Episode 208 of Mastering Dungeons! Main topic: 2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! 2024 5E PH banishes all the gods and reduces the multiverse to one page and one image! We look at how this changes 5E for new players. Our final look at Greyhawk reimagines the setting format and looks at how gods and powerful organizations create interesting play. News: MtG Netflix Revivified, the D&D Bologna Scale, Knowing Vecna, and more! Contents 00:00 Emptying Nests 02:53 Boss Battle Origins? 06:23 Codified vs Loose Rules? 15:40 Sage Advice Fixes? 19:37 Rest of World Healing? 29:18 MtG Netflix Show Revivified 31:32 What Do We Know About Vecna 35:24 D&D Bologna Scale Tested 39:17 Daggerheart Preorders 41:10 Enter the Labyrinth 43:07 2014 vs 2024 Gods and Multiverse 44:45 Design Goals 47:35 Planes and Gods in Older Editions 52:30 2014 and 2024's Gods and Planes 56:48 Is Less Information Good? 01:05:07 Wrapping Up Greyhawk 01:06:32 Encyclopedic Approach is Dated 01:08:03 Why Greyhawk is Different 01:14:32 Geography of the Flanaess 01:15:45 Greyhawk's Powerful Organizations 01:19:49 Greyhawk's Gods 01:21:03 The Living Greyhawk Campaign 01:22:26 Shout-Outs Thank you for listening! Get the full show notes with links on Patreon. Show Search Engine: https://mdsearch.alphastream.org/ Our intro and outro music is Metropolis Fanfare, provided royalty-free by Tabletop Audio (https://tabletopaudio.com) under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). MP3 file metadata populated with Online MP3 Podcast Chapter Editor, built by Dominik Peters. https://mp3chapters.github.io/ and customized for Mastering Dungeons by Vladimir Prenner from Croatia.
Hello, and welcome to this week's episode of Mastering Dungeons, your favorite RPG tabletop game industry news and reviews and craft discussion podcast. I'm Sean, here with the empty-nested Teos Abadie. Hey, Teos, how's it going? Hey!
I got a Japanese anime cry. It's great. I'm so proud of my son. I went to Santa Clara University for the first time. My wife had been there, but I did not go when they first visited. And it was amazing. Like, it was really good. The staff all said really nice, touching things. And the teachers seemed surprisingly competent and everything. And like, it was fantastic. Everything was great.
Way beyond where I dared expect it would all feel like. Yeah, it seemed like he was fitting in well. And so now he just lives without us.
I guess. And yeah. Yeah. And you can celebrate by doing exactly the same thing that you've been doing for the last 20 years. Right. Pretty much reading D&D. Yeah, basically. Right. Eating, sleeping and working.
You know, it wasn't just a weekend for him because at the local Target event, I found the issue of Time magazine, the special edition. I read it cover to cover during the nights. And yeah, it's pretty neat. It's a very fun kind of it's like a look at history from a particular perspective, which I think is great. And it's fun and it has nice pictures and art and everything.
And it has some actually really fun articles on the D&D movie. and on Stranger Things that are just kind of fun of their own right. But yeah, it's sort of like a pop culture look, like the pop culture history of D&D and the pop culture, what is important of D&D. And it's fun for its own ways for that. I also got the alternate cover Player's Handbook.
And it does not, Goldfold does not come off in my hands. So they did their job right. Congratulations. We'll call that a...
We'll call that a victory. We'll call it a victory. And also not coming off in your hands are our listeners. I don't know. That segue was worthy of Ben Byrne.
We'd like to retract everything.
Yes, I retract everything that I've said. But we do have listeners and they do write to us from time to time. Sometimes they do it via our Patreon Discord or via YouTube or Mastodon or Blue Sky or the hellscape that is currently Twitter, real life at conventions, etc. So let's start with taking some of those questions right now.
First, Michael J. Pastor, who I always think of as Michael J. Pasta because that's how Ben Burn pronounces his name with his Australian accent. Michael writes to us via YouTube, Sean's comment on the big bad boss battle in his home campaign prompted this question for a future episode. Were big boss battles in RPGs common before video games? Or is that a result of the game form feedback loop?
Or were they there all along and influenced video games from the start? Now, I would say they have been there since before video games and they have been there since before D&D. This concept has been around since people have told each other long stories. It's called a climax or a climactic scene in literature.
And over the years, the term boss battle has made its way into common parlance, whether it's video games or TTRPGs. But, I mean, Beowulf battles Grendel's mother at the end of that epic, right? That's a big boss battle. But it wasn't called that, but it was still a thing. It was the resolution of all of the action that had led up to that point. And we can go through...
sagas, epics, you know, we could do Gilgamesh, we could do all of those that lead up to this point. So yes, it's always been there. It hasn't always been called the big bad boss battle. But I'm sure that the person who wrote Beowulf or the people who wrote Beowulf would agree that that is a great way to shorten and truncate and get that concept across.
Well, you know, and Timely is today's headlines in that issue, Time magazine issue of Dungeons and Dragons. They look at all the kind of video games and they talk about this 1974 students in Southern Illinois University who develop a game for the Play-Doh computer system. They call it the dungeon.
And they decide to add a boss battle because they wanted the game to have something big at the end, right? And sort of like the first video game boss battle that was like a D&D-themed game inspired by. And I think there is that to it, but I mean, yeah, as far back as you can think of of adventures, there are big boss battle fights. And I think it's evolved... you know, hand in hand, right?
Where D&D has led the way in terms of how to depict the storytelling in a game, maybe.
right um but but also uh with the idea of these mechanics right which which are video very video gamey in form and and there's a lot of back and forth right well wouldn't it be cool if right but you can look at i don't know old deities and demigods or anything like that and and and look at you know there were deities they could just touch your magic item and drain it of all its power
Or grant you wishes or whatever, right? The ability to be a boss beyond comprehension almost because it's so incredibly powerful. And so there's always kind of been that, right?
Yep. So, great question. I hope that helped illuminate at least our thoughts on it. Next, we have Falcon Neal, who writes in via Patreon. Recently, Teo said 5e was at its best when it wasn't trying to nail down every little rules thing. In 2024, the creator seemed to have tried simplifying and moving even closer to real-world language. I'm going to stop there.
There is more sections to this question, but I need to stop there because... i don't agree with that statement yeah i would say the opposite is true and if anything we've seen 2024 moving away from simple language and using more formal language and more formal rules and the capitalization of terms to specify them as rule statements rather than language statements uh
And so right there, let's discuss that first. Do you agree? Do you disagree?
Yeah, no, 100%. I completely agree. We have formalized things. And I mean, I think Jeremy Crawford has spoken to it, right? The idea that what Jeremy's trying to do, what the team are trying to do is to simplify life for the DM so the DM doesn't have to make calls. And if you go back and listen to previous team members for 2014, they were trying to make it so let's empower the DM again, right?
