The Lazy RPG Podcast - D&D and RPG News and GM Prep from Sly Flourish
Four Histories of D&D – Lazy RPG Talk Show
Mon, 16 Sep 2024
D&D and RPG news and commentary by Mike Shea of https://slyflourish.com Contents 00:00:00 Show Start 00:01:16 Kickstarter Spotlight: Worldographer 2025 by Inkwell Ideas 00:03:36 Kickstarter Spotlight: Shadow City Mysteries 00:04:53 Product Spotlight: Level Up Advanced 5e on Bundle of Holding 00:10:46 D&D & RPG News: MCDM's License for Draw Steel 00:17:33 Product Spotlight: Shadowdark Guide to Monster Statistics by Matt Dietrich 00:22:14 Commentary: Four Sources of D&D History 00:44:16 DM Tip: Instant Monsters for 5e 00:59:02 Patreon Question: Handling Back Seat Driving Veteran Players 01:03:17 Patreon Question: Running the City of Arches with Shadowdark 01:05:40 Patreon Question: Managing Secrets with Multiple Paths Ahead 01:08:09 Patreon Question: Building Single-Session Episodic Adventures Links Subscribe to the Sly Flourish Newsletter Support Sly Flourish on Patreon Buy Sly Flourish Books: Worldographer Kickstarter Shadow City Mysteries Crowdfunding campaign Level Up A5e Bundles of Holding – Core Level Up A5e Bundles of Holding – Adventures Draw Steel creators license Shadowdark Quick Monster Stats by Matt Dietrich D&D 50 Year Panel D&D 50 Celebration Games When We Were Wizards The Making of Original D&D: 1970 - 1977
Today on the Lazy RPG Talk Show, we're going to look at the Worldographer Kickstarter, the Shadow City Mysteries crowdfunding campaign, the huge level up advanced 5e bundle of holding going on. We're going to look at the Draw Steel Creators License by MCDM, the Shadow Dark Quick Monster Stats by Matt Dietrich.
And today we're going to dive deep into the history of D&D with a whole bunch of resources that have only come out in the past few months, some of which I've already talked about on the talk show, but how all of this comes together to give us a really different view of what D&D is like and where it came from. And today we're going to talk about instant monsters.
How can you build a monster almost instantly to drop into your 5e game? and we're going to cover more 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 all kinds of tips
tricks, tools, source books, adventures, and other things to help you run your tabletop role-playing games. They get access to the awesome Lazy DM community over on Discord, and they also help me put on shows like this to the patrons of Sly Flourish. Thank you so much for your outstanding support.
my friend joe over at inkwell ideas has a new crowd funding campaign for his top product known as the worldographer worldographer has been around for god i don't know 15 years 10 or 15 years he'd have to tell me it is a local client-based application to help you build out your fantasy world it lets you fill in hex maps
And it used to be a series of separate tools, Worldographer, Cityographer, and Dungeonographer, which are now all together in one big package. And he has a new version of this coming out called Worldographer 2025. Even though it's called 2025, it's actually coming out in 2024, sort of like the new car model. And you can see all of the different kinds of things that this tool can do.
One of the things I really love is it installs to your computer. Unlike a web app, the company goes out of business, or if you're just in a bad connection, you can keep using it. You hear me talk about that all the time. If you cannot download it and stick it on a USB drive, you don't really own it. So you get to really own this application.
Lots of different generators to build worlds, to build cities, to build dungeons. All of it inside this application. There's a whole bunch.
He runs both a Patreon, which you should check out, but also has a bunch of different tools available on DriveThruRPG, different icon packs and different artwork packs that you can add into it to build it out, whether you're running science fiction adventures or apocalyptic adventures or, of course, fantasy adventures or fantasy campaigns. You can build that out. Here's one that's like a star map.
So you can do a whole bunch of different things with this one tool. He's been building it for a really long time. It's a really cool application. And you can get a free demo of it with one click. You go download it from our website. You click that. On the website is a Worldographer for Windows. The Java file, it's a Java-based application. So as long as you have Java installed, you can run it.
You can run it on Linux and you can run it on the Mac. So runs on pretty much everything. So the crowdfunding campaign is going on now, going very well. And if you want to support this excellent application, get access to this excellent application. I think he has a bunch of videos too.
There's a bunch of different video previews for the world kingdom functionality, battle map changes, city and village mapping. So if you want to see what it's like, you can check out the YouTube videos for it. Looks really, really cool. So that is the Worldographer 2025 backer kit going on right now. You can find a link to that down in the show notes.
Shadow City Mysteries tabletop RPG based on 5e in a setting of clockwork noir it reminds me a bit of Invisible Son the Monty Cook games one and that it's set in kind of a current day or sort of a more contemporary environment but has all kinds of strange like occult like mysteries going on Looks like a really cool system and or like a cool game has like its own tarot card going on here.
Different factions you can join and mysteries that you unravel in the city. And there is a, let's see, I think I skipped past it. A quick start download. And again, one click people, people are listening. They do the one click download. So if you want to take a look at what this looks like, you have a whole quick start guide available to you. 56 page quick start guide.
I thought my 40 page sample for City of Arches was really good. This one's 56 pages. Gives you a really cool idea of what the environment looks like. Really cool stuff. Look at that. Cool clockwork arm going on there. It's got like that Sin City style of, hey, only a red hair shows up. Looks really neat.
So if you want sort of an investigative occult-like mysteries that kind of have like a detective, you know, 1930s detective feel to it with standard 5e-ish sort of rules, you can check out the Shadow City Mysteries role-playing game available right now on Backerkit. Looks really neat. Level Up Advanced 5e is one of the big 5e variants that are available right now.
I am now running Level Up Advanced 5e for my Wednesday game, and we are enjoying it a lot. Level Up Advanced 5e builds upon standard 5e rules, adding things like combat maneuvers, a vast set of combat maneuvers, a whole different way of handling skill specializations and specialties, new systems like exploration and travel with things like supply.
Lots of different angles they take, plus a general refinement of 5e across the board, both looking at spells. It has advanced spells and rare spells. It has a much more streamlined monster system. And you can get access to the entire Level Up Advanced 5e set of books for a very, very reasonable price. A really, really good price over on the bundle of holding. Available right now, 15 days left.
$25 gives you the three Level Up Advanced 5e core books. This is like... The books are huge, too. They're like 600 pages. So it's like 1,500 pages of material for your 5e game. Now, here's a really cool thing. Even if you're like, yeah, I don't plan on running. I'm happy with whatever version of D&D or 5e that I'm running right now. I really don't need that.
I guarantee you, you will find a lot of value from two of those three books directly. The Level Up Advanced 5e Monstrous Menagerie is my favorite book of monsters. It is really, really excellent.
It has tons and tons of material in it to help you run your monsters, see what monsters join up with other monsters and groups, what treasure monsters might hold, what knowledge checks the characters might do in order to learn more about monsters and the monsters mechanics themselves are heavily streamlined. Paul Hughes was the lead designer of it. He's excellent.
He spent a lot of time balancing out the monster math. It's a fantastic book. I really, really love it. Trials and Treasure is their version of the DMG, and I think it is far superior to the 2014 Dungeon Master's Guide. It is an excellent book. It has regions and encounters that you might have in those regions and weather that might happen in those regions.
It's got a whole bunch of different sort of challenges, exploration challenges that the characters might find. It's got a fantastic treasure system. It is a really, really excellent book. And just those two books can plug into any version of 5e that you're running.
If you're running D&D 2014, D&D 2024, Tales of the Valiant, any other version of 5e that you're running, you can use those two books and they drop right in. You can even just use parts of those books. You don't have to pull out your whole DMG and switch it out. You can just say, oh, I'm going to use pieces of it. Really, really valuable.
