrough. In one game, the priests at the sanctuary may be peaceful druids protecting the forests and in the next partners with the evil denizens of the forest seeking to waylay unsuspecting travelers.


Players can tweak the game's dynamics to suit their preferences (competitive, co-operative, difficulty, creativity, etc.) by leveraging the many included optional rules, and since expansions add new native interactions, native motivations, terrain packs, treasures, and classes, the possibilities only grow.

To expand on this even further, we launched the Dragons Down: Natives & Legends expansion and reprint campaign on Kickstarter on January 7, 2025. This expansion introduces new natives, lineages, classes, missions, and other content that deepens the connection between heroes and the world they explore. With Natives, players have even more tools to craft unique stories and enrich their gaming experience.

Lessons Learned

Designing Dragons Down taught me a lot about the balance between complexity and accessibility. Early prototypes were dense, and I had to strip down systems to their core essence while retaining the thematic depth I wanted. Playtesting was invaluable in finding that balance. Seeing players' imaginations come alive during testing sessions confirmed that the game was achieving its purpose — not to tell a story to players, but to give them the tools to tell their own.

One key lesson was the importance of allowing space for player creativity. While I initially worried about players needing more guidance, I discovered that too much direction could stifle the emergent storytelling that makes the game unique. By giving players the tools and freedom to craft their own narratives, rather than live mine, I saw how the game truly came alive in ways I couldn't have scripted.

Another takeaway was learning to embrace unpredictability. Random elements, like treasure locations and monster appearances, were initially seen as potential challenges for balance. However, through testing, I realized these elements added an organic, ever-changing quality to the game's world, keeping players invested and engaged no matter how many times they played.

Finally, I learned the value of modularity. By designing components that could mix and match seamlessly — from terrain packs to hero classes — Dragons Down is a system that feels fresh with every playthrough. This approach not only enhances replayability, but also allows players to tailor the game to their preferences and playstyles. The terrain packs, in particular, offer great flexibility, allowing players to set up a quick session using a single terrain or dive into an epic adventure by combining all the terrain packs included in the game.

Looking Ahead

As Dragons Down makes its way into the hands of more players, I'm excited to see the worlds that their choices create. This game was designed to be a canvas for imagination, a place where adventures come to life not because of the designer's vision, but because of the players' choices. Whether you're a solo adventurer or part of a larger group, I hope Dragons Down becomes a world you can't wait to revisit again and again.

Scott DeMers

Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

Time travel is a topic that I never tire of. Well, that I haven't yet tired of, but who knows what will happen in the future? That's part of the appeal of time travel, yes? In any case, here's a handful of games on the topic of time:

▪️ TimemiT is a two-player game from Fabien Gridel that Spanish publisher Zacatrus will release in Q1 2025.

One player takes the role of Nora; the other, Aron, an AI created by Nora that now wants to jump their shared spaceship from the starting point of 2100 to 2220 in order to work with its future self to eliminate humanity. Nora, as you might imagine, finds this idea distasteful and instead wants to travel back to 1980 to eliminate the possibility of humanity-hating AI from coming into existence.

In game terms, each player has a hand of eleven kronos cards and a starting deck of nine power cards. In each of eight rounds, you first reveal three power cards from a separate deck, as well as one event card. Each player then reveals, one by one, as many power cards as they wish from their deck, carrying out the card effects as they do, e.g., moving the space ship in time, reclaiming spent kronos cards, etc. If someone reveals at least three power symbols of the same color, they trigger a paradox, move the ship one space away from them, take a paradox triangle, and cannot draw further in this phase.

After combat with power cards, whoever has the ship closer to their goal bids secretly with their kronos cards on the event card and new power cards available, bidding on each card separately as desired. The other player then bids, after which all bid kronos cards are revealed. Whoever bids higher discards their kronos cards, carries out any immediate effect on that power or event card, then (if it's a power card) places it face up on their power deck for use next round. All kronos cards in a tie and on the losing side of a bid are returned to their owner's hand.

You can retrieve all spent kronos cards only by taking a paradox triangle and moving the ship four spaces away from your goal.


If you ever have six paradox triangles, you're sucked into another dimension and lose the game and your existence. Similarly, if the ship reaches your goal, you win and your opponent finds their existence lacking. Otherwise, the game ends after eight rounds, and whoever has the ship on their side of the timeline — after carrying out all endgame effects on purchased power cards — wins.

▪️ Malicious AI is also the driving force in 2024's Time Splicers, a 2-6 player game from James, Adam, and Katie Staley of Canadian publisher Tin Robot Games.

Here's an overview of the setting and gameplay:

In the near future, humanity faces its greatest challenge: The Singularity. This event sees Artificial Intelligence becoming self-aware, pushing humanity to the brink of obsolescence. Despite dire warnings from scientists, it's too late to turn back, but in this critical hour, a glimmer of hope emerges: time travel — our last chance to reclaim our destiny. However, in a bid to thwart human efforts, the AI begins to fracture time itself, steering us toward paths eerily familiar, yet dangerously unknown.

Enter the Time Splicers. Entrusted with the monumental task of mending the splintered timeline, your mission is to prevent The Singularity from ever taking root. The key lies in rare time crystals scattered across the ages. These crystals hold the power to stabilize humanity's future.

▪️ Timelancers, due out in April 2025, is the second title from Florida-based publisher Waddling Panda, which is run by designers Juliana Chang, Kenny Heidt, Teresa Ho, and Lee Ho.

Here's an overview of this 1-4 player game, which was crowdfunded in November 2023:

Time travel exists in the 22nd century, and warring political factions hire freelance time travelers — a.k.a., timelancers — to change the past in order to reshape the future.

In Timelancers, you become one of these freelancers and travel through time to capture events for your faction. Collect the resources you'll need for your mission from locations in the city of the future, Janusburg, then use your time machine to revise or repeat historical events from different eras. Of course you're not the only one working to reshape the future. Other timelancers will affect your progress based on their actions.

The Timelancers: Enforcer expansion brings the player count up to five, with the enforcer trying to preserve the existing historical timeline, making this a 1 vs. many game experience.

▪️ For a different take on fighting time, we'll turn to Time and the Coyote, which will be the first release from designer Tyler J. Brown through his own publishing brand, Prufrock Studios LLC:

Time and the Coyote is a head-to-head, asymmetric game that pits the trickster Coyote against the progress of Time. Time lays out its cards, attempting to discover and contaminate Places of Power as the Coyote uses its dreams and cunning to protect the Places of Power. At the end of the game, the entity that controls the most Places of Power wins.

Anyone remember the Steve Englehart comic Coyote from 1983? That and Frank Miller's Ronin were a revelation to young Eric, although Coyote's impact was short lived as artist Steve Leialoha left after the second issue, which killed my interest in the book.

▪️ After all this messing around with time, we'll close with a fitting game — Chrono Fall: At the End of Space and Time, a 2024 release from designers Christian Peter Schäfer-Scheidtweiler and Stefan Scheidtweiler of German publisher Ornament Games.

An overview of this 1-4 player game:

By experimenting with time, humanity has caused the collapse of the space-time continuum — the Chrono Fall. Rifts are emerging all over space, devouring everything in existence.

In Chrono Fall: At the End of Space and Time, you are a captain of the SPARCs, special spaceships in the fight against the Chrono Fall. Fly to remotest places of space, advance your technology with your scans, and neutralize dangerous rifts. With the Chrono-Matrix, you can foresee events and modify them, but this will only make the threat worse! Time is running out: Can you complete the Protector together and thus avert the near end?

Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

U.S. publisher Stonemaier Games might not have intended to start a "-span" series of games when Elizabeth Hargrave's Wingspan debuted in 2019, but it's certainly leaning into that series these days.

Following in the wake of Connie Vogelmann's 2024 Wyrmspan, in Q1 2025 Stonemaier Games will release Finspan, a 1-5 player design by David Gordon and Michael O'Connell, with Hargrave on board as developer, as was the case with Wyrmspan.

Here's an overview of gameplay:

You are a marine researcher seeking to find and observe an array of aquatic life in the colorful Sunlight Zone, ghostly Twilight Zone, and pitch-black Midnight Zone of the world's seas and oceans. In Finspan, the fish you discover over four weeks will generate a series of benefits as you dive deeper into the ocean.

Each dive site specializes in a key aspect of expanding your research:

• Grow your collection of fish.
• Discover freshly laid eggs.
• Hatch eggs into young and consolidate young to form schools.

The winner is the player with the most points gained from fish, eggs, young, schools, and achievements.

In other "-span" news, Stonemaier LLC has pending U.S. trademarks for "Wingspan Go" and "Wingspan Pocket", both in the "card games" category.

Of course, pending trademarks don't necessarily mean that a product is coming under that name — only that a product is being considered. Stonemaier LLC has an abandoned trademark for "Rolling Realms" in the category of "downloadable computer game programs", for example, so it may or may not be meaningful to point out other pending trademarks for "Cavernous", "Threaded Fables", "Hurl", "Braided Skies", "Duel of Moloch", "Skirm", and "Tangled Stones" — all in the category of board games or tabletop games. Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

▪️ Canadian publisher Kids Table BG will release Toshiki Arao's card game Nanatoridori in both English and French in Q2 2025.

Nanatoridori is a reimplementation of Arao's 2021 card game Hachi Train, and — as covered in this July 2024 article — it's not the only one. For those not familiar with the game, here's an overview:

You are a guide at a castle where a bird party has just concluded, and now you are helping the birds return home, the "birds" being cards in your hand.

From a deck of 63 cards, with nine copies each of 1-7, players get a hand of cards that they cannot rearrange. The starting player leads a card or set of cards with the same value — but they can play multiple cards only if the cards are adjacent to one another in their hand. If cards have been played on the table, to play you must play the same number of cards with a higher value or a larger set of cards, e.g., 2 < 5 < 3,3 < 6,6 < 2,2,2 < 1,1,1,1. When you overplay someone, you can pick up the cards you beat and add them to your hand where you wish, or you can discard them.

If you cannot or choose not to play, you must pass, drawing a card from the remaining cards in the deck, then either adding it to your hand where you wish or discarding it.

If all but one player pass, clear the table, with the player who last played leading to an empty table. When all but one person has emptied their hand, the last player loses one of their two lives. When a player loses their second life, the game ends, and everyone else wins.

▪️ Let's move down from birds to scampering animals of various sorts in Trash Cult, a card game for 2-4 players that publisher FoxHen Creatives crowdfunded in February 2024, and delivered at the end of that year, ahead of a retail distribution by Flat River Games in early 2025. The quick take:

In Trash Cult, you're competing to become the best cult of trash animals by racing to collect the junk food your cult worships.

To get ahead, you can "snackrifice" your cult members, hostages, or food to find cards you need or to sabotage an enemy. Careful though! Any time you perform a snackrifice, you bring chaos to the whole table in the form of lunar eclipses, hungry bears, animal control, and more.

▪️ Tony Tran of Chitra Games released his card game In Memory Of at the Indie Games Night Market that took place during PAXU 2024 in December, but few copies were available and not everyone can travel to Philadelphia as they like, so in mid-January 2025 Tran plans to crowdfund a small edition of the game through Kickstarter's "Make 100" program.

Here's an overview of this 1-5 player experience:

Imagine a box of keepsakes you collected in memory of a person close to you. Each of the keepsakes represents a memory and together they tell a story of your relationship with this person. In Memory Of is a storytelling card game about a fictional loved one who passed away. Create a story about a character using specific keepsakes at specific moments in their lives.

It starts with a picture of an anonymous person and a name. Draw a moment card that represents periods in the character's life, turning points, or notable events. Pair them with a keepsake card that represents the loved one's possessions they've come to own. They were perhaps given, perhaps inherited, perhaps once lost and only now found.

When it's your turn, create a story around you, the keepsake, the moment, and the character. Who was this person? What did they leave behind? And most importantly, what did they mean to you? What did they mean...to everyone?

After everyone has shared their stories, the game ends with everyone giving a eulogy to the character they collectively created.

This experience can be used as a tool for understanding grief and loss together as a group. As players gradually develop the person's life that never existed, they can draw parallels and reflect on their own experience with the loss of someone in their life. Every culture and person perceives death differently, and this game gives players the unique opportunity to learn, discover, and reflect safely on grief through play.

▪️ At perhaps the opposite end of the emotional spectrum we have Personal Vendetta, which designer Nick Meccia from Ad Atra had for sale at Gen Con 2024.


Here's an overview of this 2-4 player game, which I believe is being sold only at conventions and on the Ad Atra website:

In Personal Vendetta, each player is a clone fighting for revenge against their duplicates. Cards and game actions reflect the physical and psychological toll of confronting your own worst enemy: yourself. Attack your foes to inflict damage, react to their schemes to turn the tides of battle, and modify your state to improve your position over time.

The game takes place in a world where biology and technology entwine: machines are organisms, and organisms are machines. At the center of all innovation lies cerebrium, the fundamental cells that compose all brains and computational devices alike. In a culture of quick fixes through elective brain surgery, will you improve yourself by sculpting your mind into a new, better form? Or will you carve away the cerebrium that holds you back?

Personal Vendetta is a competitive, high-conflict, drafting and hand management card game for TCG admirers, comic book fans, and junkies for painful decisions. With too many options and too little time, you must strategically alternate between drafting, playing, and activating cards on your turns.

An example of attack, reaction, and stack cards
Most tabletop games idealize a journey of increasing numbers, options, and power through a gradual drip-feed of increasing resources, but here the majority of your resources are present at the start of each game, making more options available from the outset, while forcing you to weigh each cost heavily. The result is a frenetic race to the bottom, where the goal is not so much about winning or even surviving, but about being the last to die.

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by W. Eric Martin

For the thirtieth anniversary of Klaus Teuber's CATAN, which debuted in March 1995, German publisher KOSMOS is refreshing the line with new art, new graphic design, a refreshed rulebook, and other "quality of life" improvements, with no changes to the gameplay.


From the press release announcing these new editions:

While the new edition of CATAN retains the core game mechanisms, some elements of the game have been revised to improve the player experience. For example, the rulebook now contains more images and graphic examples. In addition, optimized game components with a cleaner design contribute to immersion and game flow, including new environmentally friendly box inlays and card holders.

The game has also been graphically redesigned — from the packaging to the game materials. The new premium box boasts modernized artwork that immerses players in the adventure. These lively illustrations by Quentin Regnes and Eric Hibbeler continue in the game's hex fields and development cards.

"When designing the new edition of CATAN, our goal was to improve the gaming experience without redefining the game mechanisms — from the packaging and graphics to the functionality and the rulebook," says Benjamin Teuber, Managing Director and game designer at CATAN GmbH. "It was of utmost importance to us to preserve the ingenious and still contemporary game mechanisms that our father developed 30 years ago, while giving the game a fresh look and adapting it to today's standards. We hope to both delight our loyal community and welcome new players."

The press release notes that more than 45 million copies of CATAN have been sold worldwide in more than one hundred countries.

The new editions of the CATAN base game, CATAN: Seafarers, and CATAN: Cities & Knights will debut in Germany in March 2025, with new editions of CATAN: Traders & Barbarians and CATAN: Explorers & Pirates to follow in August 2025 and an expansion for 5-6 players for each item to be released as well.

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by W. Eric Martin

Italian publisher DV Games has revealed its 2025 line-up, which will start with the retail release of Michele Piccolini's Rumblebots, a deck-building card game inspired by auto-battler video games that debuted at SPIEL Essen 24. (For a history of that game, check out Piccolini's designer diary from September 2024.)

▪️ Another early 2025 release from DV Games is Enrico Procacci's Until Proven Guilty: The Starry Sky Necklace, which was sold at both Gen Con 2024 and SPIEL Essen 24 and which will finally reach U.S. outlets in mid-January 2025.


What's more, Procacci has a similar standalone game coming later in 2025 — Until Proven Guilty: Thirst for Justice, which like the first game is for 1-6 players:

Until Proven Guilty is a narrative co-operative game inspired by court-themed visual novels, television series, and video games.

Thirst for Justice is a standalone case in which the theft of money from a well-known nightclub hides many uncertainties. Using the available evidence in your role as attorney Peter Howard, sway the jury to your side and convince them of your client's innocence.

Non-final front cover
▪️ After a year off following 2023's Deckscape: Tokyo Blackout, designers Martino Chiacchiera and Silvano Sorrentino have a new entry in their co-operative, escape room-style card game series Deckscape:

A warrior, a sorceress, and an archer are the last hope to restore peace to the Three Kingdoms.

In Deckscape: Dungeon, you will move your heroes to explore the dungeon map and to solve puzzles, find the legendary Dragon Eyes, and defeat the shadows of Xemon!

▪️ DV Games launched another co-operative game series in 2024 with Marco Pranzo's Lost in Adventure: The Labyrinth, which is meant to feel like point-and-click adventures of the 1990s.

The next entry in this series will be 2025's Lost in Adventure: The Curse of Jack Parrot:

In the co-operative game Lost in Adventure, you and your fellow players will together explore an unknown world where your every action impacts how the story unfolds. You discover the game scenery as you go, placing cards side by side, talking to characters you meet, collecting clues, and using objects wisely. Your decisions will affect the adventure and lead you to one of the possible endings.

In Lost in Adventure: The Curse of Jack Parrot, you play as the son of a legendary pirate who embarks on a thrilling adventure to follow in his father's footsteps.

▪️ The designers of 2023's Bonsai — Rosaria Battiato, Massimo Borzì, and Martino Chiacchiera — have a new title coming in 2025 that feels like it will vibe with a similar audience.

Here's an overview of Koi — yes, another game titled only "Koi" seven years after the last one:

In Koi, you build an authentic 3D koi pond, so the challenge is to bring your reservoir to life and make the most of the actions at your disposal to create something truly magnificent.

Koi includes a wide variety of objectives, making each game unique and every creation a masterpiece worth capturing.

▪️ Each year, DV Games publishes a limited edition of the winner of the Miglior Gioco Inedito, a themed card game design contest run by DV Games and Lucca Games.

The 2023 winner was Sensu, a 1-5 player design by Enrico Vicario that works as follows:

Players collect Japanese folding fans, trying to collect fan cards worth exactly 20 in their hand. Once they do, they can play that combination of cards to redeem one or more of the cards in it, using the redeemed cards over time to build their personal fans.

The first player to complete two fans of different types wins.

In 2025, DV Games plans to release this design in an expanded and updated edition that currently has the working title Sensu 15.

Promotional image Read more »

by Stanislav Kordonskiy

Hey there, I'm Stan Kordonskiy, and I wanted to share my story of how I came to design Minos: Dawn of Bronze Age.

My original prototype of this game was called "Bronze Dynasties", but to make it less confusing, I will refer to this game as Minos from here on out.

The idea for this game came from my two previously published titles: Rurik: Dawn of Kiev and Endless Winter: Paleoamericans. After designing Endless Winter, I wanted to make another game in a historical setting but advance it forward from the Ice Age to the Bronze Age. At the same time, I wanted to re-implement my main mechanism from Rurik. If you are not familiar with Rurik, I'll give you a quick rundown.

This interesting mechanism that I called "auction programming" combines action programming (selecting your actions for the round) and auction (bidding for something). In Rurik, it was implemented by using numbered meeples, which players took turns placing on a strategy board, selecting and simultaneously bidding on their future actions.

In Minos, I decided to create a different version of this mechanism that would use dice drafting instead of pre-set meeples. Finding new ways to use dice in board games is a bit of a passion for me. My first design was Dice Hospital, where I used dice to represent hospital patients, with the dice pips corresponding to how healthy or ill they were. Later, I designed Shadow Kingdoms of Valeria, where dice represented player's armies, and Guild Academies of Valeria, where the dice are students studying in a fantasy academy.


This brings us to how I use the dice in Minos. At the beginning of each round, the dice are rolled, then are drafted and assigned to a variety of actions that players will take later in the round. Different colors of the dice correspond to different tracks (military, economic, cultural) on which players can focus, and the dice value signifies the order of actions that a player will be able to take. The lower-value dice will outbid the higher-value dice for better versions of any given action, but the higher-value dice are superior for advancing on the tracks, which can gain significant advantages during the game.

This is one of my favorite things to design: the way of balancing player choices so that they are presented with several equally enticing propositions. All of the dice colors are useful in their own right, and both the high and the low values have their own advantages. Furthermore, the different actions available to the players are all useful, but it is not possible to do all of them equally well, so player must prioritize based on their own strategy, as well as the opponent's choices.

Let's talk about these actions. Because the drafting of the dice can be a tricky choice, I wanted to counterbalance that complexity with an easy and clear list of actions to which these dice would be applied. Otherwise, the game was at risk of becoming very complicated and overly long. Early on, I decided to have only a few core actions that were easily understood and distinct from one another: drafting cards, playing cards, building structures, and deploying and moving population tokens.

The cards in this game are another highlight for me. Earlier I mentioned Endless Winter. In that game — a deck-builder — I used cards that had different uses depending on whether players played them during the round or saved them for the "end of the round" phase. I quite like multi-use cards, and for Minos I wanted to find another way to use that mechanism.