Make the calls that are going to be fun at your table the way the game should play out. And those are very different views of the world. It's fascinating to me because 4th edition was super into that codification, right? It was almost like going back to wargaming roots where you would just, you know, you look at those diagrams of whether a thing has...
uh cover or whether it uh you know is in within range and whether it has um uh a combat advantage type thing right like all of that you know are you flanking like those things were so precise and it wasn't about your judgment and you can look at 2014 with like its stealth rules and it's like
you're hidden if sort of maybe your target is distracted or your DM feels like it or whatever, you know, and then people would maybe want more because that's a natural thing that people will want. But the game was ultimately saying, and you figure this out. And now we get into a situation where invisible doesn't even mean what you think it means in English. It's like a condition, right?
It's a thing. It's a state. That's an on off switch of the game. Right. And that is really very different.
Yeah, and that's a pendulum that swings back and forth as Teos has been saying, but throughout the years, when it gets super light and it relies on conversation and GM ruling, people clamor for a more concrete fixed rule set. And then as it becomes more concrete and more fixed, you get all of the contradictions and all of the issues. at all of the problems with it.
And then people say, oh, I wish it was just easy so we could just play our game and not sit for 20 minutes discussing all these rules. And the pendulum starts to swing back. And there is no right or wrong answer. It depends on your group and it depends on the kind of game you want to play.
And so it's fun to watch this cyclical debate or the cyclical paradigm play out throughout the issue, the editions of the game.
Well, and this ties into the next section of the question. Can I kind of go on to that? Please do. This is there is a community that seems to take advantage of loose wording or intentionally look for places to gain advantage by reading rules in a particular way. A 2024 example of this is opportunity attacks.
The first two sentences in that section clearly stated that it applies to enemies and foes, but a rather large community is claiming they can do an op attack or an ally on an ally because the mechanical text
uses the word creature and they've interpreted enemies as flavor text and what this is if you haven't seen this little piece of ridiculousness it's the idea that you can take an opportunity attack to like cure your friend when they move by when they move out of here because it's i forget the exact technicality but it's like the wording Now, it doesn't say that they threaten you.
It just says that they've moved out of your reach. And it doesn't say enemies in a particular place. It says creatures.
So you could take like the I forget what is the Mage Slayer feed or whatever, but you could basically as an opportunity to cast a cure spell on your ally, which now can be abused because every time your allies need help, they can just move around you and they're away from you and cause this free healing.
And I don't know how you feel about this, Sean, but I think the more that you are nailing down things, it creates in the player this mentality that all exactness can be used, right? And so then they start parsing for this. And I sort of feel like this happens the more that you try to nail down things. It does. Right? Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, there is a community who will try to take advantage of loose wording, and then there's the community that will take advantage of specific wording, as in this case. And let me just say, with new weapon properties now, well, I want to take an opportunity attack against the barbarian who just went past me, because he's also standing next to the big bad guy, so I can cleave through...
the barbarian who will only take half damage and needs to be damaged anyway, to actually get a hit on this. But my other, oh, and now I can sneak attack, now I can blank, right? You could parse it a lot of different ways. And so, we have laws and lawyers you know, thriving because of this need to nail every specific thing down.
And no matter how much you try, it's going to be twisted and it's going to be, and you could say, well, if you wrote the rules better blank, but no, you can't, you can't, there is no point at which you can write the perfect rule that will cover every single thing because the game itself also needs to expand.
Right. Yeah, but what I think that is what you do get. So you can't kind of either way, you're going to get some people arguing whatever. And, you know, the Gamers movie had the beautiful example of like, you know, can I just set up a ballista, you know, or a crossbow behind, you know, to to just arm this thing up to then like sneak attack with it on this person in a tavern. Right.
The rules don't say I can't. And the DM is just like, I don't know that this feels wrong, but I don't know how to behave. And so here is this bro, you know, setting it all up to fire is huge. Yeah, you know, and that's the kind of thing you get. But but there is it is a thing that like the more that you claim in your game that your wording is perfect.
The more that people will go, oh, well, if it's perfect, then then that certainly means I can do the following. Right. You have endorsed this when they're just words and we're all trying to do our best. Sometimes when it's looser, you just know it's clearer that we are doing our best with few words. And so we should figure it out. Right.
And what I do think is that the more that you are nailing things down. you are driving particular behavior interactions more and more versus creative use of things. I've had a lot of fun reading Playing at the World, which on one hand, this this revised version, it can be a little boring because it's a lot about the wargaming side of things.
But and I get why John's being very clinical, John Peterson, in writing this. In describing really where does D&D come from, right? And they're getting into things like the Bronstein rules where people are starting to sort of have campaigns and starting to have roles that they play in really interesting, funny ways.
I mean, it could be we could do a whole show on this, but it translates directly to this idea of, you know, you get what you put in. When you tell people, hey, you get to play you as a character in this game, people understand that they are now an actual person, not moving just units dispassionately on the board as some country.
They are now an entity, a person, and they start thinking differently and doing things differently. And at the far level, when you prescribe particular actions everybody can take, then people want to use those actions only. And that becomes the menu of operations, right? I mean, it's like fourth edition, right?
You give everybody at wills and encounters and dailies, and it's sometimes all they can see, even though they can do anything they want. And the game says, you can do whatever you imagine. Okay, well, let me see my menu of at will encounter daily. Right.
Yeah, exactly. And that's what it comes down to, because the last part of the question is, in 2014, Sage Advice and Arata tried to fix these disparities, but Wizards has recently moved away from aggressively interpreting rules for people.
Is the game better off by letting tables have a very different rules interpretation for each table, or is it better for there to be a prescriptive rules-as-written interpretation to drive uniformity? And the answer is yes. Yes to both. Because the game wants to be different things. The game wants to be a tool set that you can take with your individual group of players and GMs.
Yeah.
Yeah. Or the game also, the rules also want to become a community-wide standard so that everyone can see the way that the game rules intend the game to work. And that's where you get a community, and that's where you get people who can share stories and do these things. But in a way, that also takes communication. It's just a different form of communication.
It's a communication of, one is, this is what our group will do. And the other is, what does the game want us to do? And that's why the... the creators of the game can and should step forward and say, this is what we intended the rules to be. We could not create the perfect wording for that, but this is what we intend.
And you can use it if you want, but this is why we created the rules the way we did.
Yeah, it's interesting to look at, like, I think second edition was really the time when we had the most kind of house rules and lack of uniformity out there, both because second edition itself had so much for it and all the oney stuff that people would use, too. But you found, you know, you couldn't be on a forum online, you know, on Usenet or wherever without. all kinds of house rules.
And then there were so many books and supplements that just had wild ideas. And so what would happen is if you went into the local pegboard at your local gaming store and you jumped into some person's game, the first thing you probably got was a house rules document. And it could be from any of those things. It could be something they found online, some product, some weird settings, some whatever.
And that was what they enjoyed. And it could be just wildly different, you know, if they liked skills and powers towards the end of it, if they liked kits, if they liked and you name it, right? You know, some sort of wizard duels in Dungeon Magazine, right? I mean, anything's possible. Yeah. And it was so wild that you just it was like you feared it.
You feared showing up at another person's table because it was so disparate. And since then, rules have tried to be a lot more cohesive, standard, understandable to the point where I think in 2015, you know, there's also you hear a cry out of like there aren't enough house rules out there, right?
