Episode 214 of Mastering Dungeons! Main topic: Memories of Gamehole Con! Shawn and Teos look back on all of the events they attended and lessons from attending conventions. Hear why Gamehole is so special. News: Claim Elemental Evil, Maps Adds Encounters, Audio-Only Drizzt, and more! Contents 00:00 Stealing Credit Cards 03:08 Cleric Subclasses Setting Only? 09:21 Good Design Not Obvious? 13:57 Claim Scions of Elemental Evil 16:26 D&D Maps Adds Encounters 19:26 Audible-Only Drizzt Novel 20:32 Discord D&D Collection 21:41 Ars Magica Definitive Collection 23:25 Rodney Thompson List and Games 25:04 MT Black World War Weird 26:08 Thunder Road Vendetta RPG 27:36 Draconis Peaceful 5E 28:57 Gamehole Revisited 29:32 Whether to Attend Conventions 33:05 Wednesday Pre-Con Gatherings 38:15 Thursday's Events 47:32 Making the Most of Friday 59:27 Packed Saturday 01:04:28 Thankful Sunday Finish 01:06:39 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.
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hello and welcome to this week's episode of mastering dungeons your favorite ttrpg gaming game design game review game of thrones no that's not us that's somebody else podcast i'm sean merwin here with my ever pleasant and ever present co-host teos abadia hey teos hey it's uh mike shea basketball time first games official games starting up That's true.
Right around October 31st is they have the big kickoffs for, for the hoops. Yeah.
If you will, whatever the kids do place tonight, a little bit later, we'll be Santa Claire playing the Billikens, my favorite mascot of all time. And I got not to switch away from important topics, but I'm dual fisting the dungeon masters guide. All right. Those, those I've got those. And then a lot of people have talked to have been picking up theirs.
Yeah, I ordered the bundle, the digital and the print version, and I got my notice this morning that my payment was canceled and therefore I was not getting it said not getting either version, but I still have the digital version. So I'm cool with that. I don't use books a lot. So but yeah, I was I thought, oh, they it didn't happen for the players handbook.
So I thought, OK, cool, I'll be safe here. No, they must not have gotten it figured out. So either that or somebody stole my credit card. We could yeah, we could.
Yeah. Who could have done that? I mean, they would have had need to know you at a certain level of comfort. And right.
And anyway, I got two books in the mail. Yeah, exactly. And also I paid for my son's college.
wait a minute. That's a great idea. I mean, you forgot that. Oh man.
Yeah. So good weekend. Good weekend. Good weekend. Uh, some men without hats. I spent a whole 24 hours not thinking about gaming and work, uh, which is probably a record for me. So, uh, it was fun. That was fun.
If anyone doesn't know how hard you work, it's whatever you could imagine. And then just add a lot more to that. It's, it's, you know, add a Christmas bonus on top. Um, On my end, you know, I didn't do a bunch of stuff for a while because I was just working, working, working on the day job. And now I'm like on a tear creating videos. I'm all excited.
I'm digesting like all kinds of like a friend of mine. Well, Jeff Mueller, who supports our show, we mentioned his work. He shared Forbidden Lands with me. And I've been eating that up, reading through it. That's been a lot of fun to read, which is a free league kind of gritty OSR style kind of game. That's cool.
Sweet. Sweet. Well, also cool are our listeners, and they sometimes ask us questions or leave us comments, and we like to address those when we can. So we're going to get a couple today, starting with Toast Milk via our Patreon Discord. It could be argued that among all the core classes in D&D, the cleric is the one that's the most tied to the setting or the world.
If marketing and character options balance in a core book were not a concern, should cleric subclasses be something that was only offered in source books or setting or campaign guides instead of in the core rule book?
so as to make sure the mechanics of their domain subclasses fit more naturally with the setting, rather than for the GM having to tweak a setting to accommodate something designed abstractly outside of it. This is a continuation of the discussion we've had over the last several weeks. And I would say, yeah, I think divine magic characters are especially setting specific.
And I would say warlocks come in a close second when you've got that power that's larger than the rules or potentially larger than the world. And I'm going to push back against myself now. Yeah. Because I was beating the drum. I do believe it, but sometimes you have to get a little vehement. There should be nothing that that is setting specific in the rules.
Obviously, D&D succeeds in a lot of ways because there is a setting lurking underneath those rules. So what the designers of D&D need to do is straddle that line between making something that's rich and evocative, or to steal a phrase from Dale Kingsmill, my co-host on the other podcast, vague and evocative.
So they need to straddle that line between making something really rich in the setting and making a tool set that's useful for creators and DMs who might want to move in a different direction. So I am happy, honestly, with the way 2014 and 2024 5E handled that, which is not, this is your god and this is what you get because of this god.
It's here's the peace domain, here's the war domain, here's the love domain, here's this or that domain, which DMs can then, yes, they might have to tweak, but it's easier to tweak than if it was more hard-coded into the rules.
hmm i you know there's something to the generic vanilla e life cleric light cleric storm you know whatever like those kinds of tempest whatever it's called you're like they're just very generic sort of like like almost like divine um uh what are those called the um like the God portfolios. Right. The right. There's a better word for it anyway. Yeah.
Everybody listening thinking that, you know, like that kind of sort of just like a columnar thing of like this is the general area of worship. Like it actually worked far better than I thought it would for 2014. And I think made it very easy to appeal. My preference would be I wouldn't say that you just only have that in a setting book. To me, what I would like is just a few questions that say, OK,
You're a life cleric. Pause and ask yourself, in this campaign, what does that mean? Jot down three bullets, right? You can literally have it like on a character sheet, right? If you're going to do like D&D Beyond, you're going to have custom character sheets. It's a cleric. Okay, here are your three bullets. Tell me. What's your life cleric really pushing? Like, what's the thing? Right.
