I’m pretty picky about purchasing resources that purport to add to your game. I’ve been burned by more than a few that, when push comes to shove, I’ll never actually use at the table, either because they’re too cumbersome or because they do something I can just as easily do myself.
On the other end of that spectrum, C. Aaron Kreader’s 101 City Encounters is a book I can’t imagine running a city campaign without. Designed as a sort of mega random encounter table, the book offers a variety of interesting vignettes and situations a party might stumble across while traveling through a fantasy city. Some are relatively mundane (a funeral procession, a request for help unloading goods from a ship), while others offer tantalizing hooks that could lead to their own mini adventure (a carrier pigeon is killed and its note taken, a red devil appears and disappears leaving strange runes where it stood). Each entry includes suggestions for running the encounter and possible follow-ups.
101 City Encounters also includes a simple system for tracking a PC’s reputation in the city with a variety of groups: the Thieves’ Guild, nobles, the townsfolk, and religious temples. Higher ranks grant various benefits from each group, while lower ranks can cause problems when the party has to deal with the group in question. The system offers just enough detail to be helpful without becoming onerous to the Judge, especially with the inclusion of a custom reputation tracking sheet.
Although compatible with DCC RPG, the book is light on stats and can easily be adapted by a competent Judge to other fantasy systems.
101 City Encounters has already benefited my games and is highly recommended, especially if you’re running a DCC Lankhmar, Planescape, or similar campaign.
I’ve got a new project I’m involved with live on Kickstarter!
My friend Luau Lou (who wrote the camp cookie hireling) is launching an anthology of three adventures for the Dare-Luck Club, his fantastic RPG of 80s-inspired adolescent adventures!
I wrote one of the adventures in the set, in which your Dare Luckers sneak into the local amusement park after hours to play some Monsters & Magicians. But when the game gets a little too real you’ll have to survive the likes of an amusement park transformed into a fantasy landscape. Can you find your way home?
A Fairly Odd Tale (12n-4p Eastern Time): A band of hapless adventurers is sucked into a book of fairy tales and must use their wits and cunning to make it out alive! I’ll be kickstarting a print run of this module later this year. Come get a sneak peak!
Museum at the End of Time (7p-11p Eastern Time): The Rite of Passage is a generational custom, and the PCs’ future position and rank within their society is largely determined by the quality of artifacts brought back to the tribe! This 0-level funnel is one of my favorite adventures to run at cons!
Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is a fun romp whose middling story is lifted by the charm of its cast. It owes an obvious debt to the popular (and lucrative) Marvel films, even if it’s more of a Thor or Captain Marvel (movies I put in the middle of the MCU spectrum) than an Iron Man or Infinity War.
If that seems like damning with faint praise, it’s not meant to be. Chris Pine’s natural charisma is on display as the lead, Edgin Darvis, a widowed father who turns to thievery as a means of providing for his daughter. When he takes a chance to pilfer a relic that can resurrect his dead wife, he winds up imprisoned, which is where we find him at the start of the film. He and his friend, Holga, an exiled barbarian, team up to recover his daughter and the relic, both of which are in the hands of the conman who betrayed them.
They assemble a small team for the heist, including Simon, an inept sorcerer, and Doric, a druid with a talent for shapeshifting. Regé-Jean Page’s chivalrous paladin, Xenk Yendar, is in less of the movie than I would have suspected from the trailers, but is a fun foil to Edgin. As the group’s plan unfolds they discover that the troubles in Neverwinter go deeper than they expected. At this point savvy moviegoers will no doubt be able to guess how the story will play out, but it’s an entertaining ride nonetheless.
Packed with Easter eggs for hardcore D&D fans, Honor Among Thieves is accessible enough for those who don’t know Baldur’s Gate from Ten Towns. In fact, the movie doesn’t try to overexplain the lore of the Realms (we’re told Doric is a tiefling, but not what a tiefling is), which would have been an easy trap to fall into. The filmmakers also display a love of practical effects in the realization of many fantastical creatures and characters, although I suspect the digitally-created red dragon Themberchaud will be the fan favorite.
My bottom line: if you’re looking for a fun popcorn flick to pass away an afternoon, Honor Among Thieves will fit the bill. If not, you could certainly wait for it to come to streaming. Personally, I’m hoping it does well enough to warrant a sequel; there are plenty more tales to be told — and creatures to be spotlighted — in this world.
