Episode 204 of Mastering Dungeons! Main topic: Weapon Mastery in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! 2024 brings exciting Weapon Master options. We discuss the design, then turn to Greyhawk and review Ket, Lendore Isles, and Lordship of the Isles. Surf and turf! News: D&D Clarifies Beyond, D&D’s Secret Level and Universal Plans, and more! Contents 00:00 Time and Friendship 03:22 Conventions with Most AL? 11:37 Is Passive Perction Wrong? 19:32 D&D Direct 21:11 Beyond Clarifications 28:24 D&D Hiring Game Designer 31:39 D&D on Amazon Prime 32:27 Paizo Reverses Community Policy 34:33 Universal D&D FanFest 35:02 D&D at Rochester's Strong Museum 36:00 Goodman Launches Organized Play 37:03 Giantsbane Covers Planescape 37:43 Cosmere is Nr 1 38:36 2024 Weapon Mastery 39:11 Design Goals 43:20 Weapon Mastery Properties 54:56 DM vs Players 01:01:03 Overall Thoughts 01:07:59 Greyhawk and Triads 01:13:13 Ket 01:23:20 Lendore Isles 01:27:27 Lordship of the Isles 01:31:22 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.
Thank you.
Hello and welcome to this week's episode of Mastering Dungeons, your favorite tabletop role-playing game, D&D news and design and review podcast. I'm Sean Merwin here with Teos Abadie. Hey, Teos, how's it going?
It's going on fumes. I have been working. I don't even know what a weekend is anymore. And I drew strength from my parents who wished me a happy birthday today. And today's not my birthday. I was like, We're on the same page, parents. I don't know what month it is, year, anything. You know, I'm just barely making it through. But it was very cute. They wrote really nice things.
It was super, super loving. And then they said, oh, and we, you know, because they're in Europe. So they're like, I don't know, maybe they thought I'm ahead or who knows what happened. But either way, at the end of it, they were like, oh, wait, today's not your birthday. And so we had a good laugh.
Well, happy, happy, not your birthday. Yeah. Thank you. And then happy birthday. I assume your birthday is around this time tomorrow.
Well, OK, in our in our timeline, not the listener timeline. Yeah. So, yeah. Happy birthday. Thank you. Thank you. I still think one of the best jokes you ever did was when you told everybody on Twitter that I was turning 60 when I was like 45 or something. And a lot of people really believed it, which made me feel really good about myself.
That sounds like something I'd do. That sounds like something I'd do.
Like you don't remember.
It was legendary. And yeah, I had a sad weekend last week. A friend of mine passed away. Oh, I'm so sorry, Sean. And we actually we buried him on his birthday, which was a couple of days ago, which is odd, but also sort of fitting.
And this was the first time when someone who I was really close with growing up, who was one of the probably three people responsible for me getting into D&D, was a great DM, was a great storyteller. I would not be sitting here today for sure if it weren't for Steve. So my hat's off to Steve. Good luck.
And for all of you out there, you know, appreciate the people who you share this hobby with because it's a very passionate thing for a lot of us. And so, yeah, that's all I had to say about that.
Big hugs, my friend. Thank you. Yeah, it's tough. This is one of the things that... You have to somehow hit a certain age to really appreciate what it's like to to to either know you're on the threshold of that because you hear it through others or to start experiencing it. And it is it's tough. And all you can do is treasure every moment you have with people around you because it is so important.
It's what makes life great. Right.
Exactly. Exactly. What also makes life great are our listeners who listen to us and appreciate, most of them appreciate what we do. And if there are any hate listeners out there, thank you. We appreciate your attention as well. But we also get messages from them via various channels. And we're going to go through a couple of those today, starting with Thomas Connolly via our Patreon.
He said, all the con news got me thinking about my convention bucket list and how to prioritize them. I want to rank all the D&D gaming conventions by number of Adventurers League opportunities. I've heard things like X tables or YDMs or Z slots, but I can't find any documented numbers. It seems like you guys might have at least some impressions, if not the actual numbers.
Can you rank the top cons by AL opportunities for me? And this is an interesting question because yes, definitely ranking it by here are the number of opportunities you'd have to play is one thing, but you can only play one game at a time. So to say Gen Con, to say, well, yes, to say Gen Con, which say runs eight slots,
is better than your local home group that runs eight slots but only has two tables is a better AL opportunity is not necessarily true. Now, the special events may tip the scale, right? Gen Con may have a bunch of special events that your local game convention might not. But some of my favorite organized play conventions over the years have been the small ones where I can sit down,
and play eight slots just like I could at Gen Con at either no price or a quarter of the price or a fraction of the cost and still have a great time with a great DM and friends and old friends and new. So that said, we will try to give you an answer to this question. J.S., you want to step in with either answering the question or giving some feedback?
Yeah, I'll take a shot at it. So I think one thing is that in general, so a lot of the big conventions are run all by Baldwin Games. And so the number of slots, the approach to a day is pretty similar. And even outside of conventions that Baldwin Games runs at Origins, Gen Con, PAX... various comic cons, winter fantasy, even outside of that, the schedule ends up being pretty similar, right?
In that you're going to get, you know, three to four games a day, and there are going to be some number of days, you know, depending on what your travel schedule is and what the convention provides. So like PAX, for example, has more days, but it actually tends to offer fewer adventures because a lot of it is focused on like learn to play.
So there may be only but so many adventures if like the folks who come over to PAX and I'll be headed to PAX this week. We do have some people who are hardcore AL and but, you know, and they often replay things because they're that hardcore. Because we're not offering new things in every slot. And that's where it gets tricky. And it can vary from year to year.
And as you mentioned, special events make it more complicated because what we want is special stuff. Well, the bigger conventions have more of that. So I find it's pretty similar. Like you said, if you can find a local convention, the nice thing there is, especially if you get to know your community, it's a lot easier to organize late night events.
extra slots and this is something we did all throughout living greyhawk we'll talk about greyhawk in the second part of the show uh we used to do things like i would go to bissell which was connecticut and i would play the offered slots and then i would play two midnight madness slots uh if not three and so the number of adventures i could play at a convention like that
was huge because i could do all this before the convention or even on-site wrangling of you know impromptu dms who would run things for us and we would crank out you know i think at one convention i did 23 adventures 23 four-hour adventures uh which is not really possible if you do the math and that's because of various trickery things that we did to run very short very quickly it was just
I wouldn't recommend it kids, but we were young and we needed these certs. You were 50, young and foolish.
I was in my 30s or 20s or I don't even know. I'm going to add 10 at least, no matter what, 15. That's fair. Yeah. And another contributing factor to the chaos now is that Adventurers League is sort of this now, this amorphous thing that could mean a lot of different things.
When Adventurers League first started, it was these are the adventures you could run and this is the character you could play. And there wasn't a lot of confusion of... what was what.
And now with different campaigns, with different rules, with CCC content and convention-specific content, like Bald Man Games does the Montreal stuff, and we've announced some more conventions, the Greasy Snitches in the UK. So that becomes even more confusing about what is AL, what's not, what's premiering, what's been around forever, what haven't I played?
It's harder to focus that into one specific, this is the convention. If you're going to a convention that Ball Band Games is running, there's a good chance that you are going to have slots full of new games or special content. Same thing with Gamehole Con, same thing with these larger conventions. Beyond that, it's very hard to say.
You have to check in, as Teo said, with each individual convention, especially when you get into the PAXs, to Comic-Cons, to those sorts of fan expos, those sorts of things where it could be a lot of AL content, or it could be just a couple run over and over and over again.