And so it might be like, well, I'm a life cleric. I'm all about vitality, rebirth and the why of it. Right. And just think about that. And boom, you're done. You're ready to go.
now we could have a setting guide that tells me what those things helps me that with those bullets more and and i would love that too right and every now and then you're gonna have a weird campaign your darkson type thing where it's like well the rules are totally different and in that case we've got a maybe subclasses don't even fit the bill right it might not be good yeah yeah and
there are games that are much more generic and they serve as a much better toolset than D&D does. But it also gets less use, less attention, not only because it's not D&D, but because it doesn't have that sort of gravitas of story built into the rules. And that
You end up doing just as much work, I think, to build the setting in those sorts of systems as you would do removing pieces from the D&D setting. Now, I do hope that designers will keep this part in mind when they are designing the base rules to remember that it is a tool set, to keep it generic enough that it is easier to use.
And I think, like I said, I think they've done that with the clerics of 20... It's a tough ask, right?
Because you want to, like, on one hand... not require a phd in the claire in the god or campaign setting to have a fun game and 2014 does that really really well uh but you want to somehow allow the person who wants to have a phd in this thing to be able to or to write their own dissertation on who their god is and whatever or that the dm did that like for that to all fit together and yeah
Yeah. One thing a system could do, since we're going to talk about this one more minute, is build the rule set up, but leave spaces. What you said with these are the three questions, do that for every class or do that for every subclass. And this part, this here, whether it's a fee or whether it's a seventh level ability is bring in from your setting.
And here are three settings that we're going to give you right from the start to model this. And then you can pull in your own settings.
Yeah, totally. Yeah, that's a neat idea.
Next, we will get to a question from Tom Dunn via also our Patreon Discord. What do you do when good design isn't obvious from an initial reading? Designers can use playtesting to determine if something works or not. Players don't have that luxury. They can only read what's on the page and use their experience and intuition to form their opinion.
Are there times when a bit of game design plays well but doesn't read well? Or is reading well a filter on game design that designers simply have to live with? And my attitude toward this is trust but verify.
So when I see something on the page, whether it's from Wizards of the Coast, a third-party publisher, or just somebody publishing on the Guild, I will say, I'm going to read this, and I will trust that it's good, but I will verify it through play. What do you think, Tejas?
Yeah, absolutely. I know with adventures as a DM, I've had situations when I read an Adventurers League adventure, and one of them particularly stands out that I prepared it for a convention, and I thought, wow, this adventure is so lackluster. It was an investigative adventure, and it just seemed like each of the scenes was so, like there was nothing super engaging about them.
But when I ran it, much to my surprise, the simplicity of it actually meant that it was therefore not confusing. And the players really worked with what was there. The right things were there. It actually worked really well. And I had a suit. It was probably the best convention I ran at that con. And it was backwards of what I expected, right?
And I think there's two levels to this question, right? Of like, when you read something... And you're not so sure about it, whether it's player or DM. One thing is that any group can have fun with anything. The worst rules out there, someone's having a blast with them. Right. So it's not about whether somebody can have fun, like always somebody can have fun.
You'll find that person who thinks it's perfect. But. on the aggregate of all the people who are going to experience it, have you just created a big barrier towards it working for enough tables?
And I think that as you become more experienced game designer, you're probably a little better, not perfect, but you're a little better at assessing from the written word what the likely impact will be on an aggregate of tables, right?
yeah and what i've seen with game designers and myself included is we get locked into we know this works and we know this doesn't and so when we see something that falls outside of this works box we're like nope can't do that you should never do that and sometimes i've noticed that game designers will do that working from
a place of knowledge, but also that knowledge excludes other knowledge they could be getting. So I've tried to myself say, all right, this isn't how I would normally do this, but let's play it out. Let's play this through and make sure that my bias is confirmed and not... It doesn't always have to be the way that you think it needs to be.
Yeah, and I think one thing that is important, right, where I do put kind of hard pieces, you know, where I really will bounce off of something, if I was reading it and it's poorly written, then I just worry, like, if you can bother with the words, I don't believe that you bother with the mechanics. Right. Right. Or if you state assumptions that are sort of just demonstrably not true in the text.
right and even wizards can do this in some of their products right where you make a statement but the next piece of the rule undermines it right or you listen to someone talk in an interview but the written page doesn't do that then you can worry about the design because there is a mismatch going on here that has not been properly baked addressed work through and here it is in the finished product right
And that's always a concern. Again, you could still have fun, but that is a weakness that you're pretty sure you can be pretty sure that there's a weakness there in that text.
Absolutely. So thank you for those questions. And at the end of the show, we'll tell you how you can ask yours. Let's jump into our news and commentary, starting with. being able to claim the adventure scions of elemental evil. I know that we talked about this last week, but by golly, I actually got the chance to look at it. Finally. And I liked it. I liked it. I'm not surprised.
I liked it because we'll Doyle worked on it. And I always trust, you know, what, what will does, but I just want to clarify and, and point out that this is an adventure you can get on D and D beyond Lincoln, our show notes.
uh it's for uh characters of level four four to six of them and it also comes with those pre-generated characters based on the 1980s dungeons and dragons animated series if you are looking for just the briefest of spoilers on the plot if you've played any of the Temple of Elemental Evil adventure from first edition and subsequent, it's very much along those lines.
And so as I read this, I'm like, okay, this is cool. And then I began to worry that we are going to get an absolute flood of the return to the return to the return of Elemental Evil, except it's not a return because we're back in time to actually before that it's it's a we're bouncing all over the place so uh
get this one see how it goes and then prepare for the flood of elemental evil themed content on the inside it is november i was gonna say it's october but i have to check myself uh before i wreck myself it's it's november sean so they're running out of time for you know 50th unless they're going to somehow carry this into the 51st but i will say that what i liked about one of the my favorite things about this is just you know and i would not be shocked if this is just
Will coming up with these names, but the names for the parliamental cults, Children of Splintered Ice, Children of Suffocating Ooze and the Order of Falling Ash. And like, boy, just steal that and put that in your campaign because it just sounds like wonderful.
And if you're interested in what the 2024 monsters are going to look like, there is an appendix in this that has three magic items. I'm not going to spoil by saying which ones. And many, many monsters. And I, again, not going to spoil by saying which ones in case you're going to play. But you can get your sneak peek about that stuff in the appendices of this adventure. Yeah. Jumping into D&D maps.
