Inside My Go-To Gaming Cupboard

A couple of years ago there was a meme floating around RPG blogs where people would post the a pic of their game shelf and reveal a bit about what their choices said about them.

Now I've never been one to jump on a  bandwagon - more schlep along after it several years after it has whizzed by.
So here we go! This is what I turn to for inspiration when dreaming up encounters and adventures.

Looking at this picture, my obsession with monster books and dungeon masters' guides is pretty clear. I've got Monster Manuals from three editions here dating back to first. The first ed Monster Manual was one of my favourite DnD books for a long time, especially as I didn't actually own it but my best friend did. We would spend hours poring over the creatures and imagining what it would be like to fight them. It was at the height of the "DnD is Satanic" scare and having a book with devils and demons in it at the age of eight was pretty scary. Now it's still great for a flick through but the monsters are often wildly unbalanced, particularly when you get to those with magic resistance.

However I regularly turn to the great 4e monster books Monster Vault and Threats to Nentir Vale, even though I am running a 5e campaign. The simple but effective powers that a lot of the monsters in these books possess are cool for spicing up an important battle. I hack them for use in 5e, reducing hit points and armour class as well as stats to fit in more with the maths of the newer edition, but it's not too much work. I also have the Dark Sun Creature Catalog from 4e for when I need a strange creature (the 5e Monster Manual is great but sometimes you want something completely different!)

Another monster book that's really cool is Out of the Pit, the compilation of the beasties from the Fighting Fantasy game books that really got me into fantasy in the mid 1980s.
This might be less familiar to US readers but it's a treasure trove of mad ideas (stuff ripped off from DnD, yes, but other more original and esoteric monsters also). It's usually pretty cheap on eBay so track one down if you can.

As I mentioned I LOVE reading through Dungeon Masters Guides and there are a few of these here, including the 4e edition which is one of the best ever produced IMO. I have the third edition DMG II which doesn't have too many rules (rare for a 3e book) and has lots of advice on running towns etc.

I have a few select adventures too - including Hoard of the Dragon Queen, Princes of the Apocalypse, the Pathfinder AP Rise of the Runelords - just stuff you can easily dip into for an idea on a monster, encounter or NPC if you're stuck. And I just added the Goodman Games books from their recent Kickstarter - GM Gems, Dungeon Alphabet and the brand new Monster Alphabet. They're absolute treasure troves for fans or random tables. You could write a whole, totally random adventure using these three books and a bag of dice (now - that's an idea I'm going to have to try one day soon!)

I have smaller adventures mostly from third party, OSR publishers - I have stuff from Zak Smith and Lamentations of the Flame Princess in the right hand pile - just smaller bits you could throw into a campaign as well as the awesome Red and Pleasant Land.

The box sets complete the pile - of course the Monster Vault tokens as well as the fine 5e Starter Set and the awesome 4e adventure Madness at Gardmore Abbey which I hope to run in the future, probably hacked for 5e. It's a great sandboxy environment with nice random elements - harking back to the likes of the original Castle Ravenloft - but it does get quite "dungeon crawly" at times. So I think it would probably take an entire campaign to run it in 4e, with every fight taking over an hour! In 5e it could be faster and a lot of fun.

Er, at the back are some straw hats, stuck there since the last beach holiday.

Note that this is not even a quarter of my ENTIRE game collection. My 5e rulebooks sit here under my laptop, ready to be busted out on a regular basis. I have a whole crate of modules and other stuff next to my bed, that's my "waiting to be read" box. I have a couple of crates of modules out in my shed, mostly stuff that I've already played through or I didn't find too inspiring. And I have a LOAD of maps, dungeon tiles, and magazines in my attic. It's kinda taking over the house… but I am sure plenty of you know how that feels!

Back from the brink!

It's been over a month sadly. A combination of factors meant that November was a complete write-off. First the internet went on us, until November 20. Then the laptop computer completely died, eliciting a several-hundred-euro bill to recover all our precious files (no, we hadn't backed up…)

A crushing schedule in work, plus multiple bouts of sickness that swept through the entire family in several waves meant that it was largely a month to forget. 

And I certainly didn't have much free time to blog!

But just because I haven't blogged in ages doesn't mean I should give up completely, right?