Yeah, and the other thing is what your levels are, right? So if you're a first-level character, right, a new player bringing in a first-level character, well, that's one thing. But if you're trying to get mid-level or high-level play, then different conventions will do that differently, right?
The Baldwin Games conventions try to give you a good assortment of that, and they are aimed at pleasing sort of the most players possible. So that benefits you if you have a wide variety of characters and levels so you can play everything that's offered. If you're either brand new or really established, well, then that, you know, will change things up.
I will share, if I can pull it up quickly here, yeah, a fun number, which is that at Gen Con... Dungeons and Dragons offered, through Baldwin Games, 15,815 seats of D&D. And so that gives you a thought of just how big that is, right? That's an enormous number of opportunities.
If you have hard-pressed to rank them, I mean, the reality is your Origins, your Gen Con, those are going to have the most seats. um, winter fantasy is right there. And, and then the others, uh, will be less than that. Right. Uh, I'd have to look and see how game whole con compares. And I'm not entirely sure.
Um, but a big part of it, I would say they're close enough to what it translates to is a lot of opportunities to get to play. If you can find a slightly smaller convention, uh, your chances to land what you want are better, right? So Gen Con has a lot of seats, but a lot of people, a lot of to counter those lots of DMs.
So Winter Fantasy, it's probably a little easier to grab the particular seats you want, the schedule you want if you sign on that first day. Gamehole, same thing. Even smaller, more and more chances that you'll get exactly what you want, even if it's a little less. So it really plays off and there's no one answer that will really fit all this.
Our next question comes from Snaggy13 via YouTube. Less experienced DM here. I have generally been using passive perception in combat, but probably in a broken way. If a player is in initiative order, i.e. we are counting actions, reactions, et cetera,
I have been checking the character's passive perception, and if it's high enough, and they mention looking, they just see whatever there is they're looking for. Traps, patterns on the floor, a weapon in a corner, etc. It has been an edge case for a while. I just think it is generally better to err on the side of too much info, given that they will forget 85% of what I say anyway.
Am I doing it wrong? Advice is welcome. First, I want to say, no, you're not doing it wrong. But there are a few things to consider. In fact, there are many things to consider, and we'll cover just a few of them here. I think passive perception is fine in a number of cases. I think in those cases, it can be okay, depending on the situation. But let's dig deeper.
Why was passive perception made in fourth edition? Well, in third edition, there was no perception. The skill was called spot, and that was used to find hidden things. Separate from listen. Right, separate from listen. So you'd make a spot check.
and but it was such a tell if the characters are traveling through the forest and the dm said okay give me spot checks and or listen checks and so everyone oh okay and they made their spot in their listen checks and if say everyone fails okay
dm says nothing everyone changes the way they behave right because an in-game clue has put in the player's mind something so the other characters start more actively searching right they change their marching order they they start doing things and so they would never they would never they would go back right they double back me like we walk through the area again like and then the dm has to go why you wouldn't do that like well we're going to i want to set up camp here come on
right exactly it changed the game there was a dissonance there so so what forey decided designers decided to do was make this passive perception check so that the dm while this was happening you just go okay oh no nobody has an 18 so they don't see it and you're surprised or you miss it but then as with any game the players will begin to game that
So they would find ways to boost that passive perception to the point where they could no longer fail or it would be very infrequently that they would fail. And then they would want to use passive perception all the time. And what passive perception was meant to do was when you have no reason to search, and look around, here's the chance that you will spot something.
So they want to, while they are actively looking around, want to use their passive perception. And again, that's not what it was there for. So we could talk about the difference between active searching and passively observing, or just passively moving. I'll stop there for a second, Teos, and let you get into it.
I think that's awesome. I love it, love it, love it. Very astute. What I would add to this is going back to, you know, what am I doing wrong? You're not doing anything wrong if you're having fun. What I would say to DMs to consider is the effect of sort of always revealing things, right?
So if you're gonna use passive perception and you're gonna say, hey, you see this, you see that, you see the other, that's fine. And if your notes are accounting for it, that's fine. And then we can think about what the kind of engagement is that you're generating. So if you are making the world interesting through this, then all good, no problems, right?
So if you're constantly saying like, you know, hey, Sarah, you just saw this thing over there that looks really cool. It's a discarded weapon kind of wedged in the corner. This is neat, right? It's showing the world off. And if you describe a trap as something about those flagstones seems off, you're going to want to investigate that. And that's really cool, right?
But what often happens at tables that kind of follow what you're talking about is they will say, you find a plus two sword, Sarah. Hey, Jeremy, over there looking, you see a trap and so you can avoid that. Now what you've done is removed the fun exploration from the game and you have solved the problems. Right. Right. And that is what players minds lead them to do. Right.
They'll think, well, if I take the observant or the alert feed and I do this and then, you know, then I will see everything and I will never be hurt. Well, you will be hurt in your soul because the game becomes so boring that every trap is solved for you. And the point of a trap is engagement, not punishment. Right.
And so if you find that in your game, your passives are resulting in an unengaging game.
and you still want to use the passives, you must make what they see engaging so that you're still on the right track or only use passives of Sean said, which is really what was intended back when the designers created it so that it's it's a way to solve a problem without giving away the surprise and seeing whether you find some clues. But don't remove that engagement.
And then if all of this question, if this question comes from our conversation about the need to spend actions, the search action, the study action, when also doing other things in combat, you don't remove the problem of doing any of the other things that we talked about. And in fact, you almost make it worse because now you're giving
you're giving this thing a free pass, but you're still making everything else spend some resource to do it. And so you funnel everyone toward the mindset of, okay, if there's a shortcut here, there must be a shortcut elsewhere. And they will either search for that shortcut or demand that shortcut. So yeah, the question still comes back to, fixing a system that needs to account for,
making play engaging without making it punishing.
Totally. And 2024 makes it almost, well, I don't know if it makes it more complicated. It's at least as complicated in 2024. And that 2024, by approaching things in a sort of piecemeal fashion of various bits, right? What is searching? What is the invisible condition? What is passive perception? But not telling you how it all works altogether. Maybe it doesn't the DMG.
uh means that it's it's a little unclear and we're back to the same situation of you've got to decide how to run your game so that you get great engagement and and the sum of the parts must equal that whole of engagement that's when you know whether you're doing it wrong or right is whether your players are excited and engaged and and hopefully don't feel invalidated for character choices but their character choices aren't aren't stripping away that engagement
Very true. So thank you for those questions, Thomas and Snaggy13. Now let's get into our news and commentary section, starting with D&D Direct. Either on the show or at some point we were discussing, oh, they haven't done any sort of D&D Live or D&D anything. And not long after that, D&D Direct was announced. Due to the- Because of us. Because of us, I'm sure.
Due to the magic of temporal podcast, D&D Direct will have already happened when you listen to this, but has not happened yet. It will happen August 27th at 9 a.m. Pacific on YouTube. Wizards will have launched D&D Direct. So we'll talk about it in detail next week. What events are going to be covered? Another peek at the 2024 Player's Handbook. A look at the future of D&D, upcoming products.
More information on Project Sigil. A closed beta coming, and you can still sign up for that closed beta at dndbeyond.com slash project dash sigil. And a talk about the collaboration they're doing with Magic the Gathering to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons.
Yep.
Next in news, D&D Beyond outlined what would happen between 2014 and 2024, and then they clarified their position, and then they re-clarified their position, and then they slightly changed their position. So I'm going to hand this one over to Teos.
