The Lazy RPG Podcast - D&D and RPG News and GM Prep from Sly Flourish
Experiences at Gamehole Con – Lazy RPG Talk Show
Mon, 28 Oct 2024
D&D and RPG news and commentary by Mike Shea of https://slyflourish.com Contents 00:00 Show Start 01:16 Product Spotlight: Defiler of Moonsilk Keep 03:44 Product Spotlight: Horizons Magazine Issue 1 06:25 Product Spotlight: Frontiers of Eberron 12:35 Kickstarter Spotlight: Adventures in Teaching and Learning with TTRPGs 14:27 Kickstarter Spotlight: Dwarven Forge Dungeons Reforged 24:25 Commentary: Experiences at Gamehole Con 34:20 DM Tip: Pool Table Game Mastering 45:43 Patreon Question: What Makes a Great Monster Book 51:44 Patreon Question: Running Big Timed Events in Scenes Links Subscribe to the Sly Flourish Newsletter Support Sly Flourish on Patreon Buy Sly Flourish Books: Defiler of Moonsilk Keep Horizons Issue 1 Frontiers of Eberron Adventures in Teaching and Learning in TTRPGs Dwarven Forge Dungeons Reforged Level Up Advanced 5e Monstrous Menagerie
Today on the Lazy RPG Talk Show, we're going to take a look at Defilers of Moonsilk Keep, a mega dungeon and mega product for Shadow Dark. We're going to look at Horizons Issue 1, Frontiers of Eberron, the Adventures in Teaching and Learning in TTRPG's Kickstarter, the Dwarven Forged Dungeons Reforged Gamefound crowdfunding campaign.
I'm going to talk about my thoughts of the convention I just got back from from Gamehole Con, which was absolutely awesome, and I want to talk a little bit about that. Today's main RPG tip is going to be talking about pool table game mastering, an idea about how to stay free-flowing and yet have deep and rich stories without having to build out giant networks of games.
And we're going to cover more questions from the October 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. The Lazy RPG Talk Show is brought to you by the patrons of Sly Flourish.
Patrons get access to all kinds of tips, tricks, tools, adventures, scenarios, sourcebooks, and other things to help them run their tabletop role-playing games. They get access to the awesome Lazy RPG community over on our Discord server. and they help me put on shows like this. To the patrons of Sly Flourish, thank you so much for your outstanding support.
Defiler of Moonsilk Keep is a Shadow Dark campaign. I got a review copy of this campaign sent by the creator, and I took a look at it, and I thought it looked really cool. You can pick this up on itch.io, I think. Yes, it's on itch.io for $5.00. And for five dollars, you get a whole lot of stuff for five dollars.
It is a hundred and seventy page shadow dark themed source book and adventure, kind of a multilayered adventure, very sort of original gray hockey style thing going on here. It includes a town that the town where everything is set. It includes NPCs and it includes a whole bunch of different things to run for an adventure.
So if you are looking for some very cool art, really neat design, and I haven't read the whole thing cover to cover, but I dove in enough to say, does this look like it's worth five bucks? And it absolutely looks like it's worth $5. I think you're getting a really good deal for a $5 product. It's definitely bigger than like a curse scroll kind of zine.
It's got a lot more depth than the curse scroll zines have for just good or ill. One of the nice things about curse scrolls is you can digest them really easily and then run off with them as I did for an entire year campaign with just one of them. But if you're looking for a little bit more detail, names of NPCs, stats for NPCs, regions...
The town of Havenford and the dungeons that exist nearby that you can explore, the various storylines that will take you to these dungeons, all kinds of things that are going on. It looks like a very cool Shadow Dark adventure. It starts at second level, so you might want to run a little like rat in the cellar kind of thing in order to get them from first to second level.
And then one of the things I really liked is the idea of a multi-stage dungeon with lots of interconnections between them. It has some kind of fun mixtures of both isometric maps and top view maps. I don't know if it has a top view and an isometric for every map, but it seems like some of the maps in here definitely have both an isometric view.
So here's like a Dyson style top view map, but then here is the cool isometric version of that same map. which I thought looked really cool and gives you a much better stage of the depth of the dungeons that you're delving into. So that is the Defiler of Moonsilk Keep available on itch.io right now. You can take a look at that. You can find, of course, a link to this in the show notes below.
Horizons is a new quarterly magazine being done by Hannah Rose, who worked over at MCDM and was the editor of the Arcadia magazine for MCDM and has brought her talents and her some colleagues with her here. to work on a new quarterly magazine funded through either directly through their website or through Patreon called Horizons. I did receive a preview copy of this as well.
However, I also subscribe to the magazine. So I did put my money where my mouth is. And it is beautiful. Wild Mage Press is the publisher of this. Hannah Rose is the editor-in-chief. She has a good, a fun description in the beginning, just like we saw with the Arcadia magazines of like what's going on in the month. And it has, in this case, four different sort of scenarios.
How to include fantastic transportation in your fantasy adventures. Whole new landscapes. Look up Kukulin. And Draco X Asterix. And Xterix. They're crystalline. Now, the interesting thing is they... I can't pronounce any of these things. The interesting thing is that they are multi-system. So three of the four major resources that you find in Arcadia, and sorry, in Arcadia, in Horizons, are 5e.
One of them is Pathfinder 2nd Edition. So that way they're kind of spreading out among just, not just 5e, kind of aiming towards the more popular ones. Obviously 5e is pretty popular. And the nice thing about the 5e ones is that they are compatible with all the different versions of 5e. though they definitely have moved towards the styles that you will see in D&D 2024.
Beautiful artwork, excellent editing, really, really good layout. I mean, you can take a look. It's as strong as anything I saw in Arcadia. It looks really, really cool. Fun, fun kind of stuff. Getting right back to the style of the Dungeon & Dragon magazine of the old days. So it is a really cool product, beautiful artwork, well done, independent publication. And I really dug it.
But yeah, here's an example where you can see that they're using the D&D 2024 style stat block. So I think we're going to see a lot more people kind of shifting over to that style just to match D&D 2024. I don't know if they have to because there's now a lot of different things going on, but we can see. So lots of neat content in here to pick up.
