Episode 210 of Mastering Dungeons! Main topic: Wardens of the Eastern Marches! Alex Kammer tells us all about Wardens of the Eastern Marches, the new organized play program from Gamehole Publishing. News: 2024 DMG Previews, Commander Rules Committee, Bastion is for Players, and more! Contents 00:00 No Vaccine for Ladders 02:19 Remove Mechanics for Setting? 15:08 D&D Made for Conflict? 31:28 DMG Previews! 41:26 Bastions Preview 42:04 Player Rules in the DMG? 44:04 New D&D Licensed Products 45:19 Commander Rules Committee Disbands 50:31 Gamehole's Organized Play 51:11 Real Castle Floor Plans 51:46 The Best LLM is Your Brain 52:58 Sorcerer's Return 54:00 Grim Hollow Transformed Update 55:56 Alex Kammer and Eastern Marches 58:19 Importance of Organized Play 01:01:35 AL at a Crossroads 01:04:51 The Eastern Marches 01:09:06 Setting and Alliances 01:12:42 Where to Play 01:13:15 3rd Party PC Options 01:19:58 Exploring the Unknown 01:21:08 Saying Yes to Creators 01:22:59 Magic Item Certs 01:26:22 Releasing Adventures 01:29:16 Gamehole and 50th 01:34:57 What Makes Gamehole Special 01:38:39 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.
Thank you.
Hello and welcome to this week's episode of Mastering Dungeons, your favorite tabletop news and reviews and design podcast. I'm Sean Merwin here with the effervescent Teos Abadie. Hey, Teos, welcome to Monday-ishness.
Thank you. I am effervescent in the way that a kid is after they've had a lot of sugar and they could crash at any moment because I got my shingles vaccine on Saturday. And this was just phase one. Those who know there's a phase two that hits you even harder. Apparently phase one was was no joke. I'm still getting over it, but I hear it's a lot better than getting shingles.
So those of you who are 50 and older plan for your shingles vaccine and just give yourself some time to recover.
Yeah, I already had mine, got my flu shot and then fell off a ladder, fell off a ladder this weekend. That was fun. Washing windows. My wife's like, don't do that without me holding there. I'm like, the ladder is fine. And then I and it was a small ladder. So I just landed on my feet.
Didn't Clark Griswold it?
Well, she was my wife was watching out the window as I was there. And so she just saw me go over. And I thought either she's had a heart attack or she's really mad. And I didn't know which I looked up and she was just. Giving me the glare.
I know a basketball player who would tell me that whenever he got hurt, he was thinking, my mom's watching and I got to get up as quickly as I can, unless it's such a vital situation where I got a fake being hurt so that, you know, we get a call. But he was like, unless I have to milk it for a call, I will get up as soon as I can, no matter how much it hurts, because my mom will be freaking out.
Yeah, these things are important. These things play into our games even, apparently. Hey, speaking of games, why don't we talk about some games? Taking questions from our listeners. We've got a ton of listeners out there who write in to us, and we thank you for doing that. And so we're going to get to a couple of them this week.
One of them is Tony Robertson coming to us via YouTube, who asks, regarding campaign guides, what are you guys' thoughts on how much a setting should change game mechanics? I'm playing in a homebrew Dark Sun game, and Goodberry was taken out, and Create Water was limited. As a player, I like it because it reinforces how this world is different, but it seems to take more effort to get group buy-in.
Absolutely. And for me, this goes right to the heart of what we talked about last week with the gods. Individual DMs and groups can change their games in any way they want and they can change the quote unquote expected setting that comes with a game. As long as everyone's on the same page in your group and if everyone's happy and they're having fun, change it away.
but your group is just four or five or six or seven of millions of players involved in our hobby. So you have to account for a lot of player types and a lot of player desires. So I have a restricted experience, but some experience. And what I found is if something goes into the main rules, including the setting that's implied by those rules,
there is an expectation that those will be available regardless of setting. They're not a suggestion to players or GMs. They are the God's gospel truth. So a significant portion of the player base will push back when you try to make a setting that changes those rules, unless you're changing it by addition instead of removal. Thoughts so far?
Yeah, for sure. You're right. When you add things, people are totally chill. When you remove it, people get kind of bothered. But I would think this is a conversation. If you're going to DM with this group for a while, like these are this is your group. This is your your gang that you play with. You need to have these conversations.
You will only be healthier for making it through these conversations. That the world does not owe you Goodberry. And if your life and satisfaction depends on Goodberry, you're probably playing wrong. You don't have to say those words. But to get that sort of understanding of we're not here for Goodberry interactions, right? We're here for the larger play.
And so when we all want to play a game that has a big component of survival and that is supposed to be harsh and difficult to live in, endless water and endless food and endless healing is a problem. And so we need to remove that from the game.
And that shouldn't be, I mean, it can be initially difficult to grasp, but we want to get to where it isn't hard to grasp and where the players can, can buy off on that. And that is both the DM getting better at explaining, selling that concept, explaining why we're doing this and the players getting better at understanding that and being, being okay to like shed that, which they're so used to.
Right. And that's a good thing. You want to go down that path with your group.
Yeah. I agree with everything you just said. Part of the issue is the breadth and depth of the rules that there are. So it's great to have that conversation. I'll be on the same page and say, in these situations, this is how we're going to handle it. However, how long does that conversation need to be? Can be detrimental to my game. Yes, you have a session zero. Yes, you do those things.
But then it's like, well, what about this? OK, and then, oh, a new book comes out. Now we have to sit down and have another three hour conversation about what we can and can't have. And I think that that. That communication is important in any game for any reason. I totally agree with that.
I think there comes a point where the payment that you have to make to get that conversation is not worth paying for what people want out of the game, if that makes sense.
Yeah, I mean, I guess so, like, you know, my group knows me fairly well. Yeah. And when we ran, for example, Tomb of Annihilation, something that comes up often is if you have a ranger who has this as their favorite terrain, they can't get lost. Right. And early on, I'd taken a poll. Before I started the campaign, do you want to like really do survival type stuff? And they were like, no, really.
It was like almost unanimous. Like, yeah, I don't want to track rations and worry about getting hungry. I don't want throat leeches. I don't want that kind of stuff. It's like, OK. So but the player still came to me and said, hey, I'm thinking of making a ranger with this favorite terrain, you know, jungle or whatever it is. Is that going to be a problem?
And they asked me and I thought about and I said, no, because you guys don't want this to be in your game. So actually, it's great. You're just making it so we're not going to get lost. And that's actually what you guys want. So we're all good. But he checked with me. Right. Because he knew that that this was an important conversation to have. And that's great. Right.
If they had the opposite said, yeah, we want to have like tracking our rations and whether food runs out and are we poisoned by the water, then I probably would have said, well, let's change that benefit. Right. In some way so that you can get lost because that's a part of the experience you actually say you want.
Yeah, I agree. I'm just it's it's a price to pay and you have to weigh that price versus what the benefit you get out of it. I mean, I think of games I've run in public for strangers where we'll sit down to play and we get going and one character says, all right, I move here and now I'm flanking. So I have advantage. I'm like, well, that's an optional rule that we're not using.
And they got up and left. And so that's fine. And I'm actually okay with that because that kind of player might not have been the best for the table I was playing, you know, running at. But there is that mindset out there of this is the game I want to play. Sure, sure. And I am going to play this game or I will not play. Yeah, yeah.
And not all DMs feel like they can have conversations with their players. I mean, I've heard a lot of examples from players. There was a Winter Fantasy where someone talked a lot about the Ravenloft campaign and their DM just couldn't have these kinds of conversations with them. And so various players would abuse the game and the system. And so the tone could never be there.
And yeah, you're right. For some groups, it is there. This is a giant hill to climb. Yeah.
I'm just going to make sure I didn't miss any of my points. There is this thing about a self-selecting audience. When the rules come out, if players are...
functioning members of society they will read the rules and they will say i like this game or not for me yeah and those who like the game will play the game and those who don't like the game will go find another game and so when you change those rules that you create what you're saying is you player have chosen this game to love and now i'm going to make it a different game
that you might not love. And so that's not an excuse, it's not a reason to change or not to change, but it's just something in interpersonal relationships and large segments of people making choices that changing things triggers. Right. It triggers that.
I mean, Darkson is that right. Darkson is take everything you're used to and we're going to flip it upside down. Right. The elves are not in tree villages and the most noble the uppity people ever. Nope. They are scoundrels and they run across the desert. Right. And and everything on right. The halflings are cannibals. I mean, we're just changing everything.
And so that is only fun if you want to buy into that. Otherwise, it'd be a tough ride. And I've met a lot of people as much as I love Dark Sun. I've met a lot of people who say, yeah, that setting's not for me. I don't like anything about it or I don't like these five things or whatever.