This is, you know, all week I've been dealing with very parallel things to this, though, in the environmental data world rather than the character builder database. But when you create databases of information that have a version to them and those things are used in an application and then you have another data set.
and you're going to somehow retain the other one, there's trouble, there's challenges, there's difficulties. It's not simple. I don't care. I've never been on a project where this was simple. And so, you know, at the D&D Summit back last year, April, you know, more than a year ago, one of the questions that I and others brought up was, hey, how are you going to handle these two data sets?
Not to mention also the VTT, which is its separate question, but how are you going to handle all this? And we got kind of deer in the headlight responses. And that worried me. Now, since that time, they've obviously kind of looked at this. But, you know, we have not had another D&D summit since then.
And I point to this as an example of where D&D would be better off if it had these kinds of meetings with people and feedback with people to say, Get a sense of maybe how the community will react, because what they announced was just a change log. Hey, here's what's coming. You know, we're going to have going from 2014 to 2024. Various elements are just going to auto update.
And so if you're in your character sheet and you've got your 2014 character, hey, your spells, your magic items, they'll be the new version. And I guess they looked at this. What they said was they looked at this as like, cool, you're getting free stuff. And what users heard was, wait, I can't play 2014 in my character sheet. You know, the world has has ended for me.
I am very angry and I'm not making light of that. I mean, people were impacted by it. And to various people, this is not free. Awesome update. It's a problem. You're always going to have people on both sides of it. And there was a lot of iron line, including a lot of disinformation. So then D&D issued a clarification. But people were still very angry.
And where they've ended up with is going back and saying, okay, okay. And this came at like last night at, I don't know, it was very late in my time when I saw it. And so on a Sunday night, they issue a, hey, we're going to do it differently. We are going to have the ability that if you have a 2014 character sheet, that character sheet will retain the 2014 elements. And that's complicated, right?
Roll20, by the way, was loving this. They have talked about how, you know, oh, with us, you can choose what you want 2014 and 2024, to which I say not so fast, Roll20, because you're being very clear about how you can choose one or the other. But you have people on all sides of this, right? You're going to have people who want to say, hey, I do want to have mostly 2014, but some 2024.
this is a mess it's a mess for roll20 it's a mess for dnd dnd as usual gets the giant spotlight and the giant internet ire uh i can only imagine the poor developers who probably had a meeting some time ago to set this all in stone talk through all the technical issues the reasons why a compromise was found this was the compromise and they come in on the office today and learn that they're gonna have to do a whole different level of work
I pour one out for all of you. I know what it feels like. I'm sorry. There's no right or wrong here, but maybe Wizards should have things like D&D Summits to talk through things with people and not be blindsided when communities react this way. That's my point. What do you think, Sean?
Yeah. As somebody who was a project manager for a software company for a while, we had user groups. If we were planning a big revision, if we were planning on even small changes, We would go to our user group and say, hi, valued users, thank you for being in our user group. Here are the things that we plan on doing.
Please give us your feedback and then we will make our final decisions based on what you have to say, because you are the ones that need to use the software. And it's different for this as opposed to what I was doing, but in some ways it's not. And you call it the summit, I call it a user group. It really helps to get feedback from people who are using this and have been super engaged, right?
You're super users. and your super fans can give you this valuable feedback so you don't put something out, which then kicks in the, you know, the Pinkertons killed two people. Someone thought that the Pinkertons had killed someone. Yeah, I was dealing with that. So that's how this works. And then, rather than solving the problem, you are dealing with these wild, unfounded rumors
and you spend all your energy there and you never get to solve the problem.
So if you can get ahead of it, it helps. Because they could have, that change log was handled like a sort of techie kind of thing. I mean, it was a mix of it, but if you're gonna talk to customers, talk to your customers, this is the change we're implementing, here's why. It's super hard to do this stuff. It's super labor intensive. You know, here's and all the choices carry pluses and minuses.
This is the path we're following. Test it out. We'll have a feedback period, something like that, you know, or test it internally with people, talk to people in user groups. There's no perfect answer here, right? I mean, and same thing with Roll20. I mean, I may want my 2014 character to fully update to 2024. I may want to mix and match options.
I may want to just create a 2024 character, or create a 2024 character that gets 2014 things. Should I expect that the tool gives me all those things? I mean, I work in an IT enough that I don't even know that anyone would give you that. It's hard and everybody's have a different flavor of what they think the tool should give for them. And so communications becomes super, super important.
And the moment I saw that first changelog, I thought, oh, this is going to go rough. And there's an there's a huge chance that in short order, they'll have to do something else. And the poor developers will have to carry that burden with whatever staff they have currently.
It's true. Hey, speaking of staff. Yeah, speaking of staff, D&D is hiring a game designer. And at first you might think, okay, cool, they're hiring a game designer. And then you think, wait a minute, didn't they just lay game designers off like eight months ago and now they're hiring back? So the answer to that is yes.
Some people have justified it by saying, well, they've promoted game designers like Justice Arman, and so they need to refill his position. But also, they didn't need to lay off game designers back then because of the lack of work. We know that they laid these people off because of what the toy division was going through.
And everybody had to lay people off to assuage the shareholders and the board of directors. To get the stock price stabilized or even going back up when you lay off people, we know your stock price goes up. And so, hey, there's a game designer position If you want to be a game designer, you can make $86.7 to $145.8 thousand dollars. So hey, great for you.
Always keep in mind what has happened, not just in the last eight months, but over the last 20 years or however long that Hasbro has owned Wizards of the Coast. If you uproot a family, if you leave a great situation hoping to do this, there is always the chance in less than a year your position will not be there.
Yeah, and the fault's not yours, employee, person who went through this, Dan, Dylan, anybody. I mean, all our hearts, huge hugs. This sucks. Yeah. But also it's just, you know, we as people who get hired must know this is the reality. And that's it's a shame because It would be a dream for most people to work at Wizards of the Coast if it weren't for these things.
But these things are part of that reality. And it can happen at any time. And it's historically happened. It's happened at TSR, right? You listen to When We Were Wizards and it's these waves of layoffs and a lot of conversations on that podcast about it. It's remarkable and sad. And we had that regular, you know, December layoffs. 5E was able to get rid of most of that. But not always.
And the reasons are complicated. But I've seen this thing happen. I've had it happen at a company I worked for with 50 people. And someone was laid off. And then we were almost immediately reauthorized to hire again. And it's like, so do we tell them they have their job back? And they're like, well, can't they apply? I'm like, yes.
I mean, you know, and it's complicated why it all happens, but it happens. And it's not just wizards and it's terrible, but that's part of the landscape.
Very true. What is also part of the landscape is Tiamat coming to Amazon Prime? Hmm? Amazon has announced an anthology series called Secret Level with each of 15 episodes featuring a different game, and it looks like D&D is one of those games. The trailer showed Tiamat breathing her breath weapons.
Another scene showed a dragon lurking in the shadows, a dwarf and epic landscapes going across the screen. If you saw the show Love, Death and Robots, then this is the same studio and the show will premiere on December 10th.
Yeah, it's a cool trailer, you know, just glimpses, but that'll be neat to see.
So tell me about Paizo. We had mentioned before about its community use policy. Could a big company or even a small company reverse its course on a decision?
No, the company that launched the ORC license so that companies can't change agreements, Sean, they wouldn't. Okay, wait a minute. In July, they said they would be changing their community use policy, replacing it with a more limited fan content policy, which of course also has some new great things to it, because that's how it always works.