Or or homebrew is a dirty word because we've become a lot more communal in how we approach things, which is making a few tweaks.
part of that is because the rules are very very good but you may be seeing a little more now as you at least people are saying that we'll see what they actually do but they're saying things like well i'm not gonna do weapon masteries i'm gonna do them this way or you know those kinds of things because i think the game is trying to sort of clamp down in a way that maybe isn't as clear to everybody or or so universally accepted for just working at any table right yeah
And our last question comes to us from LordOz3 via YouTube. And this question is in regards to the last week's question about the medicine skill and how it might be more useful in curing diseases and so on. So regarding healing, what does the rest of the world do if they don't have access to clerics?
It seems like there should be an effect that would encourage a party to have someone with healing without requiring everyone to have it or requiring the medic to, quote, max out medicine. The same goes for survival. I think it's a skill someone on the party should have if you're traveling through wilderness without requiring everyone to have it.
And this is a great question, and this could go off in a lot of different directions. But I want to focus on that sort of what does the rest of the world do if they don't have access to clerics? And it's a great question because it brings up a game design point about what the game is trying to model.
Is your game trying to model heroes battling monsters that are well above and beyond the scope of anything that a peasant could deal with? Or is it a medieval setting simulator? The answer to that has changed over time. With earlier sets of rules, in a lot of ways, it was a medieval setting simulator. And it's changed over time to become more of a hero battling monsters simulator.
So the question I have is if something works well to model what the game is trying to be, should we have to change that to better model something that the game doesn't want to be? should we have to worry about how the rules for how these heroes are dealing with monsters in terms of what it means for the peasant or the innkeeper or the blacksmith or anyone else in the world
And the answer could depend on what you want out of your game. But as a game designer, I do not want to have to think about that. If I'm making something where the model doesn't fit that. So I don't want to have to worry about how a blacksmith who hits his hand with a hammer and takes one hit point of damage heals that.
Because I'm not writing a game about farmers getting diseases or blacksmiths hitting themselves with a hammer or getting kicked by a horse they're trying to shod. I want this to be my game.
Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I share your perspective. Mm-hmm. And especially because I am very scenario now driven, right? So as an example, if you come into town and you want that blacksmith to make something for you, I'm most certainly not going to use whatever player crafting rules there are. This isn't a character, right?
This is an NPC and they will make that thing based on what I want it to take, based on the scenario, the timing, the whatever, and to make it fun.
And, you know, the last thing I want to do is say, well, OK, now this blacksmith needs to take a week of downtime and let's see if they complete three checks or whatever the thing, you know, they need to procure the materials like now, like it's going to be whatever I want it to be. And that's the kind of game that I prefer to run.
Some other folks, though, really want the whole world to always make sense. And where I think the designers are better off is when they can Maintain that separation. It is a game about your heroes, not about the whole world. But you don't want it to seem so out of whack that you go, well, this wouldn't possibly work in a real world. And I mean, let's all be clear.
We're always maintaining that little shield of dumbness, deliberate, you know, dumbness to believe in the world, because there's just no way any society would function with wizards the way all of these function, these societies depict. Even Eberron, right? I mean, even that we choose certain places where we allow lightning trains and whatever to feel like, oh, yeah, magic had an impact.
But I mean, no, you would have slave trade wizards that are just sitting there casting an at will prestidigitation day in, day out.
it would be horrible what our society would do with actual wizards would be horrible right and i don't want that in my game right you you start getting into reality with fantasy and it's it's not pretty and and you know i want to have a fun right fun game where we go and kill dragons so yeah and and then the second part of that is you know the the the
the correlation of skills and what they mean in the game to powers and what they mean in the game, it really comes down to, again, the story that you're trying to tell. Do I think that everyone should have survival maxed out in order to survive a travel through the wilderness? No. Should a party where no one has survival, have to deal with the consequences of that? Maybe.
What are the consequences of that? What should it be? Should they fail at everything they're trying to do because they have trouble getting from point A to point B with no ends to serve them food? Possibly. I don't know.
It depends on, I don't want a game that forces that to happen, but I want a game where I, as the game master, can use the rules as a tool to make that happen if I so choose with the understanding of the players that this is the game that we're in. We're in a game where survival is important. We're in a game where it will matter.
So therefore, as you're making your characters, you may want to take that into account.
Yeah. And that's what I think, you know, 2014 does a pretty good job of it, of trying to step back a little bit from where third and fourth were of sort of demanding certain skills be maxed out, be whatever. I mean, third edition, it was like a it was like warfare, right?
Like characters and their players felt like I must hit some unbelievable DC because an unbelievable DC will come my way someday. And that was such a bad, that hot-cold model was destructive. It was combative. Fourth edition brought that back a bit, but skill challenges are important. Fifth edition, I think, has tried to be much more open about it, right? That sort of flexibility to say that...
your skill system is a representation of your character. It's interaction with the environment. It allows for these scenes, these kinds of neat situations, and that there will be enough looseness in these numbers that in general, the DM can create a particular type of experience reasonably, right? And I think it does that fairly well.
Yeah, and what 2014 didn't do was say, this is the specific DC to do a very specific thing that might be very important. because then players will work to get to that number. Okay, I'm plus 14, so I don't need to worry about rolling a one, because if I roll a one, I still hit 15. And that's what 2024 did.
Only in a couple of instances, but it brought that, okay, now you only need to beat a DC 15 on your stealth check to become invisible. Even though you're not invisible.
Yeah, and we saw this at 2014 jumping right like yeah That was a case for 2014 for whatever reason at the last minute decided to make this change and suddenly Jumping was based on your score and no not a die roll in most cases And so then you could just see that well a five-foot put pit is now useless
unless something's going to push you in it right unless there's some trickery involved everybody can jump it automatically and you saw the first adventure designers even official products mess that up because it was hard to suddenly you had to know this right and then you started seeing reasons why there's a check and i'm curious whether this will happen with 2024 because if i look at what i see at least in the player's handbook i haven't seen the dmg yet but the player's handbook
tells me seems to say all locks, all traps, one DC. Yeah, that seems really weird. Anathema to most designers and how they think. So will we know what will designers do to explain why this trap is harder than the DC that's in this book? Because that's what the player was led to expect and might generate their character. If I can hit that DC, I'm done. End of story. Well, who knows right now?
We'll see where this goes.
Yeah. So thank you for those questions. And if you have questions at the end of the episode, we'll tell you how you can send them to us. But now we'll get to our news and commentary section, starting with the revivification of a Magic the Gathering Netflix series.
We've heard about a D&D show and a Magic the Gathering show coming to Netflix, and it was on, and then we didn't hear anything, and then maybe it's off, but wait, now it's back on. And what are we hearing now, Teos, about Magic the Gathering?
Well, Variety reports that this long gestating, as they called it, Magic the Gathering animated series has a new showrunner, Terry Matalas. Matalas received praise for the third season of Star Trek Picard, the sci-fi series 12 Monkeys and other projects. Before this, it was the Russo brothers in 2019 and then Jeff Klein in 2021. And then it has been just completely quiet.