And I would recommend going and picking up either a copy of the issue itself or even better subscribing to their Patreon or off of their website to help fund future issues of Horizons. Here's an example of a Pathfinder creature that you can find in here. So a good mix of different styles of adventure. That is Horizons.
Horizons by Wild Mage Press, a new quarterly magazine available for tabletop role-playing games. Looks really cool. Frontiers of Eberron. I kind of missed this when it came out. I did receive a review copy of this as well when it first came out, but I don't think it had been released yet. So I stuck it into my read pile and then promptly I did give it a good skim.
It's like, wow, I really like this. I should talk about this when it comes out. And then it came out, but I didn't notice that it came out. So I never had a chance to review it. Frontiers of Eberron is a DM Guild product available as a PDF written by Keith Baker, the creator of Eberron, along with some other writers that worked on it as well.
Which means it is only available on the DMs Guild, not available through crowdfunding. And it has a pretty high price tag because of this. One of the issues, of course, with, and Keith is stuck in a very unique problem of being an absolute expert and the core writer of a setting that is owned by Wizards of the Coast.
Which means 20% of anything that he creates for that has to be given over to Wizards of the Coast. 20%, which is pretty high. And then 30% has to be given over to drive-thru RPG, which means 50% of the cut on something that he could be getting 95% of the cut on if he was selling in his own store. But he can't sell it on his own store because it's Eberron, which means the price is pretty high.
That's why it's $34. If you're asking like $34 for a PDF is really, really high. It is high. Unfortunately, that's kind of the situation he's stuck in because it is a product, an Eberron product, which is from an intellectual property that Wizards of the Coast owns. However, it is really, really cool.
Frontiers of Eberron is a 257-page sourcebook, and it nails the exact kind of sourcebook I love to get. I really love sourcebooks, and the kind of sourcebook that I myself use as a model when I made The City of Arches, as I've been working on The City of Arches, which is a sourcebook that focuses on a region...
so that you can really get into the details of that region, but not building out like a whole prescribed adventure that you then have to manipulate and change because you didn't like what was originally written. And instead gives you tons and tons of tools and inspiration and ideas to dive into this particular location and build your own adventures.
That's where I really think a strong product is that I like. Everybody likes different things. Some people want campaign adventures where it spells out from first to 12th level exactly what you're going to do there. Other people like much wider region guides. I really like these focused region guides that give me all the material I need to be able to build the kind of adventures I want to build.
For Frontiers of Eberron, it is actually built in a region of Eberron that hasn't really been fully filled out, which is the area of the Droam region. And you have the whole like the Daughters of Sorakal, which was a major faction in the Eberron campaign that I ran a few years ago. I dealt a lot with the Drom. I really liked it.
And I like that region of the world, this sort of, you know, this nation of monsters. But they're not really monsters. They're just another group of people trying to do what they're doing. They might do sinister stuff. They might also do good things. It's not a super clean, oh, they're all evil here. It's an evil city full of, you know, Medusa and stuff like that.
It's like, no, there are Medusa there, but the Medusa are, you know, the Medusa may be on your side. And I had a lot of fun with that when I ran my Eberron campaign and the Daughters of Sorakel were one of the major factions that I dealt with. Now, mine didn't touch the Droam region. I just had them fight. They kind of moved to the region that I was running in my Eberron campaign.
But I really love this style. This book is, you know, fantastic, beautiful layout, fantastic design. I haven't, again, I haven't sat down. I get way too many books. I can't just read them all from cover to cover.
But everything I've read in this and my skim read of it showed me this is exactly the kind of book that I want to be able to grab a region of Eberron, dive in deep, build my adventure, and so on. It's got a lot of character-focused stuff. Again, they sort of wrote this around what they knew of D&D 2024 at the time. So subclasses and things like that fit the D&D 2024 style of subclasses.
But of course, the weird bit there is the Artificer, which was a class specifically designed for Eberron, then showed up in Tasha's, doesn't have a 2024 version yet. Although you can kind of take the...
artifice or class and and certainly play it alongside your dnd 2024 characters but we're in this weird state of of pseudo compatibility mostly compatible probably works but how do you how do you write for that when you're building a product like this so one of the things i noticed when i was going through it is that it's not just completely packed with character options one of the things i don't really like in big source books is when they're just like
30% of them are character option stuff that I'm probably not going to use or lots of extra monsters that I'm not really going to use or don't really need. And instead, what I really want is that setting material, that unique setting material that I can't get anywhere else. And that's really what I found in this Frontiers of Eberron Quickstone. you know, draw on rising, right?
Lots of detail about what's going on here, background and history and regions, you know, adventure plots that you can, that you can grab and run with. So it is a really outstanding product. I really, really like it. I highly recommend it. If you are running a game in Eberron, if you want to fill out like there, there's a cool Medusa, right? Medusa performer.
I, you know, here's a dragon, black dragon born, I think, or no, I don't know. It could be a war forge or something like that. Wand, wand master. Um,
If you are running an Eberron campaign, if you are interested in running a sort of frontier-focused Eberron game set in a region that has not really been filled out fully, if you like the work that Keith Baker has done on Eberron and want to dive deep into that and get it from the creator of the world who's been writing for Eberron now for, I think, 20 years,
This is a absolutely fantastic, it's a unique book. You cannot get this anywhere else. You cannot get anything like this anywhere else. It is the only book that can be made for a region like this by the people who wrote it. You know, like road encounters, all kinds of stuff that's going on in here. Really fantastic book. That is The Frontiers of Eberron Quickstone.
You can find a link to that in the show notes below. Adventures in Teaching and Learning in Role-Playing Games is a 501c3 building a compendium of resources to help educators, parents, and researchers look into role-playing games for the benefit of students. It is a very cool, you know, very, obviously a great product or great resource. subject to focus on.
Recently, my wife and I gave away about $13,000 worth of money and product to 30 different school groups to try to help their programs, help them get the materials that they needed in order to run role-playing games for kids for after-school programs, something that we feel very strongly about. And thanks to the patrons of Sly Flourish, we had the resources available to be able to do this.