But if you want to try definitely a more advanced version of 5e, I actually did a video this past week on one night. At that point, it had been one night. Now I've actually got...
i don't know a few dozen sessions at least a dozen sessions under my belt running level up advanced 5e it is definitely advanced it definitely has more stuff in it than you would typically find in your 5e games but my players who are advanced players really seem to be digging it they're getting lots of cool options they're doing lots of combat maneuvers lots of different ways that they're building up their characters it is a really cool system i like it a lot so this is a fantastic way this is probably the best way the most reasonably priced way
where you can get all of these books. $25 gives you all three Level Up Advanced 5e books, Memories of Holdenshire, which is a first-level adventure that you can run for your characters. Again, 5e compatible, so you can run it with pretty much everything. And the Level Up Narrator screen. I actually haven't seen that.
I don't know if I have the Level Up Narrator screen, so I haven't seen what that's like. But again, you can get all of that. $25 for all three of those books is an absolutely outstanding price. But that's not all. They also have an adventure pack for it, which is available. Also, it is, I think the current threshold level is $28, so $29 gives you access to all this stuff.
But you get a whole ton of different Level Up Advanced 5e books, including the Dungeon Delver's Guide, which is a great big source book for building and running dungeons in Level Up Advanced 5e. All the material from the Level Up Starter Set and some huge campaign paths. The Level Up, the Gate Pass Gazette, which has a ton of additional material, 468 pages of additional material.
The starter set I already mentioned the adventures in zeitgeist. Yeah. The adventures in zeitgeist, a bunch of series of adventures and a 400 page campaign called to save a kingdom. I haven't run these. I haven't really dived into them too deeply, but I've heard very good things about them as well. So for like 60 bucks,
a little less than $60, you get an entire system plus all of the source books that are available for this system with adventures, with additional options for characters, with all kinds of stuff that you get available in this one giant PDF pack. It is absolutely worth it. I highly recommend it. I think it is outstanding. I have this stuff. I use this stuff and I love this stuff a lot.
I think Level Up Advanced 5e is a fantastic system and I highly recommend it. And this is a great way to pick it up for a very low price.
So you can find links for the bundle of holding for Level Up Advanced 5e, both for the starter set or the starter collection that includes all the core books and the adventure pack that includes the starter set plus a whole bunch of other stuff all in the show notes below. It is really, really good. And again, you can break this stuff. This is one of the things I love about 5e.
I've, I've talked about this a lot. 5e is a platform, right? 5e is now an open platform for RPGs is an open system. That's why we can see things like the shadow city mysteries where I bet you, you can take stuff from your other 5e material and run it in your shadow city mysteries game.
Do you want to throw a weird alien monster that comes bursting out and you want, you don't really have one in the book. You can find a weird alien monster from some other 5e book and drop it right in. 5e as an open platform for RPGs is fantastic. And the idea that when you pick up all this material from Ian World Publishing for Level Up Advanced 5e, all of this stuff can run probably as is.
Some of it might require a little bit of conversion, but you can drop it into any of your 5e games. Your 5e games can now be a mishmash of stuff from lots of different publishers, lots of different material, and you can... pick and choose the stuff that you like in order to build the campaign that you want. So it's a really great pile of ingredients for you to be able to build out your 5e games.
And that's what I love about 5e as a platform. And that's what I love about these individual products like Level Up Advanced 5e and these other ones. Fantastic stuff. This past week, MCDM, the creators, this is Matt Colville's game company, has talked about, they've been working on Draw Steel. Draw Steel is their new tactical heroic fantasy role-playing game. I don't know when it's coming out.
They did a massive crowdfunding campaign for it last year, I think. My friend, James Indercasso, who I've been friends with for a long time and worked with on different products, he is the lead designer of it. Looks really good. I've actually been staying away from it because I kind of want to see it when it's done.
I'm eager, you know, I'll let other people test it out and I'm eager to see it when it's done, but I'm, I'm confident it's going to be really good. They do tons. I don't think I've seen any play testing group better than what I've seen from MCDM. I think they do incredible testing on their, on their stuff. So anyway, one of the things that they have started to do is a creator's license.
They want to set up a license where people can build material off of draw steel. This is a test license that they put out specific to the draw steel backer packet number one. And the idea is they wanted to build a very easy to read, very easy to understand contract that tells you what kind of material you're allowed to write for Drawsteel.
And they talk about like main thing is you cannot pretend to be official Drawsteel or that somehow MCDM endorsed you, but you can use a powered by Drawsteel logo. You are allowed to use anything, I believe. Read the license yourself before you listen to me on this show.
Yes, you can reuse and freely reference the Drawsteel text, mechanics, and game rules, including proper names, locations, and characters. That's a big deal. A lot of game companies don't do that. So they're giving you a lot of freedom to use the material in here. You cannot use any of the artwork from the book. So that's also an important thing.
But most almost nobody really gives away artwork that you can use other than usually logos and stuff like that. But the idea that you can freely use the text is really good. You have to put a little description in here that says that you're an independent product published by the Drosteo Creators License. You put that in here.
One thing, if you ever decided to write this, make sure you save a copy of this license locally because there's no idea that there will still be able to have that online.
So you want to definitely have a downloaded copy of this license, probably in a PDF that you have and that you keep along with whatever product you made using this so that if there's ever a question that comes into play, you can always pull it out. There was one weird thing that showed up in this license.
So I recommend if you're interested in like making material for draw steel, if you're interested in just the whole RPG publication market and you want to know more about it, then definitely read it. There was one thing, two things that got people like, ah, like they freaked out. I kind of freaked out. I read it like, oh no, what have you done? And then I'm like, oh, okay.
And it was like, MCDM may modify or revise this license at any time in its sole discretion by posting the amended license on its website located at the license and announcing the change, at least. The modification or revision will become effective after such postings. MCDM will indicate on the license date that it was amended. You are responsible for checking the license regularly.
This is what the GSL did that was terrible, which is you can change the license on me. But then they say right after that. No, don't do it. Right after that was our license amendments will not be retroactive. If we amend the license, it will only apply to MCDM content that released after the announcement of the amendment.
Any of our content that was released before an amendment is still covered by the old license. You can thus create a product based on our content today, knowing that we're not going to switch up the license and terms on you down the road.
If you have a product that you're selling or that's in development by the time MCDM issues a license agreement, you can continue distributing that product plus any updates, modified versions, and so on. So what this means is, and this is where it gets kind of interesting. And there's one kind of phrase that's missing from this license that makes it a little scary.
I talked to some folks, including lawyers, who looked at this to say like, how do you guys feel about this? Like it wasn't legal advice. We were just kind of having a conversation about it. And the one thing is like, what they're clearly trying to say is, we can change the license in the future. And if we change it in the future and you're making a product, you have to use the new license.
You can't use the old one. But if you already are making a product, when this license is out and they haven't made an update, you can be confident that you can use that old license. So essentially the licenses can expire for new stuff, but not for old stuff. That's kind of interesting, right? This is sort of a thing when we think about the OGL and stuff that went on with the licenses there.
That was one of the worries was like, oh, well, they can't ever let a license expire. So the one word that's kind of missing from here is revocability. Can they revoke the old license? So they can make it expire by basically saying the old license. Now we have a new license. And if you're going to make new stuff for our stuff, you have to use the new license.
But there's nothing to say that they cannot revoke the old one. And I think they're kind of want to be able to revoke the old one, but not for stuff that was published back then. That's an interesting and kind of fine line, which is essentially saying we want to be able to kill the license for any future product.
We don't want to have to put out a product, a license now that we have to live with for the rest of eternity for any new product that comes out. But they want to ensure that if you've made something under the old product, under the old license, back when that license was available, you still could. It's an interesting line, and we'll see how people fall within this.
It's a different story when an independent, even though MCDM is a great big company and they make millions of dollars, they're still an independent RPG company. And it's interesting, the question of like the level of importance of this is a good question. I'm, you know, it's cool. I'm glad they did something where they have some kind of open license. It feels pretty good.
And for all we know, they might say, no, we're actually happy with this license and we're never going to change it, right? But they're leaving themselves the rights to change it.
I still kind of prefer things being put out in a Creative Commons license because we know how that license works and we know that it can never be revoked and we know that they are not even the license holder in that circumstance. Creative Commons is the one that actually maintains the license. I kind of like that better. So interesting stuff. I'm glad to see them do it.
