Episode 212 of Mastering Dungeons! Main topic: Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! Amazing fans at Gamehole Con help us create a campaign, live! News: Perkins’ New Job, DMG Review, What it Feels Like to Be Nr 2, and more! Special thanks to Dante of Ghostfire Gaming for recording and processing the audio for this episode. You are the best, Dante! Contents 00:00 Live from Gamehole Con 01:28 Number 2? 02:23 What Excited Us This Week? 05:14 Previous Edition Mechanic? 09:28 Systems we Want to Try? 11:32 Recent Influences? 15:27 Our DMG Preview 18:11 DMG and Greyhawk 19:43 Greyhawk on DMsGuild 21:55 Perkins' Last Book 24:04 Trail of Cthulhu 2E 26:19 Hundred Dungeons 27:19 Grim Hollow Transformed 27:48 Creating a Campaign Setting Live 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.
Wow, you guys are lively for a Sunday. It's been so good to see you guys. I haven't seen everybody that I see here, but I've seen a lot of you around the con, which is awesome. One of the reasons I love Game Hall. Thank you for being a part of our community. There's probably someone in here who's like, what's mastering dungeons? Thank you. Well, we're still trying to find out.
Mastering Dungeons is the number 1.5 podcast in all the realms. All the realms. All the realms. I'm Sean Merwin. This is my co-host, Teos Abadieh. Welcome to this live recording of Mastering Dungeons. So normally we would have some very witty banter, but all the wit has left my body. So normally then what we would do after the witty banter is take questions from our listeners.
Guess what we have here, Mr. Teo Sabadilla. Listeners. We have listeners. Listeners. And so what I think we should do is take some live questions from our listeners, put us on the spot. If you have a question for us, raise your hand and let us know what you would like to ask. Yes.
How does it feel to always be just number two to the elders broadcast?
The question was, what was it like? And since I am on that podcast, Teos, what does it feel like? Man.
What's the Eldridge forecast?
Oh, wow, yeah, yeah. No, you know, I love watching the Eldritch Lorecast because it is such a different vibe. And I often watch it on the treadmill and then try not to laugh off the treadmill, you know, like where you don't pay attention to what's underneath you. I like that we're different. How does it feel to be number two?
You know, we're also number two to like Mike Shea's podcast and to a lot of good things. And so whenever something is great and I am less than that, I'm totally okay with that.
Absolutely. Absolutely. I love it as well. Yes, right here.
What did you see this week that piqued your interest, that you're taking home with you, that maybe surprised and delighted or dismayed you?
Okay. The question was, in case we didn't pick it up, what did we see this week, this weekend, that surprised us, delighted us? You want to take that first?
Sure. So I played the one ring three times, 2.5 times. And I really am filled with excitement over sort of how they do these journeys and how they do roles in various parts of the game and combat and other areas. I think that's really fertile ground for my brain to just start processing. So I'm excited to do a campaign. I'm excited to actually read the rule books rather than just play it.
Yeah, that's got me really excited.
What got me excited was playing the AD&D one-hour 50th anniversary game, reminding me that while that game wasn't perfect, no game is perfect, and what that game did for... The industry for its players for the last 50 years is amazing because there was nothing else like it. And while we might not use that technology, the heart of the game was there and is still here.
And if we can keep capturing that, and no matter what game we make, whether it's a high
rules dense game or just a fun storytelling game to keep that heart captured is so important and we like talking about that kind of game side of things but there's also the kind of interesting side of things and on that side I was part of a POC dinner and then a POC mixer event and
and seeing all of these many of them are newer creators uh who are coming into the space and bringing in different ideas and perspectives uh that was really good and it's really nice because you start out and you're all kind of looking at each other and you start trading stories and you realize how universal all of our concerns and worries are as creators um and some of the opportunities that they're exploring that was super super cool i can't share any of the details but there's some really neat stuff being talked about that to me are just like
It's like a flag in the sand of in this moment, this thing could kind of be created. And so I'm excited for where that can go.
And the 50th anniversary gave us the impetus to do the history of all the editions and all the different versions of the game, and some of the stories that came out of there were both revelatory and fun and terrifying, and it shows you the diverse history of this game, where it has come through, some of the tragedies it's come through, but the joys that it's also brought.
So it was a good history... topic as the 50th. Any other questions?
Yes. I'm going to follow up on your story about what's something from a previous edition of D&D, mechanically, that you'd like to see come back in the 50th?
It depends on the game. One of the things I'd like to see come back is a little more tension in the game, a little more. We've come to the point now where we sort of know and expect, in D&D particularly, that we're safe. We're safe here. We're safe now.