That's one of the nice things about getting continual funding from patrons to Sly Flourish month to month is we feel that we are a lot more free to take products, to give them away, to take money and give money to groups. And that put this on our radar as well. A whole bunch of different resources that they are putting together for educators to help bring role-playing games.
A DMG for educators is kind of an idea here, but also still having all of the fun that we would find in our fantasy role-playing games. So if you are interested in supporting a project like this, if you have a school program and you yourself are interested in getting the material from this, please take a look at this Kickstarter. You can find a link to it in the show notes below.
Really, really cool stuff and a great benefit. I mean, one of the things I'm always talking about is I really feel like this hobby is important. It's not just us killing time. It is us connecting with other people. It's teaching children to connect with each other.
It's teaching us to, you know, teaching people that might have trouble in social circumstances on how to behave in social circumstances with a foundation of a game that we are playing together. It brings, it helps us fight the loneliness that many of us can feel if we're not connected to our fellow people. It helps us break the isolation that we might find for all different reasons.
I think it's really, really strong. And this is an example of how we can take this hobby and ensure that it lasts the ages and that it's passed from one generation to the next, because I think it's really, really important stuff. So take a look at adventures and teaching and learning with tabletop role-playing games. You can find a link to that.
In Dwarven Forge, I have a side hobby that I have played with now for, I think, 20 years, ever since my wonderful and beautiful wife bought me a set of the tavern, the original resin tavern set. I no longer have it because I didn't really use it that much. And I, you know, the dungeon sets, however, I use all the time. Dwarven Forge has a new crowdfunding campaign for called Dungeons Reforged.
I'm going to start with my Dwarven Forge disclaimers because I think my Dwarven Forge disclaimers are important to state up front before we dive in to this fantastic tabletop terrain. Number one, you do not need Dwarven Forge to run an awesome tabletop fantasy role-playing game. You can get away with a laminated sheet of paper to draw your maps and pass them around.
That costs like 40 cents on the assumption you can get access to a laminator and a piece of resume paper. I made a bunch of these yesterday because I was like, I want to have them in my kit. So there are many ways to play tabletop role-playing games. And one of the things I love about this hobby is that you can play this hobby for your whole life and never spend a single dime.
There are many ways, and there are many products. One of my favorite products, I think it's my favorite tabletop role-playing game product of all time, is the Pathfinder Basic Flip Mat, which you can usually pick up for like $12 to $20. I think it's like $20 to $25 retail. I ordered two new ones.
I had such a success with it when I was at GameholeCon that I ordered two more, so I just have a couple extra on hand that I can throw into my DM kit. $20 purchase. You can draw any dungeon that you can imagine. You can draw any kind of thing. It is a wonderful tool, very flexible, works really well as an improv tool and costs very little money.
You can buy it at any local game shop for about 20 bucks. That and a wet or dry erase marker can get you really far. However, there are some really, really cool tabletop role-playing game accessories where the sky is the limit in budget. And I would say Dwarven Forge definitely falls into that. A couple other disclaimers on Dwarven Forge.
One is the expense of Dwarven Forge isn't just in money either. There are some other expenses. Space is a big one. It's going to take up, the more of this stuff you have, the more space it takes up in your house. Many people's space is a premium. They don't have the space to hold a lot of Dwarven Forge.
flexibility the flexibility of dwarvenforge has gotten a lot better there's some things that they have done in their recent designs that have made the flexibility really great but when you build a dwarvenforge setup you tend to want to use a dwarvenforge setup so unlike that sort of like hey i can draw any map in the world in a few minutes on a laminated sheet of paper when you set up a dwarvenforge thing you kind of want to run the dwarvenforge thing so time flexibility space and money
are all things to consider when you're looking at Dwarven Forge. And those are things that I really want to state. The other thing is the extra fun that you get at a tabletop role-playing game from Dwarven Forge is not proportional to the amount of money that you spend on it.
In other words, my game isn't going to be a thousand times better if I spend a thousand times as much buying Dwarven Forge stuff as opposed to buying a Paizo Flipmat. There are many things you can do to make your game really fun for your players that don't involve money at all. Okay, those are my disclaimers. That said, this is my favorite set of Dwarven Forge stuff that they're making.
I have spent years, decades, playing with Dwarven Forge. I use it in my games. One of the features that patrons of Sly Flourish get is a Dwarven Forge virtual tabletop background thing where I'm able to create Dwarven Forge setups. I will show one of them. This is actually a cavern setup that I have for my game today.
And I can take that and I can turn that into transparent image, which you can then use as a tabletop background for your virtual tabletop. So my thought was I wanted people to be able to enjoy Dwarven Forge the way I enjoy it. And I can build a room and I can take a picture and I can make it transparent and I can make it a VTT background and people can use it that way.
So people are able to get access to this stuff. But the dungeon stuff in particular is the most valuable Dwarven Forge stuff you can get for the dollar because the dungeon stuff gets used the most. And the people, the fine folks at Dwarven Forge who are really, really excellent folks, really fun to listen to them. I love listening to their shows.
I love the YouTube videos that they put out where they talk about this stuff.
and really fantastic artists they operate out of new york they sculpt everything by hand then they take those they mold they build molds in china and then products are made out of a special material they call dwarvenite which is essentially like a pvc that makes them like almost completely indestructible they have literally run over these pieces with a truck and they have not they have not broken
The dungeon sets in particular are the most usable sets for most games. They are the sets that you are most commonly going to be able to use for dungeons in your terrain. The second most likely set are the caverns set. And between those two, I tend to be able to build anything that I want to build for my games. Caverns and dungeons are the most common pieces.
So the interesting thing about this crowdfunding campaign is that this is the lowest prices that you can get on the sets that they're offering here, which are all of the dungeon sets. And they have a whole bunch of new sets and new pieces that they're including in this. So I'm a big collector.
So I immediately negotiated with the Sly Flourish board on how much I can spend on fine Dwarven Forge products and got a number. And I'm slowly crawling to that number. But you can get sets where they have the basic dungeon pieces. You can get sets where they have like the vaulted pieces.