Last week I was invited to chat with Stefan Surratt and Matt Robertson on Rules As Written, the show that dives deep into the Dungeon Crawl Classics rulebook. They had me on to talk about third party publishing, hirelings and henchmen, and why you should be making more morale checks!
I arrived in Indianapolis in the early afternoon and got my vaccination status verified. I wandered down to the stadium and must have passed my luck check, because I later found out I shouldn’t have made it down there without a badge. In the stadium I beheld the wonder of the Wizard Van in all its glory! Then I met some of the Goodman Games’ judges for a group photo before picking up my GM badge. On my way out the door I ran into Alexi and Leah Sargeant of Cloven Pine Games! Alexi was kind enough to sign my copy of The Great Soul Train Robbery.
Thursday
I started Gen Con with a session of Savage Worlds, a game I’ve heard a lot about but hadn’t played before. It was a 1950s Stargate-esque scenario; I played a military medic escorting a scientific expedition to another dimension where we saved a some villagers from being sacrificed to a hideous beast. I found Savage Worlds very quick to pick up, but a little swingy for my taste — the exploding dice mechanic makes every roll a lot more tense than I expected.
After a quick trip through the exhibitors (where I picked up some Goodman Games exclusives) I met up with my friend Luau Lou for lunch before setting up for my session of The Museum at the End of Time. I only had three of five players show up, but they had a great time traversing the Taboo Lands and descending into the titular museum.
Friday
In the morning I ran a second session of Museum which included a woman who came with her husband — it was her first RPG, ever! In the afternoon I ran Luau Lou’s module Seekers of the Un-K’nown, a Mutant Crawl Classics romp that may or may not be based on a classic D&D module. I was a little nervous since I hadn’t run it before, but it wound up being a great session with some memorable moments including mounting spears on a hover bike and befriending the robotic security guards by tending for a damaged unit.
Saturday
Saturday morning I ran a session of my Dungeon Crawl Classics module A Fairly Odd Tale. I’ve been honing this adventure for a year or so and I think I’ve got it to a solid place — enough so that I plan to publish it sometime next year. I had a mother/daughter pair at the table and they may have been my favorite players of the convention!
My Saturday afternoon game was canceled, so I took the opportunity to grab some classic fantasy novels from the Goodman Games booth and headed back to my room to get some rest.
Sunday
Sunday morning was supposed to feature a session of Star Trek Adventures, a game I’ve owned for over a year but never had the opportunity to bring to the table. Unfortunately only two of us showed up, so I wandered the exhibitors hall, picked up a few more items, and then went to the Goodman Games raffle. Unfortunately I didn’t win anything, but I had fun seeing all the prizes and watching people delight at their wins.
Final Thoughts
I had a great time! I haven’t been to Gen Con in 10 years, and this is the first time I ever ran games there. Being with other DCC/MCC fans made it super easy, and Goodman Games was very supportive (they brought afternoon snacks around to all their judges!). I was also grateful that all the games I ran were in Lucas Oil Stadium — it wasn’t nearly as loud there as in other spaces, so even though we all wore masks I never had to strain to hear people.
I intentionally didn’t hang around for a lot of evening events; I tend to be susceptible to con crud, especially when I overextend myself. This seemed to work out really well, as by the end of the con I still had plenty of energy. I may ad an evening event or two in the future.
If you’re like me, and a bit of an introvert, you may find small talk a little awkward — especially when meeting strangers around a convention table. Here are 20 questions that can help break the ice and build comradery while waiting for your session to start at Gen Con this week!
d20
Question
1
What are you most looking forward to at the convention?
2
What’s been your favorite thing at the convention so far?
3
What’s the weirdest thing you’ve seen at the convention so far?
4
What’s the coolest character you’ve played at the convention?
5
What’s the coolest thing a GM has done at the convention?
6
What is your “holy grail” RPG or RPG item?
7
What swag did you miss out on that you wished you had gotten?
8
Who has the coolest booth in the exhibitors hall?
9
What’s your favorite die (d20, d12, d30, etc.)?
10
What’s the most expensive RPG item you’ve ever purchased?
11
If money were no object, what RPG item would you purchase?
12
What media property do you think deserves a table top RPG?
13
In case of an emergency, what one RPG item would you grab on your way out the door?
14
If you could have lunch with someone in the RPG industry, who would it be?