And playing that AD&D game, it brought back that tension that I felt as a 12-year-old playing where every decision I make, this could be the last decision for this character. And we've sort of lost that for good reasons. And there are games that do that. But for D&D itself, to be able to capture that tension without the controversy of...
I just lost this character that I've been playing for 20 years, and now I'll never be able to play it again. It's that tension that sometimes is fun.
I do have a binder of all my old characters from way back in the day. And it's interesting because it's, of course, a trapper keeper as required by law. And it's like this thick, right? I don't know what that three and a half inches, four inches, something like that. And one half of it is the characters that were still alive. And one half are the characters that died. And it's equal sizes, right?
And if I look at like my fifth edition characters or my fourth edition characters, They're almost all alive, right? The number of characters that died in organized play and home campaigns, whatever, it's really small. I still have managed to TPK parties a lot and kill characters a lot, so I'm apparently that kind of DM. True. But... Thank you. Thank you, Graham.
But my personal, you know, like, my characters just, yeah, they don't suffer peril, right? And that's a different type of a thing. Which I think is okay if the story empowers us to have still great conflict, a great dramatic conflict. And you don't necessarily have to die because you keep telling your story.
Like, you know, I've said on the podcast, my experience with Blade Runner and what I did in my Blade Runner game to change from the rules is to remove these crits that just out of nowhere wipe out a character, right? Just... Oh, sorry, you just died. You know, like a guy punched you and shattered everything somehow.
And for a game that's supposed to be about your evolution of how you look at what it means to be human, boy, is that like cold water, right? And so I wanted that to be a... Actually, removing it allows for the drama. So it depends. But my answer to the question of what I would pull in from previous editions is words that aren't capitalized.
Yes.
No. I mean, yes, but... One thing that I thought, I found myself thinking this, which I did not think I would think from fourth edition, because there are a lot of things like from fourth edition, but the Paragon Paths, as a goalpost to where your character can go. Like, I really like what subclasses do, but this idea that you can evolve and reach out at higher levels to be this thing.
And a lot of times they were written with an eye towards, because it will have this impact on the campaign or the world, like you are this thing, right? And that was a cool goal that I think would have worked well in fifth edition.
Did you feel the same about Epic Destinies, the third tier, or was it just that one in particular?
Am I thinking of the wrong? Oh, because they're right there. Yeah, yeah. I guess I'm thinking more of the epic destinies. Yeah, especially those. Paragon paths, I think, are part of that process, but particularly those, yeah, you're right. I meant the epic destinies. Those are the ones that were like the big, like, yeah, you are the person that does this stuff in the world.
That's kind of cool. So do we need a level 20 to 30 in fifth edition? Sorry, in 5e, 2e.
You can also get me to argue that the game should just end at 10th level. And that's true too, right? But if we're going to have higher levels of play and we're going to aspire to reach them, then give me something to aspire for is I guess what I'm kind of would pull in. Mm-hmm.
All right. We've got a couple more minutes for questions here.
Can you speak to something regarding other systems that you're anticipating or you have some like happy anticipation to try out in your near future?
The day I left, a package arrived on my front step, and I picked it up, and I, ooh, Christmas, and I open it, and it was Rob Schwalb's Shadow of the Weird Wizard. And I'm one session away from finishing Citadel of the Unseen Sun from Ghostfire Gaming. And so what am I going to run next? And that showed up as if an omen.
that i i i need to run this uh if i can convince my players they played with rob schwalb uh at a convention many years ago and they're horrible people and and i'm like and i'm like rob rob is a lot rob is a lot as a game master and they're like we can we can handle it we can handle it and after four hours and family-friendly shows i'm going to go
After that, they're like, okay, yeah, that was enough. That was enough. They tapped out. But with Shadow of the Weird Wizard, a lot of that adult stuff has been removed. So I love that system, and I can't wait to go home and flip through that book. and see, is this something that we're going to play next?
Yeah, Rob's so brilliant. And so I'm really excited to see what he's changed. I haven't looked at the PDF. I wanted to look at the printed version. So seeing what he has changed from the Shadow of the Demon Lord will be really cool. That's probably on my list as well. I think I've been very lucky that all the things that I've wanted to try recently, I've actually been able to try.
Thank you, Gamehole and other opportunities. But so I'm in pretty, yeah, that's probably the one on my list that I haven't touched.
Well, I'm on your Discord with your friends, and you're like, oh, and this weekend we're going to try the aliens, and this weekend we're going to, and I'm like, I'm going to sit home. I want to play. But, so I envy you the ability to. We're pretty cool. You are. You are pretty cool. Yeah.
Over the past couple of years, what games have you seen that have influenced you, that you found interesting, or were your design into the show? And just in general.
