X Rounds of Combat

Day 22 - LOST The opportunities of getting lost and learning from LOST (the TV show). In 5th edition a successful Wisdom / Survival check means that you cannot get lost and will always arrive to your destination. However party getting lost gives DM an opportunity to roll on those sweet sweet random encounter tables, and then anything can happen, and both the Players and DM can have more fun with something unpredictable happening. OK, my turn to stab you. DM advice from other media. LOST was a TV phenomenon for a while, did some controversial stuff, but also did some good things. What are THOSE?! The Good - dropping some plot-lines that lead nowhere and nobody cares about is fine The Bad - dropping plot-lines because you kind of forgot about them is not good, having no main antagonist or goal is just problematic The Ugly - a sort of mundane explanation for mysterious coincidences should be avoided - polar bear showing up when someone is reading a comic book where a...

DAY 21 - VAST The original, old school way of playing D&D promises a vast, almost infinite world with infinite possibilities. The land that was promised But this is what you as a player might get. A lot of imagination required For many players, not always new ones, that is too much of a choice. "You can go anywhere, you can do anything". But where to go? What to do? Even with maps that present something it is usually abstracted to a degree that is difficult. Looks good to me when I analyse it a bit, but what does it tell you? This is mostly just colours ChicagoWiz's advice on both his blog and in his unfortunately defunct podcast The Dungeon Master's Handbook  was to create just three hexes . Start small, don't smother your players with choices, develop as you go depending on the events of the game, player expectations and your own ideas. The world does not need to be overly vast to feel alive.

Day 20 - NOBLE There are generally two types of being noble - being born into a aristocratic class, and acting honourably.  The "being born into it" reminds me of an old D&D setting Birthright   where you play rules given powers by gods. It has some focus on domain level play and sounds interesting. There even was a video game based off it.    Wow, such realism. Wow, much D&D Hey, you don't look the same in the game Of course all nobles are white, anything else would be unrealistic. Elves, dragons, magic? This is fine. The other nobility is having high morals and ideals, like Sturm Brightblade , a character from Dragonlance Chronicles, who embodied the ideals of the Knights of Solamnia despite not being one of them. Yeah, that guy with a moustache. Also, if you're located in North America there's an online store - Noble Knight Games - that has decent prices and a metric ton of stuff on sale. You can get s...

Day 19 - SCARY The whole process started around Ann Rice and her vampires being seductive and closer to succubi. Then came the brooding sparkling vegetarians in Twilight. But fear not! (or rather do) because there are still vampires that resemble more their monstrous originals. In recent media there are: Netflix’s Castlevania  based off a series of video games – gothic monsters and magic. It's a really good show Guillermo del Toro's The Strain  where vampires are more of a disease, but monstrous nonetheless. That thing is disgusting and freaky AF. For your gaming needs there's Ravenloft an absolute DnD classic from 1st, 2nd and 5th edition, with legendary Strahd von Z as the master BBEG. Strahd von Z And a recently released campaign module Undying Orbs Omnibus for Swords and Wizardry, compatible with other retro-clones and easily converted to DnD 5e. Not the most informative cover

Day 18 - PLENTY Post-scarcity economy describes a hypothetical form of economy or society, often explored in science fiction, in which things such as goods, services and information are free, or practically free. Think Star Trek and it's Starfleet. Starfleet officers don't earn money because they have replicators for food and everything else is freely available to them. For all we know this might be the case with the rest of the Federation, but it has not been explored in the shows. We only have what Captain Picard has said in First Contact : The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force of our lives.   We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity. Star Trek Adventures from Modiphius In that case, playing Star Trek Adventures , what is your motivation? As a player you are here to have fun. What is the motivation of your character to do what they do? There is no gold or wealth to accrue, no monsters to kill. Here are my ideas: Curiosity - I...

Day 17 - ONE One game to rule them all… The game that I'm really interested in playing is… The One Ring  Everything's fine. We've got this Set between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, from Cubicle 7 . They have also created a 5e adaptation of it called Adventures in Middle-earth. The only MMORPG I played for longer and enjoyed it was The Lord of the Rings Online . There.

I'm falling behind by a day. I'll try to catch up. Day 16 - DREAM I have two favourite ways to utilise dreams in RPGs. I see you're busy fighting the monster. I'll call you back. Information Information dreams can be interactive or non-interactive. The non-interactive are just a “cinematic” that is meant to provide player(s) either with some backstory, show them something that is happening somewhere else and technically their characters wouldn’t normally know, or can be a foreshadowing of future events.  The interactive aim and use is similar. The character is provided with information they would not have access otherwise but this time they interact with someone (a deity, spirit, ancestor, djinn). In this case they get to ask some questions that they might even get some truthful answers. I love maps Traversal Faerie roads from Jonathan Strange and Mr Norell function as a parallel plane of existence through which one can travel between ph...