And fans reacted against this because it really, not to get into too much in the details, but it put a lot of pressure on various projects, particularly projects that were using the first edition version of Starfinder. And this was seen as a way to try to prevent kind of 1E things happening until 2E was released. And so Paizo is now reversed course and kind of activating both policies.
So the new fan content policy will allow you to do some kind of new things like maybe create merch, but you will still also be able to use the old policy.
And it just shows that companies, this is the new modus operandi for companies, right? It's like, okay, we have this unpopular thing to do. Let's just do it. And if nobody says anything, great, we got away with it. And if people speak out, we'll see how much they speak out. And if it gets to the point where it's going to hurt us, then we will start to walk it back.
Yeah, what if they don't, though? Keep it up. Keep it up out there. If you see something happening, without spreading false rumors, speak out, speak your mind. If the company changes, great. If the company doesn't change, like we see with people who are destroying our planet, then you know they have too much power because they don't care what you think.
They're just going to do the thing that they're doing.
Because they hold all that power. Yeah. Keep places accountable. So two fun things, Sean. Universal Studios has what they're calling Fan Fest Nights for D&D. And this starts in spring 2025. They're doing Back to the Future, Star Trek, and D&D. And they did say a lot, but they'll be like immersive experiences and celebratory moments and themed food and stuff you can buy.
So details to come, but we've linked in the show notes to where you can... Keep an eye on it and even get email alerts for whenever it comes out sometime next year. And then in Rochester, New York, the Strong Museum of Play will have a D&D exhibit celebrating the 50th anniversary.
It lets you check out historical artifacts, early game prototypes, artwork, and even the history of controversies over the years. So that's interesting. You can create characters, monsters, dungeons, do a personality test to figure out your class. And this is neat. Be a dungeon master for a five minute campaign.
But yeah, the Strong Museum is two hours away from where I live. I've been there once and it was awesome. And that was many, many years ago and it's only gotten better. They also have like a toy hall of fame and a video game hall of fame now where you can play all of these really, really, really old video games.
And it was quite an experience when I first went and it's only gotten so much better and I will definitely be heading there soon. Cool. Goodman Games is launching a DCC and 5E organized play campaign. This will be year zero for the program. They have held events at GaryCon and GenCon and will come to GameholeCon. So you can play a character on the 5e track or you can play the DCC track.
You can't cross the characters over, but you can play in both campaigns if you so choose. And this makes total sense to me because Adventurers League, as we already mentioned, is sort of all over the place and not moving in a coherent direction. They're refusing to just create a new campaign, which I think many people believe they should.
So that leaves other forces ready and willing to step in and create a coherent, fun, simple, thriving campaign. So we'll see how both the DCC and the 5E version of the Goodman Games Organized Play campaign does.
Yeah, yeah. I had a fun time reading Lucas Cockrum, who is a really nice guy I've hung out with at Winter Fantasy, and he is on our Discord as well. He has a blog series called the Giant's Bane blog, and he's been going through the Planescape series, and he actually has a product as well on the DMs Guild where he provides these insights, pulls them together as he goes through running the series.
And he started with his read-through and our advice that we did on our podcast, and then he's been putting this all together into... how he runs. So you can get the outline of it on Giants, thegiantsbane.blogspot.com. And then on the DMs Guild, you can also find his write-ups.
Last but not least, we talked about Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere RPG getting off and running to quite a start. Well, it has surpassed all other role-playing game Kickstarters. It is now at $10.5 million.
36 000 backers and there's still a couple days to go so we'll see usually there's a little kick at the end so we'll see what heights it might reach it's incredible yeah demi plane already has uh a nexus for cosmere so you can go in and play around create a simple character and uh we'll see when the game comes out how it plays because that's always the big question
This week here on Mastering Dungeons in our main segment, we're going to do two things. We're going to do a 2024 5e mini review. Then we're going to cover some more regions from the Living Greyhawk Gazetteer. And Teos is double fisting the books there. He's even going to throw in a bonus book. But first let's talk about 2024. And this week we are going to look at weapon mastery.
First question, Teos.
Yes, sir.
What would you say the design goal is for weapon mastery and weapon mastery properties?
To make money by having one exciting new thing. Wait, you said design goal. Sorry, that was my mistake. You know, that's an interesting question. Well, I guess what you'd say, right? And I held up the Complete Gladiators Handbook from the Dark Sun Complete Series of Second Edition because it has something very similar to this, as others have noted. It has a section about weapons.
And in it, it comes up with these ideas of when you are proficient or when you have a specialization, then you can do extra things with all your weapons, right? So you can have like an Al-Hulak. And when you're proficient, you don't have to worry about the downside of the weapon, which it has normally. And then you can use it two-handed.
And then when you're specialized, you can now like grapple this other person and ensnare them with extra bonuses and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And...
know in second edition various of these books had these kinds of things and the point of it was to true to create some tactical play some engagement uh and to reward kind of your choice especially as a fighter class to kind of focus on these particular weapons and show your mastery of them and sort of you know you're not just using a long sword you know how to do all these cool things with your long sword right and with your spear and whatever
So it's a creation of engagement in play for those characters that use weapons. And if you take a step back, some of the argument was because spellcasters have lots of tactical great choice. Weapon people just stab and round after round. So this gives you kind of like the parody with the spellcasting class. Though I could say, and I'll shut up,
past third edition, your melee classes also have a variety of tricks through subclasses and whatever. So I don't know that you super aren't on parody already, but, you know, maybe that's part of the design goal still. What do you think?
Yeah, I agree. I think it adds a tactical element to the game that maybe 2020, 2014 was missing, or maybe it wasn't, but we've certainly seen games come out since then, or versions of 5e that have come out since then that lean very, very strongly into this tactical realm. And so I think, despite your facetious claim that, right, we want to give something new in this book that's coming out,
It adds a tactical element to the game. Whether or not the tactical element was needed, that's a whole other question that will bear out through play.
Maybe we could say design goals don't muck up the works.
Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Well, we'll see, because in 2014, there was no weapon mastery properties. Certain subclasses, as you say, Teos, certain classes, certain other elements of the game could bring this tactical play to bear. The battle master fighter could do certain things by spending dice and using different abilities.
But that wasn't something that could carry through to the rogue or the monk or those other characters.
Though the rogue and the monk had other choices to make. And, you know, the paladin, but they're smiting. And, you know, so it's not again, it's not like you didn't have anything. But but yes, most rounds you were swinging that weapon, right?
Mm hmm. Mm hmm. So the 2024 Player's Handbook has weapon mastery and mastery properties. So each weapon has a mastery property, which is usable if a character has the weapon mastery feature. And who has the weapon mastery feature? Most martial classes. what are these properties then that can be used based on the weapon for those classes that have this feature?
We'll go through them real quickly here. Cleave. If you hit a creature with a melee weapon attack using a weapon with the cleave property, you can make a melee attack roll with that weapon against a second creature within five feet of the first that is also within your reach.
If you hit, the second creature takes the weapon's damage, but you don't add the ability modifier to that damage unless the modifier is negative. And you can only do this once per turn. Okay. So there are a lot of writers that go in there.
And let me, if I can add one more thing, like a class will tell you whether you get them and how many you get, right? So the barbarian gets two at first level. It increases to third at fourth level. Then it goes to fourth for the rest of your career once you reach 10th level. So you have a number of these that you can have.