To be honest, I've wanted simpler games. I've wanted to go in the direction of, can we tell stories more simply and still have some mechanical fun? And what got my attention, it's been a couple of years now, but it's Gloomhaven. It's not a role-playing game. It's a board game that could be a role-playing game with just a little tweak.
And then they did a role-playing game version that didn't seem to explode like I thought maybe it could. But I love the mechanic. If you're not familiar with it, it's more of a board game, and you draw two cards... The top is things you can do, more of attacks. The bottom is more movement or special things your character can do. And then you have to use one from the top, the bottom from the other.
And so you have to figure out sort of on the fly what's the best way to do this and strategize. And I just like the simplicity of that. I would love to see that in a really quick role-playing game.
Yeah, I can't even separate all the influences, honestly. I feel like there has been so much coming out, I haven't been able to properly file it away. Yesterday, I was playing Magnus Archives from Monty Cook Games, and it was my second Cypher system at the game. The other one was...
Travis Woodall, I have to mention, ran this absurd, absurd game where we were in Sandinus, and Bill and Ted had gone to get Napoleon, and we were the other famous figures from history left alone in the mall.
brilliant and he's such a great guy he gave us guitar picks to represent like the points we could spend it was just it was so good but but in playing i found myself you know playing cypher system playing uh the various free league games like i feel like we're really close to sort of some game will come out that's really gonna hit a sweet spot of how you tell stories and still have this mechanical piece like i feel like we are circling really close to some game's gonna come out that's gonna nail it
in a really great way, because so many people are trying to do that, right? They're trying to combine the pleasing crunch and the story part, and I feel like we're getting really close, and that's exciting.
Yeah, over the last two years, just people have come up to me, people I know, and said, yeah, I just made this. Can you take a look at it? You want it? Ethan, last year, handed me Fetch My Blade. I'm going to start using that in my class to teach people small indie games, storytelling games. Andy Demps handed me a one-page adventure layout. Beautiful, loved it, loved it. We have...
100 Dungeons from Graham. So all of these people making these new things, I don't have enough time in the whole world to see them all, but I want to see them all and how you can use them.
Yeah, this is a really good time, which is interesting because I used to, we had an OGL panel we did yesterday. I don't know, some point. Thank you. Thank you for grounding my sense of time.
And one of the things I found myself thinking about is when I was, during fourth edition, I kind of said, I was thinking to myself, I'm so glad there isn't an OGL because all these varied games are actually showing up because people aren't just making D20 stuff. And I feel like now we can have our cake and eat it too. Like a lot of people are making 5e, but also doing other stuff.
And that's really, really sweet. Can we get to some news? Yes. Is there news? There is news. I've got some news. Okay. Hit me smooth. Yeah. So, I mean, the Dungeon Master's Guide is starting to make it out. Like, I think I was packing my bag and I'm looking at my feed and I'm like, oh, we can now talk about it if we were on the list of people who got it.
And so I can tell you guys I have the Dungeon Master's Guide in digital form and I've been looking at it and it's really, really good. But there are also other people, you know, the Gizmodos and the Polygons. We've got links in our show notes. They've been talking about it too. But it is really good.
And I was able to see Chris Perkins at his signing event, one of the rare places where you can capture a live Chris Perkins. And I said to him, like, you met your goal of, like, this was really good. Like, you set out to try to make a much better Dungeon Master's Guide, and this book does that. And I know he must have worked really, really hard on it, because that's how he does things.
It is really, really good. And it's like the Player's Handbook. It has those sort of numbered sidebar things that are really cool, but for the DM now to tell you what you're doing. And that's really nice. It has a really nice intro section. It's much better at... telling you, hey, let's know how to run a game first.
They've taken, you know, there are always decisions that I look at, oh, I don't know that I would have done that. You know, like the encounter rules are now like kind of on one page and they've simplified it down. But maybe that is better, right? And for what they've done, it's really well explained. And so I really like what I'm seeing. Yeah, I...
Can't say whether or not I have seen the Dungeon Master's Guide because I'm not an influencer. But that was a term of endearment, really. But I like what Teo said in that they're trying to make new game masters comfortable running the game. And I like that. I like that they don't try to make you an expert anymore.
get you walking first before you run and also i hope this shows a openness from wizards to let the creators out there using the open gaming license which is now in the cc do those things for them And so you can not explain everything you need to about monster design when there's a book like, I don't know, Forge of Foes there that you can use to do so. And Mike throws horns in the back.
And I'd like to see that. I'd like them to really nail down what the game is expected to do and then let other people grow from there.
Yeah, I really love it. One of the things that came up in a video that, you know, they're doing these video previews we've been talking about, and we've been talking about Greyhawk, which we are super, super fans of. And it's interesting, you know, we had sort of laughed about how many pages will actually be in the DMG.