And someone actually interviewed said, well, I think this is dead. But hey, out of nowhere, now the series has a new showrunner. And so, you know, maybe that'll bring new script writing or pilot proposals or who knows what, but more energy to the show. And, you know, the reason for reporting this isn't just that it's kind of interesting, but it's Magic the Gathering.
It's not D&D, but the D&D TV show is also in this sort of situation now. And there are things like there is the Transformers movie coming out. And these days, because of Hasbro, it can all be a lot more integrated, right? And how one does can mean how the next does. So if we have a super successful Magic the Gathering Netflix series, that may bring a D&D TV show.
We saw Optimus Prime in the virtual tabletop demo, right? Against Driz Dwarden. So all of these things kind of can fuel each other. And so in some ways, you want to kind of cheer them all on a bit and hope that they can do something interesting with them because it could all tie into how D&D fares.
It's very true. It'll be interesting to see if this actually goes forward. And if so, what the critical and... justifiable via numbers results are when it comes out. Vecna. What do we know about Vecna? Well, Jared Rasher, friend of the show, with his great blog, What Do I Know About, asks, what do we know about Vecna?
And Jared does a great job in this blog post of giving us the history of Vecna across the editions to show how Vecna has changed, but sort of has always been a multi-planar threat. What did you take out of this blog article, Teos?
It's really cool. And, you know, this has been something Jared is like my better self. It's like I was thinking to myself, you know, I really want to comb through all these old materials and really remember what all this stuff happens in these various adventures and what Vecna does and to what extent the fifth edition adventure builds off of that or is something completely different.
But I didn't have to because Jared did all the work. Thanks, Jared. Thank you. He goes and starts way back with Eldritch Wizardry and in the original Dungeons and Dragons and the DMG where it's just basically two artifacts from this dead, famous person. And then we get like a cartoon and we get all other things. And, you know, some of it's conflicting backstory, as he rightly calls out.
It doesn't all make sense or jive, but Vecna lives as an adventure based in Greyhawk. Very cool. At the end of it, Vecna is defeated and then he ends up in the domains of dread and Cass is his neighbor and another neighboring Ravenlob domain of dread. Then he escapes and Vecna reborn with sort of a weird idea of how to get out of a domain of dread.
uh divekna die was this huge adventure uh at the end of of one edition leading to the next and it's one of those things where when editions change often and maybe this is you know is is uh 2024 a new edition maybe this answers it and that we didn't have an adventure that really explained all the rules changed right but we sure do in other cases and one of the things that happens is divekna die
is all about Vecna finding how to get into Sigil and trying to rewrite everything. And it's the explanation of why, like in third edition, a plane like the Nine Hells can have a version for Greyhawk and a version for the Forgotten Realms.
right uh he is expelled out from sigil but becomes a full deity fourth edition names as a as a deity for for an entire veil setting which was interesting and even things jared talks about like critical role where it's not canon right it's not at all the way that they fought vecna and kept him from being a god and then akon the cruel at the last minute uh steals the hand of vecna and gets away not canonical at all except for the fact that akon the cruel
does have the hand in Descent into Avernus, official fifth edition adventure, and the name Exandria is mentioned. So you're like, wait, maybe it was canonical? And then, yeah, Jared makes this great point that sort of Vecna actually has been, while he started as just two artifacts and as a Greyhawk power, became a villain that was very much tied into this idea of multiverses, right?
From the Domains of Dread to trying to sort of change all these multiverses into being just a single one. Like, he's actually been at it for quite some time, and it was very clever of them to tie into that for 5th edition again.
And so, yeah, and he makes some comments like maybe the reason why the hand and I don't appear as artifacts in Vecna Eve of Ruin is because of Joe Manganiello's falling out with D&D over the Dragonlance TV series. It's really all of this blog is just fantastic reading. Really fun. Incredible. Yeah.
Jared does a great job with his blogs about, you know, deep dives into things. So keep that up. Well, Teos, we have the D&D baloney scale with all these licensing things. We see how close to the pinnacle D&D can get with its licensing out of its name to products and baloney being the summit. And we've had nerds and we've had alcohol and shirts and mugs and lots of things.
We have come now as close to we can, I think, to D&D Bologna with the latest offering from Mythical Meats, the D&D Snack Sticks. If you're a vegetarian, now is the time to stop listening to the show for the next five minutes because we are going to discuss these D&D themed Slim Jim beef jerky type snacks that come in 12 flavors, one flavor for each class.
So if you want to play your cleric the correct way, apparently, you need to get the cleric snack stick, which is Hawaiian teriyaki wild boar with beef. Okay. If you're the fighter, you get your jalapeno elk with beef. Or you're going to play a ranger, you get your hickory smoked venison with beef. Venison with beef. Okay. Yeah. And they are out there. There is a link in our show notes.
You can buy each one individually, I think, for $2.50. And if you buy the entire pack, I think it's $30 for 12 sticks.
Yeah, I think this is fun. And I appreciate the Bologna scale of things. But I will say, to me, what made D&D Bologna really awesome was it was Oscar Mayer.
right and it was something that was in grocery stores in spain where you know your random cousin whatever family member is going to be in that meat aisle and go isn't that game that my you know whatever plays and and it creates this discussion right magic the gathering had the um what was it in the frozen food aisle like egos or something like that not too long ago oh the uh hat pockets
Hot pockets. Yes. Thank you. Right. Like that's a great example. We're just random people are going to go like, oh, OK, this is a thing. And maybe go like, oh, that's that game I always wanted to try or that game I played a million years ago. And, you know, that creates a real change. Mythic meets, you know, hey, have some fun with that. But you're not in everyday store sales shelves. Right.
The D&D stamps. To me, that is the new high water mark. Right. Because. That is something in the UK and the US where random people are like, I went to my post office and I'm seeing that sign saying Dungeons and Dragons 50th year anniversary. That is the kind of, you know, exposure of the brand that is just, you know, you can't pay for enough to get that kind of thing, right?
It's like the 80s cartoon. It's just on everyone's TV. It's on everybody's stamps. It can just mail away. To me, that is the highest pinnacle we've ever seen. But I will take all of it, John. Even if I find today's dried meats to be weirdly overpriced, what happened?
Yeah. So if you have... The money to spend and the hunger, the need for high protein snacks.
You can wash it down with the Beetle and Grimm's alcohol and then have the mimic chocolate bar that I got once to try and it was very tasty. There you go.
The whole D&D themed meal. Not necessarily good for you, but very delicious. Add Daggerheart. They are now taking pre-orders. On the day that the Player's Handbook became available worldwide, the Dagger Heart website said, hey, pre-order your books now, shipping in spring of 2025. Well, we did a review of the RPG, because we had played it in various iterations.
Some limited play test is still taking place, but the final preview version was released, and now the game has gone into final production. What else do you know about this, Teos?
Yeah, you know, my group, we applied to do play testing, additional play testing. We were not picked. But they were kind enough to send us a discount on this. So I did actually pick this up already. It's $60 for that core rulebook, which comes not just the book, but also the 279 cards. That's pretty sweet. Maybe a very reasonably priced.