I DID manage to get a SMALL amount of gaming done and I thought I'd use this post to update you a little. I have some hard-earned time off work this week so hopefully I'll get the chance to add some more posts. In the meantime, here's what rocked my world and rolled my dice:

1) Dungeons and Diesel! One of the coolest things of the past month or so was watching Vin Diesel get back to his DnD roots. I'm not a fan of the Fast & Furious franchise (nothing against it, I've just not seen the movies) but I appreciate the star power of someone like Vin Diesel. Watching him join forces with the team from Geek and Sundry and the Nerdist to roll some dice was awesome. And you can really see Vin getting back into the swing of things, the critical hits are classic!

I wasn't sure what to expect from the video but it's not too long and really entertaining. If you've not seen it yet, check it out here: Vin Diesel Plays Dungeons and Dragons Extended Version

2) Matt Mercer! Linked to the above. I wasn't familiar with the Geek and Sundry or Nerdist guys before I saw the Vin Diesel vid. I was impressed by how laid back, cool and talented they all seem to be. Matt Mercer is my new favourite DM. He joins an eclectic mix of guys including Zak Sabbath/Smith, Chris Perkins, and Mike Shea who have inspired my game. His main talent seems to be keeping the narrative flowing and in this instance, PACING. 

I heard an interview recently where he said he was hoping to get a 90 minute game with Vin D, he actually got 25 minutes. And yet he managed to cram in three encounters! He knows when to up the ante, raise the pace, and when to end an encounter at a climatic moment. There was a lot to learn for family games where everyone needs to keep their attention span up. The casual player (like my parents!) will not sit and mull tactics over a 90 minute miniatures battle - we want to cram in as much action as possible! Watching Mercer at work really inspired me to tighten my DMing chops further.

3) Halloween Special! On that note, I ran a Halloween game for my wife and parents based on Mercer's scenario about the curse of Bronnbog (sp?!) 

We only had an hour or so to play but having seen this guy run it in 25 minutes, it was no problem! I even managed to squeeze in an extra encounter with a group of nasty, warty giant toads. The player all loved it and they especially loved the faster pace I set. I will now be looking to make each encounter last 15 minutes, tops. 

4) Slaying Lolth! As I mentioned before, I also have a "real" DnD group of more hardcore gamers who try and meet up a couple of times a month. This month we managed to find time for just one session, but it was a big one. All year I've been running a version of the DnD encounter adventure War of Everlasting Darkness, expanded and converted to 5e. It culminated in a huge battle against the Demon Queen of the Drow, Lolth, deeming the Spellcaves of Eryndlyn. With my son I built a massive game board using every bit of cavern terrain I could dredge out of our shed! That was NOT a 15 minute encounter I can assure you - it lasted almost four hours, but it was pretty cool and resulted in hard-fought victory for the PCs. With the characters edging towards 12th level it marks the end of the longest campaign I've managed to sustain (yes, 11 months, but I think that's longer than most these days…)

For some reason I cannot post any pics today, but I am gonna post this blog, just to break the radio silence. Adios for now….

Do we really need all six ability scores?

Yesterday I posted about hacking the ability scores to simply reduce the range to 0-5, and using the same, single number as your modifier.
To further simplify matters, I've been thinking about crunching the number of ability scores from six down to four. Here's my thoughts:

                                                                     They've been there since the beginning.                                                                     But I argue that the numbers down the right column are really the ones that matter.

STRENGTH: You've gotta keep strength, as it's a key indicator of how hard a character can hit in melee. It's one of the first things any kid will ask when creating a hero: "How strong am I?"
A single figure that you add to all melee attack rolls and all damage rolls is simple enough.
Lots of peolpe also confuse Strength with toughness (AKA Constitution) and for simplicity's sake I'm merging the two. You can therefore add your Strength score to your hit points each level. Constitution goes out the window.

SKILL: I'm keeping Dexterity, but I'm calling it Skill. That is a more accessible word for youngsters. It is also more accurate, because you add your Dex bonus to ranged attacks. And yet in real life, a person can be incredibly un-dextrous and still shoot a bow like a dream.
So Skill represents a person's nimbleness as well as their actual aptitude in shooting, throwing etc. You add your Skill score to ranged attack rolls as well as damage with ranged weapons.