And I think it's 28, though they said a different number at some point, but I thought I counted 28. It's something like that. And it's kind of the approach that we'd heard. They start really focused on Greyhawk City. And the idea is, hey, if you wanted to run a home campaign, here's an example of how you might go about it.
You'd write down some stuff, enough information, a few pages on this city, and you could run some urban adventures. And you can use the adventures that are in the DMG as example adventures and the example maps to sort of run that. And then you want to go beyond the city. So here's some rough ideas.
And if you saw like Rime of the Frostmaiden, you can kind of think of like this idea, like now you venture outwards. Here's what's going on. And then they'd have the glossography. But unlike the glossography we reviewed, they don't go nation by nation. They just sort of say like the northeast section and the central section of the Flanessans.
And they just broadly describe it like there's literally a table that tells you like, oh, Jeff Keelan, whatever. But it's just the larger themes that are being provided. It's that kind of sketch approach that many of us might take when we're fashioning our own world. And there's positives and minuses to that. But and certainly if you're a Greyhawk fan, you might want it all. But yeah. Yeah.
There's material out there already that you can go into. That's one of the joys of the DMs Guild is getting that old material, not necessarily the new material. And I think from what I've heard that this Greyhawk section, like I said with the other stuff, teaches you the basics. You want to build a world, start with a city and then work your way out from there.
And this is how it's been done in the past. You can do it. And then that leads into the adventure creation sections that I've seen little bits of where they give you like a one page adventure outline, which teaches you how to do that. So it's run the game, build your world, run adventures in that world. And it spells it out pretty nicely.
And if you're a Greyhawk fan, you might want to know, you know, where are we in the year of the setting? And so the year is 576 CY, which is the time of the world of Greyhawk fantasy setting, not the living Greyhawk LGCS that we talked about on the show. So they've actually gone back in time.
Which has its pluses and minuses, you know, because there's a lot of really neat stuff that, you know, like we were talking about on the podcast and those those people, you know, like those rulers aren't even alive now. Right. They're not yet there. And so they've changed that, I think, probably because in the videos they talk about going back to the original folio as their source.
So I think they really just went back to that material. And so you get things like the gods are in a table and just a lot of summarized high-level things, more like what Gary created back then and then we worked off of, right? But that's an interesting choice.
And they also said, we've put Greyhawk out, and now you can too. So Greyhawk will be available as IP to work on the DM skill, which I think is maybe good news for a lot of people who may have done Greyhawk work in the past, like mapping Greyhawk. For sure, for sure. So congratulations and go to it.
If you have worked in Greyhawk before, all of that work you've done can now be brought to fruition on the go.
One of the things that came up in the interviews was a little piece about how this is Chris Perkins' last book. And so we thought, huh. And I've always had the impression, whether it's right or wrong, that Chris sometimes looks like he would like a different challenge. And so I thought, well, maybe he's just retiring, like he's done, right?
But I was able to talk to him and talk to other folks and say, okay, is Chris gone? Is he retiring? Is he heading off into the sunset? No. This is what they conceive of as being his last book that he will directly write, so the Dungeon Master's Guide. And he talks about putting a lot of effort into the book specifically because of that, sort of like his last gift out there.
But what he is now changing to be is the creative director that will work on larger sort of media visions of D&D. So if there were a second movie, if those TV shows move forward, if some new video game would come in, he would be the person who would architect what that should cover and entail and then work with the rest of the team to supply that information to those groups.
And to show the difference between Teos and I, Chris stepped down to an elevator that I was on and, hey, how's it going? Good. What you working on? Yeah. And then I'm like, I should ask him. I should ask him. I should ask him. I should ask him. I'm not going to ask him. And then I read the show notes and Teos did. I mean, you got to do what you got to do.
You're just a... There are a lot of people.
For example, I played One Ring last night with a listener who came through us through Mike Shea. Thanks, Mike. And he said that what he does every year is sort of try to give Chris at a signing something uncomfortable. So he had him sign Vasson books. Apparently, oh, he also says, this is my, hey, my best friend ever. Like, we were best friends.
And so Chris now knows him and, like, looks forward to seeing what shenanigans will come up at the signing. So we were laughing about, you know, bring a Pathfinder book next time. I said, no, no, don't do that.
Don't do that.
There is a line. There's a line you should not cross.
Now it's time for a creative corner. It is. Creator corner. Let's talk about Trail of Cthulhu second edition on Backerkit. Pelgrim Press obviously put out Trail of Cthulhu a while ago using the gumshoe system to give you your Cthulhu fix. And now they are bringing it to a new edition. It's not on Kickstarter. It's on Backerkit.
