The Lazy RPG Podcast - D&D and RPG News and GM Prep from Sly Flourish
2024 D&D for Free – Lazy RPG Talk Show
Mon, 09 Sep 2024
D&D and RPG news and commentary by Mike Shea of https://slyflourish.com Contents 00:00 Show Start 01:13 Sly Flourish News: Mike Loses a Bet 02:59 D&D & RPG News: D&D 2024 and Free D&D on D&D Beyond 14:06 D&D & RPG News: Rich Lescoulflair Talking Phantasy Star RPG on Morrus's Podcast 15:42 D&D & RPG News: Matt Coleville on Eldritch Lorecast Talking About Project Sigil 19:35 D&D & RPG News: Free Hex Crawl Rules from Cursed Scroll 4 23:26 Product Spotlight: Broken Weave for 5e by Cubicle 7 36:24 DM Tip: Distance, Activity, and Attitude for Random Encounters 48:18 Patreon Question: Rewriting Published Adventures for Table Use 52:09 Patreon Question: Building Your Own Pantheon 55:38 Patreon Question: Using the Eight Steps for Published Adventures Links Subscribe to the Sly Flourish Newsletter Support Sly Flourish on Patreon Buy Sly Flourish Books: 2024 D&D Free Rules on D&D Beyond Rich Lescouflair on Phantasy Star RPG on Morrus's Podcast Matt Coleville on Eldritch Lorecast Free Hex Crawl Rules from Arcane Library Broken Weave for 5e Reaction Tables Across the Years Choosing the Right Steps from Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master
Today on the Lazy RPG Talk Show, we're going to talk about the D&D 2024 Player's Handbook and Free Rules and their implementation on D&D Beyond. Rich Leskaflair, my friend who made Esper Genesis, is over on the EN World podcast talking about the Phantasy Star role-playing game he's working on.
Matt Colville had a very interesting talk over on the Eldrick Lorecast about D&D Direct and Project Sigil. We're going to look at the free hex crawl rules that were made available by Kelsey Dion for Shadow Dark as part of the preview to Curse Scroll 4. We're going to do a deep dive into the broken weave of role-playing game by Cubicle 7.
I'm going to talk about shaking up encounters with distance, activity, and reaction roles. And we're going to cover questions from the September 2024 Patreon Q&A all today on the Lazy RPG Talk Show. I'm Mike Shea, your pal from Sly Flourish, here to talk about all things in tabletop role-playing games. This show is brought to you by the patrons of Sly Flourish.
Patrons get access to the lazy DM community over on our discord server. They get access to a whole bunch of tips, tricks, tools, supplements, adventures, source books, and things to help you run your role-playing games. And they help me put on shows like this to the patrons of Sly Flourish. Thank you so much for your outstanding support.
I lost a bet and that I'm, I'm fulfilling my bet with my index card coffee mug. And also I didn't have to do this. Retitling the show to ring slinger was right. What was ring slinger right about? Let me enjoy my coffee first. Ringslinger was right because I had two bets. I placed two bets and I was confident about both bets.
One of my philosophies about betting is if you can afford it, if you can afford to lose and you have a bet that is greater than a 50-50 chance, but the rewards are 50-50, you should always take them. So I believed there were two things where I felt the odds were definitely in my favor.
One of the things I felt strongly about, and I won the bet, was whether or not there would be a day one errata for the 2024 Player's Handbook. And there is. It's like a day minus 18 errata. They've already been errata. There's already been plenty of things that have changed on D&D Beyond for things that are already in print in the Player's Handbook. We'll try to talk about that a little bit.
So I won that bet. Luckily, that one meant actually sending books around. And luckily, now I don't have to send a book around. But the other bet I bet on was that I felt that Wizards of the Coast would not be able to have a fully functional 2024 character builder by the time the physical book came out. And I was wrong.
Ringslinger, who I placed the bet with, a fellow community member over on the Sly Flourish Discord server, was correct that they would have it available. I thought, like... There's a lot of spaghetti code going on D&D Beyond. It's got to be a real pain in the ass to manage. And I just felt like there's enough stuff changing with 2024 that I didn't feel like they would have it ready.
And I felt like the odds were greater than a 50-50 chance that that was likely. But I was wrong, because here it is. And we're going to talk about that right now. Because, in fact, we are at this recording about a week, a little bit more than a week, before the general release of the 2024 D&D Player's Handbook.
Both available in stores overall, generally available, and also fully available on D&D Beyond. For those who are Masters Tier subscribers, who pre-ordered the books... They already have access to the D&D 2024 rules on D&D Beyond, including a fully functional character builder.
It's a little, it was a little wonky at first in my own experiments with it, where it started off by saying, oh, you only have the basic characters, but then suddenly had access to other characters. My wife actually tried it out. We'll actually pull it up. My wife tried it out and she had pre-ordered the book and she did not have access to the character builder.
And we were wondering like, why, why is there no access to the, why is there not access to the core classes for her? And it turned out it's because she's not a master tier subscriber. If you are a hero tier subscriber, like, which is mostly what players would be. The, they only get access one week before the book comes out, which is Tuesday. So this coming Tuesday.
So she'll have access to be able to use it on Tuesday. However, she does have access to see the whole book so she can go read the book. She just can't use it in the compendium. So, or she can't use it in the character builder. So that was interesting. Not, not really a complaint, you know, it wasn't a big deal.
It was just, it's a complicated, it's a complicated system, but not only did they put the 2024 player's handbook, uh, on D&D Beyond in a fully functional character builder way. You can build a fighter, right? Here's my 2024 fighter. I can pick my, you know, what skills I want. I can pick my fighting style. We're going to go with great weapon fighting. Weapon masteries.
I can pick my weapon masteries. This is a brand new feature. I'm going to go with great sword for greys. I'm going to go for... Let's see. I want something. I'll do... the heavy crossbow for, or no javelin, I think to slow and want something to not, I got to have topple, right? What's my topple thing going to be? It can do with a Lance battle axe. We'll do with a battle axe. Right.