And sometimes spending your class, you'll have an option like you can actually wield one weapon, but apply the weapon mastery on others that can get kind of Trixie. But it's that idea of, yeah, you focus in on a certain number of of of weapons that then you gain their properties. And the table of weapons tells you what has a property. And then you can, you know, go from that.
Yep. Which would then behoove you to both outside of the game, make plans that you can then use inside of the game to make choices. So it does that double duty of the quote unquote lonely fun. of planning and then the at-the-table fun of executing that plan. So in that sense, it's very reasonable and attractive to different kinds of players and different kinds of play. So Cleve, as I described,
It could be very powerful, so you begin to get those riders. But you can only do it once per turn. Otherwise, every time you attack that your turn, you could be hitting two people. You can't add that ability modifier to the damage. Okay. But still, it is an attack roll, and it is a hit. So anything that is triggered by a successful attack roll and a hit could do that.
unless it is somehow the thing that you're trying to do is limited. So smiting comes into question. Sneak attack comes into question. So you could see that you have to do all of these things. Okay, but if the weapon does an extra 1d6 fire damage on a successful hit, then you do get to do that.
So we begin to get into the need to look at all of these edge cases to make sure that it's not... Broken. Broken. And I'm sure it will be at some point.
Yeah, yeah.
the the idea is that tactical piece right so for cleave alone we can think of like okay now i as the player want to try to find clumps of creatures right i want to go up uh or draw to me you know several creatures so that when i attack one i might be able to hit the other right so a boss fight or the last creature or that one lone archer i don't really want to go after that i want to go over the like the several people together
which is maybe dangerous and might be fun in that way. But that becomes the kind of MO I want to do. And what often happens with these design wise is people will say to themselves, well, can I do that reliably? Because if not, I'm not getting my benefit that I am due. Maybe I'll choose a different property and they'll keep reading. Right.
Exactly. Exactly. So I'm waiting to use my Vorpal Sword and my crit on an 18 to 20 to... Decapitate two creatures in a row with the same attack. That sort of thing. And I haven't looked at Vorpal Sword in the 2024 rules, so we'll see how all of that works out. So this cleave, Graze.
If your attack roll with the weapon misses, you still deal damage equal to your ability modifier that you used to make the attack roll. Damage is the same type as dealt by the weapon, and damage can be increased only by increasing the ability modifier. So you miss, but you still do five points of damage if you're at a 20 strength with your strength-based attack. Nick.
Oh, go ahead. Well, it's interesting also to look at the design cost of these. We talked about that. Do you muck things up, right? So with Cleave, well, you've got to make an extra attack roll every round. Right. And but it's pretty easy to look up, but you've got to do that second attack. And then there's this question of all these interactions that is, you know, a little worrisome.
Gray's pretty simple in that if you missed, you just once you get through it, you will remember, oh, yeah, you know, three damage, right? You just you shout it out. I missed takes three damage from from Gray's move on. Not too bad.
Nick, when you make the extra attack of the light property, you can make it as part of the attack action instead of as a bonus action. You can make this extra attack only once per turn. So what you're saying is I have the short sword in one hand, I have the dagger in the other. Because I'm using this extra attack, it has a light property, normally would be a bonus action to make it.
Now I can make it as part of the regular attack action. Okay, cool. What you're really doing here is saving a bonus action. And that bonus action might be useless for some character builds and might be the complete difference between a normal character and a broken character for other classes.
Yeah, I mean, monks tend to use their bonus actions. A lot of classes do. And so if you need that bonus action to do things, then this nick quality on a weapon makes sense because now you get one extra attack on top of everything else you would have done and you still get your bonus action for additional attacks or whatever it is that you're doing.
So, you know, again, we're looking at sort of making another attack role with, I think, a little more decision making here. So it's even slower maybe than than Cleave was because it's a little more at case by case basis thinking. The other thing is there is plenty of confusion, as our Discord was pointing out, between the light property, Nick, and the dual weapon fighting feat.
You have to read what am I really getting or not getting if I have various of these.
It is interesting. And as soon as you give people another attack roll, you are opening up a lot. It's one thing to say, okay, you just do an extra three damage, whether it's from Graze or just you could make Nick, you do an extra blank damage roll. But you have to differentiate it. Otherwise, people say, oh, it's just the same thing. So it becomes interesting.
And yeah, I've seen a lot of talk about this one. Next is push. If you hit a creature with this weapon, you can push the creature up to 10 feet straight away from you if it is large or smaller.
It's interesting they didn't go with your size or smaller, but yeah, fine, whatever. Yeah. Yeah, this is generally the kind of thing that people will not choose because it's so seldom useful.
It's useful if there's a pit right behind them or something like that, but usually you can't kind of punish them by going through a spell that they already took damage from, but it depends on the kind of application.
you know on the wording of things but it's it's there's the kind of people where you go i don't know that this is going to help me much you could arguably what would be fun is i think of like two npcs that actually one of them has push and the other one has cleaves you can always push people together for the cleave to work but players generally don't do that kind of thing
It's interesting because a lot of these, there's only a couple of weapons that have it. Like with push, it's only pikes, war hammers, or heavy crossbows, unless I'm missing something. Heavy crossbow, wow. And a great club, sorry, and a great club. Okay. But yeah, it's so very situational.
In the game that I run, where the whole shtick is create different spell cactus, create different damaging areas, and then enemies are dragged through grapple or through spells that move, that this would be huge. This would be mammoth. And in a theater of the mind game,
probably not at all, unless there was some sort of feat that went into it, like Polar Master, where it was, if they approach you, you can take a, you know, use your reaction to take an attack. So it's, again, as it is, It's when you start adding and layering in feats and other abilities and other features where it can become something else. Sap.
If you hit a creature with this weapon, the creature has disadvantage on its next attack roll before the start of your next turn. I hate it. Yeah.
I don't like it either and I find it strange that like a longsword has the sap feature right because you think of a sap you think of yeah and and so it's like well we need to do something with the longsword okay let's do that yeah a longsword yeah longsword that's strange yep I guess maybe they're thinking of like you're hitting with the pommel or something like that or they just ran out of options for the longsword yeah yeah yeah the problem I have here is that
My opinion is disadvantage. You shouldn't be giving disadvantage to things unless it's with something you've come up with a fun situation. Like I'm going to topple crates onto this creature. I'm down with that. Right. You spend your action for that. And it's a neat effect. I love the story of it.
Maybe if it's a spell that does it, but you've got to be careful that, you know, you don't want it spammed all the time. Spamming is the biggest thing I'm worried about, because if I'm going to sap the boss and
constantly and always give disadvantage to the monster, it's gonna have such an unequal effect, but especially on a monster that takes like one big attack, then its next attack roll, it's huge thing to have disadvantage on it. And AC is already often through the roof on the person who's tanking this thing. So I just worry that this is not, it's the opposite of what the DM wants, right?
Right. And it begs then the DM to come up with ways to mitigate it, which makes the player feel bad. Yeah. Well, it makes the player feel like the DM is against them, but the DM is just trying to tell, for the most part, with most game masters, not power-mad people, but, right, I want the dragon with its one big bite attack to do the thing. Yeah, yeah. So what do I do?
Well, okay, I'm going to make sure I use one of the, not layer actions, but legendary actions to do a small thing to get rid of that, so that when I do the big thing, and so if you're playing a just completely tactical game,
great have at it you could have fun countering everyone's thing and and you know being witty and and playing that chess match but if it's story driven and you really want to build up the story and the excitement it it it isn't fun it isn't exciting it doesn't lead to good narrative
It's tough, and a lot of it depends on how your characters are using it. If they will just use it every now and then, it can be very different, right? But the same thing with this next one, slow, right? You hit the creature with this weapon and deal damage to it. You can reduce its speed by 10 feet on the start of next turn.