You can download a PDF of the updated Quickstart rules to get a view of Gumshoe's system. How many people out there have played Call of Cthulhu? Lots. How many people have played Trail of Cthulhu? Chris. Good job, Chris. And Sean, you've played it, right? I have once. I love the gumshoe system. I love the gumshoe system for exactly this kind of game.
And it is... Call of Cthulhu has been around a long time. Great game. Probably the third most popular game out there after D&D and Pathfinder. I love Trail of Cthulhu. If you have a fix for a Cthulhu game... and want a system that sort of gamifies investigation maybe a little better than the original rules, I would strongly suggest that game.
Yeah, I'm a huge fan of Knights Black Asians, and one of the things they said in their write-up was sort of learning from their other gumshoe games and bringing that into the system you use for Trail of Cthulhu. So I've already backed this. I'm excited to try it too, because I do, I like, I love Call of Cthulhu one-shots at cons, because usually the DMs are just incredible.
But I don't love, like... feeling like my 50% chance to succeed is incredibly high compared to everything else in my character sheet. And then I fail anyway. And I'm like, how am I stopping this ritual? Like this doesn't, yeah. So I am excited about, you know, using a different system for it. Cause I love those stories and experiences.
Other news. We've mentioned 100 Dungeons before. We're going to mention 100 Dungeons again in a little more detail.
Yeah, so Graham Ward, who's in this room, has created a sword and sorcery hack version of 5e, but it's got a lot of it. He's calling it even a version of 5e. You know, I don't know if that... It's a lot more than that, yeah. And he just made one of those faces that, yeah, it's a bit of this, a bit of that. It brings a focus.
It has a focus on bringing exploration and social interaction back to the fore. And it's a nice melding of old and new school elements. It's a 304 page product, Graham, as an alpha release. Well done. He does say that a lot of that is the spells, but it's really cool. And it's, you can pay what you want.
So I know a lot of us on the Discord have already picked it up in the Patreon Discord, but it's really, really worth checking out. And then you can give feedback to Graham so that it ends up being just completely incredible.
And it's on DriveThruRPG right now, so just go to DriveThru and look for 100 Dungeons. And there's this little Kickstarter we've sort of been pitching for Ghostfire Gaming called Grim Hollow Transformed. We've probably got a week and a half left, give or take. You've probably heard me talk about it before. I've been on some streams. I've talked about it on the show.
But if you are into your dark fantasy and want lots of new rules and want to make me work even harder, which I'd love, you can back that link in the show notes, Grim Hollow Transformed. So what we want to talk about as our main topic this week on Mastering Dungeons is creating a campaign right now. We are going to build one with your help because we've talked about what should we talk about next.
And one is let's create the perfect campaign guide, of course, which there is no such thing as. But with your help, maybe we can come very, very close. So you want to take the first step here?
Sure. So, you know, we've talked about a number of angles on campaign creation, like thinking about big elements or thinking about small, right? You start at the top or the bottom. How do you how do you kind of come up with these ideas and then how do you work off of them? So does anybody have some ideas that they're thinking about around possible cool campaign concepts? Yes, Keith.
Alright, I'm gonna be the jerk here. Medium-low magic. So magic is rare enough to stay magical. You can go into most medium to large cities and find a magic shop. It sells common magic items and material components, as well as knickknacks meant to get regular folks in the door. Focus charms and stuff. Any magic of uncommon rarity or greater, you have to find or commission or buy at an auction.
It's not in general, it's not generally available only. Okay.
So I'm just going to repeat that in case it didn't get heard. So a medium to low magic setting where there might be a magic shop in a large city, but it's rare enough that it's not going to be powerful magic and any of the rare, very rare stuff you cannot buy, you have to find. My first question when I hear level of magic in a setting is, is that just the setting or is that the characters as well?
Are we going to limit character magic or are we just limiting the magic of the world itself?
Do you want me to answer that? Sure. So the idea is that, yes, the PCs can have a higher level of magic because they are exceptional, but in general, magic ability is on par with, say, having a PhD. Okay. Maybe 2% of the population at most.
What about two master's degrees, asking for a friend?
That's multi-classic.
Okay, so we're not going to limit the five-y rules of magic.
So let me back up, because I was going to ask you, Sean, when you hear a concept like this, which we could pretend came into our brains at night, whereas we're about to sleep, sorry, honey, hold on, I just need to make a note. If you woke up in the morning and said, wow, I had this idea, Like, how would you... Where would you go next?
Because I think that's something that a lot of people might ask as DMs. Like, I have this idea. Where should I go next?
For me, it depends on my mindset at the time. Right now, I'm heavy in the player rules, which is why I ask. So my thing would be, we have to reflect the... Don't touch the table. We have to reflect the rules... of the player to show them what the world is. If I say it's a low magic setting, but they are still casting Wish, then is it a low magic setting?