So fully featured material to build characters in the compendium. But not only did they release the 2024 players handbook rules, they also released what they are referring to as the D&D free rules. And the free rules right now are for character classes, fighter, cleric.
the rogue and wizard with one subclass for each of those but you can build full 20th level characters of those four classes for free you don't have to buy anything at all you don't even have to have a subscription to dnd beyond to be able to do that you can go on to dnd beyond with no payment whatsoever for anything and build using all of the dnd beyond tools a full character
In many episodes over the past while, I've been pretty critical of D&D Beyond because whatever material you have on D&D Beyond, you don't really own. And it means you can't download it. It means that they can change things underneath you. It means that you can't move it to another system, right?
Whatever investments you have in your material on D&D Beyond is at the whims of Hasbro and Watsi to decide whether or not you continue to have access to it and how long you have access to it. But the other side of this is how convenient a tool like D&D Beyond is and how many different models exist for you to interact with D&D.
And the idea that you can for no money at all, for no payment at all, that's pretty nice. And it means that there's a really low bar for people to get into D&D and tabletop role-playing games.
that with a tool that you can use that works well on a phone, it works well on tablets, it works well on a desktop machine, and it's certainly a fast process to be able to build a character out using the Character Builder. And you don't have to pay anything.
And the other one is you don't even, if you have a DM or if you as a group decide to pay for a master tier subscription and a master tier subscription fee is $5 a month, but any books that you buy can be shared with up to 60 people. It's like five campaigns and 12 people each or something like that.
That means all of the players that connect to all of your campaigns get access to the full core books that you paid for. Without having to pay anything on their own. Now, if they want to have more than a couple of characters, they'll subscribe, but it's like $2, $2 or $3 a month for them to subscribe to get that.
So it's a lot of stuff that you get and a lot of different models that you can use to decide how to get access to the stuff that you want access to on D&D Beyond. That's, that's impressive. Like when you think about it from a different angle. That's really impressive. It certainly is. The idea that, again, getting back to the idea that, think about all of the design work that went into D&D 2024.
All of these people, for their full-time jobs, was to build out this new version of D&D based on rules that, again, had full-time people building it out. And they put it out, and you can now build first to 20th level characters in four classes. For free, right? No subscription fee and no... You don't have to buy anything else.
And that means for new people who are just getting into the game, you can get them started with that. They don't have to buy a player's handbook. They don't have to subscribe to any online service. They don't have to buy anything else. They just get access to it. That's very impressive. And they did it before the release. Like, again, I lost a bet, right?
The bet was that I didn't think they'd have it available. And sure enough, they had it available. That's... that's a pretty, that's pretty good because the flip side of this is the core books, right? I've got, I've got, we now, we are now a household with three copies of the new 2024 players handbook. I bought two special edition covers. One, I bought myself one, Michelle bought for herself.
And then this one. And by the way, this is, you know, I, I should, I should mention a couple of disclaimers. One is wizards of the coast did send me a preview copy of the original players handbook in physical form. And,
and because of work that i did on dnd beyond back before wizards of the coast owned it i have a dnd insider account on dnd beyond which means i get access to all of the products that they release on dnd beyond including pre-orders and stuff so i had access to the dnd 2024 full rules on dnd beyond the minute it came out which is very nice thanks to adam bradford for hooking me up a long time ago so i'm biased in that opinion right like i didn't i didn't buy my copy on on on dnd beyond if
However, my wife did, my wife does, she's a regular subscriber and she bought the book herself. So we are a household that has paid money for this. So that's really impressive. And you think about the cost and like, first of all, Wizards of the Coast did put a pretty reasonable cost on a 384 page source book of $50.
This is the same price that the original 2014 D&D Player's Handbook was, was also $50. but it's still 50 bucks and, and, and there's 50 bucks just for one of three core rule books that you need in order to play the game. That's a pretty hefty investment. And, and having worked with players on the idea of like, let's try other role playing games, you know, it's a big investment.
They're not going to want to drop 50 or 60 bucks on a game where like they might only play for a few months, even though like still the price is still really worth it. If you're playing for a few months, paying for a core book, isn't really that out of hand. Still a big investment.
So the idea that like, hey, we have another way that you can enjoy and play this game and build out characters and print your characters, by the way, print them out on PDFs. That's free. It's a pretty good deal. So I think we can live with two different understandings of D&D Beyond.
So understanding number one is that any of the material that you buy, which you're really leasing it because you don't really have full access to it. You can't download it. You can't move it to other tools. You can't print it. You can't save it as a PDF. Any of the stuff
that you have there, you're still at the whim of whatever Hasbro decides to do with D&D Beyond, which so far is like, try to support players as much as possible, right? They're on, if they are on the in shitification curve, they are at step one, which is make a service that people really like.
And this is an example of step one, making a service that people really like, which is really good tool that that's free to use for a lot of people, free to use a very low price to use. Then we get into step two and step three and step four, but right now it's a step one. So we're at the best point.
It's a valuable tool with a lot of different ways that you can interact with it beyond like, hey, I can subscribe at different tiers. I can decide whether or not to purchase books. Our group can purchase books once for all of us and share them among our group. Those are all really valuable things that you can do. but you don't own it.
So it can be both a really valuable tool that works well for you now and will probably work well for you in the short term. We don't know what medium and long term looks like. We don't know what five years out looks like, but we know right now it's a really good solid tool.
And if you decide that, hey, the time and effort and energy that you invest in it is worth it, again, with things like being able to share your books, being able to purchase for one group and everybody has access, different tiers of subscription. If you decide that that's worth it, it's totally worth it. Now, you might also say, yeah, except I really want to own stuff too.
And by owning stuff, buying the book is a good way to go. And then being comfortable building characters out using the physical book and not an online tool is also a good way to have a resilient hold on your hobby with D&D. All of these things can be true simultaneously. It's not like one has to supersede another. So I think that that is something that we can look at.
A couple other points I want to make. One, right now, the D&D free rules that are available on D&D Beyond only include the four core classes, the fighter, the rogue, the wizard, and the mage, but are going to have all classes available. They're only going to have one subclass each, the core subclass for each class. But the free tier is going to have access to all 12 character classes.
So, you know, they're actually expanding the free rules out as well. I think that is pretty good. That means there's even more capability to be able to play D&D for very, very little money. Or free, really. You can play for free. And that's, I think, a pretty good deal.
so it's really interesting to see that and you know we're gonna i'm always you know how this operates is something that is definitely on my mind and something that we look at a lot but that was something that i as soon as i saw and again i didn't think they were going to have a character builder up and running by the time the game came out i was wrong ringslinger was right as notified by this three by five card taped to my coffee mug but it's still very impressive right when i was playing with it and i was looking at it and i was reading the books it's still very impressive
I would still, and I don't want to like end it on like, you know, yeah, but it would still be great if they had PDFs available. I would still like to be able to download a digital copy of my book along with having online access to the tool. But I do have a physical version of the book and the physical version of the book is even more resilient than a PDF is.
