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This method for learning wizard spells is inspired by the recent popularity of Wordle, a variation on the popular Mastermind guessing game. A word is selected from a random word list and players attempt to guess what the word is. This works best with freeform magic systems like that in bastards., where all that is needed is the name of the spell.
Initially all they know about the word are the number of letters (usually five). After making their guess, the other player (in our case the GM) places coloured pegs in a board to indicate the accuracy of each letter guessed:
In lieu of a pegboard and pegs, players and GMs can instead use different colours of dice to represent guesses.
The player has 5 attempts to make a correct guess, with the following outcomes:
Players and GMs should decide how many spells characters know at first level. My suggestion is three, simply because this feels good.
When you correctly guess the word, you learn that spell. If your game uses spell levels, the level of the spell is inversely correlated to the number of attempts it took to learn it i.e.
The GM should roll on this list (or another that they prefer) to randomly select the spell that the character is attempting to learn.
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This is a mirror of this Twitter thread, which was written in real time as I read Pathfinder 2nd Edition. It hasn’t been edited in any way. If you decide to pick up Pathfinder 2e I’d appreciate it if you considered using my affiliate link, which lets me earn some money from your purchase. You can also leave a tip at Ko-Fi if you like this kind of content and want to see more of it. Thanks for reading.
Saw a thread a few days ago talking about 5 strengths of Pathfinder 2e that took me from “not at all interested” to… Well…
Going to peruse it and maybe leave some thoughts in thread as I read but
A) this isn’t a review and
B) I don’t have the spoons for a discussion so while you’re welcome to reply, I might ignore it
Immediate thought: I hate D&D model of calling something a core rulebook but not including everything you need to play the game. Put monsters in your core rules if your game features monsters heavily.
Especially Pathfinder, where the monster designs are so cool. Show that off! You gain a level every 1000 XP. I’m curious to know what XP is awarded for, in that case. My guess is that it’s no longer tied to killing things or that the CR/monster xp system has been drastically reworked. That’s interesting. And we’ve dropped Race in favour of Ancestry.
Good. Crit successes and failures on skill checks exist which is an interesting decision. I like the pass/fail by 10 or more as a crit thing. I already don’t like “not all checks have a special effect on a crit”. We’re on page 10 and already introducing edge cases and complexities. We’ve got the Proficiency bonus and since it’s Pathfinder there’s maths involved.
Your Proficiency bonus = your Proficiency rank (2, 4, 6, or 8) and your level. And then you add your ability modifier, too. So that’s 3 modifiers to every roll. Part of me hates this and part of me loves that you immediately get better at things just by levelling up. I’d have to play it to know how I actually feel
We’ve got three Actions per round, plus a Reaction, and Free Actions. I’m a fan of three Actions per round; two can often feel limiting, and in 5e terms most characters get a bonus action of some kind anyway and functionally do 3 things per round. Little quality of life things I like: Attack Actions are called Strikes. So much confusion is caused by the capital-A Attack action Vs ‘attack’ as a verb so this is a nice adjustment. Proficiency affects AC.
Yay, more maths. Multiple Strikes on a round incur increasing penalties to hit which…okay, fine. I’m sure there’s classes and feats that don’t do this so you get to feel special.
BurnBryte still has the best system for handling multiple actions each turn. Downtime mechanisms being right up front in the rules is fun, and I like that it’s got retraining built into it. Pathfinder has always had a culture of RAW among its player base so this heads off dickhead GMs forcing you to stick to choices you aren’t happy with. Very interested to get to the downtime section and see what’s actually going on but I’m not going to skip ahead. We’re still using Level to refer to character levels (and monster levels – I guess CR is gone) and Spell Levels and I hate that and will always hate that.
Pick a new name for spell levels. It’s needlessly confusing for people. There’s a lot to be said for the visual consistency of Paizo’s products over the years, btw. If you showed me a random page of this book I’d know it was Paizo. If feels like I’m reading Dragon magazine again. They buried the lede when they were talking about Actions. “Casting a spell is an activity that usually uses two actions”. WHY
I really hate this whole “you can only cast one spell per turn” nonsense and don’t have the energy to get into why right now. But I hate it. Something in the example of play that hasn’t been mentioned yet: secret checks that the GM rolls for the players.
Looking for traps is a secret check & tbh I like that. It immediately that nonsense of someone failing a roll and everyone else immediately making the same check. This is actually a cool example of play as it’s introducing rules concepts we haven’t encountered yet in an organic way. Initiative isn’t a straight Dexterity check, it’s based on what you’re doing at the start of combat. So you can roll Stealth for initiative if you’re hiding. Okay, had an extended break to do chores but I’M BACK BABY
I really like these symbols, they’re nice and clear and I can imagine having your character’s abilities on a deck of cards and just playing them on the table each round to keep track of what you’ve done.
My only gripe is that I know I’d get that Free Action symbol confused with Single Action. The stat blocks for actions, feats, etc really remind me of the way Powers were presented in 4e. Nice and clear and, in theory, unambiguous
On the other hand, this crowded character sheet breaks my brain:
“All the steps of character creation are […] Marked with a number that corresponds to the sample character sheet […] Showing you where the information goes. If the field you need to fill out is on the 3rd or 4th page of the character sheet, which aren’t shown…”
Show them. If you’re going to give a visual example of something like a complex character sheet it’s not good enough to only give visuals for half of the sheet. Don’t do half a job
So we changed Race to Ancestry but we still have bioessentialism in the form of heritage-based Ability Boosts and Ability. Cool. Cool cool cool. Very interesting that rolling ability scores is relegated to an alternative method. Abilities as standard are built by plugging in numbers from your Ancestry, Background, and Class, and then boosting another 4 of your choice. I can definitely see the benefit in a game so obsessed with maths and balance of having everybody start on a level playing field like this, and I prefer it to a point buy system, but you’ll never get me to stop rolling ability scores where I have the option.
I can’t begin to explain the extent to which is this diagram breaks my brain.
