Chris Perkins
Appearances
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
Can't say whether or not I have seen the Dungeon Master's Guide because I'm not an influencer. But that was a term of endearment, really. But I like what Teo said in that they're trying to make new game masters comfortable running the game. And I like that. I like that they don't try to make you an expert anymore.
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
get you walking first before you run and also i hope this shows a openness from wizards to let the creators out there using the open gaming license which is now in the cc do those things for them And so you can not explain everything you need to about monster design when there's a book like, I don't know, Forge of Foes there that you can use to do so. And Mike throws horns in the back.
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
And I'd like to see that. I'd like them to really nail down what the game is expected to do and then let other people grow from there.
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
There's material out there already that you can go into. That's one of the joys of the DMs Guild is getting that old material, not necessarily the new material. And I think from what I've heard that this Greyhawk section, like I said with the other stuff, teaches you the basics. You want to build a world, start with a city and then work your way out from there.
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
And this is how it's been done in the past. You can do it. And then that leads into the adventure creation sections that I've seen little bits of where they give you like a one page adventure outline, which teaches you how to do that. So it's run the game, build your world, run adventures in that world. And it spells it out pretty nicely.
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
And they also said, we've put Greyhawk out, and now you can too. So Greyhawk will be available as IP to work on the DM skill, which I think is maybe good news for a lot of people who may have done Greyhawk work in the past, like mapping Greyhawk. For sure, for sure. So congratulations and go to it.
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
If you have worked in Greyhawk before, all of that work you've done can now be brought to fruition on the go.
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
And to show the difference between Teos and I, Chris stepped down to an elevator that I was on and, hey, how's it going? Good. What you working on? Yeah. And then I'm like, I should ask him. I should ask him. I should ask him. I should ask him. I'm not going to ask him. And then I read the show notes and Teos did. I mean, you got to do what you got to do.
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
Absolutely. Absolutely. I love it as well. Yes, right here.
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
You're just a... There are a lot of people.
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
Now it's time for a creative corner. It is. Creator corner. Let's talk about Trail of Cthulhu second edition on Backerkit. Pelgrim Press obviously put out Trail of Cthulhu a while ago using the gumshoe system to give you your Cthulhu fix. And now they are bringing it to a new edition. It's not on Kickstarter. It's on Backerkit.
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
You can download a PDF of the updated Quickstart rules to get a view of Gumshoe's system. How many people out there have played Call of Cthulhu? Lots. How many people have played Trail of Cthulhu? Chris. Good job, Chris. And Sean, you've played it, right? I have once. I love the gumshoe system. I love the gumshoe system for exactly this kind of game.
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
And it is... Call of Cthulhu has been around a long time. Great game. Probably the third most popular game out there after D&D and Pathfinder. I love Trail of Cthulhu. If you have a fix for a Cthulhu game... and want a system that sort of gamifies investigation maybe a little better than the original rules, I would strongly suggest that game.
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
Okay. The question was, in case we didn't pick it up, what did we see this week, this weekend, that surprised us, delighted us? You want to take that first?
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
Other news. We've mentioned 100 Dungeons before. We're going to mention 100 Dungeons again in a little more detail.
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
And it's on DriveThruRPG right now, so just go to DriveThru and look for 100 Dungeons. And there's this little Kickstarter we've sort of been pitching for Ghostfire Gaming called Grim Hollow Transformed. We've probably got a week and a half left, give or take. You've probably heard me talk about it before. I've been on some streams. I've talked about it on the show.
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
But if you are into your dark fantasy and want lots of new rules and want to make me work even harder, which I'd love, you can back that link in the show notes, Grim Hollow Transformed. So what we want to talk about as our main topic this week on Mastering Dungeons is creating a campaign right now. We are going to build one with your help because we've talked about what should we talk about next.
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
And one is let's create the perfect campaign guide, of course, which there is no such thing as. But with your help, maybe we can come very, very close. So you want to take the first step here?
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
So I'm just going to repeat that in case it didn't get heard. So a medium to low magic setting where there might be a magic shop in a large city, but it's rare enough that it's not going to be powerful magic and any of the rare, very rare stuff you cannot buy, you have to find. My first question when I hear level of magic in a setting is, is that just the setting or is that the characters as well?
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
Are we going to limit character magic or are we just limiting the magic of the world itself?
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
What about two master's degrees, asking for a friend?
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
Okay, so we're not going to limit the five-y rules of magic.
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
For me, it depends on my mindset at the time. Right now, I'm heavy in the player rules, which is why I ask. So my thing would be, we have to reflect the... Don't touch the table. We have to reflect the rules... of the player to show them what the world is. If I say it's a low magic setting, but they are still casting Wish, then is it a low magic setting?
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
So I have to decide how am I going to model the world through the player rules. And so that's what I would do first with who I am right now.