We got a message, or at least I did, saying we're now in beta. I believe they were in alpha before. And now I think they've gone to beta by adding some new features, including initiative functionality and encounter building functionality. I didn't see the video. I just read through it, Teos. But what did the video say?
Yeah, so the video walks through a new encounters sidebar you can use to run the initiative on the maps VTT. And so essentially what you do is you add tokens to the map like you would before. for the monsters and for the PC PCs. But now you can then click on them and add them to the encounter sidebar. You get to see the token little image, which is very sweet, and then the names next to them.
And then you can either use static initiative or click on auto roll and it'll roll the initiatives for those that you chose. The PCs can still roll before in chat and then you can assign the value you can group or ungroup monsters so that they can have one initiative for all the monsters you grouped or you can roll for them individually.
So you hit start combat and now that sidebar has the order for you and you can go through it. You can add more creatures and they go into a little pending area and then you can put them into the initiative. So if you want to surprise things because maps let you do things like, you know, you can set a creature to invisible and then when it comes out, you make it visible.
And then you get that at that point, you could add it to the initiative, too, so that you don't reveal it. So it supports that. And one nice thing that's kind of cool is when you are in this encounter sidebar, when you're looking at that sidebar, it actually shows you the difficulty.
So like you put a red dragon, adult red dragon, and it shows high difficulty based on the characters, which is kind of neat. Turn order is preserved. So you could do something like go through a portal and switch to another maps window and then come back and it would still have that initiative kept. which is kind of neat. There aren't things like monster attacks or anything like that.
So, you know, that would still be done through your normal integration through D&D Beyond, either through the Discord or something like that. But, you know, but it's just really about that initiative order being able to add that there, which I thought was kind of cool.
It is. And I loved the announcement on D&D Beyond where it said, Maps is the official D&D VTT that seamlessly integrates with your digital library on D&D Beyond. And I'm thinking, okay, I wonder if people are talking to each other there about certain things.
But you can get maps if you have a Master Tier subscription, and you can share it with your players regardless of what their subscription status might be. And link in our show notes to the YouTube video that shows that, or you can just go to D&D Beyond and it's one of the main stories. Next, we have a new R. A. Salvatore Drist novella, but it's Audible only. So R.A.
Salvatore announced a new short novella on Audible called Betwixt Two Worlds, a D&D 50th anniversary adventure, which features Driss's daughter with Ketebree, Briennelle Zaharina. Yeah, there's a show notes to that.
Yeah, there's a whole ecosystem now of of, you know, any if you read the first series of novels in the first, like, say, six or nine, there is now so much of an ecosystem between all the different characters and NPCs and stuff. And they all have families and all that. So if you're into that sort of thing, like, boy, it just keeps adding layers through all of these, you know, additions to the saga.
Yeah, if you've read all of them, God bless, because even I know people have tried and they just they run out of time. But we have time to look at Discord and the D&D collection that they launched. They have launched a set of avatar and profile decorations, including a gelatinous cube, glowing dice to go around your avatar, or a dragon breathing fire on your profile page.
You can also do a one-shot 5e adventure that is Discord-themed called Voyage into Discord. The adventure can be launched via the World 20 activity on the app launcher.
Yeah, I did look at the little avatar and decorations. You know, Discord's free. So every now and then I'll buy one just kind of almost like like my yearly payment to Discord. They generally get in the way of whatever you're trying to do. But but they're kind of cool. And yeah, seeing like the dragon breathe fire and stuff, it's neat. It's worth a thought if you like to decorate things like that.
um i have not checked the adventure out but you know amazing that that it's there and that's neat that you know another way that dnd gets extended to audiences that may not be aware of it for sure and we go from dnd to ars magica atlas games has launched the ars magica definitive edition this game was released in 1987 originally written by jonathan tweet and mark ryan hagan
Ars Magica RPG favors troop-style storytelling. Players play powerful magi and the companions and other characters who serve them. Tell me about this addition, Teos.
A couple things caught my eye besides the history of it and how it's influenced various RPGs. There's a $1 pledge level that lets you get over 100 digital freebies, including the fourth edition of this game and many other source books.
And then through the campaign, they sort of set a level at which they said, well, if we hit this, we will release the text of the core rulebook under the CC by SA 4.0 license. So this allows a creator to use the text commercially, but anybody who uses what you created must in turn use the same share alike license. So that means that what you create must also be shared, right?
So it's a continual sharing. Anything you make becomes open. So but that's really neat, a neat kind of take on it. So that means that lots of people could create for Ars Magica if they want. And already we have an example of the first major third party release, which is the Spanish language source book Finis Tere, El Tribunal de Iberia, focusing on the setting of mythic Spain and Portugal.
And this you've got about a week, a little less than a week on it. And by the time you listen to this, it ends November 14th, I guess, a week. All right.
And we haven't been able to get to our creator corner in a while. So let's really dig down in and get some of these things covered. One of the people I saw at GameholeCon was Rodney Thompson, who worked for Wizards, left there and was working and still works, I found out, at Bungie. Yeah. but he is still creating on the side, and he is launching a new mailing list and launching new games.
Tell us about what you saw there and what he talked about.
Yeah. Rodney, amazing creator, one of the main people behind the math of 2014 5E, made Lords of Waterdeep along with Peter Lee. So he has the new mailing list. You can go to scratchpad-publishing.myshopify.com and you can sign up for his mailing list because...
Rodney says that both Dusk City Outlaws and his Supers game Spectaculars are going to get reprinted and that there will be a new game that he's going to be kickstarting next year. So that's really cool. I love the idea of Rodney Thompson getting back into creating various games. And I love everything he's designed. So I'm looking forward to this.
I haven't played Spectaculous, but I played Dusk City Outlaws when it was still in playtest mode, and it was super fun to play. Mixing storytelling games with more crunchy games really, really slickly. So you can check that out. And I won't try to say the URL again after what Teos went through. But we will talk about MT Black, who is launching World War Weird. We love MT's work.
He has a new OSR offering set in 1941, where magicians and other remarkable operatives confront eldritch horses. What is this about? It's the complete role-playing game featuring streamlined mechanics based on The Black Hack.