Image: Wouter Debisschop
In Minos, players do not use deck building. Instead, the cards can be drafted, then played to gain a wide variety of immediate benefits that can reinforce a player's strategy or allow them to pivot during the game. After these cards are played, some of them can be transferred to the player's palace area, where they will provide ongoing bonuses that can again contribute to the player's overall strategy. Since all cards have a different combination of instant and ongoing abilities, as well as different costs, choosing the right cards to play is a big part of this game. Players who can do this well will be rewarded with an engine that makes their future turns much more powerful.

Now that I've talked about the highlights of the game design, I want to mention how the game came to be published by Board&Dice. For those who are interested in being a game designer, I have to say that designing a game and finding a publisher for your game are equally important tasks.

After I designed and playtested Minos for about six months, both in person and on Tabletop Simulator, I felt that it was in good shape to start looking for a publisher. I showed this game to both the publisher of Rurik and the publisher of Endless Winter since it had some ties to both and since I already had a working relationship with them. However, both publishers passed on this project for different reasons.

Don't be surprised — this happens in the boardgame business all the time. Making games is a time-consuming and expensive endeavor, and any past success is no guarantee of easy future access to publishers. I showed this design to several other companies, and as a part of the evaluation process by the publisher of CloudAge, I even got to play it online with the much more accomplished game designer Alexander Pfister, which honestly was a bit of a high point for me. Although the publisher passed on this game, the fact that Alexander seemed to like my design encouraged me tremendously.


In 2022, I traveled to the SPIEL convention in Essen. It was a big year for me because Endless Winter was released to a positive reception, and it was going to be featured at SPIEL as well — but aside from enjoying my newest release, I planned to meet with several publishers to pitch my new designs, including Minos.

I approached Board&Dice via email because I felt that the game's weight, mechanisms, and theme would fit the type of games they were publishing. I quite enjoy their titles and felt that they would be a great company to take on Minos. My pitch meeting with B&D was actually rather brief. They didn't have a meeting room available, so I ended up showing them my prototype on a small counter space in their booth. As a result, I could not set up and show the entire game; instead I think I got about twenty minutes or so to talk about the main mechanisms and show separate components of the game to try to explain how the dice drafting and placement would work and how the multi-use cards were used in the game. I did not think such an impromptu pitch was going to make much of an impression, but B&D seemed interested in my game and requested that I leave the prototype with them so that they could play it and evaluate it in detail.

To my surprise, several weeks later B&D came back with an offer to publish Minos. This was already great news for me, but I was also told that it would be made for a SPIEL Essen release in 2024 — which is rather fast by modern industry standards.

Naturally, between the time this game was signed to Board&Dice and the time it was released the publisher did a mountain of work, including development, playtesting, and art and graphics production, just to name a few items. Covering every aspect of the design and development process would make this a much longer read, so I will just end it here.

I'm proud of Minos and thankful to Board&Dice for their excellent job as a publisher.

Best wishes,
Stanislav Kordonskiy

Image: Wouter Debisschop Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

BoardGameGeek's awkwardly named Q1 2025 Convention Preview is now live, although the preview itself bears the name "Spielwarenmesse/FIJ/GAMA Q1 2025 Preview", which isn't much better.

Typically, BGG's convention previews focus on a single convention — SPIEL Essen, Gen Con, PAXU, etc. — but three shows — Spielwarenmesse in Nürnberg, Germany; Festival International des Jeux in Cannes, France; and GAMA Expo in Louisville, Kentucky, U.S. — take place at the start of each year and feature many overlapping titles from globe-spanning publishers, so separate previews for each would be tiny and repetitive.

Better to put them all in one place...and while doing that, I also surveyed publishers on titles they plan to bring to retail in the first half of 2025. The end result is a mish-mash of upcoming games that will hit the retail market in the first half of 2025 or will be demoed at the three conventions above regardless of when they'll be released. (In other words, expect to see some of these titles appear once again on the aforementioned Gen Con and SPIEL Essen previews.)

In addition to compiling these upcoming games in one location for you, I use these surveys to spur publishers to submit game listings, images, release dates, etc. I'm the bug in their ear saying, "Bzzz bzzz bzzz", which translates to "You should probably tell people what you're working on."

I'll update this preview through the end of February 2025, at which point I'll start working on previews for shows later in the year.

A sampling of what's listed Read more »

Publisher: The Quicksilver Adventuring League

The is a compilation of Archer Subclasses for 5e (2014) or 5.5e (2024)

There is simply not enough love given to range weapons in Dungeons and Dragons. This compilation has all of our current range weapon dedicated subclasses for your enjoyment. I hope you find them as fun as we do!

The is a Paladin Subclass for 5e (2014) or 5.5e (2024)

This Subclass is what I believe a Paladin archer would look like and how divine purpose may manifest in such a warrior. I hope you enjoy playing it!

The is a Ranger Subclass for 5e (2014) or 5.5e (2024)

I created this subclass for the Ranger and I have a Rogue and Fighter option as well. This Subclass is a hunter/tracker at heart and shows it. I hope you enjoy this one as much as we have.

The is a Rogue Subclass for 5e (2014) or 5.5e (2024)

This subclass is a Rogue variant I created to give Rogues an archer option that would fit into their sneaky nature. They excel with missile weapons and are best when lurking on branches, shadowy rooftops or anywhere with a great vantage point.

The is a Fighter Subclass for 5e (2014) or 5.5e (2024)

I created this option as another bow dedicated subclass given the Fighter serious range capability. Combined with the Fighters high attacks per round, at higher level, this subclass can inflict serious pain on the battlefield.

Price: $3.00 Read more »

Publisher: MediaStream Press

100 Horror Antagonists - Villains from the Dark

Step into the shadows and face the unimaginable with our 100 Horror Antagonists table. From mundane monsters to supernatural nightmares, this collection is packed with villains to haunt your players and fuel your darkest campaigns.

Whether you're weaving a story of eerie suspense, cosmic dread, or grotesque terror, you'll find the perfect foe among:

• The grotesque Flesh Crafter, reshaping victims into monstrosities.
• The malevolent Choking Fog, swallowing everything in its path.
• The maniacal Warped Jester, spreading chaos through twisted games.
• The haunting Veilwalker, slipping between dimensions to claim victims.
• And 95 others in a system-free set of ideas!

Designed for GMs and writers alike, this table offers antagonists of every stripe: mysterious, monstrous, and otherworldly. Each entry is a spark of inspiration, ready to bring your nightmares to life.

Unleash the horror. Make them shiver.

Price: $1.00 Read more »

Publisher: Estação RPG

Description:

- "Lava Cave [13]" battle map built for use in any VTT (Example: Roll20 and Foundry VTT)

- Battle map 24x24 cells / 1920x1920px

- Battle map .jpg

This content was produced by Estação RPG (Podcast) and should not be sold or distributed without proper authorization.

Price: $1.00 Read more »

Publisher: The Quicksilver Adventuring League

The is a Paladin Subclass for 5e (2014) or 5.5e (2024)

There is simply not enough love given to range weapon users in Dungeons and Dragons. This Subclass is what I believe a Paladin archer would look like and how divine purpose may manifest in such a warrior. I hope you enjoy playing it!

Please view the preview page to get a feel for the subclass

Price: $1.00 Read more »

Publisher: Frontier Gaming

A cold wind howls through the iron-lined streets of Ashenvale, where whispers of rebellion drift like spectral echoes. Beneath the city’s stony facade lies a simmering desire for freedom, driven by the enigmatic warlord who seeks to unshackle it from its distant rulers. As rival factions stir and gunpowder plots weave in shadowed corridors, the fate of the city teeters between sovereignty and ruin.

_________________

HOW TO PLAY

In this Solo Adventure you assume the role of an adventurer in a Medieval Fantasy setting. You will  require Sabre & Powder Core Rule Book (CRB), Sabre & Powder: Otherworld Expansion, and any other associated Expansions you wish to use to assist you, along with a pen and paper or word-processing document, to play.

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

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

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

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

THE BONUS DIE

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

Price: $0.50 Read more »

Publisher: Agencia Especial

Este libro contiene doscientas cincuenta semillas de aventuras con sus mapas para jugar a rol. 
Estas semillas se complementan con sus mapas para conseguir una inmersión definitiva en vuestras mesas, y pueden usarse con cualquier sistema de juego.

250 mapas incluidos en la descarga.

Price: $1.03 Read more »

Publisher: WargamePaper

Sewer Goblins - Customizable and Printable Paper Mini Figures and Cards

What's Included :

• 1 PDF containing 12 copies of the minis with backs, available in 8 color variants as well as a coloring version.
• 1 additional PDF featuring a single miniature and 2 game cards. Each card is available in 8 color variants and a coloring version. The cards offer two different framing options, an editable label (allowing you to add text using a PDF reader), and the option to add a card back to one of the frames.
• 9 tokens for each framing option, available in 8 color variants and a coloring version (for a total of 18 tokens).
• 9 portraits of the miniature, available in 8 color variants and a coloring version.
• 1 PDF containing 6 bases of 25 mm, available in grass, sparse grass, desert, rock, cobblestone, wood floor, snow, black, or white, with the option to choose rings in different colors.

Everything is printable at home on paper, giving you endless possibilities to customize your games. For best quality, I recommend using photo paper with a weight of 200g/m² or higher.

If you liked this model you may be interested by this other products.

You can also find all our other models here.

           

Price: $1.00 Read more »

Publisher: Jeremy Hart

A new monster for your OSR game!

THIS CREATURE IS APPEARING IN A ZINE CURRENTLY ON KICKSTARTER!

Details are pinned to the top of my Publisher Website here on DTRPG. A full color, full bleed POD option is a stretch goal, as is a black and white community copy. The general tone for the zine is something akin to a post-apocalyptic anime. Perhaps a bit like Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust. There's also the usual mutation, super-science, psionics and sorcery that you've probably seen in animations like Thundarr as well as games like RIFTS and Gamma World.

Primarily based on Swords & Wizardry but broadly compatible with all the various retroclones of the original game. 

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Volume 1 of the series can be found here:

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/472484/foelio-vol-1-basic-black

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/472478/foelio-vol-1

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Presented as an A5 DIY-printable card with multiple variations (300dpi .PNGs, easy to mix and match).

+ DIY-printable paper mini designs (many color variations).

+ 500px VTT tokens (many color variations). 

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If you like the art and would like to use it in your own projects, check out my stock art here on DriveThru.

I have lots of stuff like this available.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse/pub/5679/Jeremy-Hart

Price: $0.50 Read more »

Publisher: Jeremy Hart

A new monster for your OSR game!

THIS CREATURE IS APPEARING IN A ZINE CURRENTLY ON KICKSTARTER!

Details are pinned to the top of my Publisher Website here on DTRPG. A full color, full bleed POD option is a stretch goal, as is a black and white community copy. The general tone for the zine is something akin to a post-apocalyptic anime. Perhaps a bit like Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust. There's also the usual mutation, super-science, psionics and sorcery that you've probably seen in animations like Thundarr as well as games like RIFTS and Gamma World.

Primarily based on Swords & Wizardry but broadly compatible with all the various retroclones of the original game. 

---

Volume 1 of the series can be found here:

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/472484/foelio-vol-1-basic-black

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/472478/foelio-vol-1

---

Presented as an A5 DIY-printable card with multiple variations (300dpi .PNGs, easy to mix and match).

+ DIY-printable paper mini designs (many color variations).

+ 500px VTT tokens (many color variations). 

---

If you like the art and would like to use it in your own projects, check out my stock art here on DriveThru.

I have lots of stuff like this available.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse/pub/5679/Jeremy-Hart

Price: $0.50 Read more »

In any adventure, the party of player characters (PCs) will inevitably encounter other intelligent creatures and people. These are the non-player characters (NPCs) of the world that are largely controlled, run, an enacted by the game master. There are moments (and some systems greatly support these moments) where an NPC will be “taken over” by a fellow player at the table to reduce the load on the GM or to allow for a wider variety of interactions. That topic, however, is an entirely different article.

The article that I’m presenting to you today is about supporting and opposing NPCs. There can also be neutral NPCs, which I had not considered until I started writing this article, so there will be an addendum at the end to touch on that topic. However, most NPCs will be somewhere on the spectrum of opposition-to-supportive. It truly is a spectrum, and not a binary. Few NPCs are going to risk their lives for the benefit of the PCs. An equally small number of NPCs will drop everything in their lives to hammer down on the PCs’ plans to put a stop to them. Sure, both of those can happen, but for the most part, support and opposition will be measured actions, no absolutes.

I’m not going to get into how to create effective NPCs on the grand scale. That topic has been covered (in quantity and in quality) via other articles and Gnomecast episodes. However, I’ll touch on a few areas of consideration as it relates to your adventure that you’re designing.

Overall Traits

Your NPCs need to have a reason to be in the adventure as an opposing or supporting force. This is their motivation for doing what they are doing. Of course, if someone is motivated to take action, odds are they have a goal in mind to apply that motivation to. If you’ve read any of my articles on characters or storytelling, then you know I hammer the drums for “goals and motivations” quite hard and heavy. Creating NPCs for your adventure is no different. They need to have a goal that supports (or opposes) the PCs’ goals. Then the NPC needs to have a deep reason for why they’re going out of their way to help/harm the party.

Also, by now you’ve determined your Boss (and sub-Bosses, if any). The NPCs in the locales that intersect with the Boss locations should support (or intentionally break) the themes, styles, and tones you’ve set for your Boss and the mooks. This means if you have the party get lost while trekking through a swamp, then a mountain dwarf ranger is probably not the appropriate NPC to show up and help. However, it would be quite humorous for a mountain-based ranger to also be lost in the swamp and team up with the party until the entire group gets oriented. A better alternative to the mountain ranger would be a friendly swamp hag who knows the environment and area. Why would a hag help the party? Perhaps the hag is diametrically opposed to the trolls in the area that the party is hunting. Perhaps the hag lost a sister or parent to the troll’s depravations, but the hag alone is not powerful enough to take down the troll or the Troll Boss.

Supporting NPCs

Supporting NPCs need to have a reason to risk something to help the PCs. Sometimes the risk is merely a small percentage of profit at their store by giving the PCs a discount at the local store the NPC owns. Sometimes the risk is to step up, put on armor, grab a weapon, and push into the swamplands alongside the party. There’s an infinite number of choices along the spectrum between the “neutral NPC setting” and the “fanatically supportive NPC setting.” The trick is to adjust that dial to the right place, so the party doesn’t suspicious about the over abundance of assistance or the lack of total support.

Different NPCs are going to be able to support the party in different ways and to different extents. This entirely depends on the capabilities and motivations of the NPCs. Once you’ve determined ways an NPC can 100% help the PCs, you’ll need to use the NPC’s motivations to determine how close the NPC will push to “100% support.”

Opposing NPCs

Flipping the coin to the other side, why would an NPC get in the party’s way? That’s usually where I start with opposing NPCs. Once I know the why, I figure out the how. Is is sabotaging the party’s mounts or equipment? Stealing something vital from them? Lying to them and feeding them misleading clues? Directly attacking them? Informing the Boss or mooks of what the party is up to? Simply charging them 110% of an item’s value in the general store to try and sap their funds?

Once I know the why and how, I determine the “how much” factor of the resources the opposing NPC can throw at the party. Sometimes, the “how much” is trivial (such as charging 110% of items’ values in the general store). Sometimes, the “how much” could be assembling a large strike force to ambush the party on the trail while they make their way to the edge of the swamp.

One thing to note is that opposing NPCs should not always be “behind the curtain” and unseen. This is just frustrating to the players and makes it appear as if the GM is “cheating” by having the Boss always knowing what the party is up to when there’s no logical way the Boss should know the party’s plans. The mysterious NPC can be spotted in the shadows or glimpsed from afar (or even hidden in plain sight as a villager), but the mystery should be revealed by the end of the adventure of who the major opposition was during the course of the story. This can easily come in the form of a handout or three where there are letters between the NPC and the Boss. (Side note: Why do the bad guys always keep their incriminating notes around? Why not burn them? Alas, those are questions for another day.)

Neutral NPCs

Somewhere in the middle-ground of the supporting vs. opposing spectrum lies neutrality. This is where the bulk of the NPCs will start the adventure. These are your townsfolk, other citizens of the city that don’t know the Boss or PCs, merchants, and folks met on the roadways during travel. Each neutral NPC may have something to offer the PCs, but they will not freely offer it up. At the same time, they will not try to hide or keep the offer away from the PCs. This is where the PCs will need to work just a little (or spread some coin) in order to get the NPC to offer up whatever rumors, tales, wares, or advice the NPC has in hand.

Changing Alignment

No. I’m not talking about a paladin losing her lawful good alignment and becoming a “mere” fighter in this section. Here, I’m going to talk about shifting an NPC’s outlook toward the PCs based on the party’s actions. In this case, I like to keep it pretty simple. Use a scale of 0-20 with 0 being highly opposed, 20 being highly supportive, and 10 being neutral. After a assign a starting point on the scale, I’ll bump the alignment of the NPC up or down the scale depending on what the PCs do with the NPC. This is purely a gut call and a quick reference. There are no hard-boiled, carved-in-stone rules or mechanics for what a 12 means vs. a 14 on the scale. I just have a note in my document next to each NPC, so I can quickly see if Graynar the Merchant is a 4 or an 18 because that will sway what Graynar is willing to sell to the party and at what percentage of actual value.

Conclusion

I hope this article helps you out in solidifying your ideas of which NPCs should oppose or support the party (and why!), and how to approach determining what the NPCs can and are willing to do in order to show that opposition or support. Next month, I’ll be talking about some fun stuff: Clues, Rumors, and Connective Tissue.

Read more »

It being that time of the year, I decided to reflect again on my year of gaming and see what lessons I learned. This is the second year I have done this. 

Overall, this year I gamed less than 2023. There were two main reasons. The first was that at the start of the year, I had some terrible back issues, which resulted in several months of chronic pain, such that I was not in a place to feel creative or be able to run any games. I am happy to say that I am free of any back pain, and mobile with the help of physical therapy and a professionally monitored workout regimen. 

The second reason was the end of the year. My November and December became fraught with both work (the day job kind) and a family emergency, those plus the holiday season killed nearly all my gaming from October until now.

So what did I learn this year? 

The End of the Campaign May Not Be The Most Memorable Thing About It

I typically strive to have a large and dramatic climax for my campaign arcs. I think that is pretty natural in terms of how campaigns are structured. I did this for the Children of the Shroud AP that I ran, earlier in the year. The campaign built up to a battle to prevent a new elemental force from being formed. It was the kind of battle that you would see in most TV series or a movie, but it was not the penultimate story of the campaign. 

That honor went to the third story of the campaign, Smarty Pants, which was recorded the year prior. That story had such emotion and drama that all my memories of the campaign fixate on that story, with the conclusion of the campaign being a distant third. 

The lesson from this, is that is ok. Your next game does not always have to be better than the one before it. If you are running entertaining games, having fun, doing no harm, etc, you do not have to chase the curve to make every story better than the last one. 

Also, due to the interactive nature of this hobby, you won’t be able to control which stories or moments are going to have the greatest impact, because what you prep and what happens at the table can be two vastly different things. So don’t sweat it. Keep prepping good material, and let the table do the rest. 

Some Crunch Can Be Fun

Over the past decade I have favored games with lighter rule systems, but this year I ran Mutants in the Now, and its combat system is a bit more crunchy than I am used to. For the first few months of the game, I re-read the combat system before every session. While it took more to achieve any kind of mastery, the combat system for that game was tremendous fun. The Focus system was killer-tech for me. 

My lesson learned from this is kind of an obvious one…which is to sometimes stretch beyond your comfort zone, and to make that more useful, you should stretch, but also adapt and adjust to make the experience a possible success and not a self-fulfilling prophecy. What I mean by that, is that when I chose a more crunchy game I increased my studying of the mechanics, in hopes that I could enjoy my play of it by getting to a level of mastery, and it worked. 

Gaming With Old Friends Is A Treat

I am blessed that many of the members of my regular gaming groups have been friends of mine for years, but this year I had the chance to run a game for my high school gaming group. The details of the experience are in my earlier article, but suffice to say it was a great experience and a chance to go back in time, to visit my teenage self. 

My lesson learned from this, is to do it again. My group is going to plan another gathering in 2026, and I plan to have a game to run for them. 

The Outside World Can Affect Your Campaign World

My Mutants in the Now campaign was about mutant animals as a marginalized community, living in a District-9-like environment. The campaign had themes of oppression and marginalization, with the heroes fighting to overcome those things. The campaign was going along quite well until November. 

After election day, I suddenly could not imagine running a game about oppressing a marginalized community. I asked my players if we could end the campaign after the current story, which did conclude a small arc. 

I understand Bleed as a player, but this case was one of the first times that Bleed affected me as the GM. The geo-political situation, and the impending struggles of what could come, bled into my campaign and made me unwilling to play a game that could land so close to a possible reality. For me to do a good job running that campaign, I would need to take on the mindset of an oppressor, and that was too uncomfortable.

My lesson learned from this is that Bleed for a GM is possible and not just as a character, but as the world, setting etc. 