I'll be interested to see what kind of feedback they get and what direction that they go with it. And we'll see if other publishers actually say, yeah, this license is good enough that I feel confident in being able to write material for it. A lot of times I think other than like D&D and other than like 5E,
I think you actually have to go through some work to get publishers interested enough in your thing and excited enough and feeling like their effort is going to be valuable enough to draw them in at all. So if your license agreement isn't definitely in favor of people writing for your product, if you're kind of pushing back on it, no one's going to care.
Cause there's so many RPGs to write for now. And a lot of companies like, forget it. I'll just write my own. So I think anybody, almost everybody has to do something. If you're interested in having other publishers write for your material, you have to have a draw more than the stick, right? There's gotta be more carrot, less stick when it comes to the kind of license. Anyway, interesting stuff.
Glad to see them do it. And I'm excited to see where they go in the future with it.
matt dietrich built a product that i took a look at this is over on itch.io you can download it you can download it and name your own price and it is a shadow dark guide to monster statistics this is near and dear to my heart because we do things like this with forge of foes and it was something that i felt was missing from the shadow dark core book which was really a core idea of like what stats should i use for any given level of a monster
So Matt Dietrich put this together again, available over on itch.io. There is a link down in the show notes and I will show it off now, which is a cool guide to say, like, if you're building a month, a quick monster, if you want a monster of a given level, pick a certain level, it gives you a general idea of its armor class and hit points.
a general idea of how many attacks it gets its attack bonus the amount of damage it does per attacks and then the stat mod of stat modifiers of of median low and high so generally speaking what kind of stats do you think a monster will have and what what would be the the difficulty class of the effect that it has so it goes all the way up to level 30 i think it's kind of funny because it jumps from 19 to 30 and 30 what are you even bothering like a shadow dark a 30th level shadow dark character with 140 hit points and 22 ac 5 attacks plus 13 3d 10 is going to wipe anybody
Yeah, it doesn't matter if you're level 10 or not. If you don't have a wish spell to wish that guy away, that's going to kick your ass. So I bet you you don't really need much more up to even like level 10. Even in my Shadow Dark game, which is getting to higher levels, level 5, 6, 7 monsters are about as high as I'm getting because they're really powerful.
So, but it's really neat to have like a quick guide. And it also sort of has a measuring stick monster stat modifiers. So the idea is for a given type of monster, a variant of that monster and examples of those monsters, what would their stats be like? So you can generally say like, if I know what kind of creature we're facing, what would the general stats of those creature be?
So you don't have to just make up your own stats using the stat mod from low, medium or high. I think that that's really cool. And then it says like, how do you use this? You identify the monster category, use the baseline modifiers for that category. You can change things up with some variants and of course pick a challenge rating for the monster. This is sort of like a three page version.
It doesn't have any monster abilities in it. It's sort of like a three-page Forge of Foes for Shadow Dark. And in that sense, I think it's really cool. I think it's a good, fun, quick way to build monsters for Shadow Dark on the fly, and specifically to let you convert monsters from other material. Let's say you're running I6 Ravenloft for Halloween, and you want to use Shadow Dark for it.
And you're like, well, what is a Strahd zombie like? You can basically take the hit dice that you would find in an old-school adventure, convert that to level, and that gives you an idea of what kind of monster stats a monster would have. So for example, we have the original AD&D Ravenloft adventure, I6 Ravenloft, my favorite adventure of all time. I love this adventure.
I think it is absolutely outstanding. I think it might be one of the best adventures ever written too, but it's just a really, really cool one. But then let's say we're gonna look at Strahd Zombies in particular. We're not going to do Strahd himself, but we're going to look at Strahd zombies. So here we have Strahd zombies, right?
And the Strahd zombie in here, we see number of appearing, their armor class, their movement, the hit dice. So basically what we want to do when we're going to make a Strahd zombie is we are going to take the hit dice, which is sort of the AD&D equivalent of the level of a monster, and we're going to build our stats that way. So in this case, we can go to, do they have undead?
They have undead and we're going to say, let's say they have ghouls. They don't have anything. We're actually going to lower some of this stuff because we know like the dexterity on a zombie is really low, but we'll use the ghoul stat blocks. Two strength, dex one, con two, intelligence minus three, wisdom minus one, charisma plus zero. That feels about right.
We could mess with those, but the ghoul is probably good enough. So we know that we have those baseline stats. We're going to go to level four, which means it has 19 hit points. And if you think about it, so the hit dice were D8s, I think, when you would roll the hit dice of a monster in AD&D, which would mean it'd be 18. So that's almost exactly right, right? It's, you know, 19 hit points.
The AC, we would probably lower that to eight. We would make that pretty low because the AC 13 is more than they have. Two attacks plus three 1D6 feels exactly right. So again, you could just pick that level and now we've got the stats that we need for our Strahd zombie. You could write that down on a little note card.
You could do something else, but we've now converted an AD&D monster into Shadow Dark like that using this guide to the Shadow Dark monster statistics. So I think it's a really excellent product. You can find that over on itch.io. This is the Shadow Dark quick monster stats guide available. Name your own price. Go ahead and throw a couple bucks and you can find a link down to it in the show notes.
If you're a Shadow Dark player, it is an excellent guide to have on hand. Print it out, stick it in your GM reference binder and you are all set. Something really interesting has happened over the past two months or so. We have gotten a tremendous amount of information about the history of D&D. And I never really cared. I never really spent much time understanding the history of D&D.
I picked up little tidbits here and there. I probably read the Wikipedia page from time to time. I knew that there was a brown box and a white box and a red box and AD&D and OD&D and the D&D basic and all that stuff. But I never really paid much attention to it. I knew who Gary Gygax was, I knew who Dave Arneson was, but I didn't really pay much attention to it.
The 50th anniversary of D&D has brought about a whole bunch of different elements of the history of the game that together build this really wild picture of what this game is. That's sort of the foundation of all the role-playing games that we enjoy. And I think now I've become very interested in the history of D&D. I've picked up a lot. I've listened to a lot. I've heard a lot. I've read a lot.
It's really, really fascinating stuff. And there are four sources for this information that I wanted to highlight today and to mention. And all of these will be linked down in the show notes. All four sources. Three of those four sources are totally free. You can just download them or listen to them or watch them on YouTube. And they are really good. Like...
The, the value that you get for the ability to hit these things is untenable anywhere else. Like you're, you're hearing from the people who were involved in this hearing from the people that lived through this, that understood what was going on, that were in the room when the decisions were happening. That's fascinating stuff. And those four sources are,
are the D&D 50-year anniversary panel over at Gen Con. This is a series. This one's new. I have not talked about this on a previous show before.
There are six panels that took place at Gen Con this past year where they talked about the original D&D, a D&D, second edition, third edition, fourth edition, and fifth edition with people who were there involved or in many cases were the lead designers of those versions of D&D. And it's absolutely fascinating to hear how these things came about, what the history of the company was at that point.
A lot of these people don't work there anymore, so they're talking about what decisions were made and when. And I'm going to highlight some of the things that kind of caught my attention that have stuck with me since listening to these. All of these panels are somewhere between 40 minutes and an hour and a half. Sometimes the audio gets a little bit garbled, but it's worth...
going through them, really, really interesting panels. So I highly recommend, if you're interested at all, these are fantastic things to listen to. I really enjoyed listening to them. I listened to them while I was working on my game, while I was playing with my Dwarven Forge, driving the car, taking a walk, really, really fascinating stuff.
And then that goes along with, and this was actually published before, and I have talked about on this show, the 50th Anniversary Celebration Games. There were six of these games as well, where they played OD&D, 1st Edition, 2nd Edition, 3rd Edition, 4th Edition, and 5th Edition. And again, they had like a two-hour discussion before they played a game.
And it's that two-hour discussion that's really fascinating. So don't get intimidated by the fact that these shows are like six hours long. Or in one case, it's like seven hours long. Don't worry about the back part. You can watch them play a game if you want.