Day 15 - DOOR Door is almost always a puzzle or at least a decision. If it is closed - how do we open it? Is it secured? Is it trapped?  If it is open - why? Is it a trap? If not - who opened it before us? Insert the above questions Also, have you noticed how common in movies, comic books and illustrations is to have a door with a face?  Labyrinth of lies and truth A few doors for your entertainment: (shamelessly stolen from reddit ) A dungeon door with a face carved on it, or maybe cast in metal. It asks questions like: What colour is the sky? What am I guarding? They are not riddles, the door is self aware and curious. You could dismount it from its frame, turn into a shield and let it travel the world with you. (shamelessly stolen from Wally DM ) The door is unlocked but when you open it there is a giant mage hand behind it blocking the passage. When you try to pass through it will gently push you back and close the door - it remains unl...

Day 14 - GUIDE I could write about the many Game Master's Guides but I will just tell you a story. In the early days we were playing something homebrewed loosely based on Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. Somehow, without internet, without contact with other groups, without even Dungeons and Dragons we were doing dungeon crawls, rolling for randomised encounters and such. We've been playing OSR / retro style because to us it was the intended way to do so. So, for one reason or another we are being recruited to help the local innkeeper. Something is in the wine cellars , he says. He saw a hole in the wall, something broke through. 1st edition D&D goblin. I love that image, I should get it tattooed or something I believe someone mentioned wine tasting at one point so the innkeeper wants to go as our " guide " and to watch the barrels. Passing through the basement and then the wine cellar is uneventful. We find a few emptied barrels but nothing more....

Day 13 - MYSTERY Mysteries are not that hard to create - just add more clues . As the Alexandrian jokingly says on his blog you need at least three clues for your Player Characters. Why? Because the PCs will probably miss the first; ignore the second; and misinterpret the third before making some incredible leap of logic that gets them where you wanted them to go all along. Frodo  :  What's your password? Gandalf  :  Password. Frodo  :  No, what is your password? Gandalf  :  Password. The word spelled out. Frodo  :  You're head of security  wizard council and your password is "password"? Gandalf  :  I don't feel good about it either. I clearly remember a situation where the party was searching for a murder weapon that was hidden in the field of carrots. GM: On your way from the village to the mansion you are passing by A FIELD OF CARROTS Our party: *all shrug and continue on to the mansion* ...

Day 12 - FRIENDSHIP Most people you play games with will not be your lifetime friends but you will share something special with them.  DM rolling for damage - colourised When you move to a new place, start a new job and don't know anyone yet finding a group to play with might be a solution to finding like-minded people. 

Day 11 - Examine In early editions of Dungeons & Dragons , and therefore in most of the retro-clones like Swords & Wizardry , there was a concept of Player Skill. Your characters didn't have skills, proficiencies and whatnot. It was up to you, the player to come up with ideas and provide some descriptions.  To examine the room you did not roll for your room searching skill.  Ready to examine the environs How do you want to do this? You would then describe how you're checking all the chests, all the drawers, looking for secret compartments and such. In long hallways and corridors of a dungeon you would search for traps by checking if all the stones are the same level, if some stepping plates seem to be covered in dust as if no one walks on them, and then you would poke them anyway with a ten foot pole. Ten foot pole - an adventurer's necessity since the first D&D module B1 - In Search of the Unknown Your descriptions of examining obje...

DAY 10 - FOCUS Focus feat for 5e. Possibly overpowered but it's meant to emulate epic situations where a character temporarily gains unnatural focus and proficiency. Inner peace Non-class specific, can be selected on any level Through your training or meditation you have achieved high level of inner peace that allows you to focus on the action you perform.  In time, you will be able to master that ability and do remarkable things. can be used X times per day (X being the tier level) roll with advantage with additional d20 per tier level Tier 1 Levels 1-5:  roll 3 d20 (advantage + 1), keep highest can be used 1 per day Tier 2 Levels 6-10:  roll 4 d20 (advantage + 2), keep highest can be used 2 per day Tier 3 Levels 11-15:  roll 5 d20 (advantage + 3), keep highest can be used 3 per day Tier 4 Levels 16-20:  roll 6 d20 (advantage + 4), keep highest can be used 4 per day

Day 9 - CRITICAL Just because we love something doesn't mean we cannot be critical about it. There are many problematic things especially in the older games. Different stats or available classes for different genders, different treatment of people of various ancestries…  I like to think that we are past those and unless you're playing a historically accurate simulationist game there’s no point to them. Unless you're playing whatever that bigoted hateful mess was that Varg has published. Fifth edition of Dungeons and Dragons has done a lot of good in terms of representation of genders and various cultures. Just look at PHB illustration of fighter, monk, paladin, or wizard. Same with Pathfinder. Pathfinder iconic heroes and heroines There's no need to play out the racism when playing games set in early 20th century. Make your games pleasant for everyone, be critical of the sources and have fun.

Day 8 - OBSCURE A short one today. The hidden folk are the Icelandic and Faroese elves. They are basically fey in D&D - supernatural beings that exist in parallel worlds, can make thems-elves visible at will, and their homes look like rocks.  The hidden folk - all the peoples of Changeling: the Dreaming I'm talking these guys... Going back to the source material, making the fairy more obscure, whimsical and fantastical can give your game a fresher feel.  Try Dolmenwood for example, a lot of the stuff is free: How can you not want to play here?