Yeah, and it's funny because a message came in right before we started recording that really sums this up. So I wanted to say thank you to the MP Gossage via YouTube. I like the idea of settings putting certain constraints on the game to change how it feels, but talking as a GM of public games, I have often seen the opposite.
People will hunt through setting books for custom feats, species, spells, subclasses, and then add them to their character, giving a real mishmash of characters who appear together with no coherence. So we have the human fighter with the damn pier wall running rogue with the war forged moon Druid called Grimlock. And yes, that, that is a thing.
And it is sometimes uncomfortable to have those sorts of conversations for a very short, like one shot adventure.
I mean, I find it interesting that the 2024 5e character building process is
does not speak more to that idea of thinking through your character concept um it it has the steps and how you go through them are kind of these process steps but they aren't they don't really pull out and do a holistic thing around it um they'll they'll address that a little bit within steps but it it leads to i think to that kind of disjointed thinking or it can
I like that. I like that they started with class, but I also understand why that would be the last thing you would want to start with. But in order to get a system in place that... really forces a player to think through those steps. It forces the player to think through those steps who might not want to think through those steps.
And as you well know, to make a sort of life cycle character creation sort of thing takes a lot of work, a lot of word count, a lot of space that may not be serve the whole of the audience for the game best. I would love to see a supplement that was out there for like maybe new players or players that wanted to say, here is a life cycle character building scheme that you can employ for your games.
It's tough. I mean, you know, Wildemount kind of has that to some extent. Xanathar's has another sort of version of it. But when you put it out in these little spots, it's very different than, you know, 13th Age, which says, hey, first question, what's your one unique thing? Right. I don't know if it's the first question, but it's pretty early on. Right. And skills. Tell me what you did.
okay, that'll, that'll decide when you get bonuses. Cause it's just a, you know, and those kinds of things are very, they're very holistic. They're not this little process, little step. They are all encompassing vision of your character kind of thing. Anyway, it's interesting. And I'm not to get too, too sidetracked, but, but that is a fantastic question around this concept of campaign limits.
Do you see a, Like, what would you let's say someone came to you and said, hey, Sean, we want to write a campaign setting. Should we change these game mechanics to support it?
So we change the base rules to support it. Absolutely. Okay. Absolutely. But what you're doing is you are then limiting your audience, uh, quite a bit, which is, which is fine. It's just fine to do, but you just have to be aware of, of that's what you're doing and working on two campaign settings right now. Uh, I completely understand that question. Um,
and you just have to say who's our audience for this and and move forward based on that second question comes to us via email surprisingly and we don't say this a lot but you yes you can email us if you so choose at masteringdnd gmail.com and this email comes to us from will doyle The greatest adventure writer with his partner, Stacy, as a team going right now.
Yeah, straight up. No, it's true. It's true. It hurts me because I want to be as good as they are. Yeah. But it also pleases me because I get to read their work and get inspired by it. So it's really good. It's overall a win. They can keep doing what they do as well as they do it.
Exactly. And so Will asked this, and I took this question in steps. So here we go. In a recent episode, while talking through the origins of the D&D Open, you stressed that D&D has always been a cooperative game. This touched on a pet theory of mine. While D&D is a cooperative game, its original designers attempted to bake conflict at the table into its rules.
And my answer, just to be clear, when I said cooperative game, I was talking capital C cooperative as opposed to tennis or wrestling or poker or some game where the goals of the players are diametrically opposed to each other. D&D does not do that. It could do that, but it doesn't. So let's continue. Look at the old first edition classes.
Why offer a thief alongside a paladin class if not to sow discord? Similarly, the first edition barbarian had a hatred of magic hardwired into its class features, which put it at odds with the wizard. All right, so I have things to say, but I'm going to let Teo step in here if he so chooses.
Well, I mean, yeah. I find this... No, I'm going to give it to you. I love this question. I have a lot of thoughts and I'm still thinking of them. So go ahead.
What do you think? Okay. So I too love this thought. And it's something that I've thought about before. I've talked about this tension that... Stories thrive on tension and games to thrive on tension. But I think the tension there is more of a happy or maybe an unhappy coincidence rather than the designers making a deliberate choice.
I think the choices of the thief and the paladin and the barbarian hating magic and so therefore not liking wizards really goes back to the historical and fictional inspirations of D&D. Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, right? They were roguish sorts who were in trouble with wizards. So they disliked wizards. You have Conan, right? You have real life people, Saladin. You have the Arthurian Knights.
These are all inspirations that they drew upon to make the classes. So I think that that sort of... tension came from the cool and interesting and fun stories that inspired D&D rather than a deliberate attempt to say, okay, we are going to make sure the party hates each other or are always at odds.
Okay, I think that, you know, so I've been reading the Playing at the World second edition by John Peterson. And if I look at kind of what they're discussing, there's some really fascinating things in the history of pre- original Dungeons and Dragons, where you have these Bronstein games that are going on where people adopt roles. Right.
And so that's kind of like before there was a word role playing before that existed as a term. They are taking on roles and playing these scenarios out that are a massive change from wargaming. Right. And Dave Arneson's group starts running their Blackmore campaign using the chainmail rules and sort of modifying them in kind of non written down ways. But they're sort of playing at it.
And one of the things that he does is the idea of like classes. People are leveling and they're they're playing the various classes with sort of more meat to them, depending on how they're leveling, which Gygax then refines. And so it's a little bit of that adopting a role.
but i think it's i think where the industry was industry uh where the concepts were were less about let's create this antagonism and more a desire to root something as an entity so saying that a barbarian hates magic was a way of like going aha i've declared something that you can hang on to it wasn't about creating tension with the wizard.
It was about giving you something that you could claim as your own. Um, and, and that that would be like exciting to you. Right. And, and definitive for you. Uh, same thing with, with, um, rogues. I don't think the concept was you will steal from your party though. That void did that happen and drove me up the wall in my games back then. But it was, it was this idea of, um,
defining who you are and capturing that concept well.
Yeah. And the one place I go to also try to answer this question are adventures. And the published adventures, did they highlight or promote or bring to the forefront this inter-party tension, and they really didn't. It was more just go into the dungeon, fight the bad guys, get the treasure, and then leave.
They might reward the paladin with a holy sword, or the rogue with a chest to deal with, but that's more about letting your role shine.
Yeah.
And what I would also say is that if you look at what happened at the table, like when, you know, when I talk about those problems with the rogue or the whatever, you know, like I got a magic sword, my half work got one. And then somehow the rogue convinced the DM that they could pickpockets it out of me. Right. And I lost my sword, but I didn't know it was who had taken it.
That kind of tension destroyed our game and led to us starting a new campaign. If you deliberately wanted this, you would have allowed for a wait for this to work. And there was nothing there. Nothing adjudicated this or encouraged it or rewarded it or corrected it or spoke to it. It was just, you know, in fact, it destroyed the game when you did these things.
Yeah, it often did. There may have been intent, but if there was intent, it wasn't clear through the rules that were in front of us or the adventures that were in front of us. Continuing on with Will's question, the classic alignment system offered ways for characters to naturally oppose each other in the same group.
Indeed, the system even offered secret languages so conspirators who shared the same alignment could converse in private at the table. I'm sure the rules never specified this as their intent, and over time these oddities were mostly ironed out. Modern games are certainly geared around strong party cohesion, but it's something I always thought was present back when I first started playing.
And I agree that that there was because, as Tao said, people who've played since, you know, 80 and the days or even earlier talk all the time about the rogue slash thief character doing these things or the paladin refusing to do what the rest of the party wanted because it wasn't the quote right thing to do and all of that.
But I often talk about that tension between a tabletop role-playing game as a game system versus an engine for creating stories. And this is just another one of those threads on ludonarrative dissonance. Stories love conflict, even when that conflict is between antagonists. And cooperative games do not handle that well in the rules. Think about a football team.
If one of the players decides, well, I'm actually going to go play for the other team now. And, you know, the the offensive lineman turns around to tackle the quarterback. That doesn't do much for the game as a game. Right. And and we do see. I'm going to talk about that later. I don't want to introduce a trader mechanic in American football.
Depending on the team, I think there might already be some. But anyway, this sporting moment brought to you by Mike Shea. Did you have any thoughts on for me? The alignment question is the same thing as the the. class question. It was there.
Yeah, I again think that this was an attempt to bring verisimilitude to the world, to create an engine for play rather than one for conflict. It was about this
older unrefined view well how do we get people to care about their characters well we give them a thing to these things that they have right and you're a member of this you're a member of this class you're a member of this alignment and you're a member of this race or species you've got these things and now you care about those things so you'll talk about them and do them and dig into them and they're your role in your character and that's great
not because you'll fight other people, but but because you'll be defined by them. And I think what's happened over time is things like alignment have petered out because they're not the best tool for that. Right. And unless the whole system supports it, it's kind of just getting in the way of a lot of play, as we've talked about before. And that's true of a lot of these other things, too.