But the first two hours of every one of these are panel discussions, again, with the people who were there, with the people who know what really happened, the people that understood what the corporate pressures were when they were making these games, and what the design ideas were that worked, what design ideas didn't work. Really fascinating stuff. I cannot mention... I cannot...
I implore you enough to listen to these if you're interested in the history of the game at all. If you really want to dive into an understanding of what D&D is like, where it came from, what they were thinking when they went from second to third, when they went from first to second, second to third, third to fourth, fourth to fifth, all of that stuff is described in detail in all of this stuff.
It's really, really fascinating stuff. And then I mentioned it before, but there is a podcast series called When We Were Wizards, 14-episode podcast, absolutely fascinating, that covers the history of D&D from before it was D&D all the way up to the point where it was about to get bought out by Wizards of the Coast.
So the entire history from people who were there at the company, interviews with the people who were there, what the company was like, this is a little less about the design of the game itself than those other two sources that I mentioned. It's definitely about the corporate politics of TSR, but it's fascinating. fascinating to listen to.
And I learned so much that I didn't know before and really, really amazing, amazing stuff to hear. And just an absolutely outstanding podcast. I really recommend it. And then the fourth bit of material, my wife got this for me for our anniversary. And this one is not free. This one costs a hundred dollars is the original Dungeons and Dragons, 1970 to 1977.
This is a huge hardcover collectible book, almost 600 page book. that has the actual copies of the original versions of D&D in it in full, including a version of D&D that's never been published before, the original draft of D&D, which is like on blue carbon paper with handwritten notes and little lines describing what's going on. And it's really interesting to like look at it
And I was looking at it and on the Discord server, on the Sly Flourish Discord server, I was taking pictures of this and saying like, look at this. And some of it is completely wild. Like how many players should be playing D&D? Somewhere between four and 50. I don't know about you. It's been a while since I've run a game with 50 players before.
i don't even know exactly what he meant by a 50 player game i presume that that meant like an ongoing campaign where different people would show up at different points almost like your west marches style game sure you could run a campaign with 50 different players who kind of come in with their characters and do their certain thing at a time i don't think it was sort of like you were all sitting there worried about the backstory of every one of the 50 characters but that was fascinating so the original version of dnd didn't have the core stats it had a whole different set of stats to it
So these are just some pictures that I took while I was going through the book. By the way, I bought this book. This was not given to me as a preview or anything like that. Wizards of the Coast did not send me one of these. I actually bought one because, or I didn't buy one. My wife bought one for me for our anniversary because it was definitely something I was interested in.
So it shows you like, you know, when you, you know, hey, you know, rules for fantastic medieval paper and pencil board and miniature figures. One interesting thing is the original take on this, which Gygax wrote from notes that he got from Dave Arneson, that he,
they originally required that you owned two other games chain mail and i forget the name of it but some kind of exploration board game that was out as well and the intention was this would sit on top these are rules that would sit on top of that it was only later when he said no actually we want to make sure it's an independent game where you have everything you need in this one box
You know, so very interesting kind of how this came out. This is the original sort of draft of D&D that wasn't actually published. You know, here is the idea. Number of players, one referee, more are possibly helpful in some cases if there are many participants. And from four to 50 players, that cracked me up.
Here is like the stats, the core stats of the original one were intelligence, cunning, strength, health, and appearance. So different. Now, as soon as they got into the brown box, the actual one that was published and sold, they had switched over to the six ability scores that we know in D&D currently, Strength, Dex, Con, Int, Wiz, and Charisma.
And then in this version was the first, this is the first dungeon! the first dungeon that was ever written was in these original notes, you know, and this is, this is what the dungeon layout was like. And this one actually made it into the brown box as well. This, this made it to that original version of D and D had this, they had this map in it and this side, side view, side view of the map.
So they could see like underneath castle. Cause the castle Greyhawk was kind of that original dungeon. And it was like, how are all of these things connected? This idea that you had multiple connection points for a layered dungeon where was in the very first version of D&D. The very first version had this kind of stuff.
Spells, you know, one thing that's interesting is this is the very first listing of spells for D&D ever in 1973. So it's older than the game itself, right? This is, again, the original draft. And if you look, a lot of these spells are still in the game today. Like, they've been in every version of D&D for 50 years. And just the idea that they still work. It's not like some of it is legacy.
Some of it is like, hey, we put in Fireball because the old one had Fireball. But like Fireball still makes sense. It still makes sense in the game. We still love it. So that to me is wild that like the original versions of this game had this stuff.
One thing I thought was fascinating is the treasure tables in the original version of D&D, 1973, 51, almost 52 years ago, the treasure tables and the way that you rolled random treasure were almost the same.
you know they were almost the same as the treasure tables that you find in like the 2014 dungeon masters guide or level up advanced 5e's trials and treasure has a very similar treasure generating guide you know that's the same style was there i found that just absolutely fascinating here's a fun bit you know poke it a little bit right gary gygax had no problem at all using balrog and using stuff directly from tolkien but boy he'd sure sue the hell out of anybody else if they used a beholder
It was definitely like, and if you recall, there were lawsuits between the Tolkien estate so that the Balrog and the Ents and Hobbits got changed into Balors and Trents and Halflings. So there was stuff that made it into the book that then got pulled out of the book because of lawsuit stuff.
So I found walking through, and I haven't even finished that book yet, I've gotten skimming through it, about half of it, because it also has the original brown box version, the original DD that actually was sold. And what I just find totally fascinating about that is what I found totally fascinating about it is just how much of it was similar.
One of the things that like they had, I think the original draft of D&D had it and the brown box version had it was your monsters by dungeon level table. And I remember seeing that in the original 1E Advanced Dungeon Master's Guide as well. And I liked it so much that I recreated a version of that in the Lazy DM's workbook.
So my book, the Lazy DM's workbook, because it's missing from the Dungeon Master's Guide. The 2014 Dungeon Master's Guide doesn't have it. A lot of other groups don't really have it too. But one thing that I really think is cool is the idea of like, hey, depending on what dungeon level you're on, you can roll a die and it will tell you which monster table to roll on.
And then that tells you what monster is there. Really fun way of rolling random monsters for a table that I think has been removed since those old versions of D&D. But I put it in the Lazy DM's workbook because I thought it was a really cool way to roll random monsters depending on like the level of the dungeon that you're on. I thought it was really neat.
And that all goes back to the original D&D book. Fascinating stuff. So when we put all this together, though, there's a lot of different things that I kind of learned both about the game, but also about the industry and where it is now and kind of where it's going.
And one of the things that are brought up is like the original D&D draft had lots of differences, but a lot of similarities to the version of D&D we have today. Again, that spell list is the same. The treasure is very similar. How you roll random treasure is the same. The core attributes are the same. A lot of it is definitely the same.
That said, there's a clear shift in sort of the heroism of the characters that happened about midway through second edition, I would say. This is not really something I picked up from these four things, but you can hear about it when you hear them talking about the additions of the game.
There was a point where the empowerment of the characters changed between about halfway through second edition when they started to get the complete books, the complete splat books, where they would get all new kinds of character options, where you had new weapon and non-weapon proficiencies, all kinds of new stuff. And character builds were much more complicated.
And that leaned in in third edition and fourth edition. where you had feats and you had prestige classes and you had a lot of other things, and building characters in third, and they talked about this in their panels, building a new character in third edition took a long time, where building a character in first and second edition took a couple of minutes.
And that's where you can start to see the difference between sort of old school games like Shadow Dark and like Knave and like other old school essentials, Where it's much faster to build a character quickly and thus the lethality of the game is a lot higher because it's okay because you're going to build a character in five minutes.
The idea that one click on Shadow Darklings can get you a Shadow Dark character, but it takes you probably an hour to build a fifth edition character. That's a big difference. And that really happened between third and fourth. Fifth edition kind of straddled the line a little bit. It sort of went back and said, well, we wanted things to be a little bit more lethal, but mostly at low levels.