I really like having a mix of both vaulted pieces, which have like little columns on them and the regular dungeon pieces, which do not. That way you can have sort of like it doesn't make sense that you'd have an actual dungeon like where prisoners are kept that has nice, beautiful pillars in it.
Likewise, if you have the vampire's lair, it's not likely that the vampire is going to just have normal bare rock. And instead, they probably want to have fancy pillars on them. So you can get this. I don't think I'm going to dive into the sinister paint scheme because the flexibility of that seems a little less.
It looks really cool, but I don't think I want to mix another color in with the existing colors that I have. If I was to get one, I'd probably just get like one or two rooms that I could add in, add into the thing. But generally speaking, I really like to focus on pieces that I can reuse, use and reuse in lots of different ways.
focus on walls, corners, and floors, because you can build out just about everything with those walls, corners, and floors, and then get some really good flair so that you can make sets look awesome. And you can see all of the different kinds of flair and sets that are there. You can also see how high the prices can get for this thing, $1,300 for some of these vaults. I like this.
The ultimate dungeon bundle. Not a lot of people are going to buy this. I think 20 people, 20 people back this, which is this massive multi-table set. Now also keep in mind, not only is it $5,700, five times more than my first car, but it also a ton of space. Like it's, is it worth it? It's 2000, almost 2000 pieces. So there's a lot in there. You would, you'd be building it forever.
You don't need to spend $5,700 in order to get a good set. I really like these core mega sets. I think that the prices are actually very reasonable for the kind of stuff that you get here. You get a lot of cool flair. You get a lot of neat things that you can build, and you get a few sets. Another warning I will give you with Dwarven Forge is once you start to get into it, you just don't stop.
It's like miniature collecting. I have 2,000 or 3,000 miniatures, and I never have exactly the right ones I need, and I'm always finding myself like, oh, if I only had one more gnoll, I'd have exactly as many gnolls that I wanted to get. So very high prices. However, really, really cool stuff. I like it a lot.
One other neat thing about this campaign that I have enjoyed a lot is there is a whole series of YouTube videos that the folks at Dwarven Forge, Nate at Dwarven Forge and all the other creators at Dwarven Forge have put together showing how to use all of this stuff.
The neat thing is if you have any existing dungeon stuff, you're going to learn about new ways to use the stuff you already have really basic things. Like if you take the large columns and flip them upside down, you can more easily fit a floor tile on the top to make a little elevated platform, very basic stuff that I never thought of before.
But in these videos, I'm able to watch them and get better ideas for how to build this new things using the existing stuff that I have. So obviously it's a good way to sell Dwarven fortune. People don't
have it but also i'm learning stuff about all the pieces that i already have so lots of really neat stuff if you have the budget for it if you have the space for it if you have the time for it if you're eager to kind of look at this stuff i there is no better way to get into dwarven forge than this campaign i think it is the best campaign that i have seen them ever put out with the best pieces that i have ever seen them put out
So I it's one of the reasons I wanted to spend some time to talk about in the show, knowing that we're talking about a niche of a niche of a niche, right? A very, very thin slice of GMs that are going to get involved in this stuff. But it is really neat stuff.
This is the kind of thing where, you know, you get some really cool table artifacts, sometimes artifacts that you just drop in your map without anything else, like these these eldritch obelisks and serpent braziers and firepots. I ordered a set of these. I have an obelisk, but I could always use more obelisks. So I ordered a set of this as well.
So there are some, what they refer to as scatter, where you can get just certain cool things that you could just drop on your regular 2D maps to make it look cooler without fully investing into Dwarven Forge. But I guarantee you, once you start getting some of these pieces, you're going to end up wanting more. So, you know, examples of the stuff that are in play in this.
They're just really, really cool, fun accessories. It's a fun way, again, if you have the budget for it, it's a fun way to enhance one's game. And of course, I'll just give the same disclaimer. The things that you can do to make your game really awesome for you and your players tend not to cost any money at all. So do not get filled with FOMO for this.
Recall that there's time constraints, space constraints, flexibility constraints, and cost constraints. that and it's not going to necessarily make your game go oh my god this is the best rpg i've ever played because of these beautiful tabletop accessories the accessories are very cool but there's also other things you can do to make your game awesome
This past week, I was at what may be the best gaming convention I have ever been at, which was Gamehole Con. Gamehole Con is in Madison, Wisconsin. It was this past October. It's generally in the fall each year, and it is an absolutely wonderful gaming convention. Like I said, the best gaming convention I've been to.
Now, I have one qualifier of that, which is I was considered a special guest, which meant that I had a lot of things taken care of for me that regular attendees had to take care of themselves.
However, it feels like, and from my conversations with people, that when it comes to finding a hotel room, signing up for games, getting tickets, and the regular infrastructure of the convention, that it looked to me like a much... stronger convention than some of the far bigger ones like Gen Con or Origins.
One of the problems with Gen Con and Origins is getting hotel rooms is really, really hard. Signing up for games can often be really, really hard, either the games that you want. Even the tools and applications are just difficult to use, but they are... They can be, you know, you hit a certain number of people and everything starts to fall apart. It's really hard to get food.
The bathrooms are terrible. It's really hard to find a place to stay. It's really difficult signing up for games, getting to your games and all of that. And there are smaller conventions that I love, like Winter Fantasy is a fantastic gaming convention focused on D&D that takes place in Fort Wayne, Indiana. I love winter fantasy. I have lots of friends that go to it. I've gone to it many times.
Again, the infrastructure is fantastic. Really easy to get a room, really easy to get food, really easy. Bathrooms are good. They had hard water that gave me like a rash on my hand. But other than that, it was totally fine.
And the only trick with winter fantasy, the only thing that I don't like about winter fantasy is that it's at February, which means you're very likely to hit bad weather and you have to take two flights from where I live to get to Fort Wayne, Indiana. And those two flights, something is going to go wrong in the middle of winter.
So you almost have to like schedule extra days to handle, you know, I got caught in a blizzard last time I was driving with somebody had met on the way and we were driving there in the middle of a blizzard, wondering if we're going to be thrown off on the side of the road. But I really liked that. So smaller conventions are really great. And I would say game hole con is just the right size.