These things that create conflict are not the best ways. There are better ways for you to understand your character. And so modern games try to go in those directions rather than in these, because we've learned better ways to give you identity and tell stories and avoid conflict. But I think that's less the issue than just having good, fun play.
We'll bring Will's question home here with, if my theory is correct, what was the design intent here? I wonder if the original designers saw such conflict as a tactical challenge. A lot of older style design tests the player's ability to cooperate at the table as well as their character skills. Perhaps this was an attempt to add a sort of puzzle-like element to the roleplay itself.
What do you think? And as a wider question, do you see conflict within the party as something that can ever be encouraged? After all, conflict is the main driver of story, and we're not short of great examples like Boromir and Raistelin, et cetera, et cetera. And yeah, those are great examples of stories and how stories use conflict, especially conflict between protagonists.
But in a story, there's one player, the writer. And the writer can balance that to make it work. And the reader can step back and enjoy that conflict carefully crafted, hopefully carefully crafted by a talented writer. In a TTRPG, there are a lot of players.
So to compare a story's protagonist conflict to a TTRPG's conflict between protagonists, you have to look to see if there is a rule that takes the part of the writer who is able to balance that to make it a conflict that is worthy of a story and that actually moves the story forward. I think.
Yeah. Yeah, I think. I don't know. I for sure have had times and I've tried to make a character that was like a race line type or something that would have this. You know, I'm going to be evil. And what I've found is it basically never works unless you make it really clear to the other players and you will win me over. Let's play that out. Right. I have this dark side to me that you can fix.
Then it becomes a fun thing as we all know that this is going on and you help me sort it out and we role play through that together. That's fun. But you have to break a little bit of that wall off to say, hey, guys, I'm not going to be a problem at the table. Right. Like if you think of actually what Raceland does, like I'm just going to leave for various sessions and leave you without a wizard.
because I don't care about you is totally not cool and would not work in an actual game makes for a great story because as you said the novel party of one makes it work through the author but in actual play
You have to be very careful about those things, and it takes a level of maturity and conversation, understanding each and everybody to it, to at all pull that off, which is why the game doesn't give you that. I mean, it really it doesn't go to that level, right?
It never says to you, hey, a cool character concept is to be, you know, alive with the dark forces against the rest of your party for personal gain.
Yeah, no. Yeah, and as you said, it can be fun if everybody buys in. Everybody buys in. And if you understand ahead of time, because there's nothing more obnoxious than that heel turn, to use a professional wrestling phrase, that heel turn that catches everyone off guard. Because as the viewer, it can be fun.
The actor who played the Tia McCleric, who turned on the party and his character ended up in Descent into Avernus. I just lost it.
Oh, Joe Manganiello.
Joe Manganiello's character did that turn to get the eye of Vector, the hand of Vector, whatever.
And he's a guest on the show, which makes it work a lot better, right? It's not a player suddenly...
And so as a viewer, we can be shocked and, oh, look what he... As a player who's just... The players do shock each other with some things during those stories, at least going by the animated series that I've watched.
But they're again within those bounds of, we all know we're playing a game together. We all trust each other to not actually...
you know cause the downfall of each other in this way right we're doing this for fun and for story and we're all being checking in with each other that kind of thing and the other thing that we can think about is actually adding mechanics or having mechanic space baked into the game that account for this sort of conflict you think of a game like paranoia
The paranoia understands that the characters are trying to throw each other under the bus and gain the accolades of friend computer. But you have six clones, I think, six clones that are just waiting. So when somebody zaps you with the zap-o-matic ray gun... and pretends it's an accident. The next clone comes right up and onward the story goes. Board games have done this, right?
With the trader mechanic of Dead of Winter. It's like you may be trying to hoard all the food, which you still want to win, but you're going to win. You don't win unless you have more food than anyone else, which can throw the whole party out. Right, exactly.
And Night Spike Agents, for example, does things where, you know, not only do you have another PC at the table that you're close to, but you have some that you're opposed to. Right. Because of that idea that spies do have these sort of like, you know, issues with each other. And it captures that. But it does so around, you know, but you still have a mission to do together. Right.
And you must accomplish that mission. But that tension can be sort of interesting play at times.
Yeah. Great question, Will. Thank you for it. And thanks for letting us ramble on a bit there. Now let's get to our news and commentary, starting with previews of the Dungeon Master's Guide. They've begun on the D&D YouTube channel. And on October 1st, those previews have released. What does the first video talk about?
well it starts with my least favorite and very 2024 title everything you need to know and don't get i could spend a half hour just talking about why i hate that title but uh that aside we all know why they used it and it gives you the general approach and content of the dungeon masters guide which is to create a more useful book uh based on the lessons learned across 10 years
Perkins talks about indispensable advice for creating and running games. That was their focus for this book. This led to restructuring the book to be more intuitive, adding more timeless and always useful material rather than read a bit of lore once and you'll never want to open this book again. The concept was that you would go back to this book. It would have tools and tips and things like that.
So what are in the first three chapters?
So running a game is the first chapter. It's focused on achieving fun games. Lessons include how to's that are useful to learn, like invisible railroads to guide play, but without being too confining. Interaction and exploration gets sections, though they are shorter than combat, they said.
James Wyatt talked about answered a lot of parts in the video as well, and he said he added a new section on overland travel. thinking through the stages of a journey as a narrative with obstacles to overcome. Some look forward to seeing that.
Chapter three is the DM Toolbox, which covers situational knowledge like traps, siege weapons, poisons, curses, hazards, including a new one called Fireball Fungus. And so they did this organizing it alphabetically by topic because I guess they felt like in the previous DMG sort of all this sort of stuff was all over the place and you didn't know where to turn to find it.
So they've put this all in one place and organize alphabetically.
And then we get to the... Yeah. Yeah. They also said they were going to get five short sample adventures included along with that Greyhawk setting. This approach is directed for home games where you don't necessarily need to create a polished vinyl product, which is completely understandable. The adventures, though, aren't long. They are half-page adventures with a format meant to be...
One that DMs could emulate using their home game outlines. So they have level one, two and three adventures and then some higher level adventures. What did you think about that?
I think it's a very good strategy. It may not be what experienced folks think they want up front, but I think, you know, like I'd like to see how Perkins and Wyatt think about you should approach an adventure, right? Like, I think the game should teach that there is a problem between saying, here's your DMG. Now here's your starter set or your first hardback adventure.
Oh, that's an adventure is right. Like, you know, and you figure out what you want to do it in your home table. And so, So I think that this idea of like giving you the kind of framework that you would probably more carefully, more truthfully use and generate on your own is a better way to teach how to create adventures, right?
Like if you're doing things at the table, you just need an outline and you're going to play off of that. So it's a good goal. I look forward to seeing what the actual execution is, but I like the concept.
And so they have advice and tables and so on for those adventures that you could reuse over and over again, depending on the needs that you have. And they also have a campaign chapter, but that's now later in the book to help build on things that they've talked about earlier in the book. Perkins says that this is a complete campaign setting using Greyhawk as an example.
And he and James Wyatt discuss going back to the original folio, which had fewer pages and was more of an outline than what Teos and I went through in great detail before. So they said it's complete, but it's also a skeleton.
What a great quote. He says it's complete like three times. Perkins does. And I kind of laughed each time. Is it complete, though? It's it's. But and he made a big deal of, you know, it's the first time that there's been a setting in a DMG.
And I'm like, well, I kind of remember a couple of examples of sort of settings, including an interior veil, maybe arguably, you know, but OK, you know, but I get I get the goal here. And that was a complete chaos. No, no, no. Well, yeah, those were just wait a minute. Yeah.
know it's fine there's always a little marketing spin and honestly i thought all of these videos perkins looks like the last place he'd like to be is recording a video so i feel for him um and maybe i'm reading him wrong um both he and wyatt talk about this idea of of the goal and To me, it sounds really good, right?
Start with the city of Greyhawk as an example of an urban campaign hub and kind of your home base, your initial place from which you will radiate outward. And so we'll get an example of urban world and the city of Greyhawk and that kind of thing. And then we'll name various threats such as Ayuz or Elemental Evil or Tiamat. Those are three of the ones they named.
And that the starter adventures can to some degree link to these, they suggested why it did. And then the map is of the city of Greyhawk on one side, wilderness on the other. And from this hub, you can go out to nearby interest areas, which are fleshed out to some extent than the larger world.
So, you know, I think that's going to be the goal here is getting you started with how you can frame a campaign and a world. So complete from the perspective of that goal, perhaps. I mean, I don't think you're getting a Greyhawk campaign setting, but at least maybe the starter set to one.
Okay. We also get a glossary of lore that's alphabetical, so you can look up things as you need them. And then Chris talks about the Bastion system and how it's been refined a bit since the Unearthed Arcana article that presented the Bastion system for the first time. What does Chris say about the Bastion system?