And it does say if the creature is hit more than once by weapons that have this property, the speed reduction can't exceed 10 feet. which is good, but you could maybe Ray of Frost it or something else. And, you know, and again, that's where it gets non-fun. It's one thing if it takes a little longer for the monster to get to you.
If the monster is never going to get to the party, that would be a problem, right? If this was a tactic that everybody employs, I'll hit it with Ray of Frost. You hit it with this thing. It'll never reach us. We will murder it before it ever comes to us. Yeah. Fun once.
Mm-hmm. Yep. Topple. If you hit a creature with this weapon, you can force the creature to make a constitution saving throw. And I felt saved. The creature has the prone condition. This is the only one that has a saving throw. And I was, part of me's glad that
that you don't have to roll a saving throw every time because especially when fighters or other martial classes get two or three attacks in a round or four, to have to roll that every time slows the game down. But it's powerful enough in this case that they have to give it the saving throw. Otherwise, this creature goes prone and then
everyone wails on it unless you're casting a you know unless you're using ranged weapons with advantage um which can be very powerful or the biggest trick i've seen is it's got the prone condition now i reduce its speed to zero somehow and and you can do so with right a simple grapple
then it can't stand so now all its attacks if it's a martial cast if it's a martial creature are made with disadvantage and all attacks against it are at advantage etc etc so it turns into a problem yeah yeah i heard somebody i can't remember if it was on our discord or in my home game but uh someone was talking about
a group that played and within a few minutes they decided to all take topple and every creature was prone in every combat forever. The DM was just like, this is the worst.
and and i don't mean to be negative right but it's not like you can't have fun with this and again the more that your players are doing this as sort of just fun things every now and then it's great but that's the thing about weapon master is it kind of encourages you to just do this all the time and always be proning everything and then begs that question well how could i abuse this right how can i take this to another level and that's where you can end up with the yeah and its strength is drained and it has to consume half its movement standing up so then i can uh you know this that and the other and
Too many cases can show up or someone's going to write a guide on it, right? Yeah.
So here's my solution. You know, third edition and fourth edition, I loved playing and DMing tactical battles. I loved that chess match and I loved trying to give players, tease them to take the most optimal thing, but they had to give up something or they had to think their way around the situation. Loved it.
Fifth edition, I was very happy to get away from that tactical play, go to more narrative play. So here we go. We're getting back into the tactical stuff. My solution for this might be for my home game to limit the number of times they can do this. a thing. Right.
Almost put it on an encounter refresh like 4E.
Exactly, exactly. This is an encounter power. Or maybe even twice per encounter you can use your weapon mastery. Because then it gives them the option to do it at the exact right time without doing this spamming of... The loop, yeah. What are your thoughts overall on weapon mastery and what we've seen here?
Well, we also didn't talk about Vex. Let's just quickly say Vex. If you hit a creature with this weapon and deal damage to the creature, you have advantage on your next attack roll against the creature before the end of your next turn. All right. Overall thoughts. None of these have drawbacks, which is interesting design wise. I don't object with that. Right.
But but it would be, let's say, balanced with 2014 if we said I can vex the creature, but I deal no damage this turn. Right. So I'm going to have advantage next round, but I dealt no damage or I didn't add my ability score or something, you know, some drawback to it that would make me choose. Right.
I can topple the creature, but, you know, I give this I have give advantage to everybody because I put so much focus into toppling them. But there's none of that. This is just gravy. Take everything your character was doing before, you now get this bonus stuff and potentially quite, quite bonus-y if you put it all together.
That means the monsters, which are already considered easy, have to do even more work for the challenge to be at the same level. Because in theory, what we want design wise is fun tactics, fun choices, engagement, but not that the players always auto win. So now some other part of the game will have to do that work for you to compensate.
So it's still the same challenge level and you're still having that engagement and that fun. And. the engagement and fun of these weapon masteries have to balance out with the extra time you're taking to run your character and the
the resolving of all of it both you doing it and it being resolved right oh that's right my monster is prone says the dm my bad let me remember to okay so no he didn't get to there uh they were back here and they so they can't reach you so they wouldn't have attacked you they'll attack this other person instead oh no you know what they'll take the range weapon out it's so easy for all that to bog down and one of the dangers of games is that we say it will be so much fun when we do all these things
And yes, it is fun. Like it is. But at the end of the game, we feel a little dissatisfied. And it's because there's so much rigmarole that we didn't do the thing that we really love, which is creativity, fun back and forth, thinking in the moment, right? A lot of the games that are the best games bring those qualities to, yes, they have meaty, fun play and all that, but also the time to...
to dream and characters right like when we played mcdm's game i had a great time playing draw steel but i came up with a shtick for my character who was a warlord tactician type that he would call his mom for help on some magical telephone because he had no idea he's very new and so you know the first couple times i role played and someone in the you noted on the youtube video it was a funny concept of like uh mom there's like a guy in the other room what should i do you know like oh go you know use this power okay
But there wasn't kind of time to do that. Right. Partly it's being online, but partly it's because the game is so meaty that trying to work in the role playing takes, you know, a little bit of extra energy around all the tactics, at least until you learn all this stuff. But I love that stuff. That's the stuff I want in my games. And so they can fight each other, right?
So that's a long way of saying that I'm interested to experiment with these because I do like tactical play. I am worried that this is a load that will detract from my fun in a game.
Yes. And one of the reasons I think that we saw the 2014 five E rules and the players handbook sales do the ever upward sales growth rather than falling off is because the play that the rules brought to players, especially new players was quick and fun and fast and witty.
Yeah.
I agree. And not for every group, but in general, in general. And I feel like we're moving in a direction where the rules are not going to draw in new players the way that the 2014 rules, maybe they wouldn't have any way. But I fear that direction. And these weapon mastery feats are great for a subset. I fear they're not great for the greater play audience.
I absolutely agree with you. It's hard because there's you can't get data to back it up, you know, and so it's tough. But I absolutely feel like you do. I have that feeling that one of the keys to 2014 success was that the rules are so elegant and they are basic. So you can play any type of game, whatever your impression is of fantasy.
even if it's heroic superhero type fantasy, it could work with what 2014 gave you. As 2014 has gotten Tasha'd and on and on, and now 2024, it is more and more super heroic, whether you want it to or not. And it doesn't, you know, I was thinking actually in the shower today, I would have loved if mastery properties were an option. Yep. but they're baked in and there's no, right?
So if you want to play 2024, but you find that these are not creating the effect you want, or if a player game goes, God, this is so complicated. I just want to play a fighter. What happened? I was supposed, you told me it was the simple class, but I'm, you know, I used Nick and everybody got mad at me. And, or, you know, I used a SAP and, and, and, and then the DM seemed to not feel good.
You know, what, what am I doing wrong? You know, it's just, it's, it's that load. That load is, is significant. And, And so hard to quantify, right? It's so hard to see why a game is great or not. But I've played a lot of third edition and fourth edition where players said, this is too much for me. And they didn't want to play anymore. And 2014 largely avoided that. Not always, but largely.
And now it feels like we're definitely headed in that direction. I agree with you. Yep.
Well, we will get rid of weapon mastery and we will bring up this wonderful world of Greyhawk. We have been going through the Greyhawk Gazetteer and talking about the Living Greyhawk campaign. And we are in the midst of going through Greyhawk region by region and talking about these regions as both a part of the world and as a trigger for bringing fun adventures and fun encounters into your game.