I don't know if you're looking for a recommendation. My recommendation is if you want to use DDB on great, but I would also buy a copy of the physical book too. My friend Rich Lescaflair was on EN World. I love Morris's unofficial tabletop RPG talk. I think it's a fantastic podcast. I really enjoy it.
It's one of my three top RPG podcasts that I listen to, along with Mastering Dungeons, with my friend Teos Abadieh and Sean Merwin, and Eldrick Lorecast, the podcast that comes out of Ghostfire Gaming, with a bunch of awesome people on it. And I love all three of those podcasts. I listen to them all every week. And my friend Rich Lescaflair, who is the developer for Esper Genesis...
was on talking about so they had a really good conversation about dnd direct and stuff like that but they had an interview with rich lescaflair talking about a new rpg that he's working on for the game fantasy star fantasy star is really cool because it was one of my first favorite japanese role-playing games that i played as a kid on the sega master system not a lot of people had a sega master system but apparently both rich and i did
And Fantasy Star is a really interesting role playing game. He knew a lot about the history of Fantasy Star that I didn't know about why they made it, who made it, the interesting diverse group of people that made it when it came out. And he talks about the development of the Fantasy Star role playing game and how he got the license to make this role playing game from Sega.
And so that is a book that he's coming out. I will certainly be talking about the fantasy star role-playing game when it gets closer or when it, at the point where it is, it is, you know, developed and released, but I think it's an outstanding podcast. Really fun. I love rich, rich is awesome. And it's really fun to listen and talk about it.
So I would recommend checking out Morse's unofficial tabletop RPG talk, cause it's a fantastic podcast, but also talking, listening to the interview with Rich Liska player talking about fantasy star. So really, really, really fun time. Matt Colville was on the Eldrick Lorecast show, which is both a YouTube series and a podcast, and talking a lot about Project Sigil.
One of the unique perspectives that Matt has in this is he worked in the video game industry for some time. before he started MCDM as a role-playing game company and before he got into that.
So he has a lot of interesting insights, I thought, and an interesting opinion about what's happening with Project Sigil, what direction they want to take it, how they want to, you know, the monetization of models and effects and things like that in the game. I think he and just what it means for virtual tabletops in role playing game space as overall.
Matt, MCDM is making a virtual tabletop for Draw Steel, their role playing game, which is a as they refer to it, a tactical cinematic fantasy role playing game. I forget what the fourth fourth term is. But they are making their own virtual tabletop. So he has an insight into what that is like as well. So I thought it was a really interesting take.
You know, there's a lot of us around here, a lot of RPG pundits who have lots of things to say about virtual tabletops and about Project Sigil, which is Wizards of the Coast 3D virtual tabletop and all sorts of stuff like that.
But I don't think we have the same point of view of somebody who worked in the video game space and also is running a company that is making their own virtual tabletop while also is watching this. I'll give you one insight that he had, which I think was really fascinating. Never thought about this before.
He always thought that we often bring up the idea that tabletop role-playing games came out first and then computer games came out second. And so computer games were always sort of figuring out how to do whatever tabletop games did. And he brought up, no, they all happen at the same time. Like video games were happening at the same time tabletop games are coming out.
And from the very first role-playing games, people who had access to computers were figuring out how to turn those tabletop role-playing games into computer games. So tabletop role-playing games really grew alongside computer games, computer role-playing games in parallel, not one chasing the other.
Which actually kind of gives you an idea about why the popularity of tabletop role-playing games grew so much at a point where video games were kind of at their peak so far, I think, over the past 10 years or so.
And then thinking about how during the fourth edition times, and this came from Andy Collins and Rob Hainsoe, who were talking about this on the Gen Con TV D&D 50th anniversary specials that they did. where he talked about how the target audience for fourth edition were World of Warcraft players and how they were trying to design a game that would resonate with World of Warcraft players.
You know, that was often like a common complaint about fourth edition. It turns out it was directly true. So that brings up a thing because it's like, well, you jumped your track, right? You know, why not focus on tabletop role playing games, which grew up alongside computer games, right?
Instead of saying, oh, we need to jump the track and get over to where computer games are because that's the future. For so many years, I thought the future of tabletop games was computer games. And what Matt really kind of focuses on and then one of the things he mentions is, no, they're parallel things that grew up together rather than one building off of the other exclusively.
I thought that was a really interesting insight. So I think this is an outstanding, again, I love Eldritch Lorecast. It's a great video. It's a great podcast. It's also available on YouTube. And I would recommend checking it out and subscribing in your favorite podcatcher and listening to one with Matt Colville talking about it because it was really fascinating stuff.
What was funny is I was listening to it while building a physical Dwarven Forge setup for my in-person Wednesday game. So they were talking all about virtual tabletops and I'm busy doing a 3D terrain setup for a physical in-person game. That was pretty funny. This past week, Kelsey Dion released a new newsletter for the Shadow Dark newsletter.
If you're not subscribed to the Shadow Dark newsletter, you ought to because you're going to get lots of really cool stuff. And one of the things she released was a preview of Cursed Scroll 4. So she has announced in a couple of different places that there's going to be three new Cursed Scroll books, Cursed Scroll 4, 5, and 6. I love the Cursed Scroll series.
books there's one two and three already exist you can go get them on on arcane library i have all three and i love them and and curse scroll one has been the catalyst of my 40 ish session campaign that i've run for shadow dark i really enjoyed it i think the curse girls are fantastic she is putting together three new curse scrolls four five and six
and said that she is going to be launching a Kickstarter for these, I believe, in early 2025. So there are little ways out. But in the meantime, she did send out a preview of Cursed Scroll 4, which includes a whole segment about sort of new refined rules for doing hex crawls. And hex generation. So I will link to this. This is a PDF available on the Shadowdar, on the Arcane Library website.