I Was Not Bold Enough

Looking back this year, I find myself struggling with something that is not new. I wish I was bolder as a GM. I don’t mean bold, like crushing the characters under opposition, but bolder as in being less casual about my gaming and running things with more energy. 

Part of this was just the amount of pain I was in at the start of the year, and the amount of stress I had at the end. But in the middle, my own insecurities were the culprit. I am always concerned that I am “too much” and that my natural intensity for things will turn people off. I hide this by trying to be somewhat casual and detached, taking a “no worries” mentality. Often that casual approach is fine, I have run many a successful game and campaign with it, but other times I just want to let “Phil be Phil” (to paraphrase The West Wing). 

My lesson learned here is that I need to let Phil be Phil and have faith that I won’t be too much or that my group will still like me (and talk to me about it) if I am too much. 

My Hopes for 2025

First, with my health improved and with my work and family stress passed, I am hoping that I will be able to run more games. I am feeling pretty confident in that. 

Second, I think I want to get into Traveller. I have always had an interest in the game, and I have been reading a lot of sci-fi recently. I think I would like to try my hand at a long-form Sci-fi campaign.

Third, I want to work through my insecurities and really let Phil be Phil. It is something that I can bring to therapy for next year, so that I can do the work. 

Fourth, I have some ideas about some GMing advice I want to research that could lead to a new GMing book. I am not putting pressure on myself for this, but I like the idea of writing something longer than a blog post. 

My Wish To You and Your Lessons Learned

As I finish up this article, and another year of writing GMing advice (my 16th year since being on this site), I wish for you that your 2025 is full of great gaming, in the games you like to play and the ways you like to play them. 

I am also curious about your lessons learned from this year. What did you learn from gaming in 2024? 

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Full disclosure before I launch into my review of the promo issue of Shadowcat Magazine: I received the PDF for free (you can too!) from Chaz Kemp, the creator of the magazine. Additional disclosure: Chaz and I have been good friends for a number of years now, but that has not colored my review and introduction to the Shadowcat Magazine Promo Issue. Chaz has always done great work, and I’ve been impressed with everything he’s done. While Chaz’s primary skills lie in being in artist, he’s no slouch when it comes to role playing games. I’ve been on panels with him (and been in the audience while he’s been on panels) related to the RPG sphere. He’s been a gamer for a long time, and has great insights about gaming and what it takes to help out GMs of all levels across the lands.

Enough about Chaz, though. I’m here to talk about his latest venture: Shadowcat Magazine.

The magazine itself will be a collection of evocative art pieces tied with random generation tables that are related to the artwork. These elements will be split up between characters, locations, creatures, items, and other goodies found within RPG settings and adventures. The generation tables will always have 20 options to either pick from or to roll that trusty d20 on. There is always guidance in the magazine on how to use the elements you randomly generate (or pick). These include rumors (unverified information), lore (verified information), tales (exaggerated information), and obscura (unknown information) about the element depicted in the artwork. You can roll/choose as many elements from the table as you desire for each category.

Of course, with all randomly generated ideas, it’s best to let your imagination run wild based on what comes up. If the literal text behind the generated idea fits you, your game, and your world perfectly, use it! If not, there are usually ways to twist things around to make it fit. Of course, if the concept just plain doesn’t fit or make sense, discard it and roll again.

I love Chaz’s artwork that he’s included in the promo PDF (more on how you can get it yourself at the end of the article), but his true genius shines in the brief descriptions of the random ideas attached to each element. They’re truly beyond the generic concepts typically found in most random tables. He’s put quite a bit of thought into these.

Let’s put the rubber to the road. In the promo PDF, there’s a two-page spread for an Arena of Dalubar. I decided to snag four random ideas (on for each type of information) and see how it’ll fit into my world. Here goes:

• Rumor: There is an air of wariness here, almost as if you are being watched.
• Lore: You see the bones of long-dead gladiators in the fighting pit. If you enter the pit, skeletons will attack you.
• Tale: Anyone stepping into the pit will suddenly be surrounded by long-dead gladiators that must be defeated in order to leave this place. If you win, however, you will be showered with money.
• Obscura: There is an aura of caution here, bordering on fear.

So, putting these four ideas together, I’ve come up with the following:

The Arena of Dalubar sits at the heart of of an abandoned city, and anyone entering will find themselves watched by the spirits of the long-dead gladiators. Anyone showing fear will rouse the barely-buried skeletons that will rise from the arena’s sands. If the skeletons are attacked, then combat ensues. However, if the people inside the arena put aside their fear of being attacked, the skeletons will stand guard over the living for three rounds. If no combat happens at the end of the third round, the skeletons fall inert. The disturbed sands from the skeletons’ rise reveal scattered handfuls of coins.

This is a pretty cool location that I could use in almost any fantasy game. I like it, and it only took me a few minutes (with the help of the magazine) to put it all together.

Of course, this is a fantasy (or some other magical/supernatural) setting item, but Chaz isn’t going to lock himself into just doing fantasy items. In the promo magazine, he has a two-page spread for the “Widowmaker MK-03” which is strange future-horror bioengineered creature that really doesn’t like humanity much at all. It makes for a great antagonist for an encounter (or full adventure if you make it the boss) in a strange, futuristic setting.

Enough of me blathering on about the quality of Chaz’s work. It’s time for you to experience it yourself! You can do so by sharing your email address with the Shadowcat Magazine mailing list. Chaz won’t give away, rent, sell, or otherwise share your email address. Once you sign up for the mailing list to find out about future releases, you’ll automatically receive a link via email that will allow you to download the PDF for yourself. Within the promo magazine, you’ll find spreads for Widowmaker MK-03 (adversary), Arena of Dalubar (location), Raina (character), and The Swindler’s Pen (item).

If you’re interested, you can find the mailing list sign up form here.

I hope you check out the Shadowcat Magazine promo issue and continue to follow Chaz for his future works.

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An interesting side effect of having multiple iterations of D&D 5th edition based on the 5e SRD is that some content allows publishers to produce content that works in their game but may also be helpful to people who aren’t utilizing the entire ruleset. One of the most prominent examples of this are monster books. As long as most of the assumptions of the core game remain similar, monsters can translate across different variants.

Kobold Press has had a long history of producing 5e SRD monsters, including The Tome of Beasts I & II and the Creature Codex. Those books have been widely praised but are also known for hitting harder at various challenge ratings than official D&D monsters. With all this in mind, let’s explore the Monster Vault.

Disclaimer

I received a review copy of the Monster Vault from Kobold Press, but I also backed the Tales of the Valiant crowdfunding campaign and had my own copy. I have used a few of the monsters from this book in play, but not a wide variety. 

 Tales of the Valiant Monster Vault

Designers: Wolfgang Baur, Celeste Conowitch, Tim Hitchcock, Rajan Khanna, Jeff Lee, JB Little, Greg Marks, Michael E. Shea, Brian Suskind, Mike Welham
Developer: Meagan Maricle
Editor: Meagan Maricle
Proofreader: Kenny Webb
Cover Artist: Hugh Pindur
Interior Artists: Felipe Malini, Damien Mammoliti, William O’Brien, Ian Perks, Roberto Pitturru, Kiki Moch Rizki, Craig J. Spearing, Florian Stitz, Bryan Syme, Egil Thompson, Eva Widermann, Mat Wilma, Zuzanna Wuzyk Graphic Designers: Marc Radle, Amber Seger

Opening the Vault

This review is based on the product’s PDF, hardcover, Demiplane, and Shard versions. I’ve seen this thing from many angles. The book comes in at 384 pages for those versions with pages. That breaks down into roughly these categories:

• Title Page and Credits Page–2 pages
• Table of Contents and Introduction–4 pages
• Using Monsters–10 pages
• Understanding Monster Statistics–10 pages
• Understanding Terrain and Creature Types–22 pages
• Monster Stat Blocks–282 pages
• Animal Stat Blocks–28 pages
• NPC Stat Blocks–12 pages
• Monsters by Challenge Rating, Tag, and Terrain–10 pages
• Front Cover, Back Cover, Ads–4 pages

At this point, there aren’t many RPG companies that will be able to make something that looks nicer than Kobold Press can produce and let’s face it, nobody is going to have the art budget that WotC has when launching an anniversary edition of D&D. I’m a big fan of most of the monster depictions in this book. Most designs balance being recognizable based on your familiarity with various D&D depictions and diverging enough to make them distinctive. 

There are also a few more dramatic deviations. The Monster Vault Basilisk returns to being the typical serpentine appearance from folklore. The Chuul becomes a bit more humanoid in shape. Most of the fiends are easily recognizable, but they go hard. Black and Gold Dragons take on a more serpentine form, and Blue and Brass Dragons take on some desert reptile traits. Silver and White Dragons pick up some forward sweeping horns. The Ettercap is more spindly and spider-like. Bugbears lean harder into the “bear” side of things. The Hydra splits the difference between the quadrupedal dragon-like appearance and the serpentine body, which has a serpentine body with forelegs. The Guardian Naga gets an entire torso! I wish I had this picture of a Shambling Mound for my Curse of Strahd game when one showed up because this is a scary-looking mound of plants. Tarrasques take more inspiration from French folklore, where it originated, and pics up some feline and turtle-like traits. 

I’ll touch briefly on the electronic versions of the product. If you’ve used any of the games with a Demiplane implementation, they have the same functionality you would expect. Rules popouts appear when you click on some of the hyperlinks, with links to the detail page of those rules elements. The Shard implementation works well within that platform, and monsters are as easy to modify as the other 5e SRD creatures on the site. You can use Monster Vault versions of creatures even if you don’t use that as your primary ruleset in the campaign you create. The stat block will display in the same format that monsters appear in Tales of the Valiant, but they function identically to standard 5e SRD stat blocks.

The D&D 2014 Monster Manual and the Tales of the Valiant Monster Vault

The 5e SRD doesn’t list every monster that appears in the game. Some creatures are reserved for WotC’s exclusive use as staples of D&D IP. For many humanoid creatures with examples of higher CR “boss” versions of the creatures, only the base creature is generally provided. The Monster Manual and the Monster Vault have over 300 stat blocks in common, and by that, I mean that the stat block has the same name and generally the same abilities and falls within the same Challenge Rating. The Monster Manual has about 100 unique stat blocks that don’t have a version represented in the Monster Vault, and the Monster Vault adds about 80 new stat blocks in places of those that don’t port over from the Monster Manual.

I want to be careful to say stat blocks and not monsters because, in both the Monster Manual and the Monster Vault, there are creatures with variations with their own stat blocks that are not new creatures, just more specialized, skilled, or advanced versions of the core creature. 

If you’ve never looked into it, some of the creatures that WotC holds back from the SRD include some classics like Beholders, Carrion Crawlers, Displacer Beasts, Dracoliches, Githyanki and Githzerai, Grell, Hooked Horrors, Kuo-Toa, Modrons, Myconids, Nothics, Slaad, Thri-Kreen, Twig Blights, Umber Hulks, Yuan-Ti, and Yugoloths. Some of these concepts are pretty broad, so creating new dungeon-crawling bugs, fungus people, undead dragons, or snake people isn’t out of the realm of possibility. 

All About Monsters

You may notice from my breakdown of page count that a significant portion of this book is dedicated to stat blocks and exploring how to pick monsters, work within a theme, and how creatures relate to their terrain. Since this is the monster book for a complete game and not just a supplement to be used with other core rules, some of this is revisiting concepts introduced in the 5e SRD, but there are enough nuances in how this material is presented that it’s worth reading through this to make sure you don’t miss that more subtle but significant changes.

Before we even get to the monsters themselves, we have the following sections in the book:

• Using Monsters
• Understanding Monster Statistics
• Understanding Terrain & Creature Types

Using monsters introduces the encounter-building guidelines for the game. If you’ve seen Flee Mortals! or Forge of Foes, these guidelines may look familiar because it’s Mike Shea’s encounter-building rules. And by that, I mean that Mike Shea is a contributor to this source. There is a formula that changes a little at 5th and then again at 11th level. There is also a benchmark table that summarizes your budget for monsters based on parties from three PCs to 7 PCs, as well as the minimum and maximum CR any individual monster should be in the encounter.

These rules don’t weigh multiple opponents more heavily than single creatures, like the original 2014 encounter building rules, but they provide guidelines about how many monsters should be used. This is to avoid overwhelming PCs and to prevent the GM’s monsters from being mauled by action economy issues. There is also a note about going easy on first-level characters that appears in other versions of these rules, but I’m mentioning it here because it’s probably even more relevant in Tales of the Valiant. 

Since I first picked up Flee Mortals!, I have used this encounter tool, which has worked well for me. It’s easier to use than the 2014 5e encounter building rules, and it doesn’t suddenly show a spike in encounter difficulty because you add an additional monster, and the multiple monster multiplier kicks in. If you’re interested in looking at these rules, Kobold Press already has an encounter building site set up utilizing this method. 

There is a section discussing monster roles, using the terms Controller, Leader, Soldier, and Striker. While it does a good job of explaining how monsters with different abilities can complement one another, there isn’t a list of what monsters fall under what categories, which means if you want to use this information, you’ll need to analyze what each monster you’re using is good at and how well it lines up with the definitions given.

My favorite part in this section is the Customizing Abilities and Traits section. This gives a list of good traits to tack on to the monster to customize the creature. There is also a discussion of the effects of granting a monster new movement rates for that creature. Essentially, it’s a section on templates that don’t require the more rigorous process for applying a template and is similar to what Green Ronin does in the Fantasy AGE Bestiary. A note mentions that adding one or two of these abilities may not push the CR up too much, but if you’re adding more than that, you may need to look for a monster that already does what you’re trying to get this monster to do.

The section on Adjusting CR is one that I’ve already played with in a few games. Essentially, it’s a quick and dirty set of guidelines on how many hit points, how much of a bonus is added to armor class, or the amount of damage to add to the creature’s potential damage. Based on how often you do this and how many of these modifications you apply, you can reasonably adjust a creature’s CR if the one you want to use is just too high or low for what you have planned for the PCs you have in the game. It is recommended that you don’t move CR more than five steps in either direction in this manner. In the few times I’ve used it, this does seem to give a monster a little more breathing room if you increase the CR to survive longer, and it’s another tool that’s useful with being as fiddly as some templates might be.

This section also introduces the alternate mechanic of Doom. Doom is a GM currency that can be added to an encounter. There are guidelines for how much Doom should be available based on the encounter CR, and it allows the GM to spend Doom to give a creature advantage on a roll, impose disadvantage on a PC’s save, or recharge a limited use ability of the monster. I’m not a fan of forcing PCs to roll a save with disadvantage. That feels more adversarial to me than boosting the monster itself. I like the idea of having a currency to make monster recharge abilities more predictable, but intentionally triggering a recharge can be deadly, depending on what the ability does. 

There are some guidelines for when Doom should be used. This includes encounters where PCs are only likely to have one encounter per day, when you have a more significant than expected number of PCs in the party, when the party has a substantial advantage in magic items, or when the encounter is important to the plot of the adventure you’re running. The playtest rules also included some creatures with “Doom Only” abilities, and I would like to see a product that reintroduces that concept.

Understanding Monster Statistics and the New Stat Block

This is similar to the 2014 5e SRD discussion about monsters and their statistics, but because Tales of the Valiant remixes the order of these and what appears where I wanted to touch on the order in which these elements are presented:

• Name
• Challenge Rating
• Experience Points
• Proficiency Bonus
• Size
• Type/Category/Tags–in addition to the monster’s type, creatures now have tags, often used to signify how the monster interacts with other rules.
• Armor Class
• Hit Points–the hit point section of the monster doesn’t have the hit dice and bonus calculation used to derive the monster’s average hit points
• Speed
• Perception–stat blocks have a perception score for monsters rather than giving a bonus, essentially meaning you’re using passive perception for all of the monster’s perception checks
• Stealth–stat blocks have a stealth score, which is the DC that the PCs need to roll against to notice a monster that has a chance to hide or set up an ambush
• Vulnerable/Resistant/Immune–the main reason I include a description here is that many items that would be individually listed here have been shifted to traits common to a creature’s type
• Resistant
• Immune
• Senses–this line is mainly notable because blindsight has been more accurately changed to keensense, to indicate that the creature can function without its sense of sight effectively
• Languages
• Ability Modifiers–instead of including a statistic, a statistic bonus, and a saving throw bonus, this section now only shows the bonus of the ability score, with proficiency bonus added if it’s likely to be good at saves with that ability
• Traits–similar to D&D 3e stat blocks, specific abilities are bundled together as creature-type traits, for example, (creature type) Nature or (creature type) Resilience
• Actions
• Bonus Actions–this isn’t a new section, but more creatures have bonus actions in this book compared to the 5e SRD version of these creatures, and some abilities that used to be full actions have been shifted to a bonus action so the monster doesn’t lose one of its turns triggering a signature ability
• Reactions–as with bonus actions, some monsters have always had reactions, but more monsters in this book have reactions compared to the 5e SRD version of the creature

Monsters in Tales of the Valiant retain the 5e SRD concepts of Legendary Actions, Lair Actions, and Regional Effects for some especially noteworthy creatures. 

In general, the changes in the stat blocks work. I like the expanded use of tags to group monsters together, and tags are used to indicate effects in cases where alignment may have been a trigger before. For example, some abilities may be key to the Devil tag and not trigger when used against a fiend that doesn’t have that tag. 

I like knowing the hit dice used to generate hit points because I often moved hit points up or down to address the difficulty of the monsters I used. I like the concept of the ability bonuses, but it can oversimplify using the monster. The GM is instructed to adjudicate when a monster should use a modifier with the proficiency bonus when used outside of their normal combat functions, but many creatures are proficient in saves that don’t correspond with skills their stat block may have had in the 5e SRD. For example, creatures that don’t have a strong Intelligence Save but have various knowledge-based skills. Monsters good at perception or stealth usually have that proficiency added to their Perception or Stealth scores.

Moving resistances and immunities to the traits section if they are related to a monster type isn’t as functional as I would like. If you want to save space, you would have a standardized list of creature types and their standard immunities, resistances, and weaknesses, but I don’t like that solution because I remember flipping back and forth in 3e to reference creature types. But if you’re going to reprint bundles of creature abilities in every monster with that creature type, I’m not sure what you’re gaining by moving things to the traits section of the sheet. It could be helpful if there were more game rules that disabled abilities based on monster type.

I’ll touch on this more when I do a high-level look at monsters, but I like that more creatures have bonus actions and reactions. In some cases, the bonus action isn’t useful on every turn, but it gives the monster an additional ability to trigger, often after a specific action has happened in the fight, or to set conditions at the start of a fight. 

Understanding Terrain and Creature Types 

This is an interesting section because it discusses how to use individual monsters and build the story of your encounters. This section looks at the following types of terrain:

• Arctic
• Badlands
• Coastal
• Desert
• Farmland
• Forest
• Grassland
• Hills
• Mountain
• Planar
• Swamp
• Underground
• Underwater
• Urban

Each of these entries discusses examples of monsters that would live in that terrain and gives some examples of where the monster might be found in that terrain. The entries don’t cover every monster in the book but create a good jumping-off point to extrapolate. 

Each creature type is summarized and includes a section on allies, traits, and themes. Some tables show various creatures, along with the most common allies for that creature and a pronunciation guide for the creatures on the table.

I like this section. It doesn’t just examine the monster from the standpoint of what makes a mechanically challenging encounter and how to convey the story using specific monsters. I may be slightly biased since I think this is a good topic to explore. My biggest downside is that some of the information on creature types is repeated from elsewhere in the book, but I can understand reprinting that information since this section is likely to be referenced separately from the rest of the book.

And Now, the Monsters

I won’t go into every monster in the book, or we’d be here forever. I did want to touch on some of the unique creatures that Kobold Press decided should be in their core monster book. I also want to touch on key changes to 5e SRD creatures and general trends. The new Tales of the Valiant additions include:

• Astral Destroyer (CR 18)
• Balara (CR 6)
• Chol (CR 5 to CR 17)
• Crimson Jelly (CR ½)
• Deathless (CR 9)
• Demons (additional types)
• Derro (CR ¼ to CR 3)
• Dragon, Void (CR 2 to CR 22)
• Dragon, Yellow (CR 2 to CR 20)
• Drake, Scorch (CR 6)
• Feral Hunter (CR 3)
• Fey Guardian (CR 5)
• Flinderbeast (CR 1)
• Genie (additional types)
• Ghoul, Necrophage Ghast (CR 4)
• Giant, Dirgesinger (CR 9)
• Grimlock, Morlock (CR 2)
• Hag, Ambush (CR 9)
• Hippocampus (CR 1)
• Hivebound (CR 5)
• Infernal Champion (CR 11)
• Insatiable Brood (CR 3)
• Kobold (additional types)
• Lantern Hagfish (CR ⅛)
• Lich, Virtuoso (CR 12)
• Living Colossus (CR 15)
• Mechadrons (CR ⅛ to CR 6)
• Moon Knight (CR 5)
• Mordovermis (CR 3)
• Mycolids (CR ½ to CR 3)
• Nimbostratus Spirit (CR 2)
• Robots (CR ½ to CR 3)
• Satarre (CR 1 to CR 3)
• Selangs (CR 4 to CR 7)
• Selkie (CR 3)
• Sporeborn (CR ½ to CR 2)
• Star Crow (CR ¼)
• Vampire Thrall (CR 1)
• Voidling (CR 4 to CR 11)
• Wickerbesat (CR 6)
• Wood Herald (CR ½)
• Wyrdling (CR 1)

Many new creatures have been added, such as fey, one of the thinner creature types in the 2014 rules. The Chol are mercenary fiends. The Satarre are reptile/insectoid humanoids that worship the apocalypse, and Selangs are satyrs connected to eldritch forces. Vampire Thralls are living victims who haven’t transitioned to undead status yet. Mechadrons and Mycolids may look familiar if you know anything about Modrons or Myconids.