The product includes four ready-to-play characters and a sample mission called The Book of Creation, in which players confront Nazi forces seeking an ancient Kabbalistic tome. If you love fantasy and historical fiction, I'm going to have trouble now. World War Weird is the perfect battlefield for your next gaming session.
You can get the PDF for just $2.95 or $9.95 for the hardcover on DriveThruRPG. Softcover. Softcover. Thank you. Softcover via DriveThruRPG with a link in our show notes. So tell us about Thunder Road Vendetta.
So friend of the show, Dave Chalker, is one of the designers behind this board game, Thunder Road Vendetta, that has now become an RPG. And in the the game is like the board game is like a Mad Max style thing where it's all about you moving the cars on this play mat and ramming into each other and using all kinds of horrendous additions to your car to, you know, cause devastation.
And the RPG leans into this, creating an experience focused on wasteland post-apocalyptic driving. I immediately had to go back to this because it just sounds bonkers. And the kind of thing that I want to learn from, right? Very different from the kind of games on my shelf.
It promises quick character creation, furiously fun over-the-top vehicular action, and ongoing campaign play where you build and maintain your settlement. So this is on Kickstarter through November 21st.
thunder road vendetta rpg and it looks fantastic yep they go in like a little car and you somehow like move the car and the die is being rolled you can like lift the car up or something and it's yeah wild coming from from the the gentleman who had bro uh shark eat robot eating sharks uh
which I love to play with my younger nieces and nephews when it first came out. Yeah, great game and great designer. Last but not least, we have Draconis, the peaceful way to play D&D 5e. This Kickstarter was shared with us by a patron and is quite interesting. It is an attempt to provide 250 pages of options supporting a peaceful play of 5th edition. So tell me about this.
Yeah, the Kickstarter looks really interesting. It ends November 22nd. The rules promise a feel-good game with fun ways to engage other than violence. It's an interesting concept. It's already more than doubled its 20k initial goal. And yeah, all of these options are sort of ways to have non-violent play using 5e.
And I want to tip my hat and say thank you to everybody who supported the Grim Hollow Transform Kickstarter. Funding ended on November 1st, although you could still back via late backing. And we... I have just crept over 900,000, which is amazing. I did not think that, to be honest, that we would reach that. And I appreciate it more than you can know.
And it really does keep me working, keeps me uplifted to create stuff for all the people that backed it. So thank you. Sweet. Congrats. Thanks. And now onto our main topic here on Mastering Dungeons. We are going to do a deep dive into our experiences at GameholeCon. And we're doing this because last week we talked about sort of...
how to become a game designer or things you should think about if you want to be a game designer. And then we thought, we really didn't talk about what we did or learned at Gamehole Con, and it would be great to sort of break it down to show why you might want to go if you can afford to, if you have the time, if you have the energy to do so, and maybe even some pitfalls to
avoid certain things at conventions and i i will go into that uh for myself so uh with that we're going to sort of break down what we did at game hall and what we learned along the way uh is there anything you want to add to that test before we jump in i mean yeah you said a part there that i want to just reinforce that is the the cost and the time of conventions right one of the interesting things that happened during the pandemic especially around gen con
was a bunch of companies saying, wow, because I couldn't go to Gen Con as a company, I saved a bunch of money. I had all this extra time. I had all this extra energy. And it caused people to rethink things a bit. Now, I think they all have gone back to having booths anyway, or most of them. But it did cause folks to reflect a bit.
And I think that is really important to say, like, hey, conventions sound great on paper. But they do take your energy. They do require a bunch of time. You never you always think it's going to take less time than it does to prepare for them. It takes a bunch of money. There are ways to save on money, save on time.
But overall, it's really easy to find yourself spending a lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of energy. And that's not to not inconsequential. So it's worth kind of keeping in mind. And if you're a person who thinks, oh, I can't afford to go to conventions. Don't go, you know, or if you're like, I can't possibly do this because I have to get product out the door. Great. Keep stay on target. Right.
Like like stay on your targets, whether they're financial or time or whatever. It's fine. But there are opportunities. And for those who are interested, then I think it's great to review, you know, what does game offer and and how we approach to what we did, what we learned from it.
Yeah. So before we jump into the actual schedule, two things happened with me that made this different than previous game hole cons and previous conventions. The first was, normally I set aside time to play some games, to have meetings, sort of outside of the con schedule itself.
during my free time at this con though i was working at the ghostfire gaming booth which gate ghostfire had for the first time at gameholecon this year so that sort of cut down on the number of things i could do the second thing was i had a writing deadline of monday on a separate project that i needed to spend about two hours a day while i was at the convention to finish so
Right there is four hours at the booth, two hours of doing other work. There's six hours of my day already shot before I even... I don't know.
I see you at this convention, and you manage to have pep and vigor. I don't know how you do it.
LARPing? My doctor tells me that I'm not allowed to reveal the concoction that I take.
in order to maintain all of this. I think Sean Merwin is secretly a time traveler sent back to save the world's role-playing games and cannot share all the technology that fuels him. He's an Android.
Exactly.
I say he, like you're not right here if I'm looking at you.
You're an Android. I am a he, mostly. But we got to Madison, Wisconsin, where Gamehole Con was held.
and uh touchdown airplane what what do you do taos uh i get i get i usually get in flying from portland's terrible so it's like i have to either show up like very late in the day or very early and so i did the red eye i i grabbed the coffee i check in early i shower you
And then I go down to the lobby and immediately start seeing all kinds of cool people, which is great because the first day pre-con is like people day. And I'm an extrovert, so that's easy. And it's just wonderful. I mean, it's amazing how many people I know now in this industry and how awesome it is to see everybody. What's your first day like?
It's pretty much the same. I either fly in so I get there midday Wednesday or drive in Tuesday night, stay halfway and then drive the rest of the way, still getting there around noon. And it's sort of the same thing. Get myself together, start walking around. And I'm an introvert.
and so it's hard not because i don't enjoy people because i do but i i'll be talking with three people and i'll look and i'll see three more people and my first thought is i have to talk to them or they will they will feel like i'm ignoring them So I try to talk to... And then three other people come.