And that character creation should be relatively easy at low levels. You don't have feats. You don't have multi-classing. You know, a lot of things are kind of optional. And then eventually you can get into that more advanced stuff by adding on modules. But now with D&D 2024, it's gone back to the superhero characters. You can tell a lot just by looking at the art that is inside the 2024 D&D book.
where they have tons of big pictures of big heroic characters doing big heroic things. And it's different than the style of art that we're used to in the older versions of the game. But there's definitely more of a superheroic fantasy angle to D&D 2024. I'm not knocking it. I love superheroic fantasy RPGs. And I think we now have this incredibly wide range of different fantasy RPGs.
I'm not going to stay on this too long because I don't want to get in trouble. But we have this wide range of different RPGs that we can enjoy that go from the real, like, super fast character generation of Knave 2, where you don't even have classes. You just have sort of your jobs and occupations.
all the way to like the superheroic fantasies of Pathfinder 2 and D&D 2024 and 13th Age, where you have real high power characters doing high power stuff. 13th Age, for example, is a game where you are unique in the world by design. It says, what is your one unique thing?
That is definitely a different take on D&D than the old school where like any, you were basically a farmer who decided, you know what, I'm tired of farming. I'm going to pick up a stick and hopefully kill a giant rat and maybe get some experience points. I think it's really wild and interesting to see how that has spread across. So those are about the game itself.
From when we were Wizards, I mentioned this when I talked about when we were Wizards before. There were about two major things I picked up from that podcast. One was the business of TSR was a mess from the very first go. It wasn't like there was any one person who was put in charge and things went bad. It was a mess. Nobody knew what they were doing. Nobody knew how to run a business.
They had designers that were packing up boxes. Everyone was mad at everybody else. There was all kinds of political turmoil and political machinations going on inside the company itself. It was crazy how it ever got anywhere. And the way it got there was because the game itself was so interesting and so good that it drew enough people and that the money offset the incompetence.
for a long time, for a long, long time. The money offset the incompetence. That was really wild. And two was that idea that Gary was quadruple dipping into the funds of TSR, that he was both an owner in the company, so he'd get dividends as an owner of the company. He got royalties on his own products.
He got paid for a lavish lifestyle in Hollywood that was paid for and expensed because he said he needed that lavish lifestyle in order to rub elbows with people. And he claimed to own the IP for all of D&D himself, personally, not as part of the company. And he tried to hang on to that stuff.
And it actually screwed him in the end that they offered him a tremendously good deal to buy him out of the company. And he said no and took them to court anyway. And when he took them to court, he lost. And when he lost, they gave him like a 10th of what they were offering to begin with. And he lost a ton of money and was completely kicked out of the company at that point.
So boy, it did not, you know, did not go well. Some other interesting tidbits, Monty Cook, and he's mentioned this on Twitter before, but I thought it was really funny.
He mentioned this again on his panel, that Watsi, when Monty Cook worked for TSR at the end of TSR, him and Bruce Cordell, for example, Bruce Cordell said, I can tell when things are going bad when toilet paper stops showing up in the bathrooms. Yeah. He said, like, I could tell things weren't great when stuff like that was going on.
At which point, I think Peter Atkinson was like, let's move on from the toilet paper. But Monty Cook said that he was super happy to find out that Wizards of the Coast was going to buy out TSR because he was afraid Hasbro was going to buy it. I thought that was a really funny line. He said that a couple of times, and I don't think he was necessarily joking about that.
I think that was actually true. Well, another thing, and Rob Hainso has brought this up in a couple of different places, and he brought it up on this panel as well, that Wizards of the Coast's attempt or Hasbro's attempt to go back on the OGL, that they tried it during the fourth edition days, that they wanted to get rid of the OGL during the fourth edition days.
My friend Teo Sabadea brings this up.
and but they didn't they didn't believe they could and so instead they just didn't write a fourth edition system reference document around the ogl instead wrote the gsl which no one used but of course we know how that went because then they tried to do it again last year in 2023 and tried to do it and still and then it was such a public outcry they had to pull back again but the idea that that idea was kicking around
In Wizards of the Coast, in Hasbro, as far back as the fourth edition days, which was like the 2008, nine days, right? And they tried it then and realized they couldn't do it. So then they tried to go a different way and it didn't work for them because then it ended up creating Pathfinder. So they know how that went.
But then the interesting thing is in the fifth edition days, they went back to the OGL again because they put out the 5.1 SRD. They didn't need to.
They didn't have to put out the 5.1 SRD, but I think that the people that were in charge of the game at that point liked what had happened with the original OGL back in the early 2000s and wanted to do it again, and they put out the 5.1 SRD, which means the love and hate of the OGL wavered back and forth over 20 years. They were really high on it in early 2000s.
Then in the 2008 timeframe, they were really against it. Then in the 2014, 2015, 2016 period, they were back loving it again, because they put out the 5.1 SRD. And then whatever it was, you know, seven, eight years later in 2023, they were against it again. And now they're for it again, but probably for a different reason by putting out their stuff in the Creative Commons license.
So the licensing went back and forth and back and forth over more than 20 years. That is really fascinating. Some other bits, 3.5 as an addition was built specifically as a business decision that the people from on high said, hey, people aren't buying the core books like they're buying the core books. So make an updated core book, call it 3.5 and we'll sell them all the core books again.
and that people who had worked on the game, including Monty Cook and including Jonathan Tweet, both said, we didn't think we needed one. Like there were definitely things that needed to be updated and could have been updated and there were definitely problems, but they sure didn't need to make a new edition of the game.
And they said, I think somebody asked, when did the consensus come around to make a 3.5? And Monty Cook and Jonathan Tweet looked at each other and said, I don't think there ever was a consensus. Like there hasn't been a consensus that they needed that. So that was really funny.
And then Rob Hanso and Andy Collins, who are both lead designers on fourth edition, talked about what the environment was like at Wizards of the Coast when fourth edition was coming around, which was that they really wanted to bring all of the World of Warcraft players back into D&D. Not back into, but into D&D.
And so they had this big focus on Gleamax and a 3D virtual tabletop and recurring funding. We want some of that monthly recurring funding that World of Warcraft gets instead of just selling people books. And they really pushed heavy on that. If you remember, D&D Insider was a thing that you paid for every month.
I don't remember what it was, five bucks a month, but character builder access and stuff like that. Big focus on digital play. And they mentioned some things that were just couldn't be done. So they said, oh, we have a 3D virtual tabletop. Well, it took us six weeks in order to make a model. And they said, how many models do we have to make? And they go about 3000.
And they're like, they were their, their, their drive. And they said this, that like their hubris was over the top and was far outstripped by basic physics. They brought up, I think I mentioned this in a previous show where they brought up the idea that they hired a whole bunch of developers, but there was no common development platform.
So they told everybody just develop in whatever you're developing in and we'll fix it later. Oh my God, crazy stuff. So then the question is like, well, how similar is that to the things that are going on wizards today? I don't know. We'll have to see how that plays out. But I thought that that was really interesting. So, and then Mike Merles talking about the fifth edition of D&D.
I don't have this in my notes here, but Mike Merles was talking about what it was like when they were making the fifth edition of D&D. And how he got to the point where the anxiety was so high that he had no anxiety. He was like, whatever, whatever they're going to do.
And he said that every time he would go into, he said it became a meme that every time he would go into a business meeting about D&D, this is before fifth edition came out or late fourth edition days, there would be a picture of an oil rig on fire and like an oil platform on fire. And they'd be like, what are you going to do? The oil platform's on fire. And he's like, I don't know.
whatever right and they so they did the big play test and they put out fifth edition nobody had any idea that fifth edition was going to be as popular as it was but it turned out and he believes that it came because they did extensive play test feedback talking to the fans understanding what people wanted and really using that to drive the direction that they wanted the game to go which is something they hadn't really done with fourth edition where they were like we just want those warcraft players over here really fascinating stuff all of this came from all these different panels
Really opened my mind up into how this whole game came to be, how it's grown, how it's vacillated back and forth between different trends and ideas. You know, how we can use that to kind of see common problems about the direction that they're taking D&D and also the ways that D&D can continue to be strong in the future. I found it absolutely fascinating. And I think...