MIND: Lots of people can't get their head around the difference between Intelligence and Wisdom. I mean, some people get it right away, but I guess they're the more intelligent players. Or is it the wise players? I'm not sure. Mind might be a better description of everything from mental aptitude to psychic toughness, magical ability and plain common sense.
This is the ability score you add your spell attack rolls if you're a Cleric or Wizard. It would also be used for perception/spot checks. It would be used in a fairly high number of saving throws against magical effects too - so it cannot be treated as a complete dump stat for non-spellcasters.

LUCK: Luck is a new one. For this I drew inspiration on both Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG and the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks of my youth. It always seemed appropraite, and somewhat edgy, when you were called upon to "Test Your Luck". It meant something arbitrary, unfair and ultimately very dangerous was about to occur. But while there would still be Luck checks and Luck saving throws, I'd also like to use Luck in a different way. The idea of luck "running out" is quite cool and has been used in both the DCC and FF systems. So perhaps each point of luck you have could represent one reroll per day. It gives players (especially my target audience, younger and new players) some get-out. But it's still a resource that needs to be managed carefully.
And when your luck runs out...

NB: I'm obviously dumping Charisma. It has its uses, but for new people starting to play RPGs, I think it offers too much of a get-out clause. Instead of relying on your character's high charisma and rolling a dice, why not act out the dialogue and get a little immersed in the action?
Of course that's not everyone's cup of tea but I think it's important to establish that this is not simply a game of trying to roll highest on a d20. And hey, if you get bogged down, you can always call for a Luck check.

Sense and Sensability Scores

Look, I know that ability scores have a sweet place in all our hearts.
I know we all have our favoured ways of rolling them up.
We all recall the unbridled joy the first time we rolled a character with an 18 Strength.
We all remember working out ways to cheat at getting higher scores.

Not a bad roll.

But they confuse every newbie that's ever sat at my table. My dad still cannot work it out at times.
The way the modifiers are calculated are confusing. And then you say: "Roll d20 and add your Strength bonus" and they inevitably end up adding their actual Strength score and it all gets very muddled.

There's no point in having two numbers to represent one stat.
The ability scores were part of the original game devised by Gygax and Arneson (although a surprisingly limited part, compared to the influence your choice of class might have on character progression).
But now it's all about the modifiers.

To that end I was intrigued in the days of the Dnd Next playtests to read somewhere (and I cannot for the life of me recall where, but I am convinced it was Mike Mearsl that wrote it) that they were seriously considering doing away with the old roll 3d6 type ability scores. Because I was thinking the exact same thing at the time.

Now Wizards eventually shied away from doing this, and I guess that nostalgia and familiarity are the main reasons. After all, telling someone they've an 18 Charisma is how most of us met our wives, right?
But in the same way they clung for far too long to the morass that was descending armor class, I think it could be time for the old school ability scores to take a hike.

The math is weird anyway, as rolling 3d6 or 4d6 drop lowest or whatever's your poison gives you a nice bell curve... while the modifiers they translate to are fairly flat.


Why not give every score a rating from, say, 0 to 5? That's your Strength score. That's what you add when you roll a d20. That is it. Nothing else to worry about.


With that in mind, I started to devise a more simple and streamlined version of Dnd which uses the 0-5 system (something like a retro clone but not TOO cloney). I've been tapping away at it all week and already written up most of the races and classes. I've also reduced the number of ability scores down to four and tweaked several other bits of the game, all in a view to make it more playable for complete newbies, and young kids.

Having the 0-5 system is handy because you can give them, say, five points to divide between stats at the beginning of the game and the system feels "fair". Then as characters progress up the levels, you can offer them more points to spend. It's simple but it still plays quite a lot like pure Dnd would, in practice.

I'll tell you more tomorrow.

 Kickstarting the blog! 

Wow... nearly two weeks since my last post. Sorry, that's pretty shameful. I have been busy in work, and kinda sick at the same time, which is not exactly conducive to finding the energy to blog.
Following the holiday weekend here in Ireland I'm hoping I can post a blog every day this week and try to get things back on (some sort of rickety) track.