I feel like everything Daggerheart makes is sort of like cheaper than it should be. And maybe that's on purpose. You know, I don't know. The limited edition has alternate cover cards, larger storage box, DM screen, character sheets, 120 acrylic tokens for 150, which again, pretty reasonable for compared to other products out there.
It is interesting to see these companies that are this is starting to become a thing, right? We're like, if you don't kickstart, you still like preorder.
if it's almost like it's like kickstarting when you know that you're going to fund anyway right it's an interesting approach and sometimes you see both like pre-ordering and kickstarting and so yeah companies will do all they can to kind of get the money in before the product actually goes out we've seen it with mcdm and with others i'm excited to see what daggerheart does uh what that the last changes they do um pretty neat stuff yeah
And our creator corner, we are going to look at Kobold Press and their fifth edition Tales of the Valiant expansion and adventure path called Enter the Labyrinth. And I'm looking over at the Kickstarter right now, just launched recently.
uh this kickstarter is centered on the labyrinth a place between worlds where ancient cosmic forces vie for supremacy so it's a combination adventure path and campaign overlay meant to connect the existing campaigns with the labyrinth as a source of adventure and a place where you can have adventures New Tales of the Valiant player options are also provided.
And our members of our Patreon backers, Richard Green and Lou Anders, have been mentioned as being part of the project. And as of now, it's up at $128,000. So they have funded. They have 1,000 backers already with just a couple days in. And yeah, good for them.
Yeah, you have until October 22nd to ban it. Ban it? To back it. There we go. Don't ban it. I did think it was a neat concept, right? This idea, like, I think it's clever to say, hey, take whatever worlds you've got and bring them into the labyrinth as a sort of connective venture tissue. I thought that actually could have been something that D&D could have done more strongly with Radiant Citadel.
You know, to really say like, look, use this. Here's how. So it seems like a smart thing. And one thing I noticed is like Richard Green worked on Parsantium as a world a long time ago. And like that is being added here. Right. So there's that capacity that you can add other people's settings, not just as stretch goals, but just in that concept of this is what it's meant to do. That's neat.
So we'll keep an eye on that. And that is our new segment. On our main segment today here on Mastering Dungeons, we are going to do our double duty, our 2024 5e mini review, and then our continuing, but perhaps final, look at Greyhawk and the Living Greyhawk Gazetteer. So let's start with our mini review. And this review was started from a question that we got from Rory via Mastodon.
who asked you mentioned the 2024 players handbook has fewer words than the 2014 version one place they saved on word count is the detailing of the dnd multiverse in 2014 the gods of the multiverse got seven whole pages and the planes of existence another four In 2024, they cut the gods completely and shrank the multiverse section to just two pages. What do you make of this choice?
That's a really good question. That is a really great question. And that prompted us to go back and sort of look at what the gods and the multiverse have been – how they've been covered in the players' handbooks over the years. Obviously, you're going to get a difference – between the Player's Handbook and the Dungeon Master's Guide, and even supplements beyond that.
But by putting it in the Player's Handbook, you are saying this is something the players need to know about. And we feel that it is important enough to draw attention and put a spotlight on this. So what are the design goals of the inclusion of the gods in the multiverse in the Player's Handbook?
And the design goal for me would be to provide the context and the concepts for the players to understand the setting in which they are playing, both in terms of the stories that might be told, but also how the rules themselves connect to those concepts. And then they're there to inspire DMs, obviously, to create stories that make use of these contexts and these concepts if they so choose.
Would you agree?
Absolutely. Yeah, you want to... You're saying, by adding this section, you're saying our players... will be better off if they have some understanding of the underpinning in the world. Some of that may represent just baseline knowledge, like a person, you know, in the Forgotten Realms should have some concept of other dimensions existing. Right.
But also a little bit on the player side of the working of like, hey, there are a bunch of material planes or a material plane with a bunch of worlds in it. And I guess is the current way and and how you characterize that can be really important to the game. And sometimes when you know things too well, you forget how to share that information or maybe this is deliberate.
But if I look at, for example, the Feywild in 2014 and the Feywild in 2024, we go from a large paragraph to just this. I'm holding it up here for viewers, just the tiniest sliver. It's just a little paragraph that that shows up. And that is.
you know all we say here is this vibrant idealized realm brings with brims with life and emotion which are most intense in the realm's domains of delight and i almost don't know what you said there like i don't know what domains of delight is you just it's capitalized so it's a place i guess or place is um vibrant idealized realm you didn't even say that there are fake creatures here though i guess that's in the name feywild
Whereas the Feywild description 2014 is more of like what we might have thought about explaining of an ultra vibrant world with fake creatures. We get examples of the kinds of creatures, you know, music and all these kinds of things. And similarly with the Shadowfell, You know, the we get very little here.
In fact, what we get is this the infamous domains of dread, which aren't mentioned in 2014 as well as sort of the few things that are here. But it's just wastelands, haunted ruins and domains of dread. That's your Shadowfell in this gloom haunted realm. But it does not explain things the way that they are as a sort of alternate version of reality or anything like that.
And yeah, it's a really interesting shift of the design goal, perhaps.
Right, and so let's go back. Let's go all the way back to first edition and look at how the gods and the planes of existences were discussed in the Player's Handbook. In first edition AD&D, appendix four discusses the quote, known planes of existence. And we are shown that there are eight inner planes.
There's the prime material or physical plane, positive material plane, negative material plane, the planes of air, fire, water, and earth, and then the ethereal plane. Then we get the 17 outer planes. The first is the astral plane, which links all of these planes together. And then we get one for each sort of alignment.
So we get the seven heavens, the twin paradises, Elysium, Happy Hunting Grounds, Olympus, Gladsheim, Limbo, Pandemonium, the Abyss, Tartarus, Hades, Kahina, Nine Hells, Arkron, Nirvana, and Arcadia. So there they are. That's all spelled out for players. And all that they really say is that these are tied to alignments. Is that does that match your memory, Teos?
Yeah. And I think in the DMG is where you get more of the mapping to gods and and a little more about them and the physical image of what they look like and all of that. You know, there were a couple of different art pieces, but you get this concept of layers and infinity for some things like that.
But really, and the Player's Head book really doesn't go into gods specifically. There is a later supplement called Deities and Demigods, very popular, lots of great information and fun. And it's where I learned about mythology as a kid was from that book.
And second edition deities and demigods takes it to a whole nother level with really interesting concepts on what the priesthoods are like and adds a whole dimension. I know Alex Cameron is a big fan of that book and rightfully so, because it adds just a dimension to it that is really, really fascinating of what the gods are like and these realms.
And yeah, and I think that continues on into third edition design as well.
Yeah. So in the third and the 3.5 players handbook, There is no list of the planes of existence. So all of that stuff that we got from first edition and second edition is not discussed in any formal way. But we do get a list of gods, along with their domains and their favored weapons. What gods?
We get Bokob, Corellon, Alona, Erythnal, Farlangan, Garl Glittergold, Grumsh, Hyronius, Hextor, Kord, Moradin, Nerol, Obad-Hai, Olydamara, Pelor, St. Cuthbert, Vecna, Wejas, and Yandala. All from Greyhawk, and some of them very tied to a particular species. So yondalas as halflings, gargoyle to gold gnomes, et cetera, et cetera. But definitely... all Greyhawk deities.