So I will link to this in the show notes. And it is a good preview of the kind of stuff we can expect for building out hexes, what's inside of a hex. They're not all fully filled in. There's a lot of blanks in here. The intention is that you can kind of fill in the blanks. I think also she's probably still filling them in herself as she works on this.
and a new version of hex crawling rules i've actually seen this on the on the shadow dark discord server before but now sort of a refined list of exactly what the steps are and the process are is for hex crawling alternative set for hex crawling an alternative set of rules for hex crawling from what's in the core book again available for free so the preview itself is 14 pages talks about your different tasks talks about you know how to handle weather and
What are the different things characters can do on a journey? You know, the full procedure of the steps that you take. I actually wrote up my own little procedure like this that I was doing when I was doing hex crawls. I'll probably go back to it when I do hex crawls in my Shadow Dark game. Weather and how weather can affect the game. A good table for this.
What do you do when you camp and how does that work? There was some little tricky bits in the Shadow Dark Core book about how often to roll for monster checks and things like that when the characters are camping and when they're traveling outside as opposed to traveling inside of a dungeon. This one kind of clarifies some of that stuff. This is interesting, a whole section on fast traveling.
What are places that they can do fast travel because they already know we've traveled this path before so we don't have to worry too much about it. So that's a pretty interesting segment.
safe this doesn't look safe it says safe hexes and then it shows a person stabbing somebody it doesn't seem very safe to me if you want pcs wish to turn a hex safe they must declare it then the gm generates a number of threats in the hex based on its dangers this is kind of cool this is sort of like you know things that you have to deal with in a hex to clear it out so that the hex is then safe and that way you can take your enemies and put them on an altar and stab them with a lightning bolt shaped dagger i suppose that that's what we mean by safe
Here are the kinds of different threats. Again, you can kind of fill them out or roll a list, kind of make your own. Obviously, more room here. And then some other collection of ideas for Shadow Dark treasure maps leading to things. So really neat. I mean, kind of a neat preview of the kind of stuff that we should expect to see in a new future scroll. I'm really looking forward to these.
you know, can't, can't wait. And I suppose the good news is like, I'm finishing up my shadow dark campaign. Then I am moving to probably almost certainly over to tales of the valiant for a while. So the next time that I dive back into shadow dark, hopefully these curse scrolls will be out and I can run them. So really, really neat stuff again, available for free.
I will link to it down in the show notes. You can find it there. and a neat way to look at hex core rules that again you can take ideas from this and put it in pretty much any rpg you don't have to just use them in shadow dark a lot of the stuff that's in shadow dark you can use in other rpgs as well so i really like that
Cubicle 7 has been just knocking things out of the park over and over again. I have gushed about their book, Uncharted Journeys, for a while now as a big, thick book based just on traveling around in different, from place to place. I think it's a really outstanding book. I like it a lot. And I highly recommend it if you're looking for like really rich descriptions.
I keep pulling books out and then I can't put them back on the shelf because the shelf stuff collapses. They put out another book called A Life Well Lived right here, which is a life path system for 5E.
So if you want a sort of a different way of determining how your character came about, where they came from, this is sort of like a big extension of the kind of stuff that they had in Xanathar's Guide to Everything about building a backstory for your character from piece to piece. And also like how to have your character grow during a session and even how to retire your character.
Really interesting book. One of the things that I love about cubicle sevens philosophies is they are really aiming their attention at things no one else has really done or not done to the degree that they are putting their attention on it. So other books have definitely put in things for like how to explore from place to place. Most of the time, that's a subsection of another book.
They're like, we're going to write a big ass book just about that. Or other ones talk about like, well, what are different ways to kind of do your life path? But they're like, we're doing a whole book just about life path stuff. Also, the quality of their material is top notch. It looks beautiful. It reads really well. The design is fantastic.
It's as good as any other role playing game book that you're going to find out there. They're really, really excellent. So when the Kickstarter for Broken Weave came and went, I didn't really pay attention to it. And the reason why is when I heard about Broken Weave, I was like, oh, it was kind of like a post-apocalyptic fantasy RPG.
And I was like, man, I'm a little burned out on post-apocalyptic stuff. I don't really need another post-apocalyptic adventure in it. I thought it was something else. So I didn't pay much attention to it. But they reached out to me and they did give me a preview copy, both a PDF and a physical preview copy of Broken Weave. I got the preview copy for the PDF.
It sat on my desktop for a while while I was doing other things. And then I'm like, and I had, I think it was Friday, Thursday or Friday. It's kind of done with everything. And I opened it up and I read it and I was like, holy cow, this is really cool. I can't believe I missed this. This is really cool. And I really liked it.
So I reached out again and said, hey, is there a chance I could get the physical version? And it was at my house in a day. So they gave me the physical copy of the Broken Weave RPG, which is really, really beautiful. Again, as beautiful as any of the books that Cubicle 7 has put out. So Broken Weave is a really interesting product.
Broken Weave, it is, as I described it, a post-apocalyptic fantasy role-playing game. The part of it that I missed was the fantasy part of it. When I think post-apocalyptic, I think things like Apocalypse World and modern apocalyptic takes more so than I think about it from a fantasy perspective.
But what they've done with Broken Weave, there's a few things they've done with the story, and then there's a few things they've done with the design of this book that I think are really outstanding and worth highlighting. So from a story perspective, it is a world in decay, a fantasy world in decay. Imagine if you took the Forgotten Realms And all of the gods were dead.
And magic no longer worked the way magic operates at all. And there's no real divine power anymore. And the world is sort of falling apart. And it's filling up with this sort of negative energy. So they call it decay. Decay is this sort of...
supernatural negative energy that now flows over the whole world and it has corrupted monsters and corrupted people and corrupted places and it kind of grows you however aren't just slopping around in the decay hoping to find a dead fish to eat you are actually trying to build up another form of energy called hope and
And you have a section here, they call it hope remains that you are building your own dwelling, your own bastion, your own like sort of like a town or a village or a, you know, your own sort of centralized area and growing hope out from there to push back the decay to make the world better. And that's something that I think a lot of post-apocalyptic-y sort of games lose.