It's big enough that like everybody's there, but small enough that you can actually see everybody. So I really love this convention. And I wanted to give some, some, some things. I wanted to talk about it a little bit after the fact. So really love it. Perfect size, great games, fantastic people. I've met lots of friends of mine.
I got to spend time with my friends like Scott Fitzgerald Gray and Teos Abadieh and Sean Merwin and everybody else, people that I talk to regularly. I got to have lunch with them and dinner with them and hanging out with them. It is really, really awesome. I played a bunch of different games, including AD&D, 2014 D&D, Tales of the Valiant, Numenera, and Pirate Borg.
So I got to play a bunch of games while I was there. I also ran three games. I ran two versions or two sessions of Golgoron Arises, the intro scenario from the City of Arches, along with the Obsidian Skull, which was the adventure that's inside City of Arches. I ran that using D&D 2024. That went absolutely fine. People had a good time with that.
And then I ran a Shadow Dark from Curse Scroll 3, the Shadow Dark Gauntlet, the zero level gauntlet on Saturday morning. And that was wicked fun. I had a great time. I had one major faux pas, which is instead of bringing 32 unique characters, I brought the same four characters eight times. So that was really embarrassing for those who are in my shadow dark zero tier.
I apologize for my dumb ass, not bringing all the right characters, but people still had a good time when you're getting killed as fast as people are getting killed. They would just go, Hey, it's this guy version three. So everything went, went kind of well. So I really enjoyed that. And then being a special guest definitely had its privileges. I got to see the game hall.
There was a reception dinner the day before. So I got to see a whole bunch of people that I knew there. One highlight for me was I got to shake hands with Peter Atkinson, who was the founder of Wizards of the Coast. Creator, the main driver for the third edition of D&D and the guy who saved D&D by buying TSR when it was floundering and brought it into Wizards of the Coast.
And I got to shake his hand and thank him for creating those awesome series of videos that he did on Gen Con TV where he interviewed all those previous creators. So that was really nice. I got to tell him to his face, thank you for making those videos because those videos were so outstanding. That was a real highlight. So that was great. One thing... I met tons of people.
It was really humbling to meet so many people who knew about the work that I do. It was really kind of funny because you can sort of tell sort of the demographics of what was going on because I'm standing there with Luke Hart and Monty from Dungeon Dudes are next to me. And a guy like walks up to me and shakes hands with me. And I'm like, these two guys are so much more popular than I am.
But I think it all has to do with like the venue at the time and stuff like that. But that was really fun. If you met me there, if you said hello, if you stopped to say hello or anything like that, and you told me who you are, I suck at names. And it happened often enough that I could not keep track.
So if we had a little encounter there, please feel free to send me a note at mikeatslyflourish.com and just say, hey, I was the guy that I met you at this thing and remind me of the situation so I can keep track of those who I met because it was really fun to do. It was really fun to meet so many people, but I met so many people and I'm just, I suck at names.
I just suck at like, I'll even ask, I'll be like, what was your name again? And they're like, Matt, I guess, right? And then it's like out. And I found that day, this fun little meme that I think many people have of the, what's your name, John? And it goes one ear and into your brain and your brain cell immediately takes it and shreds the name. That's exactly what happens to me.
I'm terrible, terrible, terrible at names. So I would like to hear from you though. If I met you, I would love to just share an email back and forth and say hello. Yeah. Ran games. That was great. I was on two panels, the YouTube for RPG panel and the OGL panel.
What was fun is we had like difference people up on the panels that had like different views and sometimes differences of opinion about things. And it was fun to kind of do that. I don't know if I'm the best panelist because I could just suck all the air out of a room.
I could talk to death, which is why one of the reasons why I run a talk show with just me is I'm not stealing someone else's time, right? It's just me. But I really enjoyed the conversations. We hit on a lot of really interesting things and I enjoyed those. I'm hoping there are recordings of those panels. I don't know if there are. So we'll see.
I got to meet lots of industry folks, including Monty and Kelly from the Dungeon Dudes had really good conversations with them. Really interesting to hear about the businesses that they operate. Luke Hart from DM Lair, Anna B. Myers, who is a cartographer who has done a lot of work on Greyhawk, the cartographer for Midgard. I got to talk to her. That was really wonderful.
And many, many others that I got to talk to. I also saw lots of people, like I saw Monty Cook and I saw Bruce Cordell and I saw all these people. And I always feel weird kind of like going up and saying hello, unless I have something specific that I wanted to talk to them about. But it was really neat to just see so many industry people that were there. And I really enjoyed that.
I do have some tips. A couple of things that worked very well for me and a couple of things I really wish I had done that are probably good at gaming conventions, period. Drink tons of water. Luckily, I had two water bottles on my backpack that I was continually filling throughout the game. I drank water like crazy that whole convention.
Bring chapstick because when you're drinking tons of water in a big environment like that, your lips are going to get super chapped. I sure wish I had. I had some back in my room, but I didn't bring it with me. And I really wish I had cough drops. I lost my voice after the first day and I had two other four hour games to run at 8 a.m. the previous mornings.
And the problem is a lot of the rooms are really loud. The room I was in was really loud and got louder as we went. It's like the audio level just increases. So each day I would do my best to run those games as well as I could and then lost my voice. If I had cough drops, that would have helped a lot.
For those of us of a certain age, dietary things can matter when you're at a convention like this. Eat lots of salads. Anytime you're going to a place, eat a salad instead. Your body and your digestive tracts will thank you for it. That's something that I did is I ate salads at every meal that I could. Anytime we're going out, I got a salad rather than getting a burger so that I was healthy.
I had a healthy system that I was there. I really wish I had given myself a day between games that I was running to help myself recover from a voice. It's one thing when you're playing a game, you don't have to talk quite as much, but when you're running games, you are. So I ran three.
I probably should have stuck to two and then had a day in between them so that I could give my chance for my voice to recover. And another trick for food, one thing we found... was that an hour was almost not enough time to get food. It was like if you had an hour from like 12 to one, you had to rush to the food trucks outside, order as fast as you could and probably eat on the go.