So I have to decide how am I going to model the world through the player rules. And so that's what I would do first with who I am right now.
And I had the totally opposite thought, which is I was thinking, well, if this is going to be important to our world, then I want to explain why this is. Maybe magic has begun to waste away, and there are tales of the days of yore when magic was strong and flowed, but now items seem to lose power over time, and the really rare stuff, you've got to go into the dangerous places to reclaim.
The story of why this is going to be exciting, because imagine telling the player, and then you won't have any magic items? And you can't buy them in shops, so you can't get what you want, right? And all the players are like, yeah, well, I got a special finger to share with you. And so getting that buy-in might be through saying, but no, it's this cool thing that you will actually benefit from.
Like, the story will be cooler because of that.
Right, and that's because I'm coming at it as a designer right now, not the game master. And as soon as you start saying, I need to get the story setting, my mind immediately goes to how deeply are you going to do this before you introduce it to your players when the players may say, yeah, not interested.
So getting the player buy-in on that, if you're a game master, is important right from the start. And I would then want to build the world with them rather than build it and then present it to them? If I was going to move in a direction that's outside of the sort of standard setting, which is now Greyhawk, which is that mid to low magic? I would consider yes, but...
Yeah, so I would want to build it. Until you get into one of Gary's dungeons. Yeah.
True. Bags full of stuff.
True, true. So, okay, so we've got a pitch. I feel like we need something else. I think we need the this meets this. Yes, please.
The world is at war, and it is weary of it. Battle lines have been drawn in scarred countries, isolating them from each other. And getting from one place to another requires smuggling or some other passing of bribes. You don't know what else is out there.
Damn, I want to play this game right now. Everybody leave.
So that was said so well, I don't even know how to repeat it, but the world is at war. There are battle lines. Even moving from one place to the other requires you to find a way, bribe or whatever. So there's some dark edge to that. That's really cool.
That is really cool. And so now I'm thinking adventures that we could do within that. What do we do at levels one to four? What do we do at levels... What's after four? Five to ten. I don't want to spoil it.
If this is your first time counting, I mean, really, you want to discover it. It's so good. Wait till you find the alphabet. It's similar but different. There's 26 of them? There's a whole lore history about the alphabet, but I'm not going to bore you now.
Yeah, this is what we do off the mics. Just mock each other. Or on the mics. So that's what I'm doing. What is the adventure that comes from this? So I am going to have them be war-weary. They're going to be soldiers or an elite unit that has been... It's been burned, right? They were deserters. Maybe one deserted because they're a coward.
Maybe another deserted because they are just tired of having killed so many folks. I'm making backgrounds now. Now I'm making backgrounds. Right, give them a reason. And so now I'm in my head making backgrounds that I can say, hey, players, you can make your own story, but here are some stories that I, as the game master, would love to tell with you. Here's backgrounds.
Yeah, and because behind all of this is there's one thing which is presenting your campaign to the gang or the audience, depending on whether you're publishing or it's just your group, but But getting that buy-in requires making it personal, right? And to really tell stories together, we have to give the players that thing that they're going to dig into.
And so this is the kind of thinking, yeah, I totally want to have around a campaign.
So we've got the world and a pitch for the world. What else do we need?
Well, you know, I might add on this subject just that... like I want to start designing, right? But one of the things we talked about is that restraint of like, I want to be like, ooh, maybe there should be like a weary thing or a, but that's also where now you're changing the game. So maybe you don't want to do that. And so you might hold back from that.
But if you're publishing a setting, you could think of like, you know, if I'm going to have a couple of rules that are custom and new, should something be there to reinforce this play? Maybe, right? It might be worth trying out and play testing, you know, whether there should be something to capture this But maybe it's just examples of play, like ways to cross borders, right?
Because that might be a thing that you run into that's problematic. If you always are making these checks, so you always have a barrier crossing over, how do we make that fun rather than repetitive or a barrier, an actual barrier to the gameplay?
Yeah, because now when you say barrier, I'm thinking exploration. And when you talk about exploration, we're in this gray area. One of the questions that we could have talked about was the exploration pillar and how do you make it better, how do you gamify it, and so on. So when I see barrier, exploration is going from the unknown to the known or learning something.
Now I'm starting this group or starting the adventure that I'm going to write on the other side of the world, and they're trying to get to this side of the world. And as Taylor said, what's the barrier from this region to the next? Maybe it's a magical barrier. From this region to the next, it's a military barrier.
And we're going to make themes around that with each of the adventures or sections of adventures that I'm writing. Cool. Do we want to add another idea in? Let's do it. Oh, cool. Way in the back. No, no, you. Yep, yeah.