I’m skipping this section because if my short-lived Naming The Faceless series taught me anything it’s that I can’t parse character creation instructions just by reading them, I need to physically male a character, and that’s not something I’m about to do. I do like how many Ancestry Feat options you get at first level. There’s a lot of variance here outside of class abilities and that’s really cool. I really like the Titan Slinger feat that Halflings can choose and I don’t know why I like this one specifically. It’s fun though
Interesting that Half Elves and Half Orcs are subtypes of Human
Very weird that there’s only one 1st Level half elf feat Vs five for half orcs
In fact the number of half elf feat seems really, really limited compared to every other Ancestry. One 1st Level feat and two 5th Level and that’s it. Weird.
Pathfinder art is just fun, isn’t it?
I like that the Class entries explicitly call out what role these classes play in combat, in social encounters, while exploring, and in downtime. One thing I’ll say for 2e is that it’s doing a good job of telling me what they expect a standard Pathfinder game to look like. D&D doesn’t really do that – it often reads like it’s built with the expectation that you already know how to play. Pathfinder doesn’t seem to be making that assumption here. I also really like how many sample builds they give you for each class so you can get an idea of how to take these abilities and make something interesting.
As much as it’s maths-heavy and rules dense, I think this book does a good job of hand-holding players. Personally I find it easy to feel overwhelmed by big games and I’m honestly not really getting that here, which is nice
Lol I say “all these sample characters are great” and then I hit the Bard, generally my preferred class, and there’s only one sample.
The lack of consistency with this stuff bothers me. Either I’ve missed something, or this Concentrate tag hasn’t been explained anywhere yet. This is the first time I’ve hit something where I’ve bounced off because I don’t know what it means. To the Glossary!
“Concentrate [trait] An action with this trait requires a degree of mental concentration or disclipline.”
That’s not helpful. Is this a mechanical effect? Is it just flavour? I have no idea.
Having looked everywhere I can conceivably think of for a definition of “Concentrate” in game terms…there isn’t one. I assume it doesn’t have a mechanical effect and it’s just there to tell the GM “this can’t be done under pressure” but that isn’t spelled out anywhere. This is one of those things where in a rules light game, it wouldn’t matter. But Pathfinder is crunchy. It has rules for every eventuality. It expects you to play RAW. And the fact that this tag exists but isn’t defined is a problem. Still, it took 200+ pages for me to hit something like this, so that’s good going really
If you’re about to roll into my replies [or my comments on this blog] to explain something to me: Don’t.
I hate this paragraph, to be honest. It’s the “just homebrew it” thing all over again. This is a mechanically complex game. Why are we meant to accept “these rules might not work” 440+ pages into a 600 page book?
This is always the problem with dense games and it’s one of the reasons I don’t play them often. The more rules you have the more weird interactions there are. There’s simultaneously less room for interpreting rules as you see fit but also more need for it when they fail. Feeling a need to slap a big IN MY OPINION sticker on those last couple of tweets despite that being self-evident
I’m onto the Playing The Game section now. I’ve heard from a few people that they struggle with the +10 over DC crits because they need to account for two possible degrees of success (and similarly for fail) and that’s really interesting to me. As someone who’s played a lot of FitD and PbtA games, degrees of success isn’t something I struggle with but I remember finding it a bit weird when I first started playing those kinds of games having only been used to binary success/failure in D&D. What helped me was the PbtA phrasing of mixed success and full success, and I wonder why PF2e has gone with Success and Critical Success Vs mixed success and full success.
(Obviously the answer is “because Crits are already a thing in PF1e”)
But I wonder how much easier this would be for people who are only used to binary pass/fail if it was couched in terms that are closer to PbtA, rather than using the language of Critical Success and failure. Anyway, back to the actual mechanics.
I like that a natural 1 or 20 isn’t an instant pass/fail but rather just changes the result by a degree of success. I bet there’s a learning curve with that for people used to 1e and D&D, though. Three pages to explain how to deal damage.
Ahhh, Pathfinder. I’m honestly not sure why the game needs both Emanation and Burst effects. Bursts go from the corner of a square, and Emanations go from each side of your square, so they’re slightly different (Emanations are slightly bigger) but… Yeah. I don’t see the need, to be honest. It seems like needless complexity. I guess an Emanation is contingent on the size of the creature creating it – a Large creature Emanates from 4 squares and a Medium creature from 1 – whereas a Burst always goes from a single spot.
But still. I don’t like it. I do quite like the death mechanics in this game. The push/pull of increasing and decreasing your Dying condition feels way more gripping than e.g. 5e’s Best Of 5 Death Saves. Yes, it’s more bookkeeping, but I like it. I do question why it took until page 460 to learn about Hero Points, though.
Got to the Downtime section that I was so interested in. It’s a single page that basically says “you can swap equivalent feats and Skills that you aren’t happy with during downtime”. Which is fine, and refreshingly light on rules for this game. It’s a shame that Downtime is explicitly called out as one of the three modes of play at the start of the book and only gets a page, though. All the interesting stuff is under this one paragraph that just says, “Ask your GM”
The Game Mastering section opens with safety tools, stuff about the social contract and discussing what kind of content will be in the game, and explicit instructions that Pathfinder PCs should never engage in torture, rape, sexual assault, harm to children, or slavery. That’s good
There’s also sidebars about safety tools and about including characters with disabilities. I’m not qualified to speak on whether that sidebar is any good or not, but I think it’s fair to say that it’s good that a major game like this bothered to include something like that. Finally my questions about XP and encounter building are answered. This isn’t too dissimilar to the way encounters are built in PF1 and 5e, really. Without a bestiary in the book, though, this is all largely academic. I am aware that the book points you to a website with monsters, which I haven’t looked at, but again I’m saying PUT A BESTIARY IN YOUR CORE RULES IF YOUR GAME IS ABOUT KILLING THINGS. And before anyone tells me this game isn’t about killing things, I direct you to page 488:
“The most common type of encounter is a combat encounter, where the PCs face other creatures.”