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
What got me excited was playing the AD&D one-hour 50th anniversary game, reminding me that while that game wasn't perfect, no game is perfect, and what that game did for... The industry for its players for the last 50 years is amazing because there was nothing else like it. And while we might not use that technology, the heart of the game was there and is still here.
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
Right, and that's because I'm coming at it as a designer right now, not the game master. And as soon as you start saying, I need to get the story setting, my mind immediately goes to how deeply are you going to do this before you introduce it to your players when the players may say, yeah, not interested.
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
So getting the player buy-in on that, if you're a game master, is important right from the start. And I would then want to build the world with them rather than build it and then present it to them? If I was going to move in a direction that's outside of the sort of standard setting, which is now Greyhawk, which is that mid to low magic? I would consider yes, but...
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
Yeah, so I would want to build it. Until you get into one of Gary's dungeons. Yeah.
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
True, true. So, okay, so we've got a pitch. I feel like we need something else. I think we need the this meets this. Yes, please.
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
Damn, I want to play this game right now. Everybody leave.
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
That is really cool. And so now I'm thinking adventures that we could do within that. What do we do at levels one to four? What do we do at levels... What's after four? Five to ten. I don't want to spoil it.
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
Yeah, this is what we do off the mics. Just mock each other. Or on the mics. So that's what I'm doing. What is the adventure that comes from this? So I am going to have them be war-weary. They're going to be soldiers or an elite unit that has been... It's been burned, right? They were deserters. Maybe one deserted because they're a coward.
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
Maybe another deserted because they are just tired of having killed so many folks. I'm making backgrounds now. Now I'm making backgrounds. Right, give them a reason. And so now I'm in my head making backgrounds that I can say, hey, players, you can make your own story, but here are some stories that I, as the game master, would love to tell with you. Here's backgrounds.
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
So we've got the world and a pitch for the world. What else do we need?
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
And if we can keep capturing that, and no matter what game we make, whether it's a high
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
Yeah, because now when you say barrier, I'm thinking exploration. And when you talk about exploration, we're in this gray area. One of the questions that we could have talked about was the exploration pillar and how do you make it better, how do you gamify it, and so on. So when I see barrier, exploration is going from the unknown to the known or learning something.
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
Now I'm starting this group or starting the adventure that I'm going to write on the other side of the world, and they're trying to get to this side of the world. And as Taylor said, what's the barrier from this region to the next? Maybe it's a magical barrier. From this region to the next, it's a military barrier.
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
And we're going to make themes around that with each of the adventures or sections of adventures that I'm writing. Cool. Do we want to add another idea in? Let's do it. Oh, cool. Way in the back. No, no, you. Yep, yeah.
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
I love killing off dragons. and then having them come back.
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
Right. And so if the dragons are being killed or have died off, what does that mean of the monsters of the world, the ecology of the world? Is it possible to bring magic back if you are able to team up with dragons? Or are dragons evil rampaging beasts that you don't want anything to do with anymore?
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
And that could be one of the barriers that you're trying to cross is this was a realm that was filled with dragons. Do you need to fight them? Do you need to interact with them in some way to pass through that region as you're heading back home?
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
Yeah, and now I'm picking up Kobold Press' Dragon Magic and reading that through, see if I have any ideas about things that you could do with dragons. And then Dragon Heist, because it's all about dragons and heists. That's only in Waterdeep. Oh. So I feel like we need one more, one more idea. Troy.
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
Good. Yes. Now we also need to decide if the characters are going to be fighting something, something will need access to magic as well. So the characters have that dragon egg, but there are other dragon eggs out there that...
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
right okay yeah so so chris just said there is there are magic items but they are made with dragon parts uh and that's still holds the magic and now you've got an underground economy possibly smuggling uh you can bring in all of these elements as well
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
You talk about 13th Age once every ten minutes, so... I do it every time you bring up fate. It's like, uh, that's our beginning. I haven't said fate... Well, I just said fate, by the way.
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
All right, I think we've got a good shell here. What do we have next?
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
I think we need the world now. I think we've got enough of a story idea that we need to build the world, not only in a way that captures all of these points, but that is accepting of the adventures that we want to put into it. So we need to think about those multiple threads. Fate. I just tried to scare him.
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
multiple threads to have the adventure work with the world in a way that supports the campaign. Yeah. So would you start at the top? Let's go to a map builder to tell us about the world.
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
And that's what I, and I'm going to mention Aurora now because I have to, because that's my dragon campaign. That's what I wanted to do in the first draft. In the first draft, it was dragons were put in charge of areas, but since red dragons are better at fighting cold creatures, the red dragons were put in the Arctic region and they hated it.
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
But they serve someone else, and they're miserable, and that's why they're mean and no one wants to deal with them. Same thing, the white dragons in the volcanic areas. But just to give that a little twist. Yeah. Yeah, that's really interesting. I'm just going to sit here thinking about it.
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
Nobody. Nobody at all. So what other things about the world do we want to include?