So now I'm like, but these other three, I really need to talk to them because we're on a project together. And so all this is going on in my head and I'm trying to juggle... how do I handle all of this? And now I'm like in full freak out mode.
And then someone says, what do you think? And you're like, I wasn't listening.
I, I didn't, I haven't heard anything that you've said for the last half hour, but I agree explicitly.
I have kind of the thing that happens to me more is that I will see somebody and I'll be like, oh, sweet. Well, you know, if I saw him today, I'm certainly going to see him several times at the convention. And for some people, that's true. Like, it's always great how you'll see certain people over and over and you're like, hey, hey, you know, and you just feel like I saw that person so much.
And then I saw Dan Dillon, like as I was rushing to a seminar and I was like, oh, Dan, you're here. I can't wait to talk to you. And I never saw him again. I was like, oh, no, you know, and so you just never know.
Yeah, I think the same thing happened to me, now that I think about it. Last year at GameHoleCon, I talked to him for like four hours one night, just with a couple other people. And this time, I don't even know if I saw him. And if I did, it was, hey, I'll catch you later, and never did. Yeah, it was wild.
Well, the first thing that happens for some of us at GameHole is if you're a guest, they have a dinner.
and uh alex is kind enough to boss us to his restaurant and it's really nice to sit start the show with a nice meal and catch up with the people your old friends new friends people you've been near but haven't spoken to in sort of a peaceful environment yeah it can get a little hectic even there but at least it's it's you can sort of sit down and catch your breath
it's a fantastic event and you get to see the game hall right and I remember you know listening to you and Chris Nizak talk about your first trips to the game hall and the amazing collection that Alex Kammerer has and it is it's incredible and he's got you know Monty Cook's gaming table and then he has just all these kinds of neat things on the walls and all the dragon heads and just
copies upon copies of rare things right multiple versions of you know dragon number one from from dragon magazine and just yeah on and on right and and it's just so impressive to see that space and the love he has for the hobby is so clear there uh love that and then everybody who comes up is sharing their love for all these things
it's whether they're new or old it's it's great and and uh and yeah just seeing incredible people that make this hobby what it is is fantastic so you start out just super great great vibe
And then on Wednesday night, even if you're not a guest, there is a reception generally at the Sheraton Hotel, which is across the street from the convention center. And so you can go there and you can chat up more people. Again, more food, drink, entertainment, people. It's a great way to kick off the convention.
Yeah, absolutely. Really nice. Gets everybody in a super excellent vibe, which this is a convention that has a really nice vibe in that way around around community. And so this I think both these events help establish that.
So then you get a good night's sleep, I'm sure. I know that. Younger Sean would have been up till 3 a.m. and then fall asleep at 5 and then wake up at 7. Old Sean now goes to bed at a reasonable hour to wake up early to start work the next day. So Thursday morning, what did you do and what did you learn?
so i started to hit the ground running with dming the 50th anniversary game so i did not stay up super late because i knew i had to be on point to run a great game for for a table and i did i had a full table uh ran people through this one hour game uh that was all dragon the gold dragon themed and it's short there wasn't a whole lot to it there's a nice review of it uh on andy demps's website and he talks about his game whole experience so i ran that that was fun uh it used dwarven forged terrain which was great
And from that, it was just, you know, it's again, it's always so interesting to run a one hour game and see what you can do with it. And I actually really like the format. Like, I love running one hour games because it is both hard thing to do. It keeps you focused. But I think it provides a lot of fun to players because because everybody knows that this time is short and precious.
And so everybody makes the most of it. So I had a great that's always for me filled with lessons around DMing when I when I do one hour games. And then I went immediately and ran to join Brewer's Heist, an adventure run by David Ewald, who has written for a number of things, including he wrote the book
Of Dice and Men and of Dice and Men is this neat combination of sort of talking about his campaign and then the history of D&D. And it was fun because, you know, he describes his campaign setting and I found it really evocative. And I was always wondering, I wonder what his campaign will be like to play with him. And so this was a little bit of window into that with this.
kind of story around tainted brew and a bit of a mystery. And then you kind of end up breaking into a place and trying to solve the problem. We had a blast. It was really good. Nice four hour game. You want to take a couple of things you did on Thursday?
Sure. So Thursday morning, I originally had signed up to play Call of Cthulhu because I always say I love the setting, don't love the rules. And so every couple of years I try to play it with a different group, a different set of folks to see what am I missing? What am I missing here?
but like i said i also got called upon to work at the booth so i had to cancel that game and go work at the booth which was a really actually good experience because sometimes when you're a guest or when you're a dm you get caught up in the hustle here hustle there you only meet six people at a time
uh or if you're in meetings you're only talking with the same people you just met wednesday night uh at the guest dinner so this gave me a chance to sit still I'd have people walk past me. And so I got to sign books. I got to talk with people about their experiences with the products that we're making. And it was fun. It was a good experience.
I wouldn't want to do it eight hours a day for five days in a row, but to do it for like four hours, sell some books, talk about your inspiration, hear what other people are doing with your work is really it's really fun. It's sort of rejuvenating a bit.
Yeah, I've enjoyed booth work. I haven't done it for the RPG industry, but when I've done it for my day job quite some time ago, I did enjoy it. And it is kind of neat to watch every you get a good feel for attendees, right? Because you're watching the myriad of people that walk by and interact. And yeah, yeah, yeah.
So what other things did you do on Thursday?
I went to a D&D history roundtable. So there were a bunch of one-hour seminars that had really brilliant people talking about the history of D&D. And this was just a general sort of how the game started. And it was John Peterson, right, who writes Playing at the World and all these amazing books that really... I mean, he's one of the best scholars on D&D. I love his writing.
And he's the same speaking. He has just... endless amounts of knowledge you can tap into on the history of the game. And he was joined by David Ewald and Mike Witwer.
And the three of them just it was a really great I mean, most of it was stuff I'd heard before, but to just hear them say it and the way they paint the picture of how D&D developed was just another kind of reinforcement of kind of understanding how this game began in such fragile ways and became such a juggernaut. And they tried to make it kind of all the way through them.
It started with a heavy emphasis on the beginning, but they made it all the way through fifth edition in one hour, which is impressive.