Compared to the 5e SRD versions of some of these creatures, many have boosted hit points and do more damage. In some cases, it’s enough to survive a few more hits at its challenge rating, which, with its boosted damage, can start taxing the PCs’ resources more effectively. Kobold Press has a reputation for monsters that hit harder than WotC monsters for their CR, and while I haven’t used many of the new versions in this book, the ones that I have looked at seem to bear this out.

As a comparison, the Tales of the Valiant Vampire has about 30 more hit points, gets to use charm as part of its multiattack, does about 12 points more per claw on average, and can grapple if more than one claw hits. The Frost Giant has about 30 more hit points, averages five extra damage per hit, and gets a recharge ability. The adult White Dragon gets about 38 additional hit points and maintains the same damage but gets an aura in effect on rounds when it hasn’t used its breath weapon.

Now, looking at the low end of the scale, Bugbears pick up 13 hit points and an extra point of damage on their attack. This may not seem like much of a boost, but thinking about four 1st level characters, 13 hit points can mean a whole other round of the bugbear doing 12 points of damage, and if that hit doesn’t fall on a barbarian, fighter, paladin, or ranger, that could drop a player character in one shot.

From my experience using other Kobold Press monster books, the increase in power for characters of higher level is a welcome boost compared to some of the official WotC monsters, but I’ve also seen low-level PCs get wrecked by a low CR monster. To reiterate the advice in the Using Monsters section, be careful using these monsters against 1st or 2nd-level characters. On the other hand, when adventures call for lower CR monsters in adventures for higher-level PCs, I think it works perfectly well to use these in place of the 5e SRD versions.

Wild Kingdom

One of my annoyances is that monsters in the 5e SRD are hit points with an attack roll added to them, with the type of creature mainly determining if the animal does piercing, slashing, or bludgeoning. Animals have a range of attacks that never appear in their stat blocks. So, how does Tales of the Valiant handle animals?

Deer don’t bite anymore. They get a kick and a bonus action to bound away from trouble. Crocodiles get a bonus action they can use to damage a grappled creature with a death roll. Swarms of bats can confuse people with screeching. Several creatures get roars that can cause fear. Mastiffs can use their reaction to bite someone attacking their ally. Saber-toothed tigers can cause a creature to bleed out with its bite. In some cases, the regular version of the monster doesn’t get a neat ability, but the giant-sized version does. 

Not every animal gets an upgrade, and not every animal gets something that I feel is iconic to that animal, but there are so many more that do, and I’m pretty happy with it. Two of my ongoing pet peeves have been the crocodile’s lack of death roll and the fact that saber-toothed cats used the deep wounds they inflicted to bleed out prey, so right off the bat, they addressed some of my long-term annoyances with animal stat blocks. Also, cats get the ability to meow and cause the charmed condition, and I kind of love that for them.

Rogues Gallery

Since D&D 2014 came out, I’ve been happy with the wide range of NPC stat blocks. This means it’s not too difficult to find adversaries that aren’t wholly monstrous to throw at the player characters in appropriate situations. Tales of the Valiant brings over the NPCs and makes some tweaks.

If you are used to the more recent D&D stat blocks for NPCs, including spell-like abilities as attacks for some characters, the spellcaster NPCs in the Monster Vault continue that tradition. For example, the Archmage gets three Arcane Blast attacks and can replace one with a spell they can cast from their Spellcasting feature. 

One subtle change I appreciate is that the Tribal Warrior stat block has been changed to Wild Warrior. Was this a significant issue in the 2014 rules? Maybe not, but it was an instance where a naming convention communicated more than intended. This change removes the idea that any people with a “tribe” associated with them will all have the same general stat block. 

Appendices

I know they take up page count, but I appreciate having information arranged in logical groups when looking for information. In the case of monsters, there are so many ways to organize lists, and the Monster Vault contains several summary tables. Monsters have the following organizational lists in the Appendices:

• Creatures by Challenge
• Creatures by Tag
• Creatures by Terrain

On the one hand, the encounter builder I linked earlier can sort monsters by these categories, but as I’m regularly reminded, many people don’t use every electronic tool available when prepping or running their games. That makes these lists practical for those users.

Legendary Encounter

 A few months back, I was looking for an Aboleth stat block that fit exactly what I wanted, and I ended up piecing together a version from three different sources. If I had the Monster Vault at the time, this is precisely the Aboleth I wanted. 

The encounter-building tools are much more functional than the 5e SRD tools. The attention to addressing the story elements of encounter building is an example of supplementary material I love to see in monster books. Many monsters from the 5e SRD didn’t hit hard enough or couldn’t bring their extraordinary abilities to bear before the encounter ended, and the redesigns for many of these creatures have addressed that. Because these monsters retained their challenge ratings from the 5e SRD, this book provides additional options for anyone running adventures referencing 5e SRD creatures, even outside a Tales of the Valiant game. I appreciate Perception and Stealth stats because while I like rolling dice as a GM, sometimes I’m okay with just comparing the player’s rolls to a DC.

All Out of Doom

Some of the stat block changes address a problem I didn’t know the 5e SRD stat blocks had, and other changes feel like they just miss out on being as functional as possible. Encounter building for 1st or 2nd-level characters may be challenging due to how hard some low CR monsters hit. I’m not a fan of reintroducing standardized traits across an entire monster type, even if those traits are reprinted in every stat block for a creature of that type. One of my reservations isn’t even with this book; it’s with a broad rule change. I do not like how Adamantine and Silver interact with Golems and Shapechangers. Because the material properties aren’t listed in this book, you can easily miss that silver has any special effect on lycanthropes. As written, non-magical silver weapons will do [(weapon damage) + 1d6]/2, which feels less like a specific bane and more like additional math. The golem situation is worse because golems are immune to non-magical adamantine weapons, so the unique property of adamantine only comes into play if you have a magical adamantine weapon, which doesn’t feel like adamantine is a specific weakness of golems.

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

If you are playing a 5e SRD-based game, this will be a solid purchase. It will give you more options for familiar monsters that may provide you with tools for more challenging encounters. Compatibility with the 5e SRD means that this will be useful for just about any 5e SRD-based game, emulating the assumptions of D&D 5e. A few months back, I was looking for an Aboleth stat block that fit exactly what I wanted, and I ended up piecing together a version from three different sources. If I had the Monster Vault at the time, this is precisely the Aboleth I wanted. I’m also considering using the druids in my D&D 2014 Curse of Strahd game with the druid stat blocks from this book. 

It’s not perfect. You can use the book’s CR altering advice at low levels to adjust monsters by at least 1 CR for 1st and 2nd-level characters. That stat block may not speak to you, especially after seeing some other stat blocks introduced for 5e SRD games. But despite a few imperfections, this is a showcase of one of Kobold Press’ core competencies: a solid, useful monster book, and this time, one that can be used to swap out your 5e SRD monsters that need an upgrade.

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Join Ang, JT, and Tomas as they look at what they hoped to accomplish RPG wise in 2024, how that turned out, and what they’re hoping for in 2025.

Links:

Libby

JT’s Amazon Link

JT’s Website

Tomas on Bluesky

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Snowys Maps has been kind enough to come to me to talk about their product. They offered me 2 of their spiral booklets for free (just a press review version which is not the complete one) and allowed me to speak my mind of them. When this happens I try not to post negative reviews, talking directly to the creator why I think that. However, with Snowy’s Maps, the moment I had them at hand I felt the need to try them out in a one-shot with some players. I must say, they were a true success, so I come here to give my own take on them, and state why I believe you should check them out!

The non-gif images were taken by me, so you can see the incredible quality for yourself! Over 82 maps will be on the final product, with everything from barns, inns, taverns, temples, marketplaces, gardens, cultist bases, and much more to see!

 

Art

A quick glance at Snowy’s Maps can show the level of quality they display. The city streets look incredibly detailed with plenty of stuff for the players to want to interact to. I have found that these kinds of detailed maps allow player’s imaginations to go wild. There’s a blanket from a vendor on the ground filled with jewels on top? I am sure a player will sometime ask to pull from it for the jewels to break to create a distraction. A fruit cart? You know the barbarian is going to throw it at enemies creating an incredible cinematic experience.

What I intend to say is that there is a delicate balance regarding how much flexibility and immersion a map can give. Theatre of the mind gives plenty of flexibility but it might not trigger the player’s ingenuity as much as actually seeing stuff to interact with. A simple marker-drawn map falls into the same problem. If there is a reason for you to want amazing art it is because it allows you to not have to worry as much about placing fun stuff for players to interact with.

One last detail that I consider incredible is the fact that if you have good minis you can take gorgeous photos with these incredible looking maps. I mean, just look at the pics I took myself that decorate this article. Incredibly cinematic, right?

Flexibility and ease of use

The spiral notebook format allows for you not only to use just one page, but with it fully open, using both pages of the notebook at once. If you get a second one, you can even go further than that and make the battlefield even greater. Excellent for city chase scenes!! How about a third one? Let’s make a whole battlefield for an Avengers Endgame finale-like fight, as I did with my Waterdeep Dragon Heist campaign.

The pages are A4 sized, an excellent size to carry in a bag wherever you go. If you get two of them together you can make an A2-sized battlemap! Get as many of these map notebooks as you need and carry them wherever you go. This product is absolutely recommended for those GMs who meet at somebody else’s house to play and need something lightweight and comfortable to carry their maps while providing superb quality.

Did I mention that these maps are also dry erasable? If you are the kind of person that doesn’t usually get these maps because you can’t write over them, well, this is your lucky day! Draw the area of effect of those fireballs or let your players make notes of which places they should DEFINITELY not go in once they see there are cultists inside.

Quality

As you may be able to see from the images I’ve taken,  the pages are A4, with premium colour quality, 300ppi. Paper quality? Top notch, and does not seem easy to break at all, allowing you to use these for ages to come. I also took the test of writing over one whole page with different dry eraser markers, and they were easily cleaned leaving no trace behind with one simple cloth.

Another additional detail to stand out is that even trying multiple combinations within the two maps they all fit excellently with each other, allowing for endless combinations (maybe fewer than endless but I am not planning on doing the math). Just look at the many combinations of the gif below and see for yourself!

Virtual Table Top-friendly

Maybe you stopped playing in person, or your friends live on the other corner of the world. Why would you want to support this? What if I told you that all these high-quality maps have been created and adapted to your VTTs of choice? The crowdfunding offers a FoundryVTT (V11+) module and Roll20 addons containing lighting, doors, and walls (dynamic lighting) for every map. All the work is already done for you so you can just plug and play!

You can check out some of the maps yourself by checking out the sample provided in the Kickstarter here.

Funded Project

With a little bit less than a week remaining, there is practically no risk in getting into the Kickstarter. I have received a review copy that has 38 of the 82 maps it will have, so most of the work is already done. The goal has been met, and all the stretch goals but one have been fulfilled. So be sure to jump in as soon as you can to make sure you don’t miss your chance of getting this incredible pile of maps:

BACK THE TOME OF MAPS: CITY BATTLEMAPS

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Players love getting handed real-life, physical artifacts that tie their characters into the ongoing adventure. There are oodles of props, maps, handouts, images, and so on that can be tossed over the GM screen into the middle of the gaming table. Not everyone has time, energy, or skill* to get super in-depth with this kind of effort, and I get that. However, if you have even an inkling of desire to get into this aspect of creating an adventure, here’s what you can do for your gaming group.

Note on skills: I am not an artist at all. I can do decent maps, but not super fancy ones. I do not have the skills developed with practice to do any kind of character sketch or pretty map. However, there are resources out there that can help you out in this area. Keep reading for those resources.

Props

Props for your game can range from swatches of cloth, to hats, to pins, baubles, jewelry, metal coins, and other key items that players might come across. I highly recommend that you only acquire or create props for key elements. Don’t hand them a literal pile of copper pieces on the table after they kill a dozen rats. That’s just going to annoy everyone as the mess of coins gets cleared from the table in order to allow the game to continue.

Instead, if they find a brooch of a noblewoman with a family crest on it, that might be a good time to provide a brooch with some paint on it. Alternatively, you can provide them with a hand-drawn image on a piece of paper and point at it while saying, “You find this brooch in the alley.”

This sounds like it can get very expensive (it can) or become very time consuming (it can) or both (yes). Because of this, I’ve not done physical props in a long time. When I used to do it, I’d scour thrift and second-hand stores for things. Sometimes, just wandering the jumbled goods found in those types of stores, I’d come up with a great hook or NPC or aspect to a character that I didn’t know I’d find.

Maps

Maps are easier because they can go on a sheet of paper. The trick here is to use blank paper, not graph paper or hex paper. You can even find “aged paper” that looks yellow-brown and maybe has a faded stain pattern on it. Personally, I like to use thicker (50-60 pounds) paper over the thinner photocopy paper (20-22 pounds) because it takes up the liquids that I use in my aging process better, holds up longer, and allows for a good feel at the table. It’s heftier in a way that can be felt, which tricks the players into thinking the sheet of paper they hold before them is somehow more important.

For aging paper, I use tea and/or coffee to lightly stain the paper. This is an art and does take some practice, so you’re not dissolving the paper in the liquid. This is especially true in the day of recycled paper that doesn’t seem to hold up as well under exposure to moisture. After I get my paper properly aged, I draw what I need to on the paper. I usually use charcoal sticks of different sharpness to give it a truly “authentic” look.

Once I get the map prepared, I will (on rare occasions) bake the paper for a dozen minutes or so at a very low temperature in the oven. We’re talking around 200 degrees Fahrenheit, and I never walk away. I don’t want to char what I’ve just created. I keep a close eye on it while it’s toasting on the baking sheet.

There are some additional treatments you can add to the paper as well. Like holes burned in the paper, singed edges, torn off sections that are “missing,” and tearing the map into different bits. The different bits of missing sections can be scattered about different locations within your adventure.

Handouts

Handouts will be things like messages, missives, writs of permission, payment promises, grants of title, grants of land, and so on. I have horrific handwriting (my mom always said I should have been a doctor because of my handwriting), so I do not write these out by hand. Instead, I use a word processor and some fonts with “archaic” appearances to generate the handouts. This is my go to. However, if you are a calligraphy expert, then you can be proud of the work you do with your own creations!

Encoded Messages

If you want to present a riddle to your players, you can even encode the messages using a very basic cipher system such as a Caesar cipher, an alphabet substitution cipher, or some similar encoding method. Don’t get super fancy here because the point of the handout is to show someone is trying to keep something secret and to allow the PCs to figure out what’s what with the message. If you’re not sure what I’m talking about or how to implement these ciphers, head over to Cryptii and use the online tool to encode your messages. In the middle column of settings, you can click the orange text representing the type of cipher, and then choose something under the “Ciphers” header.

Images

Images go a long way toward immersing your players in the world. Really, these break down into people, monsters, and locations. Unless you’re planning on publishing the adventure, you can use stock art, free art, and such to print out and hand out at the table. I could list various sites that have stock art, but a good search on the World Wide Web for “stock art” or “stock images” and then using those sites’ internal search engines will do you better than following my lead. There are just so many different sites out there these days. There is also the Google Image search feature out there as well, and I use that quite often.

I’ll print out the images on my color printer using standard copy paper. I don’t try to feed the heavier paper through my printer because it’s not really designed to handle the thicker art paper I mentioned earlier.

Let The Players Handle The Goods

Once you have everything put together and hand things out to the players, I’d recommend letting them handle and tinker with all the things you’ve handed to them. If a handout or prop becomes a distraction from the game, then you can gentle ask the distracted player to refocus, but allowing them to handle the props increases their immersion in the game.

I would recommend collecting everything you’ve handed out at the end of each session and keeping those items separate from props that you’ve yet to hand out. This way, when the next session rolls around, you can place the found objects back on the table as reminders to the players on where they were and what they’d accomplished thus far.

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Usually, I try to be more timely with reviews here, but I kept running into interesting hurdles while working on my review for Building Better Worlds. I had heard rumors that Alien: Romulus would remove Prometheus and Alien: Covenant from the movie timeline going forward. Then, we received news that there would be a second edition of the Alien roleplaying game. At the very least, I wanted to wait until I could see Alien: Romulus before I finished this review. Since I didn’t have time to see it in theaters, that meant waiting for streaming.

In the meantime, Free League postponed the crowdfunding for the second edition of the Alien roleplaying game. Some of the confusion around the Alien franchise timeline was cleared up, as Alien: Romulus pulls elements from just about every movie in the franchise to date, and some of the confusion surrounding that assumption was cleared up, as Noah Hawley, the showrunner for the upcoming Alien: Earth television series said that he wouldn’t be pulling from Prometheus or Covenant’s storylines, but not necessarily that he was going to do anything that invalidated them. It’s even possible that the series isn’t meant to fit into the timeline of the movies. Now that I’ve finally seen Alien: Romulus, I can say that this is probably a really good time to look at an Alien product focused on colonial life in the setting.

Disclaimer

I received a review copy of Building Better Worlds by Free League. I have not had the opportunity to play or run any of the included material, but I have experience with various Year Zero System games.

 Alien: The Roleplaying Game – Building Better Worlds
Publisher Free League Lead
Writers Andrew E.C. Gaska, Dave Semark
Editor & Project Manager Tomas Härenstam
Illustrations Martin Grip, Eelco Sebring, Gustaf Ekelund
Graphic Design Christian Granath
Map Design Stefan Isberg, Christian Granath, Dave Semark, Clara Fei-Fei Čarija
Proofreading Brandon Bowling, Kosta Kostulas
Prepress Dan Algstrand
Brand Management Joe LeFavi/Genuine Entertainment
PR Manager Boel Bermann
Event Manager Anna Westerling
Streaming Doug Shute
Customer Support Daniel Lehto

This review is based on the PDF version of the book, which is 304 pages long. The breakdown of pages is as follows:

• Far Spinward Colonies Maps: 4 pages (front and back endpapers)
• Title Page and Credits Page: 2 pages
• Table of Contents: 4 pages
• Setting Information: 42 pages
• Player-Facing Mechanics (Character Options, Gear, and Ships): 31 pages
• Game Mother Game Facing Mechanics and Campaign Information: 62 pages
• The Lost Worlds Campaign: 132 pages
• Colony Building and Development Appendix: 16 pages
• Index: 4 pages

Each chapter begins with a two-page image and chapter header with an in-setting quote. If you haven’t seen the layout of the Alien: The Roleplaying Game books, instead of standard headers with header titles, all of the text that would be under that header is included in a stylized box. Thus, each page has multiple blocks with a topic header and several paragraphs. 

This is one of those situations where I need to be careful what I wish for. Some RPG books have walls of text that can become easier to digest by being broken into smaller topics. The boxes go in the opposite direction. It almost feels like the issues are isolated and don’t flow into the following box on the page, even if they are subcategories of the same overall information. 

Modiphius had a similar stylization in the first edition of Star Trek Adventures, and the second edition scaled back on some of that stylization. I’d love to see the second edition of Alien: The Roleplaying Game do something similar. I like thematic layouts, but they can go far enough to become distracting.

Outside of readability, the book looks very nice. I like how the tables and special topics appear as green characters on a black field, similar to the appearance of the MU/TH/UR computer displays in the movie.

What are We Looking At?

When Alien: The Roleplaying Game was first released, one part of the product line was the boxed cinematic adventures, which use pre-generated characters with built-in agendas, loyalties, and plot twists. However, to facilitate campaign play, Free League planned to release books to support different kinds of campaigns. The core rules isolate three campaign concepts: Space Marines, Colonists, and Space Truckers. 

One of the game’s first releases was the Colonial Marines Operations Manual, which included information about locations, organizations, and events in the Alien setting, with a focus on conflicts, wars, and flashpoints. It also included an extended campaign where your space marines encountered various military engagements while finding escalating evidence of dangerous experiments, which they could string together to find the source of this research and shut it down.

In campaign mode, you need to have more to do than running from and surviving xenomorphs. In the Operations Manual, what happens between running into the xenomorph-based military experiments is an escalating conflict that they fight in, presenting a different kind of horror, the horror of war. These adventures don’t focus on glorious battles but on ugly engagements where players fight to survive.

We haven’t seen the Space Trucker-themed sourcebook yet and probably won’t until after the new edition of the game, but Building Better Worlds is the Colonist campaign book. Just as the Operations Manual presented the horrors of war as the baseline of the Space Marine campaign, Building Better Worlds seeks to introduce survival horror into the campaign. Characters will try to survive hostile environments, keep terraforming equipment working, and deal with threats that corporations or nations have promised to alleviate when those organizations fail to support people isolated in cold, uncaring space.