The book explicitly tells us that most of the time we play we’re expected to be interacting with this specific part of the game, and then doesn’t give us everything we need to run that part of the game. You will never convince me not to hate that. I’m glad that magic items and traps are given so much space in here. Honestly if this book had some monsters it would be everything you need to run the game and that’s great. It’s a big improvement over the 3 book D&D model. But still not quite there.
Anyway I think I like Pathfinder 2e? I’ll have to play it to be sure but there’s very little in here that I immediately bounced off, so that’s cool. Maybe I’ll fuck around and build a character at some point.
This is a mirror of this Twitter thread, which was written in real time as I read Pathfinder 2nd Edition. It hasn’t been edited in any way. If you decide to pick up Pathfinder 2e I’d appreciate it if you considered using my affiliate link, which lets me earn some money from your purchase. You can also leave a tip at Ko-Fi if you like this kind of content and want to see more of it. Thanks for reading.
The Adventure Jam has now started and we’ve already had some great entries! Check it out here and get involved.
Last time I started thinking about the adventure I’m going to write and said I’d probably make a cover as my next step. I’ve done that, and I’ll show you what I’ve made at the end of this post, but let’s talk about the other decisions I’ve made.
Last week I read Gavin Norman’s The Incandescent Grottoes for OSE, and I also ran The Wizardarium of Calabraxis in DCC. The combination of the two made me realise that I’ve never really written a classic dungeon with different factions existing inside it, and so I’ve decided that Beyond The Drowned Spire will include some faction stuff. This means that it needs to be a little bigger than the collapsed tower I’ve been envisioning, and that’s fine because I immediately have ideas.
Initially I have two factions in mind – the Burnt Eater’s cultists, and a strange wizard living in a (magically created and sustained?) air bubble in a network of caves beneath the lake bed itself. I think for peak fun I need at least one more faction, and I don’t know who that is yet.
I have some other vague ideas – the collapsed spire itself is flooded but has some air pockets in it, and the Burnt Eater exists at the very bottom of the caves we’ve now placed beneath the spire. I think historically there was an excavation beneath the tower that – in classic dungeon fashion – dug too deep and disturbed the Burnt Eater. It was then that the lake was created, the whole complex was flooded and, at some point, the tower collapsed.
Looking at the list of names I generated last time, I notice that I’ve got Hudko Xantia, Tower Zealot of Quarfio. I think maybe our third faction are the Tower Zealots, who exist in the collapsed spire itself. The wizard under the lake bed is doing some kind of research – perhaps into the Burnt Eater, perhaps other things – and is quite happy in the home she’s made for herself, but she also can’t leave due to the presence of the Tower Zealots. Maybe the Tower Zealots know of the existence of the Burnt Eater and its cultists and maybe they don’t. At this point I don’t know for sure, but I like where this is heading.
I think possibly we need a fourth faction, just to keep things interesting, because the wizard on her own isn’t much of a faction. I’m going to grab some more BBEG’s from Nate’s generator. These are the first five names it spat out:
Two of them are already giving me ideas, so maybe we’re now expanding to five factions. I love The Broken Host of the Flowing Shrine and I really like the location “The Fecund Dome” but like “The Skeleton Prince” a little less. I might combine The Ghost Eater of the Screaming Darkness with The Fecund Dome – although I really like The Wooden Monarch as well. Lots of ideas, and I’m going to write them down and let them gestate some more.
In the mean time, I drew a very sketchy and not-at-all-detailed side view of the kind of thing I’m thinking of for the dungeon. Behold my brilliance:
And, as promised, here’s the cover I’ve made:
Next time we’ll hopefully have figured out what the deal with all these factions is, and started placing them in the dungeon.
Last week I published my random adventure title generator, which very quickly spawned a random adventure jam that’s running from September until January 1st. The idea is that you use the generator to create a title and then use that title as inspiration to write an adventure for whatever system you want. Simple enough.
This also coincides with me relaunching my Patreon – and alternating between monthly games and monthly adventures. The first adventure I released was FEAST, which came out yesterday, and September will see a game called The Fiction We Live. What this means is that I’m going to be releasing an adventure in October, right in the middle of the adventure jam, and so it makes sense that I should write one using the jam rules. (I’ll probably do that in December, too).
This is also a good excuse to start blogging again, so I’m going to document the creation of this adventure here.
Step one is very straightforward: idea generation.
I generated tons of titles, but the one I’ve settled on is Beyond The Drowned Demon.
My initial thought is that it’s going to be a short, self-contained dungeon crawl, purely because they’re the easiest kinds of adventure to write (and that’s fairly important when you’re working to a tight deadline). I’m picturing a flooded temple, possibly at the bottom of a lake. Large sections of the dungeon will be underwater, and the characters will have to figure out a way to mitigate that particular hazard if they want to explore the dungeon and achieve… whatever it is they want to achieve. I don’t know that that is yet.
As far as hooks, the most obvious one is that the characters are hired to investigate a newly-discovered temple before treasure hunters and scavengers arrive. Given the title, there will probably be a demon inside the place. Whether or not they know about it going in to the thing remains to be seen.
If you check the jam page, you’ll also see that I linked to a couple of generators created by Nate Treme – Who’s the boss here? and Names & Titles.
The very first result I got out of Who’s The Boss Here? was The Burnt Eater of the Drowned Spire and that’s just immediately perfect. I actually think I’ll change the title to suit that boss, so now the title is Beyond The Drowned Spire. I may even end up dropping “Beyond The”, though I don’t know yet.
My gut is telling me that the Drowned Spire was some kind of temple that was invaded by a demon – The Burnt Eater – and attempts to banish it failed spectacularly. In the end, the Spire was sealed and the region was flooded to seal the Burnt Eater inside. Maybe the Spire is lying on its side at the bottom of the artificially-created lake? That could be a very cool dungeon environment, with everything on its side.
I also got a couple of excellent names and titles from the other generator:
I don’t know who any of those people are but the names and titles are great and they give me something to work with.
Probably my next step will be to make a cover, because that’s just how I work. And while I’m doing that I’ll be mulling over the adventure in my head and letting ideas gestate.