You know, if you're interested at all in the stuff that I was just talking about, checking out the 50 year panel, the 50 year celebration games and the beginnings of those games when we were wizards and the making of the original D&D book, you will not be disappointed. Links for all of those, of course, are down in the show notes.
instant monsters what if you could build a fifth edition compatible monster in a couple of seconds what if you had an idea for a monster in your head or you had an npc and you knew like i've got kind of an advanced cultist like a cultist like i love my cultist what if you had a cultist but you know stronger than your your typical cult fanatic so more of like a you know a you know a cult bishop
Somebody not quite at the highest levels of high priest, but sort of like a medium level priest. Who's like challenge rating four? What would you do? Well, I've been doing this for some time now. And my whole idea is that you can build that monster in just a couple of seconds with Forge of Foes. Forge of Foes is a book that myself and Scott Gray and Teo Sabadea put together last year.
It is a book to help you build monsters quickly and easily, generate those monsters and understand how to run those monsters in your fifth edition game. So right up front in Forge of Foes, we have this list of monster statistics by challenge rating. The idea here is you can grab a challenge rating for a particular monster, and you can throw it into your game.
If you're already kind of familiar with how challenge rating works and what the general challenge ratings mean when it compares to the fiction of a monster in the game, you probably don't need it. But you can, for example, take a look and say, for my crazy, powerful cult fanatic, normal... What monster would he compare to? Is he as strong as an ogre or a priest?
He's a little bit stronger than a priest. Is he stronger than a night mummy or werewolf? What about an Etna or a ghost? You see, you know what? I think he'd probably be about equivalent to an Etna. That's CR4.
Then you can look at your stats and say, okay, that cult fanatic, you know, elite cult fanatic would have an AC of 14, 84 hit points, plus six to hit, 28 damage per round, two attacks, 14 damage each. And you're done. Now, the instant monster part is that's really all you need. Those stats that I just whipped out are really all you need in order to run a monster at your table.
You don't almost need anything else. So if you want that instant monster, just grab the core stats, drop them in there, and then wrap it in the flavor and the fiction of the game. Describe what the blasts, when you have your cult fanatic, your elite cult fanatic, when he's throwing bolts, what do they look like? Bolts of blood magic.
are arcing from his hands, hitting two people for 14 damage each, right? Or what was it, 14 damage? Yeah, 14 damage each. So you can flavor your baseline stats with any flavor you want, and it will make that monster really feel unique. I have been using monsters like this for more than a year now.
Probably more than half, maybe two thirds of the fifth edition monsters that I've been running in my fifth edition games, I've used just this table to generate those monsters. And I've asked my players afterwards how they felt about the monsters. You know, what did they think? Could they even tell? In some cases, I would test them. Like, where did you think I got that monster from?
And I go, did you get that from the Monster's Menagerie? I'm like, no, right? I got that from Forge of Foes, from the one table that I've been using the same for the year.
players generally the players that i run for aren't paying a lot of attention to the effects that monsters have they're paying attention to their characters and what their characters can do which means that we can use very simple statistics for fifth edition monsters and we can run we can we can flavor them in the flavor of the world describing the crazy attacks they have describing how they're pulling rocks out of the ground and hurling them with telekinetic force without having to change the stats at all we can just use the base stats that are here
And that's that concept of an instant monster. So where did this come from? One of the things that I really liked about this and where I got the idea of like, you know, we can build really fast monster with hardly anything was from the Cypher system.
The Cypher system is Monty Cook Games' home, or their core system for their role-playing game products like Numenera and The Strange and a bunch of other different RPGs. And one of the interesting things about monsters and challenges in the Cypher system is you just pick a number. And from that single number between one and 10, you can build all of the stats out for a given monster.
You can't quite do that with fifth edition because there isn't exactly super simple equations that you can keep in your head. You can kind of make some, but the equations are not perfect. So it's not quite as easy as the idea of saying like a Cypher monster has hit points of three times whatever challenge rating you picked. Doesn't quite work that way.
The other one is this idea of an instant monster may not be for everybody. You might just have heard that I picked a stat block with like five numbers in it. And I ran a delete cult fanatic using that and go, well, that's not a real monster. Real monsters have to have all of the stats. They have to have their, their, all of their, the, the different traits that they've got.
They've got their special attacks. You're skipping all of that stuff. And that's true. I am. And maybe you don't want to skip all that stuff. And that's true too. That's okay. You don't have to skip all that stuff. You can keep using your monsters. So I'm not saying this is the only way. I still use monsters from other books. I still love other monster books.
I still like to have monsters that have those chewy components. But I'll tell you, sometimes it's way faster for me to just whip out one of those stats from Forge of Foes and run a monster and no one cares. It's easier and faster for me. I can write that one line into my notes so I don't even have to look anything up. And my players are just as happy.
In fact, what they go is like, man, those monsters are really tough because the math is tuned up a little bit. One thing to consider, and this is an important tip for, I think, all GM prep for RPGs. I think this is important for all the prep we do. The prep that you put together is not something you're publishing for someone else.
You're writing this prep only for you, which means you only need the stuff that you need in order to run it at your table. You don't have to fill everything out. You don't have to have monster descriptions. You don't need to have every single line in there. You don't need to go through the math on how their proficiency bonus plus their ability score is what comes down to the attack bonus.
You don't need to do all that. You can just pick an attack bonus and go with it. And that's true for building adventures. It's true for building your sessions. It's true for building almost everything in your RPG. All you need are the notes to help you run the game. You can throw them right out. You never have to show them to anyone else.
And it just needs to be enough for you to enjoy the game that you're running and that your players will enjoy it. And that's why, wait, Mike, what about their wisdom saving throw? What if something happens? I'll make it up. I'll make up the wisdom saving throw. How wise is the creature? Is it really dumb? Then it's just a straight roll. Are they really wise?
Then I'll use whatever their attack bonus was for their wisdom save because it's probably the same as their proficiency bonus, right? So you get to just make those things up and it doesn't have to be super solid because you're not publishing the material that you have there. The other one is not to worry too much about fine tuning the CR.
I get a lot of people that say, hey, when you modify monsters like this, don't you have to recalculate the challenge rating? No, you don't. You know your players, you know their capabilities. So you know if you throw a monster out there and you add some stuff, is that really gonna push the characters or not?
Once you get down to the characters at your table, you have a far better understanding of challenge than the monster challenge rating does. Which means you don't have to recalculate a challenge rating. You don't have to recalculate that stuff. Don't hang on too tightly to the math is a big part of challenge rating and everything else. Ability checks. So I talked about this a little bit.
I got too many windows open. What about ability scores? So the big one for ability scores, as I just said, you can make them up. When you're making up your cult fanatic, let's say we have our elite cult fanatic, right? It's challenge rating for elite cult fanatic, really powerful cult fanatic. Well, I know that he's probably pretty good at wisdom.
So I know that I can use the same proficient ability bonus, which is what we use for an attack bonus and we use it for other stuff. I can use that plus six as his wisdom saving throw. So if he gets hit with a wisdom save, he has plus six on that saving throw. What about a con save? Probably not super con, so I'll go with a zero. What about charisma? Maybe a couple of points on charisma.
Maybe he's plus two on charisma. I only really need to come up with those ability scores if I actually need them at the moment, and then I can improvise them. So how do you improvise an ability score? An ability score improv is basically somewhere from zero to whatever their proficient ability bonus is, whatever that scale is, and you pick a number somewhere in between there.
Some monsters, like zombies, you might even go down below zero to like minus two, and you can kind of remember that from monsters. Oh no, this monster's really not dexterous, so it's minus two on its dex saves.