Yeah, they made a big deal of like, oh, you'll be so surprised about how much it's changed since the U.A. And all I could think was really, really, really. But at this high level video, they say that you have to be fifth level to get PCs, just as we saw in the U.A.
It'll grow with the PCs over time and that this is a nice activity way from the main game and a way players can feel more like DMs directing their bastion. I thought everything they said in this video was cool. They seemed to recognize the idea.
You've got to be able to do something with it while you're adventuring and that you want to put in player creativity into it and all these kinds of things. Everything at the high level sounded to me fantastic, but I had a lot of caution around hearing that. Everything sounded great, but I didn't love the UA, so we'll see how it gets better over time or what we actually end up with.
I went back and reread our Acquisitions Incorporated, what do you call them? Franchise rules. Franchises. And I also went back and looked for something that James Intracaso made for the Oracle of War campaign, because you could have salvage bases that you could build over time as you went into the Mourne land, salvaged things and brought it back.
And I went back and it had been taken down from the DM's guild. And not trying to start any conspiracy theories here, but I was like, huh, I was going to point people to that.
So, well, it was removed in theory because a while back because they they had stopped the program. So the idea was that you shouldn't find the rules because you're not supposed to make more salvage adventures and missions. But yes, those rules actually look a lot like bastions. Right.
I would say so. So I was going to try to compare the two, but I, alas, can't. Well, I can send you a copy, but... But, yeah, okay. I will at some point. And then we get talk about the art, how there is more art, and some of the art has been revised for magic items. The magic items from the 80s cartoons are available. Those are really strong. Somebody says they're really strong. Yeah. Yeah? Yeah.
Okay. Okay. We'll leave that at that. There are some changes, like the Flame Tongue no longer needs to be a sword. Magic item crafting is in the Player's Handbook, but it's limited in the Dungeon Master's Guide. It will cover more than just scrolls and potions. We get more description of the multiverse and what it means to D&D.
There's one thing that I thought was really interesting. So they said, you know, we're going to take... You're going to have additional crafting.
what the word that never came up was downtime so as far as i can tell downtime seems to be gone from 2024 which i find fascinating interesting interesting we'll have to keep an eye on that as the book comes out uh we get more description of the multiverse there are tracking sheets provided to they will be available for download to help a dm track campaign and game information
They are decorated with baby monsters. And then Chris ends the video by saying that he is grateful for the time that he spent with 2014 and the opportunity to make these new core books a better experience. And then two days later, a Bastions, a whole Bastions video came out. I did not see this video, so you're going to have to help me here.
It walks through that new system. Honestly, it sounded a lot like the Unearthed Arcana version. And but maybe that's me having a bias, just not expecting it to be vastly different given how design works. But a nice part that they covered is the vision that this gives PCs something to define, that it can help players think and act like DMs in designing their bastion.
And that led to another listener question, Sean.
I will read this listener question from the Mathemagician via our Patreon Discord. I just watched the D&D video on Bastions. In the video, they made a big point about how interacting with them is off-limits for the Dungeon Master and how these upgrades just happen at various levels. Why are we putting things in the DMG that are off-limits for the DMs?
I typically think of the DMG as off-limits for players. I'd be quite surprised to see my player sit down at the table, crack open the DMG, and say, I'm ready to play. Right. So what do you have to say about that?
Well, I think they got a little carried away on the video about this. I think that, you know, they're sometimes, I mean, they're told to be marketing people when they're design people, right? Is the problem with some of these videos. And so I think they were maybe being a little over emphatic on it. I think what they mean is that the players get to drive choosing these bastion options.
The DM still administering the rules for bastions, deciding when to introduce them, adjudicating all the DM side events around bastions and so on. Yeah, the players do have to use the DMG rules, but why are they in the DMG? I have two answers for you. See what you think, Sean. Number one, practical. There isn't space in the player's handbook. Yep, I would agree there.
Number two, having bastions in the DMG gives it something new so that you will want to buy it too. Maybe even players will want to buy it.
You've got weapon.
Yeah. Weapon masteries in the player's handbook. And you've got bastions of the DMG. Those are two new things that are supposed to drag you into buying a new book that you maybe otherwise didn't want to get. And that's why they're in the DMG.
I cannot argue there. And if you're interested in the Unearthed Arcana bastions, Teos did a beautiful YouTube video that discussed that. And there is a link in our show notes, or you could just go to alphastream.org, I'm sure, and do a little search for bastions.
Thank you, sir.
More news. The D&D licensed products just keep on coming. Ian World had a nice little article gathering recent products like the Dungeons & Dragons Pocket Expert, a random house book that gathered lore and knowledge, such as the number of tentacles a Mind Flayer has and what the Forgotten Realms are. For only $8 this week, you can become a Pocket Expert on Dungeons & Dragons.
WizKids, you like putting tabs in your books. WizKids had you covered there. I don't either. With the 2024 Player's Handbook and 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide book tabs to keep track of the different locations for things in your books. They are $10 each. And do you want some acrylic dice? Clear acrylic dice would be holders inside. Maybe you do, maybe you don't.
But if you do, I've got news for you. You can get them from Fan Roll, releasing in November for $25. That could be fun.
They look nice in the picture that I saw. Yeah, and thanks to Ian World for pulling this all together in one nice place. Ian World, I feel like, has had really, really nice coverage of late.
Yeah, for sure. Speaking of strange coverage, I am not up to date on this story, but Teos, I want to give the quick and dirty version of this amazing tale of the Commander Rules Committee for Magic the Gathering.
Yeah, this has been really fascinating. Last week, as we were recording, I saw something about the Commander Rules Committee, and we're talking about Magic the Gathering's commander format of playing cards with Magic the Gathering cards. This committee quit after internet death threats. So on the surface, I was like, oh, this is yet another sad tale of internet hatred. It's so terrible.
And there is that. But there's much more. So Commander is this format of Magic the Gathering. You get a leader card, you build a larger deck than usual around it, and it leads to kind of casual multiplayer games. Wizards doesn't really manage the format. It started as a fan-popularized format, and the rules and lists of banned cards has been managed by this independent Commander rules committee.
So they look at the card releases and might go like, you know...
this card's too much of a problem you know let's let's actually ban this or let's clarify how it works or whatever and wizards of course does make money off of commander right all those cards are cards you buy from them through the various normal channels it's increasingly important as they launch the wizards launches specific products exclusively for the commander format including rare and special art versions for commander
The RC group, this rules committee, normally takes a light hand, following social norms, accepted discussion to ban excessively popular cards. They might have been banning a card every couple of years. Well, last week or two weeks ago, they simultaneously banned four cards.
And those cards were expensive and recently used by Wizards of the Coast as the kind of chase rares to motivate you purchasing major products. The result was a dramatic drop in the value of these cards, leading to huge backlash against this rules committee, including harassment and threats, which were apparently very, very serious.
And so one of the the commandery advisory group former members said they were told by multiple people inside Wizards of the Coast that Wizards had told RC, please don't do this ban. Someone else went and looked into what is kind of the business impact of this band they did. And...
The thing is here, you know, on one hand, you have the RC trying to do what they kind of should do to say, hey, these cards you are putting out there, wizards, they're just breaking commander format. So let's ban them. Right. But this video estimated YouTube video estimated the financial impact to be between 100 and 150 million dollars in the drop of the value of these cards.
So literally, if you went out and bought this card, you lost a huge amount of money when then this rules committee banned them. So after all of these death threats, the RC has handed has basically disbanded, said we're done with this. We're not going to be we're not going to exist anymore. We can't handle these death threats and so on.
Handed control over to wizards and now wizards will be the group that decides what cards work and don't work for the commander play format. Right. No more independent voice out there. And I think it's a fascinating story because, you know, this is a situation where. an outside group could impose arguably necessary control on how the game should work.
But there could be actually a financial impact from it. And there are some aspects that are true of, I think, D&D or other RPG communities where this can be true as well, right? Organized play or other situations where maybe the financial stakes aren't close to the same. But, you know, there are parts of the game of D&D or of other RPGs that are really in the hands of other non-wizards entities.
And so, you know, a little bit of a cautionary tale here around that.
Yeah. I mean, while it's not to this extent, as an organized play, administrator over the years. We have had times where we have made rulings to say, you can't take this, you can't do this. And often it wasn't even noticed by Wizards, but there have been times when Wizards has stepped in and said, no, you have to use everything from this book in this campaign.
And there's not $100 million or $150 million at stake, but there is Sales at stake, I would say. And so it is this interesting juxtaposition of wanting a game to work well versus wanting not to curtail the sale of the game or hurt the game financially. Yeah.
Yeah, it's really fascinating. So, yeah, I wanted to talk about just because it is it is such an interesting something you don't really think about. But these kinds of effects are kind of out there even for the D&D side. Yeah.