And a couple of times an hour wasn't enough for us to get all the food that we needed. But one thing you can do is there are a couple of restaurants that were nearby. You can call those restaurants up, order your food, walk over to them while they're preparing it, pick it up and bring it back. That actually worked well. But prepare to spend a fair bit of food because food can be kind of expensive.
So those are all some tips that I have from GameHulkCon. I loved it. Outstanding convention. Again, if I met you there, it was really, really nice to meet you. Send me a note at Mike at SlyFlourish.com. I'd love to stay in touch. Really fun games. If you were in the games, I'd love to stay in touch with you as well.
I know a lot of folks joined in the games that listen to shows like this and stuff like that. And that was really, really fun. I hope you enjoy the game. I'm always worried like, oh, man, this game kind of sucked. But I think everybody had a good time. It seems like everybody had a good time. So that all went well.
And I want to thank Alex Kammer and all of the folks that worked at GameHulkCon for inviting me to the convention. Had an absolutely fantastic time. And I really hope to continue to go there in the year's future. Really, really loved it. Today, I want to talk about an idea for how we run our tabletop role-playing games called Pool Table Dungeon Mastering.
Now, I first got this idea from a TV show that I was watching and have since when I came up with the idea of this topic for the show, I started watching the TV series again. And that is one of my all time favorite TV shows called Deadwood. Deadwood is really interesting as a model for pool table dungeon mastering for a few reasons.
uh, one of the concepts about pool table dungeon mastering is constraint that you don't have this wide open world where everything is going on. You have boundaries around the campaign that you're running. You know that it's focused either in a particular region or around a particular storyline.
And you know what the boundaries of that region generally are, but you don't know what's going to happen inside that region in the TV show. Deadwood, the whole thing pretty much operates just in the town of Deadwood. They actually built this great big set and, uh, pretty much everything in the show happens within that set.
There are a few scenes that happen outside of the set, but generally speaking, the whole thing is operating inside this one big set. So CJ, a patron of Sly Flourish asked the question, what specific sources do you use for inspiration on interconnected plot lines, twists, and tropes? One of the things I'm leaning into are hooks that come with published adventures.
Part of my job is working to make compelling reasons for the specific players at my table to engage the adventure, which includes the hook, but actually is much more than merely the hook, intertwined plot lines and such. And doing this in a way that's still very open as opposed to very linear adventure is both an art and a skill.
And I'd love to learn about specific sources you mine for these type of interconnected plot lines, which in many ways are tropes, cliches, but that's okay. I'm not asking for random tables, but more like I steal from this person's books or I borrow from these movies. And he brought up like Dungeon Craft, Professor Dungeon Master. Dungeon Craft is a huge inspiration.
I watch his remakes of Keep in the Borderlands. You know what I mean? He's really easy, brings these things to life. That said, I've learned is I can't do all the work. Players have to be willing to operate and engage and things like that. So this question brought up that idea and I thought about it from Deadwood being that kind of inspiration.
So there's three interesting things I want to say about Deadwood. One is that the Deadwood is a really good example because the way Deadwood operates as a TV show is that there is a one general region and then a bunch of characters and you can think about each character as a ball on a pool table. One of the pool balls on the pool table. And each of them has sort of characteristics.
Each of those characters has characteristics. Seth Bullock has a set of characteristics. And Al Swearingen has a set of characteristics. Dan Doherty has a set of characteristics. Hurst has a set of characteristics. And they all have different things that motivate them and drive them and interest them that they often just state outright and sometimes will state to each other.
There was a really fun interaction. I think it was in the Deadwood movie where Al Swearengen is talking to Seth Bullock and says, has there ever been a situation that you did not just walk right directly into? He said that to him because that's what Seth Bullock does. Seth Bullock walks right into a situation.
There's a wonderful scene early on where a young girl is the only survivor of a massacre from a bunch of road agents. And the doctor is protecting her. And Seth Bullock, the hero of the show, comes to him and says, is she going to survive? Because he wants to know if she was a witness to it so he can learn who did it.
And the doctor says, I don't think she's going to survive and I don't think she's ever going to talk again. And Calamity Jane talks to the doctors like, why don't you trust him? He's a good guy. He says, guys like that are just as dangerous to her as the road agents who went after her in the first place.
Let's say he goes out to find him and they find out that he now knows who they are because of her testimony. They're just as likely to kill her. And now she's even more danger. So people like that are just as dangerous as the road agents that would actually do the murder. And that's an example of the characteristics that these characters have and how those balls can smash together.
And one of the wonderful things about this TV show is you don't have any idea where it's going. And guess what? Neither did David Milch, the writer and director of Deadwood, had no idea where this story was going to go. And David Milch has written lots of TV shows, but one of the ones he did that I watched when I was a kid and watched again recently was NYPD Blue.
NYPD Blue is this old cop show set in New York City. And the dialogue was amazing. The writing was amazing. And you never really knew what direction it was going to go. And one of the, in some documentaries that I saw for NYPD Blue was that he did not always have the scripts written until the day that they were going to act.
And there was this great scene where Jimmy Smits, one of the actors, is sitting there staring at his notes that he just got for a scene he has to play right then. And apparently drove him so bananas that many of the actors on NYPD Blue quit because they're like, I don't have a script. How am I supposed to do a show without a script? And the reason why is because David Milch didn't have a script.
He's like, I don't know. I got to watch you guys act and then I'll see what you're going to go. The same thing happened in Deadwood, but apparently they were ready for it because the actors said it was amazing how he would watch an interaction between two characters and then suddenly write a whole new element to the story and hand us that and we'd have to go that direction.
That's the idea of pool table dungeon mastering. But even then there was one third thing that I thought was really funny. And I didn't, long after I've been talking about pool table dungeon mastering and long after I've been talking about Deadwood is a great example. I was watching the show and here's a quote from the show. This is from E.B.
Farnham after he had a meeting with Al Swearengen and he was walking across the street back to his crappy hotel. And he says, no deceit too prolonged, no errand too demanding, no rebuke too vile. Al Swearengen's a cue and Farnham is merely his billiard ball. And I was like, he's specifically had a character talk about pool table dungeon mastering kind of in his own show.
