The Lazy RPG Podcast - D&D and RPG News and GM Prep from Sly Flourish
Knave 2 Deep Dive – Lazy RPG Talk Show
Mon, 02 Sep 2024
D&D and RPG news and commentary by Mike Shea of https://slyflourish.com Contents 00:00 Show Start 00:01:49 D&D & RPG News: Follow Up on D&D 2014 Material in D&D Beyond 00:05:59 D&D & RPG News: Lost Worlds of Gygax Humble Bundle 00:10:46 D&D & RPG News: D&D Direct Announcements 00:19:48 Product Spotlight: Knave 2 by Ben Milton 00:41:12 DM Tip: Twelve Types of Medieval Artwork and Architecture for Dungeon Delving 00:53:50 Patreon Question: Convincing New Players to Try a New System 00:57:09 Patreon Question: 18 Months Since Other Publishers Published on D&D Beyond 01:05:04 Patreon Question: Using City of Arches with Theros 01:06:38 Patreon Question: Empire of the Ghouls Out of Print 01:08:41 Patreon Question: Favorite Sourcebook and Setting Links Join the City of Arches Kickstarter! Subscribe to the Sly Flourish Newsletter Support Sly Flourish on Patreon Buy Sly Flourish Books: Lost World of Gygax Humble Bundle D&D Direct Announcements Knave 2 Twelve Types of Medieval Artwork and Architecture
Today on the Lazy RPG Talk Show, we're going to follow up on the D&D 2024 material in D&D Beyond. We're going to take a look at the Lost Worlds of Gygax Humble Bundle. I'm going to talk about some highlights from the D&D Live event that took place this past Tuesday. We're going to dive deep into Knave 2 by Ben Milton, an RPG by Ben Milton.
We're going to talk about knowing your medieval decorations. These are ways for you to transfer secrets and clues to your players through the decorations that people find on the walls. We're going to talk a little bit about ancient medieval architecture and artwork today. And we're going to cover more questions from the August 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.
if you like the work that i do we are in the last week of the city of arches kickstarter if you haven't checked it out please check out the city of arches kickstarter you can find a link down into the show notes the city of arches is a high fantasy city source book built for lazy gms to drop into your fantasy rpgs it fits into any campaign setting whether it's a homebrew setting or your own setting and it is a world and a city filled with adventure
filled with intrigue, filled with discovery, filled with dangers and threats. It's a fantastic city. I've been working on it for two years. The artwork is absolutely off the wall. I think you're gonna really, really love it. So please check that out. If you've already supported it, if you've already backed it, please tell your friends, share it on social media, tell people about it.
Tell them about the 42 page free sample that you can get that includes artwork and design and an introduction scenario to show you what the City of Arches is like. And all kinds of stuff, a whole adventure that you can run for your group in just the sample pages alone. It's absolutely free to check out. There's no reason you shouldn't check it out.
And if you like what you see, please consider backing the Kickstarter. In a very rare occurrence, if you saw my YouTube video from last week, I already had a little thing that I added in on Monday to talk about the changes that had occurred Sunday night at midnight last Sunday afternoon.
regarding the whole issue of dnd 2014 material and how they were going to change it in dnd beyond when the 2024 material comes out which i think is this tuesday i think i think tuesday we will start to have more and more dnd 2024 material going out there there's actually an in-store program for many friendly local game shops are going to be doing a dnd 2024 play guide with an adventure i'm actually going to be doing it in my local game shop so that's going to be really fun
So we weren't sure exactly what they were going to do with D&D 2014 material. At first, they were going to let you build 2014 character with classes, subclasses, species, and other things, but not spells and not magic items. That caused quite an uproar because it was basically like, hey, we're going to change all your spells on you.
All these spells you had paid for, you're not going to get anymore. And so Sunday night at midnight Eastern Standard Time, they publish an update saying, no, we will go ahead. We will do it. You will have all of your 2014 material.
If you build a 2014 character, you will have the choice of using 2014 classes, subclasses, spells, magic items, and everything so that you can build a true D&D 2014 character without having to include any D&D 2024 stuff. So good on them. I got to wonder like what happened, right? Like why not start that way?
And it really is interesting because like between this and Blurgate from before, the real question is like, How are these things getting so miscommunicated that they couldn't understand that there was going to be an uproar about this? And then they had to, like, scramble around all throughout the weekend to then come up with a new plan and a new policy to say, yes, we will be able to do this.
How did they not know this? My friend, Teo Sabadia. brought up on Mastering Dungeons when he was talking about it, that he was at the summit a year and a half ago. And he asked them then, hey, what are you going to do in D&D Beyond with the 2014 material when the D&D 24 stuff comes out? And he said he got like a deer in headlights look. That was a year and a half ago.
And somehow they had to scramble around from one point saying, no, you're not going to be able, all the spells are going to be updated to the 2024 variants. And then change their minds and say, okay, no, no, no, we are going to go back to 2014. They could have just started with that, right? And it's like the blur gate thing.
I talked about when they made a bunch of creators, including myself, blur our videos and then changed their mind and said, no, you don't have to blur the videos. Like, why not start with a clear plan before you shake everything up? So it's something that I didn't really understand.
The one thing that I still go with this is always it shows what the vulnerability is of having a centralized service that you use, that you depend upon. And if you depend upon D&D Beyond to do what it's going to do, it's not going to do that forever. As long as you have a centralized service, things are going to change. I guarantee you they will change. I guarantee it. It's 100% likely.
I don't know when. It could be 100 years from now. But you know that that stuff's not going to be around and that it's going to change and that's going to go in other ways because it's on a centralized service. And centralized services change. They change hands. They change companies. They change business models. They change all kinds of things.
So I still feel like my main criticism last week of them changing the 2014 stuff was like, you can be angry about it, but you can't be surprised. If you listen to me, you can't be surprised. They're going to change what they want to change. They're going to change their business models. They're going to change what little tchotchkes and doodads they throw in when you pre-order stuff.
They're going to do all that kind of stuff. Wizards of the Coast wants D&D to be a video game. They really, really do. They want to get recurring spending instead of selling you a hamburger that you and your friends share for 30 years, as Jerry Holcomb from Penny Arcade refers to it, which I think is a really good metaphor. It's interesting that they changed.
It's another one of those where you feel like that could have been predicted and that maybe you could have caused yourself a little less drama and have to write special new policies at midnight on Sunday. If you just spent a little time listening to your community members, again, like Taos brought this up to them a year and a half ago and realized that like, this is going to be a problem.
So I don't know. Very interesting stuff. The Lost Worlds of Gary Gygax is a new Humble Bundle that is available. Another, these humble bundles and bundles of holding are crazy good deals most of the time. If you really want to get fantastic bargains on your role-playing game material, digital role-playing game material, PDFs and stuff, keep an eye on humble bundles and bundles of holding.
You get just...
tons of stuff for very low amounts and this one is a whole bunch of products that are either from gary gygax or inspired by gary gygax after his time at tsr so none of these are tsr or wizards of the coast based dnd products these are all the stuff that he kind of did afterwards some of which had disappeared for a long time and then has come back and then other ones are sort of built upon the stuff that he had done you get 46 different pdfs for 25 that's like it's like 55 cents a pdf or something like that it is
really really dirt cheap and some of them are great big 200 300 page or you know 100 more than 100 page products that you get including castle zygig i don't really know the history of this this is like uh yigsborough this is sort of his retake of greyhawk like after he lost greyhawk to tsr he said like well i'm still going to make it i'm just going to call it something different and so he created this thing called castle zygig which was sort of his
Greyhawk take and I don't think he ever built out the dungeon for it but he did build out sort of the city that surrounds it so if you wanted like what Gary Gygax's version of Greyhawk looked like that is included in here one thing to note about this is the systems are all different systems it's sword and wizardry it's castles and crusades it's d20 based it kind of runs the gamut of different systems
I don't think that matters too much because you can many times convert it over to whatever you're playing. So if you wanted to use this for inspiration for your 5e games, you can certainly use it to inspire any of your other RPGs. Old school. This one's pretty neat. Gary Gygax's Necropolis, which is sort of a Egyptian-themed, almost like a
desert of desolation style mega dungeon it's really big and has a lot going on in there one thing to consider is i almost a lot of this stuff is pretty old and you know there's almost certainly problematic stuff in here when it comes to misogyny and people of color and other cultures and stuff like that we're not handled nearly with the grace that they are often handled with today
So that is definitely something to keep in mind when you're looking through this stuff and when you're deciding whether or not to support it or not. That's something to consider. Lost City of Gaxmore is one of them. There are a couple of interesting and then, you know, these expansions. There's actually fiction. Gord the Rogue is a bit of fiction that Gary Gygax wrote.