So what I like to do is when a character hits a monster with something that requires a saving throw, before I roll the die, I ask myself, what kind of bonus do I think this monster would have on that? And I make up that number from like zero to whatever the proficient ability bonus is. And I might even say it out loud so that the players know I'm not faking it after I roll. And I'll say...
he's really not dexterous. So, or, you know, you might say, well, no, this guy's got a little bit of dexterity. So he's plus one. And then you roll the die and you add the one and then you see if you get the save. The way to not cheat on this is to give yourself the ability bonus before you roll the die so that you're not rolling the die and then adding the bonus.
And that might change it after the fact, because then your mind might go, I don't really want him to fail this saving throw. So I'm going to make his decks a little higher. choose it before you roll. Even if it's in your head, choose it before you roll. But really, you can make up your ability score bonuses.
When you're whipping up one of these instant monsters, you don't need to do that ahead of time. You can literally do that when you're at the table running the monster. So that's definitely something to consider. Armor class. We put armor class in here, right? We have a baseline armor class for a monster from challenge rating, but really the armor class is not specific to challenge rating.
The armor class is really about the fiction of the monster. If it's wearing plate armor, for example, I had a evil wizard. The evil wizard was CR three. But I knew that that wizard probably had mage armor. So I gave him an armor class. I gave him some decks and I said it was really too high. I probably went a little too high. It should have been 13.
The equivalent of they cast mage armor on themselves. So they would have had a 13 with mage armor. And then if they cast shield, they get 18. So I knew that I could throw shield on top of their armor class. So the question is in the fiction of the game, what is their armor class like? If you don't really have an idea or you don't want to whip it up, you can just use the armor class that's here.
But if you have an idea of like, well, this guy's wearing scale armor, this is a knight wearing scale armor, it's probably a 17. Then you know that even though it's only a challenge rating two or three, that it might still have an armor class of 17. So you can kind of choose the armor class based on the fiction of the monster. Big blob zombie has an armor class of eight, right?
Even though they're challenge rating four because they're a big blob zombie, they still are very easy to hit. So again, same way as ability scores, you can ask yourself, in the fiction of this game, is this guy easy to hit? Is he hard to hit? Pick a number and off you go. Let the flavor do the heavy lifting.
So when you're whipping up one of these instant monsters, you can describe it any way that you want. And you can use those baseline statistics as the math, but then describe it in the fiction of the game. And this is where you get into the idea that you don't need a lot of special abilities for monsters if you don't want them.
You don't need any special abilities for the monsters if you don't want them. You can just make up the flavor based on whatever they're doing. So again, your elite cult fanatic is throwing blood javelins, right? Or draining the souls out of people by hitting them with these energy bolts, right? These necrotic bolts.
you can describe that sometimes if you have a lot of monsters you want to shake things up then you might want to change up the mechanics a little bit changing something into a blast for for example so again i know how a fireball works right i think we all anybody that's run games for a while understands how a fireball works what you can do is say well what if he does like a necrotic blast instead of a thing well we know that 28 is the damage per round
Half of that because they're going to hit multiple targets, so you have that to 14. And then instead of using the plus six, you would use the AC-DC and say 14 is the DC, right? So that AC-DC column works for both the armor class of the monster or the DCs of their special abilities. So now you have your cult fanatic or your elite cult fanatic who's throwing out a death globe.
The death globe blows up in an area. Everybody inside the area makes a DC 14 attack. We're going to do constitution save because it makes sense for the flavor. They make that save. They take 14 damage on a failure or seven damage on a success, right? We're doing a little lower than a fireball because it's CR4. It'd be higher. Fireballs would be really powerful.
Fireball, those kind of blast attacks are really common, really common things that you can add onto your instant monsters. And that's where we talk about improvising monster abilities. What are some abilities that you want to tie onto an instant monster? Cunning action is a really good one. Pack tactics is a really good one. Blasts and bursts and cone attacks, those kinds of things.
Knocking someone prone, restraining. These are all common things that we can do. Life draining.
jot down a little list and again you don't need to have all of the rules right in front of you you can know ah a blast or a burst or an aura or a shield restraining grappling prone pack tactics cunning action life drain healing removal you know those are all really easy things that you can stack onto your monster when you want to give them an ability generally speaking you only want to give a monster one ability and also generally speaking this isn't going to work for boss monsters
If you're going to build a boss monster, you can still use Forge of Foes to build boss monsters. We have lots of tools in Forge of Foes to do it. But most of the time, you're going to use this for normal monsters, and normal monsters really only need one thing that they do. So a lot of times, you can just look at the common monster abilities that you've got for monsters anyway and take those over.
Now, of course, Forge of Foes is packed with monster powers. So read through Forge of Foes, pick out monster powers you like, circle them or highlight them. Take a Sharpie. You have my permission. It's your book.
Take a Sharpie and draw circles around the monster powers that you think are really good that you can use in lots of different circumstances and drop those onto your monsters in different circumstances. And you can definitely reflavor your monsters. I think instant monsters is a really, really powerful and valuable trick.
If you think back to some common, the old adage of RPGs and of D&D in particular of just use a bear, there was always this idea of like, if you have a monster and you don't really know what it's about, just take the bear stat block and run the bear stat block. What we've done is given you the bear stat block for every challenge rating from 0 to 30.
So you can build a bear at whatever challenge rating you want and then re-flavor it with any flavor that you want in order to build a monster at the table really, really quickly. If you're skeptical about this, if you don't like this at all, you certainly don't have to use it. If you're skeptical about it but kind of interested, try it with a couple of monsters.
Use your monster book for everything, but just take some monsters that really don't matter, maybe a couple of guards, a couple of other NPC stat blocks. Try just putting the one-line stat block in and using it for those. See how your players react to it. See if they notice. Maybe do it for a couple more. See if they notice that.
And then you decide, when is it appropriate to pull out a monster book and run a monster with a full stat block? When can you get away with just a few stats that you jotted down in your notes? I think instant monsters are a really, really powerful tool, and I hope you'll check them out.
every month on the sly flourish patreon we have a monthly patreon q a any patron of sly flourish can ask any rpg related question every question gets answered every friday morning i sit down with my coffee i answer every question that's there on the patreon q a some of those questions make it here to the talk show so that we can dive in a little deeper harren and friends says i've been playing dnd for 10 years and dming for my group for three years each of my players has been playing dnd for at least 40 years each
They know much more about how to play D&D in the history and the lore of different monsters and types of enemies than I do. How do I handle questions during gaming sessions like, this monster has this feature, so why did it act the way you were playing it?
Or, this type of villain has this type of motivation, so why are you not including that detail when I roll high on my Insight Investigation Arcana history check? How do I answer questions that my players ask that I'm completely clueless about without ruining the flow of the game? This is definitely a problem of your players more so than your problem.
I would consider it to be pretty rude for a player to question how I am running a particular monster in my game. And I don't know. So, you know, it's a quick question with like one with like one statement. So I don't know exactly how it's playing out at the actual table. But if this is one player, if it's all your players, that's, you know, that's a pretty wild experience.
But if it's one player, you probably want to sit with that player and say, I understand you know a lot about this game, but let me run it. It doesn't make me happy when you ask me things like how the monster should be running.
right let me assume i'm running the monster the way i'm running the monster and you run your character and i won't tell you how to play your character right but that's regardless of your experience level regardless of the fact that you've been dming for three years and they've been playing for 40 that's still a it's a rude thing for them to do and you know you never want it's never going to come out particularly well to be directly confrontational with them
But I don't think it's out of hand to say it makes me uncomfortable, makes me enjoy the game less when you're questioning why monsters are doing what they're doing or why villains are doing what they're doing when you roll particular rolls. Stay in the fiction of the game and go with what's going on, right? It doesn't matter what their experience level is. That's pretty rude.
So you could also dig in a little deeper and ask them, why are you asking me that, right? Like why, you know? Why is that a concern of yours? Right? I've gotten this from time to time. There was definitely, there was a time, and I actually, I quit the whole program where I was running organized play games and I ran a game and I changed out an NPC's spell.