More next time.
Some of you may be aware of a Kickstarter promotion running this month called Zine Quest, which encourages creators to launch short campaigns aimed at funding small RPG zines.
I’ve been hard at work on my campaign, a rules-lite game based on The Borrowers called Under the Floorboards, and the Kickstarter campaign is now live. I’m also very, very pleased to say that I hit my funding goal in the initial few hours of the campaign, and that we’re now heading towards stretch goals!
Under The Floorboards is a tabletop collaborative storytelling game for 2-5 players about tiny people living in a giant, hostile world, inspired by The Borrowers.
Build your family and the house in which they live, then embark on an expedition into the land of giants in order to collect the things you need to survive – without being seen.
The game uses a simple 2d6 system for conflict resolution and an easy-to-pick-up story-building system to help GMs build engaging scenes on the fly.
Under The Floorboards is a low-prep game designed for one shot play but with tools to enable campaign play over multiple sessions. The game provides locations, hazards, and tools to quickly design your own content to keep surprising your players, and is perfect for convention play or to keep on your shelf for game nights when your whole group can’t be there.
You can back Under The Floorboards on Kickstarter here.
As a small preview for readers of Loot The Room, here is the first section of the game’s character creation rules!
Character Creation
Pick your pronouns and give yourself a name. You can choose any name you like, but if you need inspiration you can roll 2d6 and pick the corresponding entry from the table below:
| 2d6 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 |
| 1 | Willim | Yvonnda | Veronetty | Winder | Morgewn | Llewyl |
| 2 | Chrimm | Vediver | Jalc | Levilry | Chaser | Lecture |
| 3 | Floery | Glanidy | Percivie | Tripper | Ivy | Maunnie |
| 4 | Sponderisa | Henerica | Montygoe | Linney | Gwendolisa | Vany |
| 5 | Margrim | Ambode | Blod | Adelina | Clemdeary | Gwenllianda |
| 6 | Ril | Cydril | Stumble | Dangle | Bucket | Gwilym |
Decide as a group whether you all share the same family name or whether you have come together from disparate backgrounds, then either pick one family name to share or choose individual names. You may also decide that your character does not have a family name.
| 2d6 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 |
| 1 | Mouse-Hole | Squeaky-Stair | Rain-Pipe | Toy-Chest | Doll-House | Cavity-Wall |
| 2 | Boiler | Underbed | Shed | Plug-Socket | Bird-House | Bookcase |
| 3 | Clock | Pondside | Gutter | High-Shelf | Bell-Pull | Piano |
| 4 | Loft-Hatch | Garage | Chandelier | Porch | Back-Step | Rainbarrel |
| 5 | Eaves | Overmantle | Dog-House | Linen-Press | Shed | Windowsill |
| 6 | Stove-Pipe | Cellar-Door | Bird-Nest | Spare-Room | Chimney-Stack | Vanity-Desk |
Family names for Floorboard Folk are generally descriptive, and reflect the area in the giants’ house where the family lives. Sometimes, of course, Floorboard Folk find themselves displaced and are forced to move. This may be because their home comes under threat – maybe the giants block up the mouse holes, or hire an exterminator who pumps lethal gas into the walls – or perhaps it is because they have been spotted by the giants and need to find a new home before theirs can be discovered.
As a group, discuss whether you live in the traditional home indicated by your family name, or decide whether you had to move somewhere else. If you have had to move, you should collectively decide what prompted this.
The zine contains:
Find out more and back the project here!
Welcome to October’s DMs Guild roundup! Every month I gather together some of the best new releases from the DMs Guild. You won’t find many bestsellers here (though some do slip through); the huge amount of new content appearing daily means that lots of great work slips through the cracks. It’s my aim to shed some light on those undiscovered gems, and to give you some fun new things to use in your games that you might not otherwise be aware of.
This month I’ve found myself going back to the kinds of things that I always enjoy – namely, trinkets and paper miniatures. I’ve tried to make sure that I provide you with some variety, though; I even got a chance to review a couple of adventures this time around, which is a rarity. I’m also pleased to see that fewer quality products are being listed as PWYW titles. I firmly belive the people doing good work should be rewarded for that work, so it’s nice to see more and more community creators having the confidence to price their products appropriately.
As always, if you just want to see the products I’m recommending, all you need is the table below. Otherwise, scroll down for the reviews and to look at the cover art.
| Title | Price | (Suggested Price if PWYW) | What I Paid |
| Minotaur’s Betrayal | $2.95 | —– | $2.95* |
| 100 Shadowfell Trinkets and Pocket Finds Vol. 2 | $1.99 | —– | $1.38** |
| Chult Trinkets | $1.00 | —– | $1.00 |
| Grimm Encounters | $3.95 | —– | $3.95 |
| Grung Paper Miniatures | PWYW | $0.99 | $2/month*** |
| Heroes of the Planes | $2.99 | —– | $2.99 |
| Hunter | $3.95 | —– | $3.95 |
| Scarab of Death | $3.99 | —– | $3.99 |
| The White Scorpions Assassins Guild | $2.99 | —– | $2.99 |
* I received a complimentary copy of this title, but paid for it after deciding to include it in the Best Of.
** This product is discounted by 31% until October 31st.
*** I support this creator on Patreon.
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May 2017, in case you haven’t noticed, is a month with 5 Wednesdays in it. That means an extra week between my Best Of DMs Guild posts. Just as I was looking for something to fill the gap with, M.T. Black came along and collated a list of the 50 highest rated adventures on the DMs Guild.
I don’t often review adventures on this site because I don’t often get a chance to run adventures that I haven’t written myself. That means that my Best Ofs are fairly lacking in these kinds of products, and a lot of the titles found on this list have never been featured on this site. To address that, here are the top 20 highest rated DMs Guild adventures. You can see the rest of the list that M.T. Black collated – a full 50 adventures – here. If you like the sound of any of these adventures, the ‘View More’ buttons will take you to each product’s DMs Guild page.