All right, the reason that magic isn't so common anymore is all the wars have been killing off the dragons that are the anchor for the weave in the world.
I love killing off dragons. and then having them come back.
Dr. Megan Connolly had the supposition that if the magic is tied to dragons and the dragons have been being killed off in the wars, then that's why we have less magic and magic items are less strong. And that's awesome, right? That's really cool. And that starts giving us
real story seeds or if you think about the arc like one of the things that mike shea does so well and actually the new dmg does pretty well is to say like when you're building like your one to twenty idea for what a campaign could be or whatever you're going to you can you think about those arcs of where the adventure could go and now we can you know that this has a lot for that right this offers us a lot towards that
Right. And so if the dragons are being killed or have died off, what does that mean of the monsters of the world, the ecology of the world? Is it possible to bring magic back if you are able to team up with dragons? Or are dragons evil rampaging beasts that you don't want anything to do with anymore?
And that could be one of the barriers that you're trying to cross is this was a realm that was filled with dragons. Do you need to fight them? Do you need to interact with them in some way to pass through that region as you're heading back home?
Dragonlance had so much fun with that whole good versus evil dragons and the balance that sort of is in Kryn, right? And you could work off of that. What if you had these four sides of dragons or something and they're They're both all diminished, and maybe the balance is off, right? And maybe we find that the wars have actually been perpetuated by one of them or something like that.
That could be interesting, too.
Yeah, and now I'm picking up Kobold Press' Dragon Magic and reading that through, see if I have any ideas about things that you could do with dragons. And then Dragon Heist, because it's all about dragons and heists. That's only in Waterdeep. Oh. So I feel like we need one more, one more idea. Troy.
I feel like, you know, an inciting incident. You got Lodo, Midmagic, and Wartorn going off tails as, you know, is going away and the dragons are dying. The group finds a name or something, and that's what allows the characters to progress in magic normally, where everybody else is stuck at first level at best. And so they've got to decide which of the four dragons do you take it to?
What side do you lean to? And it's like a beacon. Not everybody's after them, so they have to pick quickly and go. Okay.
Good. Yes. Now we also need to decide if the characters are going to be fighting something, something will need access to magic as well. So the characters have that dragon egg, but there are other dragon eggs out there that...
just to capture that this idea that Troy was saying was an inciting incident, right, because it didn't record, like a dragon egg that they find to decide where to take it.
Yeah, you said if you need a power source or things like that, the dead dragons, the items made for them still maintain their magical power. That's actually like the weapon caches and armaments for all these countries. So they don't want the egg to hatch and there'd be more of a magical world for everybody, so they'll be wanting to take it.
right okay yeah so so chris just said there is there are magic items but they are made with dragon parts uh and that's still holds the magic and now you've got an underground economy possibly smuggling uh you can bring in all of these elements as well
This is bringing to mind 13th Age and their icon system. Okay. You have a bunch of different icons directing things in the world, and who you align with determines who is against you and who is tenuously in your favor.
You talk about 13th Age once every ten minutes, so... I do it every time you bring up fate. It's like, uh, that's our beginning. I haven't said fate... Well, I just said fate, by the way.
Uh, yeah, yeah. I always look at the icons in 13th age. They, they always feel to me like almost like when I first like understood this idea of like, Oh, the deities drop power from their clerics. Like to me, it feels very much like that. And so that would really work to say,
these dragons are icons and so maybe they're not just as simple as like oh colors and alignments but what if they are like actual true concepts of life like almost like they're pantheonistic and so now those choices you're making around like who you take a dragon egg to is really substantial and maybe certain nations are aligned with them based on these ideals that they represent and that's good fodder for for conflict
All right, I think we've got a good shell here. What do we have next?
Or do we have anything next time? I think we could choose that. Do we want to talk about the adventure you do, the campaign sketch?
I think we need the world now. I think we've got enough of a story idea that we need to build the world, not only in a way that captures all of these points, but that is accepting of the adventures that we want to put into it. So we need to think about those multiple threads. Fate. I just tried to scare him.
multiple threads to have the adventure work with the world in a way that supports the campaign. Yeah. So would you start at the top? Let's go to a map builder to tell us about the world.
Maybe the world changed over a few thousand years. You have warm periods where the oceans rise, so the continents get smaller, and and then they lower when it gets colder because that way you can have islands that are stable over a long time so there might be a reason to fight over them. So dragons won't have their lairs and stuff in certain areas.