But we had a question first and I wanted to make sure we address that. So this comes from Gareth via YouTube. Gareth asks, when you say you were a triad member of a region, what exactly did you mean? I may have missed the explanation, so a link to where you talk about it would be great. I don't remember the exact place that we talked about it, but it was several times along the way.
when we started talking about Greyhawk, where we talked about this. But we'll sum it up very quickly here.
And I think particularly our second show on Greyhawk was when we talked about living Greyhawk itself. The first one was the history of Greyhawks. I think it was our second show where we really kind of went into this.
There you go. During Living Greyhawk, the world was divided up into regions, and those regions were overseen by a group of three volunteers. Generally, each volunteer had a different role. One was the writing director who was responsible for creating the adventures that went out to players of that regional adventure campaign. The second person was generally the community manager type person.
They would talk with the people in the region or people coming to the region, answer questions, do fun things like in-character contests and things like that. The third person was generally in charge of regional meta organizations or regional organizations
rules and those meta organizations were generally groups that sprung up to fulfill a specific role within the story of the campaign so you might have guilds you might have fighting companies you might have uh knighthoods and those sorts of things uh you could spy those you could join some of the groups would be like secret you had to be invited to them or have an opportunity an adventure that would let you join the special you know whatever precisely
So when everything was working well, those three triad members were working in lockstep to create an amazing experience for the players in that region or the players of the adventures from outside the region. What it generally turned into was one person running everything and then other people running trying to help, whether the person refused the help or was not good at marshaling resources.
Triad members became very susceptible to the burned out condition. And at one point... At one point, I was the only Triad member in a region. So I was doing all of the above and trying to bring people in to help. And sometimes, like any organization, it had its problems. And that's why...
The common problem back in third edition was the World of Warcraft hit one of the triad members and they disappeared just playing World of Warcraft. We laugh about how fourth edition was designed, but it was true that we were seeing this happen.
Yeah. Yep. So that's what a triad member was. It was a volunteer who was in charge of a region in some capacity or another. So thank you for that question. I hope that answers it.
And again, just I want to say one last thing, which is the idea was really cool, right? Because if you take like, say, Adventurers League, there is an admin set that run everything. But nobody's trying to push individual storylines in that kind of level of detail.
And so breaking the world into these regional groupings with regional admins created a lot more capacity for like incredible play because all of these storylines had their own administrative team. And even if it was one person largely doing the work, you could have incredible stories coming out of some regions. Now, when it fell apart, it fell apart hard.
But when it worked, it could do what you never could have just with a regular campaign, right? So Living Forgotten Realms had regions and it had some admins, but it works slightly differently. Couldn't quite do the same thing that Living Greyhawk had done.
And certainly with Adventurers League, you have a great team of admins, but you can't get that flavor that you would have if you had these regional groups and so on.
Very, very true. Speaking of these regional groups, we are going to dive right in and continue our look at Chapter 4, the Gazetteer of the Finesse. We ended with Keoland, over which I was a triad member, and now we get into Cat, which I believe was represented by, was it Eastern Canada?
Yeah, Ontario and Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, a couple other areas, yeah. Part of Canada.
So what is Ket's deal? Ket is a feudal monarchy with a semi-hereditary rulership matrix. The leader of or the ruler of Ket is called the Begraph. Begraphs have this monarchical power, but they do answer to other power groups, including religious leaders and merchant clans. Teos, geographically, what are we looking at?
Yeah, so we talked about like high folk. This is west of high folk where we talked about. So it's kind of like still close to the center of Greyhawk if you're looking at the map, but a little west of it. And what it does is control that sort of flow. If you were coming from sort of the Baklunish West and Zaif,
and the old areas there to the west you would have to go through Khet to kind of go through one of these narrow areas if you're not going to cross the big huge mountains you're coming through Khet and then you'll either go down to Bissell to the south or you'll go through mountain passes to get towards Voluna or High Folk to the east and that was a lot of the tension there's a lot of historic tension particularly with Bissell which is where you'd have to go if you wanted to go
through Ket and down into like the Sheldemar Valley towards Keeland, anything like that. You want to get to the ocean quickly, you're going either through Bissell or Voluna.
Yep. So it's a very, very small area, and especially the area that's habitable is very small. It's got the Yetil Mountains on one side, it's got the Barrier Peak Mountains on the other. And right in the center of it all is the Bramblewood Forest. which then makes it even less normal plains, fields, places to grow crops.
But its position makes it very valuable as goods and services pass through from the backloonish West and the lands that everyone left. during the Twin Cataclysm to get to Eastern Plinius. So mercantilism is a big part of Cat, as is religion. Because there is only one faith in Cat, and that is Al-Akbar. And so it has a very Crusades feel in its history.
Yeah, if you think about Moors invading Spain... It has that feel to it. And if you know, you know, kind of like the 600 or so years that the Moors ruled Spain, it has that feel with sort of how it took over Bissell and then retreated. It feels like that was sort of a parallel they were going for here.
Very much so, almost to the point of uncomfortableness in some cases. So in its history, it has this backloonish feel to the point where one of its leaders back in history allied with Ayuz in order to repel invaders, but make gains in other areas. And that's when they invaded Bissell and took over parts of Bissell while everyone was distracted by fighting Ayuz.
You know, killing in the name of peace. Yes, precisely, precisely. So it's got this history, it's got this dual sort of mercantile but religious component to it. And there is obviously a tension. There's the leader, and the leader is always trying to balance the power of the faith versus the power of the merchant clans, and gets into trouble if they ever lean one way or the other too far.
And this is the kind of campaign or region that feels to me like an NPC. It's the kind of thing you put over somewhere so that you might have to deal with it periodically, but then go back to whatever you were doing. It doesn't feel like a place that I'd want to live in and launch adventures.
And when I look at, like you mentioned here in your show notes as well, conflicts and intrigues, it doesn't easily lend itself to things...
adventurers want to do and how to operate within this society seems kind of difficult there's not a lot of support for it and i think kept struggled as a region in third edition during living your heart because that it had its conflict with bissell but it was hard to make that conflict interesting and not just were the bad guys right and one of i i only went to play in cat once but
And only for a very brief, short amount of time. But the big thing that you had to, the trope that was Bissell was follow the laws, especially the religious laws, or you end up losing time units in the salt mines. And so you had to follow the rules and not do this and not do that. And it's fun once.
or twice, but when it's a constant refrain that you can't, especially if it's something that your character would normally do or want to do, having to to an entire character, especially with this regional thing where you can't just go and play in another region. You could play core adventures, but you're always coming back to this region.
And yeah, I noticed the same thing with conflicts and intrigues. It was this political stuff that didn't easily translate to adventures. And then there's the typical and there's bandit activity in the Bramblewood or there's monsters coming out of the barrier. And it's like, OK, but it's like that everywhere.
What how do we adventure if I this region to make the politics not an NPC, but to make it right, an important PC in this campaign that we're playing.
And I don't remember enough about the region, but, you know, one of the possibilities that you say, well, since Zaif was not a region, then you could possibly take on the sort of al-Akbar mystery and try to unravel, you know, why have we been so kind of zealous in our, say, taking over Bissell when we're supposed to be the good guys and serving al-Akbar, you know, and that could be more interesting to figure out why we've been going in a particular way.
Zaif wasn't a region?
I don't think it was.