He actually wrote a book about it. You know, smaller supplements that are in here, Ocarim, some stuff that's actually pretty new. There are things in here that are as new as like 2022, 2023. Here's another Necropolis take, I think.
There's kind of these two, you know, these interesting Gary Gygax focused books that are completely system agnostic, one called World Builder and one called Living Fantasy. and I guess volume one is canteen crew. I don't know what canteen crew is, but I really liked the material that I saw on world builder and living fantasy.
Lots of thoughts about like what armor is like and what weapons are like and how a fantasy city would, so would work. And what are the different kinds of agricultures and stuff like that? So really, you know, from, from the words of the guy who invented D and D right. Or, you know, him and him and Dave Arneson, right. Coming up with D and D and it's fun to hear his words. Monster books as well.
I don't know how useful the monster books are if you're not running in the system. I haven't really taken a look at them. I know that some of these monster books were the ones where monsters were put into the OGL and everyone else references those monsters when they're pulling them up. Gods of the Empires I thought was really interesting. This is a small book about 90 pages that's just gods.
And it's really interesting to look at. And if you wanted to drop a bunch of deities into your home campaign, or if you just need to fill out some deities that you don't have in whatever published setting you're playing in, this is a really good book to just grab a bunch of different kind of gods and drop them in. I really thought that that was a good one.
There are lots of different adventures in here as well. Some of them are pretty hit or miss. I look through them, and they're very kind of traditional adventures. But I think that adventure design has changed a lot in recent days. And so I'm finding that some of these adventures are like, oh, they're cool, but I don't know that I'm really...
you know i'm not really there under caverns of gaxmore is a small like gaxmore expansion and the 2018 sword and wizardry tome of horrors is there so 46 different products that you get for 25 if you just like filling out your pdf library if you like you know like i did yesterday like a saturday i'll just spend a couple hours kind of digging through a big pile of books and just opening them up and reading and letting them inspire me and letting them think about my story and think about my games and think about other things that i'm putting together
I find it to be a really good value. I spent 25 bucks on it. I certainly don't regret it. But, you know, it's something that we each want to consider. And like, do you really need 46 more products in your library? That's up for you to decide. But I thought it was a really cool one.
And again, it's about some of the best deals you're going to get on RPG products through these things like these bundles, these humble bundles and bundles of holding and things like that. So you can find a link to the humble bundle in the show notes below.
So this past week on Tuesday, we saw a short video from Wizards of the Coast where they called D&D Direct, where they talked about the new stuff that they are putting out for D&D in the next about the next 18 months or so is actually quite a quite a range of stuff. I don't know if there's other products that they are dropping in between then. I would I kind of doubt it.
I kind of think that they've announced everything that they're going to put out. And now granted, they're putting out three brand new 384 page source books. So or main, they're putting out the whole new DD 2024 books. So I guess we shouldn't expect to have a lot of products, but it still felt actually a little bit light, but I'm pretty excited about some of the stuff that they're putting out.
They are putting out a new starter set, but the starter set's not coming out until late 2025. It seems kind of late to put out a new starter set for a new edition of the game because it means for the next year and a half or so, the only starter sets that exist are written around 2014 rules, but then you would expect that they're going to buy 2024 books.
And then it feels very different because you don't have feats at first level and species are different and lots of things are different about 2014 to 2024. And you think about when the starter set came out for 2014, the starter set actually came out before the core books did. So it's a little surprising. I kind of expected they would have a starter set sooner than this.
I thought we might see one, you know, I think like early spring of 2025 wouldn't be that outrageous, maybe right after the Monster Manual comes out. But the idea that it's actually like six months after that. And we don't really know anything about it. Oh, we do know that it is based upon the Keep of the Borderlands kind of material.
Keep of the Borderlands and the Caves of Chaos and the Wilderness and stuff like that. So they're kind of going back to old school ideas. Keep of the Borderlands, of course, is like an OD&D. Was it AD&D or OD&D? I don't remember. an old school D&D setting. But I got to say, like when it comes to old school D&D settings, D&D 2024 doesn't feel like an old school RPG, right?
It is very much a high fantasy, super heroic RPG. So that's kind of interesting that they really wanted to go like, you know, way back. I mean, the idea of Greyhawk being inside the Dungeon Master's Guide, the idea that the starter set is going to be Keeper of the Borderlands. I'm sure it'll be cool. I'm looking forward to it. I love their starter sets.
D&D starter sets have all been, there's three of them and I like all, I love all three. They're at the top of my list when it comes to the adventures that Wizards of the Coast has published. So I'm sure it'll be good.
It's just interesting that they're hanging on so much on like 50-year-old nostalgia when the system itself is really so far advanced from that in the term of being like a superheroic RPG. I think in the middle of 2025, we're going to see a new set of adventures, a new big pile of adventures in a book that's based around dragons.
They were like, you know, lots of people have played D&D and never actually faced a dragon. So we're going to have dungeons filled with dragons as the adventures in this book. So that'll be interesting. I think one of the reasons why you tend not to fight a lot of dragons is is because dragons are really powerful and most players don't make it past level five. So it's really hard to face dragons.
So it'll be interesting to see how they have a whole bunch of different adventures that involve dragons where, you know, there aren't super high level adventures. So we're going to see that now, but the big one that I was really excited about and happy to hear about is the new Forgotten Realms books that are, again, are coming out in late 2025. There's going to be two of them.
There's going to be essentially a GM focused source book for the Forgotten Realms and a player's guide for the Forgotten Realms. They say that the player's guide will still have material that's useful to a GM, so that's good. But there will be two books, a GM book and a player book. The player book will have new character options and stuff like that. So we'll see.
Like, again, I always worry every time new character options come out right away because then suddenly you've expanded all the character options and then you get imbalanced things and you got, you know, yada, yada, yada. But we'll see. I am a little, you know, I'm allowed to have an opinion, right? So the Forgotten Realms campaign guide is going to be focusing on particular adventure regions.
So rather than being like the old third edition or fourth edition Forgotten Realms campaign guide that really covered the whole Forgotten Realms, great big books, this one is going to focus on five regions. And those regions include Icewind Dale, Baldur's Gate, the Dalelands, Kalimshan, and the Moonshays.
My problem with that is three of those five have already had new updates since fifth edition has been out. We've covered, holy cow, Baldur's Gate again? Like we have descent, you know, Baldur's Gate descent into Avernus was a whole campaign setting, which had a Baldur's Gate gazetteer built into it. There's no lack of modern material to run Baldur's Gate.
I get it, Baldur's Gate 3, let's make sure we tie in with the marketing on that, but that's also a year and a half away from now, right? I don't know that you really need to hang on to the Baldur's Gate thing again, but you already wrote a bunch of stuff just recently about Baldur's Gate.
So yeah, I feel like, okay, so now of the five main sections, one of those five main sections I've already well covered and already have plenty of material for. Icewind Dale, same problem. I just ran Rime of the Frostmaiden. And the funny thing about that is there was another Icewind Dale book called Legacy of the Crystal Shard that came out in the early fifth edition back in the D&D Next Times.
Again, I've got tons of stuff for Icewind Dale. I have no lack of material, published material, recent published material to cover Icewind Dale. So now there's two sections that I don't really need, because I've already got a lot of material for it.
The Moonshays was actually handed off to Baldman Games so that they could develop their organized play adventures for it, and they commissioned a really, really excellent Moonshay guide that is both for players and GMs to kind of fill out the whole Moonshay region.