And I didn't even hear that the first time that I thought of this idea of pool table dungeon mastering. So that cracks me up. So where are we with this? What do we do? Okay, Mike, that's great. You love Deadwood. Thank you for sharing all of your Deadwood analogies. How do we use that in our tabletop role playing games?
So the way you use it in your tabletop role-playing games is focusing on actors and actors can be NPCs or they, or they can be characters. And instead of worrying about what those plot lines are, as CJ mentions, he's worried that they're, they're worried about all of the intertwined plot lines and such. Don't worry about the intertwined plot lines. You don't know what they're going to be.
Instead, you look at each ball and you look at the characteristics that that ball has. What, who is that actor and what are their characteristics? How would they act given a certain situation? The more you can put yourself into the eyes of that actor, the easier it is for you to decide where that actor is going to go when they interact with something else or someone else.
If a character says to them, so an example of a pool table thing is in my Wednesday game, the characters just crawled through the Crypt of the Betrothed, which is an ancient vampire crypt. They met two vampires down there. The vampires are blocking access to something that the characters need.
Now, of course, the characters can just fight the vampires and try to kill them, but the vampires are really powerful. And if they try to fight them, there's a chance they could lose because they're a little low level for vampires, for full-on vampires. So instead, the vampires are like, I don't care about killing you. I just want to escape from this tomb and we're trapped here.
If you let us out, we'll give you what you want. And the character's like, if we let two vampires out, this is going to be really bad. So then they're having these conversations. And at one point, One of the characters says, well, what if it's just one of you? And the vampire queen looks over at the sire. The sire's like, what do you mean?
And she moves faster than anybody can even see and goes over and kills her husband, kills the other vampire, and just murders him right in his seat, like tears his throat out and he's dead. And then she's now seated back in her seat faster than anybody could even see. He's dead. And she goes, will this help? Now it's just me.
And I actually stole that scene directly out of Queen of the Damned, the movie Queen of the Damned, which I think came from the Anne Rice novel Queen of the Damned, where there was a king and queen and the queen kills the king and goes out to be just the ruler on her own. So I was like, and it kind of makes sense for vampires.
Like it's really makes vampires interesting because like, wait a minute, you guys were a couple for thousands of years. And then just based on this conversation, you just murdered him outright. And she's like, yeah, you know, that's how things go. That was pool table DMing. I didn't know that that was going to happen. I thought like maybe that's possible. She would totally kill her husband.
Like they would betray each other, but she's the smarter one. So she'd probably betray her husband if it meant getting free. That is pool table GMing. And then the players are all talking about like, what do we do? Do we let her out? And then they came up with the idea. What if we control her coffin?
What if we say, yeah, you can come out, but we put the coffin in our home base and we're going to make sure that we have control over you so that if you do anything too vile, we can stop it. And she's like, that's acceptable. Right. So there's this fun like I know what's in her mind. I know what she wants and desires. I know what she's willing to do. I don't have to know where it's going to go.
I don't have to have any idea about where the plot is going to go. But I know I can I can jump into her shoes at any moment and say to myself, what would I do if I was her?
and that's really that key about where is the ball gonna go when it's struck by another ball and that whole idea is you do that for all the npcs who are all the villains who are all the npcs who are the characters and how are they all interacting and how is the story evolving as these things collide i don't have to know three steps out i only have to know what's in the mind of any npc at any given point and what happens when you hit him when when when a character brings them something or talks to them what path would they take given what the characters did
That's that idea of knowing the characteristics of an actor, and by actor I mean like an NPC or a villain or something like that, and thinking about how they'll react to the actions of the characters, which is done by the players. That to me is a far more effective way of running a really fun campaign that can go in lots of different directions. It's not the only thing.
You still need adventure hooks. You still need interesting locations. You still need to have a general path that the characters are going to go so that the game is fun. But when you're talking about the interwoven plot lines that are going on in an adventure, instead of worrying about building a giant-ass network chart with all kinds of flow charts and stuff connected, just think about the nodes.
Who are the actors, and what's their motivation to do what they want? And then get in their heads and decide what are they going to do based on what the characters did. That's really the fundamental nature of pool table dungeon mastering. And if you have... The ability to go watch the show Deadwood. First of all, I got to give a disclaimer. It is a super dark show. Crazy.
It has the best four-letter language you will ever hear in any show. Tons of violence. Tons of all the triggers. It's got pretty much all of them in there. So you want to be careful when you're watching that show to make sure that's the kind of show that you want to watch.
And there's things that are uncomfortable in lots of different ways that I am uncomfortable with, with the show, but I still adore the show. And I still adore a lot of the stuff that's in the show didn't end particularly well, but the movie was good. So the movie kind of made it the ending a little bit better.
One of the problems with stories like this is sometimes the ending is often a hard part to come to. And that's a real tricky bit.
we have a really good one as a dm of ending really free-flowing things like this because we can just ask the players to write their own endings and it almost works perfectly so that's an advantage that we have so that's pool table game mastering and i i hope you like that idea and i hope that helps you answer some of these questions of like how do you keep track of super detailed plot lines the answer is you don't instead you focus on those actors and the properties of those actors
Let's talk about some Patreon questions. Every month on the Sly Flourish Patreon, we put up a monthly Q&A thread. Every week, I answer questions on this thread, every Friday, for any question related to tabletop role-playing games, and some of those questions I bring here so we can dive into them a little deeper. Nate G. says,
There are so many out there that it's difficult at times to have an understanding of what makes one better than the other. Obviously, there's a lot of personal preferences, but I'd be interested in why your favorite book is your favorite. My current favorite monster book is The Monstrous Menagerie by Level Up Advanced 5e. And I have specific reasons why I like this so much.
This is the vampire listing from Level Up Advanced 5e's Monstrous Menagerie. You can pick this up as a PDF either on the EN Publishing website or on the DMs Guild, and you can pick up physical versions from EN Publishing. It is an outstanding book. I have now been using it for years, I think, a couple of years. where it has been my primary monster book.