At least I'm not seeing it here on the list at the back. Okay. Because I set a core adventure or part of a core adventure in Zaif.
And I thought I was... I know there was an Al-Akbar story track. I don't know if that was the core or if it was in, you know, maybe it was in this region. I don't recall. Yeah. Because I remember Abyssal hearing about it. But yeah. Anyway.
One of the interesting parts, and we really haven't talked about it, was since there was this group world building aspect to it, If you were doing it right, you were reaching out as a creator, you were reaching out to other regions to say, hey, I'm doing my regional adventure, but I want to skirt into your region. Could we work together and you tell me what would be here and we can have fun?
Or a core adventure that was in a region that was represented by a triad. It was polite for the core writer to reach out and say, I'm writing this adventure. It's going here. Could you work with me? And we'll tie it into one of your stories.
And even resolve player action. So I'll try to tell this very, very quickly. But we had a situation where on the Yahoo group for the Jeff region, a person from another region started posting about how they're hanging out in town. And then they started saying the name. I forget.
whose name it was but one of the demon lords over and over again and like the watch showed up to try to stop them and all this but they kept doing it and they were pretty powerful wizards so they were able to sort of like Well, what the triad ended up doing, our triad decided to create a gateway to hell in our favorite tavern or to the abyss.
And and then players were like, we want to find that wizard and hold them accountable. So then the two triads spoke together with the region this person was from and the region where it had happened. And they coordinated a strike.
team attack on that player characters and sort of told him hey look there's a strike team coming for you we're going to resolve this which ended up with the player's character being bound in stone and presented to our king for you know deciding what to do with and yeah it was really very wild and fun and just the kind of thing that could happen just out of nowhere in in this living greyhound campaign right quite wild
then we will boogie on to the next region as I turn the page, which are the Lendore Islands. Do you want to start with this one?
Yeah. So this is kind of like if you're familiar with the Lord of the Rings concepts and, you know, we all sail off into the sea or Everest on the Forgotten Realms. It has some of that feel to it as a elven area with the following the Church of Sehanin, the highest cleric of Sehanin lives here. And we get a picture of dolphins swimming and a ship going across. But this is really far off the map.
It is all the way to the east on the edge of your map, this clump of large isles. These are not small islands that are kind of placed all the way east and south of the area, kind of east of Sundy. So it is not close to anything else.
And that's deliberate because this sort of concept of like Lord of the Rings or Forgotten Realms that, you know, one would have to go out of their way to even hear about this.
end up here um what else would you add sean in its history so so first of all this is both this combines this idea of a theocracy with the idea of elven uh its species feeling superior and yeah so you start with that and then a sewell wizard named lendore i don't know if that's how you're pronounced but that's how i do uh brought he and his followers to one of these islands.
And there was tension, but the elves finally said, fine, you stay where you are, we'll stay where we are. And there was a peace that actually turned into an alliance when a threat threatened more than one island. So it seemed like everything was fine. Lindore finally passed away, and there were omens, and there were prophecies, and all sorts of things happened.
But finally, the elves must have decided that, well, we want that island, too. Enough is enough. Because they came, and they took the island over violently. Although it was a bloodless...
War but somehow still right it was Well many many people because of the prophecy knew this was coming So they were able to either escape via ships or escape via a portal But the ones who were left when the elves got there, they didn't kill the the humans They just said okay you leave and if you stay You're going to serve us. And not in a, oh, we'll pay you a fair wage sort of way.
To the point where the human servants of the elves were not allowed to talk unless they were directly addressed by an elf.
Yeah, it's a weird region and hard to know. Again, one of those that you're like, wow, this is a real NPC region. Like, it's hard to know what you would do if you use this as your basis. Gee, what would you... There are...
rebel humans here and there are half elves that remain from earlier times who have kind of conflicting agendas but I mean boy I don't know that any of this would be any fun it's a strange region and if you were to do something with it in 2024 I would want to change kind of almost all of this and maybe dig into that feeling of
It is your Everest, right, your more elven place off the end and and and maybe that they welcome scholars from other just change it up somehow. I'd have a change to to get rid of this kind of species war aspect that, yeah, does not resonate today to me.
And you like island nations? Well, we've got another one for you coming right up. The Lordship of the Isles. This is an independent monarchy, but it's not really independent because it answers directly to the Scarlet Brotherhood. So this was once ruled by an Aridi prince. And there were also, now this is, I should say, these isles are south of the Lindore Islands.
So you're still in the same area, you're still dealing with the same sorts of issues in terms of naval power, trade, piracy, etc. So these islands were held by Aradie. the Great Kingdom, et cetera, et cetera. But as most colonial powers, you can only hold on to things far away from the seat of power, especially if they're islands and involve the Navy for so long.
And lots of pirates.
Lots of pirates were causing problem to the point where the Great Kingdom actually got its entire naval fleet together and crushed the pirates. But you can't keep a good pirate down. So some escaped or a bad one. So some escaped, some held out. And then when the Navy went away, the pirates came back to taking possession of some smaller islands.
And so these islands, the possession of them and the rulership of them changed hands several times. Then the Scarlet Brotherhood got involved and took control of the islands through the prince, Prince Framlar.
inger scotty yeah and that's where the situation is currently the scarlet brotherhood controls everything uh but the sub rulers the the rulers of the smaller islands who are you know subjects of the prince sort of know the deal. They know that the Prince is in the pocket of the Scarlet Brotherhood.
So they are, while offering fealty with one wink, they are planning their own power play with the other wink.
Yeah, it's a little weird for me because there's this whole idea of how profitable it is, right? But the problem is this is on the corner of the map. And the only thing south is the Amedeo jungle or the Amedeo jungle? No, the Piedmont land. Uh, so hip model land is down below. And so it's one of these ideas. It's very colonial in its, in its approach.
It doesn't super say it in this version, but you know, where's the, where's the trade and money coming from? Cause you're sort of far off. from where all the nations are. So what is it? Well, you've got to be extracting resources from the South and then fueling the racist Sewell Brotherhood. And so Scarlet Brotherhood, none of it is great. And, you know, it doesn't...
and it's also just so far off to the edge of the map it's a little different when you say talk about the moon shades and you have a mix of things going on you you have some clear commerce between the mainland and the the forces and the moon shades and hey you also have some pirates and some other stuff that makes a lot more sense i think than this does uh unless you're just gonna super dig into a colonial kind of narrative so i would absolutely change the lordship of the isles to be different it's it's fine to have pirates but
It's positioning and story is kind of not fun for me.
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to help us out there like subscribe and do the things teos if people want to just push me aside and just look at your stuff where do they do that uh well they can find me at alpha stream.org though boy i've i have so many things i want to do and boy that day job relentless day job keeps getting in the way but let's say they want to get rid of me and find you where do they go
Oh, they can go to all the social medias at Sean Merwin. On Blue Sky and Mastodon, I'm doing a writing tabletop RPGs tip of the day. I'm about 14 or 13 in at this moment. And so you can go follow me there and see those. You can also follow Mastering Dungeons at Mastering D&D on Mastodon, Blue Sky, and all the social medias. And you can always find us on YouTube as well. Wow, what a day.
So I don't know, Teos, what are we going to do now?
I'm going to prove the world by making my own character builder that contains all of 2014 and 2024 until I realize I've run into IP infringement and copyright infringement, and then I will be sued, and then I'll close it all down.
Sounds like fun. At least you've thought it through. That's the important thing. I am making new D&D rules for 2024, and I am capitalizing all the words.