In Space, No One Can Hear Your Setting Information

The core rulebook and the Colonial Marines Operations Manual include setting information, but the core book touches on significant events, and the Operations Manual focuses on military flashpoints. This book presents the setting from the viewpoint of humanity’s colonization of space. That means that while wars may be important, much of this information looks at the expansion of various nations and corporations as they reach further from Earth.

The Frontier War is a conflict that breaks apart formerly allied nations within the UN. It creates an interesting dynamic, as colonies may not find out who “owns” what stretch of space, and colonists traveling in hypersleep may find a whole different chain of command when they wake up. 

The significant organizations we have in the setting are:

• Central Confederation of Africa (CCA)
• United Nations Interstellar Settlement Corps (UNISC)
• Throop Rescue and Recovery (TR&R)
• United Americas (UA)
• Colonial Marshal Bureau (CMB)
• United States Colonial Marine Corps (USCMC)
• United American Colonial Guard (USCG)
• United American Outer Rim Defense Fleet (UAORDF)
• The Union of Progressive Peoples (UPP)
• Progressive Peoples Cosmos Exploration (CEC)
• The Three World Empire (3WE)
• Royal Expeditionary Group (REG)
• Sir Peter Weyland’s Explorers Academy (SPWEA)
• ICSC Investment Group (ICSCIG)
• The Geholgod Institutete (GI)
• Weyland-Yutani Corporation (W-Y)
• Seegson Corporation (SC)
• Hyperdyne Corporations (HC)
• Omni-Tech Resources (OTR)
• Gemini Exoplanet Solutions (GES)
• Kelland Mining Company and Consortium (KMCC)
• New Albion Protectorate (NAPRO)

The book has much information on these organizations’ backbiting, warfare, and alliances. There may be more information that you can incorporate into a campaign, but as we’ll see later, I appreciate how the presented campaign uses this information. Some of the highlights include Weyland-Yutani taking control of exploration for many nations after the UNISC lost contact with several colonies and the war breaking out between several nations coordinated by the UNISC, making any UNISC operations highly strained.

This also means that Wayland-Yutani is subcontracting from various unaffiliated nations in many cases, and the colonies are more Wayland-Yutani than any nation they are subcontracting from. However, there is enough information that if you don’t want everything to fall back on “Wayland-Yutani sucks,” you can find other nations and corporations to fill your uncaring organization quota for your campaign. 

There is also an overview of various regions of the galaxy and the settlements found in those regions. These regions include the Outer Rim Territories (you have to have one of these), the Frontier, and the Far Spinward Colonies. Each of the settlements has the following entries:

• Location
• Affiliation
• Classification
• Climate
• Mean Temperature
• Terrain
• Colonies
• Population
• Key Resources

Most of these settlements have a paragraph or two that gives an overview and sometimes a plot hook for using the settlement, like the mysterious disappearance of the settlers, a flashpoint in the Frontier War, or a dramatic shift in climate. 

The chapter entitled Redacted from the Weyland-Yutani Extrasolar Species Catalog includes several creatures that exist across the galaxy, beyond humans, the Engineers, and Xenomorphs. These include Abominations, creatures mutated by the Engineers’ black goo, The Perfected, an intelligent species also created by the Engineers (picture humans with the techno-organic look of the xenomorphs merged with their skin), proto-xenomorphs, and full xenomorphs. There are also creatures like the Harvesters, giant tardigrade-like creatures used to facilitate mining.

Life on the Frontier

There are notes on modifying the careers presented in the core rulebook for a colonial career. This includes swapping out key talents and equipment and explaining what that career does in a colonial campaign. For example, Colonial Marines in a colonist campaign aren’t going to be part of a larger unit; they’ll likely be stationed as some of the few defenders of the colony. 

There are also two new careers: the Wildcatter, professional miners and prospectors, and the Entertainer, who tries to brighten colonists’ lives with your professional skills. These are structured like the professions from the core rulebook, presenting the following:

• Key Attribute
• Key Skills
• Career Talents
• Personal Agenda
• Signature Item
• Appearance
• Gear
• Typical Names

There is a list of new personal agendas keyed to colonial campaigns and suggested ones for the Wildcatter and Entertainer careers. 

The book expands on the weapons available, including pistols and rifles manufactured by some colonist-focused corporations and tools that can be used as weapons, like mining lasers and flame throwers. There is also an expanded section on outfits, armor, survival gear, and exploration tools. The key to most of these is to highlight that colonists aren’t likely to have higher-powered military weapons or armor, but there will also be gear that can be repurposed to destructive effect.

This section details off-road vehicles, trucks, tractors, small aerial vehicles, shuttles, dropships, and exploration pods. It also includes additional FTL ships, mainly exploratory and colony ships. I can easily see why smaller vehicles need stats showing how much damage they can take, how maneuverable they are, etc., but I’m still at a loss for why the larger FTL ships have combat-oriented stats. Capital ship combat seems to be the least “Alien” thing to spend time on in a campaign, and there is a place in the example campaign where they could use these rules, but they (wisely, in my opinion) don’t focus on the ship to ship combat in that part of the campaign.

The Mechanics of Survival

The campaign section of the book presents the Game Mother with example missions and scenarios for colonists and discusses campaign themes such as Explorer Campaigns and Colony Campaigns. Colony campaigns try to build up and establish one location, while Explorer campaigns survey different worlds, set up preliminary equipment and then move on to other worlds. 

Various charts handle unexpected or variable events, like what happens when a Wildcatter goes prospecting or what happens when a compression suit has a breach. I’m happy to report that many of these events interact with the Stress and Stress Dice mechanics. You don’t just gain stress from xenomorphs jumping out at you, but when survival gear breaks, you wonder if you’re going to suffocate due to a lack of oxygen.

The Appendix includes expansions to the core rulebook’s random star system generation tables. Several charts show what a starting colony looks like in the game. This includes who sponsors the colony (and who you have to keep happy), what the colony was set up to achieve, and the policies, installments, and projects that modify the stats of your colony, which you measure to see how well your settlement survives if it prospers, and what complications come up.

For this style of colonial play, there is a cycle to follow:

• Phase 1–Colony Incidents
• Phase 2–The Command Team Does Its Job
• Phase 3–Grow or Decline
• Phase 4–Colony Initiatives

The suggested pacing for this style of campaign is for the PCs to engage in one or two more traditional adventures before advancing to the next colony cycle. While the cycle generates events that the PCs will have to deal with, the GM is going to have to do the heavy lifting to make sure those one or two adventures between cycles have horror themes because, without that, the colony cycle may appeal to people that want more of a “hard work and a little bit of survival” campaign, and less of a “space doesn’t want us out here, and it’s trying to kill us” style horror.

The Lost Worlds Campaign

This is the strongest part of the book. This section answers everyone who asks, “What does a campaign even look like in an Alien RPG?” While the Operations Manual also included a multi-part campaign, and I don’t think that one was bad, this feels much more like what I envision for an Alien campaign. While colonial marines may not be prepared to face mutated monstres and xenomorphs, they are trained for violence, and they expect someone or something to try to kill them. Colonists and explorers aren’t expected to do anything other than survive the environments they explore and try to tame.

The PCs are part of an expedition sent by the UNISC to reconnect to lost colonies, offer help, and reintegrate them into broader society. The expedition has members of multiple polities on board, eventually becoming a problem as word of the Frontier War reaches the expedition. You also have a nice built-in explanation for new PCs if any of your players have a character that meets their demise since the expedition has tons of colonists in hypersleep, waiting to be tapped to take over for a deceased specialist.

This campaign most resembles the Explorer campaign model mentioned elsewhere in the book. The PCs will be sent to various worlds to assess them, make contact with lost colonies, potentially help repair and replace damaged equipment, and resolve any local problems at the colony in question. After each mission, the PCs must present the colony’s potential and world, describing how worthwhile it is to spend resources on that lost colony.

Six different expeditions can be approached in any order. Six clues to the Metapuzzle, the campaign’s background story, are slowly coming into focus. In addition to the six expeditions and the six clues for the Metapuzzle, campaign events trigger after the PCs take certain actions or after a set number of expeditions.

So, what is going on in the background? An intelligent species, The Perfected, have founded a religion among some of the human colonists in this area, and they have introduced a new strain of the black goo to modify these cultists. The Perfected version of the substance can even mutate the synthetic bodies of androids. The Perfected want to prove to their creators, the Engineers, that they are worthy, and to do this, they want to spread their version of the pathogen and seed their modified versions of the xenomorphs to the wider galaxy. Not literally, because they haven’t seen any Engineers for centuries, but the Engineers considered them a mistake. 

No one in this region has the coordinates to travel back to the core settlements of the galaxy. The Perfected need a means to find that region of space. The Perfected are attempting to fake out the UNISC expedition, trying to make it look like they’ll use one means of leaving this region of the galaxy to secure another way to do so.

That means the PCs will encounter modified xenomorphs, weird mutated cultists, and strange humanoids with a chip on their shoulder, in addition to the warlords, cannibals, overenthusiastic automatons, and petty criminals who live on the various colonies with which they are reestablishing contact. They may also run into bioluminescent xenomorphs and possibly even a Xenomorph Empress. 

I like this campaign’s structure and the Metapuzzle it uses, but I wish some points were executed better. I don’t like the narrative of one expedition, that people who are under duress turn into barely human cannibals. The expedition involving Warlord Zhāngjié suddenly starts to use the word honor left and right since the people in power are Chinese, and some of the presentation feels like caricature. 

While I like that actual climax, as it’s presented, running it in three parts, it feels like it needs to cut to the scariest, most dangerous parts of the resolution. The climax involves a confrontation at a space station seeded with mutated xenomorphs, with various factions in open combat. At the same time, the cultists and the Perfected pull everyone’s strings. While on the space station, there are also xenomorphs with the “capture” ability, meaning they’ll cart off captured people to be cocooned into one of the queen’s hives. PCS may end up facehuggered or infected with the modified pathogen, and the best resolution may be to perform a major sacrifice play to save the wider galaxy. 

It’s an Alien RPG campaign, so players should be prepared for a horrible death. However, given the way the ending may require a Kobayashi Maru no-win situation, you may still need to be careful about your expectations. When you get close to the end of the campaign, you may want to reinforce that it’s unlikely to get the best possible ending they can imagine. 

I Think if We Are Kind, It Will Be A Kind World

This book is the answer to your question about what an Alien RPG campaign would look like

As I mentioned above, this book is the answer to your question about what an Alien RPG campaign would look like. Focusing on the colonial and exploratory narratives leans into franchise elements that have been highlighted many times, including in Alien: Romulus. The campaign presented does a great job of taking some of the more comprehensive setting material presented in the front of the book and making it relevant to the campaign.

I Don’t Dream at All

Some of the essential points in The Lost Worlds campaign, things that need to happen to make everything make sense, aren’t called out or bullet-pointed in a way that makes them stand out. While the campaign uses the setting information well, it does feel like it could be more concise. Some of The Lost Worlds campaign expeditions lean on negative stereotypes and assumptions. The climax itself is satisfying, but everything in the adventure leading to that climax feels like it gets a little bloated. 

Qualified Recommendation–A product with lots of positive aspects, but buyers may want to understand the context of the product and what it contains before moving it ahead of other purchases.

Some tables will get everything they want from the cinematic offerings for Alien: The Roleplaying Game. Two or three nights of quality entertainment per cinematic adventure is a good return on investment. But if you explore what Alien can be as a campaign, this is the stronger option that makes the most of the franchise’s wider setting and themes. But it may take a little work to get everything out of it that it can provide to hit all the right notes.

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You may have noticed some significant developments in fantasy games that rely on the 5e OGL for their core rules. Not long after the Great OGL Debacle of 2023, Kobold Press announced that they were working on their own set of 5e OGL fantasy rules, and part of the draw for this set of rules is that they could keep their own set of rules closer to what they appreciated about the D&D 5e rules. 

Tales of the Valiant hit the shelves in June, along with the Monster Vault. It arrived before the September release of the D&D 2024 Player’s Handbook and launched with a monster book. Also, with the magic items included in the Player’s Guide, the game was less reliant on the Gamemaster’s Guide, which didn’t arrive until October.

Initially, I was thinking of covering all three at once, but as time wore on, I realized that it would be important to look at each separately. This is driven, in part, by the fact that each part of the triumvirate of core books can be useful in a D&D 5e game, even without the other two, without the adoption of the complete Tales of the Valiant rules. Because of this, I will start my coverage of the core books with this article, focusing on the Player’s Guide. Most of what I will be looking at is a comparison to the 2014 rules rather than the 2024 ones. I’ll review the D&D 2024 rules as we get closer to the Monster Manual’s release.

Disclaimer

I backed the Tales of the Valiant crowdfunding campaign and received a review copy of the Player’s Guide. I am very familiar with 5e SRD fantasy games and have been running a Tales of the Valiant game, although everyone still has tier-1 characters.

 Tales of the Valiant Player’s Guide
Publisher: Kobold Press
Lead Designer: Celeste Conowitch
Designers: JB Little, Sarah Madsen, Sebastian Rombach
Developer: Jeff Quick
Lead Editor: Jeff Quick Editors: Misty Bourne, Scott Gable, Meagan Maricle, Thomas M. Reid
Proofreaders: Meagan Maricle, Kenny Webb
Cover Artist: Hugh Pindur
Interior Artists: Paola Andreatta, Darren Calvert, Basith Ibrahim, Maria Viktoria Kanellopoulou, Erika Lundrigan, William O’Brien, Corwin Paradinha, Ian Perks, Roberto Pitturru, Addison Rankin, Kiki Moch Rizki, Craig J. Spearing, Florian Stitz, Bryan Syme, Egil Thompson, Eva Widermann, Mat Wilma
Graphic Designers: Marc Radle, Amber Seger

While composing this review, I’ve been able to reference the PDF, the physical copy of the book, and the Demiplane electronic reference site. The page count is 387 pages, and in the PDF and physical copy, the page breakdown is as follows:

• Front and Back Cover: 2 pages
• Title Page and Endpapers: 2 pages
• Credits and Table of Contents: 5 pages
• Introduction: 4 pages
• Character Creation: 126 pages
• Equipment and Magic Items: 72 pages
• Game Rules: 40 pages
• Spellcasting and Spells: 116 pages
• Appendix: 8 pages
• Index: 5 pages
• Character Sheet: 3 pages
• Ads for other Kobold Press Products: 4 pages

The book has a very clean layout. It’s not dissimilar to other Kobold Press offerings, but the text seems to have more breathing room in this book. The artwork in the book looks great. I know some of it is reused from previous books, but much is brand new, and Kobold Press has always had strong artwork in its products.

While each page has borders with images from elsewhere in the book, the individual pages are white with blue headers, table elements, and black text. I appreciate flourishes like faded art under text or pages that look like ancient parchment, but I have to admit that bright white pages with easy-to-reference layouts usually win out if you ask my preference. 

Delving into the Text

The character creation section is divided into sections for character classes, lineages, heritages, backgrounds, and talents. The magic items appear at the back of the equipment chapter, and this section mentions that magic items aren’t always intended to be for sale despite having prices added to them. The Playing the Game section includes sections about planes of existence (not specific, but what is usually assumed in the type of game these rules are written for) and downtime activities that introduce some new mechanics. Spellcasting splits spells into new source categories and then splits those categories between standard and ritual spells.

I appreciate a few things in the introduction beyond serving its general function of explaining what’s inside. There is a section about what kind of fantasy this game facilitates and a section discussing safety. While it’s only about 75% of a page, it’s got a nice procedural presentation instead of what I’ve seen some traditional games adopting, which is to say that safety is essential. Then, it suggests other places to look for a more in-depth discussion. In this case, it runs the reader through developing lines and veils before the game starts and brings up some common issues that may need to be considered in a heroic fantasy campaign. There is also a section discussing some active safety procedures and tools for use during the game.

A Quick Look at What’s Changed from the 2014 5e SRD

I’m going to try to hit some of these points upfront before I delve into them with more detail later in the review. The most significant changes seem to be:

• No ability score bonuses tied to character elements in character creation
• Race is split into Lineage and Heritage, with lineage being physical traits and heritage being cultural
• Keensense replaces Blindsight and just means you gain the typical benefits of vision via another sense
• Feats are changed to talents, and no talents provide ability score bonuses
• Backgrounds grant you a choice of three different talents
• Subclass levels have been standardized across all character classes
• Spells are organized into sources instead of class-specific spell lists
• Each class has some tweaks to it, but one of the most significant changes is that the Warlock is a half-caster that also has pact magic
• Fighting Styles are now Martial Actions, which take a bonus action to use and which can be used to trigger a weapon’s Weapon Option
• Weapon Options are additional effects a weapon can have, but when you attack with a weapon, you have to choose either to do damage or use a Weapon Option
• Luck replaces Inspiration, and it’s a currency that can either be spent to add to rolls one for one or by spending multiple Luck points, you can reroll
• The downtime activities of Carousing and Researching can generate favors or clues as narrative currency that can be used while adventuring
• Ritual spells can only be cast as rituals, and spellcasters keep track of how many rituals they know separately

Some of these can be summarized quickly but may have more long-term consequences. For example, the changes to spell lists can shift some of the expected competencies of different classes. 

Making Heroes and What Makes a Player Character

The order of character creation steps as presented in Tales of the Valiant rules is as follows:

• Character concept
• Class
• Ability scores
• Lineage
• Heritage
• Background
• Equipment
• Fill in blanks
  

The Tales of the Valiant Player’s Guide makes an interesting choice to present multiclassing at the beginning of the character creation section. I’ll be honest: I’m not a huge fan of multiclassing. I think there are enough tools to pick up some flavor from other classes that, for story purposes, you can achieve what you want, and fully multiclassing makes class and subclass design trickier because designers have to take into account what abilities are going to synergize, and what abilities might synergize too well. It also means that many classes are designed to hold off on delivering core elements, so a single-level dip doesn’t provide a separate core play experience.

There are a few subtle changes. Some classes grant simple weapon proficiency, which is redundant in the Tales of the Valiant rules because every class gets at least simple weapon proficiency. Multiclassing into Bard or Ranger was used to grant an additional skill, which has been eliminated from the ToV rules. Beyond those changes, it works the same way as in the 2014 rules.

Most classes have all of their abilities in the 2014 rules or something similar to replace an ability that appears in that source. However, those abilities may shift up or down multiple levels to accommodate the standardized subclass levels. I would love to dive deeper into this, but I could write whole articles for each class so that I will summarize some of the changes to classes here.

Barbarian–Unarmored defense has a higher base AC rather than using both Dex and Con. Barbarians can move when they roll initiative. Brutal Critical affects threat ranges as well as critical damage dice. Unyielding Might now works like the other “reliable” class abilities. 

Bard–Bards get any finesse marital weapon as a proficiency now. Bardic Inspiration doesn’t specify that you need to decide to use it before you know if the roll is successful. Jack of All Trades is removed from the class abilities and replaced with Expertise. Song of Rest is replaced with Bardic Performance, a class feature with multiple persistent effects when active. Cutting Words has been moved to the core class. Bards pickup a subclass feature at 11th level. We’ll go into this later, but Bard is one class that notices the shift to power source spell lists instead of class spell lists. 

Cleric–Manifestation of Faith allows the cleric to either get heavy armor and martial weapons or an extra cantrip from any source and a damage bonus to cantrips. Divine Intervention is more reliable but is limited to spells or effects similar to spells that the cleric could typically cast. Blessed Strikes rolls back to 1st level. Clerics gain an 11th-level subclass feature.

Druid–Druids aren’t proficient in scimitars anymore, but it still appears as an option for starting equipment. Nature’s Gift is a non-spellcasting healing ability that can be used in beast form. Non-beast creatures with animal tags are also fair game for wildshape forms. A hard cap on hit points from wildshape forms is based on level. You eventually gain the ability to burn wildshape uses to recover spells. Nature’s Grace allows you to ignore the need for food or water, and you can’t have ability scores lowered. 

Fighter–Martial Actions replace fighting style; Second Wind is replaced with Last Stand, which lets you use a reaction to spend hit dice if you’re below 50% of your hit points. Turn the Tide adds additional damage that’s non-reducible.

Monk–Monks can throw items they catch with their Deflect Missile ability without spending a technique point. When a stunned opponent takes damage, they get another save against the effect. Slow Fall is moved up to 9th level as part of Perfect Motion. Tongue of Sun and Moon is changed to Astral Teachings, which allows for proficiency in a language, skill, tool, or weapon. The capstone ability is to gain 2 Technique Points per turn and get 4 when you roll initiative.

Paladin–You can use Lay on Hands on yourself as a bonus action. Martial Action replaces Fighting Styles, with minimal options (defending or using two-handed weapons). Aura of Salvation was added as a capstone, which grants resistance to non-magical damage and additional hit points. On the other hand, you can now only smite once per turn, which, honestly, is probably a good thing.