Yeah.
Game Hall Publishing is going to be launching a Wardens of the Eastern Marches organized play campaign. And we were getting ready to talk about this in the news, and then we decided... Hey, our friend Alex Kammer, who is the principal at Gamehole Publishing, why don't we just bring him on and talk about it?
So our next segment will be an interview with Alex Kammer about this new organized play campaign that they're planning, plus some talk about Gamehole Con, which happens next week. So check out that for more information. What else is in the news? Castle floor plans. Tell me about this.
It's a really cool website that great dash castles dot com gathers real life castle floor plans of castles across the UK, France and Germany. I've been to a few of these. They're great castles in real life, and it's really cool to see their floor plans and kind of compare them and think through.
So it's a nice resource for those of you out there who maybe want to have new castles and make them feel a little more realistic or use something real as your basis and then fantasy it up. Kind of cool.
And since Mike Shea is so kind in sponsoring our sports segments, we wanted to share some things that he's been doing. He has, believe it or not, a blog, and his latest blog post talks about the best LLM, large language model, for generating RPG stuff. It's your brain. So what does Mike talk about here?
Yeah, he covers the huge problems of LLMs being built on stolen intellectual capital, enormous and increasing energy and water consumption for simple queries, displacing workers and generally in crapifying the Internet.
And he reminds us that our brains have this ability to come up with amazing ideas and that going through the process of generating those ideas makes us increasingly better without large water and energy consumption other than your normal diet. He provides a number of exercises and ways to promote good thinking for DMs. And it's just a nice general article.
So we wanted to highlight that link in our show notes.
I am going to be checking this out for my class to help inspire some thinking when we get to certain parts of our class. So thank you, Mike, for sharing that. and on our creator corner a couple of things we see the sorcerers return a dcc adventure zine mystery and intrigue await in this grimdark dungeon crawl classics zine for first level characters Who has created this?
Friend of the show and supporter Andy Edmonds at Nerdronomicon.com has this project, providing a complete level one dungeon crawl classics adventure for just $10. And what do you get in this adventure, Teos?
Ooh, the village of Betrug, people to 16 NPCs, five fun new weapons, eight new magic items, he says, of questionable utility, which I really appreciate. Two new monsters and 50 plus pages of horror intrigue. This project, Sean, ends October 31st. It's more than halfway funded. So that does mean you can help it get it over the finishing line. And we've got plenty of time to do that.
So check it out at kickstarter.com. Search for Sorcerer's Return. Awesome.
And I want to give everybody a big thank you for supporting the Grim Hollow Transformed Kickstarter. We went live just six days ago as of this recording, and we are just a scooch away from $500,000. So from the bottom of my heart and the top of my hat, I thank you. What do you get with this Kickstarter?
You can get a campaign guide that talks all about Grim Hollow, digs down into each region, talk about how to run a dark fantasy campaign and variant rules to bring that dark fantasy feel to your campaigns, new magic items, curses, and monsters that are created by curses. Or you can get the player's guide and or.
where we have a new heritage system for building your characters, new classes, subclasses, spells, backgrounds, feats, special equipment, all of that. Five or possibly more adventures that each take place in one of the main regions. And then you can also choose, if you like virtual tabletop support, all the usual suspects plus D&D Beyond as your support for the virtual tabletop. So you can buy...
the version that will be on D&D Beyond through the Kickstarter. And like I said, thank you so much, everybody, for your support so far.
And is this campaign guide a complete campaign setting, Sean?
It is a very, very complete campaign setting as I read through, edit, and develop thousands, tens of thousands of words for the regions, for how to play a dark fantasy campaign, et cetera, et cetera. So yes, I would say it's about as complete as you can get.
Fantastic. I'm looking forward to it. Me too.
And now we are off to our main topic, which is our talk with Alex Kammer. And now for our main topic today here on Mastering Dungeons, we have a very special guest. We have Alex Kammer, the principal at GameholeCon and at Gamehole Publishing. Alex, you've been on the show before, so I figure this is our annual check-in a couple weeks before Gamehole.
But if anyone is new to our show, could you just give a quick rundown on who you are and what you do in the RPG industry?
No, I appreciate that. This is a great time of year for a wellness check on Mr. Camera, so I appreciate that. Yes, I am the director of GamelCon, an annual tabletop convention that we run here in Madison, Wisconsin, that has now become the largest majority RPG convention in the world, which is insane. I can't believe it. But that's where we are.
In addition, we have a publishing company that's been around for a little bit, but we're moving it forward more aggressively and making real strides and making bigger products and more interesting things. So we just launched our new website last week. So yeah, I do a lot of freelance design work.
In fact, I just got my author copies of The End of Everything, my book that Alan Patrick and I wrote and I'm just so freaking proud of and delighted that it's ending up in people's hands right now. I'm super excited about that. So yeah, I have toes in various parts of the hobby. Fantastic. It's great to have you again.
Thanks, Alex.
Yeah.
Yeah. Teos, do you want to direct our conversation from here in any particular direction?
We'd love to have you on for any reason, especially because we're all excited about Game Hall being right around the corner and we're all preparing. I spent all weekend working on the events I'm running.
But we particularly wanted to have you on because in our show notes for the news, we started putting together our news and we're like, hey, Gamehole Publishing launches Wardens of the East marches. And then we were thinking about, well, what should we do in the main segment? And we were thinking, well, what if we have Alex on to talk about this?
Because Gamehole Publishing launching an organized play campaign, that's pretty cool.
I appreciate it. I hope it is. I think it's going to be really fun. It's been fun so far, and I can't wait to actually have 2025 when we get players seated at tables playing our content. I'm really looking forward to that.
So you're launching an organized play campaign, and the first adventures are at this Gamehole Con?
They will be in 2025. What you'll see is if you're walking through the lobby of GamelCon this year, you'll see a Gamel publishing booth. And that's what I'll be propped up for most of the time. And I'll be passing out. You referenced, you saw on our site, a primer. We have printed copies that we'll be passing out, full color, little digest sized.
shopping tote bags for the dealer hall that hopefully people will find useful. And so I can talk about the Organized Play program, which I'm super excited about because we've had a long relationship with Adventures League. Sean, actually, that's how I met you, gosh, 10 years ago or something when we first got into writing such a core figure in getting that program off the ground.
and you know we could talk about adventures league to the extent you know we're interested as we swear it is now i suppose where it was and uh sort of why i'm doing this but uh i think we're in a really uh good position after running so much organized play and of not only just uh adventures league and dungeon dragons but other other rule sets that um
I think we've got a pretty good sense of what really works, what players are interested in, and how we can make ours really fun and can do some things that a program like Adventurous League can't do for size reasons and corporate reasons or whatever those reasons are that we can do that others can't. So I'm really excited about that.
Yeah. I mean, Teos and I came into the industry through organized play. So it's something that's so dear to us and we discuss it whenever we can on this show. And over the years, we've seen the rise and the fall of organized play through wizards, through various cycles of rules or of leadership or of corporate backing versus not corporate backing. And so it's always interesting to see other,
parties try to take the most advantage that they can of what organized play can offer. So my question to you is, why now? And what lessons do you think you've learned that you mentioned over those years?
Well, so I guess the first big why is it aligns completely with our core ethos for GameholeCon, and that is to celebrate this awesome hobby and bring as many people into it as possible to make it accessible and fun. And organized play has been awesome for that, right? I mean, just think of all the iterations that you mentioned.
So many of us got into public play, playing with strangers through organized play. And so the very concept that you could sit down at a table with a sheet and not know anyone else around the table and play D&D is amazing. And so that's sort of as a threshold matter, that's why, because I love it. I've written a ton for organized play over the years.
It's been super important to my development as a freelance author, to my development as being a DM, quite frankly. I've run so much, so many games for Pathfinder and for PFS and then through Adventures League and down the line. So it's important to me personally. But why now specifically?
Because Adventures League is, I think it's an understatement to say they're at a crossroads as what they really are and what they're going to do. You see for years, the last three or four years, really the main creators of content for the Adventures League have been Gamehole Con, and Baldwin Games.
We're the two premier partners that have sections of the Forgotten Realms in which we can write adventures. And so we've created content that we've run at various conventions, Gangwell Con, and then Dave, of course, is doing things at lots of places like Gen Con and Origins and so on. And that's been great.
But it's kind of an interesting concept when you step back from it and say, wait a minute, we're writing content for a company to promote their product and we don't even get to sell it the way we want to sell it. We don't get to do exactly what we want to do with it. We have to get approval for basically writing our own content that we're running at our own show.
that we then have to share if we sell anything half 50 cents on the dollar with the parent company who has nothing to do with the creation of that product in the first place. So there's that. And because there's really not much support from the company right now, I think they have other bigger things that they're obviously working on. And you guys have commented on this over the...
past year about what's happened with the size of the D&D team. They just don't have the bandwidth to really do a lot with organized play. And I have now seen our organized play hall, which has been the largest eventually call in the world, decline over the last several years in size, just because we're losing DMs, we're losing player interest. Despite our best efforts, I think our content's great.