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And if all that’s not enough for you, yesterday saw the release of a great collection of some lesser-known adventures that was put together by Glen Cooper (the man behind Deadly Dungeon Doors). Glen was kind enough to let me see the collection before it went live on DMs Guild, and it’s a fantastic product. He’s also written another guest post for me, which will be going live later today.
For the clearest description of what this is, it’s probably best to turn to the description from the product listing:
This is a collection of 9 incredible Dungeons & Dragons adventures and 3 supplements at an outstanding price! This product will be only available for a limited time and has been reduced by 70% from their original prices.
In total these adventures have 14 authors and have been reviewed 78 times with an average rating of 4.8! Together they represent over 60 hours of game time and 296 pages of exciting content.
What that doesn’t tell you is that Glen has also written an over-arching story that ties all of these adventures together into an Adventure Path-style campaign set in the Moonshaes. It’s an impressive piece of work that’s also shining a light on some forgotten gems from the depths of the DMs Guild, and I really hope we see more projects like this on the DMs Guild in future! You can find out more about it here.
And hell, while we’re talking adventures, why not have one more? I was recently commissioned to produce some maps for PB Publishing’s new adventure Struggle In Three Horn Valley.
Although I haven’t actually run the adventure myself I obviously had to read it to produce the maps, and I’m confident in saying that this will be a ton of fun for groups to play through. There’s a very strong element of surviving against the odds, some really cool set piece encounters that will be very memorable, and there are pirates. And dinosaurs. And pirates riding dinosaurs. Really, there’s a lot to love – but since I’m biased, I encourage you to check out this review by The Kind GM. If you’re interested, you can find out more about the adventure here.
Welcome to the latest installment of my monthly DMs Guild roundup! Before we’d start, just a quick one, if you’ll indulge me.
A few people on Twitter asked why I don’t have a Patreon page, and I didn’t have a satisfactory answer to that question. So, as of today, I now have a Patreon page. If you’re feeling generous and you’d like to help support this site, I’d appreciate it if you took a minute to check out my campaign. Your pocket change goes a long way towards helping to keep this site afloat – including funding posts like this one.
Now, with that out of the way…
Last month featured a lot of people who are regulars in these lists, and a lot of products that I was sent complimentary copies of. I don’t think that devalues the list at all – the titles I featured were genuinely the ones that I thought were the best out of everything that I looked at that month – but it’s nice to be able to say that this month’s roundup features a lot of people whose work I haven’t seen before. It’s also one of the biggest posts yet – simply put, there was a lot of great stuff to pick from.
I was sent a lot of complimentary copies this month, and I’m very grateful to those writers who choose to send me review copies. Compiling this list can be an expensive process, and gestures like that help me afford to keep this site running while still being able to highlight some really great content that I might otherwise have not be able to look at. That said, I obviously can’t include everything that I’m sent for free, so apologies if you sent me something and it didn’t make the list.
Anyway, that’s enough of me blathering on. You’re here for the Best of DMs Guild roundup, so let’s get on with it!
This offer has now expired. Sorry about that!
Published April 6th, 2017
This is, quite simply put, one of the best products I’ve seen on DMs Guild. I’ve seen plenty of tables to generate merchants (and the stuff that they’re carrying), but none have been put together with the obvious care and effort that has gone into this. It’s 35 pages of great writing and beautiful art, and I’m very happy to start this month’s roundup with it.
Traders & Merchants contains tables to use in generating any kind of merchant you could possibly think of, from magic item salesmen, spicers, fashion merchants, and even astral travellers with a host of strange magic items. There’s a section you can use to generate personalities and characteristics, presented in much the same way as the backgrounds from the Player’s Handbook, a ton of charts for loads of different types of merchants of varying levels of wealth and quality, and a really interested section on unique, Legendary Merchants. You’ll even find a lot of new magic items in here, some of which are really interesting.
This has already made its way into my game, and I fully recommend you check it out. Especially as it’s Pay What You Want, which is a steal.
Published April 5th, 2017
The (relatively) recent Unearthed Arcana presenting the Mystic class was something I’ve been looking forward to for a while, and it’s nice to see some really good content for that class starting to appear on DMs Guild. Awakened Adversaries is my favourite so far. As well as providing some really well thought out Mystic-esque NPCs, this product also provides ideas for different roles that these kinds of characters can fill in your world, along with providing well designed stat blocks for these NPCs that mean you won’t need to have the Mystic class to hand to look up the effects of their abilities.
As a DMs Guild writer myself, the stat block format for psionic characters presented in this book is something I’m definitely going to use in my own products. It’s a really nice piece of design, and it’s great to see a product that is not only useful for DMs but also for DMs Guild content creators. As an added bonus, this is Pay What You Want.
Published April 8th, 2017
Back in February’s roundup I included the Beholder paper mini, and as soon as I saw the new Orcus mini I knew I was going to have to include this, too. I’m sort of breaking my own rules here, because I try to include things that will actually be useful. Beholders are one of my favourite monsters, and I know I’m not alone in that, but I’m not sure how many groups will ever have a use for an Orcus miniature.
Look at it, though. Can you blame me for including it? It’s beautiful. I never knew I wanted Orcus in my game until I saw this. And it’s Pay What You Want, which is criminal. I might print one out just to have it sit on a shelf looking awesome.
Published April 18th, 2017
Last week I had a little bit of a rant on Twitter about how so many products on DMs Guild look the same. The author of this product sent me a screenshot of the Books installment and, not knowing that it was a genuine product, I swore I would immediately buy anything that looked like that based on the cover alone.
Then I found out it’s a real thing – so, true to my word, I bought it. And I’m glad I did. (So glad, in fact, that I bought this one as well – hence its appearance on this list). The Bags of Flavour titles are the only products Dwarves In A Trenchcoat has published so far, but they’re both fantastic and well worth your time. They’re the kind of thing I really like – an easy to use, well-written and well-presented product that breathes some life and variety into your game with a minimum of effort on your part. If you like your treasure hoards to be more than a list of gold piece values, you should definitely check these out. And they’re only a measly $1 each!