That's cool. That's cool. The next thing on your list is the running your trap design in the dungeon of doom adventure. I want to save that because I played in that later. So let's do it then. What was the Coriolis adventure?
So this was a little funny, you know, despite all my planning, I'm somehow I have like nine spreadsheets of any convention I want to attend. And at the end of it, something surprises me and I go, what? And this was one of those where I had two goals. You know, I might run a Coriolis campaign, so I want to really understand the rules. So therefore, I'm going to sign up for four hour adventure.
So one was it finished in about two hours, just a little over two hours that I didn't expect, but it just somehow ended early. The other thing is that was using the new Coriolis rules from the Kickstarter that's not out yet. And I think I could have found that out if I'd read more carefully and somehow I missed it.
So I was like, oh, OK, well, you know, so I did not become more expert at it, but I did have a blast. And Coriolis continues to be an RPG that if you want like high science fiction, right? Like the stars and ancient civilizations and, you know, just big sci-fi topics in your game. This is a great RPG for that.
And the game has a great, both editions have great premises around them and really fun dynamics. And you just, you get the feeling of what you're doing, right? When you're, We were crawling into an area that sort of irradiated and worried about what our suit would handle and what we would find.
And it just felt absolutely like you're in one of those kinds of movies or books and just dripping with cool sci fi stuff. Right. Just you just felt it very rock and very awesome. So I had a blast, even though it's only two hours and not the edition I was looking for. But yeah, it's still fun. How about you? It's funny.
I played in Bill Benham's, quote, four hours of D&D madness. So I mean, I love Bill and I don't get a chance to talk to him a lot. So I thought, let me get into his game. Let me see how he runs it. He's a Wizards of the Coast employee, right? Let's see what he does. And the first thing I did was sit down and all the other players were there and we were chatting. And Bill wasn't there yet.
And one guy said, wait, are you Sean Merwin? And I'm like, yeah. He's like, oh my. And he pulls out Acquisitions Incorporated. And he said, I was coming to get you to sign this, but you're here. Could you sign it? I'm like, absolutely. So I signed it. We were chatting. And then Bill came because he had gone, of course, to the wrong room because he's Bill. So he comes in and he sits down.
And the guy's like, oh, would you sign Acquisitions Incorporated? And I was like, huh. Bill, I don't, and Bill's like, oh, this was like the first book I worked on when I joined Wizards. I was like, I had no idea, right? Even though we're all involved in the creation of this book, Bill worked on it as well, in a producer role, I assume. And I never even knew.
So those are the kind of funny things that come up. And then Bill ran the 2024 version of this adventure with the sort of newish 2024 characters, pre-gens. as you would imagine with Bill, it was a wild, wacky time. Lots of fun, lots of fun players. So it's good to just sit down and play, even if it's a game that you don't know for sure. And then
To end up a busy day, I ran my adventure, We All Fall Down, set in the Aurora setting from Ghostfire Gaming. It's sort of a beginner adventure to introduce players to that setting, what's different between that setting and other 5e settings, pre-generated characters. And then I sat at the table with Scott Gray, and oh, I just lost it. His partner and his friend were both there.
Yes, it'll come Colleen and and it's written by Tom. Anyway, they're Jeffrey Miller was there and then another player. Great players, great time. It sort of sets it up so they can do a lot of different things, but it focuses in on role playing as much as mechanics. And yeah, a good time overall.
That's fantastic. Yeah, I love that. I heard some things about both that table and then another morning table where everybody just had a blast. And that was one of those events that I was like, how can I? Oh, I can't because I'm already booked for something else at the same slot.
So, Thursday's done. Friday, I wake up and I get to go to Teos' table to play Traps. And I loved it. Teos, we have been talking about doing this since living Greyhawk days of filming a table being run and having the DM stop and look at the camera and say, what just happened here was this. And I changed the adventure or I changed this or I'm thinking along these lines to show.
And that's what you did. And it was great. And I loved every second of it.
I honestly had no idea how this event would go. It started as I think I'll do a seminar on creating traps. And then I thought, well, wouldn't it be fun if like maybe I had like something you could see, like maybe I have dwarven forge trains you can actually look at. I'm like, I don't know how you see that from afar in a seminar room.
And I was like, what if you're standing around the table and what if they're actually playing? And at some point I just was like, OK, stop and just do this. And I spent a lot of time, we talked about that, you know, before a con, you don't think of like I at some point I even said to myself, I'll keep it simple and I'll only do this for this event. Oh, my God.
I, you know, I made pregens with their own pregen one page character sheet. So it'd be easy to see. And everybody played rogues, but a different species. And and I use the 2024 rules so I could get to learn them. And then I took the Dungeon of Doom gauntlet that I'd done, which is a long trap filled corridor and a little bit of the room before it and walked through it.
And we talked about the history of traps and we talked about, you know, why is this here? What's the intentionality behind the design? And we got to see kind of how it all plays, right? Because everybody's interacting and all six rogues trying to take turns, handle things. So I was really happy with how it went. From what you're talking about, that format of play to learn.
And I'm actually really excited to do it again for other parts of the game. Sure. As a way of, you know, like, let's play through this while talking about what's going on here, right? Whether it's role playing or it's, yeah, puzzles exploration, right? Like that could be fun, too, to do. So it's already in my brain that at Gamehole, I've got to do one like this, but different.
And I like the 12 people format concept. in that room that we ran it, which was a very quiet room. Thank goodness, because some of the other rooms are very loud. So if I can get that same room, I definitely want to do this again because I really enjoyed the format and I loved the feedback from people like the back and forth was really cool and the ideas and yeah.
No, it was great. And if you do it again, we need to record it. I know. I know. I'm volunteering you, Teos, to be recorded. You're an extrovert. There you go. Exactly. Hey, Dante, dearly. Yep. So that was both our Friday mornings. Yeah. Then did we both go off to the seminar about the open gaming license at that point?
I first did a... I think I'm making it first. I did the making of D and D three panel. I remember this because I actually asked a question at the panel. So this was Peter Agason and, uh, two other fine folks, um, who were, were there. And, um, I asked a question about the OGL, which was actually kind of fun.