I think we have really... We operate the Adventure League Hall at a loss, quite frankly. I think it's just such an important thing. I want that to be a resource for attendees to come and sit down and play, and you don't have to have a big group to play with. That's why, I guess in broad strokes, and because so many friends in the hobby now that are interested in helping with this,
And so we're going forward full steam and can really do a very, I don't, I just, you know, the sort of adjectives that are common in the marketplace, like bespoke or whatever, you know, that's what we're going to do.
We can do really fun things that we couldn't do for Adventures League in terms of the kind of stuff that players get and the kind of opportunities they'll have because we don't have a Wizard of the Coast or anyone else to answer to. We can just do it on our own.
It's really cool. And I share a lot of your sentiments around organized play and AL, and we would love for it to have that energy and excitement that it did in the first years, but it clearly hasn't for some time. So I get where you're coming from.
For folks who want to know more about Eastern Marches, I don't want to go too long before we share some of that, of why folks should be excited about this. So you've seen AL losing some of its fire. You've put together a program that can do things that you couldn't do with AL. Maybe talk us through the Eastern Marches. What's kind of the high level of what this setting campaign is like?
Sure. While Gamehole Con has been rolling forward, while I've been writing freelance stuff for other publishers, several of the other Gamehole guys and myself have been writing content for Gamehole Publishing. We were creating our own setting called the Eastern Marches, and we were locating our adventures in this setting as it's collaboratively grown.
And, you know, Ed Greenwood has written a few things for us and myself and Josh Hoyt, and we have on our gameworldpublishing.com site, you can see those adventures. That's really the, those are the pillars that undergird the setting. And so as we're building out regions of the setting, that's when it became a little more sort of epiphany level for me.
Like, why don't we run organized play in this setting that we know so well and that we can also do it in a collaborative way? Meaning that because it's a relatively new setting, of course, and while we have a lot of content, it doesn't, you know, compared to the, you know, forgotten realms, you know, the mountains of content that exists for that or really any other major public setting.
When freelance authors write for us and want to write an adventure, they can create a town. They can create any NPC they want. They can create monsters. They can do all that stuff because, again, we don't have any of the limitations that, first of all, a corporate... setting has. And this will be fun.
I think it's going to be great to be able to engage in this collaborative process of building the eastern marshes more fully while telling great stories in season-type settings as we go each year. We have season one sketched out. I'm right in the middle of writing episode one, the first adventure. And
So that's why we're doing it in the Eastern Marches, and that's why it's called the Wardens of the Eastern Marches. Specifically, we have alliances that are in our program. There are six alliances. And that was one thing that I felt that the Adventurers League kind of
Didn't kind of missed because the they had they have a similar structure, but it never became forward in the way the Adventures were written or play did you know the factions of course actions? Yeah, and those were cool and I liked them, but they didn't have any impact on anything They did more flavor in our setting at the beginning.
That was the concept right so like I the the first event that we had in a Gen Con and there were actually, you know, the banners of the factions were hanging in the hall and they tabulated which faction won, which was this entire time. Right. And they were like, so it started that way and somehow it just
Yeah, well, and I can kind of understand it's, first of all, a lot of work. If you're going to create an adventure, I'll just tell you as a designer, writing an adventure, a three-hour adventure and having a main goal, a main objective, and then six side things.
So each alliance has something, their characters have something meaningful to do, not just go pick up a thing, you know, just really to advance a story, it's tricky. And when you are, writing content, especially relying on third party people to do it and disparate authors from all over the place, it's very difficult to keep a central concept like factions to really mean something.
So I understand what happened, but it was disappointing to me because I agree with you, Tess. It was awesome. Those banners. Early GamelCon, we replicated those banners for Adventure League. I mean, it was cool. I love that. I thought the concept was so neat that you're part of a cabal beyond just being a D&D player that meant something, that informed your character's actions.
And that's very much what we want to try to accomplish here. Cool.
So tell us about the world itself. What if I'm you know, if I were a new traveler and I arrive to the eastern marches, what what would I kind of experience and see? You know, I noted that in the campaign guide, there are frozen lands to the north. There's the Sapphire Sea to the east, Colmenas Mountains to the west. But but as you know, what kind of world is this? What's it feel like?
Sure. Yeah, the Eastern Marches is a smaller part of a larger continent. And that's what you see when you pick up our guide or if you go on to our site and look at it, the map you referenced, that's what it is. It's focused on that portion of the larger continent, and we call it the Eastern Marches. But yeah, it is, as you described, there is a... frozen, colder.
There's a northern hemisphere kind of analog. The history is that there was a mediocracy located in the north that dominated this region for thousands of years. And that's why that area is rife with ruins and abandoned watchtowers and things like that, that have all kinds of interesting things and all kinds of storytelling opportunities bordered on the
on the West by the, uh, uh, Columbus mountains, as you described, that is the, the second age in our setting is a, is an work kingdom that actually, um, established the legal system, uh, in our setting, uh, and also established all kinds of other institutions of learning and universities and so on. Um, and, uh, that was the second age and, uh, going forward in time.
Now we're in the modern age where, um, There is no central authority that governs the Eastern Marches. It's a series of basically almost feudal in that they're separate city-states and just regional powers. That is why the alliances are a thing. The alliances are the only overarching authority that have control or that can exert influence across the entirety of the Eastern Marches.
There's one that say, for example, merchants and one that is more of a nature conservation, the Golden Conservancy. And their aims are then can be expressed throughout the setting because again, there is no central governmental authority. Larger cities in the South, It tends to be a little more rural in the south as well as sort of the breadbasket of the setting.
And then of course, more mountainous to the west and then this massive ocean, the Sapphire Sea to the east. So it's not heavily populated. There are a couple of bigger cities, but this is not like the Sword Coast for the Forgotten Realms in terms of just population density and stuff that's there.
Yeah.
For organized play campaigns, there's the setting on this side, which people can get into and love. And then there's the sort of organized part of organized play in terms of how do you get into it? Where can you play? What sort of... system do you have for advancement?
Could you, even though you're still a year out from when it's going to start, have you thought about that or come to any conclusions?
Oh yeah, yeah. No, we're ready to, we could go, we could start now. I want, you know, the player's guide, this handout should, you know, hopefully answers most of those questions, at least in broad strokes. So We're going to start at GamelCon 2025 is the first time that you'll actually play. And then it's open source.
So anyone who wants to run this anywhere at a convention, a store, anywhere else are absolutely free to do so. We will have the adventures up for sale at a discreet price through our site and likely through the usual website. usual suspects where you can buy things. We're still talking to Beyond. We're talking to Wizards about this.
They're interested, but they have so many things that they're doing with third-party content right now. I don't know if we're going to be carried on Beyond or not. TBD. But so once you start then, I guess you can bring a character from any... This is an interesting... Mike Shay asked me the same question. Yeah, so what happens if you bring a character from some really obscure publication?
Because what we say is that you can bring any 5e character just from a published source. So obviously Ghostfire, or Kobold, or of course Wizards, or whatever you like. But just something that has been at least published and it's had eyes on hopefully a professional game designer help build that character class. And this is the tricky part of it.
And what do we do when someone comes in with a T-Rex ninja laser beam bearing character? And that's undoubtedly going to happen. And so, it's going to be the ultimate DM fiat. They're going to say, look, that character, it's going to interrupt the fun of everyone else here. So, we can't allow that. with every presumption and leaning toward let everyone play what they want to play, please.
As long as it's not interfering with others' fun at the table, that you don't have some sort of game-breaking character, you absolutely can play it in this system. I guess we have a standard of reasonableness that we hope that everyone can appreciate and accept and that there's a reason for it. That as long as you're bringing a reasonable character to the to the game, you can play it.
Advancement is after you play one three-hour scenario, you can choose to advance. You don't have to level up. So you can level relatively quickly if you want, but you can stay at any level you like for as long as you like. And there are, based on the alliances, very specific rewards that happen at each level.
Um, for example, uh, at level two, you get an Alliance pin and if you play it at GamelCon, you'll actually get that pin. Um, it's going to be, we're having campaign coins are making them. I'll hopefully have them at the show to show off. Um, the cool thing, uh, uh, at other, uh, advancement piece is at level 10, you get an alliance signet ring.