Published March 30th, 2017
I’m a big fan of the r/dndbehindthescreen subreddit. There are some incredibly talented creators hanging out there, and the mega projects they do are always fantastic.
This massive document – 381 pages! – is the culmination of an 18-month-long project to write ecologies of (I think) every monster in the Monster Manual. Monster Ecologies were one of my favourite parts of Dragon Magazine back in the day, and this book does a wonderful job of emulating them. It’s a big read, but if you like your monsters and you like your fluff, I can’t recommend it enough. Fans of Volo’s Guide To Monsters will find a lot to love here. And, best of all, it’s completely free.
The following titles were provided to me for free by the authors. As always, though, I wouldn’t include them here if I didn’t think they were worth your time.
Published April 8th, 2017
I’ll admit I was a little hesistant about including this – not because it isn’t great (it is), but because my next DMs Guild release is also a goblins book, and also contains new variant goblins. That would be entirely self-serving of me, though, and also unfair, because this is a really great product.
It should be stated upfront that this isn’t an adventure – it’s a toolkit around which you can build an adventure (or even a campaign). This book details a specific tribe of goblins, going into their history, their culture, their living habits, their language, and more. And, along with that, you get a map of their territory, stats for new variants specific to the tribe, and plenty of plot hooks to get your party involved with the Pitshadow goblins. Jesse also has an excellent book of 100 goblin trinkets that very nearly made this list on its own merits. A Tribe Called Pitshadow is only $1, and Trinkets is Pay What You Want.
Published April 6th, 2017
It wouldn’t be one of my DMs Guild roundups without one of Jeff’s adventures, would it? His work is consistently excellent, though – there’s a very good reason why he’s become of the Guild’s leading writers.
I love a good swamp adventure (in fact, you may remember that one of my encounters in Jeff’s Encounters In The Savage Frontier collection was set in a swamp) and there aren’t enough of them out there, so it’s really nice to see Jeff finally get around to releasing something I know he’s been wanting to do for a while.
This is a solid mid-level adventure that oozes with sticky, swampy atmosphere. There are some really well-crafted set-piece encounters and an excellently designed village that serves as a central hub for the adventure. The book is filled with incredible art by the always-brilliant Daniel Walthall – and there’s a black and white printable version, too, so that all that brilliant art doesn’t empty your printer. The asking price of $2.95 is more than fair for another excellent release.
Below you’ll find a couple of products that I somehow missed when they were first released.
Published March 14th, 2017
New magic systems are a hard sell – you only need to look at the complaints about Unearthed Arcana: The Mystic being too long for evidence of that!
What Mark Hart has done here is impressive. He’s created a magic system that works alongside the existing system, and is open to most magic-using classes to dip into by taking a feat (rather than having created a new spellcasting class). The mechanics of learning, inscribing, and using runes are well thought out, and it’s nice that the mechanical aspect of the class is supported by and informed by the flavour/fluff that goes with it. The runes provided (which essentially function as new spells) are evocative and flavourful, and – as with all of Mark’s work that I’ve seen – seem very carefully balanced.
As a Pay What You Want title, this is definitely worth your time.
Published March 7th, 2017
I often find that new spells are hidesouly overpowered and unbalanced, even in official products – power creep was one of the things that killed 3rd edition for me. That’s not the case with these water-themed spells, though.
The Codex of Waves is a beautifully presented product that presents 19 spells – some of them new, some of them adapted from Stormwrack (which, incidentally, is one of my favourite 3e sourcebooks). Walrock Homebrew is a name I already know from Reddit’s r/unearthedarcana, and this first foray into DMs Guild is a really solid product. It’s unusual for me to include two products by one author in the same list, but both this and Traders and Merchants are great, and I’m looking forward to seeing what else materialises from Walrock – especially if it’s all going to continue to be Pay What You Want, as this is.
This post, and everything else on this site, is made possible by the generosity of my patrons. If you like what I’m doing, I’d appreciate it if you took a minute to check out my Patreon page and considered supporting me. Pledge tiers start at as little as $1 per month, and give you access to content before it goes up on this site, along with plenty of other bonuses and the warm fuzzy feeling of knowing you help make posts like this one possible!
This article was intended to be the beginning of a new series on worldbuilding and campaign design, in which I’m going to build both a campaign setting and a campaign to play in that setting at the same time. It still is the beginning of that series, in a way, but this isn’t the post I wanted to put up today. Part of the reason it’s late is that I spent a while trying to figure out exactly what this post would be before I wrote it. I must have started it 5 or 6 times before I got to this point. (I also wrote a long post that will be going up on Stat Boost in a month or so – but it involves me talking about my next DMs Guild project, and I’m not ready to do that yet, so it has to wait until then).
What I wanted to do was spend the week prior to posting this getting a head start on the work involved in a big project like this, with the hope that I’d be able to come into this first post with a good idea of what I wanted to do with the setting and the campaign. Unfortunately, life got in the way – as it so often does – so instead I’m going to talk about what I want these articles to be, what my initial ideas for the setting are (and where they came from), and how I see this series developing.
The first thing to say is that this won’t be a weekly post. I simply can’t commit to that. I’ll try to do at least one a month, but it may be less frequent still. I apologise in advance for that – I know it’s frustrating when you’re reading an ongoing series and you don’t know when the next instalment might appear – but I’d rather start this and make some progress on it than put it off until I have the time to do it the way I’d ideally like to do it. That’s simply because I don’t know when or if I’ll ever have the time to do that, and so putting this off until then means putting it off indefinitely.
I’ve also been thinking about Friday Fight Night. As I mentioned last time, the journals are rapidly catching up to the real-world game, and there’s going to come a point very soon were I won’t have anything to write about for the weekly post because the game it needs to talk about won’t have happened yet. I’ve got a few ideas for things to fill that space yet – including talking in more detail about building adventures, with the upcoming game acting as a case study – and this worldbuilding/campaign building/whatever-you-want-to-call-it series seems like it would be a good fit.