And that domain concept is important in the Player's Handbook because third edition takes that second edition idea of priesthoods being different and says, okay, you will get domain powers, some small bonus for the domains that are associated with your god, right?
Yep. So that's why it's important, as Tao says, to have them in the player's handbook, because it shows a rules aspect that the players will need to know. So what do we get then as we move to a very, very different rule set with 4th edition? Again, we get no explicit list of planes. That is cut out completely, but we do get gods.
What gods of Andra, Bahamut, Coralon, Arathis, Ion, Kord, Melora, Moradin, Pelor, the Raven Queen, Sehanin, Asmodeus, Bane, Gromsh, Louth, Tiamat, Torag, Vecna, and Zahir, the latter of those being evil deities. Yeah.
But that's interesting. Yeah, go ahead. This is described as a best of God's pantheon, right? As a sort of more of an example. And I think Fortithian is trying to say. There are so many worlds to D&D, and so here is kind of Nentir Vale is going to use this best of of all the different worlds and pull them in together. And that's why all these are here, which is interesting.
Yeah. And then in 2014, as Rory said in their question, 5e returns to its depth of description that we saw in first edition for these planes of existence and for gods. In fact, Appendix B is not just about the gods, but it's got several different lists of gods
from the different pantheons that you might want to play with, including some real-world pantheons like the Egyptian gods and Greek gods and Norse gods and such. And Appendix C in the book lists the different planes of existence and gives a little description of each and gives us a diagram of the planes that harkens back to that first edition Player's Handbook chart. What has changed?
The positive material plane is now called the Feywild. The negative material plane is now called the Shadowfell. And some of the outer planes get a little bit of a rename, but for the most part, it is a very close representation of what that first edition chart visual was.
Yeah, it's really interesting to look at from a number of perspectives, like we could just do an entire show on this, but it is, it feels like, and maybe I'm transposing what they've said in other cases, but the design team, you feel like this was approached from the idea of this may be the last version of D&D. We don't know if this is going to be successful or not.
Let's kind of cover all the bases. So in the gods section, you know, let's tell you the difference between Greyhawk and Eberron and Forgotten Realms and so on. And for the planes, let's try to show the kind of variety of what's out there, because this book may need to support all of it. Who knows what else we're going to get away with creating is sort of how it feels like to me.
You know, so maybe you'll be running an Egyptian themed campaign. Whereas I think the 2024 team can go like, yeah, we don't need to cover that. You know, we will be telling you what you play in and it's going to be successful enough. So we can just ditch all that stuff, right?
Yeah. And as Rory mentioned, there's just one page of text and then one page of that graphic. And what's interesting to me is not that they cut it down, but what they changed is What they changed was in the center of the outer planes, there is now something new. It's Sigil.
And the Outlands have been added in the center of all of that to support the content that they've already put out in the Planescape. Planescape, yeah. They also added between the planes of fire, water, earth, and air, planes of ash, ice, ooze, and magma. And I thought, it's so... Those places have been in the game before, but I don't remember them being highlighted in anything before.
No, in fact, I think 5th Edition tries to sort of explain them away. There are regions where they come together and delve into this. And in fact, the way that the DMG explains it, because we reviewed this in our DMG analysis, it's more like where these planes combine and with the material planes
That's where this stuff is sort of you end up with like some oozy stuff or icy stuff or whatever, but it's not. They are not separate planes. Here we go back to that, which I've always liked those planes, so I think it's cool that they exist.
But but it's one of those, you know, how do you explain what these planes are and what it means to go from one side of it to the other or deeper into it or every one to look at it? And and they definitely chose a different path here than they had earlier on. And you have to wonder why. Is there some adventure coming that's going to make use of this like? It was just someone decided.
I mean, I sometimes think of 2024, you could call it a lot of things. And boy, people seem to not want to just use one term. But, you know, while we're throwing around terms, opinionated 5E is one that I could live with because it has a perspective. Whereas you could almost call 2014, or I would argue this, unopinionated 5E should work for everybody, no matter what kind of campaign you run.
This has a very like particular way towards it. And I don't know, I look at this information on the multiverse and it's like, I don't know what to do with it. Like, you know, they bothered to put in alignments for the outer planes, going back to that AD&D concept. But, okay, and I see Arcadia, for example, drawn here.
I don't know, it sort of looks like a weird video game graphic-y kind of thing with some conical mountains and whatever's. And it just says lawful good, lawful neutral. I don't know anything about it. So why is it here? Like, if you're going to tell me so little,
what's the function of this well let me tell you what the function of that is and why i love it teos okay i love it because every setting that they're going to publish or that they have already published has different gods or no gods has different has different rules has different things to focus on and every dm's home game is going to make use of this tool in a different way.
And so I would rather have what's in the player's handbook there, which is, this is likely what you're going to see, player. This is likely, but we're not going to give you everything. We're going to put that in the DMG for the game master to decide. So you don't go into this with this assumption that this is how the Feywild works, or this is how this works, or this is how that works.
And we're going to let the game master, or we're going to let future products that we're planning to work on do that work. And this is that pendulum, right? This is the pendulum that we talked about at the start of the show of getting very, very specific versus getting very, very loose with rules. And it's the same thing with setting.
We can be very specific, but I think there's a time and a place to be super specific. And I don't think the Player's Handbook is that place if you want to give your future designers or your game masters the freedom to maneuver within it.
Well, that's fine. But then I would say... take away this two-page thing here that tells me actually very little and replace that with something that's inspiring around the scope of adventures and how they can cross the plains and give me just some neat kernels of interest that will make me want to
both play in those things and be aware of the fact that this could happen as part of play and maybe want to make me DM, right?
And tell those kinds of neat stories that go beyond your... And yeah, maybe recast it as like the life of a hero can include not just, you know, saving your town or whatever, but it can span the realms and it can bring you to the home of your deity or the biggest villains and just... Yeah.
I agree. I agree. And I think my answer back to that would be, there's this thing called nostalgia, and there's this thing called expectation that they have to deal with. If they had just left it out completely, they're risking offending the people that have always loved that aspect of D&D. So you have to mention it, but you have to mention it in a way that...
becomes not a weight i just think this brevity has you know like if i look at 2014 the table with the alignments which you can debate how useful that is or not i know how you feel you know at least it tells me arcadia the peaceable kingdoms of mechanist the clockwork nirvana of you know akron the infinite battlefield of something that tells me what the why i'm even looking at this otherwise i'm just looking at stuff on a page that's meaningless
yeah and non-inspiring except that on dnd beyond right now you can go by planescape the book and see all and get get the answer to all of that yeah i could also get confused by it or you know i don't yeah i i could also buy the 2014 book and it'll tell me more i don't know i just think that they've gone to to brevity right with like the question that prompted this of you know what do we make of
This being so drastically reduced. Well, I think a couple of things. One thing is you've you've removed the gods entirely. And in some ways that makes sense because you're not trying to limit the scope of things. But you've also made it so that deities are further disappearing from play and importance and in consideration. And I don't know that that's fun.