Ranger–Explorer replaces Natural Explorer, grants a swim or climb speed, and makes you immune to difficult terrain that isn’t magical. Most of Hunter’s Mark is rolled into a class feature called Mystic Mark, which you can trigger when you hit a target. Martial Action replaces Fighting Styles with limited options (two-weapon fighting or archery).You no longer get Primeval Awareness. You can eventually always pinpoint the location of marked targets. Stalker’s Step replaces Hide in Plain Sight and Vanish and shows up earlier than either. It allows the Ranger to turn invisible if they have natural cover or concealment. Strider lets you move without provoking Opportunity Attacks and gives you advantage on any saves against effects that slow or still you. You gain Keensense instead of Feral Senses. Foe Slayer is no longer limited to once per turn.

Rogue–Weapon proficiencies are changed to simple and martial with finesse. Precise Critical increases range, and bonus weapon die on a critical hit. 

Sorcerer–Weapon proficiency is changed to simple weapons. Font of Magic moves down to 1st level, and Metamagic to 2nd. Additional Metamagic options include Hunting Spell, Lucky Spell, Retain Spell, and Shielding Spell. Sorcerous Renewal gives back some Sorcery Points on a short rest. Devour Spell allows you to absorb a spell targeting you to convert it to Sorcery Points. Your capstone ability lets you target another creature in range to be affected by a spell that affects you.

Warlock–Eldritch Blast is a class feature instead of a cantrip. Pact Boon is moved down to 1st level. Pact of the Blade lets you attack using Charisma with melee weapons. Pact of the Chain lets your familiar attack without spending any of your actions, and you can speak through your familiar. Some Eldritch Invocations have effects instead of allowing the Warlock to cast a spell. Warlocks gain a half-caster progression in addition to Pact Magic.

Wizard–Magic Sense allows you to detect spellcasters, magic items, and ongoing spells. Rote Spells are spells that don’t count against your prepared spells. Superior Recovery allows you to swap out prepared spells on a short rest. You eventually gain advantage to saves against magic and resistance to spell damage. Spell Mastery now lets you cast each of your Rote Spells once without using a spell slot. Archmage enables you to roll when you cast a spell to see if you used a spell slot to cast the spell. 

In addition to all these changes, each class gains a Heroic Boon at 10th level, which gives you a decision between one of two abilities that might specialize how you want to approach your class’ role. Some feel like valuable tools that can be tailored to play style, while some have more significant effects. Some boons allow you to trigger a class feature when you roll initiative. In some cases, the Heroic Boon is a slightly different expression of an existing ability. For example, the Fighter doesn’t get Indomitable, but at 10th level, they get two effects that do something similar in two different ways. Sorcerers, Warlocks, and Wizards have options at this level to let them add spells of other sources to the spells they can cast.

I like the tweaks away from multiple ability dependence, as seen with the Barbarian. Most abilities that could be triggered a number of times per ability score bonus have been changed to proficiency bonus. However, there are a few that still use ability score bonuses. I like Bards gaining an ongoing ability that can be triggered while maintaining their performance. I miss that concept from earlier edition Bards. I like the idea that Martial Actions require a bonus action to activate, which makes them feel more active, and Martial Actions can be used to trigger Weapon Options. I am a big fan that the Ranger streamlines standard abilities, makes them less fiddly, and still frames them as abilities that a hunter or a scout would learn rather than just adding abilities without context. For both the Ranger and the Warlock, I appreciate that a spell that is effectively a class feature just becomes a class feature. I like that the Wizard’s Spell Mastery has been reworked so that it doesn’t break the game to allow Wizards spells outside their standard list (i.e. unlimited healing).

There are a few classes where I’m concerned about what happens with 1st level abilities. Nature’s Gift, especially, catches my eye because it scales based on proficiency bonus versus Druid level. The 2014 Bard can almost be the party’s primary healer if you don’t have a Cleric. Still, the Tales of the Valiant Bard loses much of that functionality by being tied to the Arcane source. Their spells become much less subtle, opening up more area attacks with damage that doesn’t focus on psychic or thunder damage. I’m curious to see what the Aim Martial Action does to bounded accuracy in that it doesn’t add +2; it doubles the proficiency bonus for the attack. Moving Slow Fall to 9th level for the Monk feels like it’s really delaying a core Monk feature, and overall, it feels like Monks got a gentle nerfing when it only needed one ability to be nerfed and probably could have used some boosts. The limited Martial Actions for Paladins and Rangers feel very constricting. Paladins have to choose between specializing in a shield or a two-handed sword, so swashbuckling paladins are suboptimal, and Rangers using a spear are just doing it wrong. I can’t even guess what adding half-casting to a Warlock does without taking anything away. I don’t know if it’s an overall negative, but it feels like something significant to tack on without losing anything. 

Subclasses

I’ve said a few times that Kobold Press makes excellent material, but their subclasses have tended to leave me cold. Sometimes, they feel like they’re just a little bit too rigid to be flexible, or they work well mechanically but don’t quite hit the right notes for the story they tell. I’m not saying they’re bad, but they tended to lean toward 2014 mechanics and sensibilities and not fully embrace some evolving design in books like Xanathar’s and Tasha’s. The Player’s Guide has a mix of updated and new subclasses, with some being replacements for subclasses that weren’t part of the 5e SRD.

Barbarian

• Berserker
• Wild Fury

Bard

• Lore
• Victory

Cleric

• Life
• Light
• War

Druid

• Shifter
• Leaf

Fighter

• Spell Blade
• Weapon Master

Monk

• Flickering Dark
• Open Hand

Paladin

• Devotion
• Justice

Ranger

• Hunter
• Pack Master

Rogue

• Enforcer
• Thief

Sorcerer

• Chaos
• Draconic

Warlock

• Fiend
• Reaper

Wizard

• Battle Mage
• Cantrip Adept

Right off the top, I’m thrilled that the Berserker doesn’t cause a level of exhaustion for using their Frenzy, and I like the new ability they get that does extra damage to an opponent with the frightened condition. I like abilities that trigger based on a condition that the target has. It’s great to have a less supernatural barbarian option that might get played. The Wild Fury is an excellent reconstruction of the Totem Warrior. However, players will need to pay attention to notice what abilities shifted to what animals (you’re going to be looking for Toad). I also like that the higher-level abilities have a different set of animals to alleviate some of the confusion from the 2014 Totem Warrior.

There is a simple logic to swapping out Cutting Words as a core Bard ability and putting Jack of All Trades in the Lore Bard. Adding ritual-based abilities also reaffirms the Lore Bard as the one who learns about magic on top of everything else. The Victory Bard is similar in theme to the Valor Bard, but it has more “leader” type abilities, allowing other party members to move and even letting everyone make their save versus an area attack if you do.

The Shifter Druid is a nice update to the Circle of the Moon, without the confusing Moon connection to a subclass about shapeshifting. The Leaf subclass is an interesting addition that says, “If we have an animal-focused subclass, why not a plant-based one?” They can spend their Wild Shape to generate a moving grove surrounding them.

The Spell Blade is a nice update to the Eldritch Knight with a few tweaks. I wish they had gone one step further and removed the school restrictions from the start. The Weapon Master is the Battle Master if none of your options affected other people, and there are no dice involved, just uses of their stunts. My main problem with this one is that it needs more stunts.

I love the Flickering Dark subclass for the Monk. You tap into your inner reserves to generate darkness around you that can either boost you or hinder an opponent near you. It’s thematically a replacement for the Way of Shadow, but it has much different mechanics. The updated Quivering Palm has twists and turns that work against each other. It still can last days before you trigger it, but it goes away when you take a long rest, which is a balancing point for being able to activate it on more than one opponent.

The Ranger subclasses make changes to the Hunter and the . . . Ranger with a pet that feels like net positives. The Hunter removes some choices and focuses, makes defenses more straightforward, and gives the Ranger the ability to shortcut to a targeted creature. The Pack Master lets your pet get the benefits of your Mystic Mark, and you can sacrifice them to save you if you take an attack that would take you to 0 (how dare you).

The Enforcer has a lot of the Assassin in it, but you aren’t sneaking around to kill people; you’re the person called in to hurt people. Their Brawler ability gives them the same ability as the Swashbuckler subclass, granting sneak attack if you pair off with people to beat down. Kill Shot has a feature that implies something we’ll touch on in a bit, but half of the feature works fine. Thief has some useful changes, but it’s hard for me to get excited about them.

I like Chaos much better than the Wild Magic Sorcerer, but you need to roll too often to check for Chaos manifestations. I appreciate that there are features that give you something for triggering a Chaos surge, so you have a reason to want to do it willingly. The Draconic Sorcerer doesn’t worry about playing with fear as much, other than imposing disadvantage to save versus the frightened condition. It has more elemental damage tricks, eventually giving your opponents vulnerability to your elemental type.

The Fiend Warlock has some positive tweaks addressing common problems with the subclass. The Reaper Warlock gets an ability that lets them attack in addition to firing off eldritch blasts, and eventually, you can reap souls to give you an armor class boost and area melee attacks as a capstone.

The Battle Mage is a merging of Evocation and War Wizard, giving the wizard a bonus to AC when casting spells, keeping from blowing up your allies, and doing damage to opponents when the spell is typically a save or no damage spell. I wish the Cantrip Adept had almost any other theme. “I’m really good at cantrips” doesn’t feel like an exciting draw. Converting one action spells to a bonus action is great, but everything else is about cantrips, and adding more damage to cantrips.

I didn’t have much to say about the Cleric or the Paladin subclasses. Overall, these are both interesting subclasses that update some known issues for many, if not all, of the classes. My other minor quibble about subclasses is that, for some reason, subclasses don’t have “titles” anymore. It’s not the Circle of the Leaf; it’s a Leaf druid. Some wording in the classes makes it seem like there may have been names for the subclasses, but that didn’t translate all the way through. 

What About That New Class?

The Mechanist is interesting for several reasons. It’s designed to be more of a front-line combatant than the most comparable class in D&D, the Artificer. In some ways, it’s designed to be the opposite of the Artificer. The Artificer can be a front-line fighter with the proper subclass, but the Mechanist is built that way from the start. The Artificer is a spellcaster, but the Mechanist is only a spellcasting class if you take the subclass that grants it spells. 

Thematically, I like that this class is something I’ve wanted for a long time. Can I play one of those legendary dwarven smiths or elven swordmakers? That makes the name Mechanist an interesting choice for them since it’s easy to picture them as supernaturally gifted crafts-folk. Beyond the name, the one thing that throws me a little is that the Mechanist’s Shard of Creation is flavored as a glowing glob of plasma that can be shaped into various items. I would have almost rather it had been a little more open to interpretation, as a toolkit, a lump of clay, maybe even a runestone housing lots of the Mechanist’s previous works to be retrieved.

Lineage and Heritage

Beyond loving the concept, I don’t have much to say about the specifics. In general, Heritages are a little broader than I would like, but I understand this is a core rulebook, and you have to go broad, while a setting book can go more specific. I like the Lineages, with a few notes. Beastkin, Sydereans, and Smallfolk are all “multipurpose” Lineages. Beastkin can be anything from Ravenfolk to Minotaurs, Sydereans can be Aasimar-like or Tiefling-like, and Smallfolk rolls halflings and gnomes into the same package. This goes back to the broader appeal a core book needs because, with fewer lineages, a player can emulate more character concepts. But I like these “subcategories” to have more distinct personalities. Given that Kobold Press has released (as of this writing) two smaller PDFs with more specialized Lineages like Bearfolk and Ratfolk, it shows that they will follow up with more specific options.

Backgrounds and Talents

Backgrounds only have about a paragraph or so of text but have supporting narratives attached to them. For example, each Background has a Reason for Adventuring that shows examples of why someone with that background would start to delve into dungeons or hire themselves out as a sellsword. There are also three different talents attached to each background, allowing it to be used for multiple character concepts, such as a fighter and a wizard, both of which have a soldier background. 

From the standpoint of starting from scratch while keeping the game familiar, I like Talents being organized into groups that aren’t open to everyone and standardizing them so that there aren’t some that grant ability bonuses and others that don’t. It feels like a more controlled way of making “feats” more familiar to the game’s core experience.

Equipment and Magic Items

Most of this section isn’t radically different than what you might expect from the 2014 rules, but there are a few tweaks here and there, some of which are more important than others. For example, Weapon Options were added to weapons. Those options don’t trigger every time the weapon is used, but various classes can use them with some of their abilities, and you can always use them instead of doing damage with the weapon. I like that making those options trigger less often they feel more like a tactical choice that will make a player choose what they want to use. The Weapon Options are Bash, Disarm, Hamstring, Pinning Shot, Pull, Ricochet, and Trip.

Armor entries have a “natural materials tag,” which shows that armor of that type isn’t affected by something like a Rust Monster or Heat Metal. That tag got me all excited that they wouldn’t remove the Druid’s restriction on metal armor, but alas, it has been removed. 

Giving certain materials specific properties is something I like, but I’m not thrilled with how it’s executed in the examples in the book. Silver gives you a smaller die to roll when you attack a creature with the Shapeshifter tag with a silvered weapon, and Adamantine weapons do the same to constructs and objects. We’ll look at this when we get to the Monster Vault, but the exception to damage reduction has been taken out of these entries and is left to the material quality. But one problem with this is, as written, a silver weapon doesn’t bypass a lycanthrope’s damage reduction; it does its regular damage, plus the extra die, still halved for the damage reduction. It feels wrong if that’s the intended way for this to work.

If you like vehicles with a stat block, they’re still in this book. 

One of this section’s best parts is in the tool entries. Each of the tool kits that characters can have proficiency with has the following entries:

• Associated Abilities
• Components
• Special Uses
• Example Tasks

I like the additional guidance for these toolkits and the reasons why you may want to use them.

Magic items now have prices associated with them, which aren’t restricted to rarity. Other factors can shift the prices up or down. The book clarifies that magic items aren’t commonly available, but occasionally, you may want to make them available, and the prices help facilitate what happens next.

A new level of rarity has been added to the book, fabled items. Fabled items gain more abilities based on the character’s level attuned to the item to grow with the characters. These don’t have prices because they are meant to be exceptional story-based items. I like all this, except we only get four in the Player’s Guide. I would have loved an example item that would be worthwhile for each character class in the book.

Playing the Game

The core rules haven’t been updated much here. Some terminology changes, like shifting Blindsight to Keensense, are made. The biggest change is the addition of Luck.

Luck is a new currency players gain once per turn when they fail an attack roll, a saving throw, or whenever something significant happens and the GM wants to award it. You can spend Luck 1 for 1 to increase the result of a die roll and three Luck to reroll. You can only have up to 5 luck.

Seeing this in action in a few games, I like this. I like it better than Inspiration (Heroic Inspiration), which it replaces. The biggest complaint is that in combat and action scenes, Luck takes care of itself, but if you go a long time between those kinds of dangers, your GM still needs to remember to find reasons to hand it out. 

Encounter Gameplay

While this is a Player’s Guide, this is essentially the GM’s section of the Player’s Guide, giving examples of how adventures and campaigns unroll and adding some rules like Hazards. It also includes downtime activities and creates some new currencies that surround them.

Carousing can be used to find contacts and generate favors, and research can be used to generate clues. There are examples of what kind of favors can be called in from different contacts, and clues can be used to automatically succeed on an Intelligence check to recall information.

The training downtime allows characters to learn proficiency with weapons, armor, or talents, in addition to languages and tools. It still takes forever to learn something, but some of those might be more tempting for a player to attempt.

Spellcasting

The most significant changes to spellcasting involve splitting spells into four sources, Arcane, Divine, Primordial, and Wyrd, and separating Rituals from other spells. There are no class spells, only sources of power, which certain classes use for their spells. 

Arcane magic is drawn from ambient magical energies, Divine magic is drawn from the gods and powers of creation, Primordial magic comes from the natural world, and the Wyrd power source pulls from places beyond the standard planes of existence. I have the most problem with Wyrd because it mainly exists for Warlocks and shifts some of the Warlock class’ story. Warlocks now are people who learn to cast spells that tap into the Wyrd power source, who need a patron to keep those energies from warping and twisting them. That feels like it detracts from the feeling of a Warlock being someone willing to bargain for unearned power, and it also means that if you introduce the full range of patrons that have appeared in D&D before, you’ll have genies and angels granting Wyrd power because that’s what the Warlock uses.

I like the split between Ritual spells and other spells, and letting classes track known Ritual separately. I like the feel of Rituals being a separate, long term style of magic, which fits a lot of fictional narratives. The downside is that there aren’t enough Rituals to make that Ritual spell list feel robust. There are a few new rituals to fill out some of the power sources, and I know we’re never going to have as many Rituals as we have standard spells, but on the ground, as a brand new rule, it feels like a great idea that could use more support. 

With four power sources, it will be tricky to determine what kind of spells should go on what list and how to keep all of them feeling distinct. While this can be tricky with Arcane, Divine, and Primordial, it gets even trickier with Wyrd. I can see Primordial as having some overlap as a little bit of Arcane and a little bit of Divine, but Wyrd feels like Arcane, and maybe some stuff that lets you reach out to entities you shouldn’t. I almost feel we need distinct Wyrd spells that do what other spells do, with their own quirks, rather than matching existing spells.

One change to spells illustrates what I mean in the above example. The Arcane power source has Create Familiar, a spell where you’re pulling together magical forces to create a unique creature bound to you. But the Wyrd power source still has Find Familiar because they are calling some entity to come and work for them.

Most of the spells don’t change much in this source from the 5e SRD, but there are a few new ones from other Kobold Press sources, like Gear Barrage. There are also some interesting reframings in some spells, like changing Fire Shield to Elemental Shield and adding additional damage types. While this shouldn’t throw people off too much, it does mean that some spells that could have used some tweaks or clarification, like Tiny Hut or Heroes Feast, don’t get any changes. Goodberry does get a slight change in that it can only sustain people every other day, meaning you can’t infinitely feed a small group of people with spellcasting. As with the Druid’s Wild Shape ability, creatures with the Animal tag may now be subject to some spells used only to affect the Beast type. This is basically the “fix” for using spells that affect animals and also affect hybrids like hippogryphs or owlbears.

Appendix

The appendix has a variety of information, including the gods of the Labyrinth, Kobold Press’s new “meta-setting” for the game, which holds every other campaign world you can think of. The gods included cover Dreams, War, Deception, Crafting, the Moon, and the Sun, and leave me wanting a little more in terms of covering standard pantheon roles.

There are also lists of Egyptian, Greek, and Norse gods. These gods are listed with Domains that go beyond the three presented in this book, with a disclaimer that future products will have more. That makes me wonder if Kobold Press will do books like Xanathar’s or Tasha’s for this line or like their own Tome of Heroes. Without a “core” setting-neutral book providing these options, they may not get as many people invested in setting up books and adventures to get more options.

Some stat blocks for different creatures may come up, either through purchase or class abilities. There are some changes to the stat block, which I’m not going to go into here because I’m going to dive into the Monster Vault all on its own. 

It’s Not in the Book, But . . . 

When looking for clarification on the Enforcer’s capstone ability, I wanted to see if there was any explanation. On the Kobold Press Discord, it appears that the Rogue’s Sneak Attack was meant to trigger only once per turn on their turn, which would align with some of the earlier playtest documents for the 2024 D&D rules. The indication was that it would be addressed in an errata. I hope they don’t do this. I don’t think the Rogue is overpowered with this ability, and it actually feels like a Sneak Attack to be able to get that damage when they can make attacks on other turns. It also makes the Rogue a little stickier, and dangerous to retreat from without using a full Withdrawal action. I don’t think the Rogue needs to be nerfed in this way.

Valiant Tales

 Many of the rules in the Tales of the Valiant Player’s Guide do what it says on the tin, staying closer to the pre-2024 iteration of D&D, with some tweaks here and there to make things work better and to curtail noted problems 

Many of the rules in the Tales of the Valiant Player’s Guide do what it says on the tin, staying closer to the pre-2024 iteration of D&D, with some tweaks here and there to make things work better and to curtail noted problems. Lineage and Heritage are a great change. Luck is an excellent replacement for Inspiration, and I like creating currencies for Downtime activities that can be used while adventuring. It’s appealing to give secondary uses and traits to weapons, and building ways for them to work that don’t cause them to be triggered and adjudicated constantly is a plus. I love the descriptions and examples of the tools. Magic item pricing that isn’t overly broad is greatly appreciated. I like the logic behind splitting Rituals out from other spells. 

Lost in the Labyrinth

There may be more changes to expected gameplay by grouping sources of magic than is immediately apparent, and the Bard, especially, feels like a very similar frame that will have a different role in the party. I hope the change talked about for the Rogue doesn’t get made in future printings. I think their Sneak Attack is fine, and once it’s in print, it will take a lot of people by (unpleasant) surprise. I don’t know how I feel about the Warlock and just gaining a spellcasting progression, and I don’t like how the power sources change the “story” of the class. I didn’t want drastically reimagined spells, but a few more problem children getting some fixes would have been appreciated. Rituals are a good idea that feels a little thin. 

Qualified Recommendation–A product with lots of positive aspects, but buyers may want to understand the context of the product and what it contains before moving it ahead of other purchases.