15
If you could play an RPG with any historical figure, who would it be?
16
What fictional character do you think would be the best GM?
17
Which RPG setting would you most like to live in?
18
What would you most like to change about the gaming hobby?
19
If you could only equip a RPG character with three pieces of equipment, what would they be?
20
If a horde of zombies were to attack right now, what’s your escape plan?
At this point it’s common wisdom that the 4th edition of Dungeons & Dragons is the worst. It’s certainly the most maligned edition, with a general consensus that it parrots video game mechanics, straightjackets PCs with predefined abilities, and eliminates much of what makes individual classes special.
And I love it.
Which isn’t to say I don’t have criticisms (lengthy combat and lack of support for the epic tier being two of them), but I also think there’s a lot to recommend a second look at 4e. Over the next few months I’ll be posting some of the things I think 4e got right in its changes to the fantasy RPG formula.
For instance, 4e is the edition that was made for Dungeon Masters — literally. Not a lot of people seem to remember this, but one of 4e’s explicit design goals was to make running the game as easy as possible. In the Worlds and Monsters promo, Matthew Sernett writes:
“It’s going to be a lot easier and more fun to be a Dungeon Master in 4th Edition. You’ll have to do less work to put together and run great adventures. The time that you used to spend on math can be spent on coming up with cool ideas for encounters and adventure plots instead… Making being a DM easier (and making it easier to be a good DM) is going to get more people to try running a game.”
One place this mindset is reflected is in the layout of adventure modules. Almost every encounter is laid out as a two-page spread, meaning the DM doesn’t have to flip pages back and forth while running an encounter. All the information needed is in those two pages: environmental descriptions and effects, monster stats, traps, tactical suggestions, etc. By contrast, I’m constantly flipping pages in WotC’s 5e adventures between the encounter description, the map, and the monster stats in the Monster Manual, and any spells used by the monsters in the Player’s Handbook just to run a simple encounter.
4e also featured fantastic advice in it’s 2 DMGs. The Dungeon Master’s Guide 2, in particular, is a great resource for DMs of any edition. It has advice on crafting long-term campaigns, including story structure, avoiding dead ends when PCs fail to overcome an obstacle, and integrating flashbacks, transitions, and even third-person teasers into a session. It also has great examples for creating more interesting encounters, building traps, customizing monsters, and offering alternate rewards. Anyone interested in RPG design would benefit from the DMG2’s insights.
In the end, the focus on DMs is probably one of the things that worked against 4e. Since most D&D players are, well, players, they weren’t as invested in the upgrades to running the game and didn’t see the benefits. Which is a shame. While 4e isn’t perfect, it did a lot to lift some of the burdens on DMs — a fact for which I am grateful.
Jon Peterson has made a name for himself as a gaming historian. His rightly lauded and fastidiously researched Playing at the World may well be the definitive treatment of the historical antecedents of modern role-playing games across the centuries.
Game Wizards: The Epic Battle for Dungeons & Dragons (MIT Press, 2021) tackles a more focused topic: the creation of D&D and the first 12 years of Tactical Studies Rules (TSR) from its founding to the fateful evening when Gary Gygax was removed from direct control of the company. Peterson is particularly interested in divining credit for the game’s creation, sifting through the competing claims of Gygax and Dave Arneson, and detailing the (mis)management of TSR which led to Gygax inadvertently placing himself in danger of losing the company he co-founded.
Like Playing at the World, Game Wizards is well-researched with 30 pages of endnotes citing various trade magazines, columns in Dragon, and other sources. But what makes the book more readable than, say, Playing at the World is that Game Wizards has a compelling narrative on which to hang the various financial figures and convention numbers. No one thought Dungeons & Dragon would be an especially profitable idea (Peterson regularly reminds us that Gygax and Arneson thought it might be a “$300 idea”). So when the game takes off, what had been built on nebulous contracts and verbal agreements quickly becomes the focus of intense legal battles as various players seek their piece of the pie.
Those battles seem to have been exacerbated by the interpersonal conflicts that inevitably arose when a bunch of hobbyists tried to run a business. Broken promises, poor HR policies and procedures, and the lure of wealth and fame seem to have taken its toll on those who initially banded together to bring D&D to life, leading to the sad but inevitable climax of Gygax’s reign.
Game Wizards is a treat for RPG fans, especially those (like me) who came to the hobby well after the events it depicts. I highly recommend it.