Like Shadow of the Demon Lord is an example of sort of a post-apocalyptic fantasy or apocalypse. It's not post-apocalyptic. It's during the apocalypse. And in Shadow of the Demon Lord, like the world is dying. Like terrible things are happening. And no matter what you kind of do, that's still kind of,
happening right in this one you are you are actively making the world a better place and you think like maybe by the end of a campaign you haven't made the whole world better but you've certainly made the your region of the world better you've managed to push the decay out and bring more hope to it so i the positive focus inside this pretty negative world i think is a a good unique take it reminds me a lot of numenera numenera is not a
post-apocalyptic fantasy role-playing game it is a high fantasy high science fantasy role-playing game but there have been many civilizations in numenera that have fallen and the characters and all of the npcs of the region are using the technology of these previous ages to build up in the same way it's a positive role-playing game well this is also at its heart a positive role-playing game even though the world around it is very very negative so
Now, so that's a pretty neat story idea. As far as I could tell, so I called this a deep dive, but it's not a deep dive because I skim read the book, right? Like I got it three days ago, so I haven't read everything about it. But it appears, so some of this stuff might be wrong, but it appears, for example, there are no clerics and there are no wizards. There's no spell section, really.
There isn't like, you know, the way that the characters interact with the world is differently than the divine and arcane magic that you would find with wizards and clerics. But there's still the typical fantasy tropes of like monsters and monsters that have mutated. There's a whole section about mutating monsters that are your kind of standard fair monsters in new and interesting ways.
So artwork is fantastic, right? Look at this. That's like an owlbear from hell. Like that's the worst owlbear in the world. You don't want to face that thing. The haven, the haven is the community that you kind of, you actually build it with your players, like you and the players do some world building together to build out your haven.
And then the haven is sort of your centralized area where you go out into the wilds and try to take the decayed monsters and this whole push away this force of decay to make the world, to make the world better.
beautiful artwork really neat design i love the story idea for it and it is definitely built along a lot of the same kind of core roots that other cubicle 7 things are on there so for example when you build out your character there's sort of a character creation life path system similar to what they have certainly not to the same degree because it's one book and not not a whole thing but oh
my books all collapsed a life well lived so they know about how to make a life path system and they were able to kind of put an abbreviated version of that life path system into into broken weave i think i broke my broken weave i didn't break it it's still there the weave is still my broken weave book is still woven so that's good
Still same similar kind of lineages system of dwarf, halfling, human, and the forgotten are sort of your races. Classes are totally new classes. Harrowed, the maker, the sage, the seeker, the speaker, and the warden. Again, kind of an interesting sort of almost like a Numenera-based system for how you make your characters out. And then subclasses, it looks like about three different subclasses.
So this is where I want to talk about the design of the book itself, which I think is also really fascinating. What exactly is this book? Is it a campaign source book? Is it a whole 5e system? Where does it sit? And the answer is, it is a very thick wrapper around the core rules of 5e. And the core rules, so, and where would you get those core rules?
Well, you probably get those core rules from having a 2014 Dungeons & Dragons Player's Handbook. But you could get those core rules from a normal system reference document like the 5.1 SRD. You could get the D&D Basic rules. The interesting thing is this book has pretty much everything in it except the actual rules of how to play.
That's the one part that this book doesn't have and expects that you're going to have somewhere else. Now, I think that expectation is probably pretty solid. It's very unlikely that a group is going to pick up Broken Weave and not have any other role-playing game. It's also interesting, though, that it isn't a complete role-playing game unto itself. That it really is, as I said, a thick wrapper.
And what I mean by a thick wrapper is that it doesn't just have subclasses that sit on top of the core D&D 2024 classes. It actually has entirely new classes, right? Entirely new classes. It's got equipment. It's got, you know, rules and tests and stuff like that. It's got travel. It's got monsters. It's got the whole regions of the world. It has everything.
But it really expects that underneath it, you have some kind of existing 5E rule set, even though the only part of that rule set that you're going to use is the actual rules for running the game. That like, you know, if you were to look at the D&D 2024 rules, it'd be like the first 20 pages. It doesn't include, you don't need any of the class stuff. You don't need any of the race stuff.
You don't need any of the spell stuff. You don't need any of the monsters. Now, monsters you probably need because there's really not enough monsters in here to run a full campaign. And instead, they have this thing called Decade Transformations where it talks about how to modify an existing creature.
to turn them into something that makes sense for this setting, which is where you get those like crazy mutated owlbears and stuff like that. So monsters you probably need from another source book as well. So I thought that that was an interesting design choice.
I don't think it hurts the product that it isn't a complete book on itself because I think it would be significantly bigger if it was, and it would have a lot of redundant rules in here, especially if you're already used to playing 5e. If you're used to playing D&D 2014 or other versions of 5e, you already have a lot of that stuff.
But it's an interesting, like the way that this book kind of fits in is something that I haven't really seen in an RPG before, where it isn't a standalone RPG, but it replaces, I mean, you know, 90%, I would say 95% except for monsters. If you include monsters, it's like 60% because monsters have so much stuff in it.
So the idea that you can wrap this around and pretty much if you're used to running 5e, if you've been running 5e, you probably don't need to go reference a 5e rulebook very much because a lot of those rules we kind of have in our heads at this point. Like those of us who have been playing 5e for 10 years already have a lot of those rules in our head about how we're running this game.
So that's not a criticism of the book, that it doesn't have those rules in it. I just thought it was an interesting, again, I like the way that Cubicle 7 kind of experiments with the kinds of products that it makes and sort of aims products at a certain slice of the hobby with an intention of doing something no one else has really done before.
I wouldn't say that they're the only one that's ever made a post-apocalyptic fantasy role-playing game before. And I don't, they're probably not the only one that's ever made like a 5e wrapper like this before.
But I think like you bringing those two things together and saying, hey, here's this very unique, very focused setting with like a really clear feel to it and an entire replacement for all of the core features of your 5e role-playing game. but still expects that you already understand how 5e operates, I think is a really interesting... I think that that's a really interesting take.
So do I recommend it? I think if you are interested in a post-apocalyptic fantasy role-playing game and you like Cubicle 7's products, you're not going to be disappointed. My general rule of thumb is I get the PDF... If I just kind of want to read it and get inspired from it. And I buy the physical version if I plan on running it.
So you can decide like, is this something you definitely want to run? I think this would be a really fun. You could be a very fun, short, like 10 session campaign setting. You could also do a longer campaign setting in it. And it is a very unique style that I think has an interesting place in all of the different role-playing games that we play. So very cool book. Definitely take a look at it.