Day 7 - FAMILIAR Choose your Pokemon So, you're in this weird situation where you only have GM and one player that has little experience playing roleplaying games. I had this idea where you can give the player a familiar as a sort of pet. That means that you don't have to change the published modules so much because there are almost two characters now (but tone it down a bit anyway). The other, main thing is that since familiars are celestials, fey or fiends (intelligent creatures) you the GM can occasionally voice them and help the newbie out by providing ideas and help. It's like having a talking Pikachu that suggests best tactics in the tutorial.

Day 6 - ANCIENT It was supposed to be a longer post but it is my mother's birthday so we went to Capilano Suspension Bridge which is kind of in an ancient forest, so there. Sword and sorcery games and settings I like ancient cultures and ancient settings as opposed to pseudo-medievalisms of D&D and Warhammer. As it has become tradition here is a podcast recommendation on ancient cultures - Ancient World by Scott C. My favourite games and settings are as follows: Robert E. Howard's Conan: Adventures in an age undreamed of Relatively new game from Modiphius, based on writings by Robert E Howard more than his followers. Co-written by Jason Durall, based on a very cinematic 2d20 system, with a free quickstart available. Conan not the Governator Primeval Thule I know the least about this one but it is set in an ancient pre-history, 5e based, mostly human centric, magic is dark, twisted and evil. What more do you want? Sword & sorcery 5e ...

Day 5 - SPACE Space.  Allegedly the final frontier. The guys from the magnificent Grognard Files podcast (seriously, they are awesome, go and listen to them) have a thing fittingly called Prime Directive - GMing exclusivity for a game. Couple of years back in college one guy in our group decided to run Dungeons and Dragons 5e. Naturally that meant that if I wanted to run something it could not have been D&D. I decided to run something completely different - science fiction. So, for fantasy there is D&D, obviously. If you are into less main stream games there are Runequest, Warhammer Fantasy. For supernatural horror the obvious choice is Call of Cthulhu. But science-fiction? Nothing really comes to mind (Star Wars is science-fantasy, fight me!) So I did some digging. Star*Drive, an old TSR game, their own attempt at having a sci-fi game along publishing D&D. I read about it and kind of lost interest. That was not what I was looking for. Traveller seeme...

Day 4 - SHARE I like sharing stuff that is important to me.  I'm guessing that most adult RPG players are in some sort of relationships and would like to share the fun with their partners. My wife has known some people in high school that played Warhammer but has never had much interest in playing. RPGs are the things I collect and sometimes talk about.  There is a light at the end of that tunnel though.  Kids on Bikes She did express some interest in playing when I told her about  Kids on Bikes  (because she loves Stranger Things ) and The Secrets of Cats  (because she loves cats) .   The Secrets of Cats It almost seems like you have to do some homework and go beyond D&D to get some people interested.  If you want to share your hobby with people from outside of it find a game about something that they like. 

Day 3 - ENGAGE This could have been a very different post about something else. But then the trailer for " Star Trek: Picard " came out. "Engage!" - Picard, Jean-Luc, every time he wants the pilot to engage Most of my life I played various fantasy games. Then, last year, I played Star Trek Adventures from Modiphius once as a Denobulan engineer. I barely knew what I was doing, didn't know the 2d20 system very well, only from reading a  quickstart for Robert E. Howard’s Conan: Adventures in an Age Undreamed Of . I had a blast! Conclusion? Play different games. ENGAGE with them so to speak.

Day 2 - UNIQUE There is a pressure, especially on the GM's, that everything they come up with is supposed to be unique.  It doesn't have to be.  You do you. Thank you for coming to my TED talk. But seriously: My first GM's homebrew world was Warcraft 1&2 mixed with some ideas from Might&Magic series and gods pantheon from Slavic mythology. When I started creating my first setting I should have named it Generia - the generic land of generic fantasy ripped off from Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms novels. Thankfully I only ran one adventure there. Clichea - the land of tropes ( http://unleadedwriting.com/2016/07/23/fantasy-tropes-and-cliches-beginning-with-the-world/ ) The other guy from that group made up a totally unique setting of a fantasy world but it's in the near cyberpunk future. And it totally didn't rip off Shadowrun and Cyberpunk 2020. Kickstarter is full of heartbreaker 5E settings that are supposed to give you the experien...

Let's see how far I can get. Day 1 - FIRST The first game I ever played AND GM'ed It was spring of 1998, my first year of high school, and with my classmates we have already heard of RPGs and managed to borrow a Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Rulebook (Polish Edition).  WarHammer Fantasy Roleplay, 1st edition, Polish version There were 3 or 4 of us.  None of us had ever played an RPG (the closest thing was Talisman),  none of us had ever run a game.  That did not stop us. We played "The Oldenhaller Contract," the adventure from the book itself.  None of us had read it. I quickly read the introduction and ran it for a while. The guy who would become the GM of our group took over at one point and I played a character. It was fine because none of us knew what the adventure was going to be about.  We did not finish it.  I do not remember what it was about.  We had a blast and have been playing homebrew stuff slowly evol...