And granted, it wasn't published directly by Wizards of the Coast, but trust me, the people that spent their time and energy on it love Forgotten Realms and love the Moonshays.
and it's really well produced and that's available in the DMs Guild so I don't really feel like I need a Moonshade guide either which means three of the five regions are regions that have been well covered and that you can already get excellent material for and you really don't need more stuff on those three regions Kalimshan sounds cool and the Dalelands I'm really excited about the idea of like covering the Dalelands and covering the ruins of Myth Drannor and all the adventures that could go on there I'm very excited for that that that section of it sounds really really cool
But I feel like three-fifths of this book is stuff that they've already published recently. And I really don't need more of it. So that's kind of a bummer, right? I feel like if you're going to put out another big source book like this, cover stuff that really hasn't been covered. And, you know, they really could have covered. What about Thay? What about Karatur?
What about all of these other regions? The Anuruk Desert. There's lots of different regions of the Forgotten Realms that have not been touched in decades that could have had a lot of material put on it. So that's a little bit of a bummer. On the other hand, I am really happy that it is not a adventure, a big campaign adventure.
I much prefer settings and source books that help me build my adventures. I look back at books like Eberron Rising from the Last War and Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, which gave me tons of prompts to build my own adventures. I much preferred that. to the big campaign adventures like they did with Dragonlance.
So I'm also happy to say, well, I would rather have this, I think, than a campaign adventure built in, say, the Day of Lands. So I think that this would have more legs than that does. So there is that.
And maybe like in the long term, if we look at this book five years out or ten years out, this will be the definitive source that includes stuff like Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale and the Moonshades. And we can reference that rather than having to dive all the way back to Descent into Avernus or Rime of the Frostmaiden or the Moonshade Guidelines that Baldwin Games put out. So...
Anyway, interesting stuff. Glad to see the books that are coming out. They spend a lot of time talking about Project Sigil, which is their new 3D VTT. They are super excited for Project Sigil. That doesn't mean you have to be super excited for Project Sigil. I think it's going to be limited in scope just because everybody has to have a local client in order to be able to run with it.
I've never seen like 3D VTTs be super easy to work with. I know there's other ones like Tailspire that are already out there and some people love them. I'm sure people will dig it. But I think if we see that as like that's the future of D&D and if that worries you, you don't need to be worried. If that excites you, well, maybe it's your future of D&D.
But I think a lot of people just want to have books on their tables with maps that they draw or very simple virtual tabletops that just give the bare minimum needed to show people what the positioning is like and stuff like that. So it's fine. I don't think Project Sigil is going to hurt the RPG hobby overall. I don't think it's going to be like a big sucking gravity well.
and everyone's going to move to that and i hear room you know people fear that like oh because everybody's so used to baldur's gate are we gonna have more people that come in that are expecting that level of graphics i think i've had patrons that ask this question are you gonna have people come in that have such big expectations of graphics that they're gonna immediately gravitate towards things like project sigil their 3d virtual tabletop and not really want to play the rpg and i think the answer to that is no because dnd wouldn't have been growing in popularity as much as it had if people just wanted to play video games
Because video games have already been huge. And yet we saw tremendous growth in D&D over the past 10 years. So I don't you know, it's fine. Like, I don't think it hurts anything to try it. And then people can, you know, use it or not. I don't think that it's going to negatively impact the RPG industry. And I don't think it's going to have a huge positive impact either.
I really don't see a lot of people using it, but we'll see. I could be wrong. I could be wrong about lots of things. In years past, Ben Milton made an RPG called Knave. Knave was an RPG where he wanted to capture some of the old school styles of D&D in a way that was very easy for people to grasp and very quick to run. He specifically did it when he was working with students at
school to make characters and build adventures very quickly in last year ben put out a second edition version of nave kickstarted that edition it was very popular and that has now been delivered and you can pick up nave both in pdf and in a physical version i actually have the physical version i backed the kickstarter got the physical version so this my little talk here is not sponsored by anybody and i was not given a review copy of this i actually bought this copy myself
I think it's really outstanding, though. Or I wouldn't be talking about it. So, Knave and Knave 2, we're going to be specifically talking about Knave 2. Knave 2 is an 88-page guide that is really two different things in one package. Thing number one is a lightweight, old-school role-playing game that's very quick to generate characters, very fast to jump into gameplay.
Thing two is a book filled with tons of really awesome random tables that you can use in any of your fantasy role-playing games. So it's really a resource that can serve two different purposes. One, a lightweight old-school style RPG, and two, a big pile of random tables that you can use to fill out any kind of RPG that you're running, whether it's an old-school RPG or whether a modern RPG.
Tons and tons of tables that you're going to have. So we're going to take a look at it today. So from the standpoint of a role-playing game, it very much focuses down on the core fundamentals of D&D. And you have your six ability scores, strength, dex, con, int, whiz, charisma. You make a check the same way, roll a d20, add your modifier, and you are looking to beat a task's difficulty.
The task's difficulty is 11%. plus the task difficulty, usually five when you succeed. So you're generally aiming for like a 16. 16 is kind of the default. That's actually pretty high. That means that early on, you're going to be failing more than you're going to be succeeding. So that kind of leans into the style of like, it's a sort of a grim definition
dark game where you know failure is definitely going to be a thing that happens pretty often but as your character grows in power you will have more points in your abilities and you'll have more of an ability to hit these higher dcs if it bothers you you can always change the task difficulty make it a little bit lower for for most of them it is very quick like you know the we have this quick reference guide on how initiative works how attacks work maneuvers like things like disarming pushing stunning blinding breaking gear
All of these different kinds of things that you could do. Morale, of course, an old school style of like once NPCs have hit a breaking point, you roll to see if they're going to stick around or flee. So one of the interesting things, we're actually, let me pull up a character sheet here. So here is a nave character sheet.
I think this is a good way of getting an understanding what it is like to play this game. And I actually think this is true every time you look at an RPG. One of the first things I look at when I want to see a new RPG is what does the character sheet look like?
And some of that is my experience with lots of different RPGs where I can generally look at it and go, ah, this is a D 100 roll under, or this is a D 20 roll under, or this is a D 20 at a modifier against a difficulty class or whatever. I can usually get an idea. And also you can definitely get a sense of the complexity of the RPG, depending on how complex the character sheet is.
Nave character sheets are one half of a sheet of paper. I actually made my own little character sheets. This is a character that I rolled up yesterday. It took seven minutes to roll up a character. Very, very quick to roll up a character to get started. And the main one is, of course, you have these six ability scores.
A really interesting thing about rolling random ability scores in this one is you don't roll 3D6 and add it to the thing. There are no ability scores. They are only ability bonuses. I love this idea. I don't think we need ability scores. I don't think any RPG needs ability scores except D&D. That's my firm feeling. Ability bonuses are fine.
And for ability bonuses in Knave, if you want to roll them randomly, what you do is you roll 3D6 and whatever number you got, that's which one of the abilities gets a plus one bonus. So as an example, I've got my 3D6, and I'm gonna roll three ability scores, right? And instead of this being the bonus, this one tells you which scores get the bonus.
So I rolled a one, three, and a six, which means I have plus one to strength, plus one to con, and plus one to charisma. Right. Really straightforward. If you were to, for example, roll 666, you would have plus three to charisma. So you can roll duplicates and the duplicates would be that's where you put your scores.
You can, of course, also just apply three scores to whatever you want if you prefer to build a character rather than roll a character. But I think it's really fun, especially for these lightweight RPGs. We've definitely done this in Shadow Dark. It's really fun to just randomly roll your character and see what you get. Now, NAVA is a classless system. There are no character classes.
You don't have your fighter, mage, thief, cleric sort of classes. And instead, you have careers. And there are 100 different careers. And when you're building a character, you roll two different careers. And then kind of mix those two. And they tell you a little bit something about your... your character. So an example would be 79. I am a rat catcher and a 33. I am a falconer.
So, you know, right away, Oh, a rat catcher falconer. So I am a character who's got a falconer and I've got a Falcon and it hunts rats. Now, what are the mechanics of the Falcon? I don't know. We'd probably have to come up with some way of saying like, how do you have a, let's see, the falconer has a birdcage gloves and a whistle. There's an assumption there that you would also have a Falcon.