This is the Broken Weave role-playing game by Cubicle 7 available now. You can pick it up right off of their website and you can find links to it in the show notes.
and again they sent me a free copy of the pdf and they sent me a free copy of the hardcover source book so keep that in mind while you're listening to my review random encounters are a staple in role-playing games and in fantasy role-playing games and in dungeons and dragons for the past 50 years the idea that sometimes the characters are exploring an area you roll a die to see whether or not they're going to have an encounter if they are on a certain die roll or something like that you would roll on an encounter list find some monsters throw those monsters at your characters and off they go
There's a lot of discussion and a lot of debate about random encounters, whether you should have them at all, whether they take away from the story or take up too much time. Lots of different issues that go on with random encounters. Old school role playing games love random encounters and they're used often. I actually love random encounters. I love to use them to inspire ideas.
I love to watch the game shift in ways that I'm not used to. I love to take encounter roles. and turn them into things that are relevant to the story, like figure out ways to take whatever the random encounter was and make it relevant to the story. That's something that I really like.
There's one component to random encounters that old school games really embraces that in some cases have made their way to more modern role-playing games, but not always. And that is a few other types of roles that you can add to a random encounter that further shake them up. And there are three of them that we're going to talk about today.
Distance, how close or how far away the group of monsters begins. Activity, what are those monsters up to when you might run into them? What is that group up to when you might run into them? And reaction roles, how do those monsters react to the characters?
Different systems have handled these three roles or would have not even have all three of these roles, but might focus on one or two of them or not have them at all. But it's really interesting to look back at where they came from.
And while doing a little bit of research in this, I found an article called Exploring OSR from Simulacrum is the name of the blog, a Blogspot blog, Exploring OSR Design, that talks about specifically like the reaction table.
And how it has evolved over the course of D&D and goes through talking about it from OD&D, you had like a two to five was a negative reaction, six to eight uncertain, nine to 12 was a positive reaction. AD&D, it expanded from immediately violent. In this case, it was a D100 role.
And you would go from violent or immediately attacking all the way to enthusiastically friendly and immediate acceptance. That was an AD&D. So we have OD&D and AD&D. Second edition, you get this idea of like, how do the players characters act? And then how do the monsters act depending on how the players, in this case, it looks like a 2D10 roll that you would roll to see how that's going on.
Really fun article. If you want to learn more about this kind of stuff, you can find the link to this article in the show notes where it talks about it. And then it gets into like, you know, what are some of the things that they're doing? You know, again, more reactions, immediately attack, hostile, probable, possible attack, uncertain. They could be confused.
No attack the monster leaves or considers other offers, and so on. That is in the Moldvay, Holmes Moldvay Basic Edition.
The Redbox Edition had a totally different one with like this weird, and one of the things he brings up in this article is the idea that you actually had to roll multiple times to figure out what the reaction was, because you'd have a first roll, and then depending on the first roll, you'd roll a second roll, and maybe even like a third roll. So really detailed on exactly what they're,
What is their reaction? The Rules Cyclopedia, which sort of encapsulates the BECMI set into one big book, they further refined it into this of, again, back to a single monster role of a reaction table that I think was based on, in this case, they had like a role where you could potentially have a modifier that would make them more likely to be friendly. So that's pretty interesting.
And then he talks about what he does. But it's really fascinating to see how different systems handle this kind of thing. So Shadow Dark, for example, in the back of the book and on their DM screen has these three things in there. Distance, how close or far away are they? Activity, what is that group doing? And then reaction.
And in this case, it's 2D6 plus the charisma modifier of like whoever's talking to them. And this way you can kind of roll to determine what they are doing at any given time. Very straightforward system for handling all three of these things. And if you think about it, the reason why old school games have this is there's such a focus on random encounters as a style.
And you don't want to always have the monsters attack the characters randomly. There's definitely a big part in old school games of combat may not be the ideal choice. And in fact, most often combat is not the ideal choice. Well, if you always have monsters that are sitting right on top of you ready to punch you in the face, you have no choice but combat.
This is a way of saying, hey, you might be running into a dragon, but that dragon is far away. It's busy eating something else. And if you go and approach it and you roll well... Maybe the dragon will let you go because it just ate its meal already, right? And that way there's a way to shake up the encounter so that it's not always just monsters jump on the characters and attack them.
You now have all these other different ways to do it. So Shadow Dark has their interesting way of handling it. So Old School Essentials, this is the Old School Essentials basic rules, which you can find over on DriveThruRPG. I think it's free to pick them up. And it has things like encounter distance.
When you roll an encounter, you can see exactly how far away is this group, depending on what kind of area that you're in. If you're in a dungeon, it's 2d6 times 10 feet. Wilderness, 46 times 10 yards. And then also has a monster reaction rules that sometimes if you're talking to them, you can roll a check in order to see how hostile or how friendly they are.
I didn't see an activity chart in Old School Essentials. Made by the same group is Dolmenwood. Dolmenwood is still being developed, but they keep getting closer and closer to having full campaign books. Now it is close enough. This is a 473-page campaign book for Dolmenwood. And it does have a creature activity. Like, what is the activity of that creature doing?
Here's a 1D20 list of everything from celebrating, hallucinating, they're lost, they're patrolling, encounter types. Does it have distance? I'm sure it has distance somewhere in here. It also has like a section on here for encounter distance, how far or close are they? And then reaction, if the character's potential reaction to the PCs is unclear, make a reaction roll.
And there's a section on a reaction roll in there. So lots of different games have different systems for this. Now, from a more modern standpoint, we have Level Up Advanced 5e. So I have talked a lot about Level Up Advanced 5e. So in the Level Up Advanced 5e Monsters Menagerie, my favorite book of monsters, they have a section for each monsters.
This is one of the reasons why I think this book is so outstanding.
is that not only does it list the monster stat block, which we're used to, and have a description of the monster, but it also includes these things like legends and lore, stuff that you can know about a monster, what kind of encounters you might run into involving this monster, and what other creatures would be involved in that, which I think is super useful.
What signs you might hear before you run into them. But then we also have these behavior. What are the kinds of things that they might be doing when you run into them? And we have both for ogre and ogrekin snoring in a lair and hunting or they're hungry.
Ogre mage might be they're in humanoid form offering themselves as a mercenary or in ogre form eating a gruesome feast with a knife and a fork or invisible watching travelers so they can assume their identities. So we see lots of different options. And every monster in here has these reaction. Like what kind of behavior would they be up to? Nightmares. They attack on sight.