What that means is that while this first post is going up on Wednesday (sort of) as a Stat Boost article, the rest of the series will appear on Fridays, when they do appear. They’ll be an extra Stat Boost for that week – a secret level to go with Wednesday’s normal bonus star. I envision this series as being something akin to Angry GM’s excellent Megadungeon series, though with less focus on spreadsheets and things because I’m just not particularly great at that kind of thing. Angry is excellent when it comes to game mechanics. I’m OK at it, and we’ll have to do some of it once we build adventures for the campaign – but that’s a long way off at this point.
What I’m excellent at is story. So for the most part, we’re going to be building this setting and the campaign that goes with it through the lens of story. But I’m getting ahead of myself. First let’s talk about where this series came from, and then we’ll get back to what I want to do with it.
Buried Treasure
I’ve mentioned a few times recently that I’ve been looking through my old D&D boxes and notebooks and things, unearthing writing that I’d completely forgotten about. One thing I hadn’t forgotten about was the campaign world I built way back at the end of 2nd edition – a world which I spent about 2 years developing, even though I never actually ran a game in it.
That’s a weird thing for me to consider these days – that, once upon a time, I had the time to commit to building a world at my own pace, not at a pace dictated by the fact that I had a weekly (…ish) game to run.
I imagine most DMs are in the same boat when they start running a game in a world of their own creation. I know that some people go into it with a world that’s already fully fleshed out, but I imagine that for most of us we go in with a starting village and dungeon and very little else – maybe a vague sense of what fills the spaces on the edge of the map, an idea of where the campaign might go, and a bag full of cloth to repair the seat of the pants that they’re going to spend the next six months or a year or whatever flying by. It’s certainly how it always goes for me, anyway.
Frankly, I’d love to be able to sit down and put some time into my world. One of the reasons I haven’t continued the world building series I already started is that I haven’t done much actual worldbuilding recently. It’s happened as a natural by-product of the game, of course – if you’ve been reading Friday Fight Night you might have picked up on some of it, and honestly everything that I’ve done in developing that world is included in Friday Fight Night. There’s not much to see.
That’s my old campaign world. Two binders packed full of notes and drawings and maps. There’s a world map in there, drawn across 16 sheets of A4 paper. There’s a map of every major city, divided into districts and wards, with details about their economy, imports and exports, who rules where, internal politics, factions, all that stuff. There are dungeons, and new classes, and new monsters, and thousands of years of history.
It’s all pointless, because I never got it to the table. And it’s rubbish, frankly; it’s the worst kind of generic, Greyhawkian, standard D&D fantasy, the kind of stuff we’ve moved away from since people like George R R Martin and Joe Abercrombie showed us how things could be different. I have a vague memory that when I started building this world I’d recently bought the TSR Forgotten Realms boxed set, and that I wanted to build something similar for myself (and by something similar, I mean something functionally identical). There’s even a sheet in there with a list of what books would be included in a published boxed set of this world, broken down into chapters and subheadings. It’s ridiculous.
So if this is pointless, why am I bringing it up? Well, I’m glad you asked, because that’s a really easy question to answer.
I’m bringing it up because this world represents everything I don’t want the campaign setting we’re going to build in these articles to be.
What Am I Doing Here?
So, let’s talk about what that world is. What did I do 15 or 20 years ago that I’m going to avoid here? Is there anything I did – or wanted to do – that I still want to do now. I’m going to lay out some design principles that are going to guide us as we build this setting.
The first thing to note is that this world never saw play. Because I wasn’t building it with any particular adventure or story in mind, it’s massive. Like I said, it’s the size of something like the Forgotten Realms. That’s just ludicrous. That’s too much for one party to explore, and I want this setting to see play and be discovered by the players in the course of their adventures. I’ve got an opportunity here to design something coherent. The world I’m currently playing in is a lot of fun, and I think there’s a lot of potential there. But I’m building it week by week, fleshing out the parts that the players see. I’d really like to be able to start again and build a section of the world properly before they get to play in it.
I could, actually, just use the world of my current campaign – a setting I’ve been calling The Nine Towers – and build that. But I’ve already done a lot of it – Tarnswood, for example – and if I’m going to keep up any kind of momentum on these articles then I need to be building something new. That’s just how the creative part of my brain works, and rather than fighting it I’m going to embrace it.
We might keep some of the Nine Towers work. I might decide that this setting exists on the same planet as Tarnswood and all the places the Friday Fight Night party have explored. But I want as little baggage from that world as possible carried over into this setting – and I’ve run two campaigns in the Nine Towers setting. There’s a lot of baggage. When it comes time to think about gods and things like that I might steal from the Nine Towers. We’ll see.
So. The first design principle is simple.
The campaign setting will be big enough to accommodate a full 20 levels of adventure, while being small enough to be mostly explored and discovered by a party during the course of those adventures.
I don’t know how big that makes it, exactly. That’s something we might not find out until much later in the process. But it’s a good starting point, and it’s a good thing to keep in mind when we’re designing this thing. It tells us that locations should be fairly close together, and that we should look for opportunities to reuse existing locations in new and exciting ways whenever we can, rather than building a lot of space just for the sake of it.
Now, you’re probably thinking that this could easily be accomplished by just building a city. Waterdeep, Neverwinter, Baldur’s Gate – all of them contain enough to keep a party busy for a long time. Paizo’s Shackled City adventure path did this brilliantly with the city of Cauldron – and Paizo’s Adventure Paths are going to inform this design process quite a bit, because that’s essentially what I’m trying to emulate. There are two reasons that I want to go bigger than that while still building something constrained, though.
The first is simply that I want to. I actually just wrote a whole paragraph justifying myself on this point, but I decided I don’t need to. I want to build something bigger than a city, so I’m going to. Unless I build the D&D equivalent of Megacity One. But I probably won’t do that.