And the player got mad and said that he doesn't have that spell in his list of spells in the stat block. And I said, I don't care. He's a spell caster. He can have different spells. And the guy said, well, you're not playing the mod then. And I was like, I'm not a spreadsheet. I think I told him that, right? I'm like, I'm not an Excel spreadsheet that you run against.
i'm here with the ability to change things in the mod for the fun of the game right and and after that like i recognized that the kind of organized play games that were being played there were played by players who just wanted the mod played they didn't want a dm to go off script and that's not the kind of game i like to run so i stopped doing that
But I think that there are, you know, I think that this is an important thing to kind of, you know, to stop at the root of the cause. Because you could say things like, well, these monsters are different than the ones you're used to. You could also take other monster books and run monster books from monsters that they're not familiar with.
You can even re-flavor monsters that are in the monster manual with a totally different thing and then change them. Now, you're totally in your prerogative to change everything. But I think you also want to kind of say, like, hey... back off, right? Like, you know, don't, you know, don't question how I'm running the monsters, right? I'm running them just fine.
So I think that's something you really want to consider. And I think you might want to talk to the players about it or tell them how you feel about it. Like, Hey, that makes me feel ineffective. It makes, it makes me feel bad as a game master to hear you say things like you're not running the monsters, right? I'll run the monsters how I want to run the monsters and let me learn, right?
Let me learn on my own. I don't know how helpful that advice is, but it's a really tough situation. And the main thing I wanted to get across to you is like, this is not a problem with you. This is a problem with them going outside the bounds of the agreement that you have at the table. Kevin L says, I'm about to start a City of Arches campaign using Shadow Dark. Yay!
I know City of Arches addresses the shift in tone, but as someone who has run a lot of Shadow Dark, what mechanical changes would you make? In particular, I'm considering whether to award XP for defeating named enemies and finding fantastic locations, and how to best house rule ancestry traits as a varied choice of ancestry is one of the advantages of City of Arches. Any advice is welcome.
Yeah, so I think it's not, you know, the one nice thing about Shadow Dark is that like the different ancestries that are in Shadow Dark are pretty straightforward. So you could probably take a great big list of ancestries from another source and then apply some of the things that you see in Shadow Dark to them.
Or maybe even work with the players, say which one of these ancestors would you want to be there? And then we'll customize that ancestry for your character. That's definitely something you could do. Rewarding experience, you can still reward it for picking up items. You know, City of Arches is full of MacGuffins.
And even if it's a MacGuffin that you're picking up in order to give it to another group, you could still get the experience points for having discovered it. So you could do more milestone style experience where they do it based on the events that they occur. But you could also do it based on picking up items. A lot of times the items that they pick up are part of the game.
But you might even do, again, discovery of artifacts. So, like, if you're running the Key of Worlds campaign guide, for example, well, there's lots of items in there that you pick up, like the Staff of Sirellas or the Sword of Erixius or the Blackfire Braziers. And even though they're just lighting a Blackfire Brazier, lighting the Brazier would be an experience point bump.
And it could be a big one. So you could definitely run it like that. Generally, the City of Arches is pretty mechanical light, so you shouldn't have too much trouble wrapping Shadow Dark's RPG rules around it. One thing we are adding is a bigger guide. So I had some text up front about how to run it with other games. I've actually written an expansion of that.
We're going to look at what the page count looks like, but I wrote an expansion of that that goes in deeper into all of the different aspects of the game that you might want to reflavor later.
or rework depending on which rpg you are bringing to that so an example is like what is it like to change the dcs of things in a game that where the dc is a flat 10 or like the ladder is a flat 10 and when do you switch over to boons and banes so we covered we cover things like that in it so probably a one page or two page deeper guide into how to re-flavor both from a mechanical standpoint and from a flavor and story standpoint the city of arch is to fit different systems so i think you'll i think you'll enjoy that
Dylan says, I recognize that you should ideally focus your secrets and clues on what will likely be learned in your next session. But what if you're running a sort of two of three keys or yam shaped type adventure and have potentially three adventure locations plus one town in one session? Preparing 10 feels like you're spreading them very thin between multiple rich locations.
The biggest thing I can recommend is try to put the choices of the path that the characters are going to take at the end of a session instead of the beginning of the session so that you don't have too many open paths with too much stuff that you have to prep for every path. Secrets are only one part of that problem, but locations are another part. NPCs they are run into could be another part.
General scenes could be a part. If you ever are starting a session where at the beginning or near the beginning of the session, there are big choices about what direction they go. You kind of have to prep all the possible because you don't know what way they're going to go. And that includes secrets, that includes other things. Now, secrets and clues are intended to be abstracted.
So hopefully some of those secrets can blend across one location or another, one direction that they go. If not, think about the kind of secrets that could work in any of the locations that they go. And that way you have those same secrets on hand.
But even better is trying to have the players come up with an answer about what direction they're going to go before the end of a session so that you know what direction they're going to head to at the beginning of the next session. And you can even do that if they haven't finished their current arc.
I've definitely had it where I stop the players and I say, okay, we're gonna be heading into a big fight now. I know where things are going, but where do you guys think you're gonna go after this? And I'll lay the options. I'll sort of do it as a break in the middle of one game. I'll be like, you know that these three options are coming up.
what direction do you think you're going to head to after this part? And then they might say, oh, well, we're probably going to head to this one. And you might drop all three options and describe them. They go, oh, that one sounds cool. And you go, okay, so you guys are going to go that way. Great.
If you're not all wiped out by this giant horror that you're going to face, then I will assume you're going that direction. And that way you have a direction that you can prep. So you can even sort of figure out with the players what direction they're going to head in the middle of one session. then finish out that session and then they head the direction that they went.
And that way you still have some general idea. They still had the choice. They just brought that choice up a little bit earlier so that you can work against that. And that means you can focus your secrets and clues and your locations and the other aspects of your prep around the direction that they're actually going to head rather than having to split it all up among other ones.
So that's one trick for it. But also directly answer to your question is hopefully you can come up with secrets that can work against any of those things rather than just one. Sousa GM says, I'm running a streamed campaign of Brindlewood Bay, and I'm attempting to make the episode self-contained with the exception of the finale. Any tips on doing a campaign where each session is self-contained?
Yeah, try to get the arc of each camp. You know, really think about how to build a series of Walker, Texas Ranger instead of Gone with the Wind. So depending on how long your sessions are, if they're three to four hours, think about what the whole arc is for that session and really condense it down. What is the ending? What is what is the conclusion of that going to look like?
What is the beginning of that look like? And then what do you have in the middle? And then how can you pull stuff out of the middle in order to make it fit within the time that you have? and then figure out like how that leads from one session to the next. You can look at the D&D Encounters program that's available on the DMs Guild now.
This was a fourth edition program where they built scenarios that were all part of like a main story, but each arc of the story was something that could fit into one session. And it was usually just like a scene or two. You could still do it that way. So instead of having big wide open campaigns, you basically are stringing together your campaign from these series of sessions.
And you want to make sure that whatever, you know, each one is sort of its own little sausage link that connects to the next one. And so you have a little bit of, you know, string connecting from each one. But each link is really its own arc. Where does it start? Where does it end? What happens in the middle? So I think that that is probably the way that I would think about it.
And you're really going to have to condense things down. I actually did this for a Shadow of the Demon Lord game when I ran that. My intention was to be able to run each story in one three-hour game.
thinking back that was really tight and i kind of wish i had done it in two parts so that i would have an adventure and that adventure would be designed to occur in two parts and i could sort of split it into three bits like the what's the beginning where is the middle part going to be at the end of the first session and then where is the ending going to be and then i could condense the stuff in the middle of each of those in order to build like a good solid arc that gave us a good six hours of time for that so you might consider that too instead of making each episode self-contained
do a part one and a part two. And the idea is that if you connect both of those together, you get the whole arc. It does require a little bit more careful story planning and idea about where things are going to go and a little less freedom and like exploring an entire dungeon. You're going to constantly want to kind of push them into an area.
You might look at like the five room dungeon design as an idea. It's a little bit more railroad-y in what direction they go, but it's definitely more structured and something that's easier to fit into a particular program. So check all of that out. 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.
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