And that is also a place where you can find old ancient ruins and remains of cities and stuff that was at a shoreline, even in the middle of the desert because once every 5,000 years or so it's flooded. So you give the landscape a history that you can build into old ancient legends and stuff like that.
that's great and so if we're going to use regular 5e dragon uh rules the the arctic area would be where the white dragon is if you choose there yeah okay that would be really interesting if that has changed right if the arctic white area was actually like you know tropical before that's kind of neat and that everybody they're like that would really set the world off right when it's
And that's what I, and I'm going to mention Aurora now because I have to, because that's my dragon campaign. That's what I wanted to do in the first draft. In the first draft, it was dragons were put in charge of areas, but since red dragons are better at fighting cold creatures, the red dragons were put in the Arctic region and they hated it.
But they serve someone else, and they're miserable, and that's why they're mean and no one wants to deal with them. Same thing, the white dragons in the volcanic areas. But just to give that a little twist. Yeah. Yeah, that's really interesting. I'm just going to sit here thinking about it.
Okay. There's no one in this room other than us, right?
Nobody. Nobody at all. So what other things about the world do we want to include?
Well, I caught on to this smuggling piece of it because I think about, like, what's going to be unique about my game. Like, there's 30 games of this con that have all the media magic and dragons and things, but, like, I don't know any games, I mean, there might be some, but where... smuggling or kind of going around the war is kind of the core thing.
So maybe this is a stealth game, or maybe that's something I would think about. And for smuggling to work, you'd need to, Keith's original point where magic dragons and chops and stuff, you need to have a robust economy now so that In order to smuggle something and for that to be meaningful, it needs to be something that people in this place want and people in this place can't get, sort of thing.
I think about the mechanics I can include and the kind of building blocks I need to support that kind of emergent payment.
I'm going to ask a question back. Do you need mechanics to support it or is just the story of smuggling enough? Is it... Do we need to gamify it? Or do we just... Okay.
Let that be a lesson. Where I went was we had talked about in a previous show the importance of factions and organizations, and that might be a thing that can step in here and carry a lot of that weight. It could be an opportunity to talk about what are the groups that are allowed to go between the lines?
How do we define these different areas of the world, whatever they are, nations, entities, these zones? And through that, that might be some interesting things that then tie also into the icon-like dragons as well.
I don't know if this is, so I like the smuggling idea. My brain is going like basically there is some group of people that go through old ruins, which is a fairly common thing, but the goal is explicitly to find smuggling routes, which if you can find and create and kind of like map the same smuggling route, that could give you a lot of money depending on who you do that route to.
So that could be... You want to repeat that? Yeah. So Lila was talking about if smuggling routes, finding smuggling routes is a big part of the campaign because of all these aspects we've talked about. And my brain thought, well, if we talk about all this environmental change and long history and things that have changed drastically, the whole place could be ruins all the way down, right?
And so that could then be like, yeah, there are always these ways to get underneath and that connect things that go over the board under the borders if you can brave them and if you can find them and that's that's that's neat yeah go ahead
Didn't he see him there? Oh my gosh. Yeah, and that works into the factions that you were saying. Yeah, moral ambiguity and everybody believing. Yeah, that's awesome. I was going to say, somebody we haven't heard from yet, but we've heard from everybody so far. So, Megan, go ahead.
Just one thing that I think gets left out in these kind of epic stories that makes the world feel flat is thinking about families. People are raising children in these worlds. What does that look like in these war-torn worlds with smuggling and these factions?
And it can be different from area to area, very different depending on... how close they are to the front lines, how rich that particular civilization is, where the war actually was fought. All of those things are great points for the campaign.
And that could be a unifying element where if you're, like, who your people used to be is actually a lot like what someone is now, right? Like, you're closer than you think, but you can't see it. Steve?
Yeah, if you give... I just want to repeat that. If you give...
Right. If you as the characters were a big part of why all of this is happening, even the war itself or the dragon's demise.
Right.
So looking at the time we have, maybe we should ask, how does it all end? In fire was heard several times. Well, do we want to say how it all ends? Yeah, I don't know. Because that's why we play the game, Teo Sabadea. Maybe, or where, well, yeah, that's, I mean, that's always a good question. We can talk about the whole episode, but yeah.
Well, maybe there's this strange light in the sky, and you leave it for, you know, the game master to determine. Is that, like, a world-ending asteroid? Is that some sort of, I don't know, like, space-faring race that's coming to, you know, obliterate or take over or what?
Wow. The mysterious light in the sky that the DM gets to decide what it is and what it, yeah, we come.
All right. Two more questions. Chris, go ahead.
We're talking about how it's going to end. I love you, Chris Knezak.
Troy.
That's true.
Yeah.
For those who couldn't hear it as we wrap up here, Troy has just promised to run an organized play campaign, if I heard correctly, based on this. Thank you guys. This was amazing, everybody. Thank you so much for being here.
We love you.