And that's going to be, again, a physical ring that you can get. You come and play. That'll have your alliance logo on it. And that has spells that are in your ring and that you can cast as you like. There are three charges and there's a lesser effect that you can use for a single charge three times. Or there's one larger effect that you can burn all three charges at once to do something greater.
um and i think you know again that's the kind of stuff that we can do because we feel like doing it and right um we can we can write our adventures in contemplation of that uh and um so i think i think people are gonna have a lot of fun with and also like real magic sites or certs man i love those magic certs from am and i was really bummed when they went away um and i understand why they went away it's just a lot of stuff but we don't have that problem so we have a
And I'll have some sample ones at the show, elaborate scripts that we're going to do that people can stop by and take a peek at. So it's going to be all that. We're going to have log sheets and all the kind of cool support that helps with players and DMs. Because even though we'll have
dozens of tables running at the same time, we're not trying to design something that's going to be run necessarily in a different country. Hopefully they do it, but they'll have to support however much of that they want to do is going to be on them. Gotcha.
Your discussion about how they balance something like you know, coupled press rules versus a five versus Ghostfire is something I had really wondered about because. Well, some players will do that so well and some players will be so unreasonable, and it reminds me of when I run games at PAX West or Emerald City Comic Con.
My focus is on new players and casual players, and that's kind of what I'm always thinking about. And then someone will show up and say, hey, can I just play with my A.L. character? And what I always say to them is, yeah, bring any character you want, as long as you're not going to make your DM cry.
And it's funny because 99% of the time they laugh and every now and then just look at me like, and I'm like, Do you have an unhittable AC? Is that fun for your DM? You know, are you do you always hit everything? Will no one at your table ever fail saving throw? And sometimes they just kind of blink and they go, yeah, I know what you mean.
I'm like, you know, we have pregens and they'll be like, OK, is it just it's but it's such a small number of people who they just they have to process that concept. You mean it's not fun when I destroy everything the game hinges upon? Yeah.
Yeah. And organized play is particularly susceptible to that. I think that part of the hobby attracts min-maxers or whatever term we would like to apply to that. And I think it's cool too.
fiddling around with different builds and trying to figure out what does the most stuff and where did that designer not think of the interaction between some ancestry feature with the class and oh my gosh, now I have a barbarian that's unstoppable, whatever. I get it, I understand the attraction, but for the sake of everyone's fun, we're trying to... And we'll see, I guess.
We'll see if... I hope we don't have to be more legislative in that. I hope that it'll work this way. So many great companies that are doing such good work. And my friends at Ghostfire and Kobold have also just given us license to use their monsters.
So even if we are in the yellow world, and for all God, we have so much stuff that we get to use that are IP from other companies that we'll be using in our
in our system so um you know it's not like we have to create we and we have a lot of we have a beverage of our own creatures but to be able to use all this stuff from these other great companies it's going to be awesome and it's certainly going to make the authorship a lot easier
Nice. Yeah, that's really exciting. That creates a lot of surprises for players who may not quite know, say, the A5E monsters or the Ghostfire monsters, how they can offer entirely different experiences. I think it was Ghostfire that had the interesting boss monsters that had sort of stages of play. I think that would be really neat for players to experience. That's really cool.
I mean, right? Isn't that the thing when you're a DM and you have players like, what's happening? I mean, isn't that really what we're trying to accomplish? Like, wait, what? You know, that's a big part.
I have a question. The title, you know, when I think of Eastern Marches, I think of the Western Marches kind of storied campaign where the idea was to go off and explore and sort of chart the wild. And session over session, you were kind of exploring and covering new things. Is that part of it? Or just does it happen to be a title that sounds like that?
No, it was. And it's funny, we weren't even thinking about the Western Marches when we did that. But it is basically a kind of a blank slate part of that is called the Eastern Marches because of recent colonization. Larger societies from across the Sapphire Sea have come and that's what they've called it, the Eastern Marches, because it is.
largely undiscovered other than some large coastal cities. So that's exactly why we call it that. But then I thought, oh, man, I can't believe there's already this whole thing out there called the Western Marches that is going to hopefully not create too much confusion.
No, but I think that's neat because that is a fun concept. And on our Discord, it comes up from time to time where folks will want to talk about how neat that concept is and how much fun it can be to slowly unveil different parts of the world and fill out the blank spaces of the map. So that's neat.
One of the joys of organized play is the creative energy of game masters and players being able to help build the setting. And you had talked about making towns and doing those sorts of things. How much thought have you put into letting DMs not just run the adventures, but make their own sorts of contributions or players along those lines?
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. That's the, my hope is that, uh, in the traditionally when anyone who has written for organized play, run games for organized play or play games and organized play, and they've been told, no, that we're going to try to turn as many of those in the asses as possible as just a philosophy. So, um, yes, absolutely.
With, with GMs DMs that are going to, uh, to, especially that are, uh, want to, um, you know, run chunks of a season of ours and they have suggestions or ideas or thoughts on, on how to, where to, where to go left instead of right. Absolutely. We're very, we're very interested in that. And we hope that people are as invested and excited about it as we are with these stories. Because again,
You know, D&D is better when the more people that are involved in it, the more people that are writing it, the more people that are contributing to a collective narrative. And especially when you're talking about world building, that's certainly what we hope happens, that people are interested in the setting and they want to contribute and want to create, you know, in our...
And my note to designers who are going to be working on this, you just go for it, man. Just write it. And as long as you're not altering things that are already on the map, we're going to almost certainly be good with it.
You mentioned kind of going back to an earlier thing, but you mentioned magic item certificates and folks who are listening who have not done a lot of certain organized play may not be familiar with this. But right. So it's the idea that you get an actual paper certificate that says that you got a thing. And.
Adventures League provided these and you mentioned Mike Shea earlier and one of the ones that he's brought up many times is he was he received the certificate for first to die at the D&D Open the year that we brought back the D&D Open and Sean Merwin and I wrote that and Mike was just so happy to have had his character die right and he got a special certificate I just pulled it up that
allowed him to uh you know get a benefit in addition to marking this as a story thing that happened right because of the fact that he had died from this and and uh yeah maybe talk a bit about like you know what kind of certificates when you think about magic item certificates or rewards you know what are you trying to do with these uh how are you approaching them in the campaign
Yeah, that's just that the we love the stuff. Right. And so these are going to be three and a half by five cards, cardstock, well printed things that we selected that size based on common binder sleeves.
so these can be housed in a binder uh six per page easily um you know i still have my al binder and i was just looking through it the other day you know some of those oh man i just forgot about some of the great certs that i have from you know 2016 or whatever that was and you know before um it's so neat to have that um and so we have some this usual kind of uh prohibitions about how many magic items you could have active at one of the ones just you know typical sort of 5e stuff um but that's it so you have the the um
you actually have a physical tangible thing that is represents your, your magic item, everything from prosaic things from potions to plus one weapons to all kinds of other interesting things. And you know, that, that whole concept of weird, uh, either, um, recognition for something that you did or a one-off thing that's specific to a story is pretty cool.
And I, you know, being able to have one of those, um, certainly I love having them as a player. Um, I, I think our, our players are going to enjoy that too. Um,
and again these are going to be all open source so if people want to use these uh we're going to share you know they can absolutely have them um and uh because you know that'll so you can do these and if uh we've been several green stores have already reached out to us interested uh and wanting to do this amazing you know I can't even believe we're not we're just not even off the ground yet and they're interested and I think it speaks to that this is a really um a needed thing in our hobby you know that the accessibility
of folks being able to come in and sit down and within a few minutes playing with strangers i think it's just an amazing idea considering where we were you know all of us who have been in this hobby for more than a few years where it was not a thing that not that long ago really how do you see the the storyline and the adventures propagating do you see them kind of like it premieres at game hall and then it comes out and do you have a thought of what your cadence is like kind of how many adventures where are they going out to how do you get them
So what we're going to do for this season one in 2025, we'll have 10 adventures and then an epic. So whereas the classic epic where the multi-table, the whole hall are together accomplishing a thing at the end, and Alan Patrick's actually writing that for us this 2025. Alan's been such a good bud for, you know, he's end of everything author for that.
So we've been working together and all kinds of stuff now. And so he's been very helpful with that. So he's gonna be writing the epic. So 10 adventures that takes you through, you know, I can't remember the exact array. I think we have four, one through. So we, the adventures league was built on tiers. We do two, they're a little more refined, a little more smaller bites.
So ours are one through three. And so three levels instead of five. I think that makes it easier. I always struggled with that as a DM when I had, you know, two fifth level characters and three first and like, ah, how can I really make this a cool experience? So I think making tiers a little smaller will help with that.
And, uh, so then with, um, uh, with the, our concept of you can level after one adventure, you can very, you could certainly at one show, uh, get your significant ring, you know, if you want it to, if you're so inclined to get to 10th level, um, and then the Epic will be for all levels. So that's going to be all done. That'll be at GamelCon 2025 and out it goes.
Uh, and so at least initially my, our focus is going to be.
content for each year you know one at a time now we'll see to what extent other conventions and shows are interested and you know want to create content and absolutely interested in having that conversation and you know want to inculcate encourage it any way we can but that's where we are because we i just don't know yeah if someone's at a gaming store listening to this right they can also reach out to you right and run it there which is really cool because i think gaming stores are also really looking for a source of energy for their play these days
Yeah.