And then the rat catcher has a cage, 10 rat traps and a sack. Probably filled with rats. The equipment that you pick up, you start with from your two careers, but you can actually add some other stuff. One interesting thing, if we look back at the character sheet again, is armor. There are sort of two different scores for armor.
The first one is your armor points, and armor points are basically how many pieces of armor are you wearing. An interesting feature of Knave is when you're first filling out your equipment sheet, you can take whatever armor you want up to what you can carry.
So most of the time you're not going to bother to fill out six slots worth of gear with pieces of armor, and you can only have like one per slot, and there's a description in here which ones you get. But there's no difference between chainmail and a breastplate and a gambeson and a shield and stuff like that. All of them are the equivalent of one armor point.
So you're just essentially building up your armor points by wearing more pieces of armor. So your armor class is your number of pieces of armor that you're wearing plus 11. So you get a little bit of an edge there. The equivalent of having leather armor or whatever like that. So the rest of it plays pretty straightforward. One other point. For hit points, you roll a d6.
That's how many hit points you have. You don't add your con bonus, you don't add anything else. However, when you take damage greater than your hit points, you start to lose equipment slots. And your number of equipment slots is equivalent of 10 plus your constitution bonus. So that's how many pieces of armor you can wear, which means you're not going to have more than 13 slots
when you are starting out and that includes all of the items that you picked up for your for your for your different professions and any any other pieces of stuff that you want to pick up they all basically take up a slot heavy pieces of of armor and weapons take up multiple slots not armor i don't think but weapons take up multiple slots and when you take damage greater than your hit points each point of damage is a piece of equipment slot that you lose and anything that's in that slot
The one little tricky bit is this means you really want to be careful about what pieces of equipment you have in your lower slots because it starts from the high to low. It starts at 20 and works its way up to one.
And you want to make sure that your most important gear is the gear that you have at the highest point of your sheet because you would, you know, it's okay to lose your cage, but you don't want to lose your great sword or whatever, you know, anything like that. And you basically lose that piece of equipment when you start to take damage greater than your hit points.
Healing and everything goes on from there. So that is just a quick touch on what the game itself looks like, how the game itself works. Again, really quick to build a character. Looks like a very straightforward system. Good descriptions in here are like, what are the duties of a game master when they're running knave? What are the duties of a players when they're running knave?
Again, a lot of this philosophy are things that you can read and decide whether or not you want to incorporate in other RPGs too. And you know, the whole character creation. But when you get the other half of this book that I think is so valuable, are all of these 100 tables that are all throughout the book.
So even though there's lots of stuff in here about running your game, you suddenly have things like weather, like travel shifts, weird things that happen, you know, big kind of events. There's cascading ones like city event, where then you go to another section and then you're on the city event table, like delusion. And then you have a D100 page full of delusions.
So it's really interesting to see all of the different D 100 tables that are in here. And you can use these for any role playing game, travel shifts, really cool signs, locations, structures, places, or place traits. So you can say like, Oh, you know, we're going to mix it too. I'm going to get my D 100 dice again. So for a place we have 83, which is a tavern.
And then a trait is 54, which is murmuring, a murmuring tavern, right? Or you have 22, which is a convent. And then 32, which is an endless convent, right? Those are really interesting traits. And there's so many of them.
because they're d100 tables so you get 10 000 variants these two tables alone give you 10 000 possible variants of traits and structures and that's just those two tables you can add all kinds of things in delve shifts what happens when you're going through a dungeon what's something that could happen while you're there really interesting you know events that you could roll in here what are the various rooms that you would find in a dungeon
What are the room details you might find? What are some of the themes? Again, chaos, you know, chaos mirror, you know, a cage full of outsiders. Mixing these tables up is tremendously valuable. What kinds of dungeons even exist? Mushroom forest, casinos, factories, a lock, mansions, archives, stables. Tremendous value in these D100 tables.
Trap effects, you know, burying, staining, filling, reflecting. And not only can you roll on one table and mix it with another table, you can roll on one table a couple of times and it kind of cascades out. So you can have these sort of recursive tables that build out more and more as you're going hazards mechanisms. This is great for your traps, right? What's a trap hazard mechanisms.
You know, what are the different kinds of things that characters might, that NPCs might be doing? What are the, what are the different activities that they have a D 100 table for that? You know, the D100 tables in here are just off the charts. Spells is really interesting. This is something both Knave and Knave2 do, that you don't have like caster classes.
Instead, you pick them up from a spell book. The spell book has that object for that spell and you learn that spell. And again, there's a hundred different spells in it. You can roll a D100 die to see like which spell do you get from a spell book? And that's how you get magic in this game. Really, really neat stuff. The descriptions of the spells are very, very lightweight.
They show just the things that you need in order to kind of describe them in the fiction of the world. And then there's new spells, right? You can have element and forms, wizard names, qualities, effects. elements, forms, mutations, delusions, disasters, spell schools, a hundred different spell schools, right? Relics are interesting.
Relics are sort of like things that you find out in the world that are bound to a particular patron. So you can kind of get a connection with a patron through these relics and get a power from them. Another neat idea, again, very transportable. You could take that, you could put it into any of your games. Domains and symbols.
There's a whole section on alchemy in here and the different kinds of things that you might get from a potion. A lot of these are just inspirational. Sense heat, dark vision, telekinesis, ice form. It doesn't give you all the details on how that works. You kind of make that up. But I think there's something when you read a book like Knave,
When you have a book like this, an 80-page single book that covers an entire game system plus tons of table to help you build your game, where there's an expectation of a book like this, that the GM is going to be able to grab this stuff and build off of it. And that's something that we're seeing them steer away from in a game like D&D 2024, where the search action in D&D 2024 is super refined.
How you can do it, the fact that it even takes an action, the DCs that you have to meet in order to accomplish this, all of that is encapsulated in this rule. And maybe you're like, well, that takes the burden off of the DM to have to figure out exactly what you can do with a search.
But also, it kind of takes away some of the advantage that a GM has of being able to kind of determine, based on the circumstances and situation, what searching does. So... This game is definitely leaning in the other direction. What does it mean when you have a courage potion? You have to kind of decide what that means.
But I think that's where DMing is really fun for both players and for game masters on determining what courage means. What does it mean when you drink a potion like courage? You don't need to have it all spelled out on exactly how it works. You can kind of figure that out.
And you know what the core fundamental natures of the game are, which is rolling a D20 roll, adding a modifier, meeting a DC, etc. You know, you have stuff like that with plus five and minus fives for advantages and stuff like that. Textures, tastes, colors, ingredients, you know, all the different kinds of equipment that you can pick up.
You know, tools, D100 list of tools, D100 list of random items. And think about like mixing these miscellaneous items with some of these other tables that they have in here for like themes, right? Elements. You can mix these together. These effects and items can be mixed together to create really wild stuff, really interesting stuff.
So again, mixing up these tables together, I think are really profound. Fabrics and decorations.
treasures and materials one thing i did find a little lacking where i could have used a little bit more guidance was exactly how treasure is supposed to work there's this idea that there's everything is worth basically just coin but there isn't anything about like well how much coin should you expect to receive in any given adventure there's no sort of random treasure table for coins
uh in it instead what you can do uh when you're if you're running nave is look at how many experience points it takes to level to any given level and then use that as a gauge for like well how much treasure would i expect them to acquire in order to meet these experience points so if you look that's it's two thousand experience points to get to level two so you could say and you know that one experience point comes from one coin's worth of value
which means you can decide if you're going to give some of these items away and you're going to treat those as treasure, then how many coin is a treasure worth? You have to kind of come up with a number for that. I think one thing I would have liked is I would have liked the little table that gave me, again, there's so much randomness elsewhere in this book, a random treasure thing.
on what they discover in what kind of places, maybe broken down by tier or whatever, would be handy. It's something like, Shadow Dark has this, a lot of other RPGs have this. Something to help me get a guideline for how much treasure I should be rewarding on the expectation of whatever levels.
Instead, I have to kind of do the math of saying like, okay, maybe I'm gonna break this 2,000 up into four groups of 500,
Maybe I add a little random variance to them so it's not four perfectly even ones, and maybe I apply that to different items and different pieces of gear so I know I have a budget of about 500, and I can break that up into the pieces of gear that they discover throughout a game.