I would debate the fun of that and the service that it provides to the players, the benefit to the players to remove that. Similarly, with the planes of existence, I think that when you've distilled it down to this one page of text and an image, you've lost a lot of what made this interesting.
Yes, you know, sure, it can be in the DMG and stuff, but that's the book that people keep on saying they've never read. Right. Even DMs. And yes, there is a planescape setting, but then you got to go by that and read all those things. And, you know, how many people do that? We know the numbers are low on that. And so I just this was your chance. This was your chance to inspire and inform.
And I feel like it's right.
Yeah, I I agree with you if this was sixth edition. but I don't think this book came out in a vacuum. Uh, and yeah, that's maybe that might be interesting.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and maybe that's it is that, you know, fifth edition 2014 being a new edition, it felt it had to declare what things were right. Um, like separate a bit from the dawn war of fourth edition and things like that. Um, and maybe 2024, uh, I might even say tricks itself into thinking, well, I don't have to say that because there's all this other stuff.
But but I mean, this is your this is your first book for a new player. And so I think it does. I think it should give me what I need to know. Otherwise, then remove the entire section. Right. What you've told me here is guns don't matter.
I love having this discussion because later tonight I'm going to talk to a college group about role-playing games and writing and creating. It's all part of the same conversation of based on based on what the game needs, what the rules need to deliver, what the setting needs to deliver, and are those two separate things or are they the same thing?
And if they are similar or if they are connected, how are they connected? It is an interesting discussion.
Yeah, I mean, and I think you and I, we may sound further apart than we are, like you made a comment in the show notes that I totally agree with, which is like, you know, tell me what do gods in the multiverse mean to your setting? Right. So that you position then settings to tell you, I think that would be great. Right.
Like that would be really neat because I think somehow what I see more and more at the table is only the cleric seems to care about their deity and actually very little. Like I'm seeing more and more of that. That's not always, but you just, you know, we're further, further away.
Right.
yeah yeah uh well i could we could go on we could go on but we also want to talk even if briefly about the rest of i'm going to hold mine up to the living greyhawk gazetteer uh we have been going through the regions and as we finished uh got toward the end of this list of regions, what I have decided is I don't want to read them anymore.
If only because they've stopped for me serving the purpose of what I want in a book. As I've said before, I think this is great. If you are going to be creating a campaign within or among some of these regions, this has... just a treasure trove of very specific information. For me as a game master, though, a lot of that information is not something I care about.
And as I was reading one after another after another to get into the show notes for today, my head was basically nodding because I just could not read another three pages of wall-to-wall text with no breaks, with no headings, with no anything. Art, again, black and white art, very evocative, wonderful, but just not for me.
Yeah, for sure. I agree with you, Sean. I'll just add from my end that the other thing is you see it's patternistic in the same way that if you read an encyclopedia, we've said this is encyclopedic. You know, at some point you're like, I'm going to learn. I'm going to read everything in the encyclopedia. You may have done this if you're old.
And you at some point went, yeah, maybe I'm done or I'll skip this section. And it's the same way. These start resembling the approach that was taken to the book over and over again, even though they're different regions. It's, you know, this war and this clash. And how did I use threaten you? You know, how did I use hurt you? Please tell us. And what are you doing about it?
Which is probably, you know, not great. And it's like that. And it really does... continue the same pattern over and over again. So even though there are some really neat regions, like, you know, we haven't talked about Valley of the Mage. We've only addressed Voluna a little bit, you know, Verbal Bonk. Some of these are famous areas that tie into the history.
But I think as listeners, you get it. You get what's here. And if you are curious about the last few regions, we have three where we kind of wrote up we were going to cover and won't. And then we have the list of the others.
And so you can take our show notes and go look up anywhere on the internet, kind of, you know, backgrounds about those if you want to complete it or check out the Living Greyhawk Gazetteer yourself. But, you know, I think that, you know, if I can say to sort of wrap this up, Sean, and add your piece of what you think.
One of the things we wanted to do with this series was answer the question that a lot of people will ask, which is, how is Greyhawk different from the Forgotten Realms or other settings? And it's different because I think it more closely ties to war games. the ideas of nations conquering one another, and this being a lot of the play that's in place, right?
It's been really fun for me to read John Peterson's Playing at the World, and I'm holding a copy of the second edition, because in fact, in this, they share that in one of the early diplomacy games that they're playing, they have these various variants of diplomacy, and one of them includes one involving the Great Kingdom. And it has the near div in it.
And, you know, this is all parts that we've covered in Greyhawk because they start just using it, this world for the lake of unknown depths and the dry steps. And let's see, where's my picture? There we go. You know, this is literally the world of Greyhawk or part of it. And and just that's what's going on here. Right. It's an it's a coming from this background.
And what that means is there's an emphasis on world building. where everything is balanced on the tip of a dagger and can go one way or the other way, and there's going to be blood either way. And every region is like that, which is kind of amazing, right? The Forgotten Realms feels very stable.
Even areas that are set up for change or, oh, the king passed away or whatever, it still feels like, and the next 20 years could be just like this entry. Every Greyhawk region feels like next year is going to be totally different. Right. Or more likely to be different than anything else. All right. What do you think? Yeah.
And one of the reasons why that's the case is not because of the content itself, although that's part of it. It's because of its lack of development over time, lack of novels that took place in Greyhawk, whereas we had a lot of them in the Forgotten Realms and in Dragonlance.
a lot you know no video games that came out or very very few video games that came out that moved the story forward and created powerful npcs uh that were there dealing with the problems that the player character should be dealing with um yeah that's a huge part of this feel of greyhawk yeah yeah can i just add to that the novels in in forgotten realms are often like taking possibility and resolving it
Again, and then leaving you back at that steady state. Adventures do this too, right? You know, Tiamat shows up and then everything's fine. That's what novels often do to the point where the world then feels fleshed out and stable, right? Icewind Dale, all kinds of wild things happen in the novels of the Driz Dwarden series. and then get resolved.
So now we're back to the steady state and the world feels very safe state versus Greyhawk. No, it's all right. They're about to explode, about to go one way or the other. And it can be, you know, what happens in one region. It's like dominoes for everything else. And that's kind of neat.
It also means that you have a lot of different possible stories you can tell based on what regions you choose and which aspects you lean into. Whereas the Forgotten Realms, you certainly have like climactic differences, climate, you know, architecture or whatever sort of cultural things.
But it feels like which nation you choose doesn't, you know, like if you are Baldur's Gate or Waterdeep, is it a huge difference? And I would argue it's not as great a difference as where in Greyhawk you sit.
Yeah, I would agree. So in terms of a setting and in terms of why Wizards of the Coast decided to put Greyhawk in the Dungeon Master's Guide as an example, I think that's why. I think because it's less formed and more chaotic and more on that knife's edge, as you say.
So it's much easier to take the cool things that we discussed that are in this book, eliminate 90% of the text that talks about this general and these 12 duchies of this one nation. And just say, here's where you set this adventure and why. And this is where you set this campaign and why.