And because I had really wondered, right, like Ryan Dancy is always credited as sort of architecting the OGL. But if you listen to what Ryan said, it isn't what they actually did. And primarily that Ryan's plan really seems to have been like, hey, we're only going to make core books. and so my question was sort of you never did that plan why did you not do that actual plan
And Peter Atkinson's first response, you know, who had been the CEO of Wizards of the Coast was, you know, like, we're not going to answer that. But then and I don't know why I'm blanking on his name, but the tweet. No, it was it was more guy who's played a business role. And I'm blanking on his name, but I'll think of it at some point. But he actually started to answer it.
And the answer they ended up both giving because they did end up talking about it is. We expected the OGL to create for people to write the things we didn't want to write. And instead, they had done the same kind of intelligence we had, and they knew that core books is what sells money. So they started making essentially core book type stuff.
And then there were obvious holes we had to fill and we couldn't just not do anything. We had to make all these other products as well and, you know, could never just leave it to others to do that and just live off the core books. But I thought that was really kind of neat. That is neat.
which then leads us into the seminar that you did with uh me elisa teague mike shea and uh mike merles yeah that was that was the five of us and it was about you know the open gaming license era which I first saw and went, oh, cool, let's talk about third edition and what the open gaming license did to that edition for the game, for freelancers, for wizards, for everybody.
But of course, it turned into a discussion of the OGL crisis, so-called the OGL crisis. And so, I mean, I've heard it all before. I've talked it all through before. So I sort of tried to sit back and let other people say what they had to say about it.
What I heard from folks who attended it that they liked was that we kind of had points of disagreement with one another, which I think is very illustrative of, you know, it captures perfectly what this is all about, which is that there is no one way to look at this issue, especially the contentious things. Right.
So you can try to think of what does the company actually think, which at least the team tried to speak to that and and how she saw it as a person who has to worry about the product she creates for various companies and whether somebody else can touch them or not.
um we hit it from the angles of you know being a small creator and just you know it was really i thought that that kind of diversity in our opinions was useful it would have been nice if we talked a little bit about the the impact it had on the industry because it really is fantastic and i think that topic of say contrasting third edition and fourth edition
or fourth edition and fifth edition right those are really fascinating ways to look at the effect that these things can have especially around the popular game of dnd but but i think it was still i enjoyed it so that's why yeah what uh what did you do after that I went to play historical figures and the journey to the San Dimas High School Auditorium.
And this was just absolutely wild game using the cipher system where we all got to play in Bill and Ted, the what's the name of the movie? Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. Excellent Adventure. Thank you. I'm running into the name of the second one. In Excellent Adventure, the scene where Bill and Ted have to go off and get Napoleon and they leave everybody at the mall. That was the adventure.
We had wild stallion guitar picks as our points we could spend to do cool things. And you had to stand up and say excellent and play the guitar, pretend to air guitar. If you if you wanted one back and which, of course, I felt compelled to do. It was just such a fun game, just being completely ridiculous.
I declared war on the Witch King because I saw that there was a skating rink park and I thought there had to be some Witch King behind it. And that ended up being the head of security. And we led a mob against the mall and there was a lot of blood spilled and it was just completely, completely excellent.
Yes, most excellent. I went and did a seminar on the Grim Hollow sneak peek for what was coming up in 2025 for Grim Hollow with Joe Rosso and Ben Byrne. And it's nothing that I need to go into again because I've talked about it many, many times.
Great seeing Ben at the con and everybody from the Ghostfire team. There were really a number of folks there meeting Martin. That was awesome. Dante, incredible. Yeah, yeah.
What else did you do?
I did a learn to play the one ring. I actually got three games of one ring in and two of them were the learn to play, which I guess Graham Ward helped write, which is super cool. And so he ran actually part of it in a hotel room one night. And then I got to play the learn to play, which also used it, which really helped reinforce.
This is where I did succeed in playing the one ring and going through those mechanics. And I really enjoyed everything I saw about it. I later played a four hour adventure, which then was really cool to see the journey rules, the role playing.
There's a name for the role playing rules as well, but they have a really neat way of choosing roles around combat exploration or travel and also role playing. That really works quite well. And I am jazzed to play one ring. That was great.
Um, after that, I went to a Chris Perkins signing because Chris Perkins, uh, is one of those introverts that like, if you don't go to the event that, you know, he will be there, you may never see him at the convention.
Um, and so I went to the signing and that's where I was able to confirm, um, as we reported at the show on what his new role was, uh, cause there'd been a lot of confusion as to whether he was leaving or what exactly was doing. So, so that was nice. And I got him to sign my Cursus Strahd book, which was, which was cool. Um,
um and then i went to a really neat event that had been organized um and funded through fantastic people um and this was a poc industry dinner and and it was really neat to to meet with folks from really diverse backgrounds with a lot of energy and desire to figure out this industry and find how to work within the space.
So those of us who were a little older, we tried to share knowledge and make connections and help create connections. I'll just go ahead and say now that then the next day there was a BIPOC mixer at Monte Cook Games. And so this kind of carried forward into that where we tried to also kind of have some influence and make connections and help people kind of do some really cool things.
And some of the things I heard about were really, really exciting. And I'm excited to see if they can happen. So that was a lot of fun.
Yeah, I went and worked at the booth in the afternoon. So that was my afternoon. And then I went back and worked in my room at night. So that was me. Anything else on Friday?
I hung out with with Graham Ward, Jeff Shue, you know, a number of people from our Discord. So it was super fun to get together and play one ring, roll some dice and just, you know, talk. The sharing is a little loud, so it's very vibrant and exciting. But but it was just awesome to see everybody.
And and it's nice because you see enough people like like you'd see keep them on and then, you know, then we'd be at the food carts and oh, hey, and then meet up again. And so just every little one thing that's nice about conventions like this is when you have even a short touch point with somebody, it makes it that much easier to meet with them again when you see them. Right.
And so I love that the more you go to these conventions and have these little touch points, you feel comfortable just hanging out and talking about things and asking questions, you know, getting advice from folks.