The second reason is to do with player agency and the way players affect campaign settings. We could easily ‘just’ build a city, but eventually the players are going to want to venture outside it. That’s fine – we can build a city and develop the immediate area surrounding it – but, players being players, they’re going to keep pushing out and exploring, no matter how tempting you make the city itself. Unless we build something they can’t possibly ever explore fully (or feel like they’ve explored fully, at least), there’s going to come a time when the DM is forced to build a part of the world on the fly. And I don’t want that. In fact, it’s explicitly something I don’t want.
This actually illuminates what our second design principle will be. It’s related to the first one, and tells us about how we’re going to implement the first one. In fact it could exist as a clause of the first principle, an indented bullet point beneath it. But I think it’s important enough that it should stand alone.
So. Our second principle looks like this:
The setting should be constrained in some way that prevents the players exploring outside its bounds without encouraging them to push at those boundaries.
There’s probably a clearer way to word that – it’s nearly 1am as I write this – and I may revisit it in future, but for now I’ll let it stand. Basically, if we put the players in a city, at some point they’re going to look out of a window at the hills beyond the walls and ask what’s there. We need a way to stop that happening.
The obvious answer to that is to make the setting an island. It’s a varied geographical space with very definite edges beyond which it isn’t easy to explore, and we can control exactly how big or small it is. It works as a nice way to limit us geographically, too – we can’t make City A a thousand miles away from City B if we’ve already established that the island is only 400 miles across. (And 400 miles across is probably too big, too. That’s half the length of England. But we’ll get to that later on in the series, when we know what we’re building.)
Obvious answers usually have obvious problems, in my experience. The obvious problem with it being an island is that people have historically looked at the waves and the horizon and asked what lies beyond it. Isn’t one of the most iconic lines in the first Pirates of the Caribbean Jack Sparrow’s final line, right before the credits roll? “Bring me that horizon!” It’s no “Why has the rum gone?”, but it’s a great line nonetheless.
But anyway. We’re getting off track. That will be fine later, when we’re doing creative work, but right now we’re doing what is essentially technical work, and I want to stay on focus. The island is a workable idea, probably, but it’s not a design principle. We can stash it for later.
Let’s get back to defining what we’re going to build before we build it, shall we?
Must Construct Additional Pylons
The third thing – which I’ve already touched on here – is that I want to build this setting with play in mind – which, again, ties into the first principle. We want the players to explore this setting, so we’re going to build it alongside adventures that encourage and guide that exploration. I’ve already mentioned Paizo’s Adventure Paths. I want to build something like that. A setting that is also the dungeon, on a large scale. All of our actual dungeons and adventures will simply be areas within the greater macrodungeon. (That’s a term I just made up, and shouldn’t be confused with ‘megadungeon’. I’m not building a megadungeon. Not here, anyway.)
The third principle, then.
The setting is to be designed concurrently with a series of adventures that encourage exploration and discovery of the setting over the course of 20 levels of play.
Again, there’s probably a nicer, clearer way of putting that. But it was 1am before, and now it’s later than that. Forgive me.
Those three principles are pretty much all we need at this point. I still don’t know what the setting looks like, what the story of the adventure path will be, or anything else (although I have a vague idea that it will be an island). And those principles won’t really help us come up with that. But what they will help us do is develop whatever ideas we settle on, and that’s exactly what I need them to do. I’m setting constraints on myself, but I’m not shackling myself to hard and fast rules.
Oh wait. I forgot something. Something that was included in the original world I built all those years ago that it makes sense to duplicate. Remember when I said that I was building my own Forgotten Realms boxed set? That’s it.
We’re going to build this for publication. It may take a very long time; I don’t know how or if it will ever actually be published. But we’re still going to build it with publication in mind. That means that, at some point, we’ll have to think about how to put this information together into a product. (And that post I talked about – the one I wrote but can’t use yet – actually touches on this a little, weirdly enough). But we’re not there yet. We’re not even close. But we have a fourth principle.
Let’s look at them all together.
The campaign setting will be big enough to accommodate a full 20 levels of adventure, while being small enough to be mostly explored and discovered by a party during the course of those adventures.
The setting should be constrained in some way that prevents the players exploring outside its bounds without encouraging them to push at those boundaries.
The setting is to be designed concurrently with a series of adventures that encourage exploration and discovery of the setting over the course of 20 levels of play.
The setting and the campaign that goes with it will form a published product for other DMs to use.
I’m happy with those principles. We may add to them as we figure out exactly what we’re building, but those four rules should stay with us in more or less their current form throughout this process.
I’m going to leave this here, because my next step is to start brainstorming ideas and if I do that now I’ll be here forever. I’ve also got the idea of an island fresh in my mind, burning away, telling me all the things it could be. I know that if I try and gather ideas now, I’m going to prefer anything that looks like an island – which means I’ll do more work on those ideas, so that even when I put them all to one side for a while and come back later I’ll still think an island is the best bet. It might still be the best answer, but I don’t want to find out halfway through this process that there was something even better staring me in the face all along.
I might build an island. But I don’t have to build an island. And if I start now, I know that I absolutely will build an island. So we’ll leave it for now. I don’t know when the next post in this series will be, exactly – knowing how my brain works, the next one will probably be fairly soon, and they’ll get gradually more and more spaced out until I have a breakthrough of some kind, at which point they’ll pile on top of one another. I know it’s a pain, and hard to keep up with, but this is going to be a design journal of sorts, and that’s how my design process works unless I’m working to a deadline. (We may find as we get further in that we have to enforce a deadline or else I’ll never finish, but for now we’ll leave it open ended).
I know this was long and kind of rambling. If you stuck with me this far, I want you to know that I really your time and attention. And I’d also like to hear from you about this. I’m writing for publication, so it makes sense that I should listen to what my audience want (even if I ultimately make the decision to ignore some of it). And if you read all of this then, like it or not, you’re my audience. So, talk to me. Is this a series you’d like to read? Do people still want Adventure Paths and new campaign settings in 5th edition? Is this purely a vanity project? HAVE I GONE STARK RAVING MAD? Tell me, in the comments or via email or carrier pigeon or however else you like.
Thanks again for reading. Join me next time – whenever that is – when, knowing me, we’ll probably be building an island.