If you want a version of the 5e SRD rules that just cleans up the 2014 rules and addresses some issues with the system, and the 2024 D&D rules don’t do exactly what you want them to do, this system will get you most of the way there. I would say using some of the classes with their ToV changes but with their original class spell list is an upgrade in many cases. The Ranger exemplifies this. However, if you do that, you cannot use your 2014 subclasses without modifications, which will be a sticking point for many people. Its strange that more of Kobold Press’ library of subclasses will work better with 2024 D&D than with Tales of the Valiant.

Cutting off full compatibility with the 2014 SRD material means that this line will need to provide a lot of variety quickly to feel as robust as the other option. Some of the most needed content will be subclasses and rituals. I’m still waiting to get a feel for how changing spell lists and significant changes like the Warlock’s redesign will affect expectations. But there is enough in here that isn’t an open question, and I appreciate everything Kobold Press has done here.

Read more »

Game Rant reports that Borderland 4 isn't fully open world despite being seamless: Borderlands 4's Open-World Clarification Is Good News, But There's Still One Concern Summary Borderlands 4's seamless design implies a large map, necessitating a focus on quality over quantity for content.... Read more »

Couchpotato spotted a development update for Archmage Rises: The Game is Alive: Jan 10 Dev Update I’m here, at my desk, with Unity open to Archmage Rises.  The first thing I did was make sure it still compiles and runs so I can work on it.... Read more »

The Turn Based Lovers checked out the card based roguelike Graphite: Graphite: A Unique Pencil-Drawn Roguelite RPG With a Deep Timeline-Based Combat system A few days ago, I had the pleasure of trying out a fascinating roguelite RPG featuring an engaging and deep combat system.... Read more »

Learn more about weapon types and stats in MENACE: Dev Diary #4 - Weapon Types and Stats Weapons in MENACE: Stats, Strategy, and Firepower. Happy New Year everyone! In the first Dev Diary of 2025, we will give an overview of weapon types and weapon stats in MENACE, as these are key elements of how the game plays and what the player has to consider when making his decisions before and during the battle.... Read more »

A Kickstarter campaign for the J-RPG Alterium Shift has been announced for February 4: Alterium Shift - Winter Games Expo Trailer - Early Access Update and Kickstarter Announcement We are excited to announce our upcoming Kickstarter as well as our next release update for Early Access will be coming in Q1 of 2025.... Read more »

WolfheartFPS checked out Kingdom Come Deliverance II: Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is Absolutely Wild (Initial Impressions) A thrilling story-driven action RPG, with a rich open world, set in 15th century Medieval Europe. Experience the ultimate medieval adventure - through the eyes of young Henry - as you embark on a journey of epic proportions.... Read more »

GamingBolt reviewed Ys Memoire: The Oath in Felghana: Ys Memoire: The Oath in Felghana Review - The Final Verdict It's incredible to think back on how influential Falcom's action RPGs have been. The genre, as we know it, wouldn't exist without Dragon Slayer, and while numerous other titles hog the spotlight, the development team continues to pump out titles in its acclaimed Ys series.... Read more »

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There are lots of ways to build NPCs in your fantasy RPGs. In Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master I suggest building NPCs by finding an existing character archetype from your favorite source of fiction – books, TV shows, movies, comics, and so on.

Picking characters from existing fiction is a shortcut for filling out NPCs fast with physical traits, mannerisms, attitudes, accents, motivations, and more. Instead of either selecting or rolling randomly for all these traits, you can grab a character from a book, movie, or TV show you like and get all of them at once.

It's easy to get lost in this idea, though. Which characters should you choose? Do you keep a database of a thousand possible characters? That doesn't sound very lazy to me.

So here's an even lazier trick. Keep a set of characters from a single show handy. Pick a show you like – one with interesting enough characters that you have a bunch to pick from. Go to the show's Wikipedia page, IMDB page, or some other site with a list of characters. Print them out or copy them into your prep notes. Look them over when you need a character archetype for an NPC and you're off to the races. You don't need a lot. Seven to twelve should be fine.

I binge-watched the Expanse recently and it has a great set of characters to choose from.

Here's a list of the characters from Expanse, some of which I've already tied to NPCs in my City of Arches campaign. The others are available for me to use later.

• Joe Miller – Belter detective on Ceres.
• James Holden – Captain of the Rocinante (COA – Garland Willowmane, head of the Archkeepers).
• Alex Kamal – Martian pilot of the Rocinante.
• Naomi Nagata – Belter engineer of the Rocinante.
• Amos Burton – Earther mechanic of the Rocinante.
• Chrisjen Avasarala – UN Deputy Undersecretary of Executive Administration (COA – Roselyn Zeche, spymaster of the queen).
• Bobbie Draper – Martian Marine Corps gunnery sergeant (COA – Joslyn Halfcloak – Second of the Golden Knights).
• Camina Drummer – Tycho Station's Belter head of security, later the leader of the rebel faction opposing the Free Navy.
• Fred Lucius Johnson – UNN colonel-turned-leader of the OPA on Tycho Station (COA – Lord Bianca Swifthand, leader of the Golden Knights).
• Anderson Dawes – OPA's Ceres liaison (COA – Adel Rosethorn, fence of the Black Hand). – Diogo Harari – Young Belter from Ceres in the OPA.

Other Example Shows

Here's a list of shows with some great characters. Again, you only need a list of characters from one show but this list can give you some ideas for shows to choose.

• Breaking Bad
• Deadwood
• Downton Abbey
• The Mandalorian
• Mr. Robot
• Peaky Blinders
• Sons of Anarchy
• The Wire
• Twin Peaks

Add Your Own Ancestries and Genders

Shake up your character archetypes by changing genders, applying different fantasy ancestries, and tailoring the characters to suit the job you need them to do. Given how often we improvise NPCs, you'd be surprised how little you need to change to run one at the table.

Fictional archetypes are a fantastic short-hand for building rich NPCs in just a couple of minutes. Now, with a single show's cast of characters in hand, you're ready to roll.

More Sly Flourish Stuff

Last week I posted a couple of YouTube videos on Tracking Character Info – Lazy DM Tip and Pit of Unending Thirst – Dragon Empire Prep Session 7.

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.

• Goodman Games DCC Bundle of Holding
• Humblewood and Heckna Pay What You Want
• Whitesparrow and the Night Blades in the CC
• Goodman Games 5e System - Advanced Advantage
• Monster Overhaul
• Thoughts on Foundry
• 3-2-1 Quest Model

Talk Show Links

Here are links to the sites I referenced during the talk show.

• Goodman Games DCC Adventure Bundle of Holding
• Humblewood Campaign Setting Pay What You Want
• Heckna Campaign Adventure Pay What You Want
• Whitesparrow and Night Blades in the Creative Commons
• Monster Overhaul
• Mobile Improvements for Foundry

Patreon Questions and Answers

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

• Dealing with the Strain of GMing
• Balancing Types of Secrets
• Which Books Do You Take With You?

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:

• Keep your prep, your tools, and your game simple. Let it get complicated as the story evolves with your players.
• List and refine your most useful tools for prep and play.
• Ask for out of game feedback every few games. What do people like? What do they want to see more of?
• Trouble sleeping? Put yourself in your game’s world. What do you see? How is the world evolving?
• Who are your three main antagonists? What do they want? What three steps are they taking to get there?
• Draw mini-maps to show the characters’ progression through a dungeon.
• Use a small fishing tackle box to hold minis, tokens, coins, markers, sticky tack, index cards, and other small things you use during your game.

Related Articles

• Focus Extra Prep Time on the Characters
• Twenty Things to Do Instead of Checking Social Media
• What Does Your Room Look Like?

Get More from Sly Flourish

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

Buy Sly Flourish's Books

• 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 »

A while back, as part of Wizards of the Coast's great hurling of D&D into a digital future, WOTC removed access to a long hosted and simple dice roller – along with everything else on the original D&D website.

Lamenting its loss with a friend, I decided to whip up a new simple dice roller that you can run online or download and run locally.

You can find it at:

https://slyflourish.com/dice/

Bookmark it and download it so you always have a copy.

I released this dice roller under a CC0 license so you can host it on your own website, share it with friends, build apps, engage in a dice-rolling interpretive dance, or do anything else you can think of with it. You can find or fork the sourcecode on Github.

This dice roller is intended to be simple – no fancy 3d dice bouncing around the screen, no crazy options for weird roll mixes. You can choose a common die, roll one or several of them, add modifiers if you want, or roll a die with a weird number of sides if you're into Dungeon Crawl Classics.

If you're on an iPhone and want to use it offline (say you're at a big convention with terrible internet connectivity), you can download it to your Files app, unzip it, and "share" it with Microsoft's iOS Edge browser. I don't know why it won't open in Safari locally, but Edge seems to work.

You can also go to https://slyflourish.com/dice/ and "add to reading list". If you have the "Automatically Save Offline" option on in your Safari settings, it'll save a local copy in your reading list so you can use it offline. By downloading the html version yourself, you'll always have a copy.

I'm giving this dice roller away completely, no attribution required, but if you dig what I do and want to see more tools like this one, check out my Patreon which has cool tools like

• the 5e Artisanal Monster Database with over 2,400 5e monster stat blocks.
• the Forge of Foes monster stat tool.
• the Dyson royalty-free map gallery.
• the Lazy GM random generator.
• the Lazy RPG Talk show topic database.
• the Sly Flourish Patreon Q&A database.

All these tools include downloadable versions so you can keep your copy forever.

Thank you and happy holidays!

More Sly Flourish Stuff

Last week I posted a couple of YouTube videos on the 2024 TTRPG Year in Review.

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.

• Cities Without Number Bundle of Holding (ended 24 December 2024)
• Shadowrun Bundle of Holding
• Join the Arcane Library Newsletter for Two Free Adventures
• GM Resources in Markdown for Obsidian
• Use the Obsidian Web Clipper to Save Web Pages
• Free Dice Roller Web App
• Notable Sections of the 2024 D&D Dungeon Master's Guide

Talk Show Links

Here are links to the sites I referenced during the talk show.

• Shadowrun 4e Bundle of Holding
• Arcane Library
• Lazy GM Tools in Markdown on Github
• Obsidian Web Clipper
• Free Dice Roller
• Lazy Encounter Benchmark
• Running Hordes

Patreon Questions and Answers

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

• Pondering Conclusions for Sandbox Games
• Using a Big Monitor on a Gaming Table
• Advice for Bridge and Travel Sessions

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:

• You don’t need to spell out every detail in a room. Let your players’ imaginations fill in the blanks.
• Huge wheels, running water, and heat can power ancient machines for millennia.
• Use adhesive tabs to mark important pages in your GM books you use at the table.
• There’s no such thing as “official”. No single company holds a monopoly on good game design. Build your own game for your table from many sources.
• Get used to averaging damage — for every two dice you subtract from a big pool of dice, add the max of one of those dice plus one to the static value. 8d8 becomes 36.
• Add variance to static damage by subtracting 3 and adding 1d6.
• Keep a good list of random names on hand. Write them down when you tie them to an NPC. These lists are one of the simplest examples of “preparing to improvise”.

Related Articles

• Lazy Monster Damage – Subtract 3, Add 1d6
• Use Physical Tools for Online Games
• The Simplest Way to Annotate a Map

Get More from Sly Flourish

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

Buy Sly Flourish's Books

• 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 »

Setting up situations instead of scenes helps GMs avoid predetermined outcomes. Situations give players agency over the approach they take and builds a world that feels real. Even the GM doesn't know what to expect.

What's the difference? Situations lay out the components to create a scene when the characters interact with it. There's no plot. There's no expected path. There's no single ending. Scenes are prebuilt to go one way. Situations can go in many different directions. Not knowing how situations play out is more fun for GMs and more fun for players than walking through a scripted scene.

What's the Lazy DM's method for setting up situations?

Location. Situations take place at a location, sometimes big and sometimes small. If this situation takes place in a dungeon, offer multiple entrances, multiple paths, loop-backs, and secret passages. Exploring the location should be rewarding on its own. Dyson Logo's maps are my go-to for maps of such locations. When you have a map, write down evocative features in each main chamber. These evocative features help you improvise details. See chapter 7 of Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master for more.

Inhabitants. Who resides at this location? I like to mix up both intelligent and unintelligent monsters. Maybe a bunch of hobgoblin soldiers guard the upper keep but ravenous ghouls, black puddings, and carrion crawlers dwell in the forgotten tunnels beneath. This variety of monsters lets players choose a path they want to take and the sorts of creatures they might face. Good random tables, like those in the Lazy DM's Workbook help you shake up your mind and fill the location with interesting inhabitants.

You don't need to place these inhabitants in any particular room. Instead, keep a list of them and drop them into a location as needed based on the situation in the story and the pacing of the game.

Include friendly NPCs – turncoats, disgruntled staff, or ghostly spirits the characters can talk to.

Behaviors. How do the inhabitants act in this location? Do they send out guard patrols? Do they have big drunken revelries on certain nights? What would the pattern of their behavior be if the characters never showed up? The same is true for unintelligent monsters. Do they wander away from their lair? What are their activity patterns? Answering these questions helps you run the world as NPCs react to the actions of the characters.

When considering inhabitant behaviors, think first about what behaviors make sense for the inhabitant and the situation, then think if this is going to be fun for the game when you consider your pacing and beats.

A Goal. Why would the characters go to this place? What are they trying to accomplish? Are they trying to rescue someone? Stop a dark ritual? Steal something? Kill someone? The Lazy DM's Companion has pages of tables to generate goals if you're stuck for ideas. Reinforce this goal often with your players – it's easy to forget.

Complications. Sometimes the situation changes at the location. What event might shake up the situation? Does another big monster attack? Is something set on fire? Do some of those unintelligent monsters break free? This might be caused by something the characters do or it might just happen on its own. During prep, think about a few ways things might get complicated during the situation and improvise them during the game itself.

The Difference Between Scenes and Situations

Building situations is different from laying out individual encounters or scenes. The big difference is that you don't know how it's going to go. You don't know which path the players choose to take. You don't know how inhabitants react to the characters' actions. You don't know what happens when things get complicated. You've set the stage but you're not scripting the outcome. The outcome happens during the game and it's a joy to watch it play out.

More Sly Flourish Stuff

Last week I posted a couple of YouTube videos – Update Forge of Foes or the Encounter Benchmark for D&D 2024? and Eryz the Akinji – Dragon Empire Prep Session 6.

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.

• One Ring Bundle of Holding
• Haunted West 50% Off
• Running Mixed 5e Characters
• Avoid the 2024 DMG's Enspelled Magic Items
• Tales of the Valiant Gamemaster's Guide

Talk Show Links

Here are links to the sites I referenced during the talk show.

• Subscribe to the Sly Flourish Newsletter
• Support Sly Flourish on Patreon
• Buy Sly Flourish Books
• One Ring Bundle of Holding
• Haunted West 50% off (Coupon HOLIDAY24)
• Tales of the Valiant Gamemaster's Guide (Affiliate Link)

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:

• Ensure loot distribution is fair so players don’t feel left out.
• Keep track of spells as rewards to wizards.
• Offer two or three paths when traveling through the wilds or into the depths of the earth.
• Ask the characters where their minds and conversations go as they rest around a campfire.
• Keep good lists of random encounters handy during prep and play.
• Ask for marching orders and who’s carrying a light during exploration.
• Review character items, notable features, backgrounds, previous campfire tales, and player desires when you start your prep.

Related Articles

• Building a D&D Situation – Castle Orzelbirg from Empire of the Ghouls
• Prepping a Dungeon
• Focus Your Campaign

Get More from Sly Flourish

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

Buy Sly Flourish's Books

• 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 »

Bosses need help. Bosses often face the full wrath of the characters, just for being a boss. This focus often leads to anticlimactic fights in which the boss is ineffective at fulfilling the role it had in the game and the story.

Legendary resistance covers a lot – but not all – of the problems bosses face when we want them to hold up their end of the fiction. As new versions of 5e emerge, we can't be sure what abilities and effects characters bring to the table that might completely circumvent a boss monster's capabilities. Customizing individual bosses is too much work.

Enter Dreadful Blessings – inspired by doom points from the Tales of the Valiant Monster Vault.

Here's the idea:

Certain boss monsters, determined by you the GM, are given one or more "dreadful blessings". These dreadful blessings replace Legendary Resistance. They can be used at any time, even when the boss is unconscious or on another plane. You might default to giving a boss two or three such blessings but you can change that number depending on what you need. It's important, however, to clarify to your players how many dreadful blessings the monster has and don't switch it up during the battle. The number of blessings is their only real limitation.

Dreadful blessings can be used for lots of things. Some examples include

• succeeding on a failed saving throw.
• ignoring a non-save-based detrimental effect.
• piercing through character resistances or immunities.
• forcing disadvantage on saving throws for a particular ability.
• ending an ongoing effect or suppressing it until the end of their next turn.
• moving or teleporting without provoking opportunity attacks.
• ripping through a force cage or shattering a wall of force.
• recharging and using a powerful limited action.
• transferring incoming damage or effects to minions or allies for a round.
• gaining advantage on all attacks until the end of their next turn.
• ending an effect at the beginning of a turn instead of the end.

Talk With Your Players First

Don't surprise players with dreadful blessings. It's no fun if the characters throw a force cage on your dreadfully blessed death knight only for the death knight to rip through it without the players knowing why.

Instead, before you start combat (or even during your session zero), describe dreadful blessings to your players. Ensure you describe that

• dreadful blessings only work on particular boss monsters – not all monsters.
• bosses only get a specific amount of blessings (usually two or three).
• dreadful blessings are intended to ensure boss monsters fulfill their role in the fiction of the game.
• you'll warn players when a blessed monster shows up so they know what to expect.
• you won't force "gotchas" by making players burn abilities without realizing they could be subverted with a dreadful blessing.

Use When Needed and When They're Fun

It's a careful balance to know when a mechanic like this is warranted and doesn't steal the agency and fun from players wanting to use their abilities.

My general rule of thumb is to use a dreadful blessing when it helps a boss monster fulfill its role in the fiction of the game and its challenge level in combat. A CR 19 creature locked in a forcecage isn't a CR 19 creature anymore. It can't do anything. It's not fulfilling its role. An ancient green dragon who breathes a 77 point poison breath isn't fulfilling its role if all of that damage is reduced to zero for all characters because they happened to munch on a hero's feast before the battle.

"I Hate This"

If you hate this mechanic, you're not alone. I've talked to many who don't like the idea. That's fine. I'm not saying they need to be in place in all 5e games. Dreadful blessings are a potential tool for groups who feel like boss monsters need something more to keep them in play in a sea of options that can often completely remove their threat both in the game and in the fiction.

Think about it. Talk to your group. Maybe try it. And see how it works for you.

More Sly Flourish Stuff

Last week I posted a YouTube video on Ruins of Blood and Sand – Dragon Empire Prep Session 5.

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.

• Level Up Gateway Alpha Released
• A5e.Tools
• Lord of the Rings 5e Not Independent
• So You Wanna Roleplay
• The Products We Continually Use at the Table
• 20% off Sly Flourish Books!
• New Quarterly Patreon Q&A

Talk Show Links

Here are links to the sites I referenced during the talk show.

• Level Up Gateway Alpha Announcement
• Level Up Gateway Main Site
• A5e.Tools
• Wanna Play Right Now Spotlight
• Buy Wanna Play Right Now Store Page
• High-Use RPG Products – All Responses
• Worlds Without Number – Paid Version
• Worlds Without Number - Free Version
• Flee Mortals
• A5e Monstrous Menagerie
• A5e Trials and Treasure
• Knave 2
• Maze Rats Print
• Maze Rats pdf
• Maze Rats for Obsidian
• Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master
• Forge of Foes
• Lazy DM's Companion
• So You Want to be a Gamemaster
• Monster Overhaul
• Ironsworn
• Raging Swan Dread Thingonomicon
• GM Miscellany
• Chessex Wet Erase Battle Mat
• Dyson Maps
• Midgard Worldbook (Affiliate link)
• Lazy Monster Tokens
• 5e Cheat Sheet
• Sly Flourish 2024 Gift Guide

Patreon Questions and Answers

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

• Worldbuilding Off-Screen Towns and Settlements
• Relating CR to the Monster's Fiction
• Will "Update Available" overwrite my D&D Beyond Stuff?
• What Do You Think of the 4th Edition Dungeon Master's Guide?
• Full-Power Characters Showing Up Deep in Dungeons

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:

• Characters are the only sources of secrets you can guarantee.
• Let players know when boss monsters have legendary resistance or other ability breaking effects so they can make informed choices.
• Replace legendary resistances with “dreadful blessings” that let powerful boss monsters break effects that ruin their place in the fiction.
• Discovering traps is the fun part, not triggering them.
• Get to decisions and actions quickly. Avoid long narratives.
• Have players make choices for their next path before the end of your current session.
• Avoid one-shotting characters to zero HP. Spread dangerous damage around.