And it's something new and fresh that players who have come in with fifth edition, with fourth edition, or even late in third edition, maybe have not seen yet.
Yeah. Yeah. And I think there's a real possibility that, For a future, I mean, I think the DMG for 2024 is likely to do very little, right? And I'm not saying it's bad. Like you could easily talk me into in a designer boardroom meeting kind of thing. We're all in the room.
What do we do to say, hey, let's just take a couple of areas in Greyhawk and paint a broad brushstroke of what the world is, choose a couple of regions and explain to DMs how you can use that to create a cool campaign. Done. Let's use eight pages. Ten pages. Twelve. I don't know. Are they going to cover all this stuff? No. Not at all. But...
you can use that as the springboard for either DMs doing this work or a future product where you could take this that we find in the Gazetteer and modernize it to have all of that potential we talked about, right? And to have really neat opportunities for the kinds of campaigns and stories you can tell because it's a world uniquely suited to that compared to the other settings. Yeah.
We didn't cover also here, Sean, just to make sure folks know that after this section of the glossography of the of the yeah, the glossography, I think it's called. Then you have a gazetteer of the Flores. Then you have the geography of the Flores. And this further fills in not just it goes beyond the regions, the nations.
and into the hills the mountains the swamps the forests and all of them have varying amounts of stuff sometimes a little too encyclopedic you know what are the three types of main trees or whatever but often with really cool hooks as well and the again the potential for pivotal things right what is layering in these forests and what could suddenly be a big impact um yeah which is kind of cool
Yeah, the brevity of covering these geographic regions is something that part of me wishes... Did they do a smaller version of this book? I feel like they did. I feel like they did like a... Yeah, like a player's guide to it.
A player's guide, which...
And I sort of wish that some of the regions, some of the nations had been broken down like, in this forest, here is the threat, and here's what you need to do to fight that. The hills and the mountains and the forests and the swamps that had that cool thing did that very well. Yeah.
The next chapter is the power groups, which shows both a good way to create these power groups and how they function in the world. And what sorts of adventures that you can create when you're dealing with them, either as allies or as enemies or as this nebulous background that you're still trying to suss out and figure out how they are affecting the plots that are taking place in your campaign.
Yeah, and there's some great ones we mentioned, you know, the circle of eight before and the history and how they've changed membership, the the silent ones of Keelan you had mentioned. And, you know, one that I love near and dear to my heart is the old faith. And it's a great example of how you can have this intersection of the information that's in this book with the reality of play, right?
So in my region, in the Living Greyhawk campaign that we've talked about of Jeff, this idea of the old faith that serves the Earth Mother Bayori, who is maybe the planet herself as a goddess. was taken and the idea of the flan people who worship the old faith was taken with the region of Jeff being conquered by giants, right?
If you think of it against the giant series and all of that, and created a really neat concept. And Eric Mengi was one of the architects of this, who's a patron backer. Thank you, Eric. And thank you for creating this because what he did was say, okay, Baori, Halor, Obad Hai, and even Nerol, the god of death,
are all worshiped by the flan in in certain aspects right like nerul as a god of decay and they're tied to the seasons right summer is palor and the fall is obad high and then winter is is nerul and the druids worship these aspects and they the old faith druids are often the lake in this area of jeff and with the monks and bards who protect them and you all of this can really come together to create fantastic regions
That's the kind of thing that I would love to see in the DMG, that kind of instruction of how does one create a setting that is really cool for your players to explore and get to know, right? That's so much more important than a glossography or what these hills are or what this nation is, is what do I do with what you gave me and how do I create my own version of that, right?
And for me, the last group here, the Silent Ones of Keoland, was one of those groups that was mysterious and could be used in many different ways by a game master. In this case, the Silent Ones are a secret organization that claim to be protecting Sewell magic, but you're not quite sure what that means. Does that mean they are protecting people from this ancient magic?
uh does it mean that they are using that ancient magic to control people uh including the rulers of the keel and then the vassal states around it uh And so you can move that group in different directions to make them an ally in some circumstances, an enemy in others, and even have a rift within the organization itself.
As long as you don't make it too arcane, and I don't mean that in the sense of magic, in the sense of being so secret and so inscrutable that it really doesn't matter what they are because the players will never be able to truly understand it.
you need to give some sort of an in for the players to at least begin to understand what's behind the group and what its aims are, or at least what factions of its aims are. Yeah.
Yeah. And then the chapter seven goes into deities and it's, you know, encyclopedic, though it has some nice aspects to it. And one of the things that I really love is the art. They don't do this for every god, but for a lot of the gods, they show off what different priests look like. Let me see if I can get for those viewing the video. There we go. Yeah.
And it shows how much their dress varies, but through the artist trying to also show their mannerisms and beliefs. And it goes to that question at the beginning of the book, you know, like how is it important to explain, you know, religion in some way? Well, this is one of the ways you do that by showing just how different you can be depending on who you worship, right?
And how important this is to the setting to have these different beliefs and followers and so on.
Yep. and remember as we mentioned earlier in this segment in third edition gods were important because that's how you got your domains so uh it was a rules uh augment as well as a setting augment to give that information and you know what's what was cool to me is the appendix was all about the living greyhawk campaign
and how this was promoted in an actual book, not just by mentioning it, not by just putting up an ad, but by saying, this is what the campaign is. Here is how you create a character in this campaign. And these are the ways you can get involved, including giving the regional tie-ins. So Alyssa was Sweden and, uh, Ulic, the Duchy of Ulic was California, et cetera, et cetera.
And actually telling people, here is something that we're doing worldwide, and here's how you get involved. And it showed one of the very strengths, marketing-wise, but also customer support-wise, of having this organized play campaign that was well-supported.
Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, it was really and it was one of the better ones because of that. One of the campaigns that for all of its ups and downs really got a reaction out of players and tons of people who are very devoted to it.
And I'm starting to lose my voice, Teos. So I'm going to ask you to close up shop for us here.
Absolutely. Well, I want to thank everybody who has provided feedback on this series. Now comes the time when you can tell us what you want to see us cover next. A lot of you folks have enjoyed our 2014 to 2024 comparisons. So we'll focus on that for now. But let us know what else you'd like to see. Maybe things that tie into future releases. Let us know. And thank you all.
Thank you to the Master of Dungeons supporters, Master of Realms. We give you a shout out in our show notes. All of you are vital to to our making the show and the masters of the multiverse who get this special shout out now.
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Chad Lynch, Paul Matta, The Mathemagician, Eric Mengi, Anna B. Meyer, Fantasy Cartography, and thank you for all that Greyhawk inspiration, Trey McLemore, John Mickey, Sean Molly, Falcon Neil, Tom Nelson of the Deck of Player Safety, Mighty Zeus,
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If you can also give us a review on Apple podcast or whatever podcatcher listening device you are using. And you can subscribe to YouTube to see our fantastic faces. Sean, where do we find you? At Sean Merwin, wherever you get your socials on. Fantastic. Yes. And you can find the show at Mastering D&D. You can find me at AlphaStream.org. And Sean, what are we going to do now?
We're going to save our voice so we can speak later. Fantastic. Us. Quiet.