So that's the plan. We're going to be formally hiring folks here. After the show, we're going to start getting the 10. I'm writing the first one and I think Josh is writing one. I think Royce is writing one. But beyond that, we have a bunch of slots that we're going to hire authors for. And like the way, I'm very proud of what we continue to do.
So this is also something I should say, we're not killing our Adventure League program at all. We will continue to... We will continue to produce great content, I hope, through our Border Kingdoms and we have a really great writing room. Joe Alfano has done a wonderful job with that.
I'm very proud of the fact that we pay our authors, we pay our editors, and that we take care of the folks who work for us. We're certainly going to do that with Wardens as well. But yeah, we're still going to continue to create AL content as well. Right.
That's fantastic to hear. Very cool.
Yeah, yeah.
Let's switch gears just for a second to Game Bowl Con. We know that as of this recording, it is next week on Wednesday. 10th anniversary, am I right? This is 11th. 11th. 10th was last year. Yep. What do you have to highlight this year about what's going on at Game Bowl Con 11th?
Oh man, Sean, I'm so glad you asked me because this is the biggest deal in the world and the 50th anniversary of D&D is making me just shake all year long. I can't believe it. I'm just so amazed that we are here. I can't believe that D&D is 50 years old. It must mean that I'm older than 50, which is true. And so I can't believe it and I love it.
So lots of people are doing all kinds of cool things for the anniversary. I mean, there've been all kinds of stuff. And so...
when i was thinking about what could our show do what and especially in character keeping with our character of what our game will cons about when i think of dnd i think the way to best celebrate is to play the game um it's cool to watch a live stream and watch celebrities play that's absolutely great and to uh you know it was cool to be helped with the um the museum uh at gen con uh to john peterson and bill meinhardt and i put on the 50th anniversary uh
artifact museum at Gen Con. And that was really cool sharing the sort of stuff that I have sitting behind me here, the historical relics of our hobby. But I think truly the best way is to have the game be played by as many people as possible
And so for me, the highlight of the show will be our D&D celebration games, one-hour D&D games, fifth edition games, and advanced Dungeons & Dragons games that are going to be super immersive, going to be in its own special area that my partners in Shoe Dungeon are helping me with a lot. dungeon setting that is going to be in the lobby. In that special room will be four tables.
Dwarven Forge set up on each table. Modern Dwarven Forge for the 5e games. Resin Dwarven Forge for the AD&D games. Miniatures for both. There'll be lead painted miniatures for the AD&D games. Modern Wizkid miniatures for the 5e games. There'll be tactile puzzles for each game that Jeff Martin designed by a friend from Two Dungeons. Each one will have its own puzzle to solve.
In a one-hour game, it's going to be third-level characters for both. You're kind enough to run some of it. I think the adventures themselves are compelling enough in a one hour setting, which is challenging for experienced players, but it's also designed to accommodate, to be a true learn to play.
So you have never played this game before, either AD&D or 5e and sit down and play it and you'll be fine because we really worked hard on our progenitor characters to make them easy to understand and have all the relevant information there on the sheet so you don't have to look stuff up. But I still will have spell cards there for the 5e game.
We'll have that kind of stuff that we need to make it easier for you guys that are kind enough to run these games. And so that's my hope is that... And they're almost completely sold out. I think there are 400 seats available in each and they're almost all gone. I think we're down to one has 10 and one has eight or something like that. So it's going to be awesome.
I just can't wait to see people rolling through these one-hour adventures and being able to take out go home with a cool cardstock pre-generated character and hopefully some real good cool memories of being able to play this immersive game in Dwarven Forged with great DMs. Man, do we have good DMs who are willing to volunteer to play this too, to run it for us. It's awesome.
So that's for me the highlight. There'd be lots of other cool stuff, but that's what I'm really excited about.
One that I'm excited about is you've got a number of seminars that make me think of the Gen Con series, which you were a part of, where Peter Atkinson brought teams in to talk about the creation of each edition. And you're mirroring that. You've got these different sessions where you've got, you know, the four main leads talking about what it was like to build fourth edition.
You've got Peter Atkinson there talking about third edition and all these different, you know, seminars. I want to I mean, can you record those? Yeah. I feel like they should be recorded.
Yeah, I feel like they should be too. And I'm going to try. Yes, I'm definitely going to try to. We have two streaming areas as well. And so we have a lot of tech on hand. And I hope that I'm just, yeah, that's on this week. So we'll explore that. Because you're absolutely right.
yeah i mean how how many more times are we going to get to have a real 2e panel right you know with anything yeah yeah i know it's a treasure and it's amazing what we learn i think for the hobby itself to and and it's not just even factoids but just perspectives right when to to understand what people understood at a given time like i was watching one of the shows that gen con did where where steve winter talks about the knowledge around
broken characters and what players do when they have too many options. And if you look at two, you might ask, did designers know this? And so it's like, OK, they did. You know, they did really understand this. They knew this was a problem and they were trying to balance the business side with, you know, you give players too many options, they'll break the game for DMs.
And so it's just great to capture that. And yeah, I'm really excited. So that's something I'm really looking forward to are these seminars. There are a number of them that I will try to make.
Yeah. All credit to Mike Merles for honchoing that. He did a great job wrangling everyone and put that all together. So thank you, Mike, for that. Yeah.
Yeah. And a growing dealer hall. Every year, it seems like there's a few more options and more companies coming to show off their stuff. The show is growing at a...
manageable rate which was which was great now maybe it doesn't feel manageable anymore but uh from where you started to where it is now it just seems like such a great show for people that want great games great panels to to see all the stuff it's it's all there
It's really good. Very kind of you to say, but yes, that we try to stay in front of it. It's not to be reactive with our growth to anticipate it because it's going to happen. And we're already up this year, about a thousand attendees over last year. And fortunately we took steps in our, um, our volunteer structure and how, you know, how we do things.
Um, for you, you'll see when you, if you will call me, look a little different and things like that. We're constantly tweaking things because what I just, cannot stand is having the experience affected by crowd size.
We're going to cap, we're going to do something before... We'll never get to the point where it's a queue kind of show or an overcrowded vendor hall where you can't even get through or someone with a backpack clears you out and stuff. You just can't have it. I grew up going to shows and everything we do is informed by my and the guy's experiences at shows, what we like and what we didn't like.
I very much appreciate that and the real gaming experience. Our show is about gaming. It's the common game and fan cons are great and there are more industries, things where you get together and have more mixers and great. But ours really is about sitting on the table and playing these games that we love and we're always going to have that as the focus.
As far as other publishers, you're absolutely right. It's cool to have Catalyst Labs come in as heavily as they are. A big part of the Asthma Day leadership are coming this year to check us out. So it's these things that keep going like that because I think we have a good reputation in the industry for what we do and how we do it. So it's pretty neat to see. It was never the goal.
Believe me, man, we were just happy there wasn't just us standing in a hotel back in 2013.
Some people actually came. You've had a very thoughtful way of going about it and every year it's been a great experience. Appreciate it.
All right, Teos, any last questions for Alex before we let him go?
I both wanted Gamehole to be tomorrow and I want to play my first Easter Marches tomorrow. And also I'd be happy if I had another two weeks of planning. So that's usually the sweet spot to say that I'm very excited for the show. No further questions, Your Honor.
All right. Well, I feel the same way and I look forward to taking that short little flight over to Madison in a week and two days to say hello to everyone at GameHulkCon. And Alex, thank you so much for sitting down with us and sharing some of your information.
no joy as always and i can't wait to see you guys in person next week all righty hey it was great to talk to alex super excited about that no organized play campaign and very excited to be going to game hall con very soon what do you think teos uh yeah i'm feeling a lot better now that i spent the week in preparing for game hall so i'm in good shape to run people through a trap death filled dungeon um that'll be really neat
I am doing your two hour thing. Is that what you're talking about? Oh, I'm in one of the sessions that you're doing. So I expect to die horribly many times and maybe my character too.
I will do my best to murder you educationally for the love of knowledge.
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I am at alphastream.org. From there, you can find all my things.
And I am on the socials at Sean Merwin. And the podcast is also on the socials at Mastering D&D. So we've gone through news. We've taken questions. We know all about Gamehole Con and Western, Eastern March. I almost said Western March. It's Eastern Marches. What are we going to do now?
Well, clearly we've got to find the most game-braving combinations across 2024 D&D, 2014 D&D, Tales of the Valiant, Grim Hollow, you name it. We've just got to come up with the most T-Rex, Horde of Pixies turned into T-Rex level stuff.
That reminds me, I have to make some really broken stuff to put into this new book, and then I'm going to play the character. Yeah. I'm ready. Yeah. Always thinking just not well.