They're chasing down a panicked humanoid. They seek a new rider. They're waiting for its master return or fighting a unicorn or pegasus. Right. Really interesting things that each of these creatures can be doing. So this even in modern RPGs, I would consider Level Up Advanced 5E to be a more modern role playing game.
This concept of what are some of the behaviors that you can have are definitely part of it. So what are some ways that we can actually add this in very easily? I have an idea that I've been kicking around, which I'm calling the table is the table is die roll.
The idea here is can you roll a die without a table and have it answer things like how close or how far away they are, how hostile are they, and what kind of reaction they might, what kind of reaction might they have? And maybe not activity, but even still, like maybe a little bit of activity.
And the way I treat this is essentially you take any die that you want to roll, probably a six-sider up to a 20-sider, and you decide what the low side of that die means and what the high side of that die means, and then roll and see what you get. And because you're rolling evenly across them, they are just as likely to roll low or medium or high as anything else.
distance is pretty obvious that and you use it in an abstract way so if you're rolling a d6 you would say a one that means they're right on top of you a six means they're pretty far away somewhere in between means they're they're somewhere further out it's not nearly as accurate as you would get like rolling 2d6 and applying it to a particular table but if you don't have a table handy and you just want to add some distance to an encounter you don't need a table just roll a die low means that it's they're very close high means that they're really far away
So that's for distance. For reaction, you can do the same thing. One means they're pretty benign. They're not super aggressive. Six means they're super aggressive, right? So the higher, the more aggressive they are. And that way you can kind of determine, okay, are they sort of suspicious, but okay? Are they actually very friendly? Oh, hey, how are you doing?
Or they're like, man, I'm going to punch you in the face. You can just roll a die and figure that out. You don't necessarily need a table. Activity is a little harder, but one of the ways I like to think about a table-less die for an activity roll is the lower the roll, the more benign the activity is. The higher the roll, the more extreme it is.
You still have to improvise exactly what that thing is, and certainly you're not going to get the degree of accuracy of like a table like we saw with Level Up Advanced 5e, where you can see the specific activities that specific monsters would be engaged in. That's probably still more useful. But if you don't have one of those tables handy, you can just say like, what are they doing?
So you roll one and you say, we'll just say like, maybe it's human folk, right? Just regular people going out for their day of business. A 1 would mean they're traveling through the woods, you know, it's a couple of travelers traveling through the woods on their way to trade between two villages.
A 6 means they have an altar and they're getting ready to stab somebody to death to worship their strange demon god, right? That's on the extreme side, 6 on a D6. Right. So that's on the extreme side. So you can decide like, well, how extreme is their behavior?
Are they, you know, how dark and awful is a cannibalistic stuff on the far, you know, far side of the die where they are engaged in a small party and a celebration about the spring harvest on the low side. So I think that having just keeping in your mind the idea of rolling a die and
and letting the extremities of that die kind of tell you things about what's the distance, what's the attitude, what is the activity level that they're performing, what's the sort of the intensity of the activity level that they're performing is a really good lazy trick that doesn't require any table at all that you can just sort of keep in your head and lets you shake up these encounters.
So the nice thing is when you start to mix up the encounter that you're rolling, the location where the encounter is taking place, things like are you going to join two encounters together by rolling twice and seeing that these two encounters are clashing? And then rolling things like how far away do the characters notice that it's going on? Roll a die to figure that out.
How hostile is the group to the characters? Maybe different groups are going to have different hostility levels, you know, by rolling a die and seeing how hostile they are. And to get a general idea of what kind of activity they're interested in, they're engaged in, is a really good way to shake up what these random encounters look like.
It makes every one of these random encounters completely interesting and unique in lots of different ways. That isn't just, hey, there's three more wolves in the woods and it's time for you to get into a fight. It's a real good way to shake up encounters. Let's take a look at our September 2024 Patreon Q&A. So every month on the Sly Flourish Patreon, we set up a monthly Q&A.
Patrons of Sly Flourish can ask any RPG related questions. Some of those questions I bring, I answer all of those questions every week. Some of those questions I bring here to the show so we can dive into them a little deeper.
And our first question for the month is from manual M who says, I started rewriting dungeon keys, room descriptions, scenes, and et cetera, for published D and D adventures in a more old school essentials, Mork Borg point and click writing style for my own reference and to use during play. It's a lot of work though. How do you handle it?
The same or the same, or just highlighting the book PDF and having that open at the table next to your lazy DM prep. By the way, as a bonus, this is a fantastic article summarizing different design layouts from Loot the Room. I will link to that down in the show notes. I certainly don't go through the amount of work that you are talking about here. I don't rewrite adventures.
You can see the kind of prep that I do for both published adventures and homebrew adventures by watching my adventure prep videos. I follow the eight steps and that's what I go through.
now it's very common for me to take the stuff that i find in a published adventure and refactor it myself in the way that i want in some cases i will throw out basically all of the text and i will only use the map so i did that for a few sections of shadowed keep on the borderlands not because the text wasn't really useful but because our campaign had kind of moved beyond and things had changed enough on our campaign that the kind of things they would have found in those rooms had changed because of the new inhabitants that were there
So in that case, I basically just used the map as a map layout, and then I wrote out the rest. In some cases, I will be able to use the adventurer closer to as written, but that's usually pretty rare.
And even in those cases, I still like to go through the eight steps, identify the interesting locations, identify important NPCs, figure out what monsters might show up, figure out what treasure is there, and still write all of those things out in my eight step style, right? And then sort of eight step, usually a page. I can usually like, here's an example.
of the notes that i have for my game today they all fit on one page that'll that'll operate for one session and it didn't take me a long time in fact i think i was done with that one because i had a lot of material already prepared from the previous session it took me 10 or 15 minutes so i wouldn't one of the important points that i want to hammer and i'm probably going to hammer on this a few times with a few different questions because i think this came up a few times recently you don't have to make material that you're giving to anyone else
There is a really big drive I see and I hear from GMs where they try to make the stuff that they're running at their game as good as publishable stuff. And it isn't publishable stuff. You can make scratchy little notes. You can write one word or two word descriptions on a map.