It is a drag and droppable replacement to the monster manual. And I think better than the 2014 monster manual in every way. The design of the monsters is better, but in particular, and this is the thing that I think gets to this answer, the question of what makes a good monster book better.
is the other things that a book gives you than just the stat block every monster book gives you stat blocks but what else do they include with the stat blocks the monstrous menagerie includes more stuff that's directly table usable for game masters than pretty much any of the other monster books that i've really looked at and the example is legends and lore you can do history and religion checks and immediately get information that you can give to your players about that monster
so you don't have to kind of hem and hawn read all the text up above and figure it out it tells you these are the things your players would find out the characters would find out if they roll specific checks on monsters they also include encounters for every monster so you can say a different challenge rating what kind of encounter might exist but what's really useful for this is it shows you what monsters often relate to what other monsters
So a vampire might be hanging out with ghouls or swarms of bats or wolves. Obviously, we know a lot about vampires. Malkibus, which is a demon, night hags. So it gives you ideas of the kinds of monsters that are going to hang out with other monsters. So, you know, another example would be like the hag.
So again, the hag has legends and lore, so you can learn information about a hag and then hag encounters. And it shows you like what kind of hags, you know, sea hags with coral fish or marrows. This is like a sea hag run, right? We have winter hags, night hags with chain devils, gorgons, invisible stalkers, ogre mages. So you have a whole bunch of different information available.
about what monsters tend to hang out with what other monsters. That's a really hard connection to find across a monster book, unless you have something like this that really helps you do it. Another great thing that Monstrous Menagerie does is it includes treasure parcels. So you have these challenges here for these different things, but it also includes what kind of treasure might exist.
And it makes contextual sense for that monster, like hags have brooms of flying and ropes of entanglement.
right or crystal balls right three brooms of flying for the three coven winter hags which is a cr30 encounter by the way and maybe they have a a ring of a frozen wishing well which acts as a ring of three wishes so that's really cool then you have these these signs like what are the signs that a creature might be there wilderness signs beautiful cozy cottage frogs ravens and rodents seem to be watching you so it's got other factors that you can use directly in your game
This one has different signs by wilderness, settlement, or underground. The whistle of a tea kettle, the cackling or chanting. Behaviors. How does that monster behave in a given situation? Here's a list of 12 different things. They're making gingerbread man. They greet you as royalty and promise the crown you deserve.
They're making a pot of tea or they're sweeping with a broom of flying or speaking to a mirror. Right. Here's a bunch of hag names. Auntie Deer, Baba Chicken Bone, you know, Cousin Apple Worm, Grandfather Widdershins. So you have some names when it makes sense. And of course, you have the stat blocks that exist there.
So and then there's usually a combat section that talks specifically about the tactics that that would run. That is a lot of extra stuff that they have for pretty much every monster in the Monstrous Menagerie has this extra stuff.
I haven't dove in, I just haven't had a chance to dive in as deep as I want to, but I'm going to because of the game I'm about to run, into the Tales of the Valiant Monster Vault. One of the interesting things that I saw in the Monster Vault is that it too has similar ways of tying monsters together so you can see what they've got. It has a lot on customizing monsters.
For each of the monster types, it talks about a particular monster, but then also has this list of allies, like what allies would be, and what's really cool, a pronunciation if you have trouble with these. So this is really a handy way to see like, hey, what kind of creatures are going to hang out with what other kind of creatures? Right.
If you have any if you have any sort of, you know, what what would be with a clay golem, acolytes, cultists, priests and other religious humanoids, stone golem would have spellcasting creatures. Right. It kind of shows you what kind of creatures would be connected. It's not directly in the section for each monster. It's sort of up front in it.
But, you know, again, very useful elements that I can use directly in my game. But I still really like the I still really like having those monster knowledge checks and things like that. They're in there with the monsters menagerie. And that's why I think The Monstrous Menagerie is my favorite monster book.
But I'll tell you, you know, the Tales of the Valiant Monster Vault is going to give it a run for the money. I'm going to be running it for my next game. So I'll learn more about using this particular book. And of course, we still have to see what the 2025 monster manual is going to look like when that book comes out, what kind of stuff they're going to have in there. So we'll see.
But that's when you ask, like, what are the kind of criteria for a good monster book? To me, it's about getting giving me more material to use than just whatever is in the stat block, because every monster book has stats.
Boston says I recently ran a sahoo again assault on salt marsh based on my approach and a suggestion of yours in one of your videos I did three phases plus a final confrontation each phase had three events and the players could choose from what would affect the final outcome burning ships mages doing rituals as they protect partook in these events I described the siege and mayhem going on around them the players love this approach and it was a blast to run my one issue was when planning was timers.
The examples, priests are summoning a tidal wave. How do you time this? Do you give them three rounds until the summoning is complete? How many priests are there? How many bodyguards? Does killing one priest increase the number of rounds they do? How many rounds? I'm summarizing because it's a big, long thing. Are there formulas or thought processes to help with this?
For my session, I kind of eyeballed it, and it went pretty good in most cases. But in some, I had to do quite a bit of improv, which I don't really mind, but it would be great if there was some sort of framework for these kind of events. I would definitely lean towards the just stay in the narrative and let the decisions of the characters sort of drive what the larger narrative of what's going on.
You don't necessarily need to box yourself in by having some kind of mechanical timer in order to focus on what's going on in an event. Instead, you can really, you know, instead you could just kind of like let it flow by what makes sense for the story in your mind and not have any kind of timer.
So countdown pools, countdown pools in the Level Up Advanced 5e guide by EN World has a thing about countdowns. And what's nice is it has a table that shows you
roughly how many rolls are going to occur before the system comes up this like fast roll or slow roll and how many dice in your dice pool and what happens when you roll it gives you like what the general average is it could take fewer than that it could take more than that but it gives you a general idea about how many of these things are going to take place so that's a way to do it i still think the better way to do it is to sort of improv it on your own and if you want to just roll a die behind the screen to kind of shake up your brain or maybe make some interesting things happen you can do that but i wouldn't worry on having a
Because I feel like when you're working with a lot of mechanics like that, sometimes you're going to have a situation where everyone's sitting around waiting for the next thing to happen. Or things are happening too quickly and the players are getting overwhelmed. So I think you want to have your own kind of hand on that dial of how fast things go.
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