But it's 10.45pm so I'm already running out of time to meet the target on Day One!
I'll go for a simple topic, so ... the projects I have backed or am currently looking at on Kickstarter.
Along with print-on-demand, this website is possibly the greatest thing ever to happen to gaming.

So many games, books and miniatures are being produced it's getting hard to keep up (not least in financial terms). From the gigantic success of the Reaper Bones miniatures (got in early and backed all three of those) to more niche projects, it's opened up tons of possibilities. My miniatures collection would be half its size if it wasn't for Bones. And I also got some neat books and boardgames over recent years, with no sign of things slowing down. In fact there are so many decent Kickstarters out there right now I do worry about whether it's reaching saturation point, but let's fret about that later. Here's some of the stuff I'm enjoying right now:




Folklore: The Affliction is one of those games I tried to resist but the number of minis just got too large and I caved! It's in its final hours as I type this and it has become a very good deal indeed with (currently) 160 miniatures for $149. I am a huge fan of the Ravenloft campaign setting and this reminded me of those adventures. It's not one for the kids, but in a few years they'll be old enough. I hope to break it out and play it as a board game but also maybe run some Ravenloft-style Dnd games ... even the world map/board included might be useful for an RPG campaign.

Here's that cool-looking map. Banana not included, I guess....

Zombicide: Black Plague: I missed the first Zombicide Kickstarter campaign but I caught up with the Prison Outbreak set. I've enjoyed several enjoyable games, particularly with my best friend who is crazy for the zombie genre. The number of miniatures in the box is great ... but I never really went for any of the other expansions, it was too samey. So I was stoked when I saw their most recent offering was medieval themed. This was a chance to get a new flavour of Zombicide PLUS some cool minis I can use in Dnd games. Not just zombies but necromancers, skeletons, even  murderous crows.

Death By Dice: Treasure and Loot Dice I am obsessed with dice. Cannot stop buying them. But these are dice with a difference. I acknowledge I wouldn't find a use for ALL fo these. So I bought a select few for helping to decide potions, magic items and treasure bundles on the fly. Younger players might enjoy rolling them too, to see what they pick up when they loot a body or open a chest.


Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG: I am absolutely in love with DCC although I haven't played it as much as I'd like. It really captures the wonder and craziness of early Dnd type games with a rule set that is somehow both wilder and tighter. It harks back to the days before fantasy became standardised and "vanilla" - before the Lord of the Rings movies and World of Warcraft etc. Those all did great things to spread the gospel of fantasy gaming ... but some of the wonder was lost. DCC RPG is gonzo without being silly, the characters start low-powered but can swing between insanely powerful and flat DEAD at the drop of a hat.

I must stress it's something I've been playing with my regular Dnd group as opposed to my family ... the more hardcore gaming guys really appreciate the flavour of the game.
 As for my family, I just feel they wouldn't quite get the subtleties and would end up confusing the two rule sets.
 But I do have plans to SOMEDAY get a huge group of relative newbies, give them all zero-level characters and see who has the wits to survive longest! DCC is currently on Kickstarter for fourth printing with a special deal for newcomers to the game, do not miss it.

Monster Alphabet Another one from Goodman Games (who make DCC) this is a sort of build-your-own monster toolkit. I cannot wait for my copy to arrive, I also ordered the GM Gems and Dungeon Alphabet to go with it. While the PDFs have landed, unfortunately the hard copies are taking longer than I expected. I really want the "proper" book because I'm getting less and less patient with reading PDFs. After a hard day in front of a screen I find I want a proper book. Also these are the types of books to stick on your shelf and flip through a few pages for entertainment or inspiration. Hopefully they'll be worth the wait!



Cthulhu Wars: Another one I missed the first time round. Since then I've seen the miniatures crop up on various other blogs and I've been drooling both at their size and sheer weirdness. What I like is that many of the Lovecraftian creatures look like nothing else available out there in miniature form. So I jumped at the second wave of the game. I am actually not going for the board game itself. While I'm sure I'd enjoy playing it, I really don't have time or space for ANOTHER board game. I am really just after the add-ons. Specifically, the miniatures.

The Others: 7 Sins I've also got into this one for the miniatures, although the game itself could be cool and the company has pedigree there. But THOSE DEMONS!! A ton of different types, again many resembling nothing I've ever seen before, giving even more opportunity to confound and terrorise players in an RPG setting.