And as long as it's enough for you to be able to run your game at your table, it doesn't need to be filled out any more than that.
that's true for improvising monsters you don't need to rebuild all your monster stat blocks and mathematically make sure they're perfect you can improvise the hell out of your monster stat blocks and save yourself a lot of time room descriptions you only need the things that help clue you in to what's there and if you just if it's one or two words and that's all you need if you just say alchemy lab and you know that you can riff off alchemy lab enough to determine the kinds of things that are there then you don't need anything more than that
And the same is true when you are looking through a published adventure and deciding that you'd rather have it rewritten in a different style. The question is, are you writing those notes for yourself? Or are you actually kind of going through the painful process of rewriting that adventure in a way that you could almost give it to another DM and they would be able to run it?
The only people who have to do that latter part are publishers. If you're running it for your own game, you don't need to do that. You don't need to do nearly that amount of work. It's a lot of extra work. We are tempted to do it because we read published adventures and we think that's the style we need to do for our own. And that is not the answer.
So that's the one point I wanted to kind of hammer on with this idea of sort of refactoring published adventures is you don't have to refactor it in a way that's useful for anyone else other than you. And you should only do the bare minimum that you need in order to be able to run the game that you're going to run. Dan T says, I'm in the process of making my own world.
And with that, I am making my own pantheon of gods. Have you ever done this? I would be interested to hear the lazy DM's opinion of this. Sure, I have lots of opinions. Have I made a pantheon? Not really. I have been toying around with expanding the pantheon for City of Arches for patrons.
Like I thought it would be interesting to throw a lot more gods out there for the City of Arches and make it available as like a two or three page Patreon product. so that if you wanted a bunch of extra gods to throw in your City of Arches campaign, you'd have them.
And I really, when I was thinking about the design of those patrons and those gods, I was really thinking about them from the perspective of what value they would have to someone's game, not the history of the world, Not the reality of what gods are like in any sort of society, but really what matters in the game itself. So like what pantheons do they follow?
How can you group them up so that they're easy to digest and easy to represent? Who are the old gods that are really only going to show up in ancient shrines and old temples and lost ruins? And which gods are actively being worshipped today is a big factor. But I would almost always start from... What's useful for your campaign, for you as a GM and for your players as players and as characters?
What value do you need to bring from your pantheon to that? So instead of thinking about it from a history standpoint or a theology standpoint or any other kind of view about who these gods are, what are realistic gods compared to the various gods we've had in various societies on Earth? Think about it first and foremost from what purpose it serves in your campaign.
And I would think from a personal campaign standpoint, you really only need to add the gods that you need for your game and for your players. Are there enough gods for your players to be able to hang on to them and tie their characters to them? Is there just enough gods that they're always kind of discovering a new one? Like those to me are the questions that you really want to ask.
So I would definitely say start first and foremost by what value they provide to your game and build out from there rather than trying to think about it from like a big highfalutin philosophical, theological, historical standpoint. This is game stuff that we're making. So make it useful for your game. So that's my thought about Pantheons. Oh, another big part I'll add is steel, man.
You know, we're, we're, we're GMs. We have plethoras of Pantheons. You can take Pantheons that were designed by professional designers for games, just change the names, change the genders, flip them around a little bit, modify them, modify their symbols a little bit, and no one will even know.
So you can take really rich sets of gods that exist for the Forgotten Realms or for Greyhawk or for Kobol Press's Midgard, and you can just change them around a little bit, change the names. You could do it with real gods, too. You could take the entire Norse pantheon or Greek pantheon or Asian pantheons and just change the names, change genders, change symbols. just change things up slightly.
And even if you just modify the names a little bit, but keep almost everything else, your players aren't going to go, oh, wait a minute, that's just Thor. And you're like, no, that's Wraith. Wraith is the god of storm. And you're like, Wraith, the god of storm. They're not going to figure out, oh, you mean Thor? No, right? Especially if Wraith, the god of storm, is a powerful woman warrior, right?
Now that doesn't feel like Thor at all. You can just change things slightly and you can have an entirely unique pantheon that nobody be able to figure out. That's the lazy, that's the lazy trick. John M says recently read return to the lazy dungeon master. Thank you. Glad you read it in it. You talk about the steps are good for homebrew campaigns and published adventures.
I didn't find anything in the book that gave any tips on using it for published adventures. Do you have a video or article that might give me some pointers in the subject? I do. There is an article on sly flourish, uh, It's called choosing the right steps from the lazy DM checklist. I wrote this about five years ago. And the idea here was to answer this very specific question.
The type of campaign that you're running can determine which steps are going to be most useful for you and how you can use those steps based on the material you already have. And I broke it out into a few different types of campaign settings beyond just homebrew campaign settings versus published campaign settings, but also one-shot settings versus long-term campaigns and all of these variants.
So one example is for the continuous homebrew campaign, what are the steps that are most valuable and how are you going to use that When you're building your own campaign setting, your own adventures, your own overarching campaign that you know is going to be going from session to session to session, how do you use the steps there and which steps do you look at?
The continuous published adventures, same sort of thing, only this time you're running a published campaign setting. What are the things that you need to, that might be different and which steps might you choose? The same with homebrew single session. I've got a bunch of people coming over, but I'm running a session for them, but I'm making it for my own stuff. What are the stuff you need?
Oftentimes when you're doing a homebrew version, all eight steps are going to be pretty useful. But sometimes when you're in publish settings, there are steps that either you can change because you don't need them quite as much. Maybe the materials in the adventure has everything you need already. So you can eliminate steps from it.
or the published single session game where you really only need a few things. Generally speaking, I think it's always worth going through the eight steps to decide which steps are valuable for the thing that you're running.
But the eight steps are designed to be able to work with both homebrew settings and published adventure settings, published campaign settings, published campaign worlds for both short one session games or continuing long campaigns. How you use those steps is going to change, however. So this is the article I would recommend. You can find a link to it in the show notes.
Friends, I want to thank all of you for hanging out with me today while we talked about all things in tabletop role-playing games. I hope you enjoyed the show. If you did, please consider subscribing to the Sly Flourish newsletter. It is absolutely free to sign up.
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They get access to our awesome Lazy DM community over on Discord, and they help me put on shows like this. And you can pick up any of my books, including Return to the Lazy Dungeon Master, The Lazy DM's Workbook, The Lazy DM's Companion, Forge of Foes, and The Fantastic Adventure Books, all in the Sly Flourish bookstore. Links for all of that are in the show notes. Thank you all so much.
Have a great day, and get out there and play an RPG.