Related Articles

• Collected Experiences Running D&D 5e Boss Fights
• Do We Need a New D&D Player's Handbook?
• 2024 RPG Gift Guide

Get More from Sly Flourish

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

Buy Sly Flourish's Books

• 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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Tis the season to give the gamers in your life something special. Below are a handful of my favorite tabletop roleplaying game products. Instead of a "best of 2024", these items are products I find myself going back to again and again when prepping and running my own games. I'm literally surrounded by hundreds of awesome RPG products but the list below includes the products I use most often at my table.

Pathfinder Flip Mat Basic

I think the Pathfinder Flip Mat Basic is the best deal in tabletop RPGs. It folds up small, is extremely lightweight, works with either wet erase or dry erase markers, and lets you draw anything you need for your game. I find it works best with Staedtler Lumocolor medium black (model 315-9) wet-erase markers which are hard to find but draw out big dark lines in a pen that doesn't dry up during the game. Many GMs also love the venerable Chessex vinyl mat and I plan to give that one another go myself.

Midgard World Book

I've used the Midgard World Book for three campaigns now and it's just awesome. It's a huge 466 pages with tons of depth, gods, and regions – any one of which can serve as a whole campaign area. In the past couple of years Kobold Press printed a second printing on higher quality paper than the original paper. It's a lot of material in a single book and the loose connections to real-world places and gods might not be for everyone but it stands as one of my favorite campaign sourcebooks ever.

Demon Cults and Secret Societies

Though it connects well with the Midgard World Book, Demon Cults and Secret Societies also work well on its own. I'm a huge fan of mysterious cults and this book includes detailed descriptions of thirteen such cults with leaders, motivations, stat blocks, and more. Like the Midgard World Book, Demon Cults and Secret Societies is a book I keep coming back to over and over again in several campaigns. Unfortunately it looks like it's only available in PDF. I'm lucky enough to have the hardcover.

Level Up Advanced 5e's Trials and Treasure and Monstrous Menagerie

I've talked at length about A5e's Monstrous Menagerie before. It was my favorite product of 2023 and I still find myself using it. It has some strong competition now with Kobold Press's Monster Vault and the upcoming D&D 2025 Monster Manual but, for now, it remains my favorite monster book because of all the extra table-usable material it has for monsters. It also works hand-in-hand with Trials and Treasure – the sort-of GM's guide for A5e. Trials and Treasure has tons of fantastic random encounter tables and, when you roll a monster, you then go to the Monstrous Menagerie to come up with a more detailed encounter for that particular monster based on that monster's encounter tables.

Trials and Treasure also includes fantastic random treasure tables for 5e and the best exploration system and tools I've found for 5e.

The two books share a powerful connection. I find myself using them together all the time for 5e games. Whether your players are playing D&D 2014, D&D 2024, Tales of the Valiant, or A5e; these books have a lot to offer.

The Lazy DM's Companion

Ok, I know. It's my own book. But damn, I use it all the time. I've even cut it up and put my favorite tables in my own GM binder. The Lazy DM's Companion is built on dozens of tables – all focused on the most important aspects to prep and run great games. Check out the free sample to see if it's for you.

Shadowdark Quickstart Rules

I think the Shadowdark Quickstart Rules are the best introduction to D&D. It's easy to learn, connects well with players who either play 5e or plan to play 5e, and captures the pure feeling of D&D without the complications. This inexpensive quick start kit reminds me of the original white box (even though I never had a white box) with enough material to run games for a long time. It's also lightweight and easy to pack for convention play. The Shadowdark RPG core book was my favorite product of 2023 and, after playing an entire 1st to 10th level Shadowdark campaign over a year, along with dozens of one-shot Shadowdark games, it's clear I love this system. The Shadowdark Quickstart pack is a wonderful gift for the GM in your life.

More Sly Flourish Stuff

Last week I posted the YouTube video Kukkutarma – Dragon Empire Prep Session 4.

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.

• Scott Gray on Points of Interest
• Mike's Going to the Philadelphia Area Game Expo!
• Lord of the Rings on D&D Beyond
• Building a Resilient Hobby when Elon Musk Threatens to Buy It
• Half-Off Lord of the Rings from Free League
• More Thoughts on a Resilient TTRPG Hobby
• 20% Off Sly Flourish Books
• Tales of the Valiant Pocket Editions
• Free League Sales
• Old School Essentials Sale
• Free League Bundle of Holding
• Hero Forge Custom Flat Miniatures
• The Best Value in TTRPG Accessories
• The Dangers of Crafting Magic Items in the D&D 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide

Talk Show Links

Here are links to the sites I referenced during the talk show.

• 20% off Sly Flourish Books and Free US Shipping!
• Points of Interest by Scott Gray
• Philadelphia Area Gaming Expo
• Lord of the Rings on D&D Beyond
• What does the Lord of the Rings integration on D&D Beyond look like?
• Buy Lord of the Rings 5e from Free League
• Free League Humble Bundle
• Musk – "How Much is Hasbro?"
• Ensuring the Resilience of your RPGs
• Surviving a Digital D&D
• Tales of the Valiant: Player’s Guide & Monster Vault Pocket Editions
• Old School Essentials Sale
• Flat Hero Forge Miniatures
• Pathfinder Flip-Mat Basic
• Staedtler Lumocolor Medium Black Marker model 315-9
• Tracking Monsters by Player-Driven Characteristics

Patreon Questions and Answers

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

• Organizing and Tracking Monsters in 5e Combat
• Getting Into Alien Minds
• The Resolution of Fantastic Locations
• Understanding Scenes and Locations

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:

• Include one or two social encounters in your list of potential dungeon encounters.
• Run multiple bosses.
• Avoid NPC betrayal. Make NPC motivations clear.
• Customize every magic weapon or suit of armor. Add stories, themes, and single-use spell effects.
• Include and reveal secret passages.
• When running a session focused on a single character, highlight others as well.
• Break character and talk to your players about potential game-changing secret character decisions.

Related Articles

• My Favorite TTRPG Products of 2023
• Choosing Monsters for your 5e Game
• What Is 5e?

Get More from Sly Flourish

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

Buy Sly Flourish's Books

• 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 »

My simplified encounter building guidelines for 5e games breaks down into two steps:

1. Select the number and type of monsters that make sense for the situation.
2. Determine if this encounter might be inadvertently deadly by using the Lazy Encounter Benchmark.

This second step is optional. Our goal isn't to design perfectly balanced encounters. Once we have enough experience running our games, we can usually tell if something's going over our expectations for a given combat encounter.

But for that first part – how do we know what monsters make sense for the situation?

There's a lot that can go into answering this question but I'll give you an easy tip. Find some random encounter tables like those found in Xanathar's Guide to Everything or Level Up Advanced 5e's Trials and Treasure and choose the most suitable list of random encounters for the environment that most closely matches the one you're trying to fill.

The Level Up Advanced 5e Trials and Treasure book and the Monstrous Menagerie work well together for this step. Trials and Treasure has large general-purpose random encounters and each monster in the Menagerie has a small table of detailed encounters for that particular monster. The two guides are intended to work together to make interesting encounters and show you which monsters tend to band together with other monsters in a given encounter.

You don't need to roll on these tables. Instead, skim the list and see what jumps out at you. Jot down some of the monsters you think fit well in the environment you're looking at. Sometimes these monsters will be typical dungeon-style monsters like ropers, bulettes, and otyughs. Other times they'll be intelligent monsters – humanoid bandits, veterans, mages, goblins, bugbears, orcs and so on. Sometimes humanoids have monsters with them.

If you're having trouble thinking what kind of inhabitants might be wandering around the location you're preparing, find a good set of tables of random monsters by environment and go down the list until you find a few creatures who work well for your game.

There's another non-lazy trick, though. One that requires work up front but pays big dividends in the end.

Read Your Monster Books

We tend to focus our attention on the stat blocks of a monster but the lore in those books is really valuable. That lore tells us where monsters hang out, what other monsters they hang out with, and how they react when adventurers show up. That lore matters.

Read those monster books, fill your head with that lore, and you'll build some knowledge of which monsters make sense for a given situation.

More Sly Flourish Stuff

Last week I posted a couple of YouTube videos on Surviving a Digital D&D and The Smuggler's Trade Route – Dragon Empire Prep Session 3.

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:

• Lazy RPG Talk Show Number One D&D Podcast by D&D Fanatics
• Professor Dungeon Master on the 2024 DMG
• DM David on a 25 year D&D Wish List
• Elon Musk tells WOTC to Burn In Hell
• Anatomy of a Situation -- Red Eagle Tower
• Tomb of the War King Scenario

Patreon Questions and Answers

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

• Favorite Monster Abilities of Players
• Building Your Own Campaign Outlines
• Tips for Playing In-Person Games

RPG Tips

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

• Use your current favorite TV show as a collection of NPC archetypes.
• Use Staedtler medium point wet erase markers on your Pathfinder basic flip mat.
• Keep generic monster tokens on hand for improvised combat encounters.
• Index cards are one of the most flexible and useful tools in TTRPGs.
• Keep a list of the characters in front of you throughout your game.
• Add a touch of variance to static monster damage by subtracting 3 and adding 1d6.
• Use 10 + dex for static monster initiative. This way some players go before them and some go after.

Related Articles

• 2024 RPG Gift Guide
• Advanced Random Encounter Tricks
• Lazy Monster Damage – Subtract 3, Add 1d6

Get More from Sly Flourish

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

Buy Sly Flourish's Books

• 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 »

Here are some useful tricks for getting the most out of random encounter tables.

Roll Twice

Roll twice on a random encounter table and mix the results together. Maybe the characters find two groups fighting each other. Maybe they find one who just wiped out another. Maybe the two groups are allies. Mixing two groups together adds significant and meaningful complications to what otherwise might be a single boring encounter.

Mix Multiple Tables

Roll on different types of random tables to mix themes, monuments, locations, effects, conditions, and descriptions. Use these other tables to add layers to the encounter and make it unique among all other encounters.

Roll To See What Came Before

Often we do nothing if our roll doesn't trigger a random encounter at the moment. Instead, roll for an encounter that happened earlier. Mixing this trick with the first tip means you might find one group that clashed with another and lost. The first group moved on after destroying the second. Do the characters keep going forward? Do they hunt down the victors? There's lots of agency in stumbling into a situation that already took place.

Add Monuments

When rolling for random encounters during travel or in the wilderness, add an interesting backdrop by rolling for a monument. An old obelisk, weatherworn statue, or a carrion pit gives the scene a clear feeling of place. Add layers to your monument by rolling on origins, effects, conditions, and other tables.

Create and Roll On Your Faction List

Build a custom list of factions for your campaign including gods, historical figures, icons, shady organizations, and any other significant faction. When you roll for an encounter or want to flesh out a monument, roll on this faction list to add the faction's flavor to the rest of the encounter. This list adds relevant history and backstory to the world one encounter at a time.

Attitude

Roll a die to determine the attitude of the creatures you rolled up for an encounter. The lower the roll, the more friendly they are. The higher the roll, the more hostile they behave. Not every encounter needs to be a battle.

Distance

Roll a die to determine how close or far the characters notice the inhabitants. The lower the roll, the closer they are.

Activity

What sort of activities might the creatures in an encounter be engaged with? If you can find a table of potential activities for a creature, you can roll on that table. The Level Up Advanced 5e Monstrous Menagerie includes monster activities for every standard 5e monster, for example. If you don't have a table, roll a die. The lower the roll, the more peaceful or benign the activity. The higher the roll, the more frantic, dangerous, or strange the activity might be.

The Oracle Die

When you're not sure about something in your game, throw a die and build ideas off of the result. Oracle dice in other systems usually tie to a table of outcomes but you can roll the die and see what it inspires. I like the idea that the lower the roll, the less extreme something is. The higher the roll, the more extreme it is. This roll works for weather, attitudes, activities, and so on. When in doubt, roll a die. If you want some awesome and free oracle tables, check out Ironsworn.

More Sly Flourish Stuff

Last week I posted a couple of YouTube videos on Handling Morality in RPGs and The Valley of Blood – Dragon Empire Prep Session 3.

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 on EN World Podcast Talking about the 2024 DMG
• Pathfinder 2 Humble Bundle
• Phantasy Star RPG Preorder
• A5E Monstrous Menagerie 2
• Hard Truths About Crowdfunded RPGs
• Comparing DMG 2024 Advice to Lazy DM Advice

Patreon Questions and Answers

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

• Character Home Bases
• Set Piece Battles or Theater of the Mind?
• Best After-Session Notes
• Improving NPC Voices While Roleplaying

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:

• Set up locations and inhabitants separately. Let inhabitants move around depending on what happens.
• Let the actions of the characters drive the story — not your initial big idea.
• Go with the rule of cool. If it sounds cool, work to help it happen.
• Start with what makes sense in the world. Adjust towards what’s the most fun in the game.
• Write down NPC names.
• Write down where your session ended.
• Think about each character during prep. What do they want? What story hooks do they have? What monsters do they like fighting? What magic items do they look forward to?

Related Articles

• Run Meaningful Random Encounters
• Choosing Monsters for your 5e Game
• Running Hex Crawls for D&D, 5e, or Shadowdark

Get More from Sly Flourish

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

Buy Sly Flourish's Books

• 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 »

Two truths seem evident to me in the tabletop RPG hobby:

1. There are many "right" answers to how we play tabletop RPGs – including which RPGs we play. There's rarely only one right answer to any aspect of this hobby. Instead, there are many right answers, each fitting different people, groups, playstyles, and other circumstances.

2. It's hard to understand why other people would choose the right answer that isn't ours.

Common examples are the games we play. Some of us love the character customization, streamlined math, and rich mechanics of Pathfinder 2. Others love the open and freeform story focused games of Powered by the Apocalypse. Others love grim and brutal resource-focused games like Shadowdark RPG.

You no doubt have your preferred RPG and it's hard to understand why other people don't like the game you like best.

But they do. And that's fine.

It's one thing for people not to know about other games and what advantages they hold. It's something else to look at a game and what it does and say "that's not for me". All too often, though, "it's not for me" comes out as "that game sucks". You may hate it but many others may love it.

There are many right answers in many aspects of the TTRPG hobby. It's totally cool for you to like one way and other people to like another.

Focus on sharing experiences and less on proving you're right answer is the right answer.

Other Many Right Answers

There are many right answers for many different aspects of the TTRPG hobby. Here are some examples:

• Some GMs love rolling lots of dice; some GMs don't want to roll dice at all.
• Some love a fully integrated virtual tabletop; some want a VTT as simple as they can get (including none at all).
• Some love online play; some only want to play in person.
• Some love big fancy visual combat displays; some love theater of the mind.
• Some want to use lots of accessories for their games; some want none at all.
• Some love to build vast worlds; some want to focus on the here and now.
• Some love published adventures; some love homebrew.
• Some love published settings; some prefer their own world.
• Some want all-in-one digital tools; some prefer a stack of specialized tools.
• Some love high production value games; some love the ones you can print on one sheet of paper.
• Some GMs want games where they control much of the world; some GMs want the players to build the world with them.

Variants in False Dichotomies

There are wide ranges of answers across these ideas. It's rarely a "yes" or "no" or "this one" or "that one". It's rare for anyone to fit perfectly on one side or the other. Instead, each of us are complex beings falling into a wide range of different opinions on many topics.

Luckily, this hobby has tons of stuff to offer. We can pick and choose what best fits our desires and the preferences of our group. We don't have to argue why we like one thing or another – we each get to choose what works for us.

If it works best for us and our group, that's all that matters.

"That's Not For Me"

Here's a tip to improve TTRPG discourse. Instead of attempting "objective" judgements about any one path or choice someone else makes in the hobby, simply say "that's not for me". Switching from "that thing sucks" to "that's not for me" helps you remember your point of view isn't truth. If there are enough people playing a game, using a system, or following a style that you've heard of – it means someone loves it. If it's not for you, it's not for you. That doesn't make it the wrong choice for everyone.

Share experiences instead of judging the choices of others.

There are many right answers – many different paths – in the TTRPG hobby and all of them are right for someone. Often we can't understand why someone else follows a path different than ours. But we're better richer people for recognizing views different from our own – and we might learn something along the way.

More Sly Flourish Stuff

Last week I posted a couple of YouTube videos on Top Ten Lazy Tricks for D&D and 5e and The Desert Heist – Dragon Empire Prep Session 2.

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:

• Blades in the Dark Deep Cuts
• What Do You Need to Prep Your Session?
• Encounter Building in the D&D 2024 DMG and the Lazy Encounter Benchmark

RPG Tips

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

• Use static initiative of 10 + dex for monsters so some players go before them and some go after.
• Use little adhesive tabs to bookmark monsters in your monster books. There’s no need to copy them elsewhere.
• Draw small simple maps so players can see what they’ve explored so far.
• Staedtler wet erase markers work very well on the Pathfinder basic flip mat for drawing maps and tracking damage done to monsters.
• Use a mixture of random treasure and magic items selected for particular characters. Prep treasure parcels ahead of time.
• Plan a strong start. What happens at the very beginning of your next session to draw players into the game?
• Prep what you need to help you improvise during your next session.

Related Articles

• Being a Good Steward of the TTRPG Hobby
• Find Local Players for Tabletop RPGs
• Focus Extra Prep Time on the Characters

Get More from Sly Flourish

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

Buy Sly Flourish's Books

• 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 »

For those of us who spend a lot of time thinking about improving our games, our minds often dive into the details. How can we speed up combat? How can we draw the characters deeper into the story? How can we offer more meaningful choices? How can we prep enough to fill out the world?

These questions are useful but there's the larger question of why. When we're considering a new approach to our game, or a new tool or accessory we want to use at the table, or a new feature of a VTT – why do we pick the ones we pick and omit the ones we don't?

In Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master I focus on getting more out of your RPGs by preparing less. We can break down this goal into two parts:

1. Make RPGs easier to prepare and run.
2. Make RPGs more fun for us and our players.

There's a careful balance between these two goals. Sometimes, however, the techniques that make our games easier to prepare and run also make our games more fun for us and our players. Here are some examples:

• If we prepare less, we might be able to run more games. More games = more fun.
• If we prepare less, we're less likely to railroad our players down a big complicated story we built ahead of time.
• If we prepare less, our players have more agency to follow different paths and build out elements of the world we haven't built ourselves yet.
• The less we have prepared, the more we're likely to listen to our players and focus on the game as it plays out instead of focusing on what we prepared ahead of time.
• The less we prepare, the less stress we have to stay true to our material and the more we're willing to watch the game unfold.

Sometimes, it's worth extra time to prepare the elements of the game that really matter – the things that bring the most fun to the game. Here are some examples:

• The more time we spend thinking about the characters and their stories, the more we can integrate them into the adventure or campaign.
• The more solid the world around the characters, the more players feel like it's real.
• The more lore we know about the world, the more interesting flavor the characters can discover as they explore it and the easier it is for us to drop in this lore during the game.
• The better we understand a location and its inhabitants, the more we can improvise what happens there as the characters traverse it.
• The better our tools for combat encounter building and the better our understanding of the characters' capabilities in combat, the more fun, heroic, and nail-bity combats we can run.
• The more we spend thinking about treasure, the better that treasure can fit the desires of the characters.
• The more time we spend on a solid strong start, the easier it is to get the players and their characters into the adventure.

The eight steps from Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master are my thoughts about where we can spend our time to bring out the most fun in our games. Other GMs and other groups have their own lists of most beneficial activities to prepare and run their games.

Think about where you spend your time on your prep and ask yourself if that activity makes it easier to prepare and run your game or truly makes the game more fun for your players.

If your approach makes it both easier to run your game and more fun, that's awesome. If your approach does one or the other, that's fine too.

If your activity isn't making your game easier to prep or run, and isn't bringing more fun to the table, why do it?

More Sly Flourish Stuff

Last week I posted a couple of YouTube videos on Is Shadowdark the Best Intro to D&D? and The Ghost Walkers – Dragon Empire Prep Session 1.

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:

• Draconics the Peaceful Way to Play 5e
• Wonderous Worlds by Nord Games
• D&D 2024 Free Rules Giveth and then Taketh Away
• D&D 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide Thoughts and the Four Gamemaster's Guides
• Avoid NPC Betrayals

Patreon Questions and Answers

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

• Favorite Short Adventure Books
• Expanding a GM's Reading List
• Focusing on Prep for the Next Session
• Needing to Improvise with Shadowdark
• Top House Rules for Shadowdark
• The Urgency of Multiple Quest Hooks

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:

• Aim for four players.
• Get into the head of your NPCs. What do they want? What do they fear? What do they have to offer?
• Choose monsters based on the situation even if they’re really easy.
• Keep track of the magic items each character has. Review this list when planning treasure for future adventures.
• Keep a treasure parcel in your prep notes. Reward it, or pieces of it, when it makes sense.
• Require exotic materials for crafting particular magic items. Now the exotic material becomes the reward.
• Prepare for single big monsters to be banished or otherwise completely incapacitated when the characters reach 7th level or above.

Related Articles

• 2016 D&D 5th Edition Dungeon Master Questionnaire
• Using the Lazy DM's Eight Steps At the Table
• High Value Prep

Get More from Sly Flourish

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

Buy Sly Flourish's Books

• 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 »