On Saturday, we shared another panel Making D&D Funny, the Design of the Acquisitions Incorporated book, which was lots of fun to talk about, share some of the stories, and give some pointers on trying to make D&D funny and how hard it can be and how careful you need to be in doing so.
And we got to share the news that you and Scott and I worked on a second mini Akink project, which was part of their Kickstarter to bring the Akink show back. And that went out to backers this last week. But it was backers at a very high level, like I think $300 on up. So they're also looking at ways to make this available for sale because there's some really neat features in this.
They called it a module, but it's really it's like a mini source book that extends has ideas for franchises. It has ideas for for kind of campaigns you could run. It has neat spells, very funny spells and all kinds of stuff. And so we spilled some of the beans at the panel. But yeah, I'm excited to see how people like it. And hopefully.
to see more people be able to get it because it's a really yeah we put a lot of work into it fantasy yeah i snuck away and got a one hour d and d anniversary first edition game nice which was which was super fun i mean super simple uh it definitely did not use all of the first edition uh a d and d rules but uh it was fun to have we had four players and three of us were very much
understanding of the ad and the zeitgeist of how it's supposed to work and then we had one fifth edition player who was newish to fifth edition never played and so she would like roll a die and do that well she's like do i get a re-roll how can i get a re-roll and we're all like yeah re-roll oh that's funny and you know yeah
We succeeded with only one character dying by basically leaving the wizard to die. But we were able to escape. But it was fun to forget the character sheet for a minute and just do the thing. Do the weird thing. Throw the thing through the thing. I don't need an intelligence check. I don't need this. Just do and see what happens.
yeah so i played adn d uh sort of with ed greenwood um it's hard to talk about this game for a number of reasons uh i will say that i think if that anybody from wizards of the coast had been watching this game they probably would have been horrified at how black staff tower was portrayed and all of the people inside of it i was pretty horrified by everything i saw uh and i felt like every npc hit on me
I still love Ed Greenwood, but it was not an experience I'd recommend. But what was one of the things that was interesting along those lines is it was an advanced Dungeons and Dragons game where nobody made a role.
and i tried to at one point cast a spell but maybe ed didn't hear me or maybe he didn't want me to cast his spell so i just didn't um because i was trying to figure out what was happening i wanted to cast esp uh so it was it sure was not an ad and d experience it was uh it was an ed greenwood experience with all of that entails sure uh cool and uh
I got to do the Eldritch Lorecast live with Ben, of course, Dante on the audio and video, and then Latia Jaques and Joe Rosso joining us to talk about various topics. And you can always go find that up on YouTube if you want to know what happened there. Anything else Friday that really caught you or Saturday that really caught your attention?
It was a great day. I went to the 5E panel with Mike Merles, Peter Lee, and Rodney Thompson. And just seeing all three of them in the same place was heartwarming. I love the design that they did for 5E and previous to 5E, their 4E design as well. And so just hearing how they approached the project was really cool.
I did a four hour Magnus Archives RPG by Monte Cook Games in the Monte Cook Games area. They've got a lovely play space there. That was fun. It was just sort of like a Delta Green, a little bit Cthulhu, a little bit investigative type mix. And we had a blast doing bad British accents and solving crimes that involve horrible amounts of insects. But it was cool.
We set it on fire and called it a win. And then I play that four hour one ring that I talked about. And, you know, I really I love that experience, as I said. So one ring is high on my list. So Saturday was just one of those exhaustive wall to wall fun times for me. And it's that point where you suddenly go like, oh, wait, this con is about to end.
Yeah. Oh, but it didn't end Teos because on Sunday morning, the highlight of everyone's show, I'm sure, was Mastering Dungeons Live, which as we said previously, was so nice to see that full room. It was great. It really meant a lot to me and I think to you too. And then it was the sad flight.
Well, generally it would be a sad flight home, but I got to go home with all of the Ghostfire team where we had a week of work here in lovely Fredonia, New York. That's great.
But that's great because you had that energy of all this...
The energy kept going. So Joe and Martin and Dante and Ben, we were here. Dante, you know, doing his thing. The rest of us planning future projects and getting some writing done and ideating, if you will. It was fun.
I love Dante's mastery. You know, he's he's like, you know, I can send you the files and mastering dungeons live. And they were edited already. I'm like, oh, my God, this is just beautiful. Like I said to him, I'm a little worried that our live show sounds better than our recorded studio shows. But but we'll go with it. Yeah. I definitely got a lot of energy from this convention.
I felt like I made a lot of connections with people that I care about and some new folks that I had only met a little bit or on the Internet and I became closer to them. I definitely got back and I was like, OK, time to make videos, time to do more because it was just it filled me with energy. It's also coming in time with one of my one of my many day jobs has ended.
So it gave me a little more time. But it's really filled me with energy. And part of that was folks being nice enough to say, Hey, I like success in RPGs or I love this book or, you know, asking me to sign something or any of that. And boy, that makes a big difference, right?
When you just kind of remember why you're doing this, remember that when you do this hard work at the end of it is somebody feeling thankful for it. It makes us thankful. Right. And yeah, I came back super, super energized from it. For sure.
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You can also go to YouTube and do the like and subscribe and all of those fancy things. Heyos, what are you up to?
I just put out a video looking at the Bastion system. And because I know I have thoughts and my thoughts aren't everyone's, I started with what's awesome about it. And tomorrow's video will be a little more critical and peel behind into it. So hopefully folks who just want to be like happy land can look at what's cool and how to make the most of that.
And tomorrow, if you want to peel back the layers and see that, then you can do so. So that's Monday and Tuesday. So by the time this comes out, they're both available.
Awesome. And you can find me on all the socials at Sean Merwin, or you can follow the podcast on those same socials at Mastering D&D. And again, you can also go to the YouTube channel for Mastering Dungeons and see our faces as you listen to our voices. So we have recapped the news. We have recapped some questions and we have recapped Gamehole Con. What are we going to do now?
I'm going to see if you can use the new weapon mastery feats to dual read dungeon master guides.
Oh, yes. That is a definitely a property of the evil eye weapon.
Yeah. I'll cover normal cover simultaneous. See which one's better. Roll for stress with a capital letter. Yes.