It's a little bit more work than I would like to do, and I think some random tables, again, given how many random tables exist in the rest of this book, I think that that would have been something I could have used more guidance on. Another area where I could have, you know, look at this, like weapons, right?
D100 different kinds of weapons and item traits, a bloody bola, an intelligent baton, a minimalist pike, a pulsing rancier, you know, like really cool stuff. Buildings. It even has like a warfare system. It's a one-page...
like mass battle system it took me a little time to get my head around exactly how this works and basically what it comes down to is how much money can a group spend on the military that they've got and what kind of creatures do they have in there and then you basically make your roll checks you roll three checks to kind of see how they do pretty neat system the idea that you can do the whole thing on one page is pretty cool for an entire like mass combat system on one page given their entire books that are built just around mass combat
City stuff, themes, events, street details, buildings, inn names in one and two, like the Crimson Orb, the Drunken Mole, or the Bleak Saint, right? You can do really neat stuff. Food and food traits, factions, missions and rewards, whole section on how to do downtime, what you can do with your downtime as you're earning it. Carousing takes a whole night, costs D10 times 50.
blah blah blah lots of things hirelings recruiting hirelings and then there's lots of tables for naming the hirelings and giving them personalities and traits and professions and goals of their own and you can actually use these for your character too i use when i was building my character i kind of got my head around the character by rolling randomly for a lot of these things different kinds of relationships this relationship one is actually a pretty useful one if you want to connect two characters together too i think you could i think you could use this a lot
Monsters was another area where I feel like I could have used a little bit more guidance. There's good instructions here for talking about how you build a monster and giving you these examples of different monsters. But one big question I have when it talks about determining an armor class, determining hit points and all of that, is I don't know what a low monster and a high monster are like.
I kind of had to guess that. So if it had said, for example, and this is something like we did in Forge of Foes, is we said, like, what is a challenge 20 monster like? You know, what is a challenge five monster like? And we actually listed out common monsters for those different challenge ratings. So you have an idea of, ah, Balors are about challenge 21.
Now, this one actually meets that same thing. It's based on hit dice of monster, which is like the old school way of determining the challenge rating of a monster. How many how many hit dice did it have? And you can generally guess that like low hit dice monsters, you know, level is basically the number of hit dice that it has. So you could say, okay, well, what are the levels on here?
But you kind of have to go through this whole thing and be like, well, what's the highest level monster? Like a purple worm is level 15. A lich, you know, you can always say like, you know, vampires are level eight. Okay, that gives me a general gauge. An ogre is level four. So you can use this, you know, a lich is level 11. So I think like, how about dragons?
Like you can always go back and look at dragons. So this one just has a generic dragon and says it's level 10. Okay, so you can see a generic dragon is sort of level 10. That gives me a gauge of like, well, what are other things?
A little table to help me understand like what the hit dice range are or say like, you know, the hit dice range goes from one for a common soldier to 20 for a really powerful whatever. In this case, it looks like kind of 15. Given a dragon is level 10, It really feels like 15 is probably the high. It has an eye tyrant in here, and the eye tyrant is level 11. That's equivalent to like a beholder.
So I could have used a little bit more guidance for exactly how to, given that it doesn't have a lot of monsters in here, right? It's only got two pages worth of monsters. A lot of monsters, and you can reskin these into anything. So you're really in a good state with just the monsters it has there.
But given that it's expecting me, the game is expecting me to build monsters, I would have liked a little bit more guidance in how to build these monsters, right? And instead it says like, in other old school RPGs, monsters level is called its hit dice. It's depending a lot on like, hey, we expect that you're going to use this to run it with old school adventures. You know, well, what if I don't?
What if I'm running with my own adventures? I want to build my own adventures. How do I know exactly what hit dice or level monsters mean? And how do I use that? But again, tons of random tables to help me build really cool, fun monsters with lots of different things that they do. I really like that. Has a nice gameplay example in here. And this is kind of cool.
A designer's commentary, like where did inspiration from this book come from? Where did the different ideas for this book come from? I think is a really kind of cool, you know, look into how Nave got built and then the character sheet. And then there's some adventures and some maps in the back of the book that you can use more tables.
Those tables, by the way, in the beginning of the front are all in the front page, the front couple of pages of the book. or the back couple pages of the book. The physical book is great, by the way.
This is another one where I feel like you could grab a handful of character sheets, you know, print out a bunch of character sheets, grab this book, throw it in your bag, and you could run games for a really long time. Needless to say, I wouldn't have bothered talking about all this if I didn't think Knave 2 was an excellent role-playing game. I highly recommend it.
So you can pick it up on DriveThruRPG for $20 for the PDF, or you can get the physical version, which I think is definitely worth doing. If it were me, I would definitely spend the extra $15 to get a physical version of the book, because as a physical book, this book is just really outstanding. It's another one where I'm like, I'm going to have this book on my shelf the rest of my life.
And there is nothing that can happen in the future of role-playing games that could stop me from saying, you know what, I'm going to pull this off my shelf and I'm going to run a one-shot game using Knave where we treat it like a little level one dungeon crawl. I could grab a classic adventure. I could build my own version of a classic adventure and I'm off to the races.
I think Knave is really, really cool. I think you would want this if you're looking for a very lightweight, very quick to play fantasy, old school role-playing game. or you want piles of random tables that you can use to help flesh out your own adventures, or you want both of those things, I think Knave is an excellent purchase for either of those goals. I really, really think it's cool.
When we think about fleshing out our role-playing games, and particularly the dungeons that we run and stuff like that, and when we think about secrets and clues and how we're going to reveal secrets and clues to the players when they're exploring dungeons and things like that, one of the biggest ways that we are going to explore those secrets and clues and that characters can discover those secrets and clues is by studying the artwork and the architecture of the structures that they're in.
So one of the things I've been thinking about is like, what are those pieces of artwork and what are those structures? And is there a good way for us to get our hands around these kinds of pieces of artwork, medieval artwork and architecture and structures that characters could potentially find in dungeons?
So I've started working on a Sly Flourish article on that topic where I didn't like get deep into museums and stuff like that, but I did some good Wikipedia searching and found some common medieval decorations that I thought we would look at today.
So the idea is that you can take these medieval decorations, you can take these ideas and sort of put them in a list and keep them along with your other stuff. And spending a little bit of time doing some research to understand exactly what a frieze is, what a carotid is, what encaustic painting is. what Straffito is.
That once you understand what these things are, once you've kind of internalized them, then it becomes easier for you to describe them in the game. So I just picked 12. You probably have other ones, but I wanted to pick like 12 that you could put like on a D12 list if you wanted to and not overwhelm us with too much stuff. So we're going to take a look at these today.
And they're not really in any particular order. I would say that some of the more common ones are higher in this list. Some of the less common ones are lower in the list. But all of these are things that you could describe while the characters are exploring the region around them. So, a relief, for example. Relief is a projection of an image in which the stonework around the image is carved back.
So you carve back the negative space, leaving the image protruding forward. There are some of these like above relief, which is a low, and then there are high reliefs and then sunken relief. Sunken relief is sort of the opposite. I'm going to link to my notes here in the show notes. So you can look down and see the Wikipedia descriptions of each of these things, which show pictures of each of them.
So this is an example of like a high relief where they carved deeply into something. Here is a Roman relief where all of the stonework was carved back to show that. So a relief is a very common structure for art that you might find. A frieze is a horizontal stretch painted or sculpted around the upper edge of a wall, a room, or an object like a sarcophagus.
So if you are inside of a room and the walls are relatively bare, but around the outer edge of the wall at the top of it is a carving around it, that is called a frieze. And you see friezes in, you know, Roman architecture has it, Greek architecture has it. You could often say that this exists around the upper edges of a sarcophagus.
So, you know, a common situation in D&D is there's a sarcophagus and around the outer edge of the top part of the sarcophagus is a frieze. So you can describe that as a freeze and they might learn stuff from the depictions on the freeze battles that have taken place or villains that they defeated histories about whoever is buried in the sarcophagus that could all be inside of a freeze mural.
Most of us understand what a mural is, a mural being a piece of graphic artwork painted directly onto a wall. Right. So and there's lots of different ways to paint them on a wall. And some of these other ones talk about how those paintings are on a wall.
But, you know, a mural is a very common way to see a depiction of a scene or a situation or a story or gods or whatever that is painted directly upon, you know, painted directly upon a wall. Tapestries, fabric representations of stories, you know, many different. I think all of us kind of generally know what tapestries are.
This is not super extreme, but it's nice to have on the list that when you're going through old things, you might find tattered tapestries and those tapestries have depictions of things. One of the neat things about tapestries, two factors of tapestries that are really important and interesting. One is that tapestries were often used to hide drafts in castles and things like that.
When there were cracks in the walls that they couldn't seal up or the cracks formed and they had like cold drafts at night, they would put tapestries up to block those cracks. That could be a really good way to hide secret doors and things like that. So the idea that tapestries are used to hide secret doors, that's very cool.
Now tapestries were also really nice because they were portable a your adventures can take them off the wall roll them up and take them with them and sell them but also people would decorate their places differently with different tapestries they would move the tapestries around they put new ones up take old ones down and it meant that they didn't have to sit looking at the same artwork the whole time so those are a couple reasons why tapestries might have a good effect in the game that you're running.
A fresco is kind of like a mural. It is a type of painting in which the mural is painted directly upon wet lime plaster. So in this case, you would already put up and you would have like a plaster mural up on a wall where the painting is directly in the plaster, which would preserve it over time. One reason why this is important, fresco comes from the word fresh, right?
And one reason why this is important is that plaster might crack and you might have situations where you see a fresco on a wall, but you know that it's plaster, you peel the plaster back and you find something on the other side. Maybe there's another mural. This actually has happened in castles.
I went to a castle in Ireland once where they had a plaster fresco on one wall, but the plaster had peeled back and there was a whole other depiction on the other side that they had kind of buried over. Remember I talked about how tapestries were put up in order to hide or to change up the decoration.
Well, people that own castles would want to change it up and they're like, they would do what like cheap wallpaper people do. Just put the wallpaper right up over the other wallpaper and just keep doing that until the end of time.
they would just take plaster and build frescoes right on the walls over the artwork that existed but when you're an explorer or adventurer and you want to learn things one of the interesting ways you could learn things is seeing a fresco that has begun to crack and the plaster is peeling away and there's another image on the other side maybe a worship of dark gods like maybe it's all happy on the front and then you peel it back and it turns out no there's a curse that's here and that's why this place is haunted
So frescoes are a good way to reveal stuff that is behind them. A mosaic is when you take bunches of small little bits of stone or glass or things like that, and you adhere them together to build images. So the neat thing about a mosaic is the pieces of the mosaic may be highly valuable themselves, pieces of gemstones, pieces of carved glass or whatever.
And so there could be some interesting treasure that you might discover in mosaics, mosaics being instead of being painted, mosaics were actually put together by these tiny little pieces of colored stone, ceramic glass and things like that, and then paste together and mortar. Again, you could have the same sorts of situation where some of them have peeled away.
Hey, this was like a mosaic that was on the wall, but a big pieces of the mosaic are broken, broken free. So mosaic is kind of another interesting artwork type.
carotid and telamon i think i owe um sipio for this one i think brought it up which is male and female carvings that are used as pillars or columns inside of a wall so again if you have these big columns you could say there are these catterid columns made up of like female deities holding the pillars up or telamons catterids are for for females telamons are for for males of you know carved figures that that serve as pillars you know this is in athens
You have, these are catarids, right? These pillars that are, you know, load-bearing structures that are carved like women or goddesses and things like that. And telomons are sort of the male equivalent of that. You know, here is a telomon of a male figure, you know, male figure that is holding up a particular area.
So catarids and telomons, useful for having pillars that are holding up big structures.
runic carvings runic carvings are when you have sort of an old language or you know certain kinds of you know primordial or primeval languages where their languages are descriptive in these kinds of very specific runes and those runes vikings were big into these of course norse you know old norse side had these runes And those runes could be carved in and the runes can be both language.
They can also be power. We've talked about like rune magic and our D and D games and things like that. So runic carvings would be carvings of these depictions that could be sort of read by the types of runes that they have, but also they could have, they could of course hold power in them. And maybe while you read it, things happen to you. So those are kind of runic carvings. Encaustic painting.
This is where we get into some of the stranger ones. Encaustic painting is using heated wax to apply pigments to a surface, which is often wood or canvas. So this is another one where sort of like a tapestry or sort of like frescoes that you would be, you would have these wax paintings.
And the neat thing about this and like the latest Indiana Jones movie had a thing like this, where it was like an encaustic graving painting. Or an encaustic pattern was wax, but you could melt the wax off and there would be something else beneath it.
So the idea that like maybe if you fireball a room, the encaustic painting melts and it kind of deforms the images that are there, but they see that there's something else behind. That's kind of an interesting way of dealing with this sort of encaustic painting, this hot wax painting that could show an image, but that could be kind of peeled away to reveal secrets on the other side.
That's one of the things about all of these are like, what are the ways that these things reveal their secrets? One of the reasons I put in caustic painting on here is that idea that you could melt the wax and then see the stuff that's there. Gilded engravings. The idea of taking engravings. These could be big. These could be small. They could be on small objects.
It'd be a large objects, but essentially you engrave, you engrave into like stonework or wood or whatever, and then put gold melt gold on the inside so that there's this coating of gold that,
all around the outer edge that sort of seeps into those cracks and can make very beautiful things so it's often called gilding you know gilded objects and where where gold was sort of overlaid on top of another thing to kind of show the image of whatever was there in the first place so obviously you know gilded engravings on coffins would be neat gilded engravings on shields you could certainly see gilding engravings on the walls where it was all stonework carved but there's these rivers of silver
and it wouldn't necessarily have to just be gold you know it could be other you know mithril like mithril lining inside of it if you wanted to so that's that's that's gilding mariflage is painting canvas to a painting uh canvas directly onto a wall so other than this is where you would have almost like a painting that's directly affixed to the wall in plaster and again another one where like you could cut it out and take it with you you could show stuff behind it
Things could be hidden behind the canvas wall. There could be a secret door behind the canvas wall. So a mariflage, I think I'm pronouncing that right. A mariflage would be like a mural that's directly put upon canvas that's over an area. And if characters discover, ah, at first you thought this was a mural painted directly to stone, but it's not, it's actually painted directly on canvas.
And then the question comes back as what's behind the canvas, right? What can we find there? Or can we cut it and sell it for loot, right? That's another one. Strafito is the idea of scratching a surface of one pigment in order to reveal another. So in this case, you might have two different layers of stuff.
You might paint or affix an entire color to one thing and then scrape down to get a different color on the other side. So this one's kind of a different one, but this idea of essentially you might put like gold on one thing and then scratch through the gold to reveal like obsidian on the back, all kinds of different ways that you might want to show something from behind it.
And again, it's another one where like, well, what if you scratch further? Would there be more things you could reveal? Was the surface that was put up there and then scratched through in order to depict this? What if there's actually more to it? And if you scratch further, you might discover other kinds of secrets and clues. So that's kind of another different technique.
Kind of, you know, Strafito, kind of another weird one that you would have. So those are sort of 12 different ways that you might have decorations in medieval chambers or old chambers. Again, dungeons and crypts and towers and old ruins and things like that could have all different kinds of these things. I think this is a fun list to kind of add into your kit.
so that when you're around there, when you want to describe different kinds of decorations that are on there, particularly decorations that you want to expose secrets and clues through, that having this list, this is a nice fast D12 list that you could add on there to talk about these different kinds of decorations that these locations might have for your characters to explore.
So I hope you found that useful.
every month on the sly flourish patreon we have a monthly q a any patron can ask any rpg related question to i answer every one of those questions every friday some of them i bring here to the show so we can dive in a little deeper christian h says recently we went for i recently went to my first gen con and picked up materials for dungeon crawl classics i'm currently wrapping up my first campaign as a dm and i'm thinking about my next trying to have the party of mostly new players try out this system
Do you have any advice on changing up systems and how not to overwhelm new players? So the first thing I would recommend is talking to them about it before you decide that you're going to do this before you like have a session zero, ask them, are they interested in it? Kind of show the book off. You know, a lot of times I'll just leave. This is one of my dirty tricks.
I just leave new RPG books lying around on my gaming table. And then before the game, people go, Oh, what's this mothership? Huh? I haven't heard of mothership. And I'm like, yeah, Yeah, check it out. It's pretty. Oh, this is kind of neat. They get sort of excited. They discovered on their own.
So, you know, this is the equivalent of putting the Red Ryder BB gun ad in your dad's New York Post so that he'll read it when Christmas time comes along, as seen in the Christmas story.
so but talk to them ask them if they're interested in this talk to them and and you kind of have to sell it right why do they why would they want to play this over playing something else tell them about some of the gonzo aspects of dungeon crawl classics the idea of really interesting and funny spell failures the idea of you know what are the what are the factors of dcc particularly for players there might be reasons you're excited about it why would they be excited about it
So look at the game, try to find out what those things are, describe those to them. You know, when I was pitching Level Up Advanced 5e, I said like, yeah, this got really interesting elements. Like one of the aspects that isn't a big sell is, oh, they rebalanced all the spells so they're not so broken. And the players are like, I like my broken spells. I don't have any problem with that.
I don't have any problem with Counterspell. I like Counterspell.
So, you know, but if you say things like, well, you know, the martial classes have a whole bunch of new maneuvers or there is now a whole new martial class is very similar to the old 40 warlord or there's a whole new skill specialization system in there so that you can really get like you can really dive deep into your skills and how those work.
There's a neat way of kind of escalating the specialization in particular skills like, oh, that sounds kind of interesting. Right. And a lot of times they might just be like, I don't know why this is better than what I'm already playing. They might not be super excited about it, but they might also say, yeah, but you're interested. Sure, I'll give it a shot.
The other one is trying to pick systems that aren't going to be so hard that they're not going to be able to pick them up really easily. I think that a lot of it, like when there's a big investment in an RPG, really understanding the rules, that's a harder sell than one where you're like, hey, this plays pretty much like 5E only X, Y, and Z.
So, but I would really spend some time, talk to your players about it. Why do you want to run it? Why do you think they would want to play in it? What are the advantages that this has over the other one? And generally, if you have a group that trusts you, Oh, one other big tip, Hey, we're just going to try this out for a session or two.
I want to just see if it's like, are you guys willing to try this out for a session or two? Don't try to sell them on a 40 month, you know, 40 week campaign.
sell them on a couple of sessions if those work really well you might say yeah would you like to guys want to continue this and you want to stick you know try something else and be sincere about that don't don't assume that they're going to want to do a 40 session one they might just do those two sessions and then be done but you'll have had a chance to try it out so i'd say try one shots it's a lot easier for players to commit to doing like a one or two or four session game than it is to commit to like we're all switching over to tales of the valiant that's all we're ever going to play from here on out
And it's like, well, what about D&D 2044? I was kind of interested in trying that. Well, why don't we try a couple of episodes, a couple of sessions of Tales of the Valiant and see what we think, right? A lot easier sell. Hopefully that helps. Eric H. says, in a recording, I love this one, in a recording of the Lazy D, I'm going to read this in a new voice.
in a recording of the lazy rpg talk show you posted on youtube on 20 february 2023 you said to prepare for a bold statement and you expressed that it would be bad for the industry for dnd beyond to host third-party material i assume i'm on the stand that's why i'm saying it this way i'm pretty sure that eric h did not have that attitude but i think it's funny
A year and a half later, now that D&D Beyond has hosted third-party material, I'm interested to hear your thoughts on the points you make in that video. Do you still feel that it is bad for the industry and the hobby? Do you think it has strengthened a monopoly D&D has? Do you think it weakens those hosted companies by forcing them to operate in an unfair marketplace?
In the video, you compare it to cuts taken by the likes of Amazon. Or do you think it allows those third-party publishers to reach a larger audience? I'll ask again in another 1.5 years and see how it shakes out. Eric H., I hope you do. I'm gonna give an answer to this and I would love to hear how my answer changes in a year and a half. A few things.
I don't think I ever said that it was bad for the hobby. I said it wasn't necessarily good for the hobby. And those are two separate things. My argument is that a lot of community members were saying that it was good for the hobby for D&D Beyond to sell third-party content.
My point is, I don't think there is any way to say that is good for the overall hobby if good for the overall hobby meant a more democratized marketplace for RPGs. The more you have a centralized market for RPGs, I think the less resilient the hobby is. But I wouldn't say it's bad. It's not necessarily bad either. It just means it's not universally good. They are not doing us a favor.
They are making money off of the stuff that they put on D&D Beyond. I'm going to guess 20 to 30%. They don't say, and when we talk about the unfair marketplace, I'll give you an example of an unfair marketplace. Tell me how much MCDM has to pay Wizards of the Coast to be on D&D Beyond. What's the percentage cut? I'll give you a hint, they don't tell you. You know why? It's probably NDA'd.
So if they are NDAing, How much I'm making this up. I don't know it's NDA, but nobody is saying it. Ghostfire is not saying it. Kobo Press isn't saying it. MCDM is not saying it. The publishers that are not telling us and they're not telling other publishers how much they have to pay wizards to be on that platform. You can guess it's probably 20 to 30 percent.
I would not be surprised if it's 20, 30 percent. Now, Wizards of the Coast does not have to pay that 20% or 30%. They pay like 5%. They pay card-to-card transaction fees, and that's pretty much it. Granted, they're spending the money to maintain D&D Beyond, and that's a cost.
But any new product that they put up on their own site, they don't have to pay anything near the amount of money that a third-party publisher. And that's why I think it's in an unfair environment. The answer is yes. are they still allowing getting third party publishers reach to a larger audience? Also? Yes. These, a lot of these things can be simultaneously true.
They are not, it's not one or the other. So, you know, saying like the host of company is forced to operate in an unfair marketplace, or do they get to be, they get access to a larger audience. The answer is both. They are indefinitely in an unfair marketplace.
I don't think there's any way anybody could argue that they are not in an unfair marketplace because they pay more money per product to the host of the marketplace. And the host of that marketplace also sells the same kind of products they sell only at like 50 times more volume. Now, that said, I know personally that those products that are selling, I can't speak for all of them.
But some of the products they're selling in Indy Beyond are hugely lucrative. They're doing very, very well. So I wouldn't know a publisher that's up there who is unhappy with that situation. They're probably because they bring you bring up. They just got a bunch of basically free money. They got to put a product up there, not free because they probably did some effort to get up there.
They put a product up there and it's selling really well. So they're making money. So why is that bad? Right? Well, it's not. But does that mean it's a fair business practice? No. Does that mean that the whole hobby is more resilient? No. Like those things can still all be true. You could make a lot of money on it.
and still have it be a further centralization for the number one player in the marketplace. But how is this, what is the real sign that it would be bad? And the real sign that it would be bad in my one metric that I would look at is, is D&D Beyond growing in the number of people that are using it compared to their overall hobby?
And if it's growing bigger, and particularly if we think, and I don't know how you really figure this out, but is it growing bigger in particular because now people are finding more material from other publishers there, then that means that their reach is growing and that there is a centralization of the RPG sales that's going on in one marketplace.
My own research into this says that that's not really happening. And I don't have perfect data on this. I only have the data that I've got. But one of the things is that for three years, three or four years, I've been doing a survey on YouTube asking people, do they regularly use D&D Beyond? During COVID, it was like one and two. Last year, it was about four out of 10.
And then this year, it's one out of three. So it's actually gone down slightly.
right a little bit you know almost exactly i don't know that i'd sweat it too much now these are people who follow me on youtube these are people who answered the poll they were big they were 33 or more than 3 000 respondents but it wasn't a representative sample of the overall marketplace and i don't know that we'll ever get the data on the overall marketplace but for that data that i'm looking at what it tells me is it doesn't look like dnd beyond's reach is growing disproportionately to the rest of the rpg industry that would be something that i would that i would look at
I also think that D&D Beyond is going to become less lucrative for third-party publishers the more third-party publishers are on there. So eventually it's going to get to the point where maybe you have to do a lot of work to put a product up there and it doesn't really sell.
I've experienced this on other platforms where we spend a significant amount of money to put a product on a particular platform and nobody buys it there because there's so many other things to buy there. So those are all things to consider. Do I think it's... I don't think...
like you know this isn't like a table pounding oh my god the industry is worse off than it ever was and role-playing games are going to die because of this this is i'm not putting i'm not making this a big deal and i i think it is i would be very interested to look at this again in a year and a year and a half and i think the end result is from the year i'm surprised it's been a year and a half since i talked about this i guess it's been about a year right you said yeah february 2023 was it really that long ago where i talked about that man time flies
I don't think it's gotten necessarily worse for the overall RPG industry. One area that I'll bring up, though, is I did talk to another publisher, and we were talking about D&D Beyond, and we were talking about their stuff, and they said, yeah, we get questions all the time saying, hey, is your product ever going to be up on D&D Beyond?
And they're like, well, we'd sure love to have a product there, but they're not allowing it. One thing that I think is a clear sign that it isn't necessarily good for the community is who are they choosing to be on the platform? I have another friend who is very eager to get his outstanding role-playing game product up on D&D Beyond, reached out to them and they blew him off.
They're like, oh yeah, we'll talk about it. We'll talk about that. And then never talked to him again. So his product can't be on D&D Beyond. Other people's products, they're showing up. So how do we know who's going up there and who gets to decide? Wizards of the Coast is getting to decide which products are getting this extra visibility and which ones are not. Is that a fair marketplace?
Sure doesn't sound like it to me. So those are some factors. It's not crushing the industry. It's not making it terrible. I'm not trying to like, oh my God, this is the worst thing of all time. Oh my God. No, the industry is super, super healthy. The whole hobby is super, super healthy. And I'm very, very happy with it. And I think we're in a really outstanding spot.
But I don't necessarily think, the one thing that I was really trying to nail then, and I'm still trying to nail now, is D&D Beyond adding third-party products to D&D Beyond is helping Wizards of the Coast. And it's helping those product producers. And it's helping people who use D&D Beyond to get exposure to other stuff. But is it making the whole hobby more resilient?
I don't think there's any way you can tell me that it is. Because resiliency doesn't come from one platform bringing more stuff into just that one centralized platform. Ben C says, I've been following the City of Arches since the first release. And I'm very excited to get a final copy from Kickstarter. Congrats on the success. Thank you so much.
I'm planning to use it for an upcoming Theros style game as the central city slash hub of the campaign. And I was wondering if you had any tips on reskinning key elements of the city to the theme of different settings so that I can drop it in as smoothly as possible. Yes, we have a whole section of the book where we talk about how you can, what elements are reskinnable?
What parts of it can you pull out? A big one are the gods. And this would work great for Theros. Like I think City of Arches and Theros would be outstanding.
I think that city of arches and Theros will be outstanding because you can replace like all of the gods and all the statues and all of sort of the artwork and stuff like that can be replaced with all of the gods of Theros and the mythology of Theros. You know, it's got the arena there. I think it could work really, really well for Theros.
And I think it would be pretty easy to sort of reskin the city of arches and Theros. The other one is having the arches connected to the various Pantheon realms of Theros. I think could work, could work really, really well. But yeah, there's a whole section where we're going to talk about what are the elements of the City of Arches that you'll want to pop in and pop out.
Big one are gods, main players, kings and queens, things like that, other major NPCs, some architectural descriptions and stuff like that. But a lot of it is going to be able to work well.
I don't know, like, I don't know Theros real well, but I don't know if there's an underworld, but the idea of maybe having that physical underworld where you have sunken Revia and you have the lower reaches and that the lower you get, the more into the, the underworlds you get, I think could be a really fun thing to do with Theros.
But yeah, City of Arches is designed exactly to do the thing that you're, that you're doing. So hopefully you have an easy time with that. And I'm looking forward to hearing more about it. Graham D says, do you know if Kobo press is planning to maintain their five E compatible product lines going forward?
I recently decided to run empire, the ghouls campaign, but found it was no longer available through the Kobo press store and was getting pretty expensive on Amazon. I reached out to Kobo press customer support to ask about it. And this was their reply. Unfortunately, empire, the ghouls is no longer in print and we will not be reprinting it.
Fortunately, my lovely wife tracked a copy down in Saskatchewan. Shout out to Dragon Den Games in Saskatchewan. So I am covered. Anyway, would this be a simple business decision that is just not economical to keep reprinting books? Or would it indicate that Kobo Press is going to focus on Tales of the Valiant related products?
I have already built up a nice Kobo Press Midgard collection and wonder if I need to worry about completing my collections before the book disappears." This is almost certainly a business decision in the idea that depending on what the sales of Empire of the Ghouls are like, you can reach a point where the sales are so low that it is not worth doing a reprint.
It's a sad state, and it's very sad to hear that for Empire of the Ghouls, because Empire of the Ghouls is an outstanding adventure. I really love Empire of the Ghouls. I ran a long campaign in it, really, really enjoyed it. It's something I will remember for the rest of my life, and I just love that adventure. Now, of course, you can still get the PDF, but...
And I don't know, I haven't seen if Kobo Press really goes through much work to make print-on-demand copies. I wish they would. And one thing you could reach out to customer service, which maybe if I talk to them, I'll mention it, that it's not a lot of work to get a print-on-demand version of these.
And if they could, then at least people could get a print version through DriveThruRPG or something like that. It'd probably be pretty expensive. It's a great big book. It's like a 350-page book. And that's probably part of the deal. It looks like it's an expensive book to manufacture.
And if they're not selling a lot of them, like you basically have to be able to know you're going to sell a thousand of them if it's worth doing a print run at all. And maybe they're just not selling as many copies. Now, whether or not they're kind of pivoting all to Tales of the Valiant, that one I really can't say.
I don't have any inside knowledge to tell me that they're like, oh, we're done with Midgard and we're now doing all this other stuff. Hard to say. So, but yeah, it's kind of a bummer. So yeah, if you want Empire of the Ghouls, go hunt down a copy because they might get harder and harder to get. Yeah. Joshua C says, what is your favorite campaign setting and associated setting book?
Eberron rising from the last war. That's my favorite one. I really, I thought about this. I thought about this question. I thought about it when I saw it on Patreon and I'm going to jump straight to the conclusion, which I think Eberron rising from the last war is my favorite setting book. I think you can run all different kinds of fantasy RPG adventures in it.
I think it works really well to drop in all different kinds of adventures from like, you know,
exploration of like wasteland places to city intrigue to uh horror to you know dragons it's got everything in there and yet has a theme to it that it really is cohesive and excellent uh it's a more modern setting than other ones like midgard i really like but midgard's got some problematic areas that i always feel i have to kind of work around where ever on i really don't feel like that i think there's a lot of interesting history to it
I think it handled a lot of things like saying like goblins aren't a bunch of black-hearted little thieves. Instead, they're part of the Connie empire that has been around long before and had technology as grand as anybody else. I think that really works. It's beautiful. It's a beautiful setting.
And the book, Eberron Rising from the Last War, if you don't have a copy, buy one because it's an outstanding source book. I think it is a pure definition. I don't think we're going to see a value in a source book like that ever again.
like given the cost given the word count given the size of the volume given the quality of the material i think it's one of the best source books it's it's the best source book i've ever seen and i don't know that i will see another one that i love as much as i love that one city of arches of course is different but city of arches is 160 pages rather than 324 pages so so that was that's what i would say joshua c ever on rising from the last war i think is my favorite campaign setting and associated setting book i could run adventures there for the rest of my life
Friends, thank you all so much for hanging out with me today while we talked about all things in tabletop role-playing games. If you enjoyed this show, please check out the City of Arches Kickstarter. We are in the last week of the Kickstarter. Please tell your friends. Please share it on social media. Talk about it. And if you haven't backed it, please back it. Please consider backing it.
Thank you.