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
And the 50th anniversary gave us the impetus to do the history of all the editions and all the different versions of the game, and some of the stories that came out of there were both revelatory and fun and terrifying, and it shows you the diverse history of this game, where it has come through, some of the tragedies it's come through, but the joys that it's also brought.
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
I'm going to ask a question back. Do you need mechanics to support it or is just the story of smuggling enough? Is it... Do we need to gamify it? Or do we just... Okay.
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
Didn't he see him there? Oh my gosh. Yeah, and that works into the factions that you were saying. Yeah, moral ambiguity and everybody believing. Yeah, that's awesome. I was going to say, somebody we haven't heard from yet, but we've heard from everybody so far. So, Megan, go ahead.
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
And it can be different from area to area, very different depending on... how close they are to the front lines, how rich that particular civilization is, where the war actually was fought. All of those things are great points for the campaign.
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
So it was a good history... topic as the 50th. Any other questions?
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
Right. If you as the characters were a big part of why all of this is happening, even the war itself or the dragon's demise.
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
All right. Two more questions. Chris, go ahead.
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
It depends on the game. One of the things I'd like to see come back is a little more tension in the game, a little more. We've come to the point now where we sort of know and expect, in D&D particularly, that we're safe. We're safe here. We're safe now.
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
And playing that AD&D game, it brought back that tension that I felt as a 12-year-old playing where every decision I make, this could be the last decision for this character. And we've sort of lost that for good reasons. And there are games that do that. But for D&D itself, to be able to capture that tension without the controversy of...
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
I just lost this character that I've been playing for 20 years, and now I'll never be able to play it again. It's that tension that sometimes is fun.
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
Mastering Dungeons is the number 1.5 podcast in all the realms. All the realms. All the realms. I'm Sean Merwin. This is my co-host, Teos Abadieh. Welcome to this live recording of Mastering Dungeons. So normally we would have some very witty banter, but all the wit has left my body. So normally then what we would do after the witty banter is take questions from our listeners.
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
Did you feel the same about Epic Destinies, the third tier, or was it just that one in particular?
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
That's kind of cool. So do we need a level 20 to 30 in fifth edition? Sorry, in 5e, 2e.
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
All right. We've got a couple more minutes for questions here.
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
The day I left, a package arrived on my front step, and I picked it up, and I, ooh, Christmas, and I open it, and it was Rob Schwalb's Shadow of the Weird Wizard. And I'm one session away from finishing Citadel of the Unseen Sun from Ghostfire Gaming. And so what am I going to run next? And that showed up as if an omen.
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
that i i i need to run this uh if i can convince my players they played with rob schwalb uh at a convention many years ago and they're horrible people and and i'm like and i'm like rob rob is a lot rob is a lot as a game master and they're like we can we can handle it we can handle it and after four hours and family-friendly shows i'm going to go
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
After that, they're like, okay, yeah, that was enough. That was enough. They tapped out. But with Shadow of the Weird Wizard, a lot of that adult stuff has been removed. So I love that system, and I can't wait to go home and flip through that book. and see, is this something that we're going to play next?
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
Well, I'm on your Discord with your friends, and you're like, oh, and this weekend we're going to try the aliens, and this weekend we're going to, and I'm like, I'm going to sit home. I want to play. But, so I envy you the ability to. We're pretty cool. You are. You are pretty cool. Yeah.
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
To be honest, I've wanted simpler games. I've wanted to go in the direction of, can we tell stories more simply and still have some mechanical fun? And what got my attention, it's been a couple of years now, but it's Gloomhaven. It's not a role-playing game. It's a board game that could be a role-playing game with just a little tweak.
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
Guess what we have here, Mr. Teo Sabadilla. Listeners. We have listeners. Listeners. And so what I think we should do is take some live questions from our listeners, put us on the spot. If you have a question for us, raise your hand and let us know what you would like to ask. Yes.
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
And then they did a role-playing game version that didn't seem to explode like I thought maybe it could. But I love the mechanic. If you're not familiar with it, it's more of a board game, and you draw two cards... The top is things you can do, more of attacks. The bottom is more movement or special things your character can do. And then you have to use one from the top, the bottom from the other.
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
And so you have to figure out sort of on the fly what's the best way to do this and strategize. And I just like the simplicity of that. I would love to see that in a really quick role-playing game.
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
Yeah, over the last two years, just people have come up to me, people I know, and said, yeah, I just made this. Can you take a look at it? You want it? Ethan, last year, handed me Fetch My Blade. I'm going to start using that in my class to teach people small indie games, storytelling games. Andy Demps handed me a one-page adventure layout. Beautiful, loved it, loved it. We have...
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
100 Dungeons from Graham. So all of these people making these new things, I don't have enough time in the whole world to see them all, but I want to see them all and how you can use them.
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
The question was, what was it like? And since I am on that podcast, Teos, what does it feel like? Man.