AND TWO I AM RESISTING (FOR NOW...)

Super Dungeon Explore Legends SDE look awesome and appeals to my love of 80s and 90s video game RPGs, where I cut my teeth on the likes of Zelda and Secret of Mana. But for now, as I said above, I don't have room for tons more games in my life. And while the miniatures are super cute, their chibi look means that they don't easily crossover for use in other games.

Sword and Sorcery: Ditto as above. Looks cool but I already have Heroquest, Descent, and the Dungeons and Dragons adventure board games. Do I need any more? Do I? Hmm...
Plus the real clincher here is that so far the miniatures are all pretty generic fantasy fare ... orcs and the like. I already have more orc miniatures that I'd ever care to put on the table at one time. I don't need more.

But man - those Super Dungeon Explore heroes DO look cool!

Another Newbie joins the fold

I had friends staying here over the weekend - my old pal from back in school days plus his wife and two kids. 20 years ago he was one of the guys I gamed with - mostly Warhammer stuff, painting miniatures and a few board games. We played some Dnd too but it was never our go-to game. We rarely had enough players to form a proper table.

Despite most of the weekend being consumed by chasing toddlers around the house or park, we also played a few games. We squeezed in Zombicide which is always a blast, and tried the relatively new Dnd adventure board game Temple of Elemental Evil (decent enough but predictably, it is very similar to previous games in the series). On Friday night we decided to play Dnd.

His wife had NEVER gamed before but she was refreshingly enthusiastic about the whole thing. She actually loves the fantasy milieu and is a big Harry Potter fan so I pretty much knew she would play a wizard of some kind. My friend had a fighter and my wife brought out her usual ranger character.

I had no prep time so I just bust out the DCC adventure Sailors on the Starless Sea. It is fairly straightforward but really evocative, it deviates somewhat from the hoary old orcs and goblins fare, with a lot more sinister beastman stuff going on, and I had also run a (hacked) version of it for my full 5e campaign over the past couple of months. So I was familiar with how the adventure went, and also had some ideas how to make it more appropriate for the newbie group.

Well worth picking up. It has a great mix of pulp, weirdness and creepiness

The session went down a treat and was great fun. Here's a few reminders about things you can do to help new players:

1) Give them obvious choices ... with consequences. In the original adventure, the PCs are presented with a path up to the castle and are pretty much railroaded past some plant zombies and then into the courtyard, unless they're clever and go off and think of more inventive ways to approach. In my version, there was a path leading straight up to the gatehouse and another path veering off left with a sinister hanging tree (the zombie encounter) just visible in the distance. The players were given a choice. They actually chose left, fought the weird plant zombies and then snuck into the courtyard through a crack in the wall.

There's them weird plant zombies again.

2) Make them feel useful. On a couple of occasions - in the tomb of the chaos warrior and on the longboat - there are strange runes. I ensured that the wizard character could decipher these runes. The wizard player felt invaluable. If she hadn't been there, it appeared, then the runes would have remained a mystery. Of course I might have figured out a way for a different set of characters to work out the runes, eg they might have been old dwarven glyphs if I had a dwarf in the party. But the illusion remains: if that player wasn't there, then the party would have been stuck.

Not sure where this pic is from but it's a cool image for the adventure

3) Make them feel powerful. Keep the monster AC low. Keep their hit points down. There's nothing more frustrating than swinging and missing, swining and missing. But ensure the monsters are also dangerous - make sure they CAN hit and CAN do some damage to keep the players on their toes.
The beastmen in this adventure only have 3hp (I made them 4e style minions so one hit would kill them, regardless). But I also made sure that if they hit, they delivered 1d6+1 damage which is quite a lot versus low level characters.
Once they were familiar with the combat rules, I upped the ante. I threw a wight AND a flameskull at the party at one stage. My dice were rather cold, but they survived and it was a memorably tense encounter.

As I said my friend was a big Warhammer fan so it was good to roll out some beastmen

4) Pay attention to their character sheets. They've only just created these fresh new characters so both as PCs and DMs it is important to remind each other of what the character can do, and what their personality quirks might be. I saw that the fighter had chaotic tendencies so I tempted him with the chaos warrior's helment and the cache of hold on top of the disintegrating pyramid. I saw that the wizard had Levitate on her character sheet so I let her use it to zip up the pyramid edge. I encouraged the fighter to use his action surge to close down the final boss and smack him in the face with an axe.

A lot of fun was had and we agreed to play again on the Sunday before they went home. It was a little more sedate as we were all exhausted after a busy weekend, all with work or travel the next morning. But everyone enjoyed and I'm certain there'd be no problem getting another game underway next time they visit!
Maybe not converts for life, but I'm still spreading the gospel. Job's a good one.

The adventure continues ... battling for birthday cake in the 3D dungeon

It was another Saturday and a chance to continue the adventure with my son. I've been pretty busy the past couple of weekends so it was nice to have him demanding we play a game from Thursday this week! As it happened I was clearing out the loft that morning and dug out a huge box containing my prized 3D dungeon.

This was the first big project I worked on when I got back into gaming in 2011. Before the bug truly hit, my goal was just to create a 3D board that I could play games like Heroquest or Warhammer Quest on ... and I thought I'd be okay with a few orcs, zombies and skeletons to populate it ... suffice to say my collection has grown somewhat since then ...

This is one of the more advanced rooms ... with spider and fomorian

Anyway, this was back in the BC days (Before Children) so I had plenty of time to work on the project. Pretty much any weekend, or any day I was on a late shift in work, I could put in a couple hours. And I had space to leave polystyrene, knives, glue and paint scattered about the shed which would not really be advisable these days! I managed to make a pretty sizeable dungeon, but as the baby was born and life turned manic, the work had to be put to one side and the rooms and corridors packed away in a dusty box to be home to a few fat spiders.

All the while I was making it, though, I was thinking how someday I might get to use it in a game with my son ... as yet unborn. Yesterday it got a new lease of life as we took over the lounge floor and spread out the dungeon to his design. He delighted in seeing the water room with the dragon fountain, and the pit full of snakes.

Every dungeon needs a dinosaur. And in the background you can just see the snake pit.

It was his birthday during the week so this time the "treasure" was bits of left over cake and blue icing! Cut up pretty small - that blue icing does crazy things to kids.

We had the Paw PAtrol out again as the heroes of the expedition! And when he realised their vehicles could fit inside the corridors - wow. There was huge excitement. I actually argued AGAINST bringing a fire engine into a dungeon but hey, it's as much his game as mine. And it paid off when he started to use the imagination: "Marhsall will climb the ladder to get to the bridge. He can use his water cannon to shoot the dragon's mouth".

We needed to take over the living room floor to fit the dungeon in!

He also put the Roper in the water room because he thought it looked like an octopus.
And he has a point...

'It's a bit lika an octopus! He likes the water'. Fair enough....

By the way, in case anyone's interested in the making of the dungeon:

The technique was pretty simple and the early rooms and corridors were fairly basic. I would get a flat sheet of polystyrene, score it with a pen and ruler to divide it into a grid of 1.5 inch squares. Onto this I used chunks of packaging polystyrene cut into bricks to build up walls, pillars and doorways.

Initially I was using some messy epoxy glue but then I found Hard As Nails which is great stuff. It is cheap (I get it in the bargain store for 1.50 euro) and it has a texture like tile filler, so it glues pretty much anything. It is not quite literally Hard As Nails, you do get the occasional breakage, but a dab more glue does the trick.

 I coated all this with a mixture of plaster-of-paris, water and PVA glue, to give it a rocky effect and seal it. This was important as if I wanted to spray the polystyrene, it needed to be sealed otherwise it would melt when sprayed.  I then discovered Stone Effect spray paint. It created a decent finish which I sometimes then painted over AGAIN with basic acrylic craft paint and a large, cheap brush.

Bear in mind this was back in 2011 and my modelling and painting skills / knowledge were EXTREMELY rusty after a 15 year hiatus! But at least I had plenty of time to work on them...

The later rooms got a bit more sophisticated. I added extra features like pits, pillars, wooden bridges (using coffee stirrers stained with brown ink), stalagmites (chunks of polystyrene coated liberally with the PVA mix as above). I also inserted a few wall features, mostly stuff scraped from bargain stores like